Studies in Contemporary Jewry: Volume XIII: The Fate of the European Jews, 1939-1945: Continuity or Contingency? (Studies in Contemporary Jewry)

STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY JEWRY

The publication of Studies in Contemporary Jewry has been made possible through the generous assistance of the Samuel and Althea Stroum Philanthropic Fund, Seattle, Washington

THE AVRAHAM HARMAN INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY JEWRY THE HEBREW UNIVERSITY OF JERUSALEM

THE FATE OF THE EUROPEAN JEWS, 1939-1945 Continuity or Contingency? STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY JEWRY AN ANNUAL

XIII

1997 Edited by Jonathan Frankel

Published for the Institute by OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS New York • Oxford

Oxford University Press Oxford New York Athens Auckland Bangkok Bogota Bombay Buenos Aires Calcutta Cape Town Dar es Salaam Delhi Florence Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madras Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi Paris Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto Warsaw and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan

Copyright © 1997 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 Oxford is a registered Irademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-511931-2 ISSN 0740-8625

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STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY JEWRY

Editors Jonathan Frankel Peter Y. Medding Ezra Mendelsohn Institute Editorial Board Michel Abitbol, Mordecai Altshuler, Haim Avni, David Bankier, Avraham Bargil, Yehuda Bauer, Sergio DellaPergola, Sidra Ezrahi, Allon Gal, Moshe Goodman, Yisrael Gutman, Menahem Kaufman, Israel Kolatt, Hagit Lavsky, Eli Lederhendler, Pnina Morag-Talmon, Dalia Ofer, Gideon Shimoni, Geoffrey Wigoder Managing Editors Laurie E. Fialkoff Hannah Levinsky-Koevary International Advisory and Review Board Chimen Abramsky (University College, London); Abraham Ascher (City University of New York); Arnold Band (University of California, Los Angeles); Doris Bensimon (Universite de la Sorbonne Nouvelle); Bernard Blumenkrantz (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique); Solomon Encel (University of New South Wales); Henry Feingold (City University of New York); Martin Gilbert (Oxford University); Zvi Gitelman (University of Michigan); S. Julius Gould (University of Nottingham); Paula Hyman (Yale University); Lionel Kochan (University of Warwick); David Landes (Harvard University); Seymour Martin Lipset (George Mason University); Heinz-Dietrich Lowe (Albert-Ludwigs-Universita't); Michael Meyer (Hebrew Union College—Jewish Institute of Religion, Cincinnati); Alan Mintz (Brandeis University); George Mosse (University of Wisconsin); Gerard Nahon (Centre Universitaire d'Etudes Juives); F. Raphael (Universite des Sciences Humaines de Strasbourg); Jehuda Reinharz (Brandeis University); Monika Richarz (Germania Judaica, Kolner Bibliothek zur Geschichte des deutschen Judentums); Joseph Rothschild (Columbia University); Ismar Schorsch (Jewish Theological Seminary of America); Michael Walzer (Institute for Advanced Study); Bernard Wasserstein (Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies); Ruth Wisse (Harvard University).

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Preface This is the first time that a symposium in Studies in Contemporary Jewry has been devoted to a discussion of the Holocaust. Given the centrality of the catastrophe in the history of the Jews and in contemporary Jewish consciousness, this fact might seem surprising. But the fact is that, until April 1996, two periodical publications devoted specifically to the study and analysis of the tragedy were published in Jerusalem: Yad Vashem Studies and Holocaust and Genocide Studies (the latter is now situated in Washington, D.C.). And we have therefore felt free hitherto to concentrate on other aspects of the modern Jewish experience: social, demographic and political transformations; change and continuity in the realms of thought, religion, scholarship; the role and image of the Jews in the visual arts, music and literature. It must likewise be said, though, that the sheer horror of the Nazi genocide also acted to deter us. Here is a field of study to be approached with caution, even dread. And yet with every passing year, the Holocaust attracts greater scholarly attention; calls forth even more questions; inspires controversy of profound human significance. This is not a subject to be bypassed indefinitely by an annual devoted to modern Jewish studies. And in this volume, fourteen leading scholars examine what is perhaps the most crucial of all questions called forth by the phenomenon of the Holocaust. How is it to be explained? In historical perspective, should preference go to long-term or short-term factors? Should emphasis be placed on the particular (culture and traditions of specific nations and regions) or on the universal (European civilization or even the irredeemably flawed nature of humankind)? As in previous years, it is our pleasant duty to express gratitude to a number of individuals and institutions. We should like to thank the Samuel and Althea Stroum Foundation, which through its endowment makes possible the publication of Studies; and also the Lucius N. Littauer Foundation, which this year most generously provided us with a grant to cover some essential costs otherwise not provided for. And, as always, we want to express our thanks and appreciation to our managing editors, Laurie Fialkoff and Hannah Levinsky-Koevary, without whose great professionalism and dedication Studies would fall far short of its present level in innumerable and essential aspects.

J.F.

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Contents

Symposium The Fate of the European Jews, 1939-1945: Continuity or Contingency? Yehuda Bauer, Some Introductory Comments,

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Gavin I. Langmuir, Continuities, Discontinuities and Contingencies of the Holocaust, 9 Zygmunt Bauman, The Camps: Eastern, Western, Modern,

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Steven T. Katz, Radical Historical Discontinuity: Explaining the Holocaust, 41 Götz Aly and Susanne Heim, Forced Emigration, War, Deportation and Holocaust, 56 Michael R. Marrus, Auschwitz: New Perspectives on the Final Solution, 74 Dan Diner, Memory and Method: Variance in Holocaust Narrations, 84 Geoff Eley, What Are the Contexts for German Antiscmitism? Some Thoughts on the Origins of Nazism, 1800-1945, 100 Susan Zuccotti, The Italian Racial Laws, 1938-1943: A Reevaluation, 133 Henry Rousso, The Dreyfus Affair in Vichy France: Past and Present in French Political Culture, 153 John-Paul Himka, Ukrainian Collaboration in the Extermination of the Jews During the Second World War: Sorting Out the Long-Term and Conjunctural Factors, 170

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Antony Polonsky, Beyond Condemnation, Apologetics and Apologies: On the Complexity of Polish Behavior Toward the Jews During the Second World War, 190 Dan Michman, Understanding the Jewish Dimension of the Holocaust, 225 Essay Anita Shapira, The Origins of the Myth of the "New Jew": The Zionist Variety, 253 Review Essays Richard H. King, Hannah Arendt: The Public and the Private, 271 J.C. Hurewitz, Israeli Foreign Policy: Documenting the Past 1947-1953, 280 Book Reviews

(arranged by subject) Antisemitism, Holocaust and Genocide Michel Abitbol, MiCremiuex lePétain: Antishemiyut bealgeriyah hakoloniyalit (1870-1940) (From Crémieux to Pétain: Antisemitism in Colonial Algeria [1870-1940]), NORMAN A. STILLMAN, 289 Paul R. Bartrop (ed.), False Havens: The British Empire and the Holocaust, RICHARD BOLCHOVER, 292 Lucjan Dobroszycki, Reptile Journalism: The Official Polish-Language Press Under the Nazis, 1938-1945, DAVID ENGEL, 295 Eugenia Gurin-Loov, Shoah—Suur Having: Eesti Juutide Katastroof 1941 (The Holocaust of Estonian Jews, 1941), Dov LEVIN, 297 Israel Gutman, Resistance: The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising ABRAHAM BRUMBERG, 300 David A. Hackett (ed. and trans.), The Buchenwald Report MICHAEL BERENBAUM, 303

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Contents Esriel Hildesheimer, Judische Selbstverwaltung unter dein NS-Regime WALTER Zwi BACHARACH, 304 Harold Kaplan, Conscience and Memory: Meditations in a Museum of the Holocaust, LUCIA RUEDENBERG-WRIGHT, 306 Lawrence Langer, Admitting the Holocaust: Collected Essays JAMES E. YOUNG, 308 Lawrence Langer, Art from the Ashes: A Holocaust Anthology JAMES E. YOUNG, 308 Mortimer Ostow, Myth and Madness: The Psychodynamics of Antisemitism, MARTIN WANGH, 311 Alison Owings, Frauen: German Women Recall the Third Reich EVE ROSENHAFT, 313 Efraim Zuroff, Occupation: Nazi Hunter—The Continuing Search for Perpetrators of the Holocaust, DEBORAH E. LIPSTADT, 315 History and the Social Sciences Steven E. Aschheim, Culture and Catastrophe: German and Jewish Confrontations with National Socialism and Other Crises RICHARD WOLIN, 318 Pierre Bimbaum and Ira Katznelson (eds.), Paths of Emancipation: Jews, States and Citizenship, LLOYD P. GARTNER, 319 Rose Cohen, Out of the Shadow: A Russian Jewish Girlhood on the Lower East Side, GERALD SORIN, 323 Lynn Davidman and Shelly Tenenbaum (eds.), Feminist Perspectives on Jewish Studies, SHULAMIT S. MAGNUS, 325 Gertrude Wishnick Dubrovsky, The Land Was Theirs: Jewish Farmers in the Garden State, EWA MORAWSKA, 327 Gerhard Falk, American Judaism in Transition: The Secu rization of a Religious Community, LAURENCE A. KOTLER-BER KOWITZ , 329 K

Sylvia Barack Fishman, A Breath of Life: Feminism in the American Jewish Community, MARGALIT SHILO, 332 Reena Sigman Friedman, These Are Our Children: Jewish Orphanages in the United States, 1880-1925, DANIEL SOYER, 333 Robert Alan Goldberg, Back to the Soil: The Jewish Farmers of Clarion, Utah and Their World, EWA MORAWSKA, 327

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Gregg Ivers, To Build a Wall: American Jews and the Separation of Church and State, GARY JEFFREY JACOBSON, 335 Jacob Katz, With My Own Eyes: A Historian's Autobiography GEORGE L. MOSSE, 337 Diane Lichtenstein, Writing Their Nations: The Tradition of NineteenthCentury Jewish Women Writers, SYLVIA BARACK FISHMAN, 340 Edward T. Linen thai, Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America's Holocaust Museum, ROCHELLE G. SAIDEL, 342 Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab, Jews and the New American Scene, DEBORAH DASH MOORE, 344 Lara V. Marks, Model Mothers: Jewish Mothers and Maternity Provision in East London, 1870-1939, SHARMAN KADISH,

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J. Sanford Rikoon (ed.), Rachel Calof's Story: Jewish Homesteader on the Northern Plains, HENRY J. TOBIAS, 348 Moses Rischin and John Livingston (eds.), Jews of the American West ROBERT A. ROCKAWAY, 350 Yaakov Ro'i, Jews and Jewish Life in Russia and the Soviet Union ALEXANDER ORBACH, 353 Silvia Schenkolewski-Kroll and Leonardo Senkman (eds.), Judaica Latinoamericana: Estudios Historico-Sociales II JUDITH LAIKIN ELKIN, 354 Ismar Schorsch, From Text to Context: The Turn to History in Modern Judaism, SHULAMIT VOLKOV, 357 Naomi Shepherd, A Price Below Rubies: Jewish Women as Rebels and Radicals, ROCHELLE GOLDBERG RUTHCHILD, 359 Melford E. Spiro, Gender and Culture: Kibbutz Women Revisited SHULAMIT REINHARZ, 363 Henry Felix Srebrnik, London Jews and British Communism 19351945, SHARMAN KADISH, 366 Henry J. Tobias, A History of the Jews in New Mexico ROBERT A. ROCKAWAY, 350 Language, Literature and the Arts Mark Anderson, Kafka's Clothes: Ornament and Aestheticism in the Habsburg "Fin de Siecie," W.J. DODD, 369

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Contents Alan Cheuse and Nicholas Delbanco (eds.), Talking Horse: Bernard Malamud on Life and Work, EMILY BUDICK, 371 Lawrence Graver, An Obsession with Anne Frank: Meyer Levin and the Diary, STEPHEN J. WHITFIELD, 373 Hannan Hever, Bishvi hautopiyah: masah 'al meshihiyut upolitikah bashirah ha'ivrit beerez yIsrael bein shtei milhamot ha'olam (Captives of Utopia: An Essay on Messianism and Politics in Hebrew Poetry in Eretz Israel Between the Two World Wars HAMUTAL BAR-YOSEF, 375 Lawrence A. Hoffman and Janet R. Walton (eds.), Sacred Sound and Social Change: Liturgical Music in Jewish and Christian Experience, MARK SLOBIN, 378 Astrid Starck (ed.), Westjiddish: Mundlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit— Le Yiddish occidental: Actes du Colloque de Mulhouse, AVRAHAM GREENBAUM, 381 Religion, Thought and Education Hannah Arendt, Love and St. Augustine (ed. Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott and Judith Chelius Stark), RICHARD H. KING, 271 Richard J. Bernstein, Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question RICHARD H. KING, 271 Carole Brightman (ed.), Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, 1949-1975 RICHARD H. KING, 271 Elzbieta Ettinger, Hannah ArendtiMartin Heidegger RICHARD H. KING, 271 Shulamit Soloveitchik Meiselman, The Soloveitchik Heritage: A Daughter's Memoir, SHAUL STAMPFER, 382 Gloria Wiederkehr-Pollack, Eliezer Zweifel and the Intellectual Defense of Hasidism, SHAUL STAMPFER, 383 Walter S. Wurzburger, Ethics of Responsibility: Pluralistic Approaches to Covenantal Ethics, SHUBERT SPERO, 384 Zionism, Israel and the Middle East Uri Bar-Joseph, Intelligence Intervention in the Politics of Democratic States: U.S., Israel and Britain, SHLOMO GAZIT, 387

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Yaacov Bar-Siman-Tov, Israel and the Peace Process, 1977-1982: In Search of Legitimacy for Peace, MARK A. HELLER, 390 Documents on the Foreign Policy of Israel (Vols. 1-8) J.C. HUREWITZ, 280 Political and Diplomatic Documents, December 1947-May 1948 J.C. HUREWITZ, 280 Boas Evron, Jewish State or Israeli Nation! (trans. James Diamond) CHARLES S. LIEBMAN, 392 David Garnham and Mark Tessler (eds.), Democracy, War, and Peace in the Middle East, JACOB M. LANDAU, 394 Yael Zerabavel, Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition, NACHMAN BEN-YEHUDA, 396 Recently Completed Doctoral Dissertations,

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Contents for Volume XIV, Note on Editorial Policy,

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Symposium The Fate of the European Jews, 1939-1945: Continuity or Contingency?

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Some Introductory Comments Yehuda Bauer (THE HEBREW UNIVERSITY)

It is not for an introduction to become simply another article. This is especially the case in a book like this, which is not just an assorted collection of essays, but rather grapples with a theme of crucial significance: continuity versus contingency in the origins of the Holocaust. The articles presented here range from general, philosophical discourses on what caused the Holocaust to detailed analyses of concrete situations. And needless to say, the authors do not agree among themselves—not even in the definition of the subject, much less so in their approach. But that is precisely the value of such an enterprise. It provides the reader with a sharply defined but highly varied panorama. With that said, though, I do believe that there are some issues that deserve brief comment. Several works in the past sought to present an overarching—so to speak, total— picture of the series of events most of us usually describe as the Holocaust. Almost all of them, starting with Gerald Reitlinger's Final Solution and Raul Hilberg's The Destruction of the European Jews, dealt with the perpetrators, and the basic question has always been "Why did they do it?" Exceptional in this respect are Lucy Dawidowicz's The War Against the Jews, Leni Yahil's Holocaust, Michael R. Marrus' The Holocaust in History, and the as yet uncompleted trilogy by Stephen T. Katz, The Holocaust in Historical Context, but (Katz's work apart) these are really textbooks and not attempts at an overall analysis. In recent years, at least four additional and important attempts have been made to present general explanatory frameworks—Daniel J. Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners, Zygmunt Bauman's Modernity and the Holocaust, John Weiss' The Ideology of Death and Gotz Aly's Endlosung. For all the differences between them, however, these works again survey the catastrophe from the perspective of Germany. Goldhageri believes that there was an almost immutable norm of "eliminationist" antisemitism in German society from the early part of the nineteenth century, which explains why almost all of that society became a reservoir for willing murderers; Weiss puts the blame not on all of German society, but on the GermanAustrian elite—the aristocracy, the capitalists, the bureaucracy, the army, academia and the imperial court of the pre-1918 era, which fostered a radical and eventually murderous form of antisemitism. Bauman sees the root cause in what he terms "modernity," a revolutionary, Utopian phenomenon that destroyed traditional moral and social restraints, thus opening the way to the Holocaust. And Aly, concentratin

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on the question of how Nazi policy became genocidal, finds that the ruthless attempt to reshape the ethnic composition of Eastern Europe—rather than the antisemitic ideology as such—constituted the context and background that determined the movement toward mass murder. There is no doubt that these varied modes of explanation contribute to understanding. Weiss, for instance, is persuasive when he concentrates attention on an increasingly radicalized anti-Jewish bias in the upper echelons of German society— a bias accompanied, and probably aggravated, by the growth of opposition to the elites of such middle- and working-class movements as the Progressives and the Social Democrats. Aly focuses on a factor that until now has been largely ignored or misinterpreted, and future analyses will have to take into consideration his findings regarding the context in which the famous "twisted road" (Karl Schleunes' term) to murder developed. There is, moreover, no doubt that the factors of "modernity" in Bauman's interpretation (the cost-effective calculations; the technological mind; the central importance of bureaucratically directed economies; and the consequent blunting of residual moral responsibility) influenced the decision-making process that culminated in genocide. Goldhagen's assertions that, by 1940—1941, German society had become a reservoir for willing executioners and that the major motivation was radical antisemitism have been made by others many times before, but his forceful restatement of that hypothesis will certainly have a lasting impact. However, there are some major problems involved in these and similar modes of explanation. One, as Dan Michman points out in his contribution to this volume, is a view of the Jews as either totally or largely passive in the tragedy. Without an analysis of the history of the Jewish people, and especially its history in the various countries of Europe, the reasons that the Jews became the targeted victims can only remain a mystery. Without the Jews as an active factor, the attempts at explaining the Holocaust become sterile and unconvincing. A second problem is that these four recent and major studies essentially ignore not only the European Jews (except as pure object) but also the bystanders. Of course, the term "bystanders" itself may be disputed. We are dealing here with highly disparate elements: the peoples of Eastern Europe among whom most of the Jews lived and who were often, like the Poles, themselves persecuted by the Germans; the international bodies such as the churches; the conquered nations of Western Europe, which, while suffering under the Nazi yoke, were still treated differently from Poles, Czechs, Serbs, Russians and Ukrainians; the neutral states (Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, Sweden); and even the Jews living beyond the Nazi empire. No overall analysis of what happened to European Jewry during the Second World War can afford to ignore this dimension. Finally, these general attempts to explain are for the most part devoid of a basic element required in any overarching historiographic analysis: comparison and context. One cannot argue for the uniqueness of German antisemitism without a serious effort to compare it with, for example, its French, Russian or Romanian parallels. Nor can one deal with the genocide of the Jews without comparing it to the genocide of other peoples, especially in modern times. It was this pitfall that Katz was clearly trying to avoid when he devoted the first volume of his trilogy to exactly that issue. Ultimately, of course, a series of questions emerge to which we have only partial

Some Introductory Comments

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answers; answers, moreover, on which we historians radically disagree. Was the primary motivation of the perpetrators ideological, or was it connected with the development of difficulties—Engpaesse is the term sometimes used by Aly—that radicalized the Nazi policies? When we analyze the reasons that brought the German regime into these traps in the first place, the answer is that they were racists. So are we then back to ideology, via the back door, so to speak? And how do programs for the radical resettlement of ethnic populations in East-Central Europe explain the deportation of Jews from Rhodes, or the Channel Islands, or Libya? Regarding the approach that sees in "modernity" a crucial factor in the movement of the German state toward the Holocaust, the problem seems obvious: why then the Jews—and not the proverbial bicycle-riders? And why, for example, did Italians, under a Fascist regime allied to Germany, behave quite differently from the Germans—were they not "modern"? There is no clarity, either, regarding the terms we are using. For Michman and Katz, who are represented in this volume (as for Christopher R. Browning, Eberhard Jaeckel, and many others who are not), the Holocaust was the Nazi project to murder the Jews wherever the German writ ran, which in effect meant, from an ideal Nazi point of view, throughout the entire world. For others, such as Aly, or Henry Friedlander and Sybil Milton, for instance, the Holocaust was the murderous policy implemented by the Nazis against the Jews, Gypsies (Romany) and German handicapped. This latter position argues that the Nazi attitude toward these three groups stemmed from the same basic racist (or eugenic) ideology, and that, as all these cases involved mass murder, they constituted part of one and the same policy. Nonetheless, as Katz and others have noted, while their racist ideology undoubtedly informed the Nazis' policies in these three cases, the same can be said of their policies toward all other peoples and nations—and indeed, as Aly has shown so convincingly in his impressive book (Endlosung) toward the German people themselves, many more of whom would have been destined for "cleansing" had Germany won the war. Yet their policy toward Italians, or Russians, or the French or the Germans—although likewise determined by their racist ideology—should surely not be considered part of the Holocaust? Does not the inclusion of the Gypsies and the handicapped within the definition of the Holocaust stand in contradiction to the central position occupied by the Jews in Nazi self-understanding, indeed in their concept of struggle for world domination? Did they see in the Gypsies, or in the handicapped, a threat to their world equal to the threat posed by the Jews? Where is the mention of Gypsies and the handicapped to be found in the books and the speeches of Hitler? How many of Himmler's documents deal with them, as compared to those dealing with Jews? Were there thousands of soldiers, or policemen, or bureaucrats trying to ferret out every last "Gypsy" in Europe? Do we know of any Nazi plan, whether developed in an "intentionalist" or a "functionalist" manner, dealing with the European Romany? Is there not here a confusion between different types of genocide (though I have no doubt that the murder of the Romany was indeed a definite form of genocide)? We thus find ourselves back at an issue that has been dealt with so many times in the past, namely, the problem of the uniqueness of the Holocaust. If there is nothing unique about this event, except for the trivial statement that every historical event is

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unique, then why is there such an obsessive preoccupation with it on the part of people who are totally uninvolved, either individually or collectively? Why is a suburban center of Hiroshima interested in establishing a museum devoted to Auschwitz? Why is there such a steady stream of films, TV series and books dealing with the subject? Why is there no end of books, plays, musical compositions and works of art on this event, and not on the Ibos of Nigeria, or the Biharis in Bangladesh, or (as one suspects there will not be) on the Bosnian massacres? There would seem to be very good reasons for this development, and they are all connected with the problem of uniqueness and the comparisons between the Holocaust and other genocides. All other cases were localized—that is, the attack on the targeted groups was connected to a fairly well-defined geographical location. The Ottoman Turks had no plans to murder the Armenians in Greece, or even in Egypt, and the small Armenian community of Palestine was also left alone. The same is true of Rwanda and Burundi; it was true of the Ibos in what was to become Biafra; and it is equally true of Bosnia. The Nazi genocidal policies toward the Poles were also localized: Poles living in France were not a specific target. The Romany were localized in a different manner—and though we lack sufficient source materials to say this with certainty, the policy seems to have been to target wandering, as opposed to settled, Gypsy populations. (This delineation between sedentary and wandering groups was hazy, as was Nazi policy toward the European—as distinct from the German—Romany generally, yet it seems clear enough to make the distinction.) All this was not true of the Jews. It was not the German, or Polish, or French Jews who were targeted, but all Jews in the German sphere of influence, that is, potentially everywhere. It was a global—a universalist—project. A second point of differentiation was the fact that Nazi anti-Jewishness was purely ideological. True, the Nazis also advanced instrumentalist arguments related to economic, social and political issues. But this was primarily a matter of effective propaganda. In reality, Nazi racist ideology regarding the Jews contained no pragmatic elements. What condemned the Jews was not what they were doing, but the sheer fact of their existence—their existence not in a certain place at a certain time, but their existence as such. Whether the Jews were rich or poor, they constituted a corrupting, satanic element, a dark force, in human history; they were all alike part of an international Jewish conspiracy seeking to subvert healthy Aryan societies. They were not a race as such, but an anti-race, and Nazi humanity could not coexist with them on the same planet. Poles were to become Helots, and their leading social strata to be murdered; the same policy was to be applied to the Russians and Serbs. The Czechs were in the main to be Germanized, the leadership murdered, and the rest subjected to what Aly has aptly termed Umvolkerung (a reordering of ethnicities). But Jews had to be eliminated wherever German power reached. In approaching the issue of uniqueness, still another factor has to be considered. The extraordinary character of the Holocaust was surely related to the equally extraordinary character of the Nazi regime. Comparisons increasingly made by historians and sociologists between the Nazi and Stalinist regimes concentrate on the obvious similarities. But there is one very basic dissimilarity that ought to be pondered: contrary to all other such radical regimes in the modern era, the Nazis did

Some Introductory Comments

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not aim to reorder the socioeconomic foundations of society, to solve fundamental social or political problems. They wanted to create an entirely new humanity, ordered on a hierarchical scale by "race," nationality, ethnicity—but "race" was undoubtedly the crucial, central element. They were not out to achieve that in Germany alone but rather in Europe, and after that in the world as a whole. This was an entirely new project, completely different from the Communist system, which aimed at total social reorganization before it deteriorated into an imperialist despotism. In a way (as Bauman argues), both regimes were legitimate or illegitimate offspring of the Enlightenment. But their paths diverged— Communism maintained its connection to ideas advocated by Rousseau and the Jacobins, albeit at the cost of many millions of lives, and in increasingly corrupted forms. Nazism rebelled against the Enlightenment from which it sprang. It sought to create its own Utopia, which it rightly saw not as a continuation but as a negation— totally new and utterly revolutionary—of its eighteenth-century roots. The central expression of this violent drive toward Utopia was the Holocaust. The Nazis created nothing new, except for trivia—in music, in art, in technology, in architecture, in literature, in drama. The only lasting memorial they created, apart from vast ruins across a large part of Europe, which were repaired with varying degrees of speed, was Auschwitz, the place and the memory. Nothing like Auschwitz had ever been created before. But uniqueness, of course, simply means lack of precedent. It can happen again, even though it had never happened before. Hence the growing centrality of the Holocaust in world culture, in both its elite and popular manifestations. Of course, two societies particularly display this exceptional degree of interest in the catastrophe: the Jewish and the German. Whenever one scans Israeli newspapers, it becomes obvious that, quite literally, almost every day there are items relating to the Holocaust. Works of art and of literature display a similar pattern. The same applies to the Jewish diaspora, and the flood is growing, not decreasing. And in Germany, serious public debates are all too often drawn into discussion of the Holocaust—from the German perspective, that is: why did Germans do this? On the margins of the ultra-right, of course, the question is: Did they? To what extent? In the center, the debate involves the line dividing guilt from responsibility; the uniqueness or typicality of German society; and the failure of a major European culture to halt the slide toward genocide. No other historical issue has thus exercised the mind of so many German intellectuals from the Historikerstreit to the recent controversy over Goldhagen's work. However, there is an increasing concern with the Holocaust in other societies as well—especially in the United States, but also in Canada, in some Latin American countries, in Japan, and in Eastern Europe. It appears that the Holocaust is fast becoming, if it has not already become, a synonym for evil in present-day civilization: not all genocides, but the Holocaust. There is developing, I would argue, an uncertain, vague, hazy awareness of the fact that something unprecedented happened—a "tremendum," as one observer has put it—an extreme case showing the range of possibilities inherent in human behavior. Moreover, that event is of central importance not only to the victims and their heirs, not only to the society from which the murderers came, but to all of us. Rudolph J. Rummel, in his book of 1991, Democide, has shown what I would see

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as the general context of the Holocaust, its Sitz im Leben, so to speak. He maintained that in our century, up to 1987, about 169 million humans had been murdered by governments or quasi-governmental bodies; of these, thirty-nine million were murdered in what he defines as genocides. And within his concept of genocide, he singles out the Holocaust as an unprecedented, extreme case, the extreme case—not (as Stephen Katz rightly pointed out) in a moral sense, because the life of a Jew, a Gypsy, a Russian, a Pole, or a German, for that matter, are exactly equal, and it is immoral to argue that the Holocaust was "worse" than other genocides. But it was different, and its extremity lies in the totality of the destruction planned to be visited on all victims as defined by the perpetrator. It is true that one can see other cases where this desire to annihilate totally a given human group was present in embryo, or was there but could not be uttered or implemented. Indeed, this may have been the case with many genocides. But the ideological conviction that there was no way a single Jew could live on a planet ruled by Nazi or proto-Nazi societies is unique. This volume deals with some of the questions related to this complex of issues. Was there a continuity that ended in the Nazi murder of the Jews, a kind of teleology perhaps, or were Nazi policies a novum sui generis, with some connections to the past, perhaps, but in no way necessarily connected to it? Or should we seek a middle path? Though the statements contained here are crucial for our understanding of the past we are not really dealing with the past: the Holocaust is part of the period in which we live. It happened, and therefore it can happen again—not perhaps in the same way, not by the same group to the same group, but by anyone to anyone. This is the universalist aspect of the Holocaust event. This, perhaps, is why the historians and social scientists can be seen as working on the unstated assumption that there does exist a slight chance that their findings may contribute, if only in the most marginal way, to the prevention of a parallel event in the future.

Continuities, Discontinuities and Contingencies of the Holocaust Gavin I. Langmuir (STANFORD UNIVERSITY)

When it is a choice between "Holocaust," "Shoah," "Final Solution," "War Against the Jews," "Auschwitz," or some other term, what's in a name is a matter of some importance, for each term brings with it a particular perspective and concept of action and agency, whether religious, military, ethnic, Hitlerian, social, individualistic or some other. Perhaps "Holocaust" remains the best choice for historians. Even though it implies a particular (a Jewish) perspective and is a misnomer according to its original religious meaning, nonetheless, precisely because of its ambiguous religious overtones, the word suggests a cosmic or overarching perspective that could embrace all the structures, events, agents and causalities involved in the killing authorized by the government of Germany of more than five million Jews between 1941 and 1945. Any effort to explain why the Holocaust happened faces an obvious difficulty. The religious and moral emotions aroused by the Holocaust make it hard to distinguish between personal memory, group attitudes and moral judgment, on the one hand, and historical knowledge, on the other. Even the habit of referring to what happened by a single word such as "Holocaust" has its dangers. The simple unity of the term focuses strong emotions and value judgments and encourages us to think of what happened as a single unique event, an event so incredibly horrifying as to be almost indescribable. And the fact that its core, the killing, was so sharply circumscribed in time and space further reinforces the tendency to think of the Holocaust as a sharply delimited phenomenon. The massive campaign to exterminate the Jews took place during Hitler's brief twelve years in power; it was carried out during four of the six years of the Second World War; and the killings were done primarily, although not exclusively, by Germans and occurred primarily, although not exclusively, in a relatively small number of centers. Yet thinking of the Holocaust as a distinctive, indeed unique, phenomenon can blind us, at least partially, to the complexity and diversity of the vast network of events directly involved; and we may oversimplify the causes of those events and the connections between them. In particular, concentration on the ghettos, camps and killing may conceal how old some of the essential components of the Holocaust were—and how little they depended for their existence on Hitler. Yet if we wish to 9

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estimate the role of continuity and contingency in the Holocaust, we must keep all those components in mind, even if some seem too obvious to deserve mention. To take the most obvious, for there to be the Holocaust, there had to be that supreme example of continuity, the millennial existence of Jews and Judaism. Although many of the victims neither practiced Judaism nor identified themselves as Jews, they were categorized as Jews by the Nuremberg Laws because of the recent religious history of their families: "A Jew is anyone descended from at least three grandparents who are fully Jewish as regards race"; "A grandparent is deemed fully Jewish without further ado if he has belonged to the Jewish religious community."1 For there to be the Holocaust, Jews had to be dispersed and almost physically defenseless, and they were. As a result of the great discontinuity in Jewish history caused by the captivities, migrations and expulsions of the Babylonian and Roman periods ("Next year in Jerusalem"), another millennial continuity, the Diaspora, became a central characteristic of Jewish existence. It had the decisive consequence that thereafter Jews were a militarily powerless minority almost everywhere they lived. In fact, even before the first and second Jewish wars against Rome, which led to the destruction of the Second Temple and the expulsion of Jews from Jerusalem, more Jews lived outside Palestine than within it, and increasingly they lived farther and farther from Jerusalem. By the Middle Ages, the center of gravity of Jews and Judaism had moved from the Middle East to Europe. By 1933, the overwhelming majority of Jews lived in Northern Europe, with by far the greatest number living just to the east and southeast of Germany—many of them in Austria, the first country Hitler took over, and many more in Poland, the first country Hitler was able to conquer and control, and in the section of the Soviet Union that Hitler would conquer briefly. Needless to say, for there to be the Holocaust, there had to be widespread hostility against Jews and almost complete lack of support for them. And here, if we use "hostility" very broadly and loosely to mean any dislike or animosity of any kind that Jews have ever encountered, is another very ancient continuity. But the appearance of continuity is highly deceptive. While the belief that Jews have always provoked, or suffered from, the same kind of hostility may gratify certain emotional needs, it is a myth. Over the millennia from Babylon or Rome to Hitler's Germany, there have been changes in the character and causes of hostility against Jews as radical as those over the same period in the character of European civilization. Yet when new kinds of hostility emerged over the centuries, the old did not disappear. Rather, there was a gradual cumulation of different kinds of hostility that had started at different times. By the first half of the twentieth century, people who were hostile to Jews were hostile in several different ways, whether separately or in combination. One kind of hostility has indeed been continuous since Roman times, simple xenophobia, that is, the dislike of any and all outgroups because of their difference from the ingroup. Xenophobia is a very common attitude; it has been manifested by and against members of all groups throughout history, and the insistence of Jews on maintaining their distinctive identity has made them a prime target for xenophobic hostility from antiquity to the present. In 1933, the most widespread form of hostility to Jews was probably xenophobia, not intense antisemitism. There were

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many atheists, agnostics or merely nominal Christians who adhered to no antiJewish ideology other than nationalism and whose main reason for disliking Jews was their cultural difference. Since knowledge of, and contact with, Jews was rather rare in vast areas of Europe, relatively few non-Jews were seriously bothered by their presence. Many, probably most, non-Jews disliked Jews for their refusal or inability to assimilate fully into the majority culture, but they did not hate Jews with any great intensity. The continuity of this kind of hostility is millennial. In the ancient world, Jews stood out because of their refusal to accept the religion and customs of their neighbors and conquerors. That refusal and the hostility it aroused was canonized in the Book of Esther and has been liturgically celebrated through the centuries thereafter by the feast of Purim. Tacitus' description of Jews as the "enemies of humankind" is an extreme example of the Roman reaction to the Jewish refusal to honor the gods of the Romans or to participate in the conduct deemed sacred by the Romans. It should be emphasized, however, that while Tacitus considered Judaism a bad and gloomy religion, he did not hate Jews as people would hate them later; his dislike of them did not stem from any belief that they were Christ-killers, usurers, ritual murderers, poisoners or biological polluters. Moreover, he carefully distinguished between the mythical accounts of Jewish origins that he had heard, about which he was rather skeptical, and what he thought about Jews and Judaism himself. His xenophobic hostility against Jews, if more intense, was not different in kind from the hostility he directed against Greeks and Germans; and he also considered Christians enemies of humankind. 2 It is difficult to trace this ancient and basic form of hostility toward Jews in the centuries after Rome because, with the rise of Christianity, it was overlaid by expressions of a new—and often intense—religious hostility. Yet there is sufficient evidence of good social relations between some Jews and non-Jews from the first century of the Common Era to the nineteenth to indicate that there must always have been many who were not hostile to individual Jews, but who were hostile, often only mildly, to Jews collectively because of their refusal to abandon their distinctive characteristics and merge with the majority. And that attitude continued down to the twentieth century: "Some of my best friends are Jews." Yet however mild that widespread aversion, it was permissive of great evil. Those non-Jews could easily support discrimination against Jews and were not, for the most part, predisposed to come to their aid when they seemed seriously threatened. Their attitude ensured that Hitler would not have to face any strong and general, international or popular, reaction to his treatment of Jews either before or during the war. Xenophobic hostility, although sometimes intense, was the least dangerous form of hostility against Jews because it was a common psychological attitude that was also directed against other peoples and was not particularly aimed at Jews. It became much more dangerous, however, when it reinforced an ideology, the Aryan myth, that focused on Jews and asserted the superiority of Aryan identity by contrasting it with the dangerously evil inferiority of the Jews. But here again there was obvious continuity, for the Aryan myth was by no means the first ideology to demonstrate the superiority of one group's identity by focusing on Jews and asserting their fundamental inferiority and evil. The first was the doctrine about Jews that

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Christians developed in the first four centuries of the Common Era—and that was still being taught with little change in 1933.3 That doctrine was the result of another important discontinuity in Jewish history, the split within Judaism that gave birth to talmudic Judaism and Christianity. On the one hand, the Jerusalem and Babylonian Talmuds made Judaism more inaccessible for non-Jews than had been the Hellenistic Judaism of Philo of Alexandria. On the other hand, the Christian sect that broke from Judaism took over not only the Hebrew Scripture but also many other elements of Judaic religiosity and made them accessible to more and more non-Jews. And the consequences of the emergence and spread of Christianity for Jews were so enormous that any full discussion of the role of contingency in Jewish history would have to consider whether Christianity was a contingency dependent for its existence on the unpredictable appearance of its charismatic founders, Jesus and Paul. Be that as it may, however, as a result of the success of Christianity, far more people than ever before became familiar not only with major elements of Jewish thought but also with the belief (which Hitler vigorously maintained in his own way) that Jews were peculiarly important in history. But the way that Christians believed Jews were important was highly ambiguous and primarily negative. For when the early Christian leaders formulated their theology about their new hope for salvation, they had to explain why, if God had first revealed himself to the Jews, most Jews had not recognized Jesus' divinity and become Christians. To defend the salvation offered by their faith in Jesus and to compete with Judaism, Christian thinkers in the early centuries formulated the first carefully elaborated argument th declared Jews to be radically inferior. These theologians argued that the Judais of the first covenant had been superseded by a second covenant with the coming of Jesus Christ. They declared that the vast majority of Jews at the time of Jesus had been so spiritually blind that they had been unable to recognize Jesus' divinity (or so immoral that they knew but refused to admit it); that they were responsible for the greatest of crimes, the killing of Christ; and that their defeat and dispersion thereafter at the hands of the Romans was divine punishment for their immense crime. Once chosen by God, the Jews were now rejected by him; Christians were now the true Israel. The Christian leaders taught that all the Jews who had not recognized Jesus as divine were eternally damned, as were all those afterward who still stubbornly refused to recognize his divinity, even though the triumphant spread of Christianity was making it ever more obvious. The only Jews who would be saved after the coming of Christ were those who converted to Christianity, including the remnant surviving at the end of days, who, according to the divine plan, would all convert and be saved. But in the meantime, because Jews had to remain in existence to play their important role in the last days of providential history, contemporary Jews were to be treated like Cain, to be reviled but not killed. When Aryan ideologues alleged the inferiority of Jews in order to argue the superiority of Germans, they were persuasive because long-established Christian doctrine had already made the inferiority of Jews an unexamined assumption of most non-Jews. And when the Nazis used Jews as forced labor, they were carrying

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one feature of Christian doctrine to new extremes. According to the great Church Father Augustine (354-430), contemporary Jews were the slaves of Christians and existed to serve Christian purposes. Even though Jews did not understand their own Scripture, they proved by their existence and preservation of their Scripture that Christians had not invented that Scripture and hence had not invented Christ the Messiah. It is a horrible irony that what has been praised as a great Jewish contribution, the concept of linear historical development, was used by Christian providential history to justify a cosmic condemnation of Jews. This image of Jews was imprinted on all believers down through the centuries in many ways, most strikingly by the medieval Passion plays but most consistently by ecclesiastical art, catechismal practice, sermons, the Fourth Gospel and the liturgy of the holiest of Christian feasts, the services of Holy Week—that of Good Friday in particular. By the time of the First Crusade, when the first great massacre of European Jews occurred in Northern Europe in 1096,4 the image or stereotype of the Jews as Christ-killers to be punished was firmly imprinted in the minds of many Europeans. Aided by representations in great art and music, it would remain rooted in most people's minds, at least to the Second Vatican Council in the twentieth century. In the 1930s, even people who were no longer believing Christians "knew" that the Jews had killed a good man, Jesus. It should be emphasized that, although based on religious beliefs and obviously a distortion and exaggeration, this stereotype had a solid basis in reality. Of course, all Jews at the time were not involved in the killing of Jesus, and obviously all Jews thereafter were not, but it is certainly true that Jews never believed in his divinity,5 that some Jews were involved in his death, and that most Jews who thought about him thereafter thought of him as a magician or heretic who had been properly condemned and executed.6 Moreover, the dispersion of Jews, their legal degradation and their exclusion from elite social activities right down to the twentieth century made them seem a living demonstration of the truth of the Christian assertion that God was punishing the Jews for their great crime and that Christians had replaced them as the true Israel. In the polytheistic Roman empire, Jews had enjoyed the rights of citizens, save for the prohibition of proselytism. They had even been given special privileges: they had been relieved from the obligation to worship the emperor, from appearance in courts on the Sabbath, and possibly also from military service.7 Once Constantine had converted, however, and the Christian religion was recognized as licit, and especially after it was made the official religion of the Roman empire at the end of the fourth century, Christian leaders were able to pressure the emperors into lowering the status of Jews in secular law. Among other disabilities, Jews were gradually denied the right to hold public office, own slaves or marry Christians, and they were forbidden to erect new synagogues or repair old ones without permission.8 By the eleventh century, with the fall of the western Roman empire, the Christianization of Europe in the Middle Ages and the development of the powerful Catholic Church, and its influence on secular government, the degradation of Jewish legal and social status increased greatly. The severity with which restrictive measures were implemented varied at different times and in different places; in medieval Spain, for

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example, some Jews were important officials and achieved quasi-noble status. But in most of Europe by the thirteenth century, particularly in northwestern Europe, Jews were rigorously restricted and controlled. Since the fundamental bonds of social organization in the Middle Ages were cemented by Christian oaths, Jews could not be knights and could not serve on municipal councils or, with very rare exceptions, belong to merchant or craft guilds. In 1215, so that Jews would not be mistaken for Christians, Pope Innocent III and the Fourth Lateran Council decreed that Jews must wear distinguishing clothing. This was typically interpreted to mean the wearing of a visible badge. For example, an English church council decreed that Jews must wear on their chest a clearly visible linen patch, two fingers wide and four long, different in color from their clothing.9 Although unevenly implemented, the "Jewish badge" physically symbolized the difference and alleged inferiority of Jews, and their exclusion from normal society.10 And although the requirement was abandoned in the modern period, it was preserved in iconography and the memory of it survived. The wearing of a distinguishing mark, the Star of David, that Hitler commanded was no modern invention. From antiquity to 1945, and to some extent beyond, there was also residential segregation. During the Middle Ages, as a result of the Jews' desire to live together for religious and social reasons and of the urge of non-Jews to segregate them, most Jews came to live voluntarily in separate sections of towns—a segregation that ceased to be voluntary with the compulsory ghettos of the end of the Middle Ages. By the thirteenth century, although it was not required by Christian doctrine, secular law denied Jews the right to move freely from place to place. To reside in a kingdom, principality or town, Jews had to have the explicit permission of the king or lord, and these rulers then exploited them by taxation, fines or arbitrary expropriations.11 When Jews ceased to be a valuable source of revenue for secular rulers, and when increasing hostility against them made support of them politically inadvisable, secular rulers expelled them. These expulsions, although an indirect consequence of Christian doctrine about Jews, were not recommended by the Catholic Church; indeed, they ran counter to church law about Jews. But popes did not protest energetically against them, and by 1497, as a result of the various expulsions by secular rulers, Western Europe was largely judenrein. The idea of the desirability of a European society without Jews was born long before Hitler. Not all Jews were expelled from Western Europe, however, which brings up a very different and much discussed aspect of the Holocaust: the survival of many of its potential victims, often thanks to the help of non-Jews. One of the most striking examples of historical continuity is the fact that, from the Middle Ages to the present, Jews were never expelled from Rome. In 1943, when the Germans took over much of Italy after the fall of Mussolini, they seized about a thousand of the 6,000 to 7,000 Jews of Rome, but some 4,000 found sanctuary in the monasteries and convents of Rome and the Vatican City. Indeed, despite its Fascism, fewer Jews from Italy, the most traditionally Catholic of all countries, were killed than from any other country under Axis control except Estonia, Norway, Bulgaria and Luxem-

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bourg.12 And in other parts of Europe, many survivors owed their lives to Christian clerics and laity. Deadly as some of the consequences of the Christian doctrine about Jews were, the doctrine itself was so ambiguous that its impact was by no means entirely negative. Indeed, the very existence in Europe of Jews and a flourishing Jewish culture, or of Jews as a target for attacks, owed much to Christian doctrine and papal policy. However frequently popes insisted that Jews were Christ-killers who had to be kept in a degraded condition, nonetheless, since the time of Pope Gregory the Great (590-604), the popes had also been the most consistent defenders of the right of Jews to live in Europe and practice their religion. As Gregory put it, "Just as it should not be permitted the Jews to presume to do in their synagogues anything other than what is permitted them by law, so with regard to those things which have been conceded them, they ought to suffer no injury."13 Pope Innocent IV restated that policy forcefully in his condemnation of a massacre in 1247: Divine justice has never cast the Jewish people aside so completely that it reserves no remnant of them for salvation. Therefore, it is either unpraiseworthy zeal or detestable cruelty on the part of Christians, who, covetous of their possessions or thirsting for their blood, despoil, torture, and kill them without legal judgment, contrary to the clemency of the Catholic religion which allows them to dwell in the midst of its people and has decreed tolerance for their rites.14

Then as later, papal enforcement of this policy was sporadic and often halfhearted or less. Nonetheless, the policy was restated sufficiently frequently and with sufficient firmness so that its basic principle was widely known. Consequently, although many Christians attacked Jews on many occasions, there were also Christian clerics and laity who tried to protect Jews under attack, as some did during the great massacre of 1096 and as many did during the Holocaust. As Solomon Grayzel, one of the best students of the Jewish policy of medieval popes, put it, "It is not difficult to imagine what the fate of the Jews would have been had not the popes made it a part of Church policy to guarantee the Jews life, and rights of religious observance."15 As the expulsions demonstrate, the institutionalization of the Christian doctrine about Jews had unintended and unexpected consequences. Since churchmen wanted to convert the Jews, they were consciously opposed to anything that increased the difference between the ways Christian and Jews thought, an attitude obvious in their condemnation of the Talmud in 1242. But the doctrinal depiction of Jews as evil had just the opposite effect. It set in motion the process known as the self-fulfilling prophecy: treating people as bad will make them react with kinds of conduct that seem to confirm that they are bad. Close contact between Christians and Jews was prohibited, and Jews were denied political and social rights such as membership in the military. Those denials of opportunities open to others, together with the close community life and characteristics developed to ensure survival through centuries of oppression, meant that Jews would differ from other Europeans, not only in formal religious thought and practice but also, in varying degrees, in conduct and mentality in other spheres of life. And

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those differences aroused xenophobic reactions in many non-Jews, whether believing Christians or not, right down to the twentieth century, most obviously in the case of the Ostjuden who migrated to Germany at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. The clearest instance of an unintended consequence is another long continuity, the image of the Jew as usurer, a stereotype emphasized by Marx and the Nazis and firmly embedded in history textbooks and in dictionaries until very recently.16 Jews had not been known as moneylenders in antiquity, but starting in the twelfth century, they became stereotyped as usurers. Like the Christ-killer stereotype, the usurer stereotype, although obviously an exaggeration, had a solid basis in reality. While medieval Jews were not all moneylenders and also engaged in other kinds of conduct, from the twelfth century onward they were in fact disproportionately concentrated in lending money at interest. The commercial revolution in Europe that began in the eleventh century brought with it a rapidly rising demand for credit. Although Christian doctrine and Aristotelian theory disapproved of lending at interest, money lending became a much needed and highly profitable occupation. There were many highly successful Christian lenders, the most famous being the Lombards. But Jews, who were now excluded from most other occupations, particularly in Northern Europe, were peculiarly well placed to profit from the new opportunity.17 They were familiar with commercial relations, having been significantly involved in them before excluded from commerce. They were blessed with universal literacy and wide intercommunal connections. Unlike Christians, they were not controlled by church law; and even though some disapproved, they could lend openly at interest to Christians without violating Judaic law, for Christians were not their "brothers." Moreover, their moneylending was supported and encouraged by the secular rulers who profited from it by taxing or seizing the Jewish profits. What distinguished the Jews from the Christians was not primarily the practice of moneylending as such but the fact that the percentage of Jews engaged in that suspect activity was so high, and that they, both women and men, did so openly. Thus, to the hostility motivated by xenophobia and religious conflict was added a new and frequently fierce economic hostility. The profitable concentration of Jews in moneylending was never envisaged by the basic Christian doctrine about Jews. Indeed, popes and other clerics heartily disapproved of it and tried to limit it. But because Jews were not subject to church law, clerics could only put pressure on the secular rulers who controlled Jews, and secular rulers only ceased to support Jewish lending after popular opposition had made it politically unwise and their own heavy exploitation had made it unprofitable. By then, however, the usurer stereotype was firmly enshrined in law, literature and art. In the modern period, because of that long and prominent engagement of many Jews in moneylending, and also their later prominence in high finance, the stereotype of Jews as peculiarly adept in economic manipulations—whether Bolshevik or capitalist—had some basis in reality; and it was widely accepted by many people on the political right and left, and not merely by the Nazis. But the deadliest menace to Jews in 1933 did not lie in the negative stereotypes, such as the Christ-killer or the usurer stereotype, that had some basis in reality. The greatest menace sprang from a very different source. For the Holocaust to occur,

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there had to be great irrationality. What made Hitler so deadly was his wildly irrational beliefs about Jews and the obsessive irrationality with which he pursued his policy of extermination even when it hindered pursuit of the war. The policy derived, of course, from the Aryan myth, an extreme product of wishful thinking that functioned to overcome some people's uncertainty about the value of their social and individual identity. Its creators in the nineteenth century constructed, and its adherents believed, a set of loose pseudoscientific generalizations that linked language, biology and culture in order to assert that Aryans were a biologically superior race, and that, by contrast, the allegedly immoral and asocial conduct of Jews was the unavoidable consequence of their dangerous biological inferiority.18 The idea that culture was biologically determined may have been tenable as a hypothesis up to the late nineteenth century, given the state of biological knowledge at the time, but for informed people to believe in, and base drastic action on, the Aryan myth in the second third of the twentieth century was highly irrational. Since no empirical studies had revealed any processes by which specific biological characteristics produced particular types of moral or social conduct, its pseudoscience was pure fantasy.19 Indeed, it was precisely the reverse of empirical. The myth required its adherents to repress what they knew or could discover about real Jews20 and to believe, with total conviction, that Jews had certain innate, unchangeable and highly dangerous, but nonetheless unobservable, characteristics. Though the myth aroused very real feelings of hostility, and though they were directed at physically real Jews, what stimulated that hostility was an irrational fear of purely imaginary Jewish characteristics. Here again there was continuity. Although the biological premises of the Aryan myth were relatively new, irrational fantasies about imaginary Jews were anything but new. Some wild ideas about Jews had been put forward in ancient Alexandria, where political hostility between Greeks and Jews was intense, but they did not spread widely (being unknown to Tacitus, for example) and did not endure. Deadly irrationality about Jews was a creation of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. It was medieval Christians who created the series of fantasies that caused the death of thousands of Jews and endured to the twentieth century: that all Jews conspired to kidnap Christian children in order to crucify them; that all Jews conspired to kill Christians in order to get the blood needed for the performance of Jewish rituals; that all Jews conspired to steal the consecrated wafers of the Christian Mass (believed to be the real body of Christ) in order to torture Christ anew; that, in order to overthrow Christian civilization, all Jews conspired to kill thousands and thousands of Christians by poisoning the wells of Europe and causing the Black Death. These fantasies were not a direct consequence of fundamental Christian beliefs or the Christian doctrine about Jews, as is obvious from the fact that they did not appear for the first twelve centuries of Christianity. They were a product of stress and wishful thinking. They first appeared during the institutional and intellectual ferment that occurred in Western Europe in the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries. It was then that the lineaments of modern European civilization took shape and that the characteristic features of the Catholic Church—centralized papal authority, the seven sacraments, codified church law, systematic theology, univer-

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sities, religious orders, Romanesque and Gothic cathedrals—were firmly established, much as they would endure for centuries. Yet if that ferment created an impressively strong Catholic Church that supported and encouraged a great intellectual advance, it also created the challenges to the beliefs and authority of the Church that led to the formation in the thirteenth century of that famous institution of repression, the Inquisition, the first specialized thought-police. For the first time in five hundred years, and in a cultural environment and mental atmosphere very different from that of antiquity, the movement known as Scholasticism intensively reexamined, questioned and reformulated the basic doctrines of Catholic Christianity, with the aid of a new mastery of Aristotelian logic, physics and metaphysics, and a new attention to empirical reality. The result was unsettling. Although most of the reformulations of the theologians were orthodox as judged by the ecclesiastical hierarchy, some affirmations, even some by Thomas Aquinas, were condemned. And other theologians who directly denied basic traditional beliefs had their major conclusions condemned as heretical or were themselves condemned as heretics. Moreover, while most lay folk continued to accept more or less unthinkingly what they were told to believe, some, as early as the eleventh century, began to demonstrate a new interest in thinking for themselves about religious ideas. And some, a small minority, openly rejected ecclesiastical authority, followed their own convictions and joined popular religious movements. These movements were rapidly condemned as heretical, and, with the exception of the Waldensians, all were successfully suppressed from the eleventh to the fifteenth century by local ecclesiastical authorities and the Inquisition, aided by secular authorities.21 But the campaigns against heresy did not eliminate the doubts or their causes. Far from it. While the efforts to repress dissent may have driven the expression of questions and doubts underground, they also made many more people aware that basic Catholic beliefs had been, and could be, questioned and doubted. Consequently, many people continued to entertain doubts more or less privately until, in the sixteenth century, the pressure of dissent proved stronger than the powers of repression and the Protestant revolution ended the Catholic Church's monopoly of religious government in Western Europe. The challenge was not only institutional. Since individuals, both clerical and lay, had long relied on the threatened beliefs and practices for their own individual salvation, doubts could be a major cause of personal anxiety. Whether they were, and how individuals reacted, varied greatly. Of course, most people from kings to peasants felt little personal concern. Although aware that some people had doubts, they paid little attention, for their own unexamined faith remained unshaken. Some others whose faith was firm and aggressive, especially clerics, either developed theological arguments to counter heretical doctrines or else persecuted heretics. At the other end of the spectrum were the individuals whose doubts led them to active disbelief. Some expressed them openly, but the more efficient the social repression became, the more dangerous it became to do so. Most who had doubts either kept them to themselves or else expressed them only in a safe form, jokingly and to friends. Of particular interest is another group—those caught in the middle who were torn

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between belief and doubts. These individuals were aware that some of their basic beliefs had been challenged, and they were seriously bothered by the menace, but they were unable to recognize that what was bothering them was their own uncertainty about those beliefs. Faced by that internal challenge to the security of their identity, they repressed their unformulated doubts and asserted the superiority of Catholicism and their own worth as good Catholics. They reinforced their beliefs by wishful thinking about the world around them; they imagined events that seemed to demonstrate the truth of their threatened beliefs. But the gap between what they fantasized and what could in fact be observed remained; and because, at some psychic level, they remained anxious about the value of their identity, their wishful thinking easily became angry, paranoid and irrational.22 The first irrational European fantasy about Jews was created around 1150 in England by Thomas of Monmouth, a monk at the cathedral priory of Norwich.23 Six years earlier, an unknown murderer had killed young William of Norwich at Easter time and had left his body in a nearby wood. William's uncle, a priest, alleged (without any evidence) that it was the Jews, who had only recently settled in Norwich, who had killed him. Although the sheriff paid no attention, some local ecclesiastics supported the charge, and the boy's body was buried in the monks' cemetery at the cathedral. Some four years later, Thomas of Monmouth arrived at the priory and became fascinated by the story. In order to make a saint out of this boy, who was not noted for piety, Thomas wrote a lengthy, highly detailed, dramatic and entirely imaginative account of how William had been martyred. According to Thomas, the Jews of Spain assembled every year in Narbonne (not in a cemetery in Prague, as in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion) to organize the annual sacrifice of a Christian, an act that was prescribed by their ancient writings in order to free them to return to their own land. Each year, the Jews in Narbonne cast lots to determine in which country the sacrifice should take place that year. Then the Jews of the major city of that country similarly cast lots to determine in which town of the country the sacrifice would be performed by the local Jews. In 1144, the lot had fallen on England and then on Norwich, and all the synagogues in England had known it and had consented to the act. Accordingly, the Jews of Norwich had kidnapped young William, tortured him, crucified him, and left his body in Thorpe Wood. The falsity of the fantasy is manifest from both internal and external evidence. Indeed, many of the clerics at the cathedral at the time did not believe it. But th fantasy confirmed the story about the crucifixion of Christ; it also demonstrated tha those normal-seeming contemporary Jews were indeed evil Christ-killers—and there was a hunger for saints' relics and the revenues they brought in. William was soon enshrined within the cathedral, and his fame promptly spread. The crucifixion charge was repeated in other towns in England and northern France where the body of a child whose killer was unknown was found, and more shrines were constructed for the alleged victims. The crucifixion fantasy spread so easily because, as should be emphasized, this accusation—unlike the Christ-killer or usury accusations— depicted all contemporary Jews everywhere as engaged in a secret conspiracy, an "international" conspiracy that physically threatened contemporary Christians. And thereafter, most of the fantasies that followed, right down to the Protocols and the Nazis, assumed that a Jewish conspiracy was involved in the alleged crimes.

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In 1235, a new kind of ritual murder accusation appeared in Germany, the fantasy of Jewish ritual cannibalism.24 It occurred right after a brutal campaign against accused heretics in Germany who allegedly did not believe in the presence of Christ's body and blood in the Eucharist. The Jews at Fulda were accused of having secretly killed five boys in order to get the blood they needed for the rituals necessary for their salvation, and thirty-four Jews were slain. The fantasy supported the Catholic belief that the Eucharist was necessary for salvation by alleging that even the Jews recognized that a blood ritual was needed for salvation. And since the accusation made secret murder the necessary prerequisite for an alleged Jewish ritual, it directly implied that all Jews were involved in the conspiracy to get blood. The accusation promptly proved very popular. Although popes condemned it, many more accusations of ritual cannibalism followed, right down to the famous case of Simon of Trent in 1475, which was gruesomely depicted in so many German woodcuts.25 But the fantasy that most clearly reveals the psychological processes at work, and therefore deserves the most attention, is the remarkably unbelievable accusation (which only appeared at the end of the thirteenth century) that contemporary Jews were secretly torturing Christ himself.26 The accusation depended on, and was an indirect consequence of, the importance attributed to the central symbol of Catholic salvation, the belief that Christ became physically present again on earth during the performance of the Catholic Mass or sacrament of the Eucharist, the most common medieval rite, performed countless times each week throughout Europe. It was believed that when the wafers of the Mass were consecrated by the priest, these "hosts" became the true body of Jesus Christ, that divine grace was thereby made available to the communicants who swallowed them in the proper frame of mind, and that only ordained priests of the Catholic Church could operate that saving miracle. Belief in that sacrament and the sacrament of ordination was the foundation on which the authority of the priesthood of the Catholic Church depended for its legitimacy. From about 500 to 1000 CE, belief in the ritual was expressed in performance rather than words. Almost no one asked how or whether Christ became really present when the sacrament was performed. But during the ferment that began around 1000 CE, the belief was seriously challenged at both the intellectual and the popular level. The questioning did not depend on any abstruse reasoning but on something anyone could observe: there was no apparent change in the wafer after the priest had pronounced the word of consecration. Another obvious problem was this: if the believers had been eating Christ's true body for all these years, how could there by anything left? These were simple empirical questions that made it as easy for lay people as for churchmen to question the belief in the real presence of Christ. And in the eleventh century, disbelief was first expressed by some small, largely lay, popular movements that rejected the belief in the real presence of Christ or the value of masses for the dead. They were rapidly condemned as heretical and soon put down, but a much greater challenge came in the middle of the century. Around 1050, Berengar of Tours, a renowned teacher, openly and frequently argued that there was no physical change in the wafer, only a change in the way believers perceived or thought about

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it. Because his views were a serious threat to both the traditional belief and the basic authority of the priesthood, they were repeatedly condemned by the highest levels of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. One response to this fundamental challenge was flat condemnation; another was argument. Berengar's theses provoked other scholars at the time to develop arguments in defense of the traditional belief, thereby beginning a debate that only directed increased attention to the issue. To justify the belief, theologians between 1050 and 1215 developed the doctrine of transubstantiation. It got around the obvious empirical problem by using Aristotelian categories that enabled them to distinguish between the accidents or observable characteristics of the wafer and its underlying unobservable substance, which allegedly changed. Another effort to defend the threatened belief occurred in 1215, when the Fourth Lateran Council made belief in the Real Presence a dogma that all Catholics were obliged to accept. The sanctity of the host was further emphasized emotionally in the course of the thirteenth century by the creation of a new church feast, the feast of Corpus Christi. But the arguments and liturgical reinforcement did not persuade everyone. Indeed, Duns Scotus, a noted fourteenth-century scholar who supported belief in Christ's physical presence, remarked that anyone who followed natural reason would find this belief harder to accept than all the articles of faith concerning the Incarnation! And so the debate continued right down to the Protestant revolution, when, after much discussion, the belief in any physical change in the wafer was abandoned by the new Calvinist and Lutheran religions. A third response to the challenge also began in the eleventh century and intensified thereafter. It was a product not of legal or theological thought but of wishful thinking, and it was well suited to appeal to the laity. From antiquity down to the eleventh century, there had been stories of miracles that occurred around the Mass or in connection with the wafer itself, miraculous events that converted disbelievers in Christianity or confounded sinners. But almost none of those stories reported any change in the host itself. After Berengar of Tours' challenge, however, stories of miraculous changes of the host into a small child, a martyred adult or, most frequently, flesh and blood became frequent. As the theologians of the eleventh and twelfth centuries recognized, these stories functioned to prove that the challenged belief was really valid, that, as Aquinas would later put it, God caused these miracles "for the purpose of showing that Christ's body is truly under this sacrament." To defend that belief, veneration of the host was promoted in various ways during the thirteenth century, until, in the early fourteenth century, a cleric could declare that "the Eucharist is the sacrament on which the devotion of moderns most depends." At the same time, however, the frequency of stories about host miracles involving Christians indicates that doubts about transubstantiation remained strong and that irrational efforts to overcome them were increasing. Given the importance of the issue, it was inevitable that the Jews, the symbol par excellence of disbelief in Christianity, would be brought into the act. If there was anyone in Europe who did not believe that a piece of bread changed into Christ's real body and blood, it was the Jews. Their disbelief was so obvious that it was taken for granted by Christians from antiquity to the end of the thirteenth century.

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When Jews were protagonists in miracle stories about the Mass prior to the thirteenth century, they were typically described as unbelievers who had observed a Mass, witnessed a miracle such as a change of the wafer into flesh, become convinced of the truth of Christianity, and converted. The plot of all these stories thus depended on the known fact that Jews did not believe that there was any change in the wafer. All that changed at the end of the thirteenth century. The new accusation against Jews that began in 1290 reveals just how irrational defense of belief in the Real Presence could become. In its first version, the story charged that a Jew of Paris had acquired a consecrated host. In order to show his contempt for Christianity, he and some other Jews had attacked the host in various ways; but miraculously, the host had turned into flesh and blood, thereby persuading many Jews to convert. In 1295, with papal approval, a chapel (the famous Chapelle des Billetes) was built on the spot where the miracle allegedly occurred, and the original story was dramatically altered to glorify it. The new version alleged that when the "cruel" Jew attacked the host, striking miracles occurred, including its transformation into the body of the crucified Christ. But even when Christ appeared physically, the Jew did not stop his tortures; despite the pleas of his wife and children, he continued to torture Christ. This striking fantasy spread rapidly through clerical channels to Germany, where it was promptly believed—with tragic results.27 On April 20,1298, twenty-one Jews of Röttingen, who were accused of stealing hosts and torturing Christ, were massacred by a mob led by a man called Rintfleisch, possibly a butcher. Rintfleisch then led his force from town to town in southern and southwestern Germany killing Jews, with considerable support from members of the local population. Other massacres occurred independently in other places. In all, at least 3,441, possibly between 4,000 and 5,000 Jews were killed, more than during the great massacre of 1096 or any of the massacres that had accompanied the later crusades. And whereas those massacres had been an unintended consequence of the Europe-wide papal summons to take the Cross and fight Christ's enemies—the Muslims—Rintfleisch's movement started locally, was inspired solely by hatred of Jews, and was directed solely against them. It was, so to speak, an unofficial "crusade" against Jews by a self-appointed leader who presumably had some charisma and hated Jews. And the same is true of the Armleder movement of 1336-1338 in Germany, which started with the same accusation and which may have slaughtered as many as 6,000 Jews.28 The version of the accusation that catalyzed those massacres alleged that Jews stole consecrated hosts and distributed them among their communities so that local Jews could secretly torture Christ. Again a conspiracy, and a strikingly irrational fantasy. Those who believed it had to repress a reality that had been taken for granted for centuries, that Jews did not believe that any change occurred in the consecrated wafers. Instead, adherents had to believe that even the Jews knew that the consecrated wafers really were the body of Christ! After all, what better proof of the Real Presence could there be than that even the Jews believed in the miracle of the Eucharist? This accusation was particularly deadly because it did not focus on the Jews of a particular locality where some body had been found. Since there were consecrated hosts everywhere, it could be raised against all Jews in many localities at the same time.

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Similarly, it was the ubiquity of the alleged crime that encouraged the even greater and more widespread fourteenth-century massacres set off by the fantasy that Jews had caused the Black Death by poisoning the wells of Europe. Unlike the accusations of ritual murder and torture of the host, this accusation was a classic case of scapegoating, of pinning responsibility for a very real and unusual kind of disaster on the most unpopular person or group available. Though the fantasy proclaimed that Jews were engaged in a deadly conspiracy to overthrow Christianity, it did not serve to defend any particular Christian religious belief or ritual, and the pope condemned it. As he pointed out, since Jews were dying from the plague as well as Christians, the accusation was manifestly false. The accusations of well-poisoning soon stopped, though the fantasy about Jews and the Black Death stayed in people's minds.29 The accusations that Jews had tortured consecrated hosts also died down after the Reformation, although shrines for allegedly tortured hosts kept memory of the fantasy alive. Specific accusations of ritual murder also declined sharply after the Reformation,30 except in Poland, Lithuania and Russia, but knowledge of the fantasy was kept very much alive in Western Europe by Catholic preaching, attendance at the shrines of the alleged victims, and Martin Luther's attacks on Jews. After the fifteenth century, the most uniformly Christian and Catholic period of European history ended; and thereafter the intensity of specifically religious hostility against Jews gradually declined. Although the overwhelming majority of Europeans continued to be Christians of varying degrees of indoctrination and conviction right down to the twentieth century, by the nineteenth century, atheists and agnostics were increasing and religion had long ceased to be a central issue of public policy. At least in Western Europe, the choice of religion and the content of religious feelings were increasingly seen as private and personal matters. This change in the religious atmosphere was paralled by the uneven legal and political emancipation of Jews and a period of relatively good relations between Jews and non-Jews. After 1870, however, as nationalism crested and self-styled antisemitic movements arose in reaction to modernization, economic depression and Jewish migration, the old irrationality about Jews began to rise again in Western Europe. In Austria in the 1870s and 1880s, the writings of two Catholic priests, Joseph Deckert and August Rohling, supported belief in the ritual murder accusation.31 In Rome, La Civiltd Cattolica, the semi-official journal of the papacy published by the Jesuits,32 attacked Jews on many occasions in the 1880s, even going so far as to support the accusation of ritual murder. In France in the 1880s and 1890s, Edouard Drumont's widely read La France juive repeated the accusation. Between 1867 and 1914, there were twelve ritual murder trials in the German and Austrian empires;33 and between 1911 and 1913, the Beilis case in Russia attracted attention throughout Europe. When The Protocols of the Elders of Zion appeared at the end of the nineteenth century,34 the details of its accusation were modified to suit modern conditions, but its premise of a menacing conspiracy of all Jews had been around for seven centuries. When Germans made Jews the scapegoat for the costly defeat in the First World War, they were acting like the people in the fourteenth century who had made Jews the scapegoat for the plague that killed some one-quarter of the population of Europe.

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And when the Nazis repeated the accusation of ritual murder in issues of Der Stürmer, they were following a path well trodden since the twelfth century. For there to be the Holocaust, however, there had to be a new and deadly discontinuity in the pattern of hostility to Jews, the construction of the image of Jews as a race. If the nineteenth century witnessed the uneven emancipation of Jews, it also witnessed the fight between religion and science, largely inspired by Charles Darwin and Darwinians. Increasingly, scientific knowledge, not religion, was considered to possess universal authority. And to fill the vacuum left by declining belief in the traditional Christian religions, new kinds of religion based on "scientific" beliefs about a cosmos ruled by material processes now appeared, and with them new forms of hostility to Jews. After millennia in which people had used Christian premises or rationalizations to justify their hostility toward Jews, now an evergrowing number of people from the late nineteenth century onward justified their hostility by pseudoscientific, socioeconomic or biological rationalizations— rationalizations that were endowed with hot emotion by the friction of competing socioeconomic interests and nationalisms and elevated by their proponents to the status of dogmas.35 Although it is sometimes argued that racism can be traced to fifteenth-century Spain,36 that argument reads history backwards and rests on a confusion between genealogy and biology. The early modern Spanish concept of limpieza di sangre,31 purity of blood, differed basically from the racist ideas of the nineteenth century and was a response to very different needs. In medieval society, family descent was an extremely important criterion for royalty and nobility—and for servile status. People then inherited their social position, together with its rights and duties, from their ancestors. When used with an appropriate adjective, "blood" was a genealogical term that indicated the legal and social status of a person's parents or ancestors and the kind of habits or culture that went with it. Its meaning did not derive from any concern with biology, other than the knowledge that children were the result of intercourse between a man and a woman. In reaction to the persecutions and expulsions in Spain between 1391 and 1492, thousands of Jews emigrated, but thousands of others, especially wealthier ones, converted to Christianity in order to avoid death or expulsion. These new Christians, the conversos, were now able to occupy official positions in royal government and the Catholic Church and to intermarry with Christians. Thus freed, they and their offspring advanced rapidly in the social and political hierarchy, and their success made many old Christians jealous. Since many converts had been less than sincere in their sudden conversions, and since many were being persecuted by the Inquisition, Old Christians charged that many other apparently genuine conversos and their offspring were secretly maintaining Jewish beliefs and practices.38 Starting in 1449, Old Christians tried to bar conversos from holding office in various ecclesiastical and secular corporations by making "purity of the blood," that is, having no Jewish or conversos ancestor, a requirement for office in the group. What lay behind the requirement of limpieza di sangre was not any belief that Judaic attitudes—or any other mental habits—were transmitted by purely biological processes; it was the perfectly realistic recognition that the family was a powerful channel for the social transmission of religious or cultural habits. The premises

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underlying the rules for "purity of the blood" were precisely the opposite of those underlying the Nuremberg laws. Whereas the rules for "purity of the blood" used family connections to locate alleged religious predispositions, the Nuremberg Laws used religious connections to determine whether individuals were biologically Jewish. And unlike limpieza di sangre, the racism of the Aryan myth required an awareness, however distorted, of the advances of biological knowledge since Darwin, Gregory Mendel and Louis Pasteur. With racism came the necessary precondition for genocide, at least according to my understanding of that recent and much debated term,39 which is so often used very loosely to typify any intentional wholescale slaughter. Whatever the precise definition of the term, the phenomenon is new. As Steven T. Katz has argued convincingly, although there was considerable persecution and brutal killing throughout the Middle Ages and the early modern and modern periods, there was never any intent to kill entire groups until Hitler: "The conversion of the nonbeliever and the abjuration of the heretic were the preferred solutions to the evil and danger they represented; and for those entire communities that proved unassimilable, unconvertable, the ultimate solution was expulsion."40 The contrast between those earlier persecutions and Hitler's policy is obvious, and the crucial question is, why? The earlier massacres were perpetrated by people who could hope that some, perhaps most, of the people they considered to be a threat could be assimilated or persuaded—by brutality if necessary—to change their minds and act "properly," for their evil characteristics were the result of beliefs that were changeable, not innately predetermined. Hitler, however, although he had thought of expelling the Jews, abandoned that idea after he had acquired vast power and tried instead, obsessively and at considerable expense, to kill all the Jews he could. Like the perpetrators of other great massacres, he wanted to eliminate what he believed was the evil and menace posed by certain people, but unlike them he believed that it could not be eliminated in any other way than by killing all the members of that group. He did so because of his pseudoscientific beliefs about biology. When Hitler thought of "Jews," he thought about an imaginary race whose members' horrifyingly evil moral and social ideas and characteristics could not be changed because they were inescapably determined by biological characteristics that might be diluted but could not be changed. The only way to eliminate the evil was to kill all Jews. It is unfortunate that, when the term "genocide" was coined, its first syllable was derived from genos, a Greek word with a Latin cognate, gens. In antiquity, the words meant an extended family, kindred or a people such as the Romans, who were said to be descended from a common, usually legendary, ancestor. The words did not mean "nation" or "race" in the twentieth-century sense, for those meanings had not yet come into existence. Moreover, because it was used for so many different kinds of groups, its biological connotations were quite weak. The derivation of "genocide" from "genos" thus invites the application of the term to the massive killing of almost any kind of group. It might be better if "genocide" were thought of as stemming from "genes" and understood as the effort to kill all members of a group because of the allegedly evil

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moral consequences of their biological constitution. Were "genocide" defined in this way, it would emphasize the difference between genocide and ethnocide41 and make the uniqueness of the Holocaust more evident. Since Hitler's intention to kill all Jews, as well as his attack on Gypsies and his policy of euthanasia, was the consequence of his racist belief that innate biological characteristics determined specific moral and social attitudes, not only was the Holocaust genocide according to that definition, but it was also the first, and is so far the only, instance of genocide. Since the biological beliefs about Jews of the Aryan myth were highly irrational, they encouraged more irrationality, and the adherents of the myth could and did swallow many of the older irrational ideas about Jews. Yet if the continuity of some of the older irrational ideas is obvious, a straightforward history-of-ideas approach can conceal the extent to which the prevalence or popularity of those ideas depended on non-ideational social and psychological pressures and varied as those pressures varied. Completely false, irrational and paranoid beliefs about Jews first appeared in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, a period of very rapid and unsettling political development, economic advance and religious creativity. These fantasies functioned to quell doubts about the validity of certain traditional Catholic beliefs (and consequently about the superiority of Catholic identity) that arose during those centuries of rapid change. When the rapid advance ended, it was followed, in the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, by a period of economic contraction, social conflict (peasant uprisings), political instability (civil wars) and religious crisis (the Great Schism). Doubts increased, and it was then that the major expulsions and the greatest massacres of Jews incited by those false accusations occurred. By the end of the Middle Ages, the image of the Jews as international conspirators who acted secretly within Europe to harm Christendom and individual Christians was firmly embedded in European culture. Moreover, from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century, the Jews were the only enduring target within Europe for paranoid fantasies about such a menacing conspiracy.42 Insofar as there was a permanent personification of evil, it was the Jews. Consequently, when Germans experienced a period of rapid political centralization, industrialization, economic advance, nationalistic expansion and intellectual fermentation from 1871 to 1914, and when that was followed, from 1918 to 1933, by a striking military defeat, severe economic problems, social unrest and political instability that threatened people's sense of identity, those Germans who had paranoid tendencies had a preestablished target, already marked by irrational projections, which they could blame for their own failings and misfortunes. Confronted by defeat and economic failure, they sought to counteract their doubts about the superiority of being German by extreme assertions of the value of their identity, and by blaming the eternally evil Jews for the "stab in the back" and the menace of Bolshevism. Another less obvious continuity is very striking. If we leave aside xenophobia, which has been displayed against many groups, and if we use the term "antisemitism" only for the unusual kind of hostility toward Jews that, like Hitler's, is the result of completely false and irrational beliefs about a physically threatening international conspiracy of Jews, then antisemitism first appeared in England, northern

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France, Germany and Austria in the Middle Ages—that is, in Northern, not Mediterranean, Europe. It was there that the fantasies about ritual crucifixion, ritual cannibalism and torture of the host were first created and spread, causing great loss of life, especially in Germany. Although clerics later disseminated the fantasies in Mediterranean Europe, they had little appeal there and caused few deaths. Similarly, in the modern period, the Aryan myth was developed in Northern Europe, it had its strongest appeal in Germany, and it incited the greatest massacres ever in the lands under German control. The contrast with attitudes in Italy and Spain is obvious. Though old Catholic religious ideas still generated hostility toward Jews, Hitler's mad ideas about Jews had almost no appeal, and Italian soldiers and diplomats tried to save Jews from falling into the hands of the Germans.43 Even though belief in Catholicism may have declined, Italians and Spaniards were still profoundly molded mentally by their ancient Roman Catholic culture, and Hitler's racist ideology was in flagrant contradiction with the emphasis on the universality of Catholic beliefs. To conclude, massive continuity there certainly was, but also crucial contingency. Had the general attitudes and conditions in Germany after 1918 not been what they were, and had there not been the continuities in Jewish history and in the reactions to Jews that there were, Hitler or no Hitler, there would have been no Holocaust. Those continuities were essential ingredients of the Holocaust and are a necessary part of any explanation of why Germany was at its center. They also help to explain why Germany fell under a dictatorship. But they do not explain Hitler's indubitable abilities and drive for power, nor do they explain why his abilities were combined with, and dominated by, an obsessive irrational hatred of Jews. Like Rintfleisch in the fourteenth century, Hitler led a crusade against Jews, but unlike Rintfleisch, he was able to implement his paranoia with all the powers of a modern centralized government and all the modern advances in technology. It is horribly saddening to think that, had Hitler been killed, not wounded, on October 7, 1916, Jews might have suffered some persecution in the troubled 1930s and 1940s, but the Holocaust would almost certainly not have taken place.

Notes 1. Quoted in A Holocaust Reader, ed. Lucy S. Dawidowicz (New York: 1976), 46. The religious criterion also determined who would be categorized as Jewish Mischlingen, and which of them would be categorized as fully Jewish. Given the generality of the following reflections, the notes will be primarily bibliographic and will refer only to some of the more obvious general works. 2. Sir Ronald Syme, Tacitus, vol. 2 (Oxford: 1958), 530-532. 3. For good general discussions of the developments in these centuries, see James Parkes, The Conflict of the Church and the Synagogue (New York: 1969); Marcel Simon, Verus Israel: Etude sur les relations entre Chretiens et Juifs dans l'empire romain, 2nd ed. (Paris: 1964), English translation by H. Keating (New York: 1986). 4. Sec Robert Chazan, European Jewry and the First Crusade (Berkeley: 1987). 5. This is true except for those Judeo-Christians in the first two centuries who believed in Jesus but continued to observe the Law of Judaism, of whom the Ebionites are the best known.

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6. See Bernhard Blumenkranz, Juifs et Chretiens dans le monde occidental, 430-1096 (Paris: 1960) 169-171, 258-260. 7. The classic work is Jean luster, Les Juifs dans I'empire romain, 2 vols. (Paris: 1914). 8. See ibid.; Simon, Verus Israel; and Blumenkranz, Juifs et Chretiens. 9. Solomon Grayzel, The Church and the Jews in the XIHth Century, vol 1., 2nd ed. (New York: 1966), 314. 10. For a rich discussion of the ways Jews were symbolized iconographically in art, see the index in Ruth Mellinkoff, Outcasts: Signs of Otherness in Northern European Art of the Late Middle Ages, 2 vols. (Berkeley: 1993). 11. See the classic study of Guido Kisch, The Jews in Medieval Germany (Chicago: 1949); Gavin I. Langmuir, Toward a Definition of Antisemitism (Berkeley: 1990), 167-194; William Chester Jordan, The French Monarchy and the Jews: From Philip Augustus to the Last Capetians (Philadelphia: 1989); Robert C. Stacy, "1240-60: A Watershed in AngloJewish Relations?" Historical Research 61 (1988), 135-150; idem, "Jewish lending and the medieval English economy," in A commercialising economy, England 1086 to c. 1300, ed. Richard H. Britnell and Bruce M.S. Campbell (Manchester: 1994), 78-101. 12. Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 2nd ed., 3 vols. (New York: 1985), vol. 2, 660-679; vol. 3, 1220; Martin Gilbert, The Holocaust (New York: 1986), 543, 622-623, 666, 732. 13. Quoted in Grayzel, The Church and the Jews, 9. 14. Quoted in ibid., 263. 15. Ibid., 81. 16. See Langmuir, Toward a Definition of Antisemitism, 21-41. 17. See Joseph Schatzmiller, Shylock Reconsidered: Jews, Moneylending, and Medieval Society (Berkeley: 1990). 18. See Leon Poliakov, Le mylhe aryen: Essai sur les sources du racisme et des nationalites (Paris: 1971); appearing in English as The Aryan Myth, trans. Edmund Howard (New York: 1974). 19. In 1933, the great judge Learned Hand wrote to the anthropologist Franz Boas, "I am as much out of sympathy as you can be with the whole Nazi movement and particularly with its preposterous talk about race," quoted in Gerald Gunther, Learned Hand (Cambridge: Mass: 1994), 444. Contra Hermann Liibbe ("Rationalitat und Irrationalitat des Volkermords," in Holocaust: Die Grenzen des Verstehens, ed. Hanno Loewy [Hamburg: 1992], 83), to characterize the Holocaust as irrational is not a reaction of helplessness. The fact is that the Nazis rejected scientific rationality in favor of ideological faith, and the instrumental rationality of the methods of killing only makes the paranoid irrationality of those in a scientifically advanced country who believed the fantasy about Jews more obvious. 20. As Himmler recognized in his infamous speech of 1943, in which he complained, "And then they all come trudging, 80 million worthy Germans, and each one has his decent Jew" (Dawidowicz, A Holocaust Reader, 133). 21. R.I. Moore, The Origins of European Dissent (New York: 1977); idem, The Formation of a Persecuting Society (Oxford: 1987); Malcolm Lambert, Medieval Heresy, 2nd ed. (Oxford: 1992). 22. For a theoretical discussion of religious doubts and their relation to irrationality, see Gavin I. Langmuir, History, Religion, and Antisemitism (Berkeley: 1990), chs. 12 and 13. 23. See Langmuir, Toward a Definition of Antisemitism 209-236. 24. Ibid., 263-281. 25. See Ronnie Po-Chia Hsia, Trent 1475 (New Haven: 1992). 26. For the following discussion of host miracles, see Gavin I. Langmuir, "The Tortures of the Body of Christ," in Christendom and Its Discontents, ed. Scott L. Waugh and Peter Diehl (Cambridge: 1996), 287-309. 27. Accusations did not proliferate in England or France because Jews were expelled from England in 1290, and the strong monarchy in France, which opposed attacks on Jews as

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infringements of royal authority, also expelled them in 1306. But in Germany, the civil war at the end of the thirteenth century seriously weakened central authority and opened the way for decentralized attacks on Jews. 28. Friedrich Lotter, "Die Judenverfolgung des 'König Rintfleisch in Franken urn 1298,'" Zeitschrift fur historische Forschung 15 (1988), 389, 422 and passim; and idem, "Hostienfrevelvorwurf und Blutwunderfalschung bei den Judenverfolgungen von 1298 ('Rintfleisch') und 1336-1338 ('Armleder')," in Falschungen im Mittelalter, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Schriften, vol. 33, part 5 (Hannover: 1988), 560-571. 29. There was also a fantasy spread by some clerics that people should avoid Jewish doctors because they poisoned their Christian patients. 30. Ronnie Po-Chia Hsia, The Myth of Ritual Murder: Jews and Magic in Reformation Germany (New Haven: 1988). 31. Malcolm Hay, Europe and the Jews (Boston: 1960), 134-136; Peter Pulzer, The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: 1988), 157158, 174. 32. Hay, Europe and the Jews, 129; Attilio Milano, Storia degli ebrei in Italia (Turin: 1963), 398. 33. Pulzer, The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria, 69. Eleven of the accusations were dismissed after trial by jury. In the twelfth, the Polna Case, the accused was found guilty of murder but not ritual murder. 34. Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (New York: 1969). 35. See Langmuir, History, Religion, and Antisemitism, ch. 16. 36. See, for example, A History of the Jewish People, ed. H.H. Ben-Sasson (Cambridge, Mass.: 1976) 586. 37. A.A. Sicroff, Les controverses des statuts de "purete, de sang" en Espagne duXVe au XVII siécle (Paris: 1960); John Edwards, "Race and Religion in 15th and 16th Century Spain: The Purity of the Blood Laws Revisited," Proceedings of the Tenth (1989) World Congress of Jewish Studies, Division B, vol. 2 (Jerusalem: 1990), 159-166. 38. Anna Foa, Ebrei in Europa dallPesteNera al emancipazione (Rome: 1992), 124-140, 301-303. See also the extensive bibliography and comments of Steven T. Katz in The Holocaust in Historical Context, vol. 1: The Holocaust and Mass Death before the Modern Age (New York: 1994), 372, n. 244, and 375, n. 247. 39. The debate is discussed in some detail by Katz in ibid., 125-131. 40. Ibid., 577; and see also his Leo Baeck Memorial Lecture, The Holocaust and Comparative History (New York: 1993), where he discusses the Armenian case at some length. 41. By ethnocide, I mean the effort to eradicate a group by destroying the culture that binds its members together as a group. 42. At the end of the eighteenth century and in the second half of the nineteenth, there was some belief in a Masonic conspiracy, but it eventually merged with the belief in the Jewish conspiracy. 43. Nicola Caracciolo, Ebrei e ['Italia durante la guerra (Rome: 1986); in English, Uncertain Refuge, trans. Florette Rechnitz Koffler and Richard Koffler (Chicago: 1995); István Deák, "Holocaust Heroes," The New York Review of Books 39 no. 18 (5 Nov. 1992), 22-26.

The Camps: Eastern, Western, Modern Zygmunt Bauman (UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS and UNIVERSITY OF WARSAW)

People did not know what they were doing when, on New Year's Eve 1899, they celebrated the birth of the new century with jubilation. It was as though they were greeting the rain, not knowing that it was not going to cease until the rivers rose from their beds and turned the meadows into lakes and "the waters rose fifteen cubits above the mountains." They did not suspect that the waters would not fall upon a single day, but would rise gradually with the years. They did not suspect that the Lord God was tired in this twentieth century. They drank to the Flood.—Hans Habe, llona

This much Hans Habe, musing—with the benefit of hindsight, on the moment our century was born;1 the same century, which was at its other end to be described by Eric Hobsbawm as the "age of extremes." Indeed, there are many extremes this century has reached or dangerously approached. I believe, though, that the most extreme among extreme thoughts and events was the surprise: life-giving rain turning into the all-devouring flood, fresh and translucent streams joining into a muddy and murky mire, exuberant confidence shrinking into suffocating despair, only to dissolve in the end, as Jean Baudrillard suggests, in "a state of total illusion"2 with, let us add, nothing to distinguish it from the state of a total disillusionment. Precisely: surprise. Few other centuries were greeted with greater optimism and jubilation. It seemed that history was playing into human hands. It seemed that the modern effort "to found a human order on earth, in which freedom and happiness prevailed, without any transcendental or supernatural supports—an entirely human order"3 had proved to be a gamble that had paid off, and was delivering on its promise. Human ability to improve the human lot was infinite, no suffering was incurable, no problem without a solution. Quantity was now to turn into quality; little improvements here and there would condense into the splendor of the new glorious age. One could make the world not just better, but perfect; not only vanquish the outposts of evil, but burn out its very lairs; not just make humankind healthier, but wipe out disease and its carriers once and for all. And all this was to be attained by straining human wisdom to the utmost, by exercising human skills, by gathering human strength and choosing the right strategies. Our century was to fulfill the dream first dreamed two or three centuries before, in the Age of Reason and the Age of Enlightenment: the dream to remake the world 30

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so that it would finally fit human needs, and leave no room for such needs as could not be met. Our century was thus to lead humanity further on the road already chosen; but the strides made on that road were to grow larger as leaps replaced small steps; the progress was to gather speed; ambitions were to gain in boldness, visions in vastness, intentions in the resolve to act upon them. And all this thanks to the breathtaking advances in science and technology, in the knowledge of how to do things and in the ability to do them. What for inept and primitive humanity had been mere fantasy was now within reach of a humanity that, at long last, understood how Nature worked, and had the tools to force it to work as it should. The remarkable attribute of this particular belief in human omnipotence was that no reversal of fortune could convincingly expose its futility. Once it had been assumed that the perfection of human happiness and the happiness of human perfection was a matter of human skills and determination, then every imperfection and suffering appeared "naturally" as the outcome of inadequate skills or insufficient resolve. Wrong means had been used, or good means had been applied to a wrong end, or good means aimed at good ends had been handled ineptly. We lacked—for the time being—the proper know-how and thus made mistakes; or we did not try hard enough; or, better still, more self-consoling—they were good for nothing as managers, or thought only of their own benefit and not that of others or, because of their poisonous character or poisoned intentions, they put a spoke in the wheel of progress instead of putting their shoulders to it. Give us the means and the power to use them, and we will show what humanity is capable of! There is always room for a new beginning. Such a new beginning came to be called revolution. There would be no point in desiring and making a revolution if not for the belief that the wellbeing of humanity was in human hands, that it depended solely on a right plan and the right people to make the word flesh. The belief that all suffering is the result of human sloppiness or ill-will makes all suffering intolerable. The more awe-inspiring are the comfort and happiness promised by human reason, the stronger impatience and resentment, in the face of discomfort and misery. Something must be done, done fast, in a thorough, radical fashion. To do things fast, and to do them radically, is the meaning of power. Power is the ability to do things despite all the resistance one may encounter. Power is measured by the ability to overcome or ignore other powers or the power of others. No wonder that in the era of the new man-made order, power took over the role once assigned to the magic wand or to pious prayer. Total happiness required a total order, and a total order needed total power. For the kind of power modern ambition sought, the famous Panopticon designed by Jeremy Bentham provided a (literally) towering symbol. There was just one common principle to guide all the well-ordered institutions—be they schools, military barracks, hospitals, psychiatric clinics, offices, workhouses, industrial plants or prisons. That principle was surveillance: not so much keeping a constant watch over the inmates—that would be, technically, difficult—as making everyone aware that the watchers were awake and vigilant at all times. Given this, the rest was simple. Order, as envisaged by Bentham, needed but "safe custody, confinement, solitude, forced labour, and instruction"—conditions necessary and sufficient to perform such diverse tasks as "punishing the incorrigible, guarding the insane,

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reforming the vicious, confining the suspected, employing the idle, maintaining the helpless, curing the sick, instructing the willing in any branch of industry, or training the rising race in the path of education."4 Let me make it clear: this vision was not conceived of malice or misanthropy; Bentham was not a sadist, but a truly modern benefactor, a visionary obsessed with the idea of the "happiness of the greatest number." Panoptical power was the device to secure that happiness, which only the world of certainty, a steady, well-organized world with clear-cut, unambiguous and obvious choices could offer. That the worlds of certainty and determination and human happiness were born together, Bentham was confident: "Call them soldiers, call them monks, call them machines; do they were but happy ones, I should not care."5 More order, more happiness; more certainty, less agony of indecision. To liberate the infinite potential of the human race, one needs to shape a world to the measure of that potential, to instruct all members of the human race in the kind of action that world necessarily requires, and to ensure that they draw of their own free will the right conclusions from that knowledge. This was, roughly, the objective that guided the modern mind, modern action and the strategies designed to achieve it. Insofar as our century opened with the hope of completing the job that modern civilization had set out to perform, and with the determination to speed up that process, the surprise it was soon to bring to those celebrating its arrival seems, with the benefit of hindsight, itself surprising. Given the trajectory it followed and the impatience that spurred its movement, it could not but bring to a head the contradictions that had haunted the "modern project" from the start—and thus to expose dramatically the potential for cruelty and inhumanity immanent within that project. The horrors of the twentieth century derived from the practical attempts to make happiness; the order that happiness needed; and the power necessary to install that order, total. The initiatives were new, but the underlying ideas were not. The horrors of our century were the monstrous, perhaps the mutant, yet the wholly legitimate offspring of the modern romance with the fantasy of a new world, manmade and perfect. The attempts have been many; and we have not yet seen the end of them. Our century has been densely packed with these undertakings—and it seems to be morbidly determined to persist in the same direction into the next millenium. The muffled echoes of the modern drive to make the world clean, straightforward, streamlined, transparent and orderly enough for human happiness reverberate in our contemporary epidemic of "ethnic cleansing"—from Bosnia to Rwanda and from the marshes of Iraq to the rain forests of East Timor. They are also distinctly heard in the current passion for more policemen; for improved, automated prisons; for the criminalization of social problems; and for the confinement of "socially undesirable" elements. Yet two attempts stand out for their sheer magnitude. They gave the fullest and most undiluted expression to the totalist dream and, at the same time, produced the measuring rod against which to set all the other efforts to realize that dream. These were, of course, the Nazi and the Communist experiments, which sought to do away, once and for all, with the messiness, haziness, contingency and uncertainty of human existence. They constitute the two most audacious efforts to

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straighten out both nature and history, to make good their faults, to arrange human space and time anew. In their remarkable, eye-opening book, summing up their exhaustive research on the planning and managerial offices of the Nazi era, Götz Aly and Susanne Heim propose that the history of the Nazi attempt to draw up a new political, ethnic and social map of Europe reveals the intimate link between the "politics of modernization and the politics of destruction." The Nazi conquerors were determined to impose on the European continent "a new political, economic and social structure, and to achieve it in the quickest possible way."6 That intention meant, of course, that the extant location of nations and their links with natural wealth had to be disregarded, as all "accidents" should. All sorts of peoples had been cast haphazardly by history in the wrong places; while for some other peoples no place would be right, as their presence had evidently no useful purpose or was even downright harmful to the overall plan. Certain peoples, therefore, had to be transported lock, stock and barrel to other locations where they could be used with more benefit; and certain other peoples, useless and unusable, had to be physically eliminated so that room could be made for the useful ones: Officers of the SS, officials, scientists, business leaders and engineers showed themselves to be as excited by the newly conquered territories, with their apparently unlimited possibilities, as they were by the immensity of the tasks facing them there. . . . Eastern Europe was for them a vast stretch of fallow land waiting to be cleared and built up. Just as ... anthropologists, doctors and biologists were discovering scientific methods to improve mankind and to enhance the nation's health—by the outlawing and annihilation of "worthless elements" in accordance with racial criteria and with regular standards of performance—so the economists, agronomists and geographic planners had to set to work in order to achieve a "healthy social structure" in the underdeveloped regions of Germany and of Europe as a whole.7

The group, the collectivity, as the thinkers true to the modern spirit kept reminding us, is greater than the sum of its parts. Menschheit is greater than the sum of those individuals composing it. True to the modern spirit, the "improvement of mankind," in Nazi terminology, did not translate as improvement for every human being. On the contrary: as Nazi biologists, doctors, agronomists, again in tune with modern thinking, untiringly repeated, one must destroy—or at least prevent from breeding—all the individuals considered by the breeder as likely to retard the improvement of the species. Raising the standard of the whole means getting rid of the substandard parts. Klaus Dörner calls upon us "to see the Nazis as citizens who, no less than citizens before and since, were seeking their answer to the problems of society"8—and it is a fact that the "social question" has tended to be seen through modern eyes as a matter of the difference between those with ability (Tuchtige) and those lacking it and hence inferior (Minderwertige); the former category could not be treated like the latter, and steps had to be taken to defuse or neutralize the dangers lurking in the lower group so that the higher could thrive and develop in full. Our civilization did not stop at drawing a line between the useful and the useless, or the useful and the noxious; it set out to build a world in which there would be room only for the useful, and to eliminate the useless and the harmful in the process

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of construction. And the twentieth century accumulated enough confidence, and above all the scientific and technological means, to attempt to redraw the map of society as a whole—in Europe and, given the chance, in the world as a whole. The mass murders of this century were exercises in creative destruction; conceived as surgical operations, necessary to health and perpetrated on the way to a perfect, conflict-free, harmonious society. The Nazi experiment was undertaken at the very heart of European civilization. At the periphery of European modernity, eyeing the center with a mixture of awe and envy, another—the Communist—experiment was set in motion, its aim being to catch up with and overtake whatever Europe, in its modern history, had achieved. There, the humiliating feeling of having been "left behind" added urgency to modernizing ambitions. Shortcuts were needed; the costs elsewhere spread thinly over decades and centuries had to be met with one vast down payment; a single generation had to suffer what in other places many generations had endured, but the shorter time span had to be matched by the increase of pain. For the beautiful garden of the future, the present generation of humans was but manure. No sacrifice was too high for so noble a purpose—mountains were to be dynamited or artificially built, old forests uprooted and new planted, rivers turned back or their flow arrested, and people had to be transported from places that they happened to inhabit to sites required by the design of the garden. And those who for any reason were useless or dangerous—Minderwertige, nedobrokachestvennye—or unsuited to the image of future harmony; or with their own ideas of the good society; or reluctant to surrender to the rules of the new order, were to be rendered harmless or simply destroyed. The legitimating formula of the Communist-administered destruction differed from the Nazi-managed slaughter; if the Nazi plan demanded that some people be killed for what they were and could not but be, the Communist model of the new order required that people be murdered for what they did or thought, or presumed to do or think, or were likely, given the chance, to do or think (people destined for death were neblagonadezhnye—unreliable, people one could not trust). But the underlying assumption in both cases was the same: some people deserved to live, and some lives were undeserved. Were they fit or unfit for the new world under construction? Hannah Arendt's description of totalitarian rulers applies to both systems: "Their faith in human omnipotence, their conviction that everything can be done through organization, carries them into experiments which human imaginations may have outlined but human activity certainly never realized."9 Let us note that one of the most seminal reasons that the already established or would-be totalitarian rulers were not stopped in their tracks early enough, but on the contrary gathered support and not too seldom the enthusiastic admiration of the most illustrious minds of their times, was that their faith and their conviction (to use Arendt's terms) were shared by the "advanced thought" of their era. They were at the frontline of modernity; they boldly went where other humans lacked the daring or the stamina, but not necessarily the willingness, to go. No wonder that fascist movements were eager to define themselves mostly in terms of their readiness for action; all the ideas were there, in profusion—what was missing, and what future administrators clamored to supply, was the will to act. The modern dream is one of a perfect society, a society purified of extant human

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weaknesses—and foremost among those weaknesses are weak humans, the humans not up to scratch when measured by the standard of Reason and its spokesmen. (The mass destruction of the Jews and Gypsies followed the scientifically conceived strategy elaborated by what Aly and Heim term as the "expertocracy," including first and foremost the scientific elites; the methods employed had been tried first on the mentally ill and on other "misfits" in the ill-famed campaign of Gnadentod [mercy killing].) And the ambition was to realize the modernizing dream through a continuous, determined and radical effort at "problem-solving," through removing one by one all the hurdles standing on the road to the dream—including the men and women who made problems, who were the problem. Of the Jewish Holocaust, Cynthia Ozick has written that it was the gesture of an artist removing a smudge from the otherwise perfect picture. That smudge happened to be certain people who did not fit the model of the perfect universe. Their destruction was a creative destruction, much as the destruction of weeds is a creative act in designing a well-landscaped garden. In the case of Hitler, the design was for a race-clean society. With Lenin, the design was a class-clean society. In both cases, at stake was an aesthetically satisfying, transparent, homogenous universe free from agonizing uncertainties, ambivalence, contingency—and therefore free from the backward, the unteachable and the untouchable. But was this not precisely the kind of universe dreamed up and promised by the philosophers of Enlightenment, to be pursued by the despots whom they sought to enlighten—a kingdom of reason, the ultimate exercise in human power over nature, the ultimate display of the infinite human potential? As Aly and Heim have shown, the murder of European Jews can be fully understood only as an integral part of an overall attempt to create a New Europe, better structured and better organized than before; this vision required the massive translocation of populations who always happened to dwell where they should not and where they were unwanted (unerwiinschf) since there they had no use. This was, the authors point out emphatically, a thoroughly modernizing effort, since its ultimate purpose was "to destroy the premodern diversity and to introduce the 'new order'"—a task that called in equal measure for Umsiedlung, Homogenisierung and Mobilisierung. It is easy, yet unforgivable, to forget that the famous Desk IVD/4 headed by Eichmann was established in December 1939 to deal not only with the resettlement (Umsiedlung} of the Jews, but also with that of Poles, French, Luxemburgians, Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. The camps—the concentration camps, the camps of mass annihilation—were great experimental laboratories in which the practical question of how far one could go in trimming and pruning the notoriously unreliable, erratic, unpredictable humankind was put to the test. They were also testing sites in which the strictly regimented and controlled world conceived in the totalitarian mind could be examined in miniature. Unlike so many other acts of mass cruelty that mark human history, the camps were cruelty with a purpose, means to an end. The camps— senseless in every other respect—had their own, sinister rationality. The camps were meant to perform three vital tasks. They were laboratories where the new, unheard-of volumes of domination and control were explored and tested. They were schools in which the unheard-of readiness to commit cruelty in heretofore ordinary

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human beings was proven. And they were swords held over the heads of those remaining on the other side of the barbed fence, there to teach them that their dissent would not be tolerated; that their consent was not required; and that it mattered little whether they opted for protest or acclaim. The camps displayed condensations of totalitarian domination and its corollary, the superfluity of man, in a pure form elsewhere difficult or impossible to achieve. They were the model for a society to be run as a concentration camp. This is how Ryszard Kapuscinski, the most indefatigable and observant among the war correspondents reporting from contemporary battlefields of oppression and freedom, described his experience of entering the Soviet Union by rail: Barbed wire. Barbed wire—this is what one sees first. ... At the first glance, this barbed, rapacious barrier looks senseless and surreal; who will try to cross it, if snowy desert spreads as far as eye can reach, no tracks, no people, snow lies two meters thick, one cannot make a step—and yet this wire wants to tell you something, give you a message. It says: take note, you are crossing the border into another world. From here, you won't escape. This is a world of deadly seriousness, command and obedience. Learn how to listen, learn humility, learn how to occupy as little room as possible. Best of all, do what is for you to do. Best of all keep quiet. Best of all do not ask questions.10 That particular barbed wire Kapuscinski wrote about has by now been dismantled— with the totalitarian state that built it. But it speaks still, it keeps sending the message to all who want to listen. And the message is: there is no fight against the obstreperous contingency of the human condition that does not in the end render humans superfluous. In the camps, what was tested was not just human endurability but also the feasibility of the great modern project—a totally ordered society; and inevitably it produced a totally inhuman order. In the camps, the project found its reductio ad absurdum, but also its experimentum crucis. To be sure, the transparent, orderly, controlled world cleansed of surprises and contingency was but one of modern dreams. Another was the dream of human freedom—not the freedom of a human species determined to scoff nature with its constraints and to scoff individual humans with their wants, but rather the freedom of men and women as they are, as they choose to be; and would become if given the chance. What many suspected all along but most of us know today is that there is no way to make both dreams come true. And today there no longer remain many enthusiasts for the dream of an engineered, state-administered order. We seem to be reconciled to the incurable messiness of the world; or are too busy chasing the seductions of the consumer society and thus have no time to ponder its dangers; or lack the courage and stamina to fight against the prevailing chaos were we even willing or able to pay attention to it. This does not mean necessarily that the age of the camps and of genocide has drawn to its close. In 1975, the Indonesian army occupied the neighboring territory of East Timor. Since then, "a third of the population has been slaughtered. Whole villages have been massacred by troops given to raping, torturing and mutilating indiscriminately." The response of the Western, civilized world? Our response? The US condoned the invasion, asking only that it should wait until after President Ford's official visit, Australia has signed trade deals with the Jakarta regime to exploit

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East Timor's oilfields, and Britain has supplied Indonesia's military dictatorship with large quantities of arms, including planes needed to bomb civilian communities. Asked about the British position, former Defence Minister Alan Clark replies: "I do not really ot really

fill my mind much with what one set of foreigners is doing to another."

This much we can read in The Guardian of February 22, 1994—twenty years after the genocide of the East Timor population had begun. We do not know whether the troops who tortured and mutilated and killed did what they did out of any deep hatred for the conquered people, or just because that was what the commanders' orders and the soldiers' discipline was about. What we do know is that the minister of the country that sold the troops the planes to do the job of extermination felt no emotions of any kind, except, perhaps, the satisfaction at a business deal well concluded. And since the minister in question belonged to the party that the British electors voted back into power three times since the delivery and use of the planes, we may surmise that the voters, much like the minister, did not fill their minds much with what one set of foreigners was doing to another. What we also may safely bet is that the East Timorians were exterminated because there was no place for them in the world that the rulers of Indonesia were trying to build; we may say that the destruction of East Timorians was—for the Indonesian regime—an act of creation. "Between 1960 and 1979," notes Helen Fein in her comprehensive study of contemporary genocide, "there were probably at least a dozen genocides and genocidal massacres—cases include the Kurds in Iraq, southerners in the Sudan, Tutsi in Rwanda, Hutus in Burundi, Chinese ... in Indonesia, Hindus and other Bengalis in East Pakistan, the Ache in Paraguay, many peoples in Uganda."11 Some of us heard of some of these cases, some of us never heard of any. Few of us did anything to stop them from happening or to bring those responsible to court. What all of us can be rather sure of, if we put our minds to it, is that our governments, for our sake—to keep our factories open and to save our jobs—supplied the guns, the bullets and the poison gas to enable the murderers to do their jobs. In every genocide, the victims are killed not for what they have done, but for what they are; or, more precisely still, for what they—being what they are—might yet become; or for what they, being what they are, might not become. Nothing the appointed victims may or may not do would affect the sentence of death; and that includes their choice between meekness or militancy, surrender or resistance. Who the victim is and what the victims are is a matter for their executioners to decide. In a succinct definition by Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn, "genocide is a form of one-sided mass killing in which a state or other authority intends to destroy a group, as that group and membership in it are defined by the perpetrators."12 Before the perpetrators acquire power over their victims' lives, they must acquire power over their definition. It is this first, essential power that a priori renders irrelevant everything the victims may do or refrain from doing. Genocide starts with classification and fulfills itself as a categorical killing. Unlike enemies in war, the victims of genocide have no selves; need not be guilty of anything; nor to have committed any sin. Their only, and sufficient, crime is to be classified into a category defined as criminal or hopelessly diseased. They are guilty of being accused. This stoutly monological character of genocide, this resolute preemption of all

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dialogue, this prefabricated asymmetry of relationship, this one-sidedness of authorship and actorship alike, is—I propose—the most decisive constitutive feature of all genocide. And, obversely, genocide cannot be conceived of, let alone enacted, if the structure of the relationship is one way or another prevented from being monologic. Yet there is no room for complacency even in our relatively small, postmodern part of the globe, where regimes stop well short of their past totalitarian visions; where states have abandoned (or have been forced to abandon) a monologic stance; and where the order-making and order-keeping efforts and the coercion that goes with them—once condensed and monopolized by the sovereign state and its appointed agents—are now increasingly deregulated, privatized, dispersed, reduced in scale. "Totalitarian solutions," so Hannah Arendt warned us, "may well survive the fall of totalitarian regimes in the form of strong temptations which will come up whenever it seems impossible to alleviate political, social, or economic misery in a manner worthy of man."13 And there is plenty of misery around, and more is to come in this ever more overpopulated and polluted world running short of resources and of demand for the hands and the minds of men and women as producers. At least every tenth adult all over the wealthy part of the world (some observers say, every third; we already live, they say, in a "two-thirds society" and, given the present pattern of change, will reach a "one-third society" in thirty years or so) is currently superfluous—neither a member of the potentially useful labor force nor a potential client of the shopping malls. If the classic nation-state used to polarize society into the insiders, fully-fledged members of the national/political community, and the outsiders deprived of rights, the market that takes over the task of integration polarizes society into full-fledged consumers, amenable to its seductive powers, and into flawed consumers, or nonconsumers, unable to rise to the bait and thus, from the point of view of the market, totally useless and redundant. The "underclass" that has replaced the "reserve army of labor," the unemployed and the poor of yesterday, is not marginalized through its handicapped position among the producers, but rather through its exile from the category of consumers. Unable to respond to market stimuli in the way such stimuli are meant to elicit, such people cannot be kept at bay through the methods deployed by the market forces. The oldfashioned tested methods of coercive policing and criminalization are applied against them by the state in its continuing capacity as the guardian of "law and order." It would be silly and irresponsible to play down, under the circumstances, the temptations of "totalitarian solutions," always strong when certain humans are declared redundant or forced into a superfluous condition—though in all probability the totalitarian-style solutions will for the time being be hidden under other, more palatable names. And it would be naive to suppose that the democratic rule of the majority by itself provides a sufficient guarantee against the temptation of totalitarian solutions. In a recent study significantly subtitled "Towards Gulags, Western Style?"14 the Norwegian criminologist Nils Christie has convincingly demonstrated "the capacity for modern industrial society to institutionalize large segments of the population," as manifested, among other things, in the steady rise of the prison populations. In

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the United States in 1986, 26 percent of black male school dropouts were in jail; and the numbers have gone up since then. Obviously, the prisons in liberal-democratic societies are not the camps of totalitarian states. But the tendency to criminalize whatever is defined as a "social disorder" or a "social pathology," with its attendant separation, incarceration, political and social incapacitation and disenfranchisement, is to a large extent a "totalitarian solution without a totalitarian state"—and the style of "problem-solving" it promotes has more to do than we would wish to admit with the totalitarian temptations apparently endemic in modernity. But let us repeat that it would be premature to write the obituaries of the "classic" camps as created by Hitler, Stalin and their followers. Those camps were a modern invention, even when used in the service of movements that were, in part, antimodern. The camps, together with electronically guided weaponry, gas-guzzling cars and video cameras and recorders, will in all probability remain among the modern paraphernalia most vociferously demanded and most avidly snatched by societies exposed to modernizing pressures—even though those same societies may be up in arms against such other modern inventions as habeas corpus, freedom of speech or parliamentary rule, deriding individual liberties and the tolerance of otherness as symptoms of godlessness and degeneration. All our postmodern retrospective wisdom notwithstanding, we live and will be living for some time yet in an essentially modern and modernizing world, whose awesome and often sinister capacities have perhaps become more visible and better understood, but have not vanished for that reason. The camps are part of that modern world. It still remains to be proved that they are not its integral and irremovable part.

Notes 1. Hans Habe, Ilona, trans. Michael Bullock (London: 1962), 11. 2. Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End, trans. Chris Turner (Cambridge: 1994), 121. "Messianic hope," writes Baudrillard, "was based on the reality of the Apocalypse. But this latter has no more reality than the original Big Bang. ... It circles around us, and will continue to do so tirelessly. We are encircled by our own end and incapable of getting it to land, of bringing it back to earth" (p. 119). We may say that both the "end of it all" and the "new beginning," which alternated as the twentieth-century incarnations of, simultaneously, Paradise and Apocalypse, are lived today as virtual realities, in a world that, given the human powers of design and execution, can be made in any shape, though no shape seems particularly worth the effort. 3. John Carroll, Humanism: The Wreck of Western Culture (London: 1993), 2. 4. See The Works of Jeremy Bentham, vol. 4 (Edinburgh: 1843), 40. 5. Ibid., 54, 64. 6. Gotz Aly and Susanne Heim, Vordenker der Vernichtung: Auschwitz und die deutschen Plane fur eine neue europaische Ordnung (Hamburg: 1991), 14, and see also Gotz Aly, "Erwiderung auf Dan Diner," in Vierteljahrshefte fuir Zeitgeschichte 4 (1993). An originally small office established on 6 October 1939 to supervise the "transfer of nationalities" in Europe (Reichkommissar fiir die Festigung deutschen Volkstums) soon developed into a widely ramified, mighty institution employing, apart from "office workers," thousands of economists, architects, agronomists, accountants and all kinds of scientific experts (Aly and Hcim, Vordenker der Vernichtung, 125-126). 7. Ibid., 482.

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8. Cf. Klaus Dörner, Tödliches Mitleid: Zur Frage der Unertrdglichkeit des Lebens, (Gutersloh: 1988), 13, 65. 9. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (London: 1951), 436. 10. Ryszard Kapuscinski, Imperium (Warsaw: 1993). The translation from Polish is my own. 11. Helen Fein, Genocide: A Sociological Perspective (London: 1993), 6. 12. Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn, The History and Sociology of Genocide: Analyses and Case Studies (New Haven: 1990), 23. 13. Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism. 14. Cf. Nils Christie, Crime Control as Industry: Towards Gulags, Western Style? (London: 1993).

Radical Historical Discontinuity: Explaining the Holocaust Steven T. Katz (BOSTON UNIVERSITY)

The question posed for this symposium by the editors of this volume is a very complex and difficult one to answer. There is no doubt that considerable continuity exists between Christian, modern and Nazi antisemitism. Despite the official and real decline of the role and power of the church in Western Europe, the residue of millennia of theological antisemitism remained firmly embedded in European life. Had Christianity not transformed Jews into mythical, alien creatures, Nazism would not have chosen to do likewise. In this fundamental sense, there is a high degree of commonality between premodern, modern and Hitlerian Judeophobia. However, while this long record of hate must not be forgotten, neither must it be misrepresented or misjudged. That is, for all the centuries of brutality and torment, for all the pogroms and murders of Jews, Christian and modern antisemitism was not genocidal,1 and in this essential and defining respect Christian and modern antisemitism are to be distinguished from the Nazi war against the Jews. Likewise, in trying to respond to the problem set before us, the various perspectives on the "Jewish question" after the French Revolution have to be evaluated in such a way as to achieve a nuanced understanding of the problem at hand: one has to recognize the diversity manifest in the encounter of Judaism and modernity across the spectrum of different times and places. The deep complexity involved in judging the issue of continuity and discontinuity arises in particular from the fact that, after 1789, the European context in which the Jewish question existed and was debated had fundamentally changed. Its mutation—a result of transformed European social, political and economic realities—necessarily had a major impact upon the nature of antisemitism and its consequences. Accordingly, "old" values and purposes came to mean something different, while novel concerns and goals entered the changed historical and conceptual matrix in many, often conflicting, ways. Put another way, modernity means that there was no simple continuity in the nature of antisemitism, though there was continuity. To investigate this three-tiered dialectic-—premodern, modern and Hitlerian antisemitism—in its fullness is, of course, a project beyond the scope of this essay. Instead, I propose to analyze at some length and in some detail one piece of the larger conceptual and historical puzzle, modern nationalist antisemitism, as a para41

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digm that will help us understand the more general circumstance. In particular, I want to explore how modern nationalist antisemitism represents both continuity and discontinuity relative to premodern Christian antisemitism as well as something radically different from Nazi antisemitism. Still more specifically, and the essential burden of this essay, I want to argue that in sharp contrast to Nazi antisemitism, all prior antisemitism was mediated and delimited. It is in this difference, this absence of mediation, that the essence of Nazi anti-Judaism and its uniqueness are to be found.

Modernity: A Novel Historical Context It is an oversimplification to identify the American and French revolutions as magical events that in a short (if bloody) stroke achieved and henceforth guaranteed Jewish emancipation everywhere in Western Europe. Even in France there was intense debate on the question for two years after the revolution, and it was only in 1791 that the issue was finally resolved in favor of full emancipation for all French Jews. Elsewhere in Europe, the record was even more checkered. Napoleon's conquests spread Jewish enfranchisement to Holland and parts of Germany, while Prussia moved in this direction in 1812 with its "Edict of Toleration" only after it was so encouraged by Napoleon's Sanhedrin (1807); the French emancipation of Westphalian Jewry and the emancipation of the Jews in the Duchy of Berg; Baden's "Jewry Statute" of 1809; and the liberalization of Jewish status (albeit not the grant of full civic equality) in the duchies of Anhalt-Bernburg and Anhalt-Kothen in 1810. The defeat of Napoleon returned reactionary forces to power almost everywhere in Europe, and it was only with the liberal revolutions of 1830 and 1848, despite their short-lived tenure and in their aftermath, that Jewish political equality was achieved in most West European countries. Even then, however, it would take nearly another quarter of a century for full equal rights to be extended to Jews throughout Germany, the Habsburg empire, Italy and England. Austria and Hungary guaranteed such rights only in 1867; Bismarck, in the name of the new German Reich in 1871; and finally Switzerland concurred in the process in 1874. In Poland and Russia, the overwhelming demographic centers of world Jewry, the Jews would have to wait several more decades for such political inclusion. Here is obvious evidence for the continuity of antisemitic sentiments and their real consequences well into the modern era. However, despite the lingering of antisemitic prejudice in many places and on the part of many, Bismarck's liberal promulgation of 1871 was widely understood as a guarantee of Jewish civic equality and of further integration into the mainstream of European life in all its phases. Yet—in what at first sight appears a contradiction—it is at just this juncture of political inclusion and the seeming demise of the theologically rooted tradition of state-sponsored antisemitism that we witness the fully public emergence of a new, more virulent antisemitic tradition that had been growing and gaining strength at the margins of European life and in its darker recesses since the defeat of Napoleon. This resurgent tide was encouraged by singularly contemporary sources—the real-

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ity of the Jew as political equal, the idea and the fact of the Jew as insider—while at the same time it certainly drew upon the more subterranean (and now "unofficial") hatred of Jews grounded in the earlier medieval Christian tradition. The common denominator that now linked together the many differing, at times overlapping, at times contradictory, voices in the gathering motley Judeophobic chorus was the agreement that the recent Jewish sociopolitical gains should be reversed, though this reversal was not always equated with the complete political de-emancipation of the Jew. This ambition, moreover, united the earlier, independent antisemitic theorists and the later organized antisemitic political parties, all of whom concurred in the judgment that the Jew in the "subversive" role of citizen represented a grave threat to European civilization. The center of gravity in this postemancipation situation was located in a series of contradictions. On the one hand, antisemites contended that European states were unable or unwilling to fully integrate the Jew on a democratic basis. On the other hand, it was argued that rather than the Europeans rejecting Jewry it was the Jews who had not kept their part of the "arrangement," that quid pro quo whereby the Gentile majority committed itself to emancipate the Jew from political disabilities if the Jews would liberate themselves from Judaism. Europe, so the antisemitic refrain went, had honored its obligations, but the Jews had defaulted on theirs. According to this critique, Jews continued to be a "nation apart," thereby exploiting European civilization through their newly won freedoms while resisting full assimilation into the majority culture. Of course, the implied dialectical, assimilatory "contract" with Europe was unreasonable, even unjust, and the expectations for full sociocultural assimilation in so short a compass of time were unrealistic, yet it was these sociopolitical demands, and the inability to meet them, that energized antisemitic theorists and groups throughout late nineteenth-century Europe. Thus, to the antisemitic mind, the contemporary situation looked like this: Europe would not, or could not, accept the Jew—as insider, citizen, social and economic equal—while the Jew, even if accepted, could not or would not cease being a Jew. The negative implications of this rigid, structural dilemma are readily if cruelly apparent: according to the one criterion, the Jew was damned for trying to assimilate and, according to the other, damned for not assimilating. It is this conundrum that made modern antisemitism so original and so elusive a phenomenon to analyze, so mythic a reality to combat. If Jews integrated into the heart of European cultural, political and economic life, they aroused a host of hostile reactions ranging from jealousy to fear. Their very success at integration was held against them. Alternatively, if they remained an identifiable subgroup, they were castigated for their continuing otherness, their lack of true commitment to the common good, their selfishness, insularity and sense of superiority. Yet, even here, in the midst of this novelty, there was continuity: a continuity represented by the fact that modern antisemitism, like classical antisemitism (from which I believe this consequential characteristic derives), was grounded more in stereotypes than in reality, more in myths than in empirical fact. The ironic result of this many-sided antisemitic assault was that it undoubtedly contributed to that continued Jewish self-identity, both individual and collective, that was at the root of most modern Judeophobia. Whether they wished it or not,

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antisemites forced Jews, no matter how assimilated, to confront their Jewishness. In the late nineteenth century, we therefore encounter the oddly constructed tragedy that just at the moment when many Jews were seeking full de-judaized admission to European nationality and secular society, they were singled out and rejected as suspect by national, romantic and racial ideologies. And the more Jews were so identified as unassimilable, so perceptibly marked for exclusion, the more "foreign" they became. Antisemitic hate thus fed upon itself, creating as one of its enduring corollaries the Jewish problem. Without the barriers of unending prejudice that turned Jews back into Jews, many assimilating Jews would undoubtedly have become indistinguishable as Europeans, denying in the process that very otherness antisemites feared and hated. But the abiding dread and the extreme abhorrence of Jews in certain circles led to a situation in which, despite seemingly inexorable "objective" tendencies inherent in the very processes of secularization, modernization, capitalism and liberal constitutionalism, such assimilation could not be. The Jews "are a people," Herzl correctly observed in his Judenstaat; "the enemy makes us one without our volition."

Nationalist Antisemitism Thus, modernity shows itself to the Jew in two inseparable guises. One is liberal, progressive, unprecedented; the other is illiberal, reactionary and abidingly prejudiced. It is not a matter of modernity being continuous or discontinuous with that past which it inherited, but rather of it being both at the same time. This inescapable duality can be illustrated by considering the nature of modern nationalist antisemitism. Since the creation of the first nation-state by Ferdinand and Isabella, and the resultant expulsion of Spanish Jewry, the ardent nationalist ideologue has more often than not perceived in the Jew an alien, an outsider who, by definition, could be resident within the national boundaries while not being of the nation. Usually, if not always, conceiving the nation in terms of an organic system rather than as a collective based on a contractual relationship, nationalist thinkers held both the Jewish community and the individual Jew to be, without exception, unassimilable by the body politic. Jewry, the Jew, was posited as a counterforce to that national integration and unity, which could be achieved only through the common bonds of language, religion and shared behavioral patterns. However national identity was conceived, the Jew was simultaneously decreed to be deficient. Whether this negative situation could be altered was the subject of intense debate. On the one hand, some nationalists, such as Friedrich Ruhs and Heinrich Eberhard G. Paulus, held that Jews could achieve full civil status if they were willing to pay the price— usually understood to mean either conversion to Christianity, the radical "reform" of Judaism, or total assimilation. On the other hand, there were those who asserted, on the basis of a more radical nationalist rationale (whatever its residual theological inspiration), the putative national immutability of the Jew. Both groups, however, found common ground in their agreement that as long as Jews remained identifiably

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Jewish, their existential apartness should be reflected in their civic disenfranchisement. Though European liberals professed the principle of church-state separation, there was a widely shared, deeply rooted, often unconscious or only partially articulated sense that even the post-Enlightenment secular European nation-state could not but be "Christian," given its historical evolution. As a cultural description, this assumption was correct. But as a prescriptive political formula it was the undoing of the liberal credo. And yet many liberals, as well as most conservatives of all shades, chose to uphold this implicit contradiction rather than accept the pluralistic and neutralizing implications of secular "modernity" in all of its full ramifications. The Jewish situation was adversely affected in the process, and not by accident. For more often than not, the impassioned talk of a Christian Europe or a Christian state was generated in response to Jewish political and socioeconomic activity made possible by emancipation. A close study of all shades of European political opinion suggests that this "intuition" as to the essential nature of European culture was a constant and underlying feature of non-Jewish sentiment in every decade from 1790 on, the decades after the French and American revolutions. Rooted in the inherited estimate of Christianity and the corresponding denigration of Judaism, even thinkers who were not attached to Christianity in the traditional sense still held it in high esteem, usually on the basis of the claim that it was a more exemplary religion. Jews who retained any substantive attachment to Judaism were, it was argued, necessarily barred from full entry into European citizenship. "The Christian-Germanic state," H.E. Marcard would write, "springing as it did from a Christian-Germanic folk, has a Christian personality."2 This denial of equality did not necessarily mean the expulsion of Jews or necessarily entail violence; indeed, it might even be interpreted quite benignly, as in the influential views of Frederich Julius Stahl, a converted Jew who became prominent in German legal and political circles in the 1840s and 1850s. Yet however the implications of this cultural-political premise were interpreted—whether with sympathy or malice—it did mean that Jews qua Jews were irretrievably doomed to their undesirable role as outsiders. Converts to Christianity could enter as equals, at least legally and politically, if not socially, but Jews, and assuredly Judaism, remained the eternal Ahasuerus. To this end, for example, Prussian conservatives as late as the 1850s, and then not once but twice, in 1852 and 1856, sought to delimit citizenship to Christians. Though unsuccessful, this was a harbinger of things to c me e. What enters, writ large, into these anti-Jewish polemics was not on the narrow question of citizenship but also the related and still more fearsome concern that once Jews were granted civil equality they would actually become the masters of European civilization. Given the Jew's inherent financial and intellectual know-how— allied to his less desirable character (and group) traits—the Christian majority would not be able to compete and in the end would, inexorably, become impoverished while the Jews prospered. In the stereotypical mythography of modern antisemitism, economics rivaled theology as a first cause, a natural projection of the fundamental change in Europe's own inner scale of values. The financial paranoia, and the group psychosis regarding Jewish power that it

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bred, can be seen as a transmutation of at least part of the medieval fear of the metahuman Jew. It fed, in turn, many tributaries, not least that conspiratorial psychology that inspired the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. As early as 1806, Johann Herder is quoted as saying: "The children of Israel who form a state within the state everywhere would manage by their systematic and rational conduct to reduce Christians to nothing more than slaves."3 And by 1879, Wilhelm Marr felt constrained to write that "Israel has become the leading sociopolitical great power of the nineteenth century. . . . The . . . Roman empire failed to achieve what Semitism has managed."4 To the degree that Western Jews did flourish disproportionately under the burgeoning laissez-faire capitalism of the nineteenth century, there was obviously some truth in this avowal. But the pro founder truth is that the only reason such activity caused concern at all was the fear of Jews qua Jews—a continuation and corollary of the by now very old Western antisemitic tradition—for otherwise their economic advancement would not have been perceived as of special moment. Moreover, Jewish advance was not made in a "zero-sum" situation but rather belonged to a larger economic pattern of capitalist development from which many other sections of society also benefited. Nonetheless, the dread of Jewish power assured that the new and real (if often misconstrued) Jewish concentration in the press, commerce and capitalist enterprise, coupled with Jewish prominence in education, the Jews' disproportionate presence in capital cities and the persistence of their ethnic-cultural distinctiveness, would continue to provide ammunition to antisemites right up until the Shoah. Thus, events such as the great crash of 1873, while they did not create such negative sentiment, certainly fed it, and thereby helped to fan antisemitism into a mass movement. Given this distorted economic analysis of the modern situation, Jews never lost—and were unable to lose—their status as "foreigners" and "alien" exploiters who represented, in the classic charge, a "state within a state." Jews, Bruno Bauer wrote, greeted the collapse of the old Christian Europe with joy, for they saw in it "the labor pains of their messianic time and the unmistakable harbinger of their world domination."5 This picture, of course, was false, as is readily apparent when the economic facts are understood in their totality. While it is true that a disproportionate number of Jews had entered into certain wealthy and influential classes, it did not follow that most Jews were either wealthy or really powerful. For example, at the end of the nineteenth century, only 10 to 15 percent of Austrian Jews lived in Vienna; the great bulk led an indescribably miserable existence in Galicia and Bukovina. It is estimated that toward the end of the century, some 5,000 to 6,000 Jews a year died of starvation. And as the number of Galician Jews increased in Vienna, the Jewish haute bourgeoisie became less and less representative of Viennese Jewry as a whole, while the peddler, the old-clothes dealer and the Lumpenproletariat—all scraping an irregular existence on the periphery of the economic system—became typical. A similar profile could be drawn for Hungarian and Romanian Jewry, and even, though in less extreme forms, for French, German and Italian Jewry. In Poland and Russia, the major part of Jewry constituted a permanent, impoverished underclass becoming, if anything, poorer as the nineteenth century moved on. Before 1870, however, whatever the sentiments for a narrowly defined Christian

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nation-state, and however deep the concerns over Jewish economic exploitation and eventual domination, the progressive trends—those ideological and social realities supportive of Jewish civic inclusion, political equality and free economic competition—remained predominant both politically and as the preeminent expression of the Zeitgeist. After 1870, this preeminence began to erode. Counterposed to it there emerged a far more energetic, considerably more concentrated, adversarial program of practical and programmatic'import that sought, primarily through legislation, to retard further Jewish political and economic encroachments. For example, the more extreme Prussian Conservatives announced their opposition to "all legislation that made for the disintegration instead of the unification of organic relations,"6 and this was followed up with a formal platform issued by the Deutsche-Konservative Partei in 1876 that was reactionary in every sense, not least in its emphasis on Protestant control over the state apparatus. These aspiring legislative steps were part of that political use of antisemitism that moved in ever larger epicycles through European society and which aimed simultaneously at the legal disenfranchisement of Jews and the legal reintroduction of barriers to Jewish equality in schooling, university life, the arts and the professions. The proponents of this revised antisemitic program also sought to reshape national economic policy so as to reorient it away from free trade—now known pejoratively as Manchesterism—which was said to be supported by Jewish capitalists and their German lackeys (Bismarck, no less, included) and inspired by Jewish rather than nationalist interests. (Such was the theme taken up, for example, in the works of the influential German nationalist ideologue Konstantin Franz and in the even more extreme viewpoint of Rudolf Meyer.) This revocatory socioeconomic vision was represented in unadulterated form not only in the Gesellschaft zum Schiitz des Handwerks and later in the Osterreichischer Reformverein and the Bund der Landwirthe, as well as in the editorial circles of the Kreuzzeitung, but also in many seemingly less regressive quarters of conservative European life. (And here I pass over its cultural manifestations—for example, the historiography of Henrich von Treitschke, the economic theorizing of Eugen Duhring, the malicious pseudoscholarship of August Rohling, the journalistic excesses of Edouard Drumont.) It was now not sufficient to rail at the Jew, to scorn his integrity, to denigrate his religion and his morality, to insult his spiritual or antispiritual nature; the times required organized, efficacious, peculiarly modern bureaucratic and political forms of response. Thus, for example, medieval antisemitic charges of ritual murder were now translated not only into pogroms but into the election of avowedly antisemitic political deputies to the local and national legislative bodies, as occurred in Hungary in the wake of the infamous Tiszaeszlar blood-libel trial. Again, the organized political activism was dramatically expressed in the antisemitic petition of 1882 to Bismarck that garnered more than 250,000 signatures requesting legal restrictions on Jewish participation in German life. It was this same spirit, this same practical ideal, that culminated the election of Karl Lueger as mayor of Vienna in 1895, that brought Drumont to the French Chamber of Deputies in 1890 (until 1902 as prorepresentative of Algeria), and that gave antisemites 263,861 votes (3.4 percent of the total) in Germany in 1893.

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With the benefit of hindsight, these events appear as the first major steps in the direction of the Apocalypse. That is to say, the employment of antisemitism as a political instrument around which to organize the mass politics of the modern state that Hitler so successfully and catastrophically utilized was not his invention, though he perfected its use. Or put another way, the manipulation of antisemitism as public policy is one of the seminal continuities between medieval, modern and Nazi antisemitism. But—and here the discontinuities are as salient as the continuities— in asserting this judgment we must not impute, for essential reasons yet to be described below, the finality of apocalyptic catastrophe to these nineteenth-century figures, however antisemitic they might have been relative to their own context. There is a world of difference between the mayoral residence in Vienna or the French Chamber of Deputies during the 1890s and the chancellory of the Third Reich. Ultimately, Hitler's antisemitism was more unlike than like the political antisemitism of his predecessors. Consider, for example, the weakness of nationalist (and related) antisemitism in Germany, Austria and France between 1880 and 1914. Though in hindsight the signs are often read differently—exaggerating the significance and prominence of earlier antisemitic phenomena—the reality is that nationalist antisemitism lacked the requisite galvanizing power to energize and sustain mass politics. A close analysis of the 1893 German election results that gave antisemitic parties 3.4 percent of the vote are deceptive in overstating the significance of nationalist antisemitic sentiment, as is shown by the decline of this vote in the next two elections of 1898 and 1903—and, in any case, a thirtieth of the vote is a marginal success by any measure. Moreover, one must be careful not to attribute all such votes to strictly and narrowly antisemitic opinion rather than related issues of social protest. I also note that in Germany between 1860 and 1880, the dominant political party for most of the period was the Liberal party, which opposed antisemitism. Second, the fact that the Pan-German League and the Deutscher Ostmarkverein (from its inception in 1894) both adopted an official policy of neutrality with regard to antisemitism was also symptomatic of its limited value as a political factor and force in late nineteenth-century Germany—both of these groups maintained this stance throughout the 1890s in defiance of much of their membership. Much the same might be said for the private attitude, as against the public behavior, of Kaisers Wilhelm I and II. While unsympathetic toward Jews, they repudiated official antisemitic action aimed at their disenfranchisement. Here one is also reminded of Bismarck's antisemitic observation: "This fact [of Jewish business acumen] and its consequences cannot be changed if one does not like to use methods such as the St. Bartholomew's Eve in Paris, and even the most violent antisemites would not deem [this] feasible." This was not an attractive picture, but it demonstrated political restraint. Even political antisemitism, at that time and place, had limits. The consequence of this lack of electoral support was the final dissolution of the one-issue antisemitic parties in Germany after the election of 1907. External events, internal corruption and unwise leadership had combined to undermine them. Moreover, between 1907 and 1912, no new antisemitic legislation was even presented to the Reichstag. Jews now became more prominent in national politics and in the Reichstag while the antisemitic groups were in disarray. Even the Conservatives

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with antisemitic leanings garnered less than 3 percent of the vote in the 1912 election. Indeed, in this election the Social Democrats who opposed the politics of antisemitism gained about 33 percent of the vote, while all the conservative parties won only approximately 16 percent. In consequence, the antisemitic factions did not even stand as separate parties in the 1918 elections. (Even as late as 1932, when the Nazis and their Conservative allies won 42 percent of the vote, the Social Democrats and Communists received 36 percent, and other non-antisemitic parties took 10 percent of the vote.) True, the evidence of political impotence and decline should not be misinterpreted as indicating the dissolution of German antisemitism, for this was assuredly not the case. It is enough to note, on the contrary, the growth of the Gobineau society and its influence among schoolteachers; the spread of anti-Jewish sentiment in schools and universities; the dissemination of Wagner's (and Wagner-like) antisemitism; and the prevalence of Judeophobia among the cultural and political elites. But it does demonstrate that antisemitism was then at work more on the cultural and ideological than on the political and organizational levels, as became manifest in the racist argumentation of Theodore Fritsch and the racial propaganda of Heinrich Class. Likewise, events in Austria can be said to have taken a related though not exactly comparable line of development, and this despite the significance to be attributed to Lueger's rise to prominence. Lueger himself said: "Antisemitism is an excellent means of propaganda and of getting ahead in politics, but after one has arrived, one cannot use it any longer."7 Moreover, as a practical matter, none of the many antisemitic political initiatives begun in Austria after 1867 to deny Jews full civil rights succeeded. In light of the Shoah, a great deal is sometimes made in scholarly studies of the antisemitism of Austrian pan-Germanists such as Georg von Schonerer and hatemongers such as Ernst Schneider, but in their own time and place they were marginal figures whose exclusionary organizations (such as von Schonerer's Deutschnationalen Verein, founded in Vienna in 1882) ended in failure. And their lack of success was shared by many others. The antisemitic Reformverein had all but collapsed by 1885-1886. And Franz Holubek's effort to organize a public rally in April 1882 in support of a program calling for a series of ten antisemitic measures—inter alia, the limitation of Jewish residence in Austria; the curtailment of Jewish immigration into Austria; restrictions on Jewish land ownership; the exclusion of Jews from the civil service; and the reimposition of special taxes on Jews—was brought to an abrupt halt by the police. Conversely, it was precisely in the period between 1880 and 1914 that Austrian Jewry flourished and its intellectual and artistic elite achieved prominent positions on the world stage. Similarly, in France, while nationalism was certainly a powerful force, whether in the Napoleonic era, the Second Republic or during the reign of Napoleon III, it did not portend genocide. Moreover, it was not a monolithic phenomenon. In the case of Jules Michelet, it was directed against Britain, the great enemy of Napoleonic France; with Ernest Renan, it was set in opposition to the growing assertion of German superiority; while Drumont and the Catholic circle of La libre parole and La croix came out against Protestants, capitalism, modernism and above all the Jews. There is no doubt that this latter anti-Jewish sentiment was the most

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profound—and became the most continuous—manifestation of nationalist animus. Its clearest nineteenth-century representation was the Dreyfus affair, which was accompanied by extensive anti-Jewish expressions among the public (and press) at large. Yet observing the events of the 1890s and the first decade of the twentieth century in France directly, rather than through the distorting and magnifying lenses of the Vichy era, one can only conclude that French nationalist antisemitism was a rather toothless tiger. As in Germany, the political right declined precipitously at the polls after 1902, Zola and the Dreyfusards were vindicated, and as Michael R. Marras and Robert O. Paxton remind us: "Even Maurice Barres, the shaipest tongue of the far right, had mellowed to the point of admitting that Jews were one of the ' spiritual families' of France."8 Even Drumont's La libre parole, whose circulation had reached 300,000 in 1889, had to be closed down in 1924 for lack of readers. Moreover, Charles Maurras and his French Catholic following, while increasingly absorbed by antiJewish anger and opposed totally to French citizenship for the Jews, nonetheless only demanded before 1914 that the Jews be reduced to the status of metics, of second-class citizens. Though Maurras continually referred to the need to regulate the activity of the Jews in France and, failing that, to expel them,9 his culturalpolitical premises and his obsessions focused on French national homogeneity rather than the murder of Jews. In sum, a vast gap separates the policy recommendations put forward by the circles of the Action franchise from the actualities of Himmler's death camps—not least because the French upper classes feared that an attack on "Jewish capitalists" would eventually engulf them. Once the lower classes had been mobilized, all economically advantaged groups could become the targets of revolutionary transformation. Moreover, the great passion for order characteristic of these French antisemites led them to seek remedies that would control, not destroy, the Jews. For most Frenchmen of Maurras' persuasion, it was not the presence of Jews per se, but rather their seemingly uncontrolled and ever-increasing economic power, that was perceived as threatening and abhorrent. Jewish economic power, understood as economic exploitation and social anarchy, represented a process that had to be checked. In the Right's reaction to Leon Blum's rise to political power, one sees this sentiment paradigmatically illustrated, for here was incontrovertible proof of Jewish control and leftist anarchy. Thus, in October 1936,10 Muriel Jouhandeau of the Action fran?aise called for the adoption of special laws to control the Jewish presence in France. Likewise, Marcel Deat gave this description of the Jewish issue: "The Jew is a foreigner—treat him like one. If he is useful to society, he may live on our soil. If he has served in the army, fought for our country, he is accepted as an honorable and honored ally. If he is harmful, let him be expelled."11 This is not very different from von Schonerer's Austrian proposal of 1887 to bring back the ghetto and introduce Jewish quotas in the professions, or Heinrich Class' suggestion, as president of the Pan German League in 1912, to deny Jews full citizenship, reducing them instead to the status of "resident aliens." Similarly, Maurras could write that "our patience is at an end. . . . Down with the Jews! Those whom we made the mistake of treating as if they were our equals display a ridiculous ambition to dominate us. They shall be put in their place, and it will be a

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pleasure to do so."12 This is the rhetoric of disemancipationism, by then an old tradition rooted in the era of Napoleonic defeat. It is backward looking, characterized by nostalgia for the ghetto and for Christian, feudal society: when things were in their "proper place." I note, too, that already in 1938, Maurras, in contemplating French domination by Hitlerian Germany, had declared: "Look out [for Germany]: No anti-democratism or anti-semitism is worth it |German domination of France]."13 One must not exaggerate the meaning of one warning, but in truth it was not atypical of Maurras' nationalist stance in the prewar years. What all this amounts to, is the recognition that French nationalism embodied in its innermost essence a profound antisemitic temper, but it was an antisemitism of a pre-Nazi, even in many ways of a medieval sort. This is not to underestimate French antisemitism but rather to argue that before the late 1930s, when French politics became inseparable from the wider currents sweeping across Europe, it showed little sign of being genocidal. Further to the east, among the Russian Slavophiles; among the Polish nationalists before and after the creation of an independent Polish state in 1918; among the Hungarian national antisemites under the dual monarchy between 1867 and 1918, the regime of Gyula Gomoos that came to power in 1936, and the Szalasi regime that governed Hungary through most of the Second World War; and among the Romanian nationalist antisemites beginning with the circles of Ion Bratianu—the Romanian situation was complicated by foreign intervention on behalf of the Jews—one does not find programmatic calls for the extermination of Jewry. Even Corneliua Zelea Codreanu and the Iron Guard in Romania did not champion such a policy prior to the Second World War. Nationalist antisemites in Eastern Europe, like their West European colleagues, called for the limitation of Jewish political rights, the control of Jewish economic activity, the restriction of the Jewish presence in the universities and professions and, failing all this, for the voluntary or forced emigration of Jews, but no one called for their total physical annihilation. Which is to say, all these local varieties of pre-Nazi nationalist (and other) forms of antisemitism were limited, recognizing restraints and the influence of various mediating—that is, not genocidal—factors.

Nazi Anti-Judaism Many scholars identify nationalism as one of the sources of Hitler's Weltanschauung and as a key ingredient in his antisemitism, and connect Hitler's Judeophobia to the older nationalist antisemitic tradition in essential ways. And, of course, there are links that do exist in this area. However, Hitler's antisemitism is not primarily nationalist in orientation and, ultimately, is discontinuous with the prior political tradition discussed earlier in this essay. For Hitler's Weltanschauung, and specifically his extreme views on Jews, had little to do with nationalism and everything to do with racism, or still more accurately, with a radical racial metaphysics. Hitler's opposition to the Jew crossed all national boundaries and transcended all political agendas as such agendas are usually defined, just as it transcended all ethical and legal norms. The "Jewish problem" was a universal, not a national, problem that required a worldwide "Final Solution." No appeal to nationalism, to a nationalist

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explanation, can account for the desire by a Germany chancellor to seek the total physical extermination of the Jews in such diverse areas as Denmark and Holland to the north, Rhodes and Greece to the south, and Hungary, Romania, Poland, Bulgaria, the Baltic States and Russia to the east—with additional plans drawn up for the extirpation of the Jews of Arab North Africa, Britain and Palestine. To diagnose Hitler's position on the Jewish question correctly, one must comprehend that its revolutionary character derived from an immanent Manichean metaphysical claim according to which Jews represented a fundamental and unavoidable danger. Hitler's "Jew" was not rooted in empirical realities but represented an inversion, a doctrinally generated distortion, of objective historical and sociopolitical conditions. Economic and political events—the economic crises of the 1920s and 1930s; Germany's Sonderweg; Germany's rapid industrialization and urbanization after 1870; its loss in the First World War; the liberal politics of the Weimar Republic; the role of the Jews in the development of German institutions; the volatility of the German, European and world economy; the Russian Revolution; the development of Marxism; modernist cultural movements; and even the spread of syphilis in Europe—provided the cover for Hitler's paranoid theories, but they did not cause them and, conversely, no real light was cast on these diverse events by the Fuhrer's "explanations." To look for the causes of Hitler's antisemitism in such concrete historical developments, as many scholars, including those who emphasize the role of nationalism in Hitler's Weltanschauung, are wont to do—Arno J. Mayer, for instance, describes it as "built on the bedrock of extreme and expansionist nationalism"14—is to miss the most elemental point: no primary cause or causes of this sort existed. Hitler's depiction of the "Jew" and the centrality of this malignant stereotype in his mental-ideological universe were mythic. Or, put another way, Hitler's hatred was independent of what Jews did or did not do. Thus, as he was murdering millions of Jews, nearly two-thirds of all the Jews of Europe, he continued to rant about "Jewish power." Consider, as a paradigm of how not to analyze Nazism, Arno J. Mayer's claim "by casting the Jews as the principal agents—the 'demons'—of economic, social, and cultural change, Hitler made them the surrogate victims of his counter-attack against polymorphous modernity, which was his ultimate target."15 But this is to reverse the true causal relationship. Hitler was not anti-Jewish because he was antimodern; he hated modernity because he associated it with Jews, Jewish emancipation, Jewish power. The same should certainly be said about Hitler's obsession with Communism (what he called "JudeoBolshevism")—"Marxism," he writes in Mein Katnpf, was created "by the Jew Karl Marx" for the benefit "of his race";16 his fear and detestation of left-wing politics; and his opposition to the Weimar Republic, which he saw as a Jewish political regime imposed on Germany by the Western allies who were themselves controlled by Jews. That Hitler's antisemitism was of a mythic variety certainly did not make it inefficacious, as the history of the war years reveals. Indeed, it was precisely the purity of the stereotype, the impossibility of the empirical refutation of its assertions, that contributed to the success of the metahistoric, cosmic claims so important to Nazi rhetoric. Moreover, to describe Hitler's antisemitism as mythic is not to deny that Germany had real social, economic and political problems that Hitler

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promised to solve, and that his proposed solutions were accepted by large segments of German society. However, while dealing with authentic national issues, both domestic and foreign, Hitler recreated them in a distinctive fashion consistent with his idiosyncratic version of racial Manicheanism. Thus lebensraum, for example, ultimately became a racial, not a national category—the expansion of the Aryan people at the expense of the Slavic (and Jewish) peoples. The character of Generalplan OST made this evident. The nature of the Jew and the meaning of Jewry for world history was, for the Third Reich, not a contingent, malleable factor belonging to the empirical realm; rather, as Himmler told Rudolf Hoss, the commander of Auschwitz: "Jews are the eternal enemy of the German people and must be exterminated. All Jews within our grasp are to be destroyed without exception."17 The putative cancerous, oppositional nature of the Jew was a first principle of racial metaphysics, an a priori postulate of Hitler's conceptual universe. Hence, when one seeks to decipher Nazi antisemitism and the racial program of the Third Reich, one should not err by thinking in ordinary political categories. One must avoid a reductionist, "quasi-empirical," explanation of the "war against the Jews," as if this confrontation represented an authentic national, political, economic, class or even racial—as compared to a metaphysical—war. Here Hitler's idiosyncratic redefinition of the notion of the state, his peculiar use of the terms "nation" and "nationalism," also need to be understood. For him these concepts did not carry, and were not defined in terms of, their traditional geopolitical meaning. Rather, the Nazi state, the self-declared Fuhrerstaat, insofar as it talked of the nation, was concerned with that political and more than political entity responsible for "the preservation and the promotion of psychically and psychologically similar living beings."18 Moreover, . . .the highest purpose of the volkisch state is its care for the preservation of those racial primal elements which, by providing culture, create the beauty and the dignity of a higher humanity. We, as Aryans, are therefore able to imagine a state only as the living organism of a people [Volkstum] which not only safeguards the preservation of that people, but which by a further training of its spiritual and ideal abilities, leads it to the highest freedom.19

That is, the nation is a racial community created, legitimated and preserved to foster racial ends. And it is this understanding of the nation that has as its two essential corollaries the policy of lebensraum, which guarantees sufficient living space for the Aryan race, and the adoption of extreme Judeophobia as state policy so as to assure that the state promotes racial policies certain to meet and defeat the threat of "Jewish blood." Furthermore, one needs to understand that blood, or race, while a key element in Hitler's discourse, received its valence from a more comprehensive metaphysical-mythological structure. "Those who see in National Socialism nothing more than a political movement," Hitler observed—and, we might add, scholars who erroneously decipher Nazism in accord with the normal categories of historical method or social science—"know scarcely anything of it. It is more even than a religion: it is the will to create mankind anew."20 The schematic analysis I have presented here has not been framed in the language usually employed in the analysis of nationalism, even nationalist antisemitism. But

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then Hitler's extraordinary anti-Jewish discourse—the "Jew as the personification of the devil," the "Jew as the symbol of evil," the Jew "as parasite upon the nations," the Jew "as vampire," Jewish victory as meaning only stifling "in filth and offal"21—does not describe, in any authentic sense, an actual political or nationalist ideology, nor again a real confrontation between nations. Rather, Hitler's language gives elementary expression to a radical, if bizarre, transcendental doctrine that employed the notions of nationalism and race to express a larger systematic comprehension of the historical and metahistorical order. As such, to decipher Nazism correctly requires a hermeneutical method that is appropriate: one that confronts and decodes the axiological propositions made, and which perceives the overarching Judeophobic form of the whole from which individual normative propositions flow. The assertions and prescriptions advanced by Hitler, though having deadly political consequences, were ultimately metaphysical in nature.22 I have undoubtedly exaggerated the unimportance of nationalism in the growth and success of Nazism as a practical program. I have done so consciously in order to highlight the essential point of this paper—which is no exaggeration: Hitler's assault on Jewry was unlike any prior anti-Jewish program; and it was certainly discontinuous with any prior anti-Jewish nationalist program. Hitler's Jew-hatred was unlimited and understood by its creator as requiring nothing less than the murder of every Jewish man, woman and child. This was an imperative without historical precedent.

Notes 1. I have dealt with this question at great length in vol. 1 of my Holocaust in Historical Context (New York: 1994), and will therefore let this bold conclusion stand on its own. Readers who wish to see my full analysis of this issue and the documentation on which it rests should turn to that source. 2. H.E. Marcard, Uber die Moglichteit der Juden-Emanzipation im christlichgermanischen Staat (Menden: 1843), cited by Jacob Katz, From Prejudice to Destruction: Anti-Semitism, 1700-1933 (Cambridge, Mass.: 1980), 196. One can, and should, substitute any national identity for Germanic in this quote, for this particular sentiment was expounded in every European country. 3. Quoted in Louis Gabriel M. de Bonald, "Sur les Juifs," Mercure de France, vol. 23, 249-267 and reprinted in his Oevres completes, vol. 3 (Paris: 1859), 934-948. Bonald actually misquoted Herder, whose meaning was less offensive. 4. Wilhelm Marr, Der Sieg des Judenthums uber das Germanenthum vom nicht confessionellen Standpunkt ausbetrachtet (Bern: 1879), 34-35. 5. Bruno Bauer, Das Judenthum in der Fremde (Berlin: 1863). 6. Cited by Uriel Tal, Christians and Jews in Germany: Religion, Politics and Ideology in the Second Reich, 1870-1914 (Ithaca: 1975), 124. 7. Quoted in Robert Kann, Study in Austrian Intellectual History (New York: 1973), 112n. 8. Michael Marrus and Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews (New York: 1981), 31. 9. Charles Maurras, Les Idees royalistes sur les parties, I'etat, la nation (Paris: 1919), 22-23. 10. Muriel Jouhandcau, "Comment je suis dcvenu anti-semite," Action franqaise, 8 Oct. 1936. Similar calls were heard elsewhere on the right—for instance, in the proposals of Louis Darquier de Pellepoix and Xavicr Vallat.

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11. Cited by Eugene Weber, Varieties of Fascism: Doctrines of Revolution in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: 1964), 63. 12. Action frangaise, 19 Feb. 1936, cited by Eugene Weber, Action Frangaise: Royalism and Reaction in Twentieth Century France (Stanford: 1962), 374. 13. Cited by Weber, in ibid., 421. 14. ArnoJ. Mayer, Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? (New York: 1988), 96; and see also his remark in ibid., 98: "Nationalism became a central tenet of the political faith [of Nazism]." 15. Ibid., 94. 16. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans. Ralph Manheim (Boston: 1943), 382. 17. Rudolf Hoss, Commandant of Auschwitz: The Autobiography of Rudolf Hoss (Cleveland: 1959), 205-206. 18. Hitler, Mein Kampf (New York: 1939), 594. 19. Ibid., 595. 20. Hitler, as reported in Hermann Rauschning's Gesprache mil Hitler (New York: 1940), 23 If. 21. All quotes are from Mein Kampf (1939), 324, 327 and 302. 22. See Katz, Holocaust in Historical Context, for more detailed evidence regarding this conclusion.

Forced Emigration, War, Deportation and Holocaust Gotz Aly and Susanne Heim (FREE UNIVERSITY OF BERLIN)

For a brief moment, it seemed that the many events taking place in 1995 to mark the end of the Second World War would make it possible, as so many Germans hoped, finally to close the book on the painful chapter of Nazism. But this expectation soon proved to be illusory. Steven Spielberg's film "Schmdler's List," the publication of Victor Klemperer's diaries and finally Daniel J. Goldhagen's book Hitler's Willing Executioners (to name only the most notable examples) caused the issue to flare up time and again. In Germany, any attempt to "overcome" the past engenders new controversies; and the vehemence of the debate makes clear how little National Socialism is "history." For years, the theses of the so-called "intentionalists," that is, the assumption of a "Fuhrer's order" and Adolf Hitler's "obsession" with physically annihilating the Jews, made it possible to focus the guilt on relatively few people, while relegating the others to the status of collaborators who merely obeyed orders; half-aware fellow travelers; faceless members of the blinded mass. It is by no means true, of course, that all or even most scholars have limited their investigations to the leadership of the Nazi state, but there has been a prevalent assumption that the history of Nazi policy toward the Jews can be described as a special story, isolated, independently determined and clearly separate from other aspects of Nazi policy. At the same time, the myth continues to prevail that the persecution of the Jews in the Third Reich possessed an internal logic, leading to Ideological formulations such as "from ostracism to genocide." This belief is based on the conception that Hitler, his deputy Hermann Goring, the police chiefs Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich, and their propagandist Joseph Goebbels were autocrats who generally, and especially on questions of Jewish policy, made decisions dictatorially and intentionally—that is, free of any political, military or economic pressures or considerations. This limited view often leads further to a "triumphalist" interpretation of Nazi policy toward the Jews, to the widely held thesis that the decision to initiate the Final Solution was made in the summer of 1941, when expectations of victory were at their height and the leadership (in its own mind) commanded absolute freedom of action. The protagonists, in the fever of conquest (so it is assumed), now set forth on 56

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what they had always held to be the best path: the solution of "the Jewish question" through mass murder. However, when one examines the historical process more carefully, what emerges as most visible is not the triumph but the lack of success—the constant failure of plans once made. The so-called "functionalists," who described Nazi policy more than two decades ago as a cumulative radicalization (Hans Mommsen), correctly turned attention to all those who, holding important positions, contributed to developing the bureaucracy of death. Several years ago, building upon this approach (while also critical with regard to the isolated view of anti-Jewish policies), we took the "Pioneers (Vordenker) of Extermination" as our subject.1 We attempted to determine the role and the significance of the social scientists and political advisers who, in the quiet of their offices, constantly created new, broader-based plans involving the transplantation and removal of millions of people. In this way, they hoped within a short time to create a new German-controlled Europe, reconstructed from the ground up both economically and demographically. At the same time, we considered that it was this Utopian vision that served as the essential motor of genocide. While we stand by the empirical results of that work, we have in the meantime modified our views regarding the genesis of the Final Solution. It is not enough to describe the planned Utopias; it is also essential to analyze the constant failures, even in the early stages, of the practical attempts to implement those plans. The contradictory actions of the Nazi regime (as well as the often only fragmentary documentation at the historian's disposal) can only be meaningfully understood in light of this tension. Our more recent research has led us to conclude that it was the initial failure of the various plans for expulsion and deportation that led to systematic murder.2 This failure arose from the fact that these projects were inconsistent with other goals of the Nazi state; that the accompanying disputes involved real conflicts of interest not amenable to compromise; and that the self-created demographic, military and economic pressures often made a mockery of the respective aims within weeks. Put another way, those who were organizing the expulsions and deportations only moved on to extermination after a series of setbacks. A detailed reconstruction of the individual steps, the retreats and the crises can provide important insights into the process that created the political will to murder the European Jews. What follows is a summary of our findings hitherto. The emigration of German Jews was initially both encouraged and impeded by the German authorities. They often confiscated Jewish property, thus leaving the targets of their discrimination without the means to pay travel costs, fees and the "Reich flight tax"—all needed to leave Germany—as well as a minimum amount of money required to gain entrance into a new country. Given such disincentives, emigration had to be encouraged by measured doses of bureaucratic terror. "The means available to the Jews for building a life—not only in an economic sense—are to be restricted," stated a bureaucratic recommendation of May 1934: For them, Germany must be a land with no future, a land in which the older generation can die in their left-over positions, but in which the young cannot live. Thus, the incentive to emigrate will always remain. Rowdy antisemitism is to be avoided. One

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Gotz Aly and Susanne Heim fights rats not with revolvers, but with poison and gas. The foreign policy damage of rowdyism is out of all proportion to its internal success.3

In the departments of the Gestapo and the Security Service (Sicherheitsdienst [SD])4 responsible for the "Jewish question," there could be no talk of the mere fulfillment of orders or bureaucratic routine. The staff of the SS central office acted out of conviction and with imagination. Their superiors urged them to draft their own proposals, to develop ideas and solutions, and to streamline the bureaucracy. The test questions for would-be SS officer-cadets were typical in this respect. In 1937, they were required to prepare responses to the following questions: "How do you imagine a solution to the Jewish question? How would you go about checking and proving a person's Jewish connections \Versippung}T'5 Jewish experts of the SD were expected to act just as independently. They prepared reports on the activities of individual Jews in specific organizations, collected statistical material, or developed proposals for setting up a Jewish index.6 Their professional education even included Hebrew courses, to perfect surveillance of the "ideological enemy."7 The SD's Jewish department (11/112) carefully tracked the immigration requirements of almost every country on earth.8 The focus of attention was initially on the emigration of German Jews to Palestine, which was encouraged during the early years of Nazi rule: for example, through the Transfer (Ha'avarah) Agreement. When entry to Palestine was sharply curtailed by the British as a result of Arab unrest starting in 1935, a controversy developed in the German bureaucracy regarding the emigration policy. The Foreign Office advocated a "revision of the German standpoint." Emigration to Palestine, it argued, had been promoted merely for reasons of domestic policy. Yet in a broader sense, it was in Germany's interests to maintain the fragmentation of Jewry, and to prevent Jewry from creating a "power base recognized by international law" in the form of its own state.9 As a result, the security service and the police also decided that in the future they would no longer support Zionist organizations. Instead, "constructive Jewish policies must rest more and more on emigration abroad"—that is, to countries other than Palestine.10 Instructions to the Jewish Department of the SD in November 1937 stated that the policy had changed "to the extent that the Zionists, who seek a Jewish state, will no longer receive support."11 Instead, Jewish newspapers would be required to propagate emigration elsewhere. The more Jews were driven out by the Germans, the more stringent the immigration requirements became in potential countries of refuge. The rapidly growing number of Jewish refugees following the Anschluss of Austria strengthened this tendency to close borders. Yet most of the countries made great efforts not to annoy the German government by, for example, criticizing its expulsion practices too strongly. This appeasement policy, which reached its highest point with the Munich Agreement, had long since become the general policy toward Hitler's Germany— far beyond the borders of Europe. The trend found expression with unmistakable clarity during the Evian Conference in the summer of 1938. At this conference, convened at the suggestion of U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the potential countries of immigration were to

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agree on how to distribute the refugees. The U.S. government, however, neither intended to liberalize its own immigration laws nor did it seriously expect the other countries represented at the conference to do so.12 How to finance the emigration was another question that was left hanging. Should Germany refuse to agree to release Jewish property, it was decided, the costs would have to be assumed by private organizations. As important as these financial issues were, they could also serve as an excuse for nonaction; the fact is that the U.S. refused to admit Jewish refugees over and above the quota, even when their American relatives were willing to support them.13 The maneuvering over the conference's agenda and location— out of consideration for German sensitivities, it took place not in Geneva itself, but in the small spa of Evian on the French side of the lake—made it obvious how halfhearted were the efforts to offer refuge to Jews fleeing Germany. The Germans responded to the preparations for the conference in their own way, increasing their terrorization of the Jewish minority. In mid-June 1938, three weeks before the start of the conference, the police arrested several thousand people, mainly Jews.14 "In Jewish circles," wrote the Times of London on June 17, 1938, "the goal of this operation is taken to be intimidating Jews remaining in Germany and persuading them to emigrate, as well as exercising pressure on the international conference on refugee questions in Evian." Delegates from thirty-two nations, 15 as well as from all the larger Jewish organizations and from numerous humanitarian associations, took part in the conference on July 6-15, 1938. A delegation of German Jews had been put together by the SD and submitted a memorandum approved by Herbert Hagen, the head of the relevant department (II/ l 12).16 At the same time, the president of the Reich Association of Jews in Germany, Paul Eppstein, was sent by the SD to a preparatory meeting of Jewish organizations in Paris, and was subsequently summoned to report on it.17 During the conference, what had already been hinted at during the preparatory negotiations was repeated publicly; one after another, the delegates of almost all the nations insisted that their countries were unable to take in refugees from Germany and Austria.18 Australia's representative was unusually blunt: his country had no racial problems, he said, and it was not prepared to import any. This statement caused a stir "because of its honesty, and because it expressed the inexpressible . . . antisemitism, the same motive demonstrated by Germany . . . and the one from which the conference had wanted to distance itself."19 The final document issued by the conference20—again out of diplomatic considerations, and to the satisfaction of the Main Security Office21—avoided any condemnation of Germany's anti-Jewish policies. As macabre as the conference may seem in retrospect, its stalling tactics on emigration were rooted in a real dilemma. If the participating countries refused to take in penniless refugees, they left them at the mercy of German anti-Jewish terror. But if they declared themselves willing to take in the refugees with no counterconcessions from the Germans, they would in the end be aiding in the expulsion of the Jews—most likely not only from Germany, but from Poland, Hungary and Romania, since in the lead up to the conference, those countries had demanded that the Jewish question in Eastern Europe also be placed on the agenda.22 This dilemma arose as a result of the expulsion policies pursued by Germany. But

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because the Evian Conference, rather than supporting immigration, set off a chain reaction leading to its further limitation, it would have been better from the standpoint of the victims had the conference not been held at all. From a practical point of view, the conference led only to the formation of the Intergovernmental Committee (IGC), headed by Roosevelt's confidant and lawyer, George Rublee. His main task was to try and convince the German government to enter negotiations aimed at allowing Jewish emigrants to keep their property. Even here, it was agreed that the Germans would be approached with extreme caution and discretion. Despite Germany's initial refusal to negotiate with Rublee,23 it eventually agreed in early 1939, at least in principle, to the so-called Schacht Plan, named for the minister of finance, Hjalmar Schacht, who had conducted negotiations with Rublee in London. While no formal agreement between the IGC and Germany was ever concluded, there was a confidential memorandum signed by both sides.24 The goal of the Schacht Plan was to permit two-thirds of the 600,000 Jews in Germany and Austria (as defined by the Nuremberg Laws) to emigrate. This emigration would be financed by the participants in the Evian Conference, while the German treasury continued to insist on retaining most (75 percent) of the Jewish population's property, estimated at six billion Reichsmarks. Germany was to use some of the Jewish property to pay for the upkeep of the Jews awaiting emigration, of "old Jews and of others not able to emigrate." Implementation of the plan would have meant that within one or two decades, no more Jews would have remained in the German Reich. The plan was formed of two components: forced emigration for the younger people, leaving the old to die at home. It is clear that there was an economic incentive for the German government to give the Jews remaining in Germany—robbed of their property—as little support as possible.25 In any event, the experts on Jews at the SD and the Gestapo continued to attempt to force old and impoverished Jews to emigrate—a practice that clearly contradicted the proposed agreement with Rublee. Following the Anschluss of Austria and the subsequent antisemitic terror, the number of Jewish refugees had risen rapidly even though there were no new countries willing to accept them. Thus, in March 1938, the Gestapo's Jewish experts drafted new proposals on emigration policy. Reservations remained about "a Palestine state ... as a world Jewish center, but in the foreseeable future, no viable [Jewish] state is to be expected there." As that country remained almost the only country open to "penniless Jews," a revision in Germany's policy toward Palestine had now to be considered. In their efforts to encourage emigration, the Gestapo and the SD sought to control Jewish public opinion, though with the Anschluss, this task proved unexpectedly difficult: "In Austria there is no Jewish class corresponding to the Jewish middle class in Germany and amenable to organizational efforts (Zionist, Reich Association, etc.). Instead, especially in Vienna, one finds either very wealthy Jews ... or a Jewish ghetto proletariat of the worst antisocial kind." At the end of his letter, the (unnamed) writer developed his own proposals: "Those who should emigrate are: 1) the impoverished, antisocial Jewish proletariat... 2) the other impoverished Jews (whether the infirm, the old or the young) in order to relieve the pressure on the German welfare authorities and suppress sources of unrest." On the other hand, the

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rich, well-known Jews were not to emigrate, as they were "good security." Further, "Austrian Jewry, to the extent that it is not already registered by the [Jewish] associations there, ... is to be registered with the organizations in Germany that already exist and are under constant supervision."26 The control of Jewish organizations in Austria that the Gestapo still found lacking in March was soon made good by Adolf Eichmann a few days after the Anschluss. Together with Hagen, he had ordered the arrest of members and officials of Jewish organizations and the confiscation of their files.27 Shortly thereafter, Eichmann began singlemindedly to take over supervision of the reestablished Jewish organizations.28 On August 22, 1938, the Central Office for Jewish Emigration was established. Its purpose was to streamline the expulsion of Austrian Jews: Matters that wandered from office to office and took weeks or months in the Altreich were dealt with in a day in Eichmann's Central Office; the Austrian Jews were brought to Vienna, placed in camps, and sent through the Central Office, where their property was taken from them and they were supplied within a few hours with all the stamps, papers, visas and passports necessary to leave the country. While emigration in the Altreich—despite the traumatic situations associated with it and all the difficulties— was still essentially a voluntary act, in Austria it was a forced, precipitate deportation.29

In a report on Jewry in early 1939, the efficiency of the Central Office was praised in retrospect, while the social consequences of the anti-Jewish policies were also referred to: "The loss of every economic base," it noted, had led in Austria, as in Germany earlier, to a "large-scale worsening in the situation of Jewry" and to "extensive proletarianization."30 It was this proletarianization, the dependence of so many Jews on handouts, that increasingly became a problem for the Germans and encouraged more and more radical solutions to emerge. Thus Joseph Biirckel (Reich Commissioner for the Annexation of Austria to the Reich) warned as early as autumn 1938: "We must not forget that if we wish to Aryanize and take away the livelihood of the Jews, we must solve the Jewish question completely. But to view them as dependents of the state is impossible. So we must create the conditions for them to go abroad."31 The Central Office for Jewish Emigration, then, was essentially an institution designed to accelerate the expulsion of impoverished Jews while, according to Eichmann, wealthy Jews would be allowed to emigrate only if their leaving was "linked with the simultaneous departure of a portion of Jews impoverished in terms of their property."32 It was seen as a special advantage that the Central Office obtained money to finance emigration from Jewish organizations abroad: "Leading Jews were constantly being sent abroad [to London and Paris] to get the international Jewish financial and migration societies to donate hard currency and create opportunities to emigrate."33 As would be the case with the entire resettlement and extermination bureaucracy, the Central Office was soon financing itself from the money taken from its victims.34 On the night of November 9, 1938, pogroms occurred throughout the German Reich. The incidents have been documented often and thus need not be described in detail here. Following the November pogrom, the atonement payment of a billion

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Reichmarks imposed upon the German Jews worsened the financial situation of the Jewish community still further, rendering more difficult both emigration and the care of those remaining behind. In the Altreich, too, experts on the "Jewish question" increasingly faced the problem that it was precisely those members of the Jewish community whom they wanted most to be rid of who were not emigrating— old people (especially women) and those who, after being deprived of their property and driven from their professions, no longer had enough left to finance emigration. Now the authorities feared they would become welfare cases. After November 10, Goring declared himself the authority in charge of coordinating all policy on the Jews, and his Office of the Four-Year Plan took over the task of shutting the Jews out of the economy. The state-organized theft of Jewish property now accelerated, making forced emigration still more difficult. Nonetheless, against this backdrop, Goring was acting consistently when he emphasized the positive side of the pogroms in an internal speech of December 6, 1938: "The entire question of emigration has become acute; people see that the Jews cannot live in Germany."35 Since 1933, then, the direct goal of Nazi policy had been the expulsion of the Jews and the destruction of their livelihoods. To move from this strategy to the Holocaust, further conditions were required—and these were supplied, of course, by the war. First, the German leadership once and for all closed off the option, already becoming problematic from a foreign policy standpoint, of forced emigration. At the same time, as the Germans conquered one country after another, more and more Jews came under German rule. Following the occupation and partition of Poland alone, they no longer numbered in the hundreds of thousands, but in the millions. To a far greater degree than in the first six years of the Nazi dictatorship, the war promoted an atmosphere of secrecy, atomized society, and destroyed the remaining ties to religious and legal traditions. Considerations of foreign policy no longer counted for much. And there thus emerged a situation that was called, in the perpetrators' language, a "unique opportunity." In the words of a confidant of Heydrich's, justifying a mass expulsion of a million people planned for 1941, it was necessary to carry out the operation right away, "because during the war the possibility still exists of acting relatively rigorously, without considering the mood of world public opinion."36 For his part, Goebbels noted in March 1942 (referring to the gas chambers): "Of the Jews themselves, not much is left. . . . Thank God, during the war we now have a whole range of possibilities that we are denied in peacetime, and we must take advantage of them."37 During the first two years of the war, most European Jews became the victims of the same discriminatory policies that had previously been tested in Germany and Austria. In occupied Poland, Holland and France, in the dependent countries of Slovakia, Romania and Hungary, the Jewish minority was dispossessed and robbed of social and political rights, following the German example. In addition, however, the Jews also became victims of comprehensive policies applied to more and more parts of German-occupied Europe, the purpose of which was to achieve the resettlement of many millions of people who were not Jews. It is this context that provides

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an underutilized key to uncovering sources that aid in the interpretation of Nazi racial and population policies. Alongside his function as Reichsfuhrer SS and chief of the German police, Himmler was given a second and lesser-known assignment in 1939, shortly before the outbreak of war. This was the position of Reich Commissioner for the Consolidation of Germandom. As such, in subsequent years and with the help of several thousand employees and a dozen newly created institutions such as the Main Trusteeship Office East and the German Resettlement and Trusteeship Company, he was responsible for bringing some 600,000 ethnic Germans home to the Reich. They came from the Baltic and the southern Tyrol, from Volhynia and Bessarabia, from Bukovina and Dobrudja. Benefiting Germany's foreign trade balance, the treasury of the German Reich relinquished their property (valued at some three billion Reichmarks) in exchange for crude oil and food from the Soviet Union, Romania and Italy. The ethnic Germans, for their part, received the homes, farms and businesses, the tools, cattle and household implements of the Poles and Jews whom Eichmann had expelled or ghettoized. The policy of resettlement affected the Jews in their totality far more severely than the Poles. Not only were they almost completely deprived of their property from the very beginning, they were also forced to make way for ethnic German settlers and then, in the Generalgouvernment, for Polish refugees. Whenever the policy of returning the ethnic Germans home ran into difficulties, whenever there was a shortage of homes, money, household goods and jobs for them or for the Poles and Romanians being resettled, members of Europe's Jewish minority were ever more ruthlessly robbed, forced together and squeezed to the peripheries of their respective cities and regions. Because the resettlement of the Germans was always linked to plans for greater economic efficiency and spaciousness, two and sometimes three alien [fremdvolkisch] families had to make room for every German family. In addition, huge military training grounds were to be laid out and some 300,000 small farming families transplanted from the impoverished rural regions of the Reich to the East, where they were to be placed on twenty-hectare farms. As early as the winter of 1940-1941, these many different projects required an expulsion target of some five million people. The staff of the Central Resettlement Office, the organization in charge of this project, fell far short of this goal. As a result, in the winter of 19401941 a quarter of a million ethnic German returnees were already stuck in 1,500 resettlement camps that had to be set up in the eastern and southern regions of the German Reich. Moreover, an agreement with Italy under which 200,000 South Tyrolian Germans were to be resettled was left unimplemented because of similar logistical problems. Constantly increasing pressure—created by Himmler and his staff themselves— built up behind the demands for ever more comprehensive expropriation and deportation plans. But the practical question remained—how, when and whither? In January 1940, Eichmann was already complaining of "the difficulties that result from the connections [Wechselwirkung] between settling the ethnic Germans and evacuating the Poles and Jews."38 In September 1941, when the issue was already one of mass deportations to the newly conquered Soviet areas, Rolf Heinz Höppner,

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a regional head of the Central Resettlement Office, posed the following question to Eichmann: "What is to become finally of these resettled parts of the population, undesirable for the German settlement areas; does the goal consist in permanently securing them some sort of life, or should they be completely exterminated?"39 The linkage between the repatriation policy applied to the ethnic Germans and the deportation policy applied to aliens can also be seen at the level of organizational charts and functions. Like Himmler, Reinhard Heydrich held a dual position. His special responsibility for the solution to the Jewish question is well known and has often been described. But he also stood at the head of both the Central Immigration Office and the Central Resettlement Office—a fact that has been less closely examined. This meant that at one and the same time, he was in charge of transferring ethnic Germans from Eastern and Southern Europe into the newly expanding Reich, and of transferring the previous populations out. It was to that end that, in December 1939, he created Eichmann's Office IV/D4. Until late summer 1941, it was as much responsible for the resettlement of Poles, and later of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, as for the deportation of Jews; the office was commonly referred to as dealing with "emigration and evacuation affairs."40 There was also Oswald Pohl, who led the entire concentration camp administration and an ever-expanding SS economic empire. In his capacity as the quite active chairman of the board of the German Resettlement and Trusteeship Company, he was also confronted, between 1940 and 1941, with the growing difficulties of creating space for the ethnic Germans stuck in the 1,500 resettlement camps. It is no biographical accident that those people who were responsible for the expulsion of Poles later organized the extermination of the Jews. It is well known that the head of the Litzmannstadt (Lodz) Central Resettlement Office, Hermann Krumey, traveled to Budapest with Eichmann in 1944 in order to organize the deportation of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz. From December 1941 onwards, the responsibilities of the Central Resettlement Office included both the resettlement of Poles and the "implementation of measures against the Jews and against the antisocial elements" (this was the terminology employed by one of the SS men involved in the mass gassing at Chelmno, near Lodz).41 When German administrative authorities spoke after autumn 1941 of Jewish resettlement and evacuation—code words for murder—this should be understood not merely as camouflage but also as an indication of the program's genesis. It is impossible to present here all of the empirical evidence suggesting that the general resettlement policies and the genocide of the Jews were closely linked historically; a few examples must suffice. Originally, the Lodz region was not supposed to be annexed; in 1939, after all, more than 500,000 Poles and some 300,000 Jews lived there. The annexation occurred—belatedly, on November 9, 1939—purely in response to the perceived necessities of resettling Baltic Germans. The Sosnowitz-Dombrowa-Bendzin region was also belatedly annexed to the German Reich for reasons of immediate utility: namely, the coal mines to be found there. Some 70,000 Jews lived in that region. While on September 21, 1939, Heydrich had still assumed that he would have to deport about 180,000 Jews from the newly annexed (western Polish) regions to the Generalgouvernment, three

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weeks later, because of additional annexations not motivated by Jewish policy, the figure was three times as many—a total of 550,000. At the same time, the Generalgouvernment, to which the deportees were supposed to be taken, was reduced in size and quite disproportionately weakened economically. While the strategy of mass deportation originally proceeded upon the belief that the Generalgouvernment would be a dumping ground, policed by the German occupier but otherwise left entirely to its own devices, this assumption changed rapidly. In early 1940, Goring was already forbidding further deportations beyond the limits already approved. This order was issued on February 12, 1940, for economic and military reasons, but against the will of Himmler, the Reichsfuhrer SS—whose power fell far short of the near-omnipotence often ascribed to him. On January 24, Goebbels had already noted in his diary that "Himmler at the moment is shifting populations. Not always successfully."42 The resettlement of the Baltic Germans also served to accelerate the creation of the Lodz ghetto. The representative of the Reich Commissioner for the Consolidation of Germandom in Posen wrote to a colleague from the Central Resettlement Office in January 1940 that "the Baltic Germans designated for Lodz are already on the way to Posen, so that in a few days apartments must be available in Lodz. The evacuation of Jewish apartments and the transfer of the apartment owners to the ghetto must therefore take place immediately."43 And early in March the Gestapo reported from Lodz: At dawn on 2 March, an area bordering the ghetto was surrounded. The Poles living there were arrested. After being checked by the police and secret police, some of them were brought before the court-martial, and others assigned their new residential district in the Polish quarter by the state authorities. The rest of these people were evacuated by us on March 4. On Monday, March 4, Jews from the city center were assigned to the entire residential district cleared by this operation, so that a considerable housing area was created for assignment to the Baits [i.e., Baltic Germans].44

These two examples show how the policies of repatriating ethnic Germans, of expelling Poles and removing Jews were interlocked and mutually dependent, in the end obstructing one another. Thus, in autumn 1939, Eichmann had to break off the deportation of Jews from Vienna, Katowice and Moravian Ostrau after only a few days because the resettlement of Baltic Germans and the accompanying expulsions took priority. The deportation of some 1,000 Jews from Stettin to the Lublin area, carried out on February 12-13, 1940, took place in this context; Himmler had ordered that living space be made available for Baltic Germans "with sea-related professions" (including fishermen).45 By November 1940, Himmler, with his policy of ethnic redistribution [volkische Flurbereinigung], had maneuvered himself into an almost hopeless position. Instead of the heralded ethnic and economic new order to be based on the rapid expulsion of millions of aliens, a very different reality was developing. In the late autumn of 1940, hundreds of thousands of people were stranded in resettlement camps or crowded into ghettos, robbed of their means of production. Depending on whether they were Jews, Poles or ethnic Germans, they had to be kept alive in conditions of either starvation, misery or sufficiency, but in any case,

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unproductively—in the midst of a war, with the most extreme scarcity of food, lack of living space and shortage of labor. On December 10, 1940, Himmler was forced to justify this policy fiasco in a speech "on settlement" before the Reich and Gau (district) leaders. We must leave out the details here, but the last page of the notes to his speech is crucial. Because the administration of the Generalgouvernment consistently refused to take in deported, impoverished Poles, Himmler pledged to resettle the Jews elsewhere, "thus [providing] even more space for Poles."46 In other words, the deportation of one and a half million Jews from occupied central Poland would make room for the Polish peasants to be removed from annexed western Poland, thus making space for ethnic German resettlers (primarily from Southern Europe). As Himmler declared this intention, he was probably thinking of the coming war against the Soviet Union and assuming a victory. But in the short run, he had to fall back on the method of ghettoization, which was always seen as provisional—never a long-term situation, but more as a sort of mass predeportation detention. On January 20, 1941, the head of the Resettlement Department of the Generalgouvernment in Warsaw was already giving notice of what would actually happen in the following months: the relocation of an additional 72,000 Jews into the Warsaw ghetto, because elsewhere in the city, space had to be made for 62,000 Poles— people who had to be deported from the areas of Poland now annexed to Germany and who, in their turn, would make way for Germans from Bessarabia, Bukovina and Dobrudja.47 At this juncture, we wish to show, through examples of our own (previous) tunnel vision, just how important it is to see events within this broader context. In our several years of research on the euthanasia crimes, we were unable to—and due to our lack of a suitable hypothesis, never seriously tried to—explain the murder of 10,000 to 15,000 mentally ill people that took place in the autumn of 1939 and the winter of 1939-1940 in Pomerania, Danzig-West Prussia (then the Warthegau region) and later in East Prussia. The mentally ill were either shot or killed in mobile gas chambers by two SS commando units. This first major mass murder was not really related institutionally to Operation T-4, the "euthanasia" of some 200,000 mentally ill patients throughout Germany. However, the motives rapidly become clear if we understand that, between October and December 1939, some 60,000 Baltic Germans reached the harbors of Danzig, Stettin and Swinemunde, and that shortly thereafter, in January and February 1940, some 120,000 Volhynian and Galician Germans arrived by wagon trek and train at the new German-Soviet border. In this case there was almost certainly a direct, causal relationship between resettlement and the murder of the mentally ill. Thus, we find that on October 29, 1939, officials of the Central Immigration Office in Gdingen (Gotenhafen/Gdynia) discussed clearing mental hospitals in order to make possible "the care of ill and infirm Baltic Germans." In Danzig alone, this involved more than 1,000 people. According to the officials, a similar step was to be taken in the vicinity of the Pomeranian harbor, at which the next settler ship was to arrive, since "according to our experience, with each transport more people requiring care will probably arrive." A telegram to the Main Security Office summa-

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rized the situation as follows: "The question of transporting the infirm to quarters in Pomerania and Mecklenburg is being processed by the Central [Immigration] Office of Gotenhafen." Four days later, on November 3, the same office was already organizing the deportation of mentally ill Poles: "This involves 700 mental patients who are to be transferred from the Schwetz mental hospital to the Konradstein mental hospital, near Stargard [Prussia]. The quarters that become available in this way will be reoccupied on Saturday, November 4, 1939 by 200 infirm Baltic Germans from Neustadt and 500 from Danzig."48 Konradstein was one of the centers in which Kurt Eimann's special unit shot Polish and German psychiatric patients. A similar situation to that in Schwetz applied to the Pomeranian hospitals and those of the Warthegau region. In January 1940, five hundred patients in the Chelm hospital, near the new German-Soviet border, were quickly murdered so that the hospital could be used as a transit camp for Volhynian Germans. At the same time, hundreds of patients at the Tiegenhof hospital near Gnesen were killed; the Gnesen deportation staff was led at the time by a close associate of Eichmann, Dieter Wisliceny. Himmler had twice been forced to postpone the resettlement of 50,000 Lithuanian Germans because of the strain on his resettlement apparatus, but in May 1941 that goal finally seemed to be within reach. Reception camps were to be prepared in East and West Prussia. In the period from May 21 to June 8, a total of 1,558 German and some 400 Polish mental patients were murdered in the Soldau mental hospital in East Prussia.49 The hospital later served as a central transit camp for Lithuanian German settlers. In the summer of 1940, mentally ill German Jews housed there as patients in psychiatric clinics were also collectively murdered.50 It is characteristic even of this first mass murder that it was closely linked to overall resettlement policy, and that we have no evidence of a concrete order to murder the mentally ill. Apparently those directly responsible acted on the silent understanding that considerations of utility, defined on an ad hoc basis, permitted or even necessitated such measures. Thus, by the winter of 1939-1940, murder was already institutionalized and had become an integral part of routine procedures, a concrete experience shared by all resettlement officials. All in all, by summer 1941 they had murdered more than 30,000 people for the "purpose of creating room for ethnic German settlers." Before establishing the camps to exterminate the European Jews, they had tested mass murder for two years and had gained the assurance that German bureaucrats and the German population had no difficulty in accepting such procedures. How these practical experiences influenced later action can be shown through a small example. Once the deportation of "cripples, the infirm, the ill, those unable to travel, etc." from the Warthegau region to the Generalgouvernment was forbidden in June 1940 (having been strenuously opposed by Hans Frank, the head of the Generalgouvernment), the administrative heads of Warthegau soon complained that those left behind were a "burden on the public welfare system," thus creating conditions that were "impossible in the long run." Hoppner of the Central Resettlement Office, who now realized that he could not deport the sick and infirm, noted on the margin of the report: "It is possible that other measures will have to be taken against people unable to travel." Hoppner's marginal notation is dated October 22,

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1940. According to Isaiah Trunk, a few days later—on October 27, 28, and 30— old and sick Jews from Kalisch, 290 in number, were murdered in the nearby woods. They had been told that they were being taken "to a sanatorium to be cured."51 In the autumn of 1939, Hitler, Himmler and Heydrich hoped to create a "Lublin Jewish reservation" on the eastern border of Poland. They abandoned the project a few months later, as it was then held to be incompatible with other goals, both military and economic. The well-known and well-documented Madagascar plan was then broached.52 However, victory over the British fleet in the Mediterranean—the military prerequisite—remained unattainable. Thus, after a short phase of indecisiveness, Heydrich, Eichmann and others developed a new concept for the deportation of the European Jews in the winter of 1940-1941. On March 25, 1941, the chief of the army general staff, Franz Haider, recorded that he and the army general quartermaster, Eduard Wagner, had to assess the points for discussion with Heydrich on impending Eastern questions.53 It is generally assumed that this dealt exclusively with the latitude to be granted to what would soon become the Einsatzgruppen, the mobile killing squads. But the next day, immediately after a meeting with Goring, Heydrich noted: "In regard to the solution to the Jewish question, I reported briefly to the Reich Marshall [Goring] and gave him my draft, to which he agreed, with one change regarding Rosenberg's responsibilities, and he ordered another draft."54 This document tempers the assumption made by many historians that Goring's notorious letter of July 31, 1941—which ordered Heydrich to present "an overall draft plan, setting forth the organizational, practical and material requirements needed for the execution of the sought-for final solution to the Jewish question"— was the most important milestone on the road to the Holocaust. The note of March 26 must be understood as confirmation, and perhaps expansion, of the assignment that Heydrich had received orally at the end of 1940, and which he had meanwhile frequently discussed and progressively developed. The official written form was probably necessary at the end of July 1941 only to increase Heydrich's freedom of action vis-a-vis other agencies. In any case, this was exactly the way Heydrich later used Goring's letter. "Rosenberg's responsibility," as mentioned by Goring, is evidence in this direction, for Rosenberg at the time was already the minister-designate for the civil administration of the soon to be occupied Soviet areas. In addition, the head of Office IV, Heinrich Miiller, received a copy of the letter "to inform Eichmann." This means that by March 1941, Heydrich had begun to take the territory of the Soviet Union into account when considering possible solutions to the "Jewish question." Heydrich was then preparing the concept both of the Einsatzgruppen and, in the same context, the deportation of all European Jews living west of the border dividing the German from the Soviet areas. It was from this point on that Heydrich and Eichmann apparently settled upon the option of moving the Jews further to the east, though a precise location was not yet fixed. The goals of the plan resembled the Madagascar plan only externally; in fact, they had changed radically. Although the genocidal principle of natural decimation

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through resettlement had also been typical of the Madagascar plan, this earlier concept had not involved the complete extermination of the deportees. The plan of Heydrich and Eichmann fitted into the new, imperial program of "solving the Jewish problem in the East" (Ostraumlosung) and included the extermination of the European Jews as an intermediate goal, to be carried out by socalled biological means (which were conventional compared with what was to come). Though the program went beyond the Madagascar plan and contained various elements of systematic annihilation, it still differed significantly from the extermination in gas chambers that would be favored not long after. The plans of early 1941 also broke down in the autumn of the same year—not because of the British fleet but because of the Red Army, which placed clear limits on the German offensive, despite the series of major defeats suffered by the Soviet side. A letter from Eichmann to the head of the human resources division of the Reich Commissioner for the Consolidation of Germandom on September 29, 1941, notes the logistical problems. "Although it entails difficulties for the resettlement [of the ethnic Germans]," wrote Eichmann, "a resumption of the evacuation [of nonGermans] cannot be expected at the present time." Moreover, he noted in selfjustification, the efforts to find a temporary alternative in the occupied Soviet areas had been stalled, and the "decision has been made to wait for a better transport situation."55 The letter was the result of an inquiry addressed to Eichmann at the beginning of September. He did not respond for four weeks. The letter makes it clear that, as of early October 1941, no decision had yet been taken on systematic extermination in gas chambers. The documents confirm what Martin Broszat already established in 1977: "It seems to me that there was no comprehensive, general extermination order at all; that until 1942 the program of exterminating the Jews instead developed gradually, institutionally and factually, out of individual actions, gaining a decisive character after creation of the extermination camps in Poland (between December 1941 and 1942)."56 Like Broszat, we assume that, at first—well into May 1942, that is—the practice of extermination was still experimental. This viewpoint strengthens the significance of the consensus achieved by Heydrich at the Wannsee conference and leads one to ask whether the machinery of extermination could not have been stopped, or at least slowed down, had there been serious opposition or difficulties in obtaining authorization in the early weeks and months of the war. Furthermore, it raises questions about the behavior of the Germans, in particular—questions that must be asked in proportion to the degree to which the concept of an "order from the Fiihrer" is abandoned. The polycratic structure of the Nazi state cannot be doubted. But it need not be understood, as is sometimes the case, as a conglomerate of mere vanities, jealousies and intrigues by powerful Nazis. There were real differences of interest.57 Nevertheless, Franz Neumann was only partially right when he argued as early as 1944 that the Fiihrer's decisions were merely the result of compromise reached among competing interests and leaderships.58 The concept of compromise must be explained. The divergence of interests between the various centers of power that were constantly gaining and losing

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influence in the Third Reich were greatly exacerbated not only by the tension between the various hypertrophied goals and social Utopias, but between such goals and the scarcity of the material means necessary to achieve them. Yet even if representatives of individual institutions pursued opposing and mutually exclusive interests, they were still willing to attempt to overcome the conflicts inevitably produced by their divergent goals—especially with regard to the tempo of their implementation—with the help of robbery, slave labor and extermination. It was thus logical that all the participants should have hoped for, and often enough anticipated, direct authorization from the Fuhrer. Decisions up until the autumn of 1941 were based not, as Neumann believed, on the weighing of options and on compromise, but rather on an attempt to give equal consideration to competing interests, plans and necessities and to overcome these conflicts by acts of "maximalization"—by a final solution. In the late summer and fall of 1941, it became apparent that a "final solution" based on deportation projects would never be realized. The search was therefore on for a project that would satisfy as many divergent interests as possible. Hitler, if one considers the totality of the documents, has to be described not as somebody simply issuing inexorable orders, but rather as a politician who gave his people a free hand, encouraging them to develop their imagination in order to make the seemingly impossible possible—and who supported them unconditionally. Those who had again and again postponed the deportation of the dispossessed and ghettoized Jews now openly discussed the possibility of their systematic and rapid extermination. They saw mass murder as the simplest means of achieving plans they had been developing and redeveloping for years, but had never been able to carry out. Representatives of all the institutions agreed to the new solution because it would not do any damage to their interests, and because all of them had included the longanticipated deportation of the Jews in their calculations; they had taken their property, crowded them together, starved them and treated them as though they were already nonexistent. This was exactly how Hans Frank explained—realistically, we feel—the impending murder of the Jews to the members of his government in Cracow: I would thus basically proceed on the expectation that the Jews will disappear. They must be gotten rid of. What is to happen to the Jews? Do you believe they will be housed in the Eastern lands in settlement villages? In Berlin they told us, why go to all this trouble? In the Eastern lands [the occupied Baltic] and in the Reich Commissariat [Ukraine] we can't do anything with them either; you liquidate them!

Perhaps in response to a questioning look, Frank added: "We cannot transfer our former views to such a gigantic, unique event. In any case, we must find a path leading to the goal. . . . Where and how it happens is a matter for the authorities that we have to establish and create here, and whose effectiveness I will inform you of in good time."59 In answer to the question posed to contributors of this symposium about the origins of the Holocaust, our conclusion has to be that there was no voluntarist decision on the systemic, industrial murder of the European Jews. Analysts have too readily assumed that the terrible crime must have been initiated in some utterly extra-

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ordinary way. Our empirical studies indicate, on the contrary, that what occurred was a broad-based formation of policy that followed, to a shocking extent, the usual rules of governmental bureaucratic procedure. Most political decisions are neither reached in one day nor implemented linearly. Nor are they determined exclusively in positive terms; decisive for the outcome is which options prove viable or nonviable in the testing phase of trial and error. This process—even if not all dimensions of the crime can still be explained—can and must be described as precisely as possible by the historians. This "historicization" does not, of course, mean denying the Holocaust; on the contrary, it serves to remind us of the conditions that finally led to its implementation.

Notes 1. See Gotz Aly and Susanne Heim, Vordenker der Vernichtung. Auschwitz und die deutschen Plane fur eine neue europaische Ordnung, 4th. ed. (Frankfurt: 1997). 2. See Susanne Heim, "Deutschland muss ihnen ein Land ohne Zukunft sein. Die Zwangesemigration der Juden 1933 bis 1938," in vol. 11, Beitrdge zur nationalsozialistischen Gesundheits- und Sozialpolitik, Arbeitsmigration und Flucht. Vertreibung und Arbeitskrdfteregulierung im Zwischenkriegseumpa (Berlin and Gottingen: 1993); Gotz Aly, Endlosung. Volkerverschiebung und der Mord an den europaischen Juden (Frankfurt: 1995). 3. Zur Behandlung der Judenfrage, copy of a study (probably by the Gestapo's Jewish Department) sent to Heydrich on 24 May 1934. Center for the Preservation of Historical Documentary Collections, Moscow (hereafter: CPHDC), 501/1/18, p. 18b. 4. For the sake of readability, most German organizations are rendered in an English equivalent in the text. Following is a list of these organizations in the original German: • Main Security Office—Sicherheitshauptamt, later the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (included within this organization were both the Gestapo and the Sicherheitsdienst [SD]) • Reich Association of Jews in Germany—Reichsvertretung der Juden in Deutschland • Central Office for Jewish Emigration—Zentralstelle fur jiidische Auswanderung • Reich Commissioner for the Annexation of Austria to the Reich—Reichskommissar zur Wiedervereinigung Osterreichs mit dem Deutschen Reich • Reich Commissioner for the Consolidation of Germandom—Reichskommissar fur die Festigung deutschen Volkstums (RKF); the name refers both to the commission and its head • Main Trusteeship Office East—Haupttreuhandstelle Ost • German Resettlement and Trusteeship Company—Deutsche Umsiedlung und Treuhandgesellschaft • Central Resettlement Office—Umwandererzentralstelle (UWZ) • Central Immigration Office—Einwandererzentralstelle (EWZ) 5. Note of 20 Feb. 1937: to II 1, re: assignments for SS Junkers, CPHDC 501/3/31. 6. Letter to SD Main Office, 21 April 1936. Bundesarchiv-Koblenz (hereafter: BAK), R58/994, If; see also Gotz Aly and Karl Heinz Roth, Die restlose Erfassung. Volkszdhlen, Identifizieren und Aussondern im Nationalsozialismus (Berlin: 1984), 76 ff. 7. See Shlomo Aronson, Reinhard Heydrich und die Fruhgeschichte von Gestapo und SD (Stuttgart: 1971), 203; BAK, R58/991. 8. CPHDC, 500/1/672; 500/1/217, p. 14 ff; 500/1/550; 500/1/669, pp. 78 ff, and 500/1/716, pp. 17 ff. 9. Circular directive from the Foreign Office, 22 June 1937 (top secret); Aklen fur deutschen auswdrtigen Politik (hereafter: ADAP) series, vol. 5, 632-634. 10. SD, Department 11/112, 18 Oct. 1937 to Department 11/11, re: Meeting of Heads of

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Main Departments II—Overview of the Situation of the Jews in Germany, CPHDC, 501/3/31, pp. 52f. 11. Work instruction for Department 11/112, CPHDC, 500/1/506, pp. 119 ff. 12. Ralph Weingarten, Die Hilfeleistung der westlichen Welt bei der Endldsung der deutschen Judenfrage. Das Intergovernmental Committee on Political Refugees (IGC) 19381939 (Bern: 1981), 39 ff. 13. Ibid., 45. 14. In some cities, the majority of those arrested were Jews, and in an exchange of letters in the Jewish Department of the SD, the raids were classified as an operation against Jews, antisocial elements and Gypsies. See SD Fuhrer of the SD Oberabschnitt Southeast, Head of Main Office II/l 12, 12 July 1938, to SD Department 11/112 in Berlin, CPHDC, 500/1/290, p. 229. 15. Germany, Italy, Japan, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union sent no representatives, while Poland and Romania (not officially invited) sent observers. 16. "Report on the Refugee Conference at Evian," CPHDC 500/1/612, pp. 18-30. 17. Note by Herbert Hagen, 15 June 1938, CPHDC, 500/1/649, pp. 22-25. The other representatives of Greater Germany were also required to submit reports; such notes by the representative from Vienna are found in ibid., pp. 90-99. 18. The reluctance to take in refugees was articulated in the press even more clearly than by the national representatives. See Shlomo Z. Katz, "Public Opinion in Western Europe and the Evian Conference of July 1938," in Yad Vashem Studies on the European Catastrophe and Resistance v. 9 (1973), 105-132. 19. Weingarten, Die Hilfeleistung, 64. 20. The conference resolutions are reprinted in Salomon Adler-Rudel, "The Evian Conference on the Refugee Question," Leo Baeck Year Book 13 (1968), 235-274; see esp. 272 f. 21. See Herbert Hagen's report to Heinrich Himmler on 15 Aug. 1938 regarding the Refugee Conference in Evian, CPHDC, 500/1/612, p. 28. 22. See Politisches Archiv des Auswartigen Amts (hereafter: PA), R 102291. 23. Undersecretary's notes, 18 Oct. 1938, in ADAP, series D, vol. 5, pp. 758 f. 24. See Weingarten, Die Hilfeleistung, 139.

25. Ibid., 132 f.

26. See the head of the security police S-PP (IIB) 728/38 to the Reichsfiihrer SS and head of the German police in the Reich Ministry of the Interior (stamped as received by Department 11/112 of the SD, 24 March 1938), CPHDC, 500/1/549, pp. 5-11. 27. The documents of Jewish organizations confiscated by the Hagen-Eichmann Sonderkommando can be found, at least in part, in the Moscow special archives. See Gotz Aly and Susanne Heim, Das Zentrale Staatsarchiv inMoskau (Sonderarchiv). Rekonstruktion und Bestandsverzeichnis verschollen geglaubten Schriftguts aus der NS-Zeit (Dusseldorf: 1992). 28. Hans Safrian, Die Eichmann-Mdnner (Vienna: 1993), 38. 29. Francis R. Nicosia, "Bin nutzlicher Feind. Zionismus im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland 1933-1939," in Vierteljahrshefte fur Zeitgeschichte 37 (1989), 367-400. This quote appears on p. 395. 30. Undated, unsigned report, CPHDC, 500/1/160, pp. 33-37, here p. 35. 31. Quoted in Safrian, Die Eichmann-Manner, 36. 32. Central Office for Jewish Emigration, 14 Sept. 1938, to SD Department II/l 12; attention SS O Stuf. Hagen, CPHDC, 500/1/625, pp. 10-13. 33. Ibid. 34. Report by Hagen, "Re: Central Office for Jewish Emigration in Vienna"; BAK R58/486, pp. 29-31. 35. Quoted in Susanne Heim and Gotz Aly, "Staatliche Ordnung und organische Losung. Die Rede Hermann Gorings uber die Judenfrage vom 6. Dezember 1938," in Jahrbuch fur Antisernitisrnusforschung, vol. 2, ed. Wolfgang Benz (Frankfurt: 1992), 378-404, here p. 385. 36. Bruno Streckenbach, on 15 Jan. 1941; noted in Hans Frank's diary, BAK, R52/II/233, pp. 4060 ff.

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37. Ralf Georg Reuth (ed.), Joseph Goebbels. Tagebucher (Munich and Zurich: 1992), 1776 f. (See entry of 27 March 1942.) 38. Note on a meeting by Hans Ehlich, 17 Jan. 1940, BAK, Subsidiary DahlwitzHoppegarten ZR890A2, p. 218 if. 39. Note of 2 Sept. 1941 by Hoppner for Eichmann and Ehlich, with letter of 3 Sept. 1941; ibid., 222-239. 40. On Eichmann's function at the time, see Aly, Endlosung, 103 ff. 41. Letter from an employee of the Central Resettlement Office, Litzmannstadt, Heinrich Kinna, of 13 July 1943 to Main Personnel Office of the SS; Berlin Document Center (personal file of Heinrich Kinna). In the letter, Kinna told of his earlier activities. 42. Quoted in Aly, Endlosung, 95. 43. Letter from Doring to Albert Rapp, Archiwum Gtownej Komisji Badania Zbrodni Hitlerowskich w Polsce (hereafter: AGK), Central Resettlement Office (Posen) 114, p. 12. 44. Telegram from Rudolph Earth to Rapp, AGK, Central Resettlement Office (Posen) 129, p. 1. 45. See Aly, Endlosung, 83, 85, 97. 46. See ibid., 195 ff. 47. Ibid., 59 ff. Obviously, the intention was to apply this procedure to all four districts of the Generalgouvernment, since by the end of April 1941 a total of 248,500 people were to be expelled from western Poland. 48. The entire correspondence quoted here can be found in BAK, R69/426. 49. The SS unit that was already organizing mass murder with the help of gas trucks at the time had the title of Special Unit [Sonderkommando] Lange. It was this unit that ran the Chelmno (Kulmhof) extermination camp near Lodz starting in December 1941. Actually, this was not a camp but rather a gas truck station to which the victims were brought. An identical procedure had already been carried out in Soldau. 50. We interpret this as an operation intended to murder those considered to be untransportable; in the summer of 1940, the mass deportation Madagascar plan was still being seriously considered. See Aly and Heim, Vordenker der Vernichtung, 261 ff. 51. Quoted in Aly, Endlosung, 194 f. 52. In retrospect, many observers find the plan so unrealistic as to see it as a euphemism for extermination. But the Germans involved saw it differently; after all, the Axis powers had conquered Abyssinia and Somalia, and in Hitler's chancellery there was talk of appointing a governor of German East Africa. Officials responsible for the deportations in Lodz were applying at the time for courses on the tropics. 53. See Franz Haider, Kriegstagebuch (Stuttgart: 1964), vol. 2, 328. 54. Note by Heydrich, 26 March 1941, on "today's address to the Reich Marshall"; CPHDC, 500/3/795. 55. Letter from Eichmann to Ernst Fahndrich of 29 Sept. 1941; AGK, Central Resettlement Office (Litzmannstadt) 1, p. 110. 56. See Martin Broszat, "Hitler und die Genesis der Endlosung. Aus Anlass der Thesen von David Irving" in his Nach Hitler. Der schwierige Umgang mit unserer Geschichte (Munich: 1988), 63. We do not agree with Broszat's view that the Final Solution developed more or less progressively. Instead, as our findings prove, clear developmental leaps can be found in March, July and October 1941. 57. We consider the thesis of the polycratic structure of the party and state apparatus to be correct, but do not agree with the author's further conclusion that this resulted in paralyzing chaos. 58. See Franz Neumann, Behemoth. Struktur und Praxis des Nationalsozialismus 19331944 (Frankfurt: 1984), 542 and 553 ff. 59. Werner Prag and Wolfgang Jacobmeyer (eds.), Das Diensttagebuch des deutschen Generalgouverneurs in Polen 1939-1945 (Stuttgart: 1975), 457.

Auschwitz: New Perspectives on the Final Solution Michael R. Marrus (UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO)

Auschwitz does not lend itself easily to a historical perspective.' For most, the camp will forever be what it became: the largest and most important of the Nazi concentration camps, the most destructive and sophisticated killing machine ever developed, the place where the greatest number of Jews—close to one million—were killed during the Holocaust, and as a result, the largest cemetery in the world. No one intended this at the beginning, however, and for much of its history Auschwitz was, in Raul Hilberg's striking phrase, "a site in search of a mission."2 And because it took time for Auschwitz to become what it became, its history is complex, and there are different missions to explain. Looking back, our preoccupation with the camp's ultimate significance interferes with our understanding of how the Auschwitz we know actually came to be. What I would like to do in this brief essay is to survey this history. Doing so, I think, is an aid to understanding what troubles people especially about the Nazi Holocaust—how people could do such things to other human beings. I have a second object in mind, as well. Historians of the Holocaust have been understandably preoccupied with the effort to understand the origins of the Final Solution, the process by which the Nazis' assault upon the Jewish people assumed the particular form that it did—comprehensive, European-wide mass murder. In their effort to understand, historians have sometimes aligned themselves in one of two camps: intentionalists, who see a longstanding Hitlerian intention to murder the Jews, waiting only for the opportune moment; and functionalists, who believe that the Nazis' policies toward the Jews evolved, determining a "Final Solution" only during the course of the campaign against the Soviet Union. Recently, partly as the result of the utilization of previously undiscussed documentation, much of which is in the archives of the Auschwitz State Museum in Poland and some of which lay untouched in the former Soviet Union, historians have evinced a new interest in Auschwitz. In particular, I will refer the work of Robert-Jan van Pelt, Deborah Dwork and Jean-Claude Pressac. I note as well the excellent volume, Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, edited by Yisrael Gutman and Michael Berenbaum and published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and for the broader context, Nazi Mass Murder: A Documentary History of the Use of 74

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Poison Gas, a translation of a German work edited by three authorities, Eugen Kogon, Hermann Langbein and Adalbert Ruckerl. I hasten to say that none of these books identifies a "smoking gun"—a definitive answer to the question of origins that historians have so actively debated. But I believe that the perspective of Auschwitz they present enriches our understanding of the murderous process as a whole, including the still definitively unresolved question of how precisely it came into operation. The beginning can be traced to the spring of 1940, when the SS and the Kattowitz district police authorities in Upper Silesia, a territory incorporated into the Reich after the German defeat of Poland, decided to establish a concentration camp in the little town of Oswigcim (or Auschwitz, in its German name), about fifty kilometers southwest of Cracow. Choosing the site of what had been a Polish military barracks, with substantial, evenly spaced brick buildings, the Germans built what was later called Auschwitz I or the Stammlager—the core camp of what eventually became a huge complex, more than forty camps in all. Opened a few months later, the camp was intended for Polish political prisoners captured by the Germans in Silesia and in the nearby Warthegau, as well as in the Generalgouvernement—unincorporated central Poland that was under direct Nazi rule. Originally, the Germans intended Auschwitz as a transit camp, the prisoners of which were to be sent westward as slave laborers in the German Reich. Before long, with more than 10,000 inmates, Auschwitz became the most important concentration camp in the incorporated Polish territories. For nearly two years, Polish prisoners filled the enlarged barracks and suffered and died in Auschwitz—without a hint of a special, European-scale vision for the murder of European Jewry. Indeed, the conception of a murderous "Final Solution" was at least a year in the future; and for the time being, Polish Jews were concentrated in ghettos, starved, and some of them murdered elsewhere. Jews in other countries remained where they were. Meanwhile, as van Pelt and Dwork underscore, the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, developed a particular interest in Auschwitz, one that had little directly to do with Jews. In a border region historically seen by Germans as part of their ancestral lebensraum, Auschwitz and the rest of the incorporated territories were subject to a determined effort of Germanization—the imposition of German names, deportations of local inhabitants, the obliteration of Polish culture and institutions, and the beginnings of a settlement of ethnic Germans, or Volksdeutsche, who were to populate these lands in the future. 3 Put mainly in charge of this process when Hitler named him Reichskommissar fur die Festigung deutschen Volkstums (Reich Commissioner for the Consolidation of Germandom), Himmler infused it with his characteristic blend of fanatical zeal and ideologically inspired imagination. SS planners saw the town and concentration camp as part of the surrounding Interessensgebiet, or planning district of Auschwitz—an SS-supervised zone of almost twenty-five square miles incorporating the town, the camp, nearby villages and neighboring territory. The Interessensgebiet, in turn, was part of a much larger planning region assigned a high priority in the anticipated transformation of the area into a model for the entire Nazi-conquered lebensraum in the East. As a result, the area around Auschwitz sprouted projects, initiated by the SS, on which inmates were to toil, quite literally until they died—draining fields, building structures,

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constructing roads. Projects included fish, rabbit and poultry farms, experimental plant and cattle-breeding facilities, and a sand and gravel facility to be utilized in local construction. A branch of the gigantic I.G. Farben chemical corporation, intended to produce synthetic oil and rubber, was also part of the original plan. The town of Auschwitz was to be rebuilt and a Himmlerstadt was to arise as a symbol of the new German character of the recently incorporated territories. "Himmler insisted that all Poles and Jews would be removed from the area," van Pelt adds, "and that Auschwitz itself would become 'a paradigm of the settlement in the East.'"4 In early March 1941, Himmler visited Auschwitz for the first time. His ambitions were running remarkably high. That spring, however, Utopian projects for the German lebensraum took second place to a much more pressing Nazi project— Operation Barbarossa, the spectacular Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, in which Auschwitz too had its part to play. Linking his own schemes with the planning for the campaign, Himmler ordered that a huge prisoner-of-war camp, intended to hold as many as 100,000 Red Army captives, be built on the site of the village of Brzezinka—named Birkenau by the Germans—just a few kilometers from the Auschwitz camp. Himmler hoped thereby to create a vast pool of slave laborers who would serve the I.G. Farben industrial facilities to be built nearby. As a result of the new armament-production facilities in the Auschwitz region, he indicated the SS would have a leading role in providing weapons to the Wehrmacht.5 It was to be a huge effort, and prisoners from an expanded Auschwitz concentration camp were to do the work. In the months that followed, the camp and its surrounding territory teemed with activity. Gangs of emaciated, skimpily dressed prisoners marched to the Birkenau site and elsewhere to realize the Germans' plans. Thousands of inmates trudged daily to the agricultural establishments of the Interessemgebiet. Fed at starvation levels, inadequately clothed and brutally treated, they were commonly worked to death. Meanwhile, the Stammlager expanded far beyond its capacity—holding 18,000 prisoners at the end of 1941, and as many as 30,000 two years later. However, the great masses of Russians that were anticipated as a result of the expected early disintegration of the Soviet Union never materialized. Rather, smaller contingents straggled into the camp—often barely alive after the ordeals inflicted upon them along the way. Rudolf Hoss, the camp commandant, described in his memoirs the desperate circumstances of the Russians in the autumn of 1941 and the subsequent winter—reduced to cannibalism in some circumstances, and dying at a rate that van Pelt calculates as 240 percent per year (most, in fact, died within seven months).6 As the battles on the eastern front raged, work progressed much more slowly than the Germans originally planned. In 1942, to meet the challenge in the Soviet Union, the Germans began an intensive mobilization for war, a process that involved assigning the prisoner-of-war population elsewhere for the production of armaments and for agriculture. These changes, concludes van Pelt, "brought an effective end to Himmler's plans to collect a large Russian labor force in Birkenau."7 Auschwitz increasingly appeared as a backwater. Officials in Berlin were now reluctant to assign high priority to the pet projects of the SS. Building materials failed to arrive. Often surviving no more than a few weeks, the inmate-workers proved to be a less

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than satisfactory labor force. One response—common now in dealing with hundreds of thousands of Red Army prisoners of war—was simply to murder those deemed "unfit for work" and unlikely to last long on their own. Murder had been part of the routine of Nazi concentration camps from their very beginnings in 1933, and systematic killings at Auschwitz required no break with established practice and no outside directive. From an early point in its development, the camp had become a place of execution, to which condemned prisoners were sent by the Gestapo headquarters in nearby Kattowitz. The first gassings, so far as we know, occurred in the summer of 1941 in the basement of block 11 of the Stammlager—a site that turned out to be singularly inappropriate for the purpose, given its location in the center of the camp where the proceedings could be observed, and given its distance from the camp crematorium to which bodies had to be taken to be burnt. Secrecy, safety for camp personnel and efficiency were all served when, in September 1941, the killings using prussic acid were moved to the camp perimeter, where the crematory furnaces had been remodeled to i nclude an adjacent gas chamber. The victims included Soviet prisoners, Poles and later also Jews—in the latter case, mostly elderly people, who were killed immediately upon their arrival in the camp.8 So far as one can tell, however, these killings were "routine" in the sense that the Germans were eliminating "useless mouths"—sick or otherwise unwanted prisoners who were not designated for work. To this point there is no firm indication that Auschwitz was destined to have a central task in the elimination of European Jewry. To be sure, there is postwar testimony from the camp commandant himself, Rudolf Hoss, that in mid-1941 he was informed that Auschwitz was to have precisely such a role. At Nuremburg in 1946, Hoss claimed that Himmler summoned him to Berlin in June of 1941 and told him of Hitler's decision to murder the Jews— and assigned him particular responsibility at Auschwitz. He was admonished to keep the conversation strictly secret, Hoss further recalled—even from his immediate superior, Richard Glucks, the inspector of concentration camps.9 Historians have tried unsuccessfully to corroborate Hoss' account of this encounter. Most reject his claim of a June meeting with the SS leader in favor of a slightly later date: Himmler's biographer Richard Breitman considers mid-July as a possibility; Hilberg argues for later that summer; and Jean-Claude Pressac thinks that Hoss erred by an entire year and that in fact the meeting did not occur until June 1942.10 In the most thorough assessment of this episode, Dwork and van Pelt consider that there probably was a June meeting with Himmler to discuss the extermination facilities at Auschwitz, but that these were not as yet linked to the European-wide murder of the Jews. This, they suggest, was a wider scheme that evolved in the particular context of Himmler's quest to extend his authority in the newly conquered eastern territories.'' There seems to be no sign of preparation for the murder of Jews on a vast scale in Auschwitz through the summer and autumn of 1941, or even the winter of 1941— 1942. In October, plans for Birkenau as a prisoner-of-war camp were approved by the Auschwitz construction director, SS Major Karl Bischoff, and signed by Rudolf Hoss. Work on the Birkenau camp proceeded through this period, although seemingly without a high priority from Berlin, given the unexpected drain on the Reich's resources created by the Russian campaign. Construction lagged. At the same time,

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conditions in the camp deteriorated catastrophically. Winter proved especially difficult for the prisoner labor force, and mortality soared. Still, there was no sign of a fundamental redirection in the sense of a "Final Solution." Planning for the camp in January 1942, according to van Pelt, did not envisage mortality on the scale of industrialized murder. New crematoria were ordered to burn the bodies of prisoners who succumbed to the poor conditions; what was expected was occasionally high mortality due to epidemics, but not industrialized mass murder.12 January 1942, it will be recalled, was the month of the Wannsee Conference, when the administrative process was set in motion for the rounding up of Jews across Europe and their transfer to Eastern Europe, where they were to be murdered. Throughout this period, one must stress, Jews were being killed elsewhere by the hundreds of thousands. On the eastern front, the Einsatzgruppen slaughtered Jews by shooting—murdering men, women and children without distinction from the latter part of the summer of 1941. Systematic killing by means of poison gas began in Chelmno (Kulmof) at the end of that year.13 But there were no provisions, as yet, for facilities to murder Jews on a European-wide scale. Birkenau, then envisaged as a temporary camp, still seems to have been seen as a labor camp to serve Himmler's various projects. Ultimately, the collapse of these schemes helped define the singularly murderous mission for the Auschwitz complex and its role in the elimination of European Jewry. Such definition was slow in coming, although in the process tens of thousands of Jews perished in the Auschwitz camps—some worked to death, some killed off by hunger and disease, and still others "selected" for immediate execution. Yet there was still more to Auschwitz than murder. Himmler's grandiose ambitions for the Germanization of conquered Soviet territory survived the disappointments of the Barbarossa campaign, and he remained jubilant about his prospects in July 1942, when he visited Auschwitz for a second time. While committed to the Final Solution, the SS boss was also eager, for a while at least, to mobilize some of the Jews as a slave labor force to achieve his aims, and Birkenau still had a role in this process. In the wake of Himmler's visit, Dwork and van Pelt note, the Auschwitz planning staff looked to the expansion of Birkenau to hold 200,000 inmates who would work in the armaments industry. Killing remained a priority, but so did the industrial and geopolitical projects of the SS.14 These aspirations, however, increasingly collided with wartime realities and with the internal politics of the Third Reich. Earlier plans to make Auschwitz into a model town, among other things capable of attracting the industrialists of I.G. Farben, were now on the shelf. In charge of armaments production from February 1942, Albert Speer eventually outmaneuvered the SS chieftain. In September 1942, according to Speer's own account, he managed to persuade the Fiihrer to scuttle plans to use concentration camps as centers for armament production.1S And finally, after the catastrophe of Stalingrad in January 1943, Nazi priorities shifted decisively. In the attempt to avert catastrophe in the east, Himmler was now forced to put aside both his industrial ambitions and his grandiose schemes for the Germinization of conquered territory. Of all Himmler's designs, Dwork and van Pelt contend, only one remained: "to enact a truly Final Solution to the Jewish Question."16 The participation of Auschwitz in this process may be said to have begun in the

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spring or early summer of 1942, when shipments made up entirely of Jews began to arrive on a regular basis, and murder facilities were installed in Birkenau to kill them using the deadly Zyklon B. Apparently, the killing machinery in the Stammlager was simply not up to the task. Not only did equipment there fail to function properly, its capacity was insufficient and in the crowded core camp it was too difficult to camouflage the proceedings. To address these problems, probably in February 1942, the camp administration decided to move the killing operations to the spacious, only partly built Birkenau. For this purpose, commandant Hoss selected a small farmhouse (known as Bunker 1 or the "little red house") on the edge of the birch forest at the western part of the camp, in which 300 to 400 people could be jammed together and murdered. There is some uncertainty about precisely when gassings there began, but it seems likely that this was some time in March. Later, a second and larger farmhouse, called the "little white house" by prisoners, was pressed into service as Bunker 2.17 During the second half of the year, transports of Jews arrived from far and wide— from France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Slovakia, as well as from various parts of Poland—as many as 175,000 in all. All but 44,000 or so of this number came from Central or Western Europe. Most were killed, with their bodies buried in mass graves in a nearby meadow. And yet during 1942, as Raul Hilberg points out, Auschwitz was only a small cog in the Nazis' killing machinery, accounting for just over ten percent of the Jews deported to camps in once-Polish territory that year. Nearly 90 percent—more than 1.4 million Jews, went to Chelmno (some 145,000 victims) and to the camps of the Generalgouvernement—Belzec, Treblinka, and Sobibor—which accounted for more than 1.2 million killed.18 Several historians identify mid-1942 as the moment when the Nazis' planning for Birkenau gave clear evidence that the camp was intended to become a gigantic facility for the murder of Jews. Francizek Piper, basing himself on detailed research, suggests that Himmler's visit to the camp in July may well have been the trigger.19 While at Birkenau, the chief of the SS witnessed a selection of Dutch Jews and their gassing in one of the two farmhouses used for that purpose. Until that point, the bodies of those who had been gassed at Birkenau were simply buried or burned in pits. Now it became apparent that such methods threatened to pollute groundwater, and could not in any event keep up with the soaring mortality. Camp authorities went to work during the late summer and autumn of 1942 to design new structures to dispose of the bodies. Astonishing photographs taken by the SS in 1942 and 1943, recently published in a volume by Teresa Swiebocka of the Auschwitz State Museum, show teams of primitively dressed prisoners building these huge facilities, seemingly with their bare hands or with crude implements, during the winter months and into the spring.20 Assessing documentation from Topf and Sons, an Erfurt engineering firm that designed crematory ovens, Gerald Fleming concludes that the "'industrial' extermination of the Jews in Auschwitz-Birkenau [was] planned between June and August 1942."21 Examining similar material, Dwork and van Pelt see the shift occurring a few months later, at the beginning of 1943, with the conversion of existing crematoria to meet a new conception: "buildings designed ... to operate as killing machines, with gas chambers, a morgue and a furnace hall arranged in functional sequence."22

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For the French researcher Jean-Claude Pressac, the planning trajectory for the implementation of industrial-scale murders of Jews was somewhat different. During the summer of 1942, he points out, a terrible typhus epidemic raged in Auschwitz, the result of polluted water, overcrowding and unsanitary conditions. As the death toll skyrocketed, and as trainloads of Jews continued to arrive, the camp authorities pressed urgently for a solution to their difficulties. The new crematoria, he implies, were originally intended to burn the bodies of those who had succumbed to the epidemic—as well as those gassed in the primitive facilities then in use. Birkenau, however, was destined for higher things. Himmler still envisaged a huge camp population, with Jewish workers mobilized for armaments production and the transformation of the Interessensgebiet.23 Then, during the autumn, when the cold weather impeded the functioning of Bunkers 1 and 2, the camp administration "began to consider the transfer of the gassing ... to a room in a crematorium."24 In this vision, technical problems prompted the authorities to seek a more efficient solution to a killing process that was hitherto not central to the camp's operation. In the autumn of 1942, Pressac claims, the camp's SS building officers crossed a line: henceforth, they conceived the four crematoria, then about to be built and installed, as crematoria and gas chambers—designed to kill thousands of people daily. Modifications continued. What emerged were the designs of four huge killing complexes in which individuals would enter, undress and proceed to gas chambers, with their bodies being burned at the end of the process. However conceived, work on the huge new gas chamber-crematoria proceeded with much difficulty during the winter of 1942-1943, while killing continued in the more rudimentary facilities of Bunkers 1 and 2. In March 1943, Crematorium II was finally ready. During a single night, a group of 1,492 Jews from the Cracow ghetto were murdered in the new facility. Technical problems then appeared, requiring adjustments. In fits and starts, the three other gas chamber-crematoria came into use. All four were functioning in June of that year, although breakdowns still occurred. Topf employees and the SS struggled mightily to get things right. Nothing ever seems to have worked smoothly, however, and Pressac has noted a deterioration in relations between the SS authorities and their principal contractor. Eventually, in 1944, most of the problems seem to have been solved, but by then there were new reasons for worry at Topf and Sons. "As the military situation of the Axis was getting very shaky," says Pressac, "certain Topf officials began to consider what the future of the firm might be after an Allied victory. They realized that the future was bleak."25 Indeed, for Auschwitz-Birkenau, the only thing that worked reasonably well was the killing. Certainly, by the spring of 1943 when the first of the gigantic new killing machines began to operate, Himmler's Utopian projects must have seemed like a distant memory. Birkenau focused increasingly on murdering Jews. Within months, the economic and administrative headquarters of the SS, in Berlin, decided to cut back investments in the camp to the absolutely indispensable. Work on the northern part of Birkenau, known as "Mexico" by the inmates, was halted. The dispatch of Jews to be murdered, however, increased dramatically. The new machinery now killed at an unprecedented rate—close to 4,000 people a day when things were

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going well. But even here there were problems. Theoretically, as Raul Hilberg notes, Auschwitz was capable of murdering more than a million people annually. Yet the numbers killed were nowhere near that total. Because so many Jews had been murdered elsewhere, and because deportation from some of the remaining Jewish communities proved difficult to organize, the number of Jews sent to Auschwitz between April 1943 and March 1944 was 160,000. Thereafter, murder finally became the essential priority of the Auschwitz camp. The last eight months of the camp's existence saw almost four times as many Jews deported to Auschwitz as in the previous year—more than 585,000—the great majority of whom (some 426,000) were Hungarian Jews. One of the last great reservoirs of European Jewry that had hitherto escaped the Final Solution, the latter were deported in great haste in the spring and early summer of 1944. As a result, more Hungarian Jews by far than any other nationality were murdered in the gas chambers of Birkenau.26 The end came, as is well known, because of the advance of the Red Army. In July, Soviet forces, together with Polish partisan units, liberated Lublin's Majdanek concentration camp largely intact. The Auschwitz authorities began to evacuate Polish and Russian prisoners to camps in the Reich. Sensing that the end was near, the Jewish Sonderkommando of Birkenau, those who were forced to operate the murder facilities, staged a suicidal revolt in October—the only significant uprising to take place in the Auschwitz complex. The Crematorium IV complex was largely destroyed. At the end of November, Himmler gave orders for the destruction of the other gas chamber-crematoria. On January 18, the camp authorities marched some 60,000 inmates out of the camp. About 7,000, mostly too ill to walk, were left behind. On January 27, Ukrainian units of the Red Army reached the camp. Its Nazi mission was finally over. In the West, Auschwitz is virtually synonymous with the murder of European Jews. But historians are now making clear how the camp's extraordinary role in that process developed slowly and belatedly. Part of the importance of Auschwitz lies in the great number of Jews murdered there. According to the most recent estimate (by Franciszek Piper) some 1,300,000 people were deported to the camp complex, all but 200,000 of whom were Jews. Among the others were more than 140,000 Poles, 23,000 Gypsies and 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war. No one knows precisely how many of the deportees were murdered—or by precisely what means. We do know that, at one point or another, nearly 223,000 left Auschwitz alive—many transferred to other camps, some evacuated before liberation, some freed by the Russians and a handful of escapees—and many of these, of course, did not survive for long. In Piper's estimation, 1,100,000 or more were killed or died in Auschwitz. And of these, close to 90 percent, nearly a million people, were Jews.27 Auschwitz was also singular, it is sometimes said, because of the unprecedented, effective application of the most up-to-date technology and the most modern scientific methods in the killing of human beings and the disposal of their bodies. Thanks to the utilization of the records from the camp's building authorities, historians can now examine this process in detail. True, killing was "modern" at Auschwitz if we consider the use of poison gas and contrast the workings of the gas chambercrematoria complexes of Birkenau with the shooting squads of the Einsatzgruppen

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and other killing units used in Poland, the Soviet Union and elsewhere. In a sense, gas was more modern than bullets—not to mention starvation, disease and exposure. One should not exaggerate the levels of science and efficiency, however. Auschwitz was hardly the German equivalent of the Manhattan Project. The larger context for the nightmarish world of Auschwitz, as Dwork and van Pelt rightly emphasize, was not science but rather the woolly-minded romanticism of German volkisch nationalism, resting on crude notions of Aryan racial superiority and a redemptive doctrine of settlement. And the machinery of destruction built by Topf and the other SS contractors was no scientific wonder. Pressac has followed, in nauseating detail, the activity of the engineers as they wrestled with "the design, use, modifications and destruction of the crematoria and gas chambers"28 of Auschwitz-Birkenau. The Topf personnel and their SS employers applied their learning to solve the murderers' problems, to be sure, but their work seems to be far more akin to an artisan's workshop than a scientist's laboratory. Indeed, the gruesome history of the mechanics of the death machinery recounts one blunder after another, broken equipment, failed experiments and persistent malfunction. We should take care lest we grant too much intellectual credit to the SS's contractors for their scientific contribution to mass murder. Finally, a reflection on the origins of the Final Solution. The story of Auschwitz does not address the debate directly, of course, nor does it give greater credence to either an intentionalist or a functional interpretation. What it does underscore, I believe, is that however they came to the idea of murdering the Jews of Europe, the Nazis spent remarkably little time thinking of precisely how they would accomplish their task. For a variety of reasons, most notably the availability of good rail communications, the Auschwitz camp eventually came to be seen as an important instrument in the realization of the Nazis' goals. Killing proved to be a much more imposing challenge than the Nazis ever anticipated, however, and despite the terrible results of their destruction, we should not exaggerate their virtuosity in carrying out their plans. What we can say for certain is that they wanted the Jews dead, and wanted it more than ever when the outlook for the Reich worsened in 1943 and 1944.

Notes 1. On issues of historical memory and Auschwitz, see Deborah Dwork and Robert-Jan van Pelt, "Reclaiming Auschwitz," in Holocaust Remembrance: The Shapes of Memory, ed. Geoffrey H. Hartman (Oxford: 1994), 232-251; James Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Their Meaning (New Haven: 1993), ch. 5; and Jonathan Webber, "The Future of Auschwitz: Some Personal Reflections," The First Frank Green Lecture (Oxford Centre for Postgraduate Hebrew Studies, 1992). For a comprehensive bibliography, see Anna Malcowna, Bibliographia KL Auschwitz za lata 1942-1980 (Oswiecim: 1991). 2. Quoted in Robert-Jan van Pelt, "A Site in Search of a Mission," in Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, ed. Yisrael Gutman and Michael Berenbaum (Bloomington and Indianapolis: 1994). 3. The reader is referred to the excellent new book by Deborah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt, Auschwitz: 1270 to the Present (New York: 1996), which appeared after this article was completed, but which the author was able to consult in manuscript form in the preparation of this essay.

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4. Gutman and Berenbaum (eds.), Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, 106. 5. Danuta Czech, Kalendarium der Ereignisse im Kozentrationslager AuschwitzBirkenau 1939-1945 (Reinbek: 1989), entry for 1 March 1941. 6. Rudolf Hoss, Death Dealer: The Memoirs of the SS Kommandant at Auschwitz, ed. Steven Paskuly, trans. Andrew Pollinger (Buffalo: 1992), 133; van Pelt, "A Site in Search of a Mission," 139. 7. Ibid., 148. 8. Czech, Kalendarium, 116-119; Franciszek Piper, "Gas Chambers and Crematoria," in Gutman and Berenbaum (eds.), Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, 160; Jean-Claude Pressac, Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers (New York; 1989), 132. 9. Hoss, Death Dealer, 21. 10. Raul Hilberg, "Auschwitz and the Final Solution," in Gutman and Berenbaum (eds.), Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, 83 and 90 (n. 7); Richard Breitman, Architect of Genocide (New York: 1991), 295; Czech, Kalendarium, 106-107; Jean-Claude Pressac, Les Crematoires d'Auschwitz: la machinerie du Meutre de Masse (Paris: 1993),41, 102(n. 131); Jean-Claude Pressac with Robert-Jan van Pelt, "The Machinery of Mass Murder at Auschwitz," in Gutman and Berenbaum (eds.), Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, 213. See also Eugen Kogon, Hermann Langbein and Adam Rikkerl (eds.), Nazi Mass Murder: A Documentary History of the Use of Poison Gas, trans. Mary Scott and Caroline Lloyd-Morris (New Haven: 1993), 145-146. 11. Dwork and van Pelt, Auschwitz: 1270 to the Present. 12. Van Pelt, "A Site in Search of a Mission," 144. 13. On Chelmno, see Kogon, Langbein and Riickerl, Nazi Mass Murder, ch. 5. 14. Dwork and van Pelt, Auschwitz: 1270 to the Present, ch. 10. 15. Albert Speer, Infiltration, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (New York: 1981), 22-25. 16. Dwork and van Pelt, Auschwitz: 1270 to the Present, ch. !0. 17. Pressac, Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers, 161-182; Pressac, Crematoires d'Auschwitz, 39; van Pelt, "A Site in Search of a Mission," 145-146; Piper, "Gas Chambers and Crematoria," 161-164 and 178 (n. 25). For a slightly different view of the timing, see Kogon, Langbein and Riickerl, Nazi Mass Murder, 147. 18. Hilberg, "Auschwitz and the Final Solution," 85-86; Yitzhak Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps (Bloomington: 1987), 377-379. 19. Piper, "Gas Chambers and Crematoria," 163. 20. Theresa Swiebocka, Jonathan Webber and Connie Wilsack (eds.), Auschwitz: A History in Photographs (Bloomington: 1993), 86-93. 21. Gerald Fleming, Hitler and the Final Solution, new ed. (Berkeley, California: 1994), 196. 22. Dwork and van Pelt, Auschwitz: 1270 to the Present, ch. 10. 23. Pressac, Crematoires d'Auschwitz, chs. 7 and 8; Pressac with van Pelt, "Machinery of Mass Murder at Auschwitz," 214-216. 24. Pressac, Crematoires d'Auschwitz, 60; Pressac with van Pelt, "Machinery of Mass Murder at Auschwitz," 223. 25. Ibid., 237. 26. Hilberg, "Auschwitz and the Final Solution," 88-89. 27. Franciszek Piper, "The Number of Victims," in Gutman and Berenbaum (eds.), Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, 61-76. See also Wolfgang Benz, Dimension des Volkermords: Die Zahl der judischen Opfer des Nationalsozialismus (Munich: 1991). 28. Pressac with van Pelt, "Machinery of Mass Murder at Auschwitz," 183.

Memory and Method: Variance in Holocaust Narrations Dan Diner (TEL-AVIV UNIVERSITY)

It is common knowledge that history and memory are viewed as antithetical. Historical research is rightly skeptical about evidence recycled, as a purported reflection of reality, by memory. After all, historical sciences base their claims to verity on time-tested instruments of knowing and proof, a gamut ranging from source criticism to the densely aggregated fields of discourse and debate on method and epistemology. Nonetheless, historiography cannot escape the confrontation with memory, which represents a world that relativizes, and hence undermines, the claims to universal validity made by historical scholarship. This essay, then, explores the interrelationship of historiography and memory as related to an event still in search of its proper locus in historical research: the Holocaust. In his major work on Europe from 1815 to 1980, the British doyen of German history, Gordon A. Craig, makes no mention whatsoever of the Nazi "Final Solution," the destruction of the Jews of Europe.1 Such an omission cries out for explanation. After all, Craig is certainly not one of those historians who deliberately bypass the Holocaust, denying it any serious significance. In his many publications, Craig has often given ample space to such topics as Jewish emancipation and the contortions of antisemitism; and elsewhere he has written about the Holocaust, even though he does not claim to have any special expertise on the topic. How, then, can we account for this seemingly anomalous omission of the subject in his voluminous and comprehensive volume on European history in modern times? Is this a simple oversight, sheer neglect, a moment of scholarly laxity of no further import? By asking this, I do not intend to treat this omission as scandalous, or even to hint at some deeper, unconscious motivations. Rather, my query precedes from what would seem to be a plausible assumption: namely, that Craig's neglect of the Holocaust in this book is rooted in the far more fundamental factors that shape research—the systematic preliminary decisions a historian makes; the perspective and periodization, the preferred method and narrative structure that he or she chooses. Historiography is always "situated." And there are various contextual clues suggesting that the omission of the mass murder of European Jewry in Craig's work can 84

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be accounted for by its guiding blueprint, its overall layout and structure. It can be argued that his perspective on European history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the closely linked periodization that such a perspective entails, necessarily predisposed him to sidestep the Holocaust. The fact is that in his presentation of European history over the last two centuries, he develops a historical systematization that is thoroughly British in stamp and stance. Of course, one does not have to contend that an inveterately "British" perspective on German and Continental history is somehow necessarily disposed to omitting the Holocaust or giving short shrift to the Jewish catastrophe. Nonetheless, there is considerable evidence to support the assumption that, in reconstructing historical events, an Anglo-centered historiography of German and European history in modern times tends to proceed from a set of preliminary—"blueprinting"—tendencies that seriously impede the integration of the Holocaust into its thematic framework.2 A case in point is the preference for a scheme of periodization that conjoins the nineteenth and twentieth centuries into a single epoch. Historians reared in a Continental tradition are far less likely to splice the two centuries into a conjunct age. After all, seen from their shared perspective, the two centuries appear quite dissimilar. In the light of the succeeding catastrophic era, the nineteenth century seems like a veritable epitome of optimism promising the forward inarch of history. The contrast is clear, even stark: on the one hand, the age of industrialization and the emergence of nation-states, democratization and the genesis of parliamentary government, positivism and the belief in progress; on the other, that dark concatenation of events encompassing two world wars, mass murder and totalitarian experimentation with human nature.3 Of course, what can be characterized as British (the "Anglo-Saxon") periodization does not profess agnosticism in the face of the cataclysms of European history—in any event, not when it comes to assessing their moral dimension. But when compared with the Continental worlds of experience, the shift in perspective is likely to generate a slew of different emphases. For example, the distance from the Continental vortex of events that is scrupulously maintained by the historical naval nation and manifested in the principle of the balance of power also has implications for historiography, informing analogous patterns of interpretation and paradigm. This holds in particular for the characteristic approach to political, diplomatic and military history that traditionally pervades classical British historiography. In turn, associated images of history mold perceptions that increasingly have their own logical consequences, producing a context of interpretation manifest in method as well as in topic selection. And it is in this choice of both methodology and theme that the distant stance of the imperial sea power toward the Continent and its convulsions exerts its influence. In short, the high-relief distinction between the optimism of the nineteenth century and the catastrophes of our own age, consonant with Continental memory, tends in the British perception to be flattened down, abraded to relative inconsequence. Thus, it should not be surprising if Craig's work on European history is geared to historical preconceptions of a type quite different from those that predominate among Continental historians. After all, the design of any historical work is always linked to some paradigmatic perspective. And to a significant degree, that pcrspec-

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live is most often shaped by the primacy of power politics: in the case of British historiography, the primacy of the principle of balance. Such a perception has a long reach, stretching at least from the Napoleonic wars and the subsequent reorganization of Europe by the Congress of Vienna, on to the foundation of the Second (Wilhelminian) Reich, the ravages of the Great War and Hitler's totalitarian claim to continental hegemony. It thus catalyzes and constructs an image of history with massive implications for the analysis of political behavior, especially that concerning Nazi Germany. True, the British image of Germany was centrally imbued with a view of Prussia that originated in the nineteenth century, but it was then also projected onto the Third Reich—as though that polity were a hegemonial power of the traditional type, albeit an inordinately aggressive variant.4 One certainly cannot contend that Craig's image of history is simply dogmatized along these lines. Nonetheless, the interpretive scheme that he employs to analyze the history of political events does follow the general thrust of such a paradigmatic model. To that extent, his historical narrative is structured in such a way that it participates in a culturally shaped view of Prussia—and hence of Nazi Germany— as, above all, a fundamental threat to the principle of the balance of power. Seen from such an angle of vision, a view that conflates the nineteenth and twentieth centuries into a single epoch in European history hardly requires revision. A perspective so tilted toward the history of power politics and the centrality of balance does provide a useful lens in the sense that diverse chains of events in European history can be meaningfully interpreted and given a congruent treatment. Yet there is a major drawback specifically pertaining to Nazi Germany: if, in view of the enormity of its crimes, Nazism is accorded a specific significance in the universal history of mankind, then it becomes exceedingly problematic to assume a perspective founded merely on the concept of balance. At the very least, the explanatory power of long lines of continuity is seriously vitiated if the phenomenon of Nazi rule is interpreted primarily as a mere culmination of Prussian history. Through such a contorting aperture, the specifics of Nazism are entirely blurred. Examples of such a sharply angled perception are legion, among them Britain's tragic underestimation—on various occasions—of the extent of Prussian-German military opposition to Hitler. Attempts to establish contact with that opposition foundered in some measure as a result of Britain's blinkered and negative image of Prussia.5 Easy acceptance of such continuities could only have a dramatic impact on views of the Holocaust, both during and since the Second World War—whose very designation suggests a straight continuation of the Great War, a further phase in the traditional European struggle for power. Perceptions of this sort contributed to the tendency, then as now, to marginalize events, such as the mass killing at Auschwitz and elsewhere, that took place beyond the frame of mere war actions. Extermination was overshadowed by the images of warfare; that Auschwitz was not bombed by the Allies in 1944 was due in part to the fact that the fate of European Jewry remained hidden behind the filters of the logic of war.6 This also holds true for the way in which the Allied judiciary dealt with the Nazi crimes and criminals after the war. Here again, the "Anglo-Saxon" view of Nazi Germany as an extension and apotheosis of Prussia, pointed in a similar direction.

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From the outset at the Nuremburg tribunal, the overriding concern was far more to punish those Germans held responsible for a war of aggression as well as for war crimes and crimes against humanity committed during the war proper, rather than to examine the genocide against the Jews and other victims of systematic atrocities perpetrated beyond those parameters. The breakup of Prussia by Allied decree in February 1947 also dovetailed with that anachronistic tradition which views Nazi Germany as the caretaker of the Borussian Machtstaat. Thus, the design of historical surveys such as Craig's Europe Since 1815, based on a peculiarly British periodization, points up the fact that longstanding narrative traditions are intricately woven into the web of historiography. It becomes clear that memory and history should be seen not as outright antitheses but rather as variant expressions—differing in density—of a narrative structure that is common and antecedent to both.7 However, the primary focus here is not on British memory and historiography. Their striking distance from the Holocaust has been noted mainly in order to stress one basic point: the proximity of collective memories and popular images of history to their congruous types of historiography. What that close linkage means for political cultures far more directly affected by the Holocaust will now be explored by examining the antinomy of German experience and Jewish suffering. It would, of course, be a gross distortion to assume that historiographical narratives derive solely from the historian's rootedness within a given "ethnic," national or other collective entity. The precepts of historical methodology and the criteria imposed by the discipline cannot, with all their complexity and universality, simply be shaped by the reductionist tendencies of collective memory. Yet the opposite claim is no less problematic; it would be excessively rationalistic to ignore the impress of traditional and group memories on historiography. It is especially at those critical junctures where mere empirical evidence, the putative historical facts, are transposed into the flow of the narrative, that variant experience tends to produce critical divergencies in historical interpretation.8 And when it comes to questions of cause and causality, this tendency becomes still more acute. The historian works by and large under the impact of group remembrances that all in all differ in terms of their duration and rates of decay. Their impact strongly influences the way in which the historian represents the events and circumstances of the past.9 As far as the narratives termed here "German" or "Jewish" are concerned, there is much evidence for the claim that the different approaches are molded along the patterns of a courtroom discourse. True, the thrust toward justificatory narratives is not confined to the issue of the Holocaust: it lies at the basis of most historical writing. Yet this tendency becomes accentuated in the face of such an extreme event as the Holocaust and its moral backdrop. Courtroom discourse is generally characterized by a juxtaposition of long- and short-terrn recollections. The fact that the plaintiff's memory usually reaches further back in time than the more modest recollections of the defendant is taken into due account, as is reflected by certain procedural structures of the trial. Peter Burke stresses the judicial character of historical memory by recalling that, in England in the early modern period, there was an official (known as the "remembrancer")

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whose job it was to repeatedly remind a debtor of the necessity to pay his debt. His function was to assure that, for the sake of social peace, the still-outstanding claims would not be forgotten.10 Analogous to individual memory, collective memory also contains remembrance marked by differing degrees of durability. Peter Burke distinguishes between nations with a long, as opposed to a short, memory span. The Irish, Poles, Serbs and Jews are generally assigned to the former category, with the British, French and Germans being placed in the latter. Despite all differences between the individual and the collective, it is evident that even on the level of shared sentiments, the creditor's claims clash with the defensiveness of the debtor. This becomes clearly evident with regard to the impact of historiography in general, and with regard to the Holocaust in particular. Indeed, at the earliest stage of the confrontation with the mass crimes of the Nazis, there stood a trial. And the Nuremberg tribunal probably influenced the later historiography of Nazism more than any other postwar event. Its judicial structure exerted a tremendous impact on the collection and systematic sorting of materials, and later, on the patterns of argument pitting prosecution against defense. This adversarial relationship, finding its way into historiography, is consonant with trial procedure. Just as the indictment attempts to establish and prove guilt, the defense trots out reasons to justify the actions of the accused—entering, as it were, a plea for negligence.11 In attempting to establish the truth, the historian follows, whether knowingly or not, the guidelines familiar from courtroom discourse. Again, it should be stressed that in the historiography of the Holocaust, it would be erroneous merely to posit a so-called "German" against a "Jewish" memory. The analogy with the discourse of the trial, however significant and valuable, should not be carried too far. After all, those who write history must conform to the rules of a discipline; they are expected to produce a rational analysis that serves to curtail the influence of collective-biographical experience. Nonetheless, it is surely possible to discern the basic outlines of a courtroom-like structure when a lurking suspicion is pursued: namely, that the intentionalist school of research on Nazism and the Holocaust is ultimately claiming culpability. That is to say, this tendency in research is more consonant with the memory of the victims; while in contrast, the structuralist or functionalist approach seems to be more in accordance with the recollections of ordinary Germans. This perception tends toward a certain leniency, in keeping with a behavior it regards more in conformity with the concept of negligence rather than culpability. It should be stressed that the Holocaust seems to differ fundamentally from other historical events by dint of its negative "radicality," which generates an exceptional divergence in the choice of perspectives. This radicality emanates from various elements in the cataclysm: the relative swiftness of the mass murder qua event; the large number of victims; the special modes of killing beyond the actual warfare and, above all, the murder without any apparent meaning when measured by previous historical experience. This specificity obviously has an impact on historical narration. At first glance it may appear a paradox, but gauged in terms of the victims' experience, Auschwitz has no appropriate narrative, only a set of statistics. And this

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fact is consonant with an entire complex of phenomena that point at its negative radicality. One is the extreme relationship between time and number. The singular slaughter of millions took place in an extremely short period of less than four years; and if the industrial mass destruction is taken as the actual core of Auschwitz— leaving to one side such events as the mass killings by the Einsatzgruppen in the early phase and the death marches toward the end of the war—then the actual span of the Holocaust is contracted still more, to the period from the spring or summer of 1942 to the autumn of 1944. Characterizing Auschwitz as an administrative and industrial event entails far more than just condemning it as particularly reprehensible. To classify the mass murder in this way is to emphasize the standardized nature of death, a repetition of one and the same action for weeks, months and years. The metaphor of statistics thus becomes cauterized into the negative icon of the six million. Beyond its mere empirical meaning, this figure symbolizes the appropriate narrative, which the event itself obviously lacks. Given Auschwitz's non-narratability, the vacuum is filled by surrogate tales of an epic structure. This epic form evokes a reversal to what seems to be familiar, historical images and recollections that point to antecedent remembrance. Thus, for instance, the history of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, although peripheral in its importance when measured against the atrociousness and scope of the administrative and industrial mass murder, takes on the meaning of a substituted narrative in lieu of what cannot be properly recounted. In view of the statistical vacuum that Auschwitz creates for posterity, that event provides a compensatory tale. Moreover, the absence of a narrative appropriate to the event leads to the historical phenomenon or mode of consciousness that can be termed compressed time.12 In other words, in place of a historical representation of the Holocaust comes a narrative that concentrates mostly on its real, or allegedly real, prehistory, that is, on the history of antisemitism. True, at the very center of the prehistory of the Holocaust there does stand antisemitism—and this for good reason: the anti-Jewish policies of the Nazis were thoroughly antisemitic in their racist underpinnings. Without antisemitism, it is impossible to conceive the specific victimization of Jews. In addition, antisemitism offers a narrative that is lengthy and ramified. Analogous to a negative teleology, it is able to shift the enormous weight of the event of the Holocaust to its prehistory, stretching back into the distant past. It can, however interpreted, imbue the event with meaning. Among the various Jewish narratives of antisemitism, one tale stands out: that of Jewry in the Polish lands. The Polish-Jewish relationship has such particular salience because its patterns became, by and large, the dominant form of narration for Jews in general after 1945. Its principal distinguishing mark is that everyday Polish antisemitism, experienced historically in concrete terms over longer periods of time, comes to represent the basically abstract and short-term phenomenon of Nazi mass murder. In the interests of continuity and narrativity, the historical experience of East European Jewry is the common narrative that provides the images that illustrate the Holocaust. 13 A strange conflation results. The Holocaust committed by Nazi Germany becomes somehow placed in a framework of narration

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that is clearly outside its causal scope and empirical explication. In short, the history of the Holocaust becomes largely integrated into the history of antisemitism. Though structured along substantially different lines, the interpretative pattern of antisemitism is also salient in the attempts characteristic of non-Jewish memory to represent the Holocaust and come to terms with it. Beyond all other singularities, the event assumes a special importance because of the very fact that its main victims were persons of Jewish descent. This does not mean that the Jewish victims are automatically assigned some kind of superior moral standing as compared with other victims of Nazism. Rather, an important psychological and cultural fact is imbedded and recognized here: namely that the Jews continue to occupy a special place in Western consciousness. And no matter how secular its external configuration may now be, it is still largely characterized by layers of perception with a sacred and Christian content. Therefore, the mass murder of Jews ultimately appears to touch deeper psychological levels and to evoke more powerful emotions than the victimization of others by the Nazi machinery of destruction. The "meaning of the Jews" is still a matter that inspires profoundly existential questions for Western self-understanding. It is this deeper dimension that calls forth Gentile emotions pointing beyond the concrete historical event and its temporal frame to times in the distant past. This past, imbued with quasi-mythical suprahistorical images, encourages an interpretation of the Holocaust as transcending mere event. Despite these mythical dimensions, such interpretations have their own validity, recognizing as they do the reality of antisemitism as a major aspect of European history. The process of coping with the enormity of the mass annihilation becomes saturated with the motif and feelings of guilt, whether in the form of confession or of mere defense. In short, historical reconstructions of the Holocaust are overladen with quasijudicial confrontations concerning its causes, the meaning of collective responsibility and issues of individual guilt. All in all, these are questions that seem to arise necessarily, as it were, due to the exceptional character of the event, its particular circumstances and its impact on consciousness. They are not directed from some external vantage point of interpretation but are rather intrinsic to that event. To that extent, they are part and parcel of its epistemology. These questions of methodology and epistemology inevitably invite radically opposing responses from historians grounded in different collective experiences and memories. The reasons should be obvious: a deed such as the Nazi mass extermination, implemented with bureaucratic and industrial efficiency, and thus based on a high degree of division of labor, induces a massive sense of distance in the perspective of the perpetrators, a kind of alienation and dissociation from an adequate sense of personal responsibility. Yet this dissociation from one's own actions is massively repudiated by the existential experience of the victims. For them, the effect of the act, based on the factory-like division of labor that mobilized an entire society, takes on an immediate concrete form, absolutely monstrous both in its intrinsic enormity and in terms of individual personal suffering. 14 After all, the purpose and meaning of the administrative and industrial annihilation was precisely to interpose emotional distance between perpetrators and victims in order to make it easier for the

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former to kill indiscriminately. And such an organizational form of mass murder had its intended results. Those implicated in the collective outrages thus remained relatively well shielded from any individual sense of guilt. However, in a compensatory shift, that guilt has come to be felt all the more by later generations. In Germany today, it is a conspicuous component in the public culture and in the public rites of shame. Seen as a whole, the Nazi mass extermination breaks down into two differing, indeed antipodal worlds of experience: banality on the side of the perpetrator and monstrosity on the side of the victims. Historiography must recognize this split in experience, and will continue to do so in the future. It is unlikely there will soon be any reconstruction of Auschwitz that can splice together these two so disparate experiential universes. In this context, the case of Hannah Arendt is almost iconic in its significance. The Jewish public strongly resented her partisan stance, which could be read as defending the perspective of the perpetrators.15 In her stress on the banality of evil as central to the biography of Adolf Eichmann and to the Holocaust narrative, she was accused of betraying the Jewish people. Others intimated to her that the perspective she had adopted was not hers.16 In her report on the Eichmann trial, Arendt repudiated the Jewish historical narrative as developed by Gideon Hausner, the Israeli chief prosecutor. That narrative was grounded on an extremely pessimistic, even negative, interpretation of Jewish history in the diaspora, and on a conception of antisemitism as virtually suprahistorical in character and scope. Arendt sought to parry such a negative teleology of Jewish existential experience and the implication that the Holocaust was an almost inexorable outcome of Jewish history. The anger of her critics was provoked by the fact that she tried to fend off that negative interpretation by developing a historical narrative that marginalized antisemitism and was far more consonant with the experiential world of the perpetrators.17 Antisemitism as the pivotal factor behind the Holocaust—this is undoubtedly at the core of the historical narrative most attuned to the sensed experience of the victims. Such a narrative proceeds along the lines characterized above as judicial. In short, the narrative that sets the Holocaust squarely within the history of antisemitism points, by and large, toward intention and so to guilt. The longue durée in Jewish experience of anti-Jewish enmity is congruent with a view that tends to see the Holocaust as all but premeditated. And this focus clearly gives rise to a narrative as the prosecutor's brief. 18 A good example is the controversial and much discussed work by Daniel J. Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners. Goldhagen constructs the history of the Holocaust as springing from a deeply ingrained and long-existent German antisemitism of an annihilistic nature. In order to emphasize the extreme anti-Jewish hatred that animated the perpetrators, Goldhagen focuses selectively on highly specific events in the Holocaust: actions that presupposed an immediate physical proximity of the henchmen to their victims. These include the massacres committed by police reserve battalions, which he describes in copious detail, and the murderous death marches in the final phase of the war. But for this very same reason, he refrains from presenting a description of the Final Solution in its more narrow sense, namely, the assembly-line annihilation of millions.

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Seen against the backdrop of an evolving historiography, his theses can be naturally read in counterpoint to those of Hannah Arendt in Eichmann in Jerusalem, who underscores the banality of the events, a concept already analogous in concept to industrial murder. Goldhagen, by contrast, shifts the spotlight once more to the antisemitic motives of the perpetrators. To that extent, his narrative is certainly consonant with the past as generally shaped by Jewish memory. It is, of course, questionable whether the concept of antisemitism is sufficient to explain the actual motives of the perpetrators. Indeed, the approach exemplified by Goldhagen blurs distinctions between the diverse layers of what is commonly understood as antisemitism. Some involved in the mass murder were doubtless moved by traditional anti-Jewish revulsion; others by the Nazi ideology in which the Jews loomed large as the very epitome of the enemy (although the individual party member was not required to accept that doctrine); and still others—uncommonly deft at making use of the Jews or the so-called "Jewish question" as a ticket to advancement—by simple opportunism or careerism. The antisemitism of conviction that Goldhagen musters for his argumentative onslaught is far too erratic to be operationally serviceable as a monistic explanation in historical research. Notwithstanding, Goldhagen has probably made a useful contribution to the further course of Holocaust research, challenging readers and researchers to a long overdue reorientation in the choice of perspectives. In no small measure, his book should be seen in the context of Holocaust historiography as a reaction to the now dominant direction in research: the approach that tries to vault beyond antisemitism as a cause for the Holocaust, and thus also over its Jewish victims as Jews. In lieu of antisemitism, all possible circumstances can be selected to explain the path to genocide. The innovative German historian Götz Aly, for instance, now seems to have moved away from his earlier "economistic" approach to the Holocaust that conceptualizes the Jewish victims as victims of totally blind processes geared to rationalization and to the maximalization of gain. Yet he has recently developed a not so dissimilar interpretive framework that can be viewed as the almost exact reverse of that advanced by Goldhagen. While Goldhagen concentrates on antisemitic hatred, on the police battalions and the death marches, Aly's interpretation seizes on the Nazi policy of Flurbereinigung—roughly, "reparcelling and reclamation"—mainly, and all but exclusively, in the so-called Warthegau region of Posen and the contiguous parts of Poland.19 The emphasis is thus shifted away from a central focus on the Jews: it not only (and properly so) highlights the expulsion of Poles into the Generalgouvernement, but also deals with the "resettlement" of ethnic Germans into the areas thereby vacated. In order to place Nazi policy in the historically unspecific context of "ethnic cleansing" and to argue that the ultimate consequence of such actions was genocide, Aly necessarily has to underplay the broader context encompassing his key year of 1940: namely, the anti-Jewish policies of Germany in the 1930s, during which time the Jews were excluded as pariahs and goaded to forced emigration, on the one hand, and the murderous actions undertaken from the summer of 1941 against the Jews in the Soviet Union (inter alia, as part of the Nazi campaign against the Bolsheviks), on the other. It is of notable significance that the massacre and genocide of Jews in the U.S.S.R. preceded the mass murder of Polish Jewry. In any event, an immediate

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linkage—insinuating direct causation—between the early evacuations, the preceding ghettoization and the later annihilation of Jews in the Polish areas unconnected to Barbarossa is unconvincing. In order to paper over the apparent lack of events that can be mustered as possible causal elements, linking the "ethnic cleansing" of 1940 in the western Polish territories to the mass killings of 1941 onwards in the East, Aly offers his readers a kind of chronology in each chapter, lumping together the most diverse and sundry developments of the time whatever their alleged proximity to one another might or might not signify. Such a surrogate for causality is designed to disguise the author's inability to prove what his thesis asserts: namely, the centrality of the "ethnic cleansing" operations as a major cause of the Final Solution. Once more it becomes amply clear that monocausal reductions are of little utility in explaining the Holocaust. And this holds true even when, as in Aly's case, the main driving force is no longer economic rationalization, as in his earlier book, but rather definite operations identifiable as "ethnic cleansing." Yet despite their myriad antagonisms with respect to questions of causation and historical method, Goldhagen and Aly are akin: in order to reduce the Holocaust to one basic cause, they must extract from the total web of events a single aspect that can provide a pattern for generalization. A closer look at Aly's work reveals a remarkably distinct approach to the Holocaust. As he sees it, the Germans who were resettled into the Warthegau were just as much victims as the Poles and Jews resettled out of the region. There is no specificity with regard to the ethnic and religious background of those who were moved. In the logistics of the resettlement policy, Aly finds an overriding uniformity: the trains rumbled on indifferently, transporting Poles, Jews and ethnic Germans in and out. From there one has only to take a short step to include the problem of the expulsions of the Germans from vast areas of East Central and Eastern Europe at the end of the war within this same syndrome. And without underestimating the real and terrible suffering endured by Germans who were then driven from their homes, it is rather problematic to link their fate conceptually with the mass annihilation of European Jewry. It points up once again the covert presence of anterior narratives, the retelling of one's own national story even (or particularly) in relation to the Holocaust. There is a suggestion here of some covert rivalry between victims' recollections challenging the historical memory of the Jews as central victims of the Holocaust.20 Leaving aside questions of method, there seems to be in Aly's approach an unmistakable tendency to downplay the image of Jews as objects of a premeditated act directed against them as Jews; and by so doing, to blur the very element of intent. And premeditation, of course, is closely interlaced with the problem of guilt. After a long phase in which the prevailing historiographic trend has thus been to universalize the mass crimes of the German Nazis by de-emphasizing the ethnic and religious aspect of their victims, and this both in the public arena and in research, Goldhagen has now shifted the focus back to the antisemitic and ideological elements in Nazism, raising once again the question so particular and perturbing to German consciousness: that of direct responsibility. The urge to pose the choice in judicial terms as one between guilt and negligence is certainly in accord with the opposing worlds of Jews and Germans with regard to the Holocaust. To the extent

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that the focus falls on premeditation and guilt, there is an increased recourse to antisemitism as a key to interpretation. Such an approach is consonant with Jewish experience under Nazism, as well as with the long-term historical memory and collective consciousness of the Jews, with the tendency to construct a sequential chronology of events that interlinks a logical chain of cause and effect. Of course, it remains an open question to what extent those events were actually intertwined; but the emphasis on antisemitism lends the argument for interconnection a measure of plausibility. Meanings and relations that arch over long periods of time are borrowed from the arsenal of long-term Jewish memory. Historians such as Raul Hilberg, incidentally, also fall back on "prehistorical" relations and contexts.21 Not unlike Hannah Arendt in this regard, Hilberg was accused of presenting the Nazi destruction of European Jewry from a perspective generally alien to Jewish experience. Yet that charge is unconvincing, directed as it is against an approach that deals so centrally with the decisions and circumstances underlying the implementation of the Final Solution. Such a reproach seems especially odd, since Hilberg integrated negative views commonly shared by Jewish— and, indeed, Western—opinion about Germans in his purportedly "German" narrative. The chapters that open his monumental study, entitled "Prehistory of Antisemitism: From Luther to Hitler" and "Preparation: From Thought to Deed," make it clear that he intends to situate his work in the long tradition of negative Jewish historical experience—and this despite all his use of materials from German and Nazi agencies and agents. It is principally questions of continuity and causality that lead to conflict in the interpretation and representation of the events. In historical construction, an approach that embraces the perspective of the victims will stress an immediate connection between an intention to destroy expressed long before the act and the measures that actually led to destruction. Generally, such an interpretation will be in a position to enlist key documents from which it is possible to derive apparently indubitable proof for deliberate action. Yet such a perspective tends to obscure the immediate circumstances that contributed to the act. A historical narrative based heavily on genuine (or purportedly key) documents drawn from German archives—a corpus that goes back in large part to the materials amassed at Nuremberg—heightens even further the judicial character of the historical discourse. Such documents may be especially suitable in proving criminal intent or culpability. Yet in the light of present-day research, they appear to be of only limited value in the reconstruction of the historical circumstances that led to the Holocaust. Among the fundamental documents suggesting a direct link between intention, decision and realization are, for example, the so-called Euthanasia Decree issued by Hitler in September 1939; Hermann Goring's note to Reinhard Heydrich dated July 31, 1941, empowering him to execute the Final Solution in the territories occupied by Germany; and the minutes of the Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942. Theories that propound a direct connection between the intention expressed in the documents and the mass murder proceed from the presupposition that the actions of decision-makers in the Nazi state were consonant with rational administrative be-

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havior. If such rationality is assumed, no question can remain regarding the issue of responsibility. That approach, however, necessarily fails to take into account the realities of Nazi rule and the concomitant polycratic fragmentation of government in the Third Reich. Thus, the Euthanasia Decree was not only written on Hitler's private stationery but was actually backdated to the beginning of the war on September 1, apparently in order to intervene in a dispute between the Fuhrer's subordinates over the spheres of their authority.22 Similarly, the memo from Goring to Heydrich bears a date (July 31) that, like September 1 on the Euthanasia Decree, does not reflect any particular conjuncture of events; it was prepared by Eichmann on Heydrich's order, to be endorsed by Goring. Finally, there was the Wannsee Conference—originally planned for December 9, 1941, postponed and finally scheduled to take place six weeks later, not in Heydrich's office but in an unofficial site and not at usual working hours. All of the carefully choreographed details had their clearly defined purpose: to impress upon the assembled bureaucrats, representing party and state officials, that Heydrich was empowered with special authority regarding the Final Solution to the Jewish question in all those parts of Europe that were under German control, which entitled him to intervene at will wherever he desired. For Heydrich, the Jewish issue had come to symbolize a currency of power and influence in his possession. As for the execution of the Final Solution, no decision had to be taken; the extermination of the Jews was long underway. The mass slaughter, in short, was hardly a process that can be reconstructed by reference to the planned, rational-bureaucratic formation of action by the government. It was far more the result of a process of continuous radicalization, nourished by different sources, rather than of mere "decisions." At this point, let us try to sum up and draw some conclusions. All these events— sequential and simultaneous, interrelated or independent—are often represented in a way that tends to reduce complexities along a direct path of causation and teleology running straight from antisemitic declarations of intent (which undoubtedly existed) to the finalized act. Stemming from the understandable desire for coherence, one single chronological concatenation of events is constructed: the measures of anti-Jewish discrimination in Germany during the 1930s; their intensification after the Anschluss of Austria; the forced emigration; the ghettoization in Poland in 1939-1940; the onset of massacres by the mobile killing units of the SS and the police reserve battalions in the Soviet Union from the summer of 1941 onwards; and finally the systematic, assembly-line destruction in the death camps in Poland in 1942-1944. A historian who pursues this line is inclined to lose sight of the untidy circumstances of the moment, ranging from the unplanned actions and improvisations of the various Nazi agencies to their infighting over jurisdiction. Historians bent on proving intentional action will interpret such haphazard elements that coagulated contingently into the Holocaust—against the backdrop of what was undoubtedly an operative antisemitic Weltanschauung—as a logical sequence, the unfolding of a predetermined plan. Such a reading of the developments, based on immediate continuities, is quite consonant with a memory indebted primarily to the experiential worlds of the victims. At the opposite pole to this view is the perception that Nazi actions were

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basically unplanned—by and large the result of mere impersonal social forces. Such a reading, which focuses on the ever-increasing radicalization leading to the mass murder, insinuates that the Holocaust resulted largely from the practical inability of the Nazi agencies to find a way out of the dead ends into which they had maneuvered themselves.23 Although there may indeed be something to this argument, it necessarily ignores one central fact: that at every stage of radicalization, it was mainly Jews who were the target of Nazi actions. Although a viewpoint that attributes the murder of the Jews to institutional radicalization does not necessarily deny the anti-Jewish character of those measures that snowballed into mass murder, it nonetheless tends to underplay the role of antisemitism, in particular, and the ideological factors, in general, that directed Nazi actions.24 The different and even antagonistic interpretations of the developments that brought the Holocaust about—labeled the intentionalist and structuralist schools— reflect different interests in research. After all, the epistemological questions involved in the respective approaches lie on totally different planes. While the intentionalists emphasize ideological motivation as the cause of the Holocaust, they are really focusing on the motives of the Nazis. And they see these motives as linked to the origin of the victims: thus the victimhood of the Jews points to an antisemitic motivation on the part of the perpetrators. They implicitly ask who—who were the victims? The functionalists or structuralists, by contrast, focus far more on the actual process of implementation. Their implicit query is how—how did the mass murder occur? Thus, while the intentionalists place the victims, the Jews, at the center of their interpretation, the functionalists highlight the unfolding of bureaucratic processes. Seen from this angle, the seemingly conflicting schools do not represent mutually exclusive forms of historical interpretation. On the contrary, they should be seen as actually complementing one another. The fact that the members of these two historiographical camps view one another as adversaries holding diametrically opposed conceptions does not speak well for a differentiated sense of method. Rather, it confirms the effect of diversely rooted memories. A "Jewish" conditioned memory is inclined to inquire why the catastrophe befell Jews in particular, a "German" memory is less prone to take the victims as a primary point of departure and readier to proceed from the disencumbering effect of bureaucratic events and procedures that led in a quite impersonal way to the mass annihilation. Such an "objective" or "sober-minded" choice of perspective serves as an anodyne, neutralizing deep strata of consciousness in which the traditional conception of the Jews continues to live on. But Jewish memory finds it unacceptable to interpret the destruction of Europe's Jews exclusively as a consequence of mere negligence, of unpremeditated action: the testimony of experience is too insistent. After all, the measures of persecution engulfed the Jews as Jews; and the survivors often owed their lives to a deception regarding their origin. Jewish consciousness is dead set against any tendency to situate the Jewish victims in some locus beyond the fact of their being Jews. After all, they were murdered arbitrarily not as human beings, but as Jews. How, then, can we account for the push to "universalize" the Holocaust, to

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sanitize it by "humanization"?25 The not so hidden agenda here is less to explore and illuminate the murder of the Jews, so burdensome to consciousness, as to develop a far less binding critique of civilization and its discontents, framed largely in anthropological, not historical, terms. And that critique is bent on generalization, a clearly misconceived universalization of what transpired in the Holocaust. From a strictly and rigorously historical perspective, one that attempts to understand the past as past, this tendency is suspect insofar as it appropriates the Holocaust, not so much to confront past reality as to discover potentialities for mass murder in the future. Such tactics of avoidance are, it would seem, triggered by subliminal narrative structures, which actually bear a strong similarity to classic structures familiar from the tradition of theological disputation between Christians and Jews—between a Judaism universalized into Christianity, on the one hand, and the particularistic understanding of self embodied in the concept of God's chosen people, on the other. The claim of Jewish chosenness stands in stark opposition to the Christological repudiation of that conception.26 These controversies are reflected in diverse attempts to interpret and symbolize the Holocaust, but spring from a predisposing matrix: namely, those anterior structures of remembrance and narrative. Take the now notorious antagonism between Jewish and Polish memory, reflected with cyclical regularity both in the recurrent rituals of remembering and in Holocaust historiography. The Poles view themselves within the framework of a particular set of memories, namely as the chosen people of Christ—and thus as part of a martyrological tradition that clashes with the even longer-term memory of the Jews. This contrast spills over into historiography, and can be readily discerned even in book titles. Thus, the standard work by the Israeli historians Israel Gutman and Shmuel Krakowski on Poles and Jews during the Second World War is significantly entitled Unequal Victims, while Richard C. Lucas' work The Forgotten Holocaust reacts against what he sees as the overly exclusive focus on Jewish victimhood in the historiography of the period in question, and is thus far more sympathetic toward the Poles.27 In sum, the "Jewish" and "German" approaches to the historiographical reconstruction of the Holocaust differ as much as do the memories of Germans and Jews with regard to the actual historical events. Jewish memory is inclined to set the mass murder against the backdrop of major political developments and ideological commitments. A reconstruction congruent with the German experience will largely tend to focus more on everyday life, the trivial and accidental. Jewish memory engages events from a certain telescopic distance, bent on a narrative appropriate to the catastrophe; German memory inclines toward a close-up view of happenings, selecting images of the Holocaust that tend to the mundane. Put more pointedly: reeling from the unalloyed enormity and power of the event, the Jewish memory feels more adequately reflected by a macro-perspective in the representation of the Holocaust. And indeed, if one wishes to symbolize the inordinately complex process that led to the Holocaust, this can be done far more plausibly by linking it to the great historical ruptures, the incisive political shifts and the overt ideological programs than by recourse to contingent circumstance. The "German" mjcro-perspective tends to dissolve the total picture into its seemingly trivial constituent parts.28

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Memory and historical method, then, are closely interconnected—in any event, more intertwined than the traditional historiography of the Holocaust cares to admit. Maybe this fact is linked to the meaning of Auschwitz for the present and future: an event of veritable supra-historical importance whose historical impact is not reduced by the passage of time. Yet that linkage does not relieve historians of their obligation to utilize conscientiously all tools in order to reconstruct the past. After all, this is the homage that history owes to memory.

Notes 1. Gordon A. Craig, Europe Since 1815 (New York: 1974). 2. See Lucy Davidowicz, The Holocaust and the Historians (Cambridge and London: 1991); and, more recently, Tony Kushner, The Holocaust and Liberal Imagination: A Social and Cultural History (Oxford: 1994). On the "Anglo-Saxon" mode of perception, see esp. 205ff. 3. On the systematic difference between German and English historiography, see James Joll, "National History and National Historians: Some German and English Views of the Past," 1984 Annual Lecture, German Historical Institute of London (London: 1985), 3-25. Joll puts forward the thesis that English historiography is focused primarily on continuity, German historiography on rupture. 4. See Lothar Kettenacker, "Preussen in der alliierten Kriegsplanung, 1939-1947," in Studien zur Geschichte Englands und der deutsch-britischen Beziehungen. Festschrift filr Paul Kluke, ed. Lothar Kettenacker, et al. (Munich: 1981), 312-340, esp. 319-20. 5. Klemens von Klemperer, Die verlassenene Verschworer. Der deutsche Widerstand auf derSuche nach Verbundeten 1938-1945 (Berlin: 1994), 103ff. 6. Martin Gilbert, Auschwitz and the Allies (London: 1981). 7. Maurice Halbwachs, in La Memoirs collective (Paris: 1950), counterposes history (qua histoire) to memory in a far more pointed manner. 8. This taboo question was first broached in the debate between Martin Broszat and Saul Friedlander; see "Um die 'Historisierung' des Nationalsozialismus. Ein Briefwechsel," Vierteljahrshefte fur Zeitgeschichte 36 (1988), 339-372; in English translation: "A Controversy about the Historicization of National Socialism," Yad Vashem Studies 19 (1988), 1-47. 9. On the significance of language symbolism in constructing meaning, see Paul Ricoeur, Zeit und Erzdhlung, vol. 1, Zeit und historische Erzdhlung (Munich: 1988); idem, Die lebendige Metapher (Munich: 1986); see also the work of Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: 1985). 10. Peter Burke, "Geschichte als soziales Gedachtnis," in Mnemosyne. Formen und Functionen kultureler Erinnerung, ed. Aleida Assmann and Dietrich Harth (Frankfurt: 1991), 289-304, esp. 296-97. 11. On the criminology relating to collective criminal acts, see Herbert Jaeger, Verbrechen unter totalitdrer Herrschaft (Frankfurt: 1982), esp. 380ff. 12. On the phenomenon of "compressed time" in Jewish memory, see Dan Diner, "Gestaute Zeit. Massenvernichtung und judische Erzahlstruktur," in Kreisldufe. Nationalsozialismus und Gedachtnis (Berlin: 1995), 123ff. 13. See, for example, Cynthia Heller, At the Edge of Destruction, 2nd ed. (Detroit: 1994). 14. Dan Diner, "Historical Experience and Cognition: Perspectives on National Socialism, History and Memory 2, no. 1 (1990), 85-110. 15. See the still much underrated work by Jacob Robinson, And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight: The Eichmann Trial, the Jewish Catastrophe, and Hannah Arendt's Narrative (New York: 1965). 16. Dan Diner, "Hannah Arendt Reconsidered: The Banal and Evil in Her Holocaust Narrative," Babylon (1996).

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17. Friedrich Arnold Krummacher (ed.), Die Kontroverse. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann und die Juden (Munich: 1964). 18. See Daniel J. Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: 1996). 19. Gotz Aly, "Endlosung." Volkerverschiebung und der Mord an den europdischen Juden (Frankfurt: 1995), 29ff. 20. Take, for example, the announcement of upcoming publications by an important German publishing house that also claims to stress its interest in bringing important works on the Holocaust to the attention of the public. In commenting there on Gudrun Schwartz, Die nationalsozialistischen Lager (Frankfurt: 1996), the publisher notes: The Europe of the Nazis was a Europe of camps. Not only were certain population groups particularly singled out for murder, forced labor, exploitation or terrorization [and] confined in death camps, work camps, concentration camps, camps for POWs or penal camps. Everyday Germans were also confined: those ethnic Germans brought "home into the Reich," and many others who found themselves almost constantly in some sort of transit, vacation or training camp, or other sort of Lager. (Fischer Taschenbiicher, "Programmschau Mai bis Oktober 1996," 61). 21. Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (New York: 1985). 22. This document (found in the Bundesarchiv Koblenz, R22, Nr 4209) notes that "Reichsleiter Bouhler and Dr. Brand have been given the responsibility to expand the authority of doctors, later to be specifically named, so that, based on human judgment, incurable patients can, after a critical assessment of the condition of their health, be granted euthanasia." 23. See Hans Mommsen, "Die Realisierung des Utopischen. Die 'Endlosung' im 'Dritten Reich,'" Geschichte und Gesellschaft 9 (1983), 381-420. 24. The recent lengthy study of Ulrich Herbert, Best. Biographische Studien uber Radikalismus, Weltanschauung und Vernunft 1903-1989 (Bonn: 1996), on one of the masterminds of the Gestapo and Main Security Office of the Reich, appears to herald an opposing tendency in research that will once more focus more intensely on the ideological dimension. 25. For an extreme example, see Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Cambridge: 1989). 26. On the preservation of the distant past in a religious form, see Maurice Halbwachs, Das Gedachtnis und seine sozialen Bedingungen (Frankfurt: 1985 [1925]), 243ff. 27. Israel Gutman and Shmuel Krakowski, Unequal Victims: Poles and Jews During World War Two (New York: 1986); Richard C. Lucas, The Forgotten Holocaust: Poles Under German Occupation 1939-1944 (Lexington: 1986). 28. Of exceptional importance are the diaries of Victor Klemperer, Ich will Zeugnis ablegen bis zum letzten. Tagebucher 1931-1945, ed. Walter Nowojski, 2 vols. (Berlin: 1996). Klemperer evokes the everyday reality of a German Jew in the Third Reich who is not engulfed by the swirl of events that descended on the Jews who fell victim to the Holocaust. These notes and comments reflect an experience that a "German" memory is thoroughly prepared to accept, especially since Klemperer himself experiences a transformation of his identity (and thus of his memory) as a German Jew under National Socialism. The diaries constitute an unusual document of personal testimony in which the two perspectives nearly coalesce—though admittedly under the special circumstances so favorable for Klemperer, which "precluded" the awful fate that awaited the overwhelming majority of Europe's Jews. This merging of perspectives may well have contributed to the book's current popularity in Germany.

What Are the Contexts for German Antisemitism? Geoff Eley (UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN) Historicizing Nazism In the past two decades the scholarly discussion of the Nazi Judeocide has shifted attention away from the question of long-term origins and toward the immediate contexts of Nazism. The intelligibility of National Socialism as movement and regime, its prehistories and the place of antisemitism in its formation have all been addressed increasingly as problems of the years 1918-1945, to be explored via analysis of the Third Reich itself and the preceding crises of Germany's social and political order between the end of the Kaiserreich and the collapse of the Weimar Republic. The contrary approach, which sees antisemitism in particular as a uniquely German phenomenon stretching back far into the early modern and medieval periods, has become much less common than, say, in the 1960s, when the scholarly research was just beginning. Given the strength of this current emphasis on immediate contexts, which is very much the prevailing trend, such calls to situate the Judeocide in the deep nineteenth century of German history now start to seem like a radical departure. True, the current scholarship on Nazism is certainly not insensitive to longer-term contexts. It definitely holds a place for the critical relevance of the Kaiserreich (between Bismarck's unification of Germany and the First World War), for instance, and since the Fischer Controversy of the 1960s and the associated influence of the so-called Bielefeld School of critical social-science historians, the relevance of structural continuities between the later nineteenth century and the Third Reich has been repeatedly acknowledged. It is really a far more specific tradition of inquiry that is being disavowed, namely, the highly essentialized attribution of antisemitic dispositions to German culture in some more deeply embedded structural sense going back to the Napoleonic and French revolutionary eras, the romantic counterreactions to the Enlightenment, and even the Protestant Reformation and beyond. Generalized talk of "the Germans," though still the common currency of nonacademic public discourse today, and in many ways the common sense of broader popular understandings, has fallen before theoretical differentiation and the scholarly investigation of appropriately delimited problems.1 Simplistic cultural interpretations based on arguments about national character—"from Luther to Hitler"— of the kind associated with William Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (published in 1960), we might confidently have thought, are roundly discredited.2 100

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Thus the well-known debates among so-called "structuralists" and "intentionalists" about the character of Nazism, and the associated disagreements about the inception of the Final Solution, for instance, have encouraged an approach to Nazi antisemitism that concentrates on the period of the Third Reich per se. The most successful attempt to transcend the impasse of those debates employs a strongly delimited context of explanation, emphasizing the period between the turn of the century and the 1930s. I am referring here to Detlev Peukert's contribution, but also to a wider complex of work on "the genesis of the 'Final Solution' from the spirit of science," and the related perspectives of women's history on the gender dimensions of Nazi racial policies.3 Indeed, research on the Weimar and Nazi eras itself encourages this focus on the immediate contexts almost by definition. In practice, the numerous exponents of the Sonderweg thesis also concentrate on another such bounded period, this time that of the Kaiserreich, in which the failures and distortions of "modernization" become the generative conditions for Germany's distinctive antisemitism, particularly in the years of the so-called Great Depression between 1873 and 1895-1896.4 Finally, the critics of the Sonderweg thesis likewise insist on historicizing the relationship of Nazism to earlier periods of German history more carefully, looking at the outcome of key conjunctures between the 1860s and 1930s, and trying to be as exact as possible about their specific effects.5 In this situation, the publication of Paul Lawrence Rose's Revolutionary Antisemitism in Germany: From Kant to Wagner (1990), reissued two years later as German Question/Jewish Question: Revolutionary Antisemitism from Kant to Wagner, was a significant throwback to an earlier moment of historiography. Operating from the ground of a narrowly constructed intellectual history—formalistic, textual in an unimaginatively old-fashioned sense, exegetical, high-cultural, decontextualized—this book managed to vault past the detailed historiography mentioned above (the carefully contextualized theorizing and monographic scholarship on the central developments between the 1870s and 1945) to reinstate the bluntest and most simplistic concept of linear continuity concerning the origins of Nazism. As so often with such arguments, the author's ability to perform this feat rested upon a startling vagueness of definition. First a grossly homogenized and essentialist concept of antisemitism is stated, based on the idea of "resentment of the Jews for being 'a nation apart,'" fusing "a religious concept of the chosen people with a secular one of Jewish ethnicity." As Rose puts it: "Despite the proliferation of specific antisemitisms—pagan, Christian, rationalist, economic, moral, racist, French, Russian, American, anti-Zionist, liberal, Arab and even Jewish antisemitism—it is obvious that there is a universal essence of 'antisemitism' that pervades all its previous manifestations." Then the uniqueness of the German example is asserted via a claim about the unchanging character of German intellectual culture since the Enlightenment, in which "the faith of the German revolution," as "a new vision of freedom and emancipated humanity . . . vouchsafed especially to men raised in German culture," becomes the core of an antisemitism that for Rose united every significant nineteenth-century German thinker, including "Fichte and Kant, Humboldt and Hegel, Marx and Feuerbach, Borne and Marr, Frantz and Bauer, Heine and Wagner."6 For Rose, the red thread running through this "revolutionary antisemitism" seems

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to be a statist desire for social improvement, for which the apartness of the Jews (in the sense of both separatism and otherness) came during the Enlightenment to be seen as the crucial obstacle. The Jews' difference became an offense "against humanity" on the grounds that "they suffered from a defect of truly human moral feelings, notably love and freedom." Consequently, "the revolutionary ideal of a new humanity," as German visionary thinkers conceived it, concentrated on the necessity of Jewish assimilation if this deficit was to be properly redeemed: "Whether one looks at Kant, Marx, Humboldt, Herder, or Wagner, they are united in their striving to construct a new 'pure humanity,' variously based on reason or love, that would constitute a revolution in human nature and human history alike," for which revolutionary antisemitism, as the eradication of Judaism through total assimilation, became the key. In other words, noble ideals of the perfectability of "man" became tied to the "destruction of Judaism" in the German philosophical traditions of the nineteenth century, in a common orientation that united "left" and "right." This is extraordinarily dubious intellectual history on the grandest scale, organized around selective and tendentious readings of a small number of texts and thinkers, and an ill-defined notion of "the German revolution" ("an outlook, a mood, a sensibility"), invoking supposed fixities of German culture that are never explained, and a claim about the centrality of "national character" to modern European history that is never theorized. In its advocacy of Jewish emancipation, Rose argues, German liberalism (likewise never properly defined) promoted not the rights of Jews as citizens, but the powers of the state over its subjects. Thus from Christian Wilhelm von Dohm to Wilhelm von Humboldt, he argues, the German liberals linked the possibility of Jewish freedom to the destruction of Jewish identity, to dejudaization. The discourse of Jewish emancipation thereby turned into its opposite.7 Rose stops his exposition in the 1870s, but the reach of the argument extends unequivocally down to 1933. In this sense he resumes the search for Nazi pedigrees of an earlier generation of historians, who found the origins of the Third Reich in a long nineteenth-century lineage of ideologists and thinkers, from the leading philosophers of the German-speaking world and a wider range of academics to the major propagandists of what George Mosse called "the German ideology," and to a variety of less exalted pundits and pamphleteers. This tradition of intellectual history, whose heyday was the 1960s, was heavily teleological, and concentrated on the cultural patterning thought to explain popular receptivity before the First World War to the emergent repertoire of Social Darwinist, elitist, and racist ideology, in which antisemitism was also centrally represented. To this conception, Rose adds a detailed explication of antisemitic ideas in the period before unification, in the first two thirds of the nineteenth century, inventing his own coinage—"revolutionary antisemitism," as noted above—to describe the uniqueness of German history in this respect, effacing in the process the distinctions and relativities involved in the meanings of antisemitism for individuals and across time and place. In particular, Rose dispenses with the complicated historical distinction between Christian-religious and racist antisemitisms, where the one presupposed long traditions of anti-Jewish imagery and theology going back to medieval times and decisively recharged during the Lutheran Reformation, and the other entailed the tri-

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umph of science in the modern era. Instead, he invokes a "universal mental structure" (variously described, in incorrigibly vague terms, as an "unpleasing psychology," a "prevailing emotional climate," a mood of "insecurity and resentment"), which constituted the exceptional quality of German antisemitism in the modern era. From this period there came a "mythological universe," or "state of mind," which already marked German attitudes toward the Jew as different. This period of antisemitic history "helped to attune the German mind to envisaging only extreme solutions to the Jewish Question, whether metaphorical or physical solutions, whether motivated by goodwill or malice."8 Rose ends his book with a chapter on Richard Wagner, the "prophet of revolutionary antisemitism," whom he sees as the culmination and primary embodiment of the (by then) established demonization of the Jew in Germany: The idea of revolution was an epiphany that shook his marriage, altered his whole conception of his art and opera, and set him on a permanent revolutionary path [from the Vormarz to the 1880s], which, despite its ideological and political windings between liberalism, socialism and monarchism, was always directed by an abiding antisemitism.9 In this grand narration of the German past, in which the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries of German history, including the Enlightenment, lead straight to the Holocaust, it is "Wagner's revolutionism, which encompassed both revolutionary antisemitism and a vision of a German revolution," that provided the direct connection to Hitler.10 In contrast with Rose's account (subsequently expanded into a separate book), the earlier study by Jacob Katz deliberately disencumbered Wagner's attitudes from the heavier associations given them by later racist commentators, among whom Wagner's son-in-law, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, was the most prominent.11 Here the purpose is not to diminish the importance of Wagner's antisemitic ideas or to explain them away. One of the harmful effects of Rose's work, in fact, is precisely to polarize the interpretive options into a spurious moral choice, so that one either acknowledges Wagner's antisemitism as the overriding truth of his career or else slips down the slope of apologetics, making excuses and evading the unpalatable realities of German cultural history. Yet Katz, in contrast, eschews this accusatory simplification, and without smoothing over the antisemitic constancies in Wagner's outlook, provides a far more careful guide to the changing sources and significance of anti-Jewish hostility during the period.12 There seems little doubt that the passion of Paul Rose is connected to debates during the 1980s about the "normalization" of German history. This slogan had a complex and variable valency. While in some hands it certainly amounted to an apologetic desire for exculpation, for returning German history to a narrative of healthy or normal development, fully comparable to the other national histories of the West, for instance, for others it was the opposite, a means precisely of acknowledging German responsibility for Nazism, and of situating that responsibility more extensively in German society than before. It meant locating Nazism and its excesses, including especially the Judeocide, in the wider societal context of what happened to Germany during the Third Reich and more broadly during the early

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twentieth century; it meant emphasizing the intelligibility of Nazism, its susceptibility to both social and cultural, as well as to political and ideological analysis; it meant comparing German history in the 1930s and 1940s with societies elsewhere; and it meant recognizing that German fascism required more than the extremism of Hitler and the fanaticism of his militant disciples, developing rather from structures and processes of conflict in society at large, from a crisis of a normal—in that sense—society.13 Moreover, the critique of the Sonderweg thesis, by the present author and others, which also argues for the normalizing of German history in important ways, is the opposite of a naive historicism, let alone of conservative apologetics. By stressing the "normalcy" of German developments under the Kaiserreich—and especially the productive, rather than the dysfunctional or aberrant, relationship of the latter's mixed authoritarian and liberal-constitutional political forms to the dynamism of the industrializing capitalist economy—works such as (my co-authored) The Peculiarities of German History make a case for the greater importance of the immediate conjunctures of 1914-1933 in explaining Nazism, as against all those deeper nineteenth-century or "pre-industrial" pathologies preferred by the Sonderweg advocates. Simultaneously, The Peculiarities of German History insists on the comparability of German history with other national histories in the same period before the First World War, not by equating it with British, French or Italian history, but by exploring the authoritarian and antidemocratic potentialities of these other societal cases as well. In other words, depathologizing German history also means deidealizing the rest. Either way, the future of Nazism was not inscribed in the logics of social and political history under the Kaiserreich or the deeper patterns of German culture, even though certain potentialities were obviously being assembled immediately before 1914, but was rather a consequence of later developments, especially the radicalizations and brutalizations attendant on the First World War, the dialectic of revolutionary and counterrevolutionary violence during 1918-1923, and the final crisis of 1929-1933. Nonetheless, calls to "historicize" the experience of the Third Reich, or to consider the history of the Kaiserreich dispassionately and on "its own terms," uncoupled from the question of Nazism and its origins, can also lend themselves to patently apologetic purposes, and have stirred many legitimate misgivings. The Historikerstreit of 1986-1987 was an extensive airing of these political implications, in which the Federal Republic's intellectual Right emerged from the closet, and while the liberal public sphere successfully withstood this particular challenge and the "critical" historians appeared to carry the day, the subsequent drama of German reunification radically changed the setting. Since 1989-1990, the space for apologetic evasions of German responsibility for National Socialism has enormously expanded. Reclaiming a deeper national history unburdened by the acknowledged but exceptional crimes of the Third Reich, accompanied by the affirmative language of national identity and the more aggressive demands of an increasingly unbridled nationalism from the newly relegitimized Right, inevitably implies fudging the uglier manifestations of the German past, of which antisemitism is a primary example, whether these are to be considered unique German characteristics or the German versions of more general European phenomena.14

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Popular Attitudes Toward the Third Reich This is the situation in which a book like Revolutionary Antisemitism can be written. As Peter Bergmann has aptly put it: Rose's blast illustrates the degree the Historikerstreit has repolemicized the writing of German history. The effort to normalize the German past has prompted a renewed stress on the abnormality of German cultural traditions. The long-scorned 'Luther-to-Hitler' perspective . . . has made a comeback with German unification and ethnic cleansing.l5 A further example of this recourse to an older and tried perspective—the aggressive repetition of trusted verities from an earlier period of historical discussion, when the deep structures of German history seemed self-evidently responsible for the catastrophe of the Final Solution—is Daniel J. Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners, in many ways a counterpart to the work of Paul Rose. Though mainly focused on the internal history of the Judeocide itself, this book begins with an extensive survey of the period before 1933, organized around a so-called "cultural cognitive model" of antisemitism, which locates the latter as a deep pattern of beliefs and behavior already established in the era of the French Revolution: "From the beginning of the nineteenth century, antisemitism was ubiquitous in Germany. It was its 'common sense.'"16 Even more: the German version of antisemitism was peculiarly virulent and comprehensive, implicitly genocidal, or at least "eliminationist." Yet Goldhagen feels able to make these claims with only the most cursory of references to the huge historical literature of the period before 1914, with literally no national or cross-cultural comparisons, with the baldest of unitary and essentializing generalizations about German society as a whole, and with an indifference to the requirements of evidence that is extraordinary.17 Equally simplistically (and implausibly), he insists that with the defeat of Nazism in 1945 the traces of eliminationist antisemitism were erased, because the democratic constitution of 1949 brought West Germany (and the West Germans) into the political community of the West. In other words, the continuity of eliminationist antisemitism saturates the course of German history before 1933 and down to 1945, but after 1945 it has gone. One of the consequences of Goldhagen's approach is that he simply abolishes the problem that has exercised the best scholarship on Nazism and the Judeocide for a quarter of a century now, namely, the question of how best to understand the extent of popular complicity. By insisting that antisemitic prejudices were universal under the Third Reich, indeed that the active desire for the elimination of Jews from German society was the default condition of popular culture once the official offensive against Jewish survival was launched, Goldhagen removes the issues of popular agency and motivation, individually and collectively, from the agenda, for they simply disappear into the black stain of the shared guilt and responsibility of all "ordinary Germans." This erases the grey intermediate, and indeterminate, terrain of ambiguous identification—where even the most privatized and principled opposition to the regime was always already contaminated by its racialized languages and practices of public mobilization, by its extraordinarily aggressive and pervasive normativities—and reduces the possible repertoire of interpretation and analysis to a moral stance of absolute indictment.

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At one level, this is perhaps an understandable reaction to much of the work on popular attitudes and behavior between 1933 and 1945, because by stressing the violence and pervasiveness of the Third Reich's coercive apparatus and its draconian repression, the atomization of society under the impact of the regime's restless co-optation of all organized and informal associational and public activity, and the compulsion of survival in everyday life, such studies have frequently reduced the effective space of popular agency and relativized the moral burdens of living beneath a fascist regime—whether these are to do with the unwillingness to express dissent, the passivity and silence in the face of injustices, or the failure to act in defense of Jews or other victims of the time. Where this is not an explicit part of the discussion, it frequently emerges from the logic of the presentation, particularly in a large number of the local histories produced during the explosion of Alltagsgeschichte in the late 1970s and 1980s. Yet the best of this work is motivated not by a desire for popular exculpation, it is important to say, but by precisely the commitment to understanding the ability of Nazism to enter even the most private and resistant spaces of everyday behavior and to reshape their character, whether these were in the workplace, the subcultures of youth, or the family and the home. Moreover, we may add, exactly the same efforts at empathy and imaginative understanding have guided recent work on the Jewish experience under Nazism, whether before 1933, during the process of ghettoization, or in the camps, muddying the picture with regard to the possible forms of response, and generally showing just how complex were the exigencies and pragmatics of survival. These are the issues—the extraordinarily complicated questions of conformity and opposition, resistance and collaboration, accommodation and dissent— most difficult to answer in the context of the Third Reich, in a situation where the normal modalities of political expression and representation, the open and legitimate contest of viewpoints within a free political system and a legally protected public sphere, had been destroyed. Goldhagen's book is a call to simplistic ethical accountability and a refusal of moral ambiguity. At one irreducible level, of course, there is no ambiguity at all, for Nazism and its racialized and antisemitic policies, let alone the Judeocide, are to be absolutely condemned. Moreover, the extreme nature of the Nazi state and the violent forms of its rule have been a permanent discouragement to any kind of analysis of what constitutes "popular consent," because the prevalence of coercion and terror seem to render every such approach out of place. The rethinking of the category of the political and its place in social life, through the influence of Antonio Gramsci, Michel Foucault, feminist theory and cultural studies, has been far more hesitant in the context of Nazism, because the Third Reich has always seemed an unanswerable demonstration that power in its coercive, national-centralized, and state-institutional forms, mattered. To look for power elsewhere, or to search for "consent" in such a context, seemed theoretically inappropriate and ethically wrong, both unnecessary and a diversion from the violence, terror and repression that were Nazism's primary truth. But one cannot ignore the fact that to have experienced the Third Reich from the "inside," whether as one of its targeted enemies, as an ordinary individual earning a livelihood in paid employment (as a factory worker or a shop assistant, a clerk or a

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coal miner, possibly a former Social Democrat or Communist), as a young person socialized via the mass organizations of the party-state, as a woman fixed in the dominant discourses of maternalism and domesticity, or even as a lower-ranking civil servant or administrator, entailed very particular rules of comportment, where a wholly principled and consistent ethics of everyday life would mean discrimination, harassment, loss of employment, surveillance, imprisonment and eventually death. An ability to get inside this painful and dangerous ambiguity, in which even the most mundane and trivial of daily actions could be construed as either an ethical compromise with the regime and its values or a modest but existentially significant subversion, has been the hardest won achievement of recent historiography, for which Saul Friedlander's remarkable study of Kurt Gerstein may stand as an early marker.18 Moreover, for some historians it is precisely the violent and coercive truth of Nazi rule that makes the Third Reich such an important place to begin. Precisely because normal politics were suspended, historians have had to think about how else political views could be expressed. The degree to which domination is imposed by force, and the legal bases of contestation and negotiation destroyed, compels us to rethink the issue of a regime's legitimacy, particularly (as under Nazism) when its popular support seems to be so broad. One answer—that opposition was driven underground, while the mass of ordinary people made various kinds of pragmatic accommodation to the Third Reich's ability to deliver material improvement—was pioneered by Tim Mason in his research on the working class, in which he distinguished between the political resistance of the labor movement's underground organizations, which was secret, small-scale, and isolated from wider support, and the gradual reemergence of class conflict in industry, what he termed the workers' opposition. Mason's argument thereby specified the limits of the Nazi regime's political control and provided an early critique of the then influential totalitarian model. But he also characterized the terms of "opposition" as essentially nonpolitical—as a refusal of the regime's ideological message and a withdrawal of active consent, either by pulling back into the relative safety of private life, or by holding to self-interest defined in material terms. While the "workers' opposition" in this sense posed enormous problems for the regime between 1936 and 1940, it did so without an explicit political challenge: It manifested itself through spontaneous strikes, through the exercise of collective pressure on employers and Nazi organizations, through the most various acts of defiance against work-place rules and government decrees, through slow-downs in production, absenteeism, the taking of sick-leave, demonstrations of discontent, etc. 19

It is important to remember that in Mason's work this analysis was linked to a larger argument about the dynamics and instabilities of Nazi political rule. Briefly, the inability of the Third Reich to handle its simultaneous priorities—managing the complex structural demands and political effects of a national economy harnessed to rearmament, while maintaining the social policies (in the broadest sense) necessary to the credibility of the vaunted Volksgemeinschaff, pursuing the overriding goals of foreign expansion and at the same time fearing that, at a crucial moment (as during the First World War), popular support might break down—produced, under specific conditions of crisis in 1939-1940, both the particular timing and the distinctively

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brutal ways in which the war was launched and fought.20 This view, that the Third Reich's aggressive expansionism and ultimate self-destructiveness originated in the combination of the extraordinarily radical Nazi ideological project with the structural conflicts of a complex industrial-capitalist (or "modern") society, also became associated with the most important social history produced on the Third Reich during the 1970s, for which the influence of Hans Mommsen and Martin Broszat was key.21 This work observed the same distinction developed by Mason, between: (a) the politics and ideology of the Nazi leadership, which, despite its bluster and apparent pervasiveness, lacked the coherence and specificity to explain the regime's unique dynamism; and (b) the complexities of the social context, which created a field of pressures and problems for the regime—whose effects were neither controlled nor clearly foreseen—and provided the real driving force behind policy. On this basis, three main lines of analysis emerged. The first hinged on a carefully differentiated account of the Third Reich as a political system, conceptualized via the idea of "polycracy." The second saw the brutalities of Nazi policy as emerging less from the logical unfolding of clearly held ideological designs than from "cumulative radicalization" and the unevenly evolving consequences of disorder, from the gap between ideological rhetoric and the capacity for action—that is, as much from administrative failures and incoherence as from administrative success. The third located the source of such a radicalization in a set of dispositions within German society, in structurally rooted social pathologies that were in turn related to deep peculiarities of Germany's illiberal and authoritarian political development. In this sense, the radical dynamism of the Nazi regime originated in its encounter with a set of social and institutional structures rather than from Nazi ideological fanaticism as such.22 For our immediate purposes, it is the underlying distinction between "ideology" and "social context" that I want to highlight. As in Mason's writings, such work manages to uphold the importance of the social context for understanding Nazism (and the need for a much broader notion of German societal responsibility beyond the Nazi movement and Hitler), while markedly downplaying the role of Nazi ideology in the narrower sense. In other words, there is a distinction here between the ordinary population's practical complicity in the regime's daily working and its simultaneous nonpermeability to the specific ideological message of Nazism in the forms in which that was immediately and consciously encountered. This distinction is present in some of the best work on the still-emerging social history of the Third Reich, including both the Bavaria project coordinated by Broszat and also Ian Kershaw's work on popular opinion.23 It is here that the contribution of Alltagsgeschichte becomes relevant. Much of the general impetus for this enterprise came in the late 1970s and early 1980s from investigations and oral histories of local experience under the Third Reich, and in the meantime a number of major works have employed its perspectives, including Lutz Niethammer's project on life histories and the social history of poplar culture in the Ruhr, Detlev Peukert's various works and the essays of Alf Liidtke.24 At one level, these authors begin with the established claims of social history, stressing the continuity of "the real contradictions of a modern industrial society" beneath the surface of the Volksgemeinschaft, and the generalized complicity of ordinary Germans in the construction and effects of the Nazi new order. Peukert has stressed the

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subtle and not so subtle blurrings of the lines between "victims and perpetrators," pointing to "the multiple ambiguities of ordinary people making their choices among the various greys of active consent, accommodation, and nonconformity."25 Even the opponents of Nazism could not escape its infection, as their retreat into the private sphere of familial self-protection and the individual conscience naturally secured the system's public stability: The Third Reich cannot have failed to leave its mark on all members of society. . . . Even the resistance fighters who did not conform were weighed down by the experience of persecution, by the sense of their own impotence, and of the petty compromises that were imperative for survival. The system did its work on the anti-fascists too; and often enough it worked despite the shortcomings of the fascists themselves.26 How then did Nazi ideology enter the social world of the everyday? The state's formal organizations (particularly those aimed at the young) and explicit mobilizations clearly cannot be neglected here, and the fascist public sphere of elaborately staged mass events—the "aestheticization of violence" through the massive rallies, festivals and commemorations, monumental architecture, the ritualizing of public transactions, and so on—has become a particularly fruitful context of analysis.27 The "Hitler Myth" has served as an excellent illustration of how the grounding of the regime's legitimacy in popular perceptions could be secured.28 But to understand the ability of Nazism to insinuate itself into the apparently "unpolitical" realm of everyday transactions, we need to step back from the Third Reich itself to the broader context of German history and to some important debates in theory, which have steadily expanded and redefined the boundaries of how we think about politics and the category of the political, making the conventional distinction between the public and the private increasingly an obstacle to understanding rather than a guide. In the English-speaking world, feminist theory, the ideas of Gramsci and the reception of Foucault have all played their part in this process since the early 1970s, but in German history the best contribution has come from the historians of everyday life.29 By getting "inside" the "structures, processes and patterns" of social analysis to explore "the daily experiences of people in their concrete life-situations, which also stamp their needs," as Alf Liidtke puts it, Alltagsgeschichte promises to make the connection between political history and social history, and political history and cultural history, in a challenging new way.30 Thus "micro-history," or the careful construction of historical "miniatures," allows us to get closer to the ambiguities and contradictions through which people actually live their lives. It gets us to the terrain where domination and exploitation, otherwise often mere abstractions, are directly encountered, processed into manageable meanings, and inscribed as the organizing common sense of individual and collective lives. This everyday context helps subvert the conventional binaries of "the personal and the political" and "the public and the private" that organize so much of the existing literature in this area. Moreover, this is not to establish a new binary between the public sphere, politics and ideology on the one hand, and "real experience" and the everyday on the other, but to show how it is precisely here, in the "production and re-production of immediate life" (in Engels' well-known phrase) that politics has been working busily away. Liidtke—writing on Imperial Germany—has offered the concept of

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Eigensinn for the ways in which workers in particular affirmed and defended a space of autonomy and independence for themselves, beneath the formal institutional levels of public policy and organized political life, as well as the prerogatives of management and capital, constructing a sense of selfhood in a hostile and limiting world, and allowing their own agency to emerge. Eigensinn means a combination of self-reliance, self-will, and self-respect, realized through the often unconscious and unreflected effort at reappropriating alienated social relations, especially at work, but also at school, in the street, and in any other context externally defined by structures and processes beyond workers' immediate control.31 Liidtke is not arguing that the everyday is a realm of experience somehow more "authentic" than the culture of the labor movement organized formally into socialist (and nonsocialist) institutions, or morally superior, or a source of legitimacy that is closer to the ground and ipso facto more democratic. But he does remind us that both the working class and the broader realm of popular-democratic mobilization were larger than the potentials actually captured by socialist and trade-union organizations in their given forms: labor movement institutions were in a vital sense held in a field of difficult, tense, sometimes antagonistic and at all events contradictory relations with the overall working-class cultures for which they claimed in a unitary sense to speak. Thus, such small acts of self-affirmation (like horseplay, or absenteeism of various kinds, or a variety of workplace practices defended against management) as Liidtke identifies under the rubric of Eigensinn may well not have expressed a consciously anticapitalist outlook, and may have been innocent of formal political concerns. But at a more basic and less consciously articulated level, this everyday culture ("in the factory or in the office, in the tenement house and on the street") incorporated "an intense political sensibility and militancy."32 Workers' apparent indifference to organized politics need not mean in itself that they had no idea of an alternative society or the good life, simply that such aspirations were normally kept locked in a "private" economy of desires. However, if that was so, a key question then becomes how exactly the connection to "real" (i.e., formal, partypolitical) politics could be made. On the one hand, only a minority of workers were ever members of any socialist party and its trade unions, and even fewer had any developed or consistent familiarity with the finer points of the socialist program. On the other hand, the experience of everyday life, as that complex of sites where the abstractions of power are made concrete, encouraged attitudes of independence and solidarity with an obvious political potential: in class-circumscribed contexts of social action and social value, where movements addressed people in avowedly class-conscious ways, Eigensinn could provide the experiential bases of much broader mobilization. To grasp this, we need to look into the hidden places of social life, where the quotidian ingenuities of ordinary people elude the attentions of the powerful, "beyond the public gaze." Here we can find a "hidden transcript" of popular independence, manifest "in the daily conversations, folklore, jokes, songs, and other cultural practices of oppressed peoples," which disobey the rules of power. With this goes a posture of "bloodymindedness"—"theft, footdragging, the destruction of property, or ... an open, direct confrontation, a verbal or physical attack against those in power or symbols of domination." 33 In other words, the workers' Alltag (cvcrydayness) generated a

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culture of resistance, which, under circumstances of generalized social and political upheaval (such as the revolutionary years 1918-1920), or during smaller local mobilizations, could acquire fuller and more overt political meaning. Then "the divisions between the hidden and public transcripts are ruptured."34 The worlds of formal politics and of everyday can move together. However, there is nothing natural or predetermined about a juncture of this kind—about the synchrony of the labor movement and the working-class parties with the broader working-class culture of everyday life, or for that matter between any political movement and the broader social constituencies it seeks to represent. In fact, in German history there have been a series of spectacular instances of the two elements (the Left and the people) failing to move "in time": in August 1914, in early 1933 and most recently in 1990. Instead, it was a different set of popular identifications that became activated more effectively, bringing the weight of popular support and acquiescence behind the opponents of the labor movement. Here Ludtke moves to a structural argument, seeing as profoundly disabling the growing removal, or abstraction, of the political in the narrower sense ("the arena of formalized political and large-scale political organization" at the level of the national state) into a separate realm removed from the participation and experience of most ordinary workers (the "everyday politics" of Eigensinri). The failure of the Left to notice and disrupt this process, to intervene creatively to secure organic connections between its own institutional organization and the everyday lives of its putative constituency, opened a gap between the hard-won activity of the organized labor movement and the more amorphous but vigorous actualities of working-class experience in the workplace, the neighborhood and the home, which provided a space in which other dynamic forces were able to work. This ultimately rendered popular culture extremely vulnerable to radicalized systems of domination once the democratic openings of 1918-1920 had been missed. Under the Third Reich, when the formal structures of working-class politics had been smashed, the quotidian structures of solidarity and self-assertion were all that was to be left, and the limited resilience they provided after 1933 needs to be understood.35 On the one hand, the everyday resources of working-class culture acquired a disproportionately greater significance in a situation where the normal party and trade-union instrumentalities of labor-movement politics were losing much of their effect, as in Germany after 1930, following the suspension of parliamentary government and the massive unemployment of the depression. After the Nazi Machtergreifung, when those instrumentalities disappeared altogether, such resources were also a vital basis of working-class survival in a private and existential sense, as the solidarity structures of working-class neighborhoods still provided some defenses against Nazi incursions and intrusiveness, and the pursuit of Eigensinn secured some modicum of autonomy and self-respect in the workplace. But just as the labor movement without a grounding in everyday life fell short of its own progressive and emancipatory self-representation before 1933, so everyday culture without the public apparatus of labor-movement institutions proved to be an inadequate basis for "opposition" once the Nazis had won. Here Ludtke's recent essays have been especially helpful. While skilled workers in particular were able to "make it through" the Nazi time by withdrawing into precisely such an informal

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culture of work, sustaining at least their integrity as workers via a sense of pride in and on the job, the Third Reich's own appropriation of the rhetoric of deutsche Qualitatsarbeit hardly made this a refuge free of political freight. Moreover, Liidtke has also begun to explore the ways in which the Nazi Labor Front specifically worked on such political meanings, whether through its elaborate social and recreational programs, the wider ensemble of ritual and ceremonial around work, or the many small rhetorics of validation that increasingly encouraged workers to identify with a racialized masculinity and Germanness. In the absence of countervailing political influences, this systematic linkage of social validation to a pervasive discourse of national pride, national efficiency and racial superiority—linked eventually to a drive for military aggrandisement—could not but have had its effect.36 Under Nazism, therefore, Eigensinn secured both autonomy and complicity. We can see this most clearly, perhaps, with the forced foreign labor incorporated so massively into the Nazi war economy after 1939, where German skilled workers were drawn inexorably into the Nazi system via their performance of supervisory and semimanagerial roles in the workplace. Whatever their individual "humanity," such German workers participated necessarily in the construction of a system of brutally racist discrimination against foreign workers, in whose exploitation they structurally shared. More generally, the conscious indifference of the surrounding German population to the maltreatment of the foreign workers in their midst is now well attested. Here the political effects of a set of everyday circumstances were at their most insidious, and they make clear the degree to which Nazism had managed to disorganize the existing bases of civilized human and social exchange, radically reordering them according to its own premises. The suppression of the massive wartime presence of forced foreign workers in popular and official memory after 1945, and the absence of this subject until recently from the historiography of the Third Reich, are a measure of the depressingly easy assimilation of an exceptionally brutal apparatus of hardship and suffering within the burdensome but mundane routines of ordinary life among the dominant population, producing in effect the reduction of racism and its violence to the inescapable architecture of the nondescript everyday.37 In light of this accumulated scholarship concerning all aspects of the Third Reich's popular legitimacy and its relationship to everyday forms of racism, Daniel J. Goldhagen's claims to have first pioneered the study of popular antisemitism in Hitler's Willing Executioners, and his accusation that the field has been generally neglected, are quite extraordinary. While Goldhagen adds some further material, presented in relentlessly explicit and horrifically graphic narrative detail, in each of his three primary accounts of the Judeocide—the activities of the reserve police battalions in occupied Poland; the work camps and extermination through labor; and the death marches in the final phase of the war—there is a strong existing historiography.38 No matter how exactly we conceptualize the acquiescence of the general populace in the Third Reich's offensive against the Jews—whether we see it as willing collaboration, explicit conformity to the regime's official propaganda, susceptibility to the language of national pride and racial superiority, pragmatic recognition of the realities of personal and family survival (how jobs and incomes were to be secured, how careers were to be made, how social respectability could be attained), or the dull compulsions of Nazism's repressive political culture—the

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well-established approaches have explicitly acknowledged the generalized centrality of German societal participation and responsibility. This is the valency of the call for "normalization" in the analysis of Nazism, in fact: for by focusing on the broader social, political and cultural dispositions in German society, as opposed to Hitler's personal rule or the ideological cadres of his movement, we can come to understand much better how easily "normal" German society could be deformed into an acceptance of the regime's racialized and antisemitic project. However, Goldhagen perhaps performs a useful service by stressing the role of ideology and values in preparing the ground for the Final Solution, because the emphasis of social history on "social context," on society-centered rather than "ideological" explanations, has certainly obscured the degree to which Nazism worked successfully to transform social values from below. For it is all very well to express skepticism about "Nazi ideology" in the narrower sense of that term, and to doubt the penetration into ordinary German society of the specific ideas and programmatic codification of the Nazi leaders. But as soon as we focus on the acquiescence, complicity and collaboration of "non-Nazis" at all levels of German society after 1933 (especially among the respectable bourgeoisie, in business, the professions, the armed services and the civil apparatuses of the state)—which has been one of the key emphases in the social history of Nazi policy-making—we immediately require an extended understanding of ideology, as being embedded in social practices and social relations, as well as in people's heads. Simply to remember the other targets of the Nazis' racialist ambitions is to remind ourselves of the radical extent of their desire to reorder social values—not just the Sinti and Roma and the other East European subject nationalities (for example, the three million Catholic citizens of Poland who were murdered, as well as the three million Jewish ones), but also entire social categories, including socialists and Communists, homosexuals, mental defectives, the aged and the infirm, various categories of the socially incompetent and the incurably ill, and then Polish intellectuals, Soviet POWs, "political commissars," and more. The vicious treatment of such groups laid the ground for the Judeocide in a double sense—both discursively, by labeling these categories as "unworthy of life," and by preparing the German population for similar and more comprehensive racialist assaults on the Jews; and practically by, for instance, the grisly process of experimentation that killed several million Soviet POWs. Moreover, to grasp this broader context of maltreatment, we need to understand the eugenicist and related ideologies of social engineering that were already permeating the medical and social-policy professions before the Nazis came to power. In other words, there is a prior process of ideological preparation that requires our attention, but one specifically located in the early twentieth century, not in the deep mists of German time.

Nineteenth-Century Antisemitisms If an overemphasis on the long run or deep-historical perspective on Nazi antisemitism occludes the complex specificities of experience under the Third Reich itself, it distorts the earlier nineteenth-century contexts of antisemitism as well. Nazism has had two major effects in this respect, skewing our perception: an extraordinarily

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strong teleology of origins; and a related tendency to overinterpret or exaggerate the centrality of the German experience. On the one hand, the "road to Auschwitz" is traced to the nineteenth-century beginnings of "modernization," when the Jew's ambiguous status in an imperfectly liberalized society drew to itself a nascent coalition of sociocultural discontents. On the other hand, it is commonly assumed that the antisemitic cast of thought was especially common in (geographical) Germany, where the "dilemmas of modernity" were thought to be uniquely acute, so that heavily intellectualized animosities against "the Jew" kept pace with the gathering popularity of "antimodernism" in German intellectual life. The case for continuity, though, does become somewhat stronger when the focus shifts from the earlier to the later nineteenth century (exchanging the context of Enlightenment and its complex dialectic of public identification for the transformations of capitalism and the creation of the territorial nation-state). If constant in some respects, the negative construction of the Jew underwent profound changes as the repertoire of representation became redesigned into a quite different regime of dominant imagery and assumptions. In the ambivalence and angularity of the Jew's relations with the dominant Gentile society, he was made to symbolize all that was uncomfortable, threatening and rotten in the emergent capitalist environment. The Jew's essential otherness helped define the accumulating discontents of German bourgeois society in the decades before the First World War. The older historiography assumes the constancy of the antisemitic syndrome in German society in a way consonant with Goldhagen's recent intervention, fixing anti-Jewish ideas into a pattern of structural dispositions, which collectively constituted the peculiarity of German history against that of the "West": authoritarianism, irrationalism, antimodernism, and an atrophied sense of citizenship and civil rights—in short, all the features that the Sonderweg thesis traditionally seeks to stress, rendering the events of 1933-1945 more intelligible in terms of the deeper German past, and tracing their possibility to the essential features of German society as it entered the "modern age." In this view, the "road to Auschwitz" was both long and straight, built from materials deeply embedded in the German political culture. In its classical forms, such an approach privileged a heavily idealist type of intellectual or cultural history over other kinds of analysis, stressing the peculiar characteristics of the "German mind," or the formation of a distinctive "German ideology"; and the work of Rose and Goldhagen is a heavy-handed reversion in that respect.39 This perspective is also a catastrophic one, viewing earlier developments very much with the future destruction of European Jewry in mind. This is especially marked, of course, in writing about the German Jewish community and its response to antisemitism. Beyond a certain point (chronologies vary, but the deep reference point is the antisemitic upsurge of the late 1870s and 1880s), efforts to reach an accommodation within German society, normally through some kind of liberal assimilationist perspective, are made to seem self-evidently misconceived, doomed by the logic of the future catastrophe. Separatist or Zionist conclusions are easily drawn from this diagnosis.40 Apart from the internalist histories of the German Jewish community, which have their own justifications, the most fruitful direction of these discussions has been a symptomatic one. That is, the Jewish predicament is made to encapsulate the

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essential dilemmas of German society in the modern world. For Jacob Katz, the "Jewish question"—a term belonging, strictly speaking, to a nineteenth-century discourse on emancipation—was a symptom of the general pathology of bourgeois civilization, reflecting through the antithetical couplet of "emancipation and antisemitism" both the buoyancy of its early years and the stridency of its later doubts.41 Reinhard Riirup has pursued the same line in a succession of useful essays, tying the argument more directly to the fluctuating fortunes of German liberalism.42 From these and other important works, German Jewish emancipation is given two distinct origins: not only the universalist conceptions of human freedom nourished during the Enlightenment, most eloquently embodied in the career of Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786), and politically realized in the French National Assembly's resolution of September 27, 1791; but also the practical alliance of the so-called "court Jews" with the absolutist monarchies of the eighteenth century, whose willingness to free the Jews from corporate disabilities (exemplified in Joseph II's Edict of Tolerance in 1782) was tied to their ability to "earn" such concessions through a process of general assimilation. With the romantic and nationalist reactions against the French Revolution, it is usually agreed, the second of these two conceptions increasingly prevailed in the German discussion. Moreover, as Riirup argues, the Jews, among other groups, paid the costs of German liberals' necessary compromises with the existing monarchical order. Thus, by the 1870s, they had achieved the worst of both worlds: making do with a dangerously qualified measure of emancipation (in practice, if not in law), and lacking the full realization of liberalism's purported juridical agenda, they were nonetheless inseparably identified with bourgeois liberalism by the latter's enemies. The ideological trinity of bourgeois society, liberal politics and Jewish emancipation, linked to the cultural critique of capitalism, played a generative part in the rise of the new antisemitic politics. The liberal concept of emancipation was itself riven by contradiction, quite aside from the objections of conservative, reactionary and radical critics. Within the vast literature on this subject, Uriel Tal has explored the issues with impressive sensitivity, linking the limits of Jewish integration to the worst dilemmas of "progress" in an environment still littered with "backward" survivals.43 Liberals agonized over the boundaries of toleration. Should they include institutions like the churches that fostered illiberal attitudes, or should the latter be systematically excluded from the public sphere, in the name of separating church and state, the privacy of conscience and a general secularist ideal? At what point did the autonomy of such institutions start to infringe upon human and civic freedoms as liberals defined them? One answer was the separation of church and state: the churches would exercise pastoral functions, but lose the guardianship of culture. Religion would be privatized. The state would take full control of education. In this sense, liberal attitudes to the Jew were part and parcel of the Kulturkampf, where the latter meant not just the antiCatholic campaigns of the 1870s, but the larger "struggle to define the limits of religious authority with respect to society, science and culture," and beyond this the vision of a freshly constituted and progressively expanding bourgeois social order.44 In other words, for the liberals of the 1870s, Judaism took its place among other traditional institutions that had outlived their functions in an age of rational authority. This animus was strengthened by identifying rational authority with the legit-

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imacy of the nation-state, which was felt to be threatened by cultural minorities or enclaves with strong traditions of corporate autonomy. It was also increasingly argued, though not necessarily by liberals, that Jews could only be properly integrated if they ceased to be Jews, or at least became "dejudaized." There was room for Jews as individuals, but not for the cultural particularism of their traditional religion, which was too much of a potential counterpole to the primary obligations of patriotic citizenship. Finally, in this reading of German liberal history, the fact that cultural integration was to occur under the auspices of an only partially reformed authoritarian state (the Bismarckian empire), contrary to the heady expectations of the 1860s, engendered a long-maturing crisis of conscience for both liberals and Jews, acutely dramatized where these identities were the same.45 So these were the twin coordinates of German antisemitism, as most German historians have viewed them: the symbolic status of the emancipated Jew, and the failed "modernization" of German society. To contemporaries, the emancipated Jew seemed the embodiment (actual and symbolic) of the new world, and as such drew the full force of the latter's critics. At the same time, the cultural critique of bourgeois society—the ideology of "antimodernism," as most German historians have preferred to call it—derived added strength from the much-vaunted peculiarities of German history, namely, the failure of the German liberals to eradicate the feudal or preindustrial past. Antisemitism (and antimodern ideas more generally) appeared in most societies undergoing capitalist transformation, but in Germany they were succored (it is argued) by the relative weakness of the liberal tradition. Under conditions of crisis—in the Great Depression of 1873-1896, when both the limitations of German liberalism and the social consequences of capitalism were painfully accentuated—the potential anti-Jewish resentments became vengefully focused.46 Older animosities, whose primary articulations were religious, became overdetermined by a new type of imagery, whose principal architects were invariably renegade liberals. The Jew became the modern scapegoat—the repository of cultural discontents, the embodiment of decadent materialism, the antithesis of organicist nationalism. From the active beneficiary of "progress," its willing accomplice one might say, the Jew was converted into its evil genius. This approach has told us a great deal about the intricacies of bourgeois emancipation, the vulnerabilities of a liberal outlook and the starting point of modern antisemitism in Central Europe. Beyond this, the temptation to reformulate the Jewish question as the question of humanity or society at large has been irresistible for a long and distinguished line of essayists, from Karl Marx through Jean-Paul Sartre to Isaac Deutscher. In both the historical and these more philosophical discussions, the Jewish question is given a largely symptomatic importance, becoming a sensitive intellectual barometer for the general vitality of German liberalism in the later nineteenth century. Yet there is a limit to what may be squeezed from the general proposition that "the history of Jewish emancipation is at the same time a history of the rise and success of bourgeois-liberal society, just as later the history of antisemitism as a movement of counter-emancipation is also a history of the crises and decline of that society."47 For one thing, the first part of this statement rings truer than the second, or at least lends itself to more precise historical application. To describe Jewish emancipation as an integral part of the "emergence of bourgeois-

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liberal society" between 1789 and 1871 is a perfectly sober commentary on the social history of Western Europe. In contrast, to call antisemitism "the first great counter-movement against modern society and the ideas of 1789" is far more of a moral-philosophical judgment, lacking in historical specificity and fraught with interpretative problems. The rise of political antisemitism after the 1870s, whether on a German or a European scale, was marked by genealogies, rhythms and temporalities far more complex than these neo-Hegelian formulations imply.48 Of course, the adoption of the 1870s as the watershed, which is typical of a wider literature, has much to be said for it. The palpable integration of the German Jews within the socioeconomic fabric of the emergent capitalist civilization created an entirely new context for antisemitism. Their participation within civil society, which the legal act of emancipation ratified, and which was completed with the unification of Germany in 1867-1871, easily focused social resentments, as it could be made to symbolize the general corpus of liberalizing legislation in the 1860s. When the economic downturn of the 1870s discredited the ideals of liberal capitalism for wide sections of the populace, these identifications were naturally strengthened, leading to the characteristic vocabulary of modern antisemitism. In this sense, the latter first presumed the earlier process of emancipation. But the periodized dichotomy between an ascendant liberalism in the earlier nineteenth century and its corruption or degeneration into illiberal forms of politics after the 1870s is far too simple, and the "othering" of the Jews in German intellectual culture requires a more specific set of histories than this. If the nineteenthcentury notation of the Jewish question concerned the terms under which the Jews could be admitted to civic equality (via political rights of citizenship and full equality under the law), Daginar Herzog's recent study of religious politics in pre-1848 Baden (the most liberal of the preunification German states) powerfully illuminates how a particular discourse of emancipation could lead to the marking of the Jews as unassimilable in a newly essentialized way.49 Once the basic goals of emancipation had been met, in other words, liberals still found difficulties in reconciling "equality" with "difference." That is, they found it hard to acknowledge legitimate cultural autonomies, in this case Judaism and the manifold ways in which distinctive religious practices and communal traditions separated "Jews" from "Christians." According to the reigning liberal assumptions, after all, Jews would simply assimilate to the dominant culture. The more reformist positions stressed the inevitability of assimilation as emancipation's natural correlate (that is, once legal equality was secured, the pressure to preserve social and cultural differences would gradually fall away), while the more cautious ones reversed this order, making emancipation dependent on assimilation. At all events, for most liberals Jewish emancipation clearly implied assimilation, where the latter meant effective dejudaization, or giving up being Jewish. For Jews, in other words, achieving equality was to mean surrendering their difference. This produced a rather backhanded support for Jewish rights, which even encouraged anti-Jewish sentiments, for by refusing to abandon their cultural separateness, the Jews were made into the explanation for their own disadvantaged status. As Herzog shows, the way in which the liberals advocated emancipation allowed the persistence of anti-Jewish feelings throughout the liberal heyday in Baden between

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the late eighteenth and later nineteenth centuries. In this sense, the liberal refusal to develop a theory of minority rights was the worm in the bud of Enlightenment, the weakness at the very center of the universalist support for fundamental human rights. This argument then becomes the starting point for a far-reaching critique of liberalism. It was not the weakness of liberalism in Germany, or the failure of Enlightenment properly to take hold, that explains the possibility of antisemitism, that is, but a flaw at the center of liberalism's own positive creed, its own best version, which was so strongly centered around a set of dominant cultural norms. Liberalism was itself part of the problem, in other words, as opposed to the solution that in German history was somehow never presented. Moreover, it was a religious ferment within the church (specifically, the emergence of dissent), rather than any natural unfolding of the liberals' own positive beliefs, that unlocked the existing structure of assumptions and opened the way directly for a more forthright support for Jewish emancipation. That is, the radical dissent of the German Catholic congregations in the 1840s in Baden fractured the confident unity of the dominant Christian culture, generated calls for toleration and forced radical liberals, in the interests of consistency, to acknowledge the legitimacy of the Jewish minority's right to religious toleration as well. Then too, once the religious basis for conceptualizing the nature of the Jewish "difference" was removed, it had to be thought of as originating elsewhere, and it was in this new discursive space that a new focus on social differences occurred, within an incipient theory of race. Thus an unfamiliar kind of antisemitic language could now be glimpsed, one that was disengaged from the earlier context of religious differences and displayed definite affinities with the later nineteenth-century forms of antisemitism. Moreover, whereas debates over religious freedom catalyzed a new conservative-liberal polarization in Baden politics, it was the specifically liberal sector that registered this key departure. Thus, an understanding of the origins of antisemitism cannot be achieved without this kind of careful intellectual history of the surrounding political debates, because Jewish emancipation per se was only one term in an extremely mobile political discourse relating to progress and religious freedom. There are other recent works that also push the "modernity" of antisemitism further back into the first half of the nineteenth century in this way. James Harris, for instance, explores the growth of a well-organized popular mobilization in rural Bavaria against the proposal of Maximilian H's government for the emancipation of the Jews after the revolution of 1848. Using the petitions opposing the measure deposited in the Bavarian state archives, Harris uncovers a broadly based grassroots campaign, displaying many of the features of democratic politics and therefore "modern" to that extent, but which does not exactly fit the conventional periodization or characterization of antisemitic belief outlined above. This Bavarian movement articulated neither the racialized imagery of the Jews common from the last third of the nineteenth century nor the more traditional Christian demonology. Notions of conspiracy, in which the Jews were detected behind the reins of government, or as the orchestrators of moral corruption, or as the source of general decay, were largely absent, as were incitements to communal violence. Instead, the mobilization was organized largely

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around established notions of community rights, which the juridical freeing of the Jews seemed to be eroding.50 We are in a much better position to judge the departures of the 1870s and 1880s, therefore, if we develop a sharper sense of the specificity of movements and conjunctures in this way, by exploring the variable meanings of anti-Jewish hostility in its immediate settings of time and place, with due attention to the concrete social and cultural histories involved, the lines of political solidarity and conflict, the institutional structures, the operative public languages and surrounding discursive fields, the particular events, and so on. As they stand, existing treatments of the new political antisemitism of the Bismarckian years easily elide the breaks and disjunctions with the earlier liberal traditions. It is certainly true that the more abrasive progressivist advocacy of the Kulturkampf marked out some dangerous terrain, where liberal attacks on superstition, backwardness and the repressive and authoritarian aspects of clericalism merged imperceptibly into the unacceptable persecution of the priesthood, the erosion of religious freedom and the harassment of communal beliefs; and this is where the transference of liberal intolerance into anti-Jewish sentiments could also occur and the seeds of bourgeois antisemitism might be cultivated. But liberal equivocations only facilitated the latter development; they seldom promoted it. Similarly, Tal proposes a continuity of Christian prejudice in his interpretation, reflected directly in the Christian antisemitism of the Conservatives in the febrile period between the late 1880s and the mid 1890s, when it seemed for a moment that the Conservative party might be captured for a kind of populist antisemitism anchored in the Berlin movement launched by the court chaplain, Adolf Stoecker.51 But when this continuity is made to subsume even liberalism itself by calling it a secularized religion (even allowing for the evident Protestantism of the German liberals) and the new racial antisemitism is seen to reproduce the same theorems of German Protestantism, transmuted through the emergent idiom of anthropology and science, the argument becomes strained and unconvincing. To begin with, it is important to separate two movements of an antisemitic type. Whereas the intellectual fascination gripping a man like Heinrich von Treitschke at the end of the 1870s was certainly a novel development with profound implications for the received liberal orthodoxies, the more popular antisemitism of the time was a quite different phenomenon, far more rooted in traditions of rural and small-town life, and much less directly implicated in the formal ideological debate about "emancipation" in which historians like Rurup and Tal wish to situate the modern antisemitic departure. Such populisms were also transported into the metropolitan discourse of cities like Munich and Berlin, where they became rearticulated into the sociopolitical tensions of the morally disordered and hugely expanding urban environment by demagogues such as Stoecker. The situated dynamic of particular historical movements, when connections and identifications became freshly proposed, was also important. Thus 1879, a critical turning-point in national politics, coming after the Anti-Socialist Law the previous year and bringing the high tariff economic settlement that extricated Bismarck from his parliamentary dependence on the liberals, marked a striking convergence of pioneering anti-Jewish interventions by intellectuals with high visibility, exemplify-

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ing the nascent coalition of varying backgrounds that now came together: Stoecker's newly founded Christian-Social Workers' Party, fresh from its disappointments in the 1878 elections, hitched its chariot to the antisemitic issue; Treitschke used his monthly column in the Preussische Jahrbucher to launch a commentary on Germany's contemporary "Jewish question" from one of the most respected platforms of the national public sphere; while Wilhelm Marr, a former ultra-radical of 1848, converted to the racist Right via his experiences in the United States and in South and Central America, spoke his anger at the Jews from the wreckage of a failed personal life and a marginalized political position and published what became one of the key antisemitic tracts of the pre-1914 era, The Victory of Jewry over Germandom, which went through twelve editions in its first year.52 What these interventions had in common was the marking out of a particular kind of political space: on the one hand, Jewishness was a negative excrescence of the modern spirit of materialism in the capitalist age; on the other hand, it now had to be combated systematically, through parties, pressure groups, and the press. Above all, in this intellectualized version, the Jews were a danger to the German national essence— "the Jews are our misfortune!" "Our culture," argued Treitschke, is a young one. Our being still lacks a national style, an instinctive pride, a thoroughly imprinted character. That is why for so long we stood defenseless against alien essences. Now, however, we are at the point of acquiring those goods. We can only wish that our Jews recognize in time the transformation that is the logical consequence of the rise of the German state.53 The foundation of the Verein Deutscher Studenten 1880 was one of the first concrete effects of this new intellectual presence in the political culture.54 Peasant antisemitism was also directed against "modern society," but its relationship to "the new" was far more clearly distanced and hostile: whereas antisemitic intellectuals enunciated their critiques from inside the contradictions of modernity, embracing many aspects of the new industrial civilization, the new technologies of power and the sovereignty of the nation, the rural and small-town agitators directed their ire at modernity per se. But even here there was some syncretic ambiguity— even more than Harris' Bavarian petitioner movement of 1849-1850, the new upsurge of anti-Jewish hostility used the languages and modalities of democratic mobilization within a public sphere. In one sense, the extension of the market into the countryside helped reactivate traditional prejudices, Christian and otherwise, and these represented a deeply held if confused egalitarianism that saw the Jew as a symbol of usury and urban decadence and harked back to the peasant militancy of 1848. But rural antisemitism was also a distinctive accompaniment of German industrialization in the rapidly territorializing circumstances of the newly established nation-state. What was new about the antisemitism that flourished in Hessen, Thuringia and Saxony in the 1880s, apart from the term itself, was less the attacks on the Jews as such, or the formal ideas, than the new forms of their articulation in the political conditions left by the heroic years of 1864-1871. Antisemitism here was a language of peasant and Mittelstand protest, the imperfect anticapitalism of groups whose idealization of small property preempted more radical and coherent

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critiques like those of the Social Democrats. The young Antisemitic parties were a key vehicle, exploiting the new opportunities of universal suffrage, vocally abandoning traditions of deference and creating serious problems for the National Liberals and the official Conservative parties in the process.55 While their overall popular vote averaged only 3.2 percent between 1893 and 1912, the Antisemitic parties' political significance can be too easily dismissed on this basis. From another perspective, they maintained a stable bloc of 11 — 16 deputies in the central belt of Hessen-Saxony during this period. In grassroots support and local profile they bore a clear resemblance to other regional movements—the Agrarian League in the Protestant North, the Center Party in the Catholic South, and to similar but more isolated manifestations like the charismatic excesses of Hermann Ahlwardt in eastern Prussia.56 If we concentrate on anti-Jewish legislation as the principal raison d'etre of the Antisemitic parties, we shall miss their character as regionally contingent movements of rural protest, whose social goals transcended the call for civil restrictions on the rights of the Jews. Thus, to judge the Antisemites by their inability to pass laws against the Jews entirely misses the point. To assess their impact we need other criteria: government responsiveness to rural and Mittelstand pressure, the passage of protective legislation or the readiness of other parties to syphon off popular resentments. Political Antisemitism was born among the peasants of Hessen and the Mittelstand of Saxony from embittered hostility to the party establishments, who offered fine words but no concrete solutions for their problems. It would not be too much to say that the electoral fortunes of the Antisemites fluctuated with the ability of official Conservatives to make themselves the accepted organ of agrarian and Mittelstand protest. While Conservatives dithered, the Antisemites joined with the Agrarian League and the Mittelstand groups to form an important right-wing ginger group in the Reichstag; when the establishment became more receptive, the demand for separate political organization fell away. But this did not mean that antisemitism had disappeared as a political force; it was simply diffused far more widely within the Right, while the old formal antisemitic demands of the 1880s became displaced onto movements that gave them a subsidiary rather than a primary role in official as well as real terms.57 The failure to distinguish analytically between this popular antisemitism and the intellectual antisemitism identified with Treitschke and Marr, and for that matter Wagner and the Bayreuth circle and the wider network of right-wing thinkers identified by historians like Stern and Mosse, is a serious weakness of the literature. Though they shared a formal vocabulary, the respective languages of the two were quite different, and after the 1890s the intellectuals of a movement like the PanGerman League studiously avoided their antisemitic counterparts among the rural and poor urban Mittelstand as vulgar rabble-rousers (Radau-Antisemiten). The outstanding problem, in fact, remains the conditions under which these divergent and mutually hostile impulses were able to conjoin in a single political movement on the eve of the First World War. This was the point at which the problem of antisemitism enters the larger question of Nazism and its Wilhelmine prehistory, and we still know next to nothing about the mechanisms that brought the Pan-German doctor, teacher and civil servant into the same political stable as the antisemitic farmer, blacksmith and shopkeeper. The internal histories of political Antisemitism between

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the 1880s and 1914 are a critical case study in the political coalescence of old and new petite bourgeoisie, and of old and new Right, with powerful implications for the future possibility of a German fascism. Making due allowance for the turning point of 1879, it is important to stress the relative marginality of antisemitic ideas in German public life, taking the Kaiserreich as a whole. For instance, antisemitism as such was not part of the radicalnationalist ideological repertoire for most of the Imperial period. There was an influential radical antisemitic group around Fritz Bley and Paul Dehn in the Berlin branch of the Pan-German League (Alldeutscher Verband), but it enjoyed little general support in the organization, and on two occasions (1902 and 1904) failed to get candidates elected onto the wider executive. Ernst Hasse, the longstanding chair of the League from 1893 until his death in 1908, opposed any attempt to exclude Jews from the Pan-German membership or to commit the movement to an official position on the "Jewish question." He tended to lump antisemitism indiscriminately with other more exotic interests of the radical-nationalist milieu, with "the Los-vonRom movement, the Wodan-cult, the anti-alcohol movement, purification of the language, the promotion of so-called German writing," and so on, as the lunatic fringe, which could give the Pan-Germans a bad name.58 This stance also reflected a principled reluctance on Basse's part to see the Pan-Germans embroiled in domestic politics, or more accurately with the party-political divisiveness and fragmentation of the parliamentary right, which radical nationalists saw as diversionary from the real and overriding priorities of a true "national politics" (nationals Politik). With the death of Hasse and succession of Heinrich Class to the leadership of the League in early 1908, all of this changed. As Class said, one of his three "unspoken provisos" on accepting the chairmanship was that "slowly but surely the support for the volkisch creed and view of the state be forced through."59 Henceforth, explicitly and formally racialist ideas figured far more prominently in Pan-German discourse, and by the 1913 convention of the League, this intellectual alignment was very plain and public. A pivotal role in this respect was played by Class' so-called "Kaiser book," Wenn ich der Kaiser war, conceived as a dramatic political provocation, and published under the pseudonym of Daniel Frymann in 1912.60 The mobility and relative indeterminacy of anti-Jewish prejudices in German public life need to be properly acknowledged for the later nineteenth century if we are to grasp the specificities of the transition to the more virulently racialized political discourse that spawned the Nazis. One way of doing this is comparative, because massive scholarship on antisemitism in France and Britain has made it abundantly clear that Imperial Germany was entirely typical in this respect, and in many ways provided a far more hospitable social environment and political culture for Jewish assimilation or coexistence than, for instance, the France of the Third Republic at the turn of the century.61 Moreover, aside from the main strands of public antisemitism already distinguished above, there were longer traditions of continuing vitality, including varieties of Christian hostilities to the Jew and, of course, the time-honored "social" antisemitism of the Prussian aristocracy. But the histories of the highly intellectualized discourse that crystallized around the Berlin Antisemitismusstreit of 1879-1881 (incited in large part by Treitschke's articles and lectures and the agitations of Stoecker) and of the popular agitations

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unfolding in the countryside need to be carefully charted for the following decades. By the 1890s, the Jew's symbolic status as the harbinger of an unpalatable modernity was being worked into a variety of more specific projects, defined by systematic racialist philosophical and scientific argumentation, from the Bayreuth circle and the rise of Houston Stewart Chamberlain and other public intellectuals (such as Hermann Langbehn), to Ludwig Schemann's Gobineau-Vereinigung (founded 1893), and Friedrich Lange's Deutsch-Bund (1894). Antisemitic motifs were also becoming widely diffused in representational terms, through fiction, popular philosophy, visual culture, the periodical and daily press, and the middlebrow pedagogies of social improvement, public respectability and patriotic identification. Likewise, the social crises of agricultural change and indebtedness in the countryside, the pressures of industrialization on traditional small business, the growing demands of the state on its citizenry and the general expansion of the public sphere in the 1890s generalized the antisemitic fermentation of rural and small-town politics. Both processes—politicized antisemitic intellectuality and the mobilizations of peasantry and Mitlelstand—generated a sizable intellectual cadre consisting of the right-wing writers, journalists, academics, the functionaries of various associations and radical-nationalist activists focused on nationale Politik, together with the Antisemitic party-political milieu of Reichstag deputies, functionaries, journalists, local orators, and so on. Of course, these discrete milieus overlapped. Many in the popular antisemitic cadres would be familiar with the post-Treitschkian cultural and intellectual antisemitism, and many were also members of organizations like the Pan-German League and other radical-nationalist associations. Several of the League's affiliated Reichstag deputies were Antisemites such as Max von Liebermann-Sonnenberg or Ferdinand Werner. But there was a powerful residual (and not so residual) bildungsburgerlich disdain in leading Pan-German circles for the vulgar gutter politics such individuals signified, and this was one reason for the consistent political distance from formal antisemitism exercised by Ernst Hasse, and for the disposition even of Heinrich Class to proceed extremely circumspectly in his desire to commit the Pan-German League to an avowedly volkisch direction. In other words, the valency of antisemitic commitments in German politics before 1914 was linked to the larger dynamics of disagreement and change within the Right, in which there were really two descending levels of antagonism: first, that of the governmental and party-political notabilities (Honoratioren) toward the PanGerman dreamers—"beer-bench politicians," as the Chancellor Bernhard von Biilow called them62—and second, that of the Pan-German and radical-nationalist Bildungsbiirger themselves towards the rabble-rousing Radau-Antisemiten, who were too preoccupied in social demagogy to be considered very reliable from a radical-nationalist point of view. Furthermore, though there was a degree of sociological overlap between the two sets of intellectual cadres, the Pan-Germans and other radical nationalists were notoriously unsuccessful in recruiting the peasants, artisans and small tradesmen who tended to vote most consistently for the Antisemitic parties. Both from choice and necessity, the Pan-Germans in particular tended to focus their recruitment on the "educated strata," whether in town or country.63 That being the case, the convergence of these separate movements within a common political framework, extending from the difficulties of the Reich finance

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reform, the Daily Telegraph crisis, and a general breaking apart of radicalnationalist identification with the government during 1908-1909, to the Right's defeats in the elections of 1912, and reaching its climax in the Kartell der schaffenden Stande (Cartel of the Productive Estates) in September 1913, was an extremely portentous development.64 After the turn of the century, in fact, there was a growing association between intellectual and popular antisemitism, so that both party-political and nonparliamentary Antisemites were very much involved in the emergent national Mittelstand movement. Theodor Fritsch, long a mainstay of intellectual publicistic antisemitism, leader of the Reichshammerbund (founded 1912, with precursors stretching some time before) and a central organizer of the Saxon Mittelstand movement, is a classic exemplar of this kind. But at the same time, the most respectable antisemitic theorists (like Houston Stewart Chamberlain) were extremely remote from this practical process and also some distance from the Pan-Germans (despite their links to individuals like Bley or Dehn, or the Munich publisher J. F. Lehmann).65 Consequently, the coming together of the two antisemitisms with the Pan-Germans, inside the larger coalescence of the Kartell der schaffenden Stande on the eve of the First World War, is a key juncture we only partially understand. It is here, in the context of the Cartel of 1913,1 would argue, that the problem of antisemitism becomes part of the mainstream history of the Right, a vital subplot in the larger theme of the old Right/new Right coalescence.

Conclusion Where does this leave us? My discussions of the Third Reich and the nineteenth century have stressed the importance of contextualizing the incidence, forms and meanings of antisemitism as specifically as possible. Contra Rose and Goldhagen, the antisemitic ideas and practices we encounter in the 1930s (let alone the period of the Judeocide itself during the Second World War) were not the same as those to be found at different times in the period before 1914, and in the nineteenth century there were also some profound disjunctions, usually taken to be centered on the political transition of the 1870s. In each of these contexts, moreover, the variable valency of attitudes toward the Jew needs to be approached via the surrounding political contexts of societal conflict and cohesion, whether these were the painful histories of complicity, collaboration and the difficulties of resistance under the Third Reich, the liberal discourse of emancipation in the middle third of the nineteenth century, the progressivist ambitions of the Kulturkampf in the 1870s, the social discontents of the countryside or the radical-nationalist desire for a purification of German politics (and this list is in no way exhaustive). The importance of establishing specificity in these ways is emphasized all the more once we take a comparative view and explore the equally powerful presence of antisemitic ideas and movements elsewhere: in East-Central Europe, in France, in Britain, and so on, both before and after the First World War. The wartime conjuncture, and the associated period of revolutionary turbulence after 1918, have not been addressed in this essay as such, but there are very strong grounds for regarding the period between 1908 and 1923 as a crucial time in the

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radicalization of hostilities toward the Jew, and of the acceptance of antisemitic languages across social and political landscapes relatively untouched thereto by their promises and incitements. It does seem that in 1917-1919 a public antisemitism that was far more virulent and unrestrained took shape, and quite suddenly antisemitism provided a vocabulary of counterrevolutionary desperation for individuals who had treated it far more fastidiously before 1914.66 This trend drew its momentum not only from the political traumas of military defeat and revolution, but also from the direct physical encounters with Eastern Slav and Jewish cultures during the eastward expansion, which delivered powerful shocks to nationalist sensibilities. Fields of tension between long-settled and assimilated German Jews and the newly immigrating or transmigrating Eastern Jews (the much reviled figure of the Ostjude) are also a crucial part of the story.67 The discourse of science in the social policy domain, with the allied fields of eugenics, social hygiene and public health, within an increasingly racialized climate of ideas between the 1890s and the 1930s, is likewise vital to the understanding of antisemitism in that period.68 The huge field of literary and visual representations of the Jew in the arts, fiction, the press, popular culture, and so forth, clearly repays analysis.69 But in any event, in whichever of these ways we pursue the changing forms of antisemitism during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the first priority is to historicize our approach, by which I mean the need to situate the analysis of antisemitism carefully and concretely in the immediate contexts of its production. It is only then, with as finely textured an understanding of its disastrous popular appeal as the accumulated insights of social and cultural theory and the relativities of comparative history and sociology will allow, and with an elaborately contextualized grasp of its specific genealogies and political effects, that we shall be able to reengage the question of longer-term continuities and deeper historical explanation. It is this complex and difficult project that the recent works of Paul Rose and Daniel Goldhagen wish to refarniliarize and simplify. This essay has chosen the relatively well-trodden ground of the Third Reich and the nineteenth century in order to reaffirm the importance of this complex analytical recognition. But arguably it will be the intervening periods—between the late Kaiserreich and the late 1920s—that provide the most fruitful and most exacting contexts for future discussion.

Notes 1. This is not to say that deep cultural patterns do not exist or can play no part in the discussion. The most sophisticated version of such an approach is probably Norbert Elias, The Germans: Power Struggles and the Development of Habitus in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (New York: 1996). But even here, the causal leap from claims about the social structure and cultural continuities, which are themselves problematic, to the explanation for specific political events hugely separated in time (like the rise of Nazism and the Judeocide) is a problem. As Eric Dunning and Stephen Mennell note in their preface, Elias explores "many of the ways in which those features of German habitus, personality, social structure and behaviour which combined to produce the rise of Hitler and the Nazi genocides can be understood as having grown out of Germany's past" (viii). 2. See William L. Shirer, The. Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (London: 1960).

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3. See Detlev J.K. Peukert, "The Genesis of the 'Final Solution' from the Spirit of Science," in Reevaluating the Third Reich, ed. Thomas Childers and Jane Caplan (New York: 1993); and Atina Grossmann, "Feminist Debates about Women and National Socialism," Gender and History 3 (Autumn 1991), 350-358. The best general introduction to the relevant literatures on the Third Reich is Ian Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation, 3rd ed. (London: 1993), together with Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann, The Racial State: Germany 1933-1945 (Cambridge: 1991). See also David F. Crew (ed.), Nazism and German Society 1933-1945 (London and New York: 1994). 4. The Sonderweg thesis postulates Germany's exceptional history or "misdevelopment" when compared to other countries in the West, consisting of the absence of bourgeois revolution, the weakness of liberalism and the primacy of preindustrial traditions in the political culture, which led to the persistence of authoritarian structures in state and society— and the future vulnerability of German society to the rise of Nazism. 5. See David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Oxford: 1984); Geoff Eley, "What Produces Fascism: Pre-Industrial Traditions or a Crisis of the Capitalist State?" in his From Unification to Nazism: Reinterpreting the German Past (London: 1986), 254-282. 6. Paul Lawrence Rose, Revolutionary Antisemitism in Germany: From Kant to Wagner (Princeton: 1990), xvi, also for the following. 7. Quotations are taken from ibid., xvi, If.; and Paul Lawrence Rose, German Question/Jewish Question (Princeton: 1992), 381. See also Revolutionary Antisemitism, p. 67ff.: The inevitable problem faced by the Germans was how to deal with this "foreign" nation that lived symbiotically within German society. That the Germans felt this problem to be so overwhelming and central a political issue, that they reacted so hysterically, that so many persuasive rational arguments were advanced all too often in a spirit of essential bad faith masquerading as concern for humanity—all this must ultimately be explained by deep-rooted elements in German culture, German tradition, and the German psyche that cannot be investigated here. But to deny that the phenomenon of German national character is a real category of explanation, to deny the specificity of the various national political and cultural traditions of European peoples, is to react in a spirit of liberal prejudice which, while it may be morally inspired, is scarcely objective or respectful of historical reality. There is clearly such a thing as German national character, just as there is Jewish national character. 8. The quoted phrases are taken from ibid., 42-43. 9. Paul Lawrence Rose, Wagner: Race and Revolution (New Haven: 1992), 49ff. 10. Rose, Revolutionary Antisemitism, 378f.: "Hitler admitted only one real precursor— Richard Wagner. Much of the literature on the 'Wagner-Hitler' connection, however, has missed the essential common link between the two figures, namely, their revolutionary mentality." 11. Jacob Katz, The Darker Side of Genius: Richard Wagner's Anti-Semitism (Hanover and London: 1986). See also Geoffrey G. Field, Evangelist of Race: The Germanic Vision of Houston Stewart Chamberlain (New York: 1981); and Roderick Stackelberg, Idealism Debased: From "Volkisch" Ideology to National Socialism (Kent, Ohio: 1981). 12. In a sense, Katz's approach fits well into the contextualization that in different ways redefined the agendas of intellectual history after the 1960s, sometimes at the expense of dissolving their autonomy into social and cultural history together. For Rose, in contrast, there is only the movement of the idea through history. For further discussion of Wagner and his complexities, see the special issue of New German Critique 69 (Fall 1996), edited by David J. Levin and Mark M. Anderson, on "Richard Wagner," especially the article by Marc A. Weiner, "Reading the Ideal," 53-83. 13. See Martin Broszat, "A Plea for the Historicization of National Socialism"; Saul Friedlander, "Some Reflections on the Historicization of National Socialism"; and Martin Broszat and Saul Friedlander, "A Controversy about the Historicization of National Socialism," in Reworking the Past: Hitler, the Holocaust and the Historians' Debate, ed. Peter

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Baldwin (Boston: 1990), 77-132. For the general context of debate in the 1980s, see Geoff Eley, "Nazism, Politics, and the Image of the Past: Thoughts on the West German Historikerstreit, 1986-87," Past and Present 121 (Nov. 1988), 171-208. 14. See Eley, "Nazism, Politics, and the Image of the Past" and idem, "Modernity at the Limit: Rethinking German Exceptionalism before 1914," New Formations 28 (Spring 1996), 21-45; also see two articles by Stefan Berger, "Historians and Nation-Building in Germany after Reunification," Past and Present 148 (Aug. 1995), 187-222, and "Challenge by Reunification: The 'Historical Social Science' at Era's End," Tel Aviver Jahrbuch fur deutsche Geschichte 25 (1996), 259-280. 15. Peter Bergmann, review of Rose, Wagner, in American Historical Review 98, no. 5 (1993), 1629. 16. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: 1996), 77. 17. Goldhagen's evidence for his societal generalizations depends on a remarkable circularity of argument: the universality of antisemitism in German society is declared; for this not to have been the case, evidence of opposition or resistance to antisemitism or of positive sympathy for the Jews would need to be present; in the absence of such evidence, the universality of antisemitism is proved. 18. See Saul Friedlander, Kurt Gerstein: The Ambiguity of Good (New York: 1969). 19. Tim Mason, "The Workers' Opposition in Nazi Germany," History Workshop Journal 11 (Spring 1981), 120. 20. For his final statements on the subject, see Tim Mason, "Debate: Germany, 'Domestic Crisis' and War in 1939," Past and Present 111 (Feb. 1989), 205-221; and "The Domestic Dynamics of Nazi Conquests: A Response to Critics," in Mason's Nazism, Fascism and the Working Class (Cambridge: 1995), 295-322. His classic statements, "Some Origins of the Second World War," and "Internal Crisis and War of Aggression, 1938-1939," are found in ibid., 33-52 and 104-130. 21. See especially Martin Broszat, The Hitler State: The Foundation and Development of the Internal Structure of the Third Reich (London: 1981); Hans Mommsen, Beamtentum im Dritten Reich (Stuttgart: 1966), and idem, From Weimar to Auschwitz (Princeton: 1991). The best guide to historiographical debates over the Third Reich is Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship. 22. Of course the most well-known instance of the "cumulative radicalization" thesis from our point of view concerns the relationship between Nazi antisemitism and the Final Solution per se. Mommsen in particular has argued that the decision for systematic extermination of the Jews—that is, the specific decision for genocide as opposed to, say, some combination of deportation and concentration of the Jewish populations of Europe in ghettos, together with the mass killings behind the lines of the anti-Soviet war—was a result of the logic of disorder in 1940-1941 itself, of a cumulative radicalization in that sense. Simultaneously, the systematic anti-Jewish program was only possible because of the openness of large parts of German society to the inhumane and bureaucratic victimization of unwanted minorities in the first place. In each case, the explanatory strategy is shifted away from ideological commitments of the Nazi leadership and toward (a) the chaotic logic of the process of policy-making, and then (b) the societal structures and dispositions that made the measures feasible once arrived at. See Hans Mommsen, "The Realization of the Unthinkable: The 'Final Solution of the Jewish Question' in the Third Reich," in The Policies of Genocide: Jews and Soviet Prisoners of War in Nazi Germany, ed. Gerhard Hirschfeld (London: 1986), 93-144, reprinted in Mommsen, From Weimar to Auschwitz, 224-253; Martin Broszat, "Hitler and the Genesis of the 'Final Solution,'" in Aspects of the Third Reich, ed. Hans W. Koch (New York: 1985), 390-429; Broszat, "Soziale Motivation and Fiihrer-Bindung des Nationalsozialismus," Vierteljahrshefte fur Zeitgeschichte 18 (1970), 392-409. For the argument about "polycratic rule," see Peter Hiittenbergcr, "Nationalsozialistischc Polykratie," Geschichte und Gesellschaft 2 (1976), 417-422. 23. See Martin Broszat, Elke Frohlich, et al. (eds.), Bayern in der NS-Zeit, 6 vols.

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(Munich: 1977-1983); Ian Kershaw, Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich (Oxford: 1983); and idem, The "Hitler Myth": Image and Reality in the Third Reich (Oxford: 1987). 24. See Lutz Niethammer and Alexander von Plato (eds.), Lebensgeschichte und Sozialkultur im Ruhrgebiet 1930-1960, 3 vols., 2nd ed. (Bonn: 1986); Detlev Peukert, Die Edelweisspiraten: Protestbewegungen jugendlicher Arbeiter im Dritten Reich. Eine Dokumentation (Cologne: 1980); idem, Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity and Opposition in Everyday Life (London: 1987); Alf Liidtke, '"Formierung der Massen' oder: Mitmachen und Hinnehmen? 'Alltagsgeschichte' und Faschismusanalyse," in Normalitat oder Normalisierung? Geschichtswerkstatten und Faschismusanalyse, ed. Heide Gerstenberger and Dorothea Schmidt (Munster: 1987), 15-34; idem, "Wo blieb die 'rote Glut'? Arbeitererfahrungen und deutscher Faschismus," and "'Ehre der Arbeit': Industriearbeiter und Macht der Symbole. Zur Reichweite symbolischer Orientierungen im Nationalsozialismus," in Alf Liidtke, Eigen-Sinn: Fabrikalltag, Arbeitererfahrungen und Politik vom Kaiserreich bis in den Faschismus (Hamburg: 1993), 221-282, and 283-350. 25. Peukert, Inside Nazi Germany, 243. 26. Ibid., 79f. 27. For the former, see especially Dagmar Reese, "Straff, aber nicht stramm—herb, aber nich derb," Zur Vergesellschaftung der Madchen durch den Bund Deutscher Madel im sozialkulturellen Vergleich zweier Milieus (Wenheim and Basel: 1989). For the latter, Peter Reichel, Der schone Schein des Dritten Reiches. Faszination und Gewalt des Faschismus (Munich: 1991); Brandon Taylor and Wilfried van der Will (eds.), The Nazification of Art: Art, Design, Music, Architecture, and Film in the ThirdReich (Winchester: 1990); William J. Wilson, Swastika Wonderland: Festivals, Popular Culture, and the Third Reich (forthcoming); and in the Italian context, Jeffrey T. Schnapp, Staging Fascism: "18 BL" and the Theater of Masses for Masses (Stanford: 1996). See also Richard J. Golsan (ed.), Fascism, Aesthetics, and Culture (Hanover. 1992). 28. Kershaw, The "Hitler Myth"; Peukert, Inside Nazi Germany, 67-80. 29. See Geoff Eley, "Wie denken wir liber Politik? Alltagsgeschichte und die Kategorie des Politischen," in Alltagskultur, Subjektivitdt und Geschichte. Zur Theorie und Praxis von Alltagsgeschichte, ed. Berliner Geschichtswerkstatt (Munster: 1994), 17-36; Geoff Eley, "Is All the World a Text? From Social History to the History of Society Two Decades Later," in The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences, ed. Terrence McDonald (Ann Arbor: 1996), 193— 243; "Introduction," in Culture /Power /History: A Reader in Contemporary Social Theory, ed. Nicholas B. Dirks, Geoff Eley and Sherry B. Ortner (Princeton: 1994), 3-45. 30. Alf Liidtke, "Zur Einleitung," Sozialwissenschaftliche Informationen fur Unterricht und Studium (SOWI) 6 (1977), 147. 31. See especially Alf Liidtke, "Lohn, Pausen, Neckereien: Eigensinn und Politik bei Fabrikarbeitern in Deutschland um 1900," in Liidtke, Eigen-Sinn, 120-160. 32. Alf Liidtke, "Organizational Order or Eigensinn? Workers' Privacy and Workers' Politics in Imperial Germany," in Rites of Power: Symbolism, Ritual, and Politics Since the Middle Ages, ed. Sean Wilentz (Philadelphia: 1985), 322. 33. Robin Kelley, "An Archaeology of Resistance," American Quarterly 44 (1992), 293. Kelley's essay is a review of James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: 1990). 34. Ibid. 35. Alf Liidtke, "Betriebe als Kampffeld: Kontrolle, Notwendigkeits-Kooperation und 'Eigensinn'. Beispiele aus dem Maschinenbau, 1890-1940," in Organisation als soziales System: Kontrolle und Kommunikationstechnologie in Arbeitsorganisation, ed. R. Seltz, U. Mill and E. Hildebrandt (Berlin: 1986), 132. 36. See especially Liidtke, "Ehre der Arbeit." 37. The recent pioneer of scholarly work on foreign labor in the Nazi war economy is Ulrich Herbert. See his following works: Fremdarbeiter: Politik und Praxis des "AusldnderEinsatzes" in der Kriegswirtschaft des Dritten Reiches (Bonn: 1985); "Labour and Exter-

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mination: Economic Interest and the Primacy of Weltanschauung in National Socialism," Past and Present 138 (Feb. 1993), 144-195; (ed.), Europa undder Reichseinsatz". Ausldndische Zivilarbeiter, Kriegsgefangene und KZ-Hdftlinge in Deutschland 1938-1945 (Essen: 1991); and A History of Foreign Labor in Germany, 1880-1980: Seasonal Workers I Forced Laborers/Guest Workers (Ann Arbor: 1990), 127-192. 38. Goldhagen's dismissal of existing work is at its most egregious in relation to Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men, and only slightly less so in relation to Ulrich Herbert's pioneering research on the coercive deployment of foreign workers and the policy of "annihilation through labor." See Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: 1992), and "One Day in Jozefow: Initiation to Mass Murder," in Lessons and Legacies: The Meaning of the Holocaust in a Changing World, ed. Peter Hayes (Evanston: 1991), 196-209. See the works by Ulrich Herbert listed in the preceding footnote above. The death marches are less extensively treated in the existing scholarly literature. But see, for example, the account in Randolph Braham, The Politics of Genocide: The Holocaust in Hungary, vol. 2 (New York: 1981), 835ff., which makes it clear that there was nothing exceptionally German about the atrocities perpetrated on the death marches. In general, the participation in the Judeocide of "ordinary" Hungarians, Romanians, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, and so on, is a powerful comparative rebuke to Goldhagen's thesis. Most tellingly, perhaps, the substance of Goldhagen's accounts are anticipated entirely in Raul Hillberg's Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe 1933-1945 (New York: 1992). The latter is a far more summary presentation, but the case for describing the atrocities in the elaborate and exhaustive detail provided by Goldhagen is not unimpeachably superior. 39. See, for instance, the following classic versions: Hans Kohn, The Mind of Germany (London: 1966); Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair (Berkeley: 1961); and George Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology (London: 1966). For a critique and an alternative approach, see Geoff Eley, Reshaping the German Right: Radical Nationalism and Political Change after Bismarck (Ann Arbor: 1991), 160-205. 40. See in particular Stephen M. Poppel, Zionism in Germany, 1897-1933 (Philadelphia: 1976); Jehuda Reinharz, Fatherland or Promised Land: The Dilemma of the German Jew, 1893-1914 (Ann Arbor: 1975); Ismar Schorsch, Jewish Reactions to German Anti-Semitism, 1870-1914 (New York: 1972). The main logic of this work is to castigate the self-deceptions of German-Jewish assimilationism, concentrating on the Centralverein deutscher Staatsbiirger jiidischen Glaubens (CV) formed in 1893, which combined the defense of Jewish interests with the upholding of liberal values. Such integrationist efforts seem self-evidently futile from an inevitabilist perspective of 1933, leaving German Jews with no safe or viable strategy beyond Zionism or other forms of separatism or emigration. But for an alternative reading, which situates the CV far more sensitively in the political field of the Kaiserreich, without the unhistorical privileging of Zionist perspectives or the negative teleology of 1933, see Marjorie Lamberti's Jewish Activism in Imperial Germany: The Struggle for Civic Equality (London and New Haven: 1978). Lamberti convincingly argues that the CV negotiated a middle path between abject assimilation and separatism, joining a genuinely liberal ideology of nationality, citizenship and religious toleration to a clear sense of Jewish cultural individuality. In the process she illuminates a wide range of general problems, including the evolving character of the Imperial state and the rule of law, the structure of left liberalism, control of education, the formation of the professions and the abiding intellectual dilemmas of cultural assimilation. 41. See especially Jacob Katz's Emancipation and Assimilation: Studies in Modern Jewish History (Westmead: 1972); and From Prejudice to Destruction: Antisemitism, 1700-1933 (Cambridge, Mass.: 1980), esp. 107-220. 42. See especially Reinhard Rump's Emanzipation und Antisemitismus. Studien zur "Judenfrage" der biirgerlichen Gesellschaft (Gottingen: 1975); "Emancipation and Crisis—the 'Jewish Question' in Germany, 1850-1890," and "German Liberalism and the Emancipation of the Jews," Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 20 (1975), 13-25, and 59-68.

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43. Uriel Tal, Christians and Jews in Germany: Religion, Politics, and Ideology in the Second Reich, 1870-1914 (Ithaca: 1975). 44. Ibid., 81. 45. Many of these dilemmas were already prefigured in the career of Moses Mendelssohn, for which see the biography by Alexander Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn: A Biographical Study (University, Ala.: 1978). 46. See here especially Shulamit Volkov, The Rise of Popular Antimodernism in Germany: The Case of the Urban Master Artisans, 1873-1896 (Princeton: 1978). For further studies emphasizing the economics and occupational sociology of popular antisemitism, see Robert Gellately, The Politics of Economic Despair: Shopkeepers and German Politics, 1890-1914 (London: 1974); Iris Hamel, Vdlkischer Verband und nationale Gewerkschaft. Der deutschnationale Handlungsgehilfen-Verband (Frankfurt: 1967). 47. Riirup, Emanzipation und Antisemitismus, 73. 48. Ibid., 29, 12. 49. See Dagmar Herzog, Intimacy and Exclusion: Religious Politics in Pre-Revolutionary Baden (Princeton: 1996), esp. 53-84. 50. James F. Harris, The People Speak Out: Anti-Semitism and Emancipation in Nineteenth-Century Bavaria (Ann Arbor: 1994). 51. See Geoff Eley, "Antisemitism, Agrarian Mobilization, and the Conservative Party: Radicalism and Containment in the Founding of the Agrarian League, 1890-1893," in Between Reform, Reaction, and Resistance: Studies in the. History of German Conservatism from 1789 to 1945, ed. Larry E. Jones and James Retallack (Oxford and Providence: 1993), 187-227. 52. These three texts are conveniently collected in Richard S. Levy (ed.), Antisemitism in the Modern World: An Anthology of Texts (Lexington, Mass.: 1991), 56-93. The original references are as follows: Adolf Stoecker, "Unsere Forderungen an das moderne Judentum," in Christlich-Sozial: Reden und Aufsdtze (Bielefeld and Leipzig: 1885), 143-154 (speech to the Christian-Social Workers' Party, 19 Sept. 1979); "Praeceptor Germaniae," Preussische Jahrbilcher, 44 (1879), 572-576; Wilhelm Marr, Der Sieg des Judenthums uber das Germanenthum: Vom nicht confessionellen Standpurckt aus betrachtet (Bern: 1879). See also Michael Meyer, "Great Debate on Antisemitism—Jewish Reaction to New Hostility in Germany, 1879-1881," Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 11 (1966), 130-170; Moshe Zimmermann, Wilhelm Marr: The Patriarch of Antisemitism (New York: 1986). 53. Heinrich von Treitschke, "A Word About Our Jews" (1879-1880), in Levy (ed.), Antisemitism in the Modern World, 72-73. 54. See especially Norbert Kampe, Studenten und "Judenfrage" im Deutschen Kaiserreich. Die Entstehung einer akademischen Trdgerschicht des Antisemitismus (Gottingen: 1988). 55. There were a number of political parties in Wilhelmian Germany that placed antisemitism at the center of their programs (hence the capital "A"); but it has to be understood that other parties, the Conservatives, for example, included antisemitic planks in their much broader platforms. 56. See Paul W. Massing, Rehearsal for Destruction: A Study of Political Anti-Semitism in Imperial Germany (New York: 1949); Peter Pulzer, The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria, rev. ed. (London: 1988); Richard S. Levy, The Downfall of the Antisemitic Political Parties in Imperial Germany (London and New Haven: 1975); Dan S. White, The Splintered Party: National Liberalism in Hessen and the Reich 1867-1918 (Cambridge, Mass.: 1976); Helmut Biisch, Die Stoeckerbewegung im Siegerland. Ein Beitrag zur Siegerlander Geschichte in der zweiten Halfte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Siegen: 1968); James C. Hunt, The People's Party in Wurttemberg and Southern Germany, 18901914: The Possibilities of Democratic Politics (Stuttgart: 1975); Karl Mockl, Die Prinzregentenzeit. Gesellschaft und Politik wdhrend der Ara des Prinzregenten Luitpold in Bayern (Munich: 1972); David Blackbourn, Class, Religion, and Local Politics in Wilhelmine Germany: The Centre Party in Wurttemberg before 1914 (London and New Haven: 1980); David Peal, "Anti-Semitism and Rural Transformation in Kurhesscn: The Rise and Fall of the

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Bockel Movement" (Ph.D. thesis, Columbia University, 1985); David Blackbourn, "Roman Catholics, the Centre Party, and Anti-Semitism in Imperial Germany," in Nationalist and Racialist Movements in Britain and Germany before 1914, ed. Paul Kennedy and Anthony Nicholls (London: 1981), 106-129; Eley, Reshaping the German Right, 19-40. 57. See especially Hans-Jurgen Puhle, Agrarische Interessenpolitik und preussischer Konservatismus im Wilhelminischen Reich 1893-1914 (Hannover: 1966), which shows beyond all doubt that by 1914 antisemitism had been assimilated into the conservative mainstream via the Agrarian League. In contrast, Richard Levy's claim that by 1913-1914 antisemitic techniques had been discredited, and that the Conservatives were moving away from them, has no justification in the evidence he presents. See Levy, Downfall of the Antisemitic Political Parties, 3. 58. Ernst Hasse's opening speech to the annual convention of the Pan-German League in Eisenach, 25 May 1902, Kundgebungen, Beschliisse und Forderungen des Alldeutschen Verbandes 1890-1902 (Munich: 1902), 94. Hasse concluded his list of domestic political issues to be avoided with "agrarian politics, trading policy, and most recently the League for Reich Elections." For other, more radical spirits in the movement, such as Hasse's future successor as chairman, Heinrich Class, this was like discarding the baby with the bathwater, and after 1908 the Pan-Germans moved increasingly toward the synthesizing and coordination of these discrete and previously marginal concerns, fashioning them into the overall project of a radical-nationalist and vdlkisch reconstruction of right-wing politics. For a detailed discussion, see Eley, Reshaping the German Right, 242-253. 59. Heinrich Class, Wider den Strom. Vom Werden und Wachsen der nationalen Opposition im alien Reich (Leipzig: 1932), 130. 60. The full title was Wenn ich der Kaiser war. Politische Wahrheiten und Notwendigkeiten (Leipzig: 1912). The author's real identity was kept even from the rest of the PanGerman League leadership, and Class confided in only two of his closest collaborators. For the details of the book's distribution and impact, see Dirk Stegmann, Die Erben Bismarcks. Parteien und Verbande in der Spatphase des Wilhelminischen Deutschlands. Sammlungspolitik 1897-1918 (Cologne: 1970), 293-304. See also Class, Wider den Strom, 234ff. 61. For France, see the exhaustive study by Stephen Wilson, Ideology and Experience: Antisemitism in France at the Time of the Dreyfus Affair (London and Toronto: 1982), whose 812 pages leave no doubt that French antisemitism was equally as virulent and variant as the German. For Britain, see Colin Holmes, Anti-Semitism in British Society, 1876-1939 (London: 1979); Gisela Gebzelter, Political Anti-Semitism in England 1918-1939 (London: 1979), and idem, "Anti-Semitism—A Focal Point for the British Radical Right," in Kennedy and Nicholls (eds.), Nationalist and Racialist Movements, 88-105. 62. This description, which rankled for many years among the Pan-Germans, was made in a speech in the Reichstag on 12 December 1900 that attacked the League's political seriousness in light of its pro-Boer agitation. See Eley, Reshaping the German Right, 243. 63. For a full discussion of the sociology of the nationalist pressure groups, see ibid., ch. 4, "Inside the Pressure Groups," 101-159, esp. 118-40 ("Who Joined, Why, and What Did It Mean?"). 64. The Kartell der schaffenden Stdnde was a revival of the earlier right-wing political coalition formed in 1897-1898 (itself anticipated by Bismarck's turn to the right in 18781879), based on economic protectionism and antisocialism, and the cooperation of heavy industry and big agriculture ("iron and rye"). The distinguishing features of the 1913 version were a) the presence of the Mittelstand (freshly organized in its own national association), b) the prominence of Pan-Germans and other radical nationalists in its counsels and c) its extraparliamentary character, with a definite animus against the Reichstag and the existing constitution per se. 65. See here Geoffrey G. Field, Evangelist of Race; and Gary D. Stark, Entrepreneurs of Ideology: Neoconservative Publishers in Germany, 1890-1933 (Chapel Hill: 1981). 66. See especially the work of Uwe Lohalm, VolkischerRadikalismus. Die Geschichte des deulschvolkischen Schutz- und Trulzbundes, 1919—1923 (Hamburg: 1970), whose importance remains underappreciated in the literature. For my own thoughts, see Reshaping

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the German Right, 335-349, and "Conservatives and Radical Nationalists in Germany: The Production of Fascist Potentials, 1912-1928," in Fascists and Conservatives in Europe, ed. Martin Blinkhorn (London: 1990), 50-70. 67. See the following: Jack Wertheimer, Unwelcome Strangers: East European Jews in Imperial Germany (New York: 1987); Steven E. Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German Jewish Consciousness, J800-J 933 (Madison: 1982); Jonathan Frankel, "An Introductory Essay—The Paradoxical Politics of Marginality: Thoughts on the Jewish Situation During the Years 1914-21," Studies in Contemporary Jewry, vol. 4, The Jews and the European Crisis, 1914- 21, ed. Jonathan Frankel (New York: 1988), 3-21; Geoff Eley, "Remapping the Nation: War, Revolutionary Upheaval, and State Formation in Eastern Europe, 1914-1923," in Ukrainian-Jewish Relations in Historical Perspective, ed. Peter J. Potichnyj and Howard Aster (Edmonton: 1988), 204-246. 68. The best introduction is through Paul Weindling, Health, Race and German Politics between National Unification and Nazism 1870-1945 (Cambridge: 1989). 69. See here the many works of Sander L. Oilman, for which Jewish Self-Hatred: AntiSemitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews (Baltimore: 1986), and The Jew's Body (New York and London: 1991) may stand in; also Judith Halberstam, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Durham: 1995), esp. 86-106.

The Italian Racial Laws, 1938-1943: A Reevaluation Susan Zuccotti (NEW YORK)

The theme of continuity or contingency, when applied to the racial laws in Fascist Italy between 1938 and 1943, gives rise to conflicting interpretations regarding both origins and impact. Did the laws in this most Catholic of states involve a continuity with the past—with religious antisemitism and comprehensive restrictions that lasted in most of the Italian states until 1860 and in papal Rome until 1870? Or were they a contingency, a temporary aberration, an alien concept in liberal Italy imposed by the powerful new German ally or, at the very least, by Prime Minister Benito Mussolini, eager to please that ally? Concerning impact, did the racial laws in turn initiate a new continuity, easing the transition between Mussolini's independent Italy and the deportations and murders of Jews following the German occupation in September 1943? Or was there no meaningful connection between pre- and postoccupation Italy? Did most Italians regard the fierce Nazi persecution of Italian Jews, aided and abetted by Fascists still loyal to the puppet Republic of Salo, as yet another new and alien contingency? Answers to these questions have been impeded by the failure of scholars to agree even upon the nature of the racial laws themselves—upon the degree of harshness involved in both their content and their enforcement. The issue is fundamental, capable of distorting all that follows. Historians viewing the laws as mild, for example, may be less reluctant to recognize a continuity with earlier religious antisemitism, but any connection between Italy before the occupation and after may then remain obscure. Those perceiving the laws as harsh, in contrast, may dismiss continuity with preexisting Catholic attitudes and focus responsibility exclusively on the Nazis or, at least, Mussolini. Continuity between Mussolini's original state and the horrors committed by his subsequent puppet regime, however, then becomes more apparent. This chapter proposes to reexamine the content and enforcement of the racial laws, to clarify specific misunderstandings, assess their actual impact and clear the ground for the consideration of broader issues of continuity and contingency. In the years since the Second World War, historians of the Holocaust, especially non-Italians, have tended to view both the content and the enforcement of the Italian 133

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racial laws as comparatively mild. Anti-Jewish statutes imposed by Mussolini between September 1938 and July 1943 were, according to historian Robert Wistrich, "less rigorous than their German models. ... "' With regard to enforcement, Wistrich goes on to say that "a mixture of administrative corruption, general disorder, casual carelessness, and humanitarian sentiments shown by many Italian officials made their application far less severe than in Germany."2 "Italian Fascism never pursued its anti-Jewish program with the fanaticism of other fascist movements," adds historian Paul Bookbinder.3 Raul Hilberg agrees, writing that "the Italian government failed to follow up its [racial] decrees and, frequently, even to enforce them."4 While these general assessments contain an element of truth, they convey an inaccurate impression of mildness. In addition, historical descriptions of specific provisions of the laws have often included inadvertent errors or half-truths that have helped reinforce perceptions of a "gentle" or halfhearted policy. Examples include: 1. "[A]ll Jewish converts to Catholicism were exempted [from measures excluding Jews from public schools]."5 2. "Exemptions were granted to those that fought for Italy in the First World War and those who had fought for Fascism prior to the ascent to power."6 3. "Even under the Race laws, nearly one quarter of the native Jewish population in Italy qualified for exemption."7 4. "Mussolini betrayed his own lack of commitment to racism by granting legal exemptions to Jewish families whose members had been war veterans, early members of the Fascist party, or had earned 'exceptional recognition.'"8 5. "The continuous presence of several thousands of foreign Jewish refugees in Italy on the eve of the war is proof that the Fascist regime did not enforce the racial laws strictly."9 These misleading statements and the assessments they reinforce are caused in part by knowledge of events subsequent to Italy's entry into the war on the German side in June 1940. Between 1941 and 1943, diplomats and military personnel from officially antisemitic Italy frequently protected Jews in Italian-occupied Croatia, southern Greece and southeastern France from the Germans, the Ustasha (the Croatian fascists) and Vichy French officials demanding their deportation or murder. Later, during the German occupation of Italy from September 1943 until the liberation, many Italian citizens incurred great risks to help Jews threatened with deportation. But benevolent behavior at such levels does not prove that the racial laws were neither severe nor enforced. Misinterpretations may also derive from the accounts of survivors, who tend to emphasize positive rather than negative personal experiences under the racial laws. Primo Levi, remembering the professor in Turin who hired him as a student research assistant, did not dwell on the four or five others who rejected him on racial grounds.10 Enzo Levi, a lawyer, honoring colleagues in Modena who allowed him to practice behind the scenes, said little of others who were delighted with a decline in competition. 11 Memo Bemporad, an industrialist, discussing Fascist officials who readily agreed to endorse his petition for exemption from the racial laws, did not explain why that petition was refused. 12 Augusto Segre in Casale Monferrato,

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moved by an old friend in military uniform who insisted on walking with him after the publication of the racial laws, did not linger on others who had turned their backs.13 That survivors were not irrevocably embittered by their experiences under the racial laws and later under the German occupation is a tribute to the support they often received from non-Jews. It is not a proof that the laws themselves were mild or poorly enforced. As is well known, the antisemitic laws decreed in Italy in 1938 were officially preceded on July 14 by the infamous Manifesto degli scienziati razzisti, in which ten so-called experts (of whom only one had national stature) declared that "the majority of the population of Italy today is of Aryan origin . . . there exists a pure Italian race . . . [and] the Jews do not belong to the Italian race."14 A few days later, the Ministry of the Interior announced that the Central Demography Office would become the far more sinister Office of Demography and Race, familiarly known as the Demorazza. The new agency supervised two countings of Jews in August. The first consisted of the collection of past and present membership lists from all the Jewish communities in Italy. It was, in other words, a religious and cultural, rather than a racial, count. The second, compiled by the provincial prefects and completed by August 22, was a listing of all "racial Jews" in each province, regardless of community membership, religious affiliation or presence in a mixed marriage. It indicated that in a country of about forty-five million people, there were 47,252 Italian Jews and 10,173 foreign Jews.15 Ominously enough, the first law to affect Jews in Italy was entitled "Provisions for the Defense of the Race in Fascist Schools."16 Dated September 5, the law had been rushed through to precede the new academic year. Overnight and without warning, Jewish teachers at all levels were denied their positions. Jewish children were prohibited from attending public elementary and secondary schools. Jewish students already in university programs were permitted to finish their studies, but no new students could enroll. The law was initially meant to apply to "anyone born of two parents of the Jewish race, even if he professes a religion different from the Jewish one." A subsequent measure on November 15 added that no books written entirely or partially by Jews could be used in the schools. It also declared that elementary schools with more than ten Jewish pupils were to establish separate sections and facilities for them. Secondary schools had no such obligation, but individual Jewish communities could organize their own schools if they wished. Jewish students could prepare for and take government examinations, but always separately.17 A law affecting foreign Jews followed two days later, on September 7.18 Jews who were not citizens could no longer maintain legal residence in Italy, Libya or the Dodecanese Islands. Still worse, Jews who had been naturalized after January 1, 1919, lost their citizenship and were regarded as foreigners. They became stateless. Article 4 of the law specified that Jews who had immigrated after January 1, 1919, must leave the country within six months. Immigrants remaining in March 1939 were to be expelled. The definition of Jewishness was the same as that in the law regulating education. Uncertain cases were to be decided by officials of the Ministry of the Interior.

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Fascist Italy's principal racial law, entitled "Provisions for the Defense of the Italian Race" and consisting of twenty-nine articles, was dated November 17,193 8. 19 The first article declared that "marriage between an Italian citizen of the Aryan race and a person belonging to another race is prohibited." While this prohibition applied to "races" in general, subsequent articles were specifically anti-Jewish. Jews were prohibited from serving in the military "in peace and in war." They could not own or manage businesses or factories involved with the national defense, or businesses, factories or land over a certain size or value.20 They were prohibited from employing "Aryan" domestic servants and from belonging to the Fascist party. They were denied employment in national, provincial or communal administrations, or in public institutions, banks or private insurance companies. Articles 17 and 23 repeated the September measures against foreign Jews. Article 25, however, conceded to those who had reached the age of sixty-five or had married Italian citizens before October 1, 1938, the right, upon immediate application, to remain in the country. Article 8 of the law of November 17 addressed the thorny question of who was to be considered Jewish. Legally Jewish were those with two parents "of the Jewish race," regardless of their own religion; those with one parent "of Jewish race" and one "of foreign nationality"; those with a Jewish mother and an unknown father; and those with at least one Jewish parent who themselves "may belong to the Jewish r e l i g i o n , . . . or have been inscribed in a Jewish community, or have demonstrated, in any other manner, manifestations of Jewishness." Not to be considered Jewish was "anyone with two Italian parents of whom only one wasJewish, who, on the date of October 1,1938,. . . belonged to a religion other than the Jewish one." In other words, to be declared nonJewish, the offspring of mixed marriages were required to produce proof of prior baptism. Subsequent measures permitted the baptism at birth of children of mixed marriages born after the onset of the racial laws. Article 19 of the law called for another Jewish census. According to Article 14, the Ministry of the Interior could, on a case by case basis after individual application and the submission of proper documentation, grant to specific categories of Jews exemptions from prohibitions on military service (a policy soon changed, as will be seen), ownership or management of large businesses, factories and land, and employment in private insurance companies. The first category included the families of those killed in the Libyan War, the First World War, the Ethiopian War, and the Spanish Civil War, as well as those who fell "for the Fascist cause." The second category listed several groups: wounded veterans, volunteers or medal winners from the above-mentioned wars; those wounded in the Fascist cause; those who joined the Fascist party in the years between 1919 and 1922 (that is, before Mussolini came to power) or in the second half of 1924 (after the assassination of Senator Giacomo Matteotti by Fascist thugs on June 10); those who had served with Gabriele D'Annunzio in Fiume in 1919 and 1920; and individuals of an undefined "exceptional merit" as determined by a specially organized commission responsible to the Ministry of the Interior. Exemptions could be extended to the spouses, children and parents of the individuals concerned, even if the individuals themselves were deceased. It will be observed that the first three total or partial errors enumerated above can be addressed already. Regarding the first point, all Jewish converts to Catholicism

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were decidedly not exempted from measures banning Jews from public schools. Converts with two Jewish parents were considered to be Jews, and were banned; baptism rendered an individual legally not Jewish and thus eligible to attend public schools only if he or she had at least one non-Jewish parent. No one who was legally Jewish could be exempted from educational racist measures. Exemptions could apply to measures on ownership and management of resources, employment in private insurance companies and, somewhat later, continuation in certain proscribed private professions, but not education. Second, exemptions were not granted to those who fought for Italy or for fascism. Rather, those individuals were merely eligible to apply for such concessions. Similarly, nearly one quarter of the native Jewish population in Italy did not qualify for exemption, but were merely qualified to apply. In fact, as will be seen, well over 25 percent did apply, but positive decisions for exemption fell far below that level. It bears emphasizing that an individual was qualified to apply for exemptions if he or she met one of the criteria mentioned above, but not if he or she was simply a Jewish spouse in a mixed marriage. Jewish spouses lost employment, education and property rights, and the whole family suffered accordingly. This category was particularly important in Italy, given the exceptionally high rate of intermarriage before 1938. 21 Furthermore, the grant of exemption status did not automatically cover all of the prohibitions mentioned in Article 14 as liable to concessions (ownership or management of certain resources and specific nonpublic employment), but only those deemed relevant by the special commission. And as Memo Bemporad explained, even those "could be (and were) revoked at any time by any Fascist prefect or federale or even by more modest party functionaries." 22 The racial laws of 1938 were extremely severe for their time. Indeed, it can be argued that they were at least as onerous as the original Nuremberg Laws of 1935 (until Kristallnacht on November 8, 1938). German Jewish elementary-school children were not initially excluded, while secondary-school and university students were subject to a numerus clausus. Property restrictions in Italy were harsher than equivalent provisions under the 1935 Nuremberg Laws, although here too the Nazis caught up by the middle of 1938. 23 Italian exemption policies were narrower than those initially offered to German Jewish civil servants and professionals. 24 Measures against foreign Jews in Italy included their expulsion—a step the Nazis took against thousands of Polish Jews in the autumn of 1938, but not against all foreign Jews until the (much more tragic) onset of deportations in 1941. Moreover, Jews naturalized in Italy after 1919 who lost their citizenship became stateless, while in the Third Reich their counterparts were placed in the special and somewhat more favorable category of "subject" in 1935. More severe in Germany, of course, was the fact that all Jews, including the native-born, lost citizenship and became mere "subjects" at that same time, and were required as well to carry special documents. That sweeping measure was adopted in Italy only at the end of November 1943 by the Republic of Salo. Definitions of Jewishness in the two countries were roughly similar as they applied to full Jews, but differed with regard to the children of mixed marriages. In Italy, the baptism of misti, provided that it had occurred before the racial laws or within ten days of birth, made all the difference, and those so baptized would normally be

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considered Aryans. In the Third Reich after the Nuremberg Laws, all children of mixed marriages, unless they practiced Judaism or were married to Jews (in which case they were deemed full Jews), fell into the category of Mischling and were subjected to certain restrictions. Baptism for them was irrelevant. Obviously, then, the baptized children of mixed marriages fared far better in Italy than in Germany for, as full Aryans, they suffered no restrictions. However, the unbaptized children of such marriages, unless they had specially identified themselves with Judaism, initially fared better in Germany, for in Italy they were regarded as fully Jewish. Further complicating the situation, individuals with only one Jewish grandparent in Germany were Mischling, and thus restricted, whereas in Italy they were clearly Aryan. Roughly as severe as those in Germany in 1938, the Italian racial laws were harsher than their counterparts in more traditionally antisemitic nations such as Romania and Hungary. Furthermore, they were more oppressive in many respects than the laws issued in Vichy France in October 1940 and June 1941. Throughout the war, intermarriage was never prohibited in France as it was in Italy, and Jewish children were never banished from public primary and secondary schools. A numerus clausus was applied to admission and attendance at universities, but no complete ban was issued. Some naturalized Jews, along with some naturalized nonJews, saw their citizenship rescinded on a case by case basis after a special review, but the Vichy government never denaturalized all Jews who had become citizens since 1919, or any other more recent date. It must be added, though, that while no law ever decreed that all foreign Jews must leave France within six months, the Vichy regime did round up tens of thousands of foreign Jews in both the occupied and unoccupied zones during the summer of 1942 and thereafter, delivering them to the Germans for deportation. The consequences, of course, were far more devastating than those of the Italian racial laws of 1938. In the months following adoption of the November 1938 laws, the Italian government issued a host of additional proscriptions against the Jews. Among the most drastic of these measures was a law promulgated in the summer of 1939 requiring the special registration of Jewish professionals such as notaries, journalists, medical doctors, pharmacists, veterinarians, lawyers, judges, accountants, engineers, architects, chemists, agronomists and mathematicians. All Jewish notaries were prohibited from practicing. Jews could not continue as journalists unless they had exemptions. In the other professions, unexempted Jews could practice only among themselves. Many other prohibitions in 1939 and 1940 emanated from administrative circulars rather than from legislation. Initiated by individual bureaucrats who saw the laws as "incomplete," the resulting circulars from the Ministry of the Interior constituted sheer harassment. 25 Jews could not own radios, place advertisements or death notices in the newspapers, publish books, hold public conferences, list their names and numbers in telephone directories, or frequent popular vacation spots. Local ordinances, in turn, were often even more onerous than the national laws and circulars. Licenses for small businesses, shops, restaurants or cafes were often revoked, whether or not their owners had exemption status. In Rome, for example, even the licenses of Jewish ragpickers and secondhand clothes dealers were can-

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celed, to the delight of their non-Jewish competitors but to the dismay of their customers. 26 Supplies were often denied even to legitimate businesses. Individuals were fired by their employers, quite apart from legal requirements. Needless to say, the victims had no recourse. Equally arbitrary was a policy introduced on July 13, 1939, by which a Tribunale della razza composed of three judges and two officials of the Ministry of the Interior could simply rule that a Jew was not a Jew at all. This "aryanization" program defined no standards or criteria, and required no explanations or justification. The commission had full discretion to act as it saw fit. Unlike exempted Jews, who as a result of real services to their country or to the Fascist party were relieved of some racial proscriptions, beneficiaries of the aryanization program were treated as full Aryans and subjected to no prohibitions at all. On the surface, this program implies leniency and nonenforcement. The extent to which it was applied will be examined below. In contrast to developments in the Third Reich, racial policy in Italy before the German occupation did not, with two exceptions, intensify after 1939. Jewish citizens before September 1943 were not driven from their homes to be assembled in particular buildings, ghettos or cities. There was no imposition of the Star of David, no special Jewish stamp on documents, no restriction of movement. Jewish schools, synagogues and charitable organizations functioned freely, with little interference or violence. Antisemitic incidents occurred on a limited scale, but there was no equivalent of Kristallnacht.27 The two exceptions, however, were certainly harsh. With the Italian entry into the war, there began a policy of the arrest and internment of foreign Jews and of Jewish citizens suspected (even on the flimsiest grounds) of disloyalty. This policy was officially confirmed by decree on September 4, 1940. And on May 6, 1942, partly to address non-Jewish complaints that Jews were not serving in the military, an administrative circular ordered that all Jews between the ages of eighteen and fifty-five were to register for obligatory labor service. Previously secured exemptions were not applicable. Both of these programs were ominous and could easily have had disastrous results. In France, among other countries, Jews in forced labor or internment camps were the first to be deported in 1942. The fate of their counterparts in Italy will be examined below. The Italian racial laws were harsh in content, and they were also harshly enforced. The first step toward enforcement involved the listing of Jews. Italian civil servants responsible for compiling those lists clearly scurried about with zeal to fulfill their obligations. In a careful study of bureaucratic responses in the Province of Cuneo, for example, historian Adriana Muncinelli concludes: For anyone who nourishes illusions, based on the stereotype of the good people of our country, of a bland and disenchanted application of the racial measures on the part of the provincial and local authorities, tempered by good sense and the priority given to other values, a summary reading of the documentation of the entire operation preserved at the State Archives of Cuneo is enough to shatter them. 28 Anxious not to miss anyone in the obligatory listing of all Jews in his province on August 22, 1938, the prefect of Cuneo included all family members of any individ-

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ual with a Jewish name—Debenedetti, Levi, Diena, Jona, Segre, Sacerdote— regardless not only of the religious affiliations of spouses and children of mixed marriages, but also of possible conversions of individuals with "Jewish names" that had occurred generations earlier. Furthermore, he carefully and seriously investigated the origins of many other names unusual in the area, and thus "suspect."29 Many individuals had no idea that their names were on a Jewish list until actual persecutions ensued. Once informed, of course, they could submit baptismal records and "clear themselves." But since conversion was only relevant in cases of the offspring of mixed marriages, many with names such as Levi or Segre were obliged to prove not only the Christianity of their parents, but of their grandparents as well. Predictably, clarification proceeded at a snail's pace, and those involved suffered from loss of jobs, property and education and from the right to marry non-Jews— often until the end of 1942, and sometimes longer. 30 Since even a conscientious prefect could not be certain of finding all the Jews in his province, zealous employees or even private citizens occasionally stepped in to rectify an oversight. Thus, a representative of the Ministry of Public Instruction in Cuneo, checking through the names of teachers in his area for possible dismissal if they were Jews, reported a woman suspected of being Jewish simply because her father's first name was Abramo. The woman, Rosa Mirandola, lost her position immediately, and an exhaustive and complex investigation continued until January 1943. Not irrelevant to the investigation was the desire of the two bureaucratic officials involved to outdo one another in their efficiency, zeal, and even understanding of the issue. 31 Lists compiled by prefects in 1938 and by the self-registration required in 1939 were carefully revised and updated in the years that followed. At least 2,633 Jews who had escaped notice in 1938 and had not registered themselves in 1939 had been "discovered," as was the case with Rosa Mirandola, by 1942. Many had been denounced, investigated, tried and punished. Included in their number were 160 in Milan, sixteen in Livorno, and eight in Turin.32 Finalizing lists, of course, involved reaching decisions on applications for verification of Jewishness, aryanization or exemptions. In all cases, the process was ponderous and corrupt. Concerning the verification of Jewishness, existing data reveals that of a total of 9,647 requests by February 1942, the Office of Demography and Race had decided that 3,466 applicants were Jewish and 1,787 were Aryan.33 Cases still unresolved numbered 4,394, with those individuals awaiting resolution meanwhile being treated as Jews. With regard to aryanization—a process subject to corruption almost by definition because of the absence of criteria for decision-making—there were 163 requests by October 1942. Of these, the Tribunate della razza had decided 104 in favor of aryanization and forty-three against. Sixteen cases were still under consideration. 34 The proportion of favorable decisions suggests leniency—the intent of the program to begin with—but the numbers were small and the process was so demeaning that such a description is deceptive. The simplest way to achieve aryanization was to claim illegitimate birth to a Jewish mother in an adulterous affair with a non-Jewish father. The offspring of the alleged mixed relationship would then produce a false baptismal certificate, and wait.35 As the waiting period lengthened, the petitioner

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would be approached by experts "in touch with the commission" who offered to expedite his or her case. Even when made, decisions were often not communicated, in order to draw out the process and increase charges. Fees could run as high as 500,000 lire. 36 While aryanization was (for a price and for limited numbers) broadly interpreted, the exemption program was executed far more rigidly than was generally understood both at the time and subsequently. The program had initially been offered for several reasons. It appeased King Victor Emmanuel III, whose objections to the racial laws had involved his concern for Italian Jews who had clearly demonstrated their loyalty to the country. 37 It soothed the consciences of a handful of members of the Fascist Grand Council—Luigi Federzoni, Italo Balbo, Emilio De Bono—who had expressed their displeasure at the meeting on October 6, 1938, that had been called to discuss the pending legislation. 38 It also reassured the Italian non-Jewish population generally, and calmed internal reactions. Mussolini himself never liked the exemption program, telling Galeazzo Ciano during a break in the Grand Council meeting, "Exemptions don't mean anything. We have to raise the problem. ... So, even if I am conciliatory tonight, I will be very tough in the preparation of the laws." 39 This confidence refutes the allegation (listed as error 4 at the beginning of this article) that Mussolini lacked commitment to racism and favored an exemption program. The laws nevertheless did provide for concessions: the toughness came in the enforcement. As Federzoni later recalled of Demorazza officials, "in the execution of the [racial] laws they managed to annul as many of the concessions as they could, . . . reducing the actual scope of the exemption program to little more than a glimmer. . . ."40 One of the first acts of sabotage of the program was the government decree of December 22, 1938, which definitively removed all Jewish officers and junior officers from the armed forces, regardless of their exemption status. As seen, Article 14 of the racial laws in November had specifically included military service among the activities for which exemptions could be granted. The inclusion had especially pleased the king, whose definition of "worthy" Italian Jews focused especially upon the military. 41 One month later, the concession was overruled, on the grounds that military officers were civil servants, and thus ineligible for exemptions according to other clauses of the racial laws. 42 The hypocrisy is evident. There were numerous categories of eligibility for exemptions that involved past military service: descendants of men killed in their country's past wars, or men who had volunteered for, or been wounded, or decorated in those wars. Many men with these personal service records were still on active duty. Their careers were now brutally terminated. Immediately after the prefects' census of 1938, the Office of Demography and Race estimated that 3,502 Italian Jews might be eligible to request exemptions for themselves and their families on the grounds of service in war or to the Fascist cause, and another 834 might claim "exceptional merit." Together they represented 4,336 individuals, or about three times that number if extended to families. By June 1, 1942, the office had received many more applications than expected—from 8,171 individuals, representing some 15,339 people. By January 15, 1943, it had examined 5,870 cases, approving 2,486 and refusing 3,384.43 The number approved was

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somewhat more than half of those estimated to be eligible in 1938. When extended to families, it represented 6,494 people—roughly 14 percent of the 47,252 Italian Jews believed to have been present in 1938. It also bears repeating that these beneficiaries did not enjoy the restoration of all their rights as citizens. They still could not teach or send their children to school, work in the public service or marry non-Jews. Nor could they be confident that their limited exemptions would not be annulled overnight. Barring corruption, the real standard determining exemptions involved politics (that is, support for Fascism) rather than a military record or "exceptional merit" through economic achievement or public service. Memo Bemporad, for example, himself an important industrialist and theoretically eligible because of economic merit, also had a grandfather who had fought with Garibaldi, an uncle killed in the First World War after being decorated, a mother who had received a silver medal for medical service during that same war, and a father-in-law several times decorated for war and civilian services. Several prominent Fascists endorsed his petition, including his old friend Tullio Tamburini, prefect in the 1930s and early 1940s and later chief of police under the Republic of Salo. With no record of service to Fascism, however, Bemporad and other family members did not receive exemptions.44 Giorgio Bassani, an engineer from Mondovi, owned and operated a metallurgical plant employing 300 people whose jobs would be at risk if it were taken from him. He provided low-rent housing for his employees and, consistent with the Fascist demographic campaign, offered six months' free rent to families when a child was born. In support of his petition, the carabinieri reported that he was "highly regarded publicly." The local prefect declared him "a worthy member (un benemerito) of the metallurgical industry." But Bassani had joined the Fascist party only in 1933, and the local Fascist Federation report on him was lukewarm. His request was also refused. 45 Once lists had been compiled and exemptions decided, the racial measures remained to be enforced. Considering foreign Jews first, it appears that those naturalized since 1919 did in fact lose their citizenship. They numbered about 900 people, but since most of them had entered Italy before 1919, they were not required to leave the country. Expulsion measures affected some 9,000 Jewish immigrants who had arrived after January 1919.46 Of these, another 900 had received official permission by March 1939 to remain in the country, either because they were over age sixty-five or else married to non-Jewish Italians. 47 That number increased slightly when the Ministry of the Interior decided to "tolerate" some foreign Jews judged "worthy of special consideration." 48 "Worthy" Jews tended to come from countries whose diplomatic representatives protected them. The unworthy were from the Third Reich and its allies—the very immigrants most in need of asylum. What type of requests based on "worthiness" were refused? From the Province of Cuneo, Muncinelli mentions two: Ladislao Roboz, Hungarian by birth, Italian by choice, father of two children born in Italy, medical doctor, member of the Sindacato fascista dei medici, and Catholic convert with his entire family; and Giacomo Goldberger, also Hungarian by birth, naturalized, and a doctor. 49 With their requests refused, both left Italy in 1939. More fortunate, but only in the short run, was Alessandro Schiffer, born in Hungary, baptized and confirmed in the Catholic

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Church in Italy, married to a non-Jewish Italian citizen, successful in business in his new country of residence and himself naturalized in 1927. Schiffer lost that citizenship, but was allowed to remain in the country because of his Italian wife. As a foreign Jew, however, he was not allowed to work or move freely about the country. He was harassed more by some authorities than by others until February 1944, when he was interned by carabinieri at Borgo San Dalmazzo, subsequently to be deported to his death at Auschwitz. 50 After subtracting the number allowed to remain from the number affected, it appears that some 7,000 to 8,000 foreign Jews were expected to leave Italy under the racial laws. Only 3,720 had left by March 1939, and as the deadline for expulsion approached, bureaucrats in the Ministry of the Interior, aware that foreign Jews often had nowhere to go and unwilling to drive them all into a no-man's-land at the frontier, temporarily suspended the expulsion decree.51 Intense government pressure for emigration continued, however, along with a more rigid ban on the right to work and an awareness on the part of the Jews themselves that the expulsion decree could be reinvoked at any time. Thus, government reports indicate that the number of foreign Jewish emigrants rose to 6,480 by September, and continued to increase until Italy's entry into the war in June 1940. 52 These statistics are somewhat deceptive, for some of those who left may have been from other categories (those permitted to remain, or recent refugees passing through). Nevertheless, there exists a strong suggestion that most foreign Jews vulnerable to expulsion under the racial laws left the country. Many were hounded and harassed mercilessly by police in what historian Klaus Voigt calls "real psychological warfare to accelerate their exodus."53 Terrified of being expelled to their home countries, German and Austrian Jewish immigrants, in particular, made desperate efforts to find alternative places of refuge. Needless to say, they left the country impoverished, for their bank accounts in Italy were blocked and the transfer of assets was prohibited. 54 While the Ministry of the Interior certainly enforced racial measures against foreign Jews already in Italy, the picture is muddied by the Foreign Ministry's policy between February and August 1939 of admitting Jews with temporary tourist visas, without accompanying visas for entry into other countries. Some 5,000 Jews, mostly desperate Germans and Austrians, entered Italy at the same time that their compatriots were being required to leave. This policy is usually explained not in humanitarian terms, but as a response to the Italian tourist and navigation industries, facing hard times and anxious for customers. It was based on the assumption that the "tourists," carrying valid documents, would go home after their visits. As return became less likely and as the number of Jewish "visitors" soared during the late summer of 1939, this easygoing policy was abandoned. Meanwhile, Jews caught with expired tourist visas, along with other foreign Jews who had neither left nor received permission to remain, were ordered to be conducted to an isolated frontier of their choice, unobserved from the other side—usually France, Switzerland or Yugoslavia—and quietly pushed across. The victims, terrified of a more forcible expulsion into the Third Reich, usually cooperated.55 Theirs was a more gentle expulsion, but expulsion it remained. The "partial error" number 5, listed at the beginning of this text, may now be

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examined more closely. "The continuous presence of several thousands of foreign Jewish refugees in Italy on the eve of the war is proof that the Fascist regime did not enforce the racial laws strictly." Certainly, measures against foreign Jews constituted only one aspect of the racial laws; possible leniency in one case says little about enforcement as a whole. In addition, however, while the remaining presence of foreign Jews in 1940 indicates that the regime did not physically expel every possible victim in the country, the words "not . . . strictly" seem inappropriate. That well over 6,480 foreign Jews felt obliged to leave a country where many had lived for years may well be defined as strict. That foreign Jews were harassed, threatened, detained, denied the right to work, deprived of their assets and pushed over frontiers is far from lenient. It is true that sympathetic local officials often drew the line at expelling Jews back into the Third Reich and ignored occasional orders to do so. But it is also true that when war came to Italy, thousands of foreign Jews were rounded up and interned or placed in supervised residence. They were not rounded up because they were "enemy aliens" for most of them were from the Third Reich or its supporters, allies of Fascist Italy. They were rounded up because they were Jews. It is a measure of the fear and uncertainty in which they lived that some foreign Jews actually welcomed internment in 1940. With the government now providing a modicum of room and board, the terrors of starvation diminished. As trains carrying internees turned south, fears of repatriation also receded for a time. In June and July, about 100 men in handcuffs arrived at a still incompleted and rough new camp situated amid malaria-infested bogs in Ferramonti-Tarsia, in the Province of Cosenza. Their numbers rose to 700 by September, when they were joined by Jewish refugees from Libya. During the next three years, hundreds of other refugees, mostly but not always Jews, arrived from Yugoslavia, Albania, Czechoslovakia, Greece and elsewhere. Nearly 2,000 were there in early September 1943, when Italian guards finally opened the camp as the German army approached. 56 The laws calling for the internment of foreign Jews, then, were enforced—not brutally but certainly thoroughly. Exact percentages are difficult to determine, for some foreign Jews went underground after 1938 while others entered Italy illegally as the war proceeded. Most historians agree with Renzo De Felice that "the majority of foreign Jews was progressively interned and concentrated."57 At least fifteen internment camps and more than 400 centers of enforced residence existed in Italy by 1942. Most were in the center or south, although many villages in the Veneto housed foreign Jewish families subject to the rules of confinement.58 Individuals received small daily subsidies plus fifty lire a month for housing. They were not permitted to work or travel outside specific perimeters, and they were obliged to report to the authorities regularly. Most were treated decently by both the authorities and the local inhabitants, and most remained reasonably comfortable until the German occupation in September 1943. At that point, most disappeared into the general populace, where they often found the help they needed to survive. Indeed, they may well have done better than foreign Jews allowed to remain in their homes, where they were legally registered and reluctant or fearful to leave. When the Germans arrived, Jews in enforced residence often had a stronger sense of the danger, and hid more quickly. 59 Among Italian Jews, most racial measures were also enforced. Predictably, appli-

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cation was most thorough in education and public administration, where Jews "overlooked" by those in authority were most likely to be spotted by zealous underlings, and where exemptions did not apply. Within a few weeks of the prohibitions, at least 400 Jewish civil servants (including 150 military officers), 500 private employees and 2,500 in the professions lost their positions. 60 All teachers and students known to be Jewish were removed; they numbered about 200 teachers and professors at all levels, nearly 1,000 secondary-school students and 4,400 elementary-school pupils.61 The professors included many of Italy's most prominent scholars: Attilio Momigliano at Florence, famous in the field of Italian literature and criticism; Federico Commeo, also at Florence, highly esteemed in jurisprudence and administrative law; Emilio Segre at Palermo, a future Nobel Prize winner in physics; Riccardo Bachi at Rome, a noted economist; Tullio Levi Civita, also at Rome, a world-renowned mathematician; Giuseppe Levi at Turin, a specialist in human anatomy; and scores of others. 62 Exemptions did not apply to them, and they were not made. They were not conveniently "overlooked," and few non-Jews publicly rose to their defense. In a quiet protest in Florence, Massimo Bontempelli refused to fill the chair left vacant by Momigliano, but he communicated his decision privately only to the Minister of National Education, Guiseppe Bottai.63 Also rigorously enforced in the educational sphere was the prohibition of textbooks by Jewish authors. At the end of August, the Federazione nazionale fascista degli industriali editori sent forms to all publishing houses, to be forwarded to the authors of their scholastic texts, to determine possible Jewish connections. Jewish editors and employees were dismissed. About 114 textbooks with "Jewish origins" were withdrawn from the schools. 64 A debate also ensued on the legitimacy of citing Jewish scholars in footnotes and bibliographies. Various solutions were suggested, until the distressing problem was resolved by a ministerial circular; reference to, and citation of, Jewish authors could be made in texts used in the schools, if absolutely necessary, as long as those individuals had died before 1850. Bibliographies could cite Jewish sources without restriction. 65 While the enforcement of measures involving censuses, foreign Jews, education and employment is clear, the complex issue of property expropriation remains more elusive and obscure. The ownership and management of businesses, factories and real estate was public knowledge. Once censuses were completed, bureaucrats with the responsibility of ferreting Jews out of their positions were able to pinpoint owners almost as easily as they did students, professors and civil servants. If they missed anyone, there were always business competitors or rivals—Muncinelli writes of the "appetites aroused by Jewish property"—eager to make Jewish ownership known.66 Unless owners had received exemption status, their large businesses and properties were duly scheduled for expropriation; they themselves were to be partially and gradually compensated over thirty years.67 Giorgio Bassani of Mondovi, who, as seen above, failed to secure the exemption that would have allowed him to keep his factory, lost it completely by the end of 1940.68 Moise Gabriele Levi lost his entire share of the bank bearing his name that he had run since 1907. His son Marco lost his managing position at the local ceramic factory, the other major industry in Mondovi apart from Bassani's metallurgical plant, and all Levi stock in the company was transferred to new non-Jewish holders. Moise Levi died soon

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thereafter, in 1940, at the age of sixty.69 In Mondovi in the Province of Cuneo, at least, racial laws on property were enforced with a vengeance. Many Jewish owners tried to reduce damages by initiating their own controlled property transfers. Some sold out quickly on their own, unleashing what one observer after the war described as an indecent scramble to buy up Jewish property cheaply.70 Others tried to shift official ownership to trusted non-Jewish associates, or to convert privately held enterprises or even personal estates into joint stock companies in which they retained a controlling interest. Owners of small shops, businesses or land not large enough to be subject to expropriation often did the same, in anticipation of future trouble. All types of property transfers were challenged in court, where decisions, predictably, were usually unfavorable to the Jews. 71 While impressionistic accounts of expropriation and loss abound, statistical evidence remains to be unearthed and compiled. It is clear, however, that virtually all Jewish property above the value defined in the laws was affected in one way or another. If some owners salvaged a part of their possessions, it was not because bureaucrats did not try to enforce the law, but because some non-Jews were willing to help Jewish friends and associates. It is equally clear that small owners and employees suffered economic distress, usually because of the enforcement of local persecutory ordinances. As Guido Buffarini Guidi at the Ministry of the Interior reported to Mussolini after one year of the policy: In contrast to what is happening with regard to comfortable Jews [who were, according to him, evading expropriation through phony stock transfers], Jews belonging to the categories of employees, modest professionals, workers, artisans and traveling salesmen, etc., who live only from the proceeds of their daily work, have been placed in the position of not being able to provide their families with the basic necessities of life.72

In addition to educational, employment and economic constraints, Jews in Italy were, as seen, subjected to numerous petty harassments. How consistently were these enforced? The answer probably depends upon whether enforcement was easily visible. Jews secretly retained radios, surely. Barred from visiting vacation spots in the summer of 1939 and later, some continued to do so discreetly, but some of these were asked to leave when an anxious innkeeper feared detection and penalties. Jews did not publish obituaries or list their names in telephone books, for someone was sure to notice and protest these public acts. Their books were no longer issued in their names, although sympathetic editors sometimes allowed them to publish under pseudonyms. Under some duress, the Casa Editrice Bemporad in Florence agreed in 1939 to become the Casa Editrice Poliziano; the Casa Editrice Lattes in Turin became the Editrice Libreria Italiania S.A.; the Casa Editrice Formiggini in Rome obtained the name Edizioni dell' I.C.S.73 This may not have been book burning, but neither was it mild and harmless. Before the war, moreover, some 2,500 "Aryan" domestics working for Jews reluctantly relinquished their positions and worried about finding new ones—a clear indication of enforcement of a measure that greatly inconvenienced many nonJews.74 Survivors frequently mention loyal domestics who worked illegally, even for reduced wages or for no pay at all. 75 Such evidence indicates not that officials

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did not enforce the racial laws, but that they succeeded primarily within the public sphere. Most onerous of the harassments, perhaps, were the public declarations of hatred that appeared everywhere. Sion Segre Amar vividly remembered the bitterness of his honeymoon in Florence, interrupted at every turn. Waiting to buy tickets for a symphony concert, he read in // Telegrafo on December 31, 1938, that no Jewish composers, directors, conductors or musicians would be part of the program. At the movies, he saw a large announcement that no films by the "Jewish producers" of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer would be shown. Back home in Turin, he went to a favorite fashionable cafe. In big bright letters of red and gold, to harmonize with the decor, were printed the words, "Entrance prohibited to dogs and Jews."76 Memo Bemporad recalls similar incidents in Florence: "You know," my mother-in-law told me, "this morning in such and such a shop I found a sign reading 'Jews are not served here,' and in one cafe, 'Jews are not admitted' and in another 'access prohibited to dogs and Jews.'" I remember the names and addresses of several. But let's leave them to their misery.77

Such signs were not imposed by the original racial laws, which did not prohibit the presence of Jews in public places. They resulted in part from local ordinances, often quietly recommended from above, and in part from individual initiatives. If non-Jewish customers objected, the fact is not mentioned in the memoirs. By the time Italy entered the war, the racial laws had, for the most part, been thoroughly enforced. Appeals regarding the verification of Jewishness and exemption status continued, along with litigation involving property. The expulsion of foreign Jews was converted into internment. Some 6,000 Italian Jews and 7,000 foreigners had left the country. Those remaining had been effectively removed from the public sphere, the public eye and the public consciousness. Only one new persecutory measure, as previously noted, was introduced before September 1943, and interestingly enough, it became the first case of failed enforcement. On July 31, 1943, an official report declared that 15,517 Jewish men and women between the ages of eighteen and fifty-five had registered for the forced labor program decreed a year earlier. Of these, 2,410 had received temporary dispensations and 1,301 permanent ones. Of the remaining 11,806 people, 2,038 had actually worked—only 13 percent of the total number registered.78 The sight of their Jewish countrymen and women performing forced manual labor in public places had proved to be unpopular with Italian non-Jews. And the government had other worries. The indisputable harshness of the Italian racial laws, both in their content and in their enforcement, needs to be acknowledged. Some 58,000 Jews in Italy suffered before the war from an official persecution equal to that existing in some other Central and East European countries but unknown in Europe west of Germany. They did not suffer from an equivalent popular rejection, hatred or violence, perhaps, although the humiliation of hate posters and an antisemitic press was a daily reality. Nor did the persecution escalate into terror and murder until after the German occupation. But the suffering was nonetheless real, and should never be minimized. The persecution and suffering were successfully imposed by, and inextricably

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linked to, a Fascist regime. Fascism, even in tolerant Italy, developed a racist dimension—a fact that, in light of the resurgence of neo-fascism in Europe, should be carefully recalled. Enforcement may have succeeded more from careerism than conviction. It may have occurred through the efforts of two or three small offices at the Ministry of the Interior, the Ministry of Public Instruction and the Ministry of Popular Culture, at odds with other government officials almost as much as with the Italian public. But it occurred, with little popular support but with equally little resistance. Acknowledgment of that reality enables historians and political scientists to raise a different set of questions not only about the nature of Mussolini's regime, but about the Holocaust in Italy generally. What was the nature of dissent from the racial laws within and between the ministries? If, as historians usually believe, most of the Italian elites disliked the laws, from where did the enforcement come? How was it possible? What does all this tell us about totalitarian regimes? Finally, given their record of demonstrated sympathy to persecuted Jews during the Holocaust, where and why did some Italians finally draw the line? How visible and agonizing did the persecution have to be before it was noticed and opposed? Are we to believe that people accepted laws that removed the Jews from public life, but became involved when the issue was one of life or death? Diplomats and military personnel in the Italian-occupied territories of Croatia, Greece and southern France seem to have done exactly that. Is such behavior predictable, understandable, "humane"? If so, do we see it elsewhere, in other countries? And how does the issue of continuity versus contingency help us to analyze and understand these questions? If, as it seems, the racial laws were more contingent upon the Fascist regime than an outgrowth of an earlier religious antisemitism essentially rejected by liberal Italy, does continuity with that same mixed cultural heritage nevertheless help explain the initial insensitivity and indifference of nonJews to the suffering of their Jewish compatriots? And if, as also seems likely, the racial laws prepared the way for the deportations and murders that followed, did popular illusions of contingency—the belief that direct physical cruelty could only be a product of the German occupiers and the vilest of Fascist lackeys, and was inherently un-Italian—nevertheless affect behavior and encourage rescue efforts? For that matter, did similar perceptions of contingency operate in other Western countries? Did a majority of French, Dutch, Belgians, Danes, Norwegians and Finns regard the destruction of the Jewish people as a phenomenon so alien to their national culture, despite the obvious participation in that destruction of some or many of their countrymen, that they could not accept or condone it? If so, how did that sentiment influence behavior? Did perceptions of continuity operate more strongly in the East, in Poland, in the German-occupied regions of the Soviet Union, the Baltic countries, Romania, Hungary and Yugoslavia? Did non-Jews in regions less affected by the revolutionary principles of liberty, equality and fraternity take persecution more for granted because it seemed an inherent part of the national culture? There is no clear correlation between prewar antisemitism and Jewish survival statistics in individual countries, for many other factors influenced rates of destruction. But surely popular perceptions, as opposed in some cases to the reality, of contingency and continuity did heavily influence behavioral patterns and survival rates.

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Whatever the answer to these questions, it is clear that any wartime assistance to Jews on the part of Italian non-Jews must be viewed in the context of a harshly defined and enforced antisemitic climate at home, not only after but well before the German occupation. Denial of that harshness is not only incorrect. It also diminishes the independence, originality and moral integrity of those Italian non-Jews who, whether few or many, whether early or late, finally did think, judge and act to help Jews, in opposition to the regime under which they had lived for twenty-one years.

Notes 1. Robert S. Wistrich, "Fascism and the Jews of Italy," in Fascist Antisemitism and the Italian Jews, ed. Robert S. Wistrich and Sergio DellaPergola (Jerusalem: 1995), 13-18, 17. King Victor Emmanuel III removed Mussolini as head of government in July 1943, but the Germans reinstalled him as head of the puppet Republic of Salo when they occupied Italy in September. The racial laws remained in effect until the end of the war, and persecution intensified greatly during the occupation. This essay is concerned with the racial laws in independent, preoccupation Italy only. 2. Ibid. 3. Paul Bookbinder, "Italy in the Overall Context of the Holocaust," in The Italian Refuge: Rescue of Jews During the Holocaust, ed. Ivo Herzer (Washington, D.C.: 1989), 95108, 100. 4. Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (New York and London: 1985), vol. 2, 660. 5. Stanley G. Payne, A History of Fascism 1914-1945 (Madison: 1995), 242. 6. Mario Sznajder, "The Fascist Regime, Antisemitism and the Racial Laws in Italy," in Fascist Antisemitism and the Italian Jews, 19-36, 30. 7. Wistrich, "Fascism and the Jews of Italy," 17. 8. Gene Bernardini, "Anti-Semitism," in Historical Dictionary of Fascist Italy, ed. Philip V. Cannistraro (Westport, Conn.: 1982), 28-30. 9. Sznajder, "The Fascist Regime," 31. 10. Primo Levi, The Periodic Table, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: 1984), 5354. 11. Enzo Levi, Memorie di una vita (1889-1947) (Modena: 1972), 108. 12. Memo Bemporad, La Macine: Storia di una famiglia israelita negli ultimi 60 anni di vita italiana (Rome: 1984), 52-54. 13. Augusto Segre, Memorie di vita ebraica: Casale Monferrato-Roma-Gerusalemme 1918-1960 (Rome: 1979), 258. 14. The document is cited in full in Michele Sarfatti Mussolini contro gli ebrei: Cronaca dell'elaborazione delle leggi del 1938 (Turin: 1994), 18-20. 15. Renzo De Felice, Storia degli ebrei italiana sotto il fascismo (Turin: 1961), 6, 9. The calculation for Jewish citizens was undoubtedly too high. 16. The full text of the law is printed in Sarfatti, Mussolini contro gli ebrei, 186. 17. Ibid., 195-197. 18. Ibid., 185. 19. Ibid., 190-194. 20. The size or value of property was defined as follows: any company that employed one hundred or more people; real estate worth more than 5,000 lire; and factories with taxable revenue above 20,000 lire. Regulations for the disposition of these properties were issued on February 9, 1939. 21. In a report to Mussolini in 1940, Undersecretary of State at the Ministry of the Interior (and later Minister) Guido Buffarini Guidi declared that census data revealed that mixed

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marriages constituted 59 percent of all marriages that included Jews. The report is found in a collection put together by his son, Glauco Buffarini Guidi, La vera verita: I documenti dell' archivio segreto del ministro degli Interni Guido Buffarini Guidi dal 1938 al 1945 (Milan: 1970), 38-43. 22. Bemporad, La Macine, 54. A federate was a Fascist party provincial secretary. 23. Small Jewish-owned businesses in Germany had suffered since April 1933 from official and unofficial boycotts. The law subjecting all Jewish property to registration and aryanization was promulgated on June 14, 1938, in the Third Implementation Order to the Reich Citizenship Law (the Nuremberg Laws). 24. For example, in 1933, German Jewish civil servants who had served in government since August 1, 1914, or who had fought for Germany or its allies in the First World War or whose fathers or sons had been killed in that war were automatically exempted from regulations banning Jews from the civil service. Exemption policies in the Third Reich became far more restrictive with time. 25. For an excellent analysis as well as examples of several important circulars printed in full, see Michele Sarfatti, "Documenti della legislazione antiebraica," La Rassegna Mensile di Israel: 1938: le leggi contro gli ebrei, 54, nos. 1-2 (Jan.-Aug. 1988), 169-198. 26. Eucardio Momigliano, Storia tragica e grottesca del razzismofascista (Verona: 1946), 112. 27. The worst incidents occurred in Trieste, where antisemitic sentiment had always been stronger than in other Italian cities. Attacks on Jewish individuals and shops became frequent in 1940. Vandals damaged the outside of the synagogue in October 1941 and destroyed lamps, furniture, and sacred scrolls and books inside on July 18, 1942. Elsewhere, antisemitic tracts were distributed in Ferrara in July and September 1940, and a synagogue was destroyed and a rabbi beaten on September 2, 1941. In Turin, equally vicious tracts and graffiti appeared just before and after an attempt to ignite the synagogue on October 14, 1941. Similar events took place in other cities. 28. Adriana Muncinelli, Even: Pietruzza della memoria: Ebrei 1938-1945 (Turin: 1994), 14. 29. Ibid., 18. 30. Ibid., 20. 31. Ibid., 20-22. The investigation determined that Rosa Mirandola's parents had been inscribed in the Jewish community in Alessandria and that her maternal grandmother had died in a Jewish hospital. She continued to insist that she was not Jewish. The Office of Demography and Race finally ruled that she was, unless and until she could produce baptismal records for herself, her parents and her grandparents. 32. De Felice, Storia degli ebrei italiania, 357. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid., 357-358. 35. The process is described by Momigliano, Storia tragica e grottesca, 107, and Antonio Spinosa, "Le persecuzioni razziali in Italia," ch. 4, "La legislazione," Il Ponte 9, no. 7 (July 1953), 950-968, 959. 36. Spinosa, "Le persecuzioni," 959; Momigliano, Storia tragica e grottesca, 101-102. 37. See Guido Buffarini Guidi's letter to Mussolini, 12 Sept. 1938, describing his discussion of the pending racial measures with the king, reproduced in full in Buffarini Guidi, La vera verita, 20-21. 38. Federzoni later described his and his colleagues' objections at that meeting and wrote, "we had fulfilled the obligations of our conscience. . . ."Luigi Federzon, Itatia di ieri per la storia di domani (Milan: 1967), 161. 39. Galeazzo Ciano, Diario 1937-1938 (Bologna: 1948), entry for 6 Oct. 1938, p 264. 40. Federzoni, Italia di ieri, 161. 41. See Buffarini Guidi's letter to Mussolini, 12 Sept. 1938, in Buffarini Guidi, La vera verita, 20. 42. Momigliano, Storia tragica e grottesca, 102-103. 43. De Felice, Storia degli ebrei italiani, 359-360. 44. Bemporad, La Macine, 51—52.

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45. Muncinelli, Even: Pletruzza della memoria, 99-100. 46. Klaus Voigt, // Refugio precario: Gli esuli in Italia dal 1933 al 1945, trans. Loredana Melissari (Florence: 1993), 299-300. 47. De Felice, Storia degli ebrei Italiana, 361. 48. Spinosa, "Le persecuzioni," 954. 49. Muncinelli, Even: Pietrmza della memoria, 43-44. 50. Ibid., 45-50. 51. Sarfatti points out, in Rassegna mensile, 169, that the resulting administrative circular was one of very few to attenuate rather than intensify the racial laws. 52. De Felice, Storia degli ebrei italiani, 361; and Voigt, // Refugio precario, 308-310. 53. // Refugio precario, 302. 54. Spinosa, "La persecuzioni," 954; and Voigt, Il Refugio precario, 300-301. 55. For a detailed discussion of Jewish "tourists" in Italy before the war, see Voigt, // Refugio precario, 310-322. 56. For more on Ferramonti, see Carlo Spartaco Capogreco, Ferramonti: La vita e gli uomini del piu grande campo d'internamento fascista (Florence: 1987); idem, "The Internment Camp of Ferramonti-Tarsia," trans. Ruth Feldman, in Herzer (ed.), Italian Refuge, 159-173; Francesco Folino, Ferramonti: Un lager di Mussolini: Gli internati durante la guerra (Cosenza: 1985); and Israele Kalk, "I campi di concentramento italiani per ebrei profughi: Ferramonti Tarsia (Calabria)," Gli ebrei in Italia durante il fascismo, (published by the Quaderni della Federazione Giovanile Ebraica d'ltalia, 25 April 1961), 63-71. 57. De Felice, Storia degli ebrei italiani, 363. 58. Ibid., 364. 59. It is fascinating to speculate about what could have happened, and perhaps nearly did, to Jews in internment. Klaus Voigt, "Jewish Refugees and Immigrants in Italy, 1933-1945," in Herzer (ed.), Italian Refuge, 141-158, shows that Nazi demands for the deportation "to the east" of these trapped and helpless people increased in the first half of 1943. He suggests (pp. 149-151) that officials at the Ministry of the Interior agreed, quoting a ministry document to the police, dated July 25, 1943; "Given the existing war situation, the opportunity exists to transfer 2,000 elements (including forty communists) who are now interned in the concentration camps of Ferramonti-Tarsia to the province of Bolzano." But Mussolini fell that evening, and consideration of the transfer ended. Had it occurred and had the victims continued on into the Third Reich, the Italian Fascist regime would have been guilty of doing precisely what the Vichy regime did in August 1942—delivering foreign Jews from unoccupied territory to the Germans. Delivery one year later than the French action would have occurred with fuller knowledge of the consequences of deportation. 60. Report by Guido Buffarini Guidi, quoted in Buffarini Guidi, La vera verita, 39; and Spinosa, "Le persecuzioni," 963. 61. Spinosa, "Le persecuzioni," 962-963. 62. A list of the names, fields and location of ninety-seven professors who lost their positions was printed in Il Popolo d' ltalia, 13 Oct. 1938, and is reproduced in Spinosa, "Le persecuzioni," 960-962. 63. Momigliano, Storia tragica e grottesca, 133. 64. Spinosa, "Le persecuzioni," 962. 65. The ministerial circular is quoted in Alberto Cavaglion and Gian Paolo Romagnani, Le interdizioni del Duce: A cinquanf anni dalle leggi razziali in Italia (1938-1988) (Turin: 1988), 33. 66. Muncinelli, Even: Pietruzza della memoria, 92. 67. For discussion of the organization known as EGELI (Ente di gestione e liquidazione immobiliare), established by law on March 27, 1939, to administer Jewish property regulations, see Adolfo Scalpelli, "L'Ente di gestione e liquidazione immobiliare: note sulle conseguenze economiche della persecuzione razziale," Gli Ebrei in Italia durante ilfascismo (Quaderni del Centra di Documentazione Ebraica Contemporanea II, March 1962), 92-112. 68. Muncinelli, Even: Pietruzza della memoria, 91. 69. Ibid., 62 and 91.

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70. Momigliano, Storia tragica e grottesca, 103. 71. Spinosa, "Le persecuzioni," 964-968, cites many court decisions strictly enforcing racial property measures. 72. The report is quoted in Buffarini Guidi, La vera verita, 41. 73. Cavaglion and Romagnani, Le interdizioni del Duce, 34. 74. De Felice, Storia degli ebrei italiani, 356. 75. For just two examples, see Momigliano, Storia tragica e grottesca, 92-93; and Carlo Modigliani, Una croce e una Stella: Dal mio diario (Milan: 1959), 40-42. 76. Sion Segre Amar, // mio ghetto (Milan: 1987), 134-138. 77. Bemporad, La Macine, 54. 78. De Felice, Storia degli ebrei italiani, 366.

The Dreyfus Affair in Vichy France: Past and Present in French Political Culture Henry Rousso

(INSTITUT D' HISTOIRE DU TEMPS PRESENT, CNRS, PARIS)

On November 3, 1940, La France au travail, a collaborationist daily, printed a sixcolumn headline reading "A Dreyfus Affair—Never Again!" Such optimism was the result of an order from the Ministry of War forbidding Jews, in application of the law of October 3, 1940—the first Statut des Juifs under the Vichy regime—to volunteer or reenlist in the French armed forces. Those who volunteered had to be French a litre originaire, the son of a French father or, failing this, a direct descendent of someone who had fought in the First World War.l The statute prohibited Jews from becoming officers (even noncommissioned), but did not prevent them from being privates. The ministerial order that described the application of the law to the French army sounded like vengeance for the "Affair." Five years later (January 27, 1945), the Court of Justice at Lyons sentenced Charles Maurras, the founder of the ultranationalist Action francaise movement, to life imprisonment and "national degradation" (national dishonor) for secret dealings with the enemy. The jury had not heeded the prosecutor, who had pleaded that this old anti-Dreyfusard, faithful supporter of the revolution nationale, be sentenced to death. As the gendarmes were leading him out of the courtroom, Maurras cried: "This is Dreyfus' revenge!"2 These two explicit references, chronicled at the beginning and the end of an epoch, might suggest that the Dreyfus affair was a stinging memory during the occupation, or even that certain aspects of the civil war between 1940 and 1944 were its replays in a much more tragic context. This interpretation is not unrealistic, fitting as it does into a broader thesis that views the Dreyfus affair as a historical paradigm in contemporary French political life. It may help explain the unyielding structural recurrence of internal strife throughout the twentieth century; the unhealable fracture between supporters and opponents of the republican ideology; and the contours and limits of Jewish assimilation in France.3 In this volume on the fate of the Jews during the Second World War as viewed from a long-term perspective, the purpose of this essay is to consider what effect the recollection of the Dreyfus affair had, or did not have, on France under the Vichy 153

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regime. How did references to what had been a major crisis for the nascent republic, as well as one of the strongest displays of European antisemitism in the nineteenth century, affect discourse and action forty years later—on a stage where antisemitism had become state policy and where the Final Solution was part of the script? What have to be examined are the lengthy sequels to the affair; their explicit links with the protagonists and the events of the Vichy period; and, more broadly, the memories or social representations that then came into play. Such an analysis should throw light on how the past provides sustenance for political actions and traditions; on how the present uses the past; and on how the past influences ultimate political goals (if there are any). This foray into the "collective memory," here defined as the dynamic relation that a social group, a community of thought or an entire nation may use to cope with its history, is indispensable when measuring the relevance of the abovementioned "paradigm" and the real or assumed particularities of the Jewish fate during the last war. From this vantage point, a distinction needs to be made between the Dreyfus affair as perceived and imagined by those who personally lived in Vichy France, and the historical or sociological analysis that, with hindsight, can elucidate filial linkages, analogies and irreducible differences that may not have been visible at the time. The distinction between these two levels of reading is especially important because the focus of this article is a recent period of which the memory is still very much alive. Both the Dreyfus affair and Vichy are still today—to some extent— crucial factors in the political traditions of France. Herein lies the ultimate justification for the question put forth in this article. The period from Dreyfus to Vichy is not a closed chapter; to examine it means trying to grasp unfinished history: each of these two events is still exerting an impact on us all.4 Inevitably, it is difficult to avoid reading these phenomena from an ideological viewpoint or, even worse, in an anachronistic or Ideological light. These introductory words of warning are not without cause. For several years, contemporary French historiography has been striving to determine whether antisemitism (which very few historians fail to recognize as a deep-rooted, permanent reality in French national traditions) is one of the keys to understanding the nation's major political crises, including the most recent ones. This contention fits into a wider debate on the nature of French fascism that stems from the writings of Zeev Sternhell. The question was raised in relation to Vichy: were Marshal Phillippe Petain's antisemitic ideology and policies central to an understanding of the very nature of the regime and its overall policy or not, and if so, to what extent?5 This discussion is indirectly connected to a debate of even more immediate concern—that concerning the nature of the French radical right, whose influence has been steadily growing during the last few years. Is the movement of the far right the latest incarnation of anti-Dreyfusism and Petainism, or is it a "new" political movement whose roots, avowedly, are sunk in the French nationalist and racist tradition, but whose actions can only be understood within the present-day context? Is it a resurgence or an emergence? These distinctions involve more than subtle academic nuances. They have a direct impact when it comes to selecting modes of

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political action and seeking ways to parry the extreme right.6 Similarly, the debate on the role, position and extent of antisemitism in the French political culture, both past and present, forms part of the increasingly acute question of how to act and think as a Jew in the French society of today, a society that is torn between the republican model, with its assimilationist tradition, and the appeal of the communautariste (or "multicultural") model.

Direct Sequels to the Affair When the Vichy regime was established, the Dreyfus affair was forty years old. This was no small period of time, considering the world-shattering events that had marked the history of France and the rest of Europe in the interim: the First World War, the advent of fascism, Nazism, Communism and the first military victories of the Third Reich. The Dreyfus affair, although not forgotten, already belonged in certain ways to another era, the era of the young republic, which in the 1890s was still fragile. But forty years is not so long when measured against the normal span of human life. Many of the protagonists in the affair were still alive during the occupation; and even those born thereafter preserved the collective memories and, at times, were left with their own searing scars. Alfred Dreyfus died in 1935. The destiny of his family constitutes the most distinctive link between the two events.7 It exemplifies the variety of experience suffered by the French Jews under Vichy and demonstrates how the weight of the past can decide human destinies. Dreyfus' son-in-law, Pierre-Paul Levy, the husband of his daughter Jeanne, was drafted in 1940. He tended to downplay the true nature of the early persecutions, even though they were embodied in French law. On June 16, 1941, he wrote, "the government is doing everything it can to postpone and attenuate the measures imposed on it." This was less than a fortnight after the second Statut des juifs had been promulgated. 8 His four children, Simone, Madeleine, Etienne and Jean-Louis, in contrast, participated actively in the resistance movement. Between 1943 and 1944, the two boys joined the Organisation juive de combat, which was a small group of Zionists who formed the Castres maquis in the southwest of France. Madeleine became one of the martyrs of the underground resistance. She worked in the social welfare services of the Combat movement, one of the main resistance organizations within France, and was promoted to the rank of adjudant (sergeantmajor) in the Forces frangaises de 1'interieur (FFI), before being arrested in Toulouse in November 1943. She was then deported and, in January 1944, murdered in Auschwitz. For their part, Alfred Dreyfus' nephews, Rene and Henri (the sons of his brother Jacques), were arrested in the sweeps of the spring of 1942. Henri, the radicalsocialist mayor of Carpentras, had earlier been stripped of his title by the Vichy regime. He regained office after the war. Dreyfus' great-nieces and great-nephew, France, Suzie and Jean-Pierre (the children of Marguerite Dreyfus-Reinach Mercier, daughter of Mathieu Dreyfus), were

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active in the Gaullist resistance movement. France went to Cuba and then to Montreal, where she worked as a secretary for the Forces navales francaises libres. Suzie was arrested in 1943 in the Italian-occupied zone. Jean-Pierre Reinach, who enlisted in the armed forces of the Free French, was killed in June 1942 after having been parachuted into France by the French central intelligence bureau. Pierre Dreyfus, Alfred Dreyfus' son, managed to evacuate his family by sea from Marseilles to New York. His visa had been obtained through the Joint Distribution Committee, one of the international organizations that remained very active until November 1942, when the south of France was invaded and occupied. In the U.S., he contacted the Free French and found a job at the Office of War Information. Regardless of how suspicious one may be of family determinism, this tale is very illustrative. The Dreyfus family indeed fell victim to the fate awaiting the Jews of France as a collectivity and, like other such families, it was dismantled, torn apart, with some of its members arrested and deported. At the same time, it was undoubtedly far more engaged than the average French Jewish family in the resistance movement, be it on the home front, in the Resistance exterieure or even in the Jewish Resistance proper. This may have been partly the result of immediate factors. But there is no escaping the idea that it was also related to recollections of the Dreyfus affair. The overarching motivation that inspired members of the Dreyfus family to join the Resistance clearly seems to have been patriotism and belief in French democratic values, rather than political commitment per se. The biographical details described above are varied, but none alludes to any Communist affiliations. This is where the weight of the Dreyfus affair, and its profound significance, came to the fore. Fidelity to family traditions, more or less marked, was not unique to the descendants of Dreyfus. It can, for example, be recalled that one of the five general commissioners for Jewish affairs in the Vichy regime (February to May 1944) was Charles Mercier du Paty de Clam, the son of the officer Armand Mercier du Paty de Clam, who had made his debut in history on October 15, 1894, by arresting Dreyfus. Was this the reason for his appointment? It is possible, even probable. The Commission for Jewish Affairs was run on criteria that reflected an irrational fanaticism, which led to a murderous policy of collaboration with the Nazis—sometimes coupled with the most grotesque situations.9 Mercier du Paty de Clam was acquitted by the High Court of Justice on March 19, 1947, which decided that he had rendered his service in an "ineffective" manner. He had had no visible qualifications for occupying the post; he had just a name. These filial linkages may be few in number, but they are laden with meaning and show how fidelity to the past, whether in favor of this side or that, can be an important factor in the making of commitments. This said, there were too few such direct sequels to the Dreyfus affair to consider them as decisive evidence of continuity between the two crises. The protagonists of the Dreyfus affair who were still alive in 1940 (apart from, perhaps, Charles Maurras), played a marginal role in Vichy. The passage of time between the Dreyfus and the Vichy era had taken its toll, and the momentous intervening events had likewise served to cast the 1890s into shadow. The relation between the two events has thus to be understood primarily in terms of political representations; the past, after all, is always a reconstruction given shape by the exigencies of the moment.

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French Antisemitism between Tradition and Innovation Whoever delves into the plethora of antisemitic texts of the early 1940s, be they Petainist, collaborationist, clericalist or secular, quickly sees that allusions to the Dreyfus affair were few and far between. Vichy propaganda very seldom referred to the affair. This was especially true because hatred for Jews, although set out in the regime's legal enactments, was not a preferred theme, usually being relayed to the public indirectly.10 A look at the literature recommended to the members of the Legion frangaise des combattants, which spearheaded the "national revolution," provides a good example. The list contained not only books like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion or La France juive but also the Precis de I'Affaire Dreyfus by DutraitCrozon, which was the primary reference book for the anti-Dreyfusards.11 But not a single book on the Dreyfus case was published between 1940 and 1944, either in the Northern or the Southern zone, although the times would seem to have lent themselves well to revisionist interpretations.12 And any mention of the affair by an author or a newspaper was always very brief. In one of the most fanatically antisemitic brochures of the era, entitled Juifs, je vous hais, no real mention is made of the Dreyfus affair in the 140-page history of the "Jewish takeover" in France and the world. How surprising, since the brochure was produced by Henry Coston, a prolific antisemite and a disciple of Edouard Drumont. The only reference there to the event that had served as one of the foundation stones of French antisemitism was a famous drawing made in 1899 of Dreyfus at the Rennes trial, with a legend that read "Dreyfus, the Jew, Before his Judges." It served to illustrate an article on the "Jews in the French Army," but the article itself made no mention of the affair!13 That the Dreyfus affair was not highlighted by Vichy is a fact that has rarely been noted in historiography; it is also unexpected and certainly worthy of explanation. First, one of the accusations serving as a leitmotiv of antisemitic discourse during the occupation was that the Jews had been responsible for the war against Germany and, causally, for the defeat of 1940, and that this was a war which "French people" had not wanted. This theme was in full accord with the logic of nationalist pacifism that, during the 1930s, had advanced arguments of a nature diametrically opposed to those employed at the time of the Dreyfus affair. An article dated September 1941 to celebrate the opening of the Paris exhibit on "The Jew and France," a widely recognized success, reads: It is obvious that the Jewish question has become one of unprecedented immediacy for the French people. The "average Frenchman," in general, until now, has not been antisemitic. Only some theoreticians . . . had proclaimed themselves to be such. For a short number of years, the Dreyfus affair did reactivate the anti-Jewish movement, but after that, and especially after the First World War, the commotion calmed down, and except for a small number of individuals and publications, the masses paid little attention to the strong vice in which Israel held France. And when National-Socialist Germany, for reasons not understood in France, started taking measures of racial defense, a certain pity was shown for the refugees who came seeking asylum. France offered them generous but witless hospitality. It took the events of 1939 to open our eyes. We then realized—unfortunately, it was too late—that we had fought a Jewish war—a war for the Jews who were allied to international capitalism, Marxism, and Anglo-Saxon impe-

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rialism; that national disintegration, the cause of our defeat, was mainly the work of the Jews; and that recovery would only be possible if they were weeded out of our national life. 14

This accusation may sound like Nazi propaganda—one's thoughts turn to Hitler's speech of January 30, 1939—but its roots can be found in the Maurrassian tradition as it had developed in France after the First World War: The ravages of 1789-1830 and 1848 were made worse by the Dreyfusard revolution, which led to pillaged churches and national disarmament. Liberal democracy caused the temporary defeat of France by disorganizing and totally incapacitating our army. In its journals and in its courtrooms, it pronounced the doom of fifteen hundred thousand young victims of the forthcoming war [1914-1918].15

Such rhetoric had deadly consequences during the occupation. On January 10, 1944, Victor Basch and his wife, Helene, were killed by the Lyons Milice (the paramilitary force) in an act that was so senseless, so despicable, that even Lieutenant Moritz of the SS, one of the leaders of the Lyons SIPO-SD, refused to participate at the last minute on the grounds that the victims were "too old."16 Victor Basch was eighty-one years old and represented all the values that the French Milice hated. He had been a staunch defender of Dreyfus; and it was he who had rallied all the pro-Dreyfus forces during the Rennes trial. Later he became the president of the Human Rights League, an organization born during the Dreyfus affair.17 As far as the Milice was concerned, however, the main incentive for killing him was not to liquidate a symbol of the Dreyfus affair. At least this was not what his assassin, Joseph Lecussan (condemned to death and executed in 1946), explained when justifying the act at his own trial: This fugitive from the ghettos of Central Europe was one of the secret forces that gave orders to the French government. He was the founder of the Popular Front, which was to lead our country to catastrophe, and, therefore, bore heavy responsibility for the disaster of 1940. ... As a professor at the Sorbonne, he perverted the French youth. He was the prototype of the foreign Jew who, like Stavisky and many others, comes to play politics in France by forcing his way into the freemasonry. Basch made sure that the slaughterhouses of 1939-45 were well supplied. Victor Basch did not deserve to live in peace when he was to blame for the death of so many innocents.18

There is a second element that helps explain why the antisemites of the time did not use the Dreyfus affair as an explicit referent. Allusions to it were almost always made to demonstrate that the affair was a Jewish "invention"; herein lies a central rhetorical design—the conspiracy theory—that, since time immemorial, has structured antisemitic discourse. From this perspective, the details of the case (denunciation of Dreyfus as a traitor; the presence of Jews in the army) were less important than the affair per se, which was declared to be, in toto, a manipulation of public opinion by Jewish pressure groups. Je suis partout, the emblematic newspaper of the French fascist intellectuals, who broke away from Charles Maurras and from the old anti-Dreyfusard tradition in the 1930s, expounded the same idea. In a very long article (actually, a dossier) on "The Jews and France," dated February 1939, Robert Brasillach defended the idea of a Statut des juifs on the basis of the classical nationalistic postulate that "the Jews are

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foreigners." But although he recommended a measure that less than two years thereafter was to become official Vichy policy, he explained his position as follows: "Persecutions have always been the deed of anarchic peoples whose power is insecure." To his mind, a Statut desjuifs was simply not tantamount to persecution. This was a widely held idea in certain milieus and, during the early days of the occupation, was even disseminated in certain resistance groups. It was Brasillach who made the statement that was to become a recurring refrain of the Petainists and the collaborators: "Antisemitism is not a German invention. It is a French tradition."19 Lucien Rebatet, who prepared the dossier, traced the history of Jews in France and wrote a boxed article on the "Affair," which he termed "Israel's most gigantic maneuver." He went on to add: The author of this study has never doubted the culpability of Dreyfus. The same applies to most of the journalists here, who essentially belong to the postwar [First World War] generation and therefore did not experience the passions enflamed by the affair. [But] should this guilt be a dogma for French antisemitism? One can be a Dreyfusard, one can maintain an open mind about Dreyfus' innocence or guilt, and still be among the most steadfast antisemites.20

This statement of Rebatet again reflects the complex variety of attitudes held visa-vis the Dreyfus affair. The abundant historiography on the affair has demonstrated that antisemitism and anti-Dreyfusism did not always go together. There were antiDrey fusards who were not fanatical antisemites and, conversely, there were certain Dreyfusards who had antisemitic prejudices or reflexes. Further, the question of Dreyfus' guilt was not always the overriding priority for the anti-Dreyfusards. Some of them did not really believe him to be a traitor. In this war of ideas, the "cause," the defense of the army, or the "nation" was considered more important than the fate of one man. Similarly, for certain Dreyfusards, the importance of defending universal values far outweighed the importance of the personal destiny of one man, Alfred Dreyfus.21 Three years after the threatening dossier appeared in Je suis partout, Jean Drault, another disciple and companion of Drumont, defended a very similar thesis in his Histoire de I antisemitisme, published in 1942: The Dreyfus affair was nothing other than ... a volley of shot fired by the Jews against the antisemitism that was coming increasingly to pervade public opinion. JudeoFreemasonry had long been trying to stem the movement. . . . The Dreyfus affair seemed to be the perfect answer. A Jewish captain condemned for treason by a war council, on evidence that was nut given to the defense. What a magnificent theme!22

Yet a third factor contributed to keeping the affair out of the limelight during the occupation, even though this was a period of unlimited—indigenous—antisemitic ideology and of massive persecution. Most of the anti-Dreyfusards, both during and after the affair, truly believed that Alfred Dreyfus had spied for Germany. This is an element that is sometimes underestimated when historiography focuses too squarely on the "Franco-French" aspects and ideology of the affair. For many of the antiDreyfusards, the affair was "une affaire boche" to cite an expression invented by the daily Action francaise during the interwar period: "Initially, the Dreyfus affair, which occupied twelve years of our history, was nothing more than a matter of

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spying and treason, a mere episode in the war of deceit waged in our country by the Germans during peacetime";23 or again: "The mental and physical purge cannot be completed before this 'Dreyfus affair' has been sent back to its German [boche] fatherland, which it never should have left."24 Once this line of discourse was adopted, then reference to the affair was rendered of little use for anyone who, together with the Nazis, was trying to promote a French antisemitism anchored in French tradition. It must be remembered that the affair had been first and foremost a defeat for the anti-Jewish movement and had been perceived as such by the protagonists at the turn of the century, although in the climate reigning during the occupation it could theoretically have been interpreted, in retrospect, as a step toward the final victory of antisemitism. True, this consideration had not been weighty enough to prevent many references from being made to the Dreyfus affair in the interwar period, especially in the Action franqaise and in other newspapers on the far right, and this at a time when political debates were particularly harsh. But during the Vichy period, with the victory of the reactionary camp, the situation was radically different. The Dreyfus affair served to deepen division and national disunion: this was both an objective historical fact and a perception much alive in the minds of contemporaries and of subsequent generations. Seen in that perspective, reference to the anti-Dreyfusard fight could hardly be used by proponents of "national unity," be they collaborationists or Petainists. This was all the more true since it was the anti-Dreyfusards themselves who had decried the lack of unity during the interwar period, and had accused the Jews, using an inversion of blame that is commonplace in antisemitic discourse. Last, it was difficult for the collaborators of Nazi Germany—who, as already noted, advocated "Franco-German reconciliation"—to make anything much of I'affaire boche; the German occupiers, ultimately, might have been able to accept the idea of a "Jewish conspiracy" but could not agree to the slightest hint of German responsibility. This is one sign, among others, of the insurmountable contradictions in which the French fascists were caught during the occupation. On the one hand, they had to repudiate part of their nationalist heritage—the anti-Dreyfusard nationalism had been consolidated through joint denunciation of the Jews and Germany, the hereditary enemy—and, on the other, they asserted that French antisemitism had always existed and had predated the German variety. These contradictions had first begun to appear in the 1930s, with the growth of French fascist movements, which were fascinated by their Italian and German counterparts. During the occupation, they reached a peak.

The Dreyfusard Heritage The Dreyfus heritage was probably more alive within the Resistance than among the collaborators. Contradictions between the past and the present were less strongly felt by members of the Resistance because the battle against Nazism could be seen as the perfect continuation of the Dreyfusard battle. Strikingly enough, reference to the Dreyfus affair was most explicit and frequent among the Jewish Communists. In the autumn of 1941, a few months after the German invasion of the Soviet

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Union, a clandestine brochure entitled L'Antisemitisme, le racisme, le probleme juif was published. It was long considered the work of George Politzer, but was undoubtedly written by Louis Gronowski, one of the national leaders of the Main d'oeuvre immigree (MOI), who previously had been in charge of the Jewish section.25 In this eighty-page pamphlet, written in highly orthodox Marxist terminology, antisemitism is presented as a "weapon of capitalism" to divide the working classes and create a diversion during a period of "decline" among the ruling classes. After dismissing the Vichy persecutors and the Jewish plutocracy—"the Rothschild family"—in the same breath, and deploring the fate of "Jewish hostages who were shot at the same time as the other French patriots," the text turns to the Dreyfus affair: While the poor were busy attacking each other, the finance capital that fraternally united Catholic and Jewish bankers [extended its] hold over France. The noise of the fighting in the streets of France between Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards must have inured the French . . . against the cries of agony from thousands and tens of thousands of indigenous people in the conquered colonial countries, because it was precisely at this time that the colonial conquests were taking place. . . . This is how the affair centered on antisemitism served to make the labor pains of French imperialism less agonizing!26

Focused on conspiracy, this rhetoric—which calls to mind what Jules Guesde or even Jean Jaures had to say at the beginning of the Dreyfus affair—revealed an incapacity or a refusal to recognize the specific nature of Nazi antisemitism. This is a trait that the Communists shared at that time with other groups in the Resistance. It must be realized that contemporaries were often incapable of understanding situations that, with hindsight, seem very clear; recognition of this key fact is frequently missing in the present-day discourse on the Holocaust. At the time, many protagonists, including certain French Jews, refused to dissociate the "Jewish problem" and racial persecution from the fate of the French people as a whole. At the same time, perhaps not with entire consistency, these same Jewish Communists were the first to decry Nazi and Vichy actions aimed specifically at the Jews. In October 1940, in one of its underground publications called Undzer vort, the Jewish section of the MOI took the lead in denouncing the antisemitic legislation of the Vichy regime. In June 1941, shortly before Germany invaded the Soviet Union, this same section distributed pamphlets in reaction to the first roundups of Jews in Paris on May 14, 1941. The text, signed by a "group of Jewish women and children," appealed to French solidarity in the name of Dreyfusard values. "We must voice our pain and find, in your midst, an Emile Zola who will brandish a powerful 'J' accuse!' against this crime." Referring to the fate of 5,000 Jewish children who were arrested and interned, the tract concluded: To the French people! It is with a heavy heart that we turn to these "illegal" means to inform you of the suffering inflicted upon us. We well know the misfortune that has befallen the French people, and in this we have our share. But we cannot remain silent about the vile lies that have been cast at us by people without a conscience who depict us as responsible for the misfortunes of France. In the name of your glorious past, and in the name of the "Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen," and in the name of such great men as Voltaire, J. J. Rousseau, Victor Hugo, Emile Zola and Jean Jaures, we appeal to you to join us in a protest that comes from 5,000 innocent victims, from

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5,000 ruined households, from thousands of children exposed to hunger and misery. We call for the liberation of our spouses and children. We implore, "Justice! Justice! Justice!"27 It is significant that this text was written by Jewish Communists, most of whom were originally foreigners. They very powerfully affirmed their unshatterable faith in a universalist France, the "motherland of human rights." The tactical dimension, of course, should not be underestimated. Even though their perspective was that of a class-rooted anti-Fascism, they called the French ("you") to react against racial persecution in the name of Dreyfusard values, which were the values of the Enlightenment and of the French Revolution—in other words the values of "your" (the French) past. It took a few more months, though, before these Communists started to replace their strict Marxist vision by a claim to direct linkage with the Dreyfusard line. Thereby they were able to assimilate part of a historical heritage that might not have been their own, but which was not alien to them because of its universal message. Actually, for most of these members of the Resistance, there was no contradiction between their Communist commitment, their Jewish identity, and their passionate attachment to France.28 This evolution paralleled the evolution of the Communist party as a whole and its strategy, adopted in 1941, of calling for national unity. But it was also undoubtedly and very deeply the result of a new awareness—the awareness of their Jewishness, which meant that they were candidates for repression not only as members of the Resistance, but also, and even more strongly, as Jews ("Jews" included as well their wives, children and other relatives). Starting from 1942, the MOI established an underground press devoted to the fight against antisemitism. It brought out close to a dozen publications in French and in Yiddish. Two were written for a non-Jewish readership: J'accuse, which was launched in October 1942 in Paris, in the Northern zone, and Fraternite, based in Lyons, in the Southern zone. Each journal was published in print runs of between 1,000 and 5,000 copies. They were put out by the Mouvement national contre le racisme, which was founded in May-June 1942, and which brought together Jews, Catholics and Protestants such as Pasteur Vallery-Radot, Georges Duhamel and Robert Debre.29 The first issue of J'accuse, dated October 10, 1942, included long quotations from a pastoral letter by the Bishop of Montauban, Monsignor Theas, protesting against the roundups and reiterating a universal Christian message: "I shall make the Christian conscience, roused to indignation, heard, and I proclaim that all men, be they Aryan or non-Aryan, are brothers because they have been created by the same God; that all men, whatever be their race or their religion, have the right to be respected by men and by states." A pastoral letter by Monsignor Saliege, Archbishop of Toulouse, was also cited: "Jews are men, and Jewesses are women. One cannot do whatever one wants against them. They are part of the human race. They are our brothers as are so many others. A Christian cannot forget this."30 Thus, the Dreyfusard theme of the Jewish Communists was matched by a Christian message, or at least a message underwritten by Protestants and Catholic groups that objected to the general tendency of the Catholic Church. This gives an idea of

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the distance covered since the Dreyfus affair, with its accompanying and violent religious antagonisms. Ultimately, it may be important to note that for the Jewish members of the Communist resistance, the war often involved more than issues of morality or ideology: In the two-thousand-year history of Jewish martyrdom, there had never before been so favorable a conjuncture, in that the enemy [of the Jews] was likewise the enemy of all mankind. Never before had there been such unity regarding the purpose of a war—even if the democratic regimes did not like to delve too much into this issue. Why, then, did we nonetheless have such a feeling of solitude? Was it atavism? I do not think so. It was indeed not felt on the emotional, human or even political levels. But it came out in everyday matters and actions.31

In these complex thoughts of Adam Rayski, one of the leaders of the Jewish section of the MOI, there is a certain element of a posteriori reconstruction. But memory, even if taken forty years back, is still the reflection of an experience. And the feeling of "solitude" here expresses a feeling that many French Jews must have shared in the early 1940s. Are we not reminded of the fate of Alfred Dreyfus, alone on Devil's Island at a time of formidable commotion in metropolitan France?

Was Vichy the Anti-Dreyfusard Revenge? "What made France fall," Hannah Arendt has written, was the fact that she had no more true Dreyfusards, no one who believed that democracy and freedom, equality and justice could any longer be defended or realized under the republic. At long last the republic fell like overripe fruit into the lap of that old AntiDreyfusard clique which had always formed the kernel of her army, and this at a time when she had few enemies but almost no friends. How little the Petain clique was the product of German fascism was shown clearly by its slavish adherence to the old formulas of forty years before.32

Having analyzed the direct consequences of the Dreyfus affair in Vichy France and the perception of the affair at that time, the remaining question, then, is that of historical interpretation: how the relationship between the two events is to be judged in retrospect. This takes us to another level. Involved here is not only the discourse that identifies links (both explicit and implicit) between the 1890s and the 1940s, but also the issue of political action taken as a whole and within its own context.

Is Antisemitism Under Vichy on a Continuum With Anti-Dreyfusism? The immediate answer would be "yes"—the Statut des juifs drawn up in October 1940 and the similar antisemitic legislation of Vichy were all marked by the heritage of the Dreyfus affair. Of course, the immediate context (the foreign occupation) and the increasing weight of Nazi pressure on the French government must not be forgotten. That said, however, the Vichy regime chose on its own initiative to launch "state antisemitism": a term coined by the Action francaise and a concept justified by the ideologues of the regime. In court, in 1945, Charles Maurras

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vehemently rejected the idea that French antisemitism could be mistaken for the German variety (antisemitisme boche), and Xavier Vallat, the first general commissioner for Jewish affairs, resolutely denied having collaborated with the enemy, referring to the specifically French character of Vichy antisemitism.33 This "state antisemitism" was meant to negate totally the long-term trend that in republican France had produced the Juifs d'Etat (Jews prominent in the state service), to cite Pierre Birnbaum. State antisemitism, as a perfect negative, meant rejection of the assimilationist policy, born of the French Revolution, with regard to the Jews. But going even further, it meant rejection of republican principles as a whole, in particular the principle of citizenship. According to this organicist concept, Jews were not only "unassimilable" but also constituted, together with the Freemasons, a category to be especially targeted because of their excessively loyal support for the political system that Vichy wanted to destroy. The antisemitism of Vichy, perceived from this angle, was indeed a direct heritage from anti-Dreyfusard antisemitism, which was obsessed with the idea that the Jews were secretly worming their way into the supposedly crucial spheres of power and influence: the civil service, the armed forces, culture. The Statuts des juifs, police population records, economic "aryanization" and professional exclusion translated French antisemitism into acts based on an exclusionary principle. But this fact cannot be used to characterize the full range of Vichy antisemitic persecution. In the first place, the anti-Jewish measures were also an extreme expression of the xenophobic tendencies and measures that had emerged toward the end of the Third Republic. The clearest, most brutal manifestation of this trend was the establishment of a dense network of internment camps in the Southern zone. Similarly, the difference in treatment, under Vichy, of French Jews and foreign Jews (far harsher for the latter) was the result of this same prewar xenophobia, which in itself cannot be dissociated from antisemitism. Second, at that time, French antisemitism and xenophobia (like the Hitlerite versions) were regularly associated with anti-Communism. This explains why Vichy made special efforts to repress the Jewish Communists, who in their turn (through their operations as part of the Resistance), did indeed constitute a genuine threat to the regime. This overlap of Jews and Communists was exploited as a recurrent, effective theme of propaganda, which both Vichy and the Nazis used to sway French public opinion in favor of the massive internments and the first roundups. Third, and this is undoubtedly essential, there was a difference in the nature of the Vichy persecution that paralleled the first German operations until the spring of 1942 and the policy instituted after that date when the Final Solution was put into practice in France. The active collusion in the genocide, which is now well known and has been thoroughly analyzed, stemmed less from an explicit determination to participate in the extermination of the Jews (that was a Nazi, not a Vichy, project) than from the overall strategy of the regime: the wish to "negotiate" with the occupiers in order to obtain various advantages—a policy known as "state collaboration." The foreign and French Jews from both the Northern and the Southern zones were not turned over because the regime was antisemitic: that was a necessary but not a sufficient condition. Rather, the crucial considerations were, on the one

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hand, that Nazi coercion and pressure were strong and, on the other, that the Vichy regime was seeking, whatever the cost (here as in other matters), to assert its sovereignty in the face of the occupier. In the Vichy mind-set, in the eyes of someone like Rene Bousquet, who—unlike such fanatically antisemitic disciples of Maurras as, for example, Xavier Vallat or the fascist Darquier de Pellepoix (who had infinitely less responsibility than the head of the French police)—the fate of the Jews was of little importance compared to "reasons of state" and to the chance of achieving some reciprocal benefit in exchange for cooperation with the Nazis. This was made easier by the fact that the regime and the Nazis had the same enemies, even though at the outset they had not intended to treat them in the same manner. Nevertheless, the question that is brought out here cannot be satisfactorily answered by looking only at the antisemitic policy of Vichy. It requires investigation of other aspects of the regime's ideology and practice, always bearing in mind that the Dreyfus affair was not exclusively—not even mainly—a question of antisemitism.34 The crisis of 1898-1900 challenged the very idea of a republic as a political system. It brought out the question of the place of the army in the nation, and it was central in the confrontation between the Catholic Church and the republican state.

Was Vichy the Revenge of the Catholic Church? Seemingly yes, if reference is made only to the propaganda and diffuse ideology of the regime. More substantially, "yes" during its early period, between August 1940 and February 1941. There was a very pronounced clerical reaction that resulted in the reintroduction, not only symbolic, of religious education in the classroom and in the abrogation of certain provisions hostile to religious congregations that had been adopted during the vote of 1906 on the separation of church and state. The newspaper La Croix went so far as to proclaim, in September 1940, that "L'Ecole sans dieu a vecu" ("the days of schools without God are over"). But this clerical reaction was short-lived. As soon as Admiral Darlan came to power (February 1941), the regime did its best to avoid enflaming the dispute on schools that had marked the beginning of the century—a line consistent with the concern, then declared paramount, for "national unity." This policy, moreover, fitted well the tendency of the Vichy regime, then still in its formative stage, to present itself as essentially "modernizing." Vichy needed the Church to consolidate its influence, and the Church gave it as much assistance as possible, but the regime, withstanding unquestionable pressure, did not want to reopen wounds of the early 1900s. At the same time, as has been noted, many Catholics, through their acts of resistance and their solidarity with the victims of the regime, explicitly served the "Dreyfusard" tradition.

Was Vichy the Revenge of the Army? Yes, this is quite possible. In June 1940, General Maxime Weygand refused the orders of the government instructing him to surrender to the German victors. (As a result, as desired by the army chiefs, a political armistice had to be signed instead.) This was a clear act of rebellion against the republican institutions, and the first breach of the pact (introduced after the Dreyfus affair) that had made the military

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subordinate to the civil power. The army thus sought to evade responsibility for defeat. Next came the idea that the army remained as the only hope. The determination of some of the military leaders, first and foremost Petain, to stop the war as quickly as possible in order to "protect the social order" served as the starting point for the future Vichy regime. And thus a clique of high-ranking officers, nurtured on anti-Dreyfusism, on hate and on a spirit of revenge against the republic, contributed openly to a system already toppling under the blows of the defeat. The Vichy regime, therefore, was partly born from this spirit of vengeance. It was led by and even found its incarnation in a prestigious marshal who became the subject of a veritable cult—more because of the aura hallowing him as the "victor of Verdun" than because of his political policy. But the Vichy regime was not a military dictatorship. The prefects, the police and administrative services as a whole—in the occupied zone even more than in the Southern zone—had an incomparably more important role to play than the ragged army that, following the armistice, survived on the toleration of the Reich. Considering the unprecedented military defeat and the subjection of the country, any revenge by the army could only be very limited. All in all, then, should one concur with those who consider the Dreyfus affair as a paradigm setting a pattern to be repeated at the time of Vichy and the occupation? For Michel Winock, what had been new in the affair was in fact that, in contrast to all the previous conflicts of nineteenth-century France, it did not simply pitch Right against Left (as these terms had traditionally been understood since the French Revolution) nor class against class.35 It was a crisis in which two systems of values confronted each other; and in which the "intellectuals" played a new, pivotal role— claiming truth versus authority, justice versus order, reason versus instinct, universalism versus exclusive nationalism, and individualism versus holism. These two opposing systems of value subsequently resurfaced in all the French political crises, including that of 1940-1944. But although relevant and largely justified, this thesis has a major flaw in that it reduces the Vichy crisis to a strictly internal French affair, a mere episode in the "Franco-French wars." In reality, this crisis was additionally the French aspect of a worldwide conflagration, and the policies of the Vichy regime can only be understood within that context, meaning specifically the Nazi occupation and the Second World War. The fact is that the Dreyfus affair cannot be reduced to the issue of antisemitism alone, as Winock has clearly demonstrated. And similarly, the anti-Jewish policies of Vichy cannot be reduced to a mere resurgence of anti-Dreyfusard antisemitism. On the one hand, the principal crime—collusion in the implementation of the Final Solution—was due less to state antisemitism than to state collaboration, and, on the other, the logic of the regime went beyond the desire for revenge against Dreyfusism. Vichy, whether viewed by the historian or by the elites of the time, involved more than resentment against the past. It was neither a military dictatorship nor a clerical government, but rather a regime possessed of its own ideological ambitions and of a vision that situated France as a member of Nazified Europe. Furthermore, the thesis that gives pride of place to continuity leaves a shadow

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cast over the consequences of the First World War and, in particular, over its decisive contribution to the rise of Nazism and fascism, on the one hand, and to the emergence of Communism, on the other. These were two major developments that had direct effects on the evolving nature of antisemitism, in France as elsewhere. If the actors, particularly in Vichy and the collaborationist camp, did not simply act in accordance with the anti-Dreyfusard tradition, it was because they found themselves placed in another historical configuration. And this fact must not be neglected in our retrospective interpretations on the grounds that actors are not always aware of the history in which they are moving. Quite the contrary—as I have tried to show here—the recollection of the affair during the Vichy regime was dim because it could not readily be put to political use at that time, and because it did not serve the objectives set out by the Petainist regime and the French fascists. The Dreyfus affair shook a political system, the republic, down to its very foundation. But at the end of the day, there was only (or nearly only) one real victim. The Vichy crisis was a catastrophic threat to France, to the very existence of France as a nation. But at the same time, it was no more than the expression—at the level of a single nation—of an enterprise that threatened all of mankind and that took millions of lives.

Notes This essay is a revised version of a paper presented at the conference "One Hundred Years After the Dreyfus Affair," held at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, November 6-10, 1994. I thank Zeev Sternhell, who was one of the main organizers of the conference, for giving me permission to publish this article in the present forum. I would also like to express my appreciation to Tilly Gaillard, who translated this essay from the French.

1. Order by the Ministre secretaire d'etat a la Guerre, dated 23 Oct. 1940. Published in Journal officiel de la Republique francaise (which had not yet become the Journal officiel de I'etat franqais), 1 Nov. 1940. 2. Le Proces de Charles Maurras. Compte rendu stenographique (Paris: 1946), 371. 3. This notion of "historical paradigm," which is obviously inspired by Hannah Arendt's thesis in her Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), is expounded in detail by Michel Winock in his article "Les affaires Dreyfus," Vingtieme siecle. Revue d'histoire, special issue on the "Guerres franco-francaises," no. 5 (Jan.-March 1985), 19-37. See also his Lafievre hexagonale: Les grandes crises politiques 1871-1968 (Paris: 1987) ("Points-Histoire"). The thesis on ideological continuity between the various crises in national unity in France was also developed by Zeev Sternhell, in particular in a paper he presented at the aforementioned conference, "L'Aifaire Dreyfus, signe avant-coureur des crises ideologiques du 20eme siecle." Regarding the importance of the Dreyfus affair in the history of Jews in France, see the ample works by Pierre Birnbaum, in particular Les fous de la Republique: Histoire politique des Juifs d'Etat, de Gambetta a Vichy (Paris: 1992) and his edited work, La France de I'Affaire Dreyfus (Paris: 1994), in particular his article, "La citoyennete en peril: les juifs entre integration et resistance," 505-542. 4. In 1996, the French legal system moved to try Maurice Papon, a member of the Vichy administration, for crimes against humanity—more specifically, for his role in antisemitic persecution. 5. For an analysis of "judeoccntrism," see Eric Conan and Henry Rousso, Vichy, un passe qui ne passe pas, 2nd ed. (Paris: 1996); English translation forthcoming. 6. This distinction between "emergence" and "resurgence" was made by Pierre-Andre

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Taguieff, who for years has argued that the National Front is relatively new on the French political scene; thus, references to the past (the Algerian war, Vichy, the Dreyfus affair), which are often used to understand the nature of this phenomenon, are of little assistance in understanding the current political situation. See, in particular, Taguieff's La force du prejuge: Essai sur le racisme el ses doubles (Paris: 1988) and Les fins de I'antiracisme (Paris: 1995). 7. On this question, see Michael Burns, Dreyfus: A Family Affair, From the French Revolution to the Holocaust (New York: 1991), particularly the last chapter, which has inspired me here. 8. Private archives of the Dreyfus family, cited by Michael Burns, in ibid., 546. 9. On the Commissariat, see Joseph Billig, Le Commissariat general aux questions juives (1941-1944) (Paris: 1955-1960); and also Michael A. Marrus and Robert O. Paxton, Vichy et les Juifs (Paris: 1981). 10. Cf. Laurent Gervereau and Denis Peschanski (eds.), La Propagande sous Vichy: 1940-1944 (Paris: 1990). 11. Cf. Jean-Paul Cointet, "La Legion francaise de Combattants et la question juive," in La France et la Question juive 1940-1944, ed. Georges Wellers, Andre Kaspi and Serge Klarsfeld (Paris: 1981), 109. 12. Cf. the annual Biblio: Catalogue des ouvrages p a u s en langue francaise dans le monde entier, vols. 8-12 (Paris: 1941-1945). 13. Juifs, je vous hais, p. 51. The article on the army was written by a certain F. Teyssier. This brochure was published on 15 April 1944 by the Bureau central de presse et d'infonnations run by Maurice-Yvan Sicard, one of the leaders of Jacques Doriot's Parti populaire francais. Participants included some of the leading antisemites of the time, such as Georges Montandon, Jean Drault and Jacques Ploncard. 14. Robert de Beauplan, "L'exposition antijuive," LIllustration, 20 Sept. 1941, 59-60. 15. L''Action francaise, 15 Dec. 1923. 16. Cf. Laurent Greilsamer and Daniel Schneidermann, Un certain Monsieur Paul: L'affaire Touvier (Paris: 1989 and 1944), 75. Many details concerning this episode are found in the preliminary investigation file on Paul Touvier; see Conan and Rousso, Vichy, unpasse qui ne passe pas. 17. On Victor Basch, see the recent biography of Francoise Basch, Victor Basch: de l'affaire Dreyfus au crime de la Milice (Paris: 1994). 18. Joseph Lecussan, "Pourquoi j'ai tue Victor Basch," document dated 24 Sept. 1945, included in the Paul Touvier preliminary investigation file, cited by Greilsamer and Schneidermann in Un certain Monsieur Paul, 75. See also Francoise Basch, Victor Basch, 335. Paul Touvier, a member of the Milice, was long suspected of participating in this murder, although at his trial in April 1994, this particular charge was dropped. 19. Robert Brasillach, "Les Francais devant les Juifs," Je suis partout, 17 Feb. 1939, special issue "Les Juifs et la France." 20. Lucien Rebtet, "La condition historique des Juifs en France," ibid., 6. 21. On the question of non-antisemitic anti-Dreyfusards, Antoine Compagnon referred (at the aforementioned conference, "One Hundred Years After the Dreyfus Affair") to the wellknown case of Fernand Brunetiere. On the culpability of Dreyfus as seen by the antiDreyfusards, see Bertrand Joly, "Les antidreyfusards croyaient-ils Dreyfus coupable?" Revue historique, no. 590 (April-June 1994), 401-437. 22. Jean Drault, Histoire de V antisemitisme (Paris: 1942), 138. Drault, a contemporary of Dreyfus (he was 76 in 1942), was condemned to seven years in prison in 1946 by the Seine Court of Justice. When asked to state his profession before the judges he said: "J'etais dans le journalisme antisemite" (cited in Combat, 5 Nov. 1946). 23. Jean Roget, L'Affaire Dreyfus: Ce que tout Francais doit en connaitre (Paris: 1925), 7. 24. L'Action francaise, 26 Feb. 1931. 25. For an analysis of this text, see Annie Kriegel, "La resistance communiste," in Lillian Messinger (ed.), La France et la question juive, 348 If; Stephane Courtois, "Que savait la presse communiste clandestine?" in Qui savait quoi? L'extermination des Juifs, 1941-1945, ed. Stephane Courtois and Adam Rayski (Paris: 1987), 104. See also Stephane Courtois,

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Denis Peschanski and Adam Rayski, Le sang de I'etranger: Les immigres de la MOI dans la Resistance (Paris: 1989). 26. L'Antisemitisme, le racisme, le probleme juif (Nov. 1941), 25-27, quoted by Marc Knobel in his "La Rehabilitation du capitaine Alfred Dreyfus? (1898-1945)" (Master's thesis, Universite de Paris I, 1983), 279. 27. Document reproduced and analyzed by Adam Rayski, in Courtois and Rayski (eds.), Qui savait quoil, 124. 28. This point has raised much discussion in recent historiography. One of the most relevant books on the topic is that of Renee Poznanski, Etre juif en France pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale (Paris: 1994). 29. Adam Rayski devotes an important chapter to this issue in Qui savait quoil 122-228. Also consult his Nos illusions perdues (Paris: 1985) and his recent long essay, Le choix des Juifs sous Vichy (Paris: 1992). 30. J'accuse, organe de liaison des forces francaises contre la barbarie raciste, no. 1 (10 Oct. 1942) quoted in Courtois and Rayski (eds.), Qui savait quoil, 153-154. 31. Adam Rayski, Nos illusions perdues, 9. 32. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (London: 1951), 93. 33. Le Proces de Charles Maurras, 9-10 and Le Proces de Xavier Vallat presente par ses amis (Paris: 1948). On these questions, see Henry Rousso, "Une justice impossible: L'epuration et la politique antijuive de Vichy," Annales ESC, no. 3 (May-June 1993), 745-772. 34. On this point, I tend to agree with the analysis made by Michel Winock in his article "Une question de principe," in Birnbaum (ed.), La France de l'Affaire Dreyfus, 543-572. 35. Michel Winock, "Les affaires Dreyfus."

Ukrainian Collaboration in the Extermination of the Jews During the Second World War: Sorting Out the Long-Term and Conjunctural Factors John-Paul Himka (UNIVERSITY OF ALBERTA)

The subject of Ukrainian collaboration in the Nazi-directed genocide of the European Jews is a minefield. Over the past decade it has several times erupted into public controversy (notably over the Deschenes Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals in Canada, the trial of John Demjanjuk in Israel and the television broadcast "The Ugly Face of Freedom" [60 Minutes] in the United States).1 The rhetoric on both the Ukrainian and Jewish sides of these controversies can reach an uncomfortably high pitch. Even the scholarly literature on the subject is sharply polarized.2 The issue is not only sensitive, but devilishly complex. Moreover, it is an issue with insufficient monographic research behind it; it is only apprehendable from the sources, which are multilingual, widely scattered and frustratingly contradictory. Given the context in which it is written, this chapter is necessarily exploratory and its conclusions tentative. It is offered, within these limitations, as a case study of the problem of continuity versus contingency in the perpetration of the genocide against the Jews; that is, as an attempt to sort out the long-term from the short-term factors inducing Ukrainians to collaborate in the extermination of the Jewish population, by examining the time frame in which the circumstances and attitudes facilitating collaboration were formed. Readers should take note of two important distortions that are inevitable given the specific focus of this investigation. First, because the investigation requires a focus on participation in genocide, it may give the impression that such participation was more widespread in the Ukrainian population than it in fact was. It is therefore necessary to state explicitly and formally that it is not the purpose of this article to attempt to delineate the extent of Ukrainian collaboration. In his memoirs, Rabbi David Kahane recounts that many Jews from Lviv were able to jump off the train that was taking them to Belzec. "Some peasants took pity on the jumpers, fed them, and showed them the way back to the city. Other peasants turned them over to the Ukrainian police or the Gestapo."3 For the purposes of this article, only the motivations of the latter peasants 170

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are important, while those of the former are irrelevant; but the fact that the peasants who fed and helped the junipers do not appear in this specialized investigation does not mean that they did not exist.4 Second, since the article deals with factors that might explain collaboration in mass murder, it risks giving the impression of an exculpation, in conformity with the widely held principle that to understand is to forgive. It is, though, an underlying assumption of this essay that understanding is important enough in its own right (and particularly with regard to so traumatic a historical event as the Holocaust) to be worth taking such risks. It should also be noted in this connection that the main aim of the article is not to elaborate upon explanatory factors, but to place these factors within a time frame in order to contribute to the discussion about how deeply rooted historically were the conditions and preconditions of the annihilation of the Jews in Europe. The main body of the essay is divided into four parts. The first part registers factors that seem to have little connection to any particular period of history, that seem to be universal or timeless or part of "human nature." The rest of the essay treats the historical genesis of those factors. For the sake of convenience, I have divided the genesis into three large periods, but more complex divisions could certainly be made. The three periods are the interwar years and the war itself (the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s); the period of the national movement (the nineteenth and early twentieth century); and the period of what might be called "primary cultural accumulation" (the medieval and early modern eras). The conclusions will attempt to weigh the contribution of the different periods to the formation of attitudes and conditions conducive to collaboration in the Nazi persecution and destruction of the Jews.

"Timeless" Factors Whether any human trait is truly "timeless" is open to question, but the intention here is to point to some factors motivating collaboration that are not easy for historians to analyze with their customary tools, that seem to stand apart from the process of history and yet influence it. Two such factors stand out with reference to collaboration in the Holocaust: greed and sadism. For the purposes of this article they are defined respectively as a desire for material gain that transcends established norms for keeping this desire in check and as a psychological disposition that derives pleasure from inflicting pain and death. The Holocaust provided numerous opportunities for the enrichment of the nonJewish population at the expense of the doomed Jewish population. The expulsion of the Jews from their homes to the ghettos and their exclusion from many branches of the economy improved the living quarters and livelihoods of the many Gentiles— primarily Germans and Ukrainians in Ukraine—who took their place. It gave large numbers of the non-Jewish population a certain investment in the Final Solution. But benefiting in this way from the Holocaust must be distinguished from active participation in the destruction of the Jews motivated by a desire for material gain. The Holocaust created conditions in which certain greed-driven crimes could be

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committed with impunity (or relative impunity) as long as they were committed against Jews. The wave of pogroms that swept the western regions of the Soviet Union shortly after the German invasion provided an opportunity to loot, in spite of attempts by the German military authorities to prevent this.5 Once the more systematic persecution began, Jews outside the ghettos were exposed to robbery perpetrated by brigands.6 Greed also motivated some to volunteer for positions in the Ukrainian police or in the watch battalions of concentration and death camps, both of which provided opportunities for enrichment through bribes and extortion.7 There were also those who participated in Nazi crimes because they were initially attracted by or subsequently developed a delight in cruelty and murder. The Greek Catholic metropolitan of Halych, Andrei Sheptytsky, was particularly concerned about the cultivation of sadistic proclivities among Ukrainians who took part in Nazi-directed political murder. In his pastoral letter of November 21, 1942, he wrote: [The murderer] not only killed his neighbor, but he deprived his soul of supernatural life, of God's grace, and led it into an abyss from which perhaps there will be no salvation! For by shedding innocent blood he perhaps summoned in his soul the demons of lust, which say to him to seek his own joy in the sufferings and pains of his neighbor. The sight of the shed blood calls forth in the human soul a sensual lust, linked with cruelty, which seeks satisfaction in dealing suffering and death to its victims. Bloodthirstiness can become such a passion, unconstrained, that its greatest pleasure is to torture and kill people. . . . Crime becomes for [the bloodthirsty murderer] a necessary daily nourishment without which he suffers and is tormented as if he were suffering from some sickness of thirst and hunger that he must satisfy.8

The metropolitan's analysis of the role of sadistic impulses in perpetration has recently been borne out by a study of a German reserve police battalion and how its members coped with participation in mass executions, primarily of Jews.9 There is, it seems, always a sector in every population in whom sadism is active or latent. In normal historical situations, active sadists would be marginalized as criminal elements and latent ones would not become active; similarly, in normal historical situations, greed would in most cases not lead to robbery or extortion. But during the Nazi occupation of Ukraine, criminality moved from the margins of society to its center, and individuals with an inclination to rob, extort and kill were not lost in the larger crowd of humanity, but rather stepped to the fore. Thus, although certain "timeless" factors were at work in the disposition to become a perpetrator, it was the circumstances of the Nazi occupation that magnified the importance of these factors out of proportion. By no means did all the Ukrainians who collaborated individually in the destruction of the Jews have criminal tendencies such as described here, but it is important to be cognizant of the participation of such individuals in the mass murder and to understand that it was the particular conjuncture that raised them to an unusual prominence.

Conjunctural Factors The Nazi occupation created the general conditions in which certain types of criminal behavior flourished, and also special conditions for Ukrainians. There is a

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popular saying that crime consists of one percent motivation and ninety-nine percent opportunity. Ukrainians were afforded extraordinary opportunities by the Nazis. In line with their racialist thinking, the Nazis made judgments about the worth and capacities of the various nationalities over whom they ruled. Their judgments about Ukrainians, Lithuanians and Latvians were that these peoples were particularly suited for work in the process of destruction. It seems that it was the notorious Otto Globocnik who was responsible for making the decision that members of precisely these three nationalities would be recruited as "Hiwis" (from Hilfwillige, "volunteers") to clear ghettos and to conduct mass executions.10 Ukrainians and Baits, generally former Soviet POWs, were also deliberately recruited to serve as guards in concentration and death camps. The Ukrainian police, unlike the Polish police, for example, were routinely assigned to participate in ghetto clearings and mass executions.11 The Nazis' thinking was that, owing to historical circumstances, the Ukrainians (and the Baltic nationalities) were particularly anti-Bolshevik and therefore antisemitic, and, moreover, sufficiently primitive to perform whatever dirty work was required.12 Perhaps for this reason the Nazis decided to instigate the wave of pogroms that encompassed all the western territories of the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941. In these pogroms, tens of thousands of Jews perished at the hands of the non-Jewish local population. The Nazis attempted nothing similar to this mobilization of anti-Jewish mass violence in any other territory they held. Even if one does not agree fully with Raul Hilberg's assessment that "truly spontaneous pogroms, free from Einsatzgruppen influence, did not take place; all outbreaks were either organized or inspired by the Einsatzgruppen,"13 from the German documentation that most of the pogroms were incited by the Germans themselves and by local agents working on their instructions.14 Although the Nazis considered Ukrainians to be, as it were, natural allies in the war against the Jews, experience showed them that it was not always possible to count on their collaboration.15 They therefore expended considerable effort on propaganda to intensify anti-Jewish feeling. Here only a few examples can be mentioned. In Zhytomyr, where the population was particularly reluctant to help in the destruction of the Jews, the Nazis staged something like a Stalinist show trial in which a Jew (a certain Kieper) who had served in the GPU confessed to more than 1,350 murders, which he had committed in order to "give vent to his hatred for everything that was not Jewish." He had his favorite methods for killing his victims and was not above using his rifle butt to smash the foot of a baby nursing at her mother's breast. Instead of a public trial, however, Kieper was given a public execution. His crimes were described on two large posters placed on the gallows. Before the execution, his crimes were announced in Ukrainian and German from a loudspeaker van. Given the Stalinist cultural context, the show execution must have produced a considerable resonance among the population. At any rate, the organizers of the spectacle (Einsatzgruppe C) were themselves quite satisfied with what they had achieved and recommended it as a model for others to follow.16 A particularly effective propaganda device, used in conjunction with the incitement of the pogroms in the summer of 1941, was to bring the local population to

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prisons and mass graves to view the (often mutilated) corpses of Soviet political prisoners. Jews were also paraded out, forced to clean the corpses and accused of responsibility for the atrocities.17 Of course, aside from the orchestration of such major spectacles, the Nazis made use of the press to fan anti-Jewish sentiment; for example, on the eve of the final liquidation of the Galician Jews, the Nazis ordered the two major Ukrainian papers of the Generalgouvernement (Krakivs' ki visti and L'vivs'ki visti) to run a series of antisemitic articles.18 In addition to persuasion, the Nazis used coercion to encourage Ukrainians to assume the role of perpetrators. Coercion to this end (as opposed to the more general coercion aimed at discouraging the population at large from aiding Jews) was selectively aimed at recruiting Ukrainians, particularly Soviet POWs, to serve as guards in concentration and death camps, perhaps also to serve as Hiwis. No systematic study of the recruitment of these categories of perpetrators has been undertaken, but the fragmentary evidence is suggestive. In his study of Jewish resistance in Poland, Shmuel Krakowski recounts the following: In December [1941], about 300 Soviet prisoners came to the camp in Lipowa Street [Lublin]. After a short stay in the camp, they were given Nazi uniforms and incorporated into the guard units [Wachtbataillonen]. They took part in the liquidation of the ghettos in the Lublin area and of Lublin itself. It was from them that the Jewish prisoners found out that 100,000 Soviet prisoners-of-war had been killed near Chelm Lubelski, where they had been kept out in the open in a field surrounded by a high voltage fence. The prisoners were given no food for several weeks, and many starved to death. The extreme hunger led to cases of cannibalism. Only a few hundred of the very strong survived, and they were given the option of serving the Germans.19

Perhaps related, if not so extreme, applications of coercion explain why the Ukrainian guards sometimes collaborated with the Jewish resistance organizations, as was the case at the Plaszow concentration camp, where more than 300 Jews and sixteen Ukrainian guards escaped together, and, to a lesser extent, at Sobibor.20 Thus far, this essay has concentrated on conjunctural factors introduced by the Nazis during the occupation of Ukrainian territory. It remains to discuss two other factors in which the Nazi role was not as prominent. The first of these is that there was a pro-German orientation in the Ukrainian nationalist movement, at least in the initial stages of the German-Soviet war, and an even stronger and more persistent anti-Soviet animus. From the perspective of Ukrainian nationalists, the chief enemies of their nation were Communist Russia and Poland. In the late 1930s they looked for deliverance to Hitler, who was not only anti-Polish and anti-Soviet, but who also seemed determined to redraw the map of Europe in accordance with the ethnic principle (the annexation of Austria and the Sudetenland, the autonomy and then independence of Slovakia, the autonomy of Carpatho-Ukraine). Moreover, certain Nazi circles, notably those around Alfred Rosenberg, cultivated Ukrainian sympathies and held out the prospect of a large, independent Ukrainian state to be closely associated with Germany. When Hitler launched his invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, the nationalists' hopes seemed on the verge of fulfillment. At the behest of Stepan Bandera, the leader of the revolutionary wing of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, Volodymyr Stakhiv wrote to Hitler on June 23, 1941, to express confidence that the German

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campaign would "destroy the corrupting Jewish-Bolshevik influence in Europe and finally break Russian imperialism" and to point out that "the restoration of an independent national Ukrainian state along the lines of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty will firmly establish the ethnic [volkische] new order in Eastern Europe."21 The letter fairly accurately captures the mood of the nationalists. The reference to the "JewishBolshevik influence" was not a stock phrase of Ukrainian nationalism, which tended to identify Bolshevism more with Russians than Jews, but an indication that the nationalists were willing to accommodate Nazi antisemitisrn. The pro-German orientation of Ukrainian nationalism remained in this pristine state for only a few weeks. In July 1941 the Germans arrested the leaders of the Bandera movement after the latter attempted to proclaim the restoration of an independent Ukrainian state. Not only did the Germans disallow Ukrainian statehood, but they incorporated Galicia, where Ukrainian nationalism was most deeply rooted, into the Generalgouvernement (that is, much of the former Poland) on August 1, 1941, and entrusted the Reichskommissariat Ukraine to the selfproclaimed "brutal dog," Erich Koch. The mistreatment and mass murder of Ukrainian POWs and civilians further estranged the nationalists from the Nazis. However, there was the lingering feeling among many nationalists that for Ukrainians the lesser evil was Hitler; the greater evil, Stalin.22 The pro-German orientation of the organized national movement of course facilitated participation in the genocide, although probably not directly, except perhaps in some of the pogroms of the first weeks. What it probably did do, however, was create an atmosphere in which compliance with the Germans in all matters, including participation in the killing, was psychologically easier. Even with the decline of the pro-German orientation, the anti-Soviet sentiments of the nationalists remained high throughout the war.23 This put them at odds with the Jews of the region, who naturally placed their own hopes for survival in a return of Soviet power.24 Although inadequately documented, it is reasonable to assume that the Bandera partisan movement, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA)—like its Polish counterpart, the Home Army—liquidated Jewish partisan bands because they were pro-Communist.25 In addition, the Ukrainians, like the Poles of the Eastern Borderlands, believed that the Jews had worked closely with the Soviets during their occupation of Western Ukraine and Western Belarus in 1939-1941. In Western Ukraine, the Nazi propaganda that identified Jews and Bolshevism met with some success. The second conjunctural factor in which the Nazis played a contributory, rather than primary, role is the circumstance that for Ukrainians the mass murder of the Jews did not stand out as an extraordinary event in the same way that it would have for most other European peoples. The Ukrainians had become inured to mass political violence in the decades preceding the Holocaust, and it is fair to speculate that this had an impact on the national psychology and political culture. The Austro-Hungarian political and military authorities had incarcerated in concentration camps and summarily executed tens of thousands of their own Ukrainian citizens during the First World War on suspicion of pro-Russian sympathies. The Ukrainians under Polish rule suffered campaigns of "pacification" in the 1930s. These amounted to large-scale, state-directed pogroms. Although the loss of life

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was relatively limited, beatings and the destruction of property took place on a grand scale. During their occupation of the formerly Polish Ukrainian territories in 19391941, the Soviet authorities resettled close to half a million Poles to the east and conducted mass arrests of Ukrainians, thousands of whom were liquidated immediately after the outbreak of the German-Soviet war. In Soviet Ukraine, mass political violence became commonplace in the 1930s. Hundreds of thousands of "kulaks" were arrested and deported, millions perished in the famine of 1933, almost the entire Ukrainian intelligentsia was exiled or executed and massive killing operations were conducted in places such as Vinnytsia and the Bykivnia forests. Thus, by the time the Nazis arrived, the Ukrainians may already have come to regard mass violence as a more normal component of the political environment than did other European peoples. Moreover, even Nazi violence was more extreme in Ukraine than it was in many other regions under Nazi rule and much of it was directed against Ukrainians (particularly prisoners of war, but also against the civilian population). Several Western scholars have pointed out that the exceptionally brutal conditions of the Nazi occupation in Eastern Europe had the effect of deadening the sensitivities of the local population to the particular tragedy of the Jews.26 In fact, though, the observation seems to call for expansion: the violence of the preceding (particularly the Soviet) period as well as that of the Nazi occupation must have not only desensitized the local population to the extermination of the Jews, but also have reduced taboos inhibiting participation in the extermination process.

Long-Term Factors with Roots in the Era of Nationalism As with many East European peoples, the Ukrainians underwent a "national revival" in the nineteenth century, with the result that nationalism occupied an important place in the worldview of many Ukrainians. The nationalist worldview permeated Ukrainian society most thoroughly in Austrian-ruled Galicia, where it had become hegemonic by the turn of the century.27 The success of the national movement was more limited in Dnieper Ukraine, owing to the obstacles put in its way by the tsarist government. However, the revolution of 1905, the collapse of tsarism, the revolutionary events of 1917-1920 and the policy of ukrainization in Soviet Ukraine in the 1920s all contributed to a broadening and deepening of the movement in Dnieper Ukraine. The Stalinist persecutions of the Ukrainian intelligentsia in the 1930s set the movement back again.28 As a result, when the Germans entered Ukraine in the summer of 1941, Galicia was largely nationalist in outlook, while Dnieper Ukraine was markedly less so. Elements of the nationalist worldview in general and certain peculiarities of its formation in Galicia seem to have come into play in connection with collaboration in anti-Jewish actions. To begin with the most obvious, nationalism divides the world into collectivities of nations and ascribes collective characteristics and collective responsibility to members of nations. It is thus a worldview that could without much difficulty

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assimilate the Nazi view that the Jews formed a race with certain collective characteristics and collective responsibility. From the strictly nationalist as well as from the Nazi perspective, a Jewish child was above all a Jew, not a child. Nationalism drew a distinct line between "us" and "the other," with solidarity limited to the "us" and assessment of "the other" deriving from the viewpoint of its relation to "us." The nationalist perspective generalized from the behavior of certain individuals to the whole of the national collectivity and back from this whole to other individuals whose behavior had never in fact been observed. The Nazis appealed to this type of reasoning continually in order to justify their own anti-Jewish actions or to encourage others to commit them. A characteristic example of the former phenomenon was the aftermath to the Kieper affair in Zhytomyr: the Einsatzgruppe followed up the execution of Kieper with the shooting of 402 Zhytomyr Jews. A characteristic example of the latter was the device of bringing randomly selected Jews to the sites of Soviet mass killings in order to instigate a pogrom. The nationalist perspective played an important role in the development of the view that the Jews as a group had collaborated closely with the Soviet authorities, and particularly with the Soviet secret police, during the first Soviet occupation of Western Ukraine in 1939-1941. However difficult, considerable progress has been made recently in establishing the facts of what happened during this period.29 It seems reasonable to assume that the Soviet occupation authorities relied somewhat disproportionately on Jews among the local urban population, since the Poles, who constituted the plurality of this population, were earmarked for displacement and deportation, while the Ukrainians constituted a decided minority; moreover, those Ukrainians who were in the cities tended to be members of the intelligentsia imbued with a nationalist and anti-Soviet outlook. It also seems reasonable to assume that pro-Soviet sympathies were more widespread among the Jewish community than among the Ukrainian community and that the type of anti-Sovietism that permeated Ukrainian society was not so common among Jews. Although these are reasonable assumptions, they are not borne out by the evidence, which in fact points to a Soviet administration staffed overwhelmingly by Ukrainians (largely imported from the central and eastern Ukrainian territories, but including locals, especially in the countryside), as well as to the development of anti-Soviet feelings among Jews as a result of the expropriation of their businesses and the suppression of their national organizations. How does one account, then, for the stereotype of the Soviet-abetting Jews? The probable answer lies in the nationalist way of thinking. On the one hand, the collaboration of individual Jews with the Soviet authorities would be generalized so that "the Jews" would be seen as Soviet collaborators. On the other hand, the same collaboration of numerous individuals of Ukrainian nationality would be completely excepted from generalization, since this would be inadmissible from the nationalist standpoint, which sees one's own nation in ideal terms; deviants from the nationalist ideal would be conceived of as "exceptions" and, more frequently, "traitors," in any case not at all representative of the nation as a whole. The image of the Jews as collaborators with the Soviets was probably also reinforced by the traditional Ukrainian nationalist image of the Jews as inveterate collaborators with the Ukrainians' national enemies. This view was rooted in histor-

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ical reality. For all of the nineteenth and most of the twentieth century, Ukrainians constituted a submerged nationality in which another nationality controlled the state apparatus and also dominated cultural life. The goal of the Ukrainian national movement was to change this situation so that Ukrainians possessed both political and cultural authority. The Jews, however, tended to support the dominant political nationality and assimilate to the dominant national culture. Characteristically, assimilated Jews spoke German and later Polish in Galicia, Magyar and later Czech in Transcarpathia, German and later Romanian in Bukovina, and Russian in the rest of Ukraine. In the Polish-Ukrainian national conflict in Austrian Galicia, they tended to side with the Poles until the early twentieth century, and in the Russian-Ukrainian conflict during the Revolution, to side with the Russians. The Jews were protecting their interests as a vulnerable minority; there was also little assimilative attraction for them in either Ukrainian society, composed so overwhelmingly of peasants, or in Ukrainian culture. During the Holocaust, the image of Jews as allies of the Ukrainians' enemies primarily referred to Jewish sympathies with the Soviets. That image (or in the following case, the actual role) was also more general. During the Ukrainian-Polish irregular war that was conducted as a shadow conflict within the Second World War, some Jewish partisans sided with the Polish side and therefore were attacked by forces associated with the Bandera movement.30 The view of Jews as cultural and political allies of the Ukrainians' enemies was only one component of the image of the Jews that had been constructed within the Ukrainian national movement prior to the Second World War. The other major component was socioeconomic, the view of Jews as the exploiters of the Ukrainian people. This subject will be examined in the next section, however. Ukrainian nationalism incorporated little modern antisemitic ideology.31 The main thrust of the Ukrainian struggle was directed against Russians and Poles; the Jews were merely adjunct. Ukrainian nationalism never developed the fully articulated antisemitism that existed in the Polish, Russian, Hungarian or Romanian nationalisms.32 Ukrainians and Ukrainian nationalists may have disliked Jews, but they did so for traditional reasons or on the grounds of realpolitik; rarely would they demonize Jews or place them at the center of some conspiracy. Nonetheless, in the era of nationalism, antisemitic ideology was widespread in Eastern Europe, and certainly the Ukrainians were frequently exposed to it, even if they did not incorporate it into their own nationalist discourse. In some cases, antisemitism was a major component of the ideology of nationalist movements with which the Ukrainian national movement engaged in intense conflict, such as the Polish National Democrats in Austrian Galicia and interwar Poland and the Russian Black Hundreds in tsarist Ukraine. In certain states within which the Ukrainians found themselves, antisemitism suffused the political culture (late imperial Austria, imperial Russia, interwar Poland, interwar Romania). This constant exposure to antisemitic ideology probably facilitated its acceptance when it was also espoused, in a more lethal form, by the German occupation authorities. Finally, there was a peculiarity in the way that nationalism developed among the Ukrainians of Galicia that seems to have had a major effect on participation in the annihilation of the Jewish population. It is useful to return again to a diagnosis made by the head of the Greek Catholic church, Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky. In a

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number of his pastoral letters, beginning in 190733 and continuing through the pastoral letter of 1942 cited earlier, Sheptytsky identified a moral defect in the Ukrainian national movement in Galicia: it practiced "politics without God." By this he meant that it sometimes acted in the erroneous conviction "that politics frees a person from the obligation of Divine law and justifies crime."34 Before the Nazi occupation, Sheptytsky chiefly had in mind nationalist acts of terrorism, and in particular politically motivated assassinations. What he discerned was that the principle of the end justifying the means had somehow gone too far within the political culture of Galician Ukrainian nationalism. It is not the place here to explore in any detail the roots of this "politics without God," but probably it can be dated back to a critical experience of the late 1860s through the mid-1870s when the Galician intelligentsia, then largely Russophile in outlook, participated in and encouraged the forcible conversion of the Chelm eparchy to Russian Orthodoxy, acting as accessories to violations of conscience, murder and mass exile in order to achieve a political end.35 In any case, the radical dissociation of politics from ethics was a discernible strain in the Galician Ukrainian national movement decades before the Holocaust. During the Holocaust, however, this dissociation could, and did, have particularly grievous consequences. A remarkable example is the decision by the Bandera movement to infiltrate the Ukrainian police units set up by the Germans. Although the police units were at first largely recruited from the preexisting police forces, volunteers were also accepted, especially after the Germans realized that the prewar police formations, particularly in the pre-1939 Soviet Ukraine, included a large number of Communist party members. The Bandera movement—that is, the radical wing of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists—was intent on establishing a Ukrainian state and understood that it needed an armed force to achieve this goal. Participation in the police units would provide Ukrainian nationalists with some training and with arms. Indeed, the thousands of Ukrainian policemen who deserted in the fall of 1942 contributed immensely to the formation of the Banderadominated Ukrainian Insurgent Army.36 Prior to that, the Bandera movement had virtually taken over a police academy in Rivne, where the Banderites then stockpiled weapons and taught recruits to prepare for "a war of liberation of Ukraine against Germany," until their activities were uncovered by the Germans in the spring of 1942.37 The nationalists of the Bandera movement reckoned that as the front moved eastward, relatively sparse German forces would be left in Ukraine. At that point, the Ukrainian police could overwhelm the German civil administration ("If there were fifty policemen to five Germans, who would hold power then?").38 Of course, infiltrating the Ukrainian police formations meant taking part in antiJewish actions. Apparently, this did not constitute an obstacle of conscience for the radical nationalists. In fact, taking part in some actions was probably useful, since weapons could be confiscated during ghetto clearings and added to the stockpile.39 When the Germans discovered the stockpiles associated with the Rivne academy, the members of the Bandera movement denied that they were theirs and said that they belonged to Jews.40 According to the Germans, to finance their activities, the Banderites raised some of the contributions from Jews, whom they often blackmailed.41 At the same time, however, the Bandera movement provided some Jews

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with false papers.42 The impression created by the German documentation is that the extreme Ukrainian nationalists were so indifferent to the fate of the Jews43 that they would either kill them or help them, however best suited their political goals. Morality (Sheptytsky's "obligation of Divine law") did not enter into the calculation.

Long-Term Factors with Medieval and Early Modern Roots Of the factors facilitating collaboration whose roots can be traced back centuries, the preeminent one was the socioeconomic antagonism between Ukrainians and Jews. This was an antagonism dating back to the early modern era, when Jews served as lessees and managers of estates and manorial appurtenances, while Ukrainians were enserfed peasants living under extremely oppressive conditions. The hard feelings engendered by this situation resulted in several bloody massacres of Jews by Ukrainian Cossacks and peasants, notably during the Cossack uprising led by Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky in the middle of the seventeenth century and during the Haidamaka uprisings of the eighteenth century. In the nineteenth century the antagonism underwent some fundamental transformations, but remained salient.44 Serfdom was abolished, but the penetration of a money economy into the Ukrainian countryside gave rise to new conflicts in which Jewish moneylenders, tavernkeepers and shopkeepers found themselves at odds with Ukrainian peasants, priests and an aspiring petite bourgeoisie.45 The unscrupulous Jew plying the simple peasant with drinks in order eventually to foreclose on his land became a stock figure of popular Ukrainian political literature. Certainly the realities that lay behind the antagonism had been considerably reduced during the decades immediately preceding the Holocaust. In Soviet Ukraine the whole economic structure had been transformed, but it is likely that elements of the old antagonism resurfaced whenever a Ukrainian peasant encountered a Jew entrusted with grain requisition. In interwar Galicia the development of the Ukrainian cooperative movement and the success of the temperance movement were phenomenal; moreover, interwar Poland was much more hostile to Jewish economic activity than had been prewar Austria—all of which must have drastically lowered the incidence of Ukrainian-Jewish socioeconomic conflict. Memories, however, especially memories encoded in the national worldview, can outlast realities: in the anti-Jewish articles contributed by Ukrainian authors to Krakivs'ki visti in the summer of 1943, the most common theme was that Jews were responsible for the impoverishment of the Ukrainian peasantry (the next most common theme was that the Jews had aided the Soviets in 1939-1941).46 The persistence of such socioeconomically motivated resentment into the time of the Holocaust of course strengthened the image of the Jew as an inimical "other," with whom, therefore, one need have no solidarity, whose removal, in fact, would be welcome. Moreover, the rather widespread notion that Jews had become rich through cheating and exploiting Ukrainian peasants must have served to lessen inhibitions about robbing or blackmailing them. Another factor reaching back centuries, in this case close to a millennium, is

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religious in nature. The idea that there is a continuum of antisemitism within Christianity that contributed significantly to the Holocaust has often found expression in the scholarly literature. Raul Hilberg made the case laconically but powerfully in the introduction to his magisterial work on the destruction of the European Jews. More recently, at greater length and with elaborate theoretical underpinnings, Gavin Langmuir has sought to demonstrate the connection between aspects of Christian religiosity and Nazi antisemitism.47 As stimulating as Langmuir's work is, it is of little direct relevance to the issue of Ukrainian religious antisemitism, because both Langmuir and Hilberg conceive of Christendom only as Western Christendom and do not take into account the separate development of Eastern, Byzantine Christendom, which is the Christendom primarily relevant for Ukraine. Sources indicate that Christian antisemitism or anti-Judaism (Langmuir's distinction) was present at least among clerical circles during the Holocaust. The most striking case concerns Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky. Although Sheptytsky protested several times against the Nazi persecution of the Jews and rescued a number of Jews himself, his thinking displayed religiously motivated anti-Jewish attitudes that could have led to the opposite behavior in a cleric with less compassion. For example, in a discussion with a French collaborator, Dr. Frederic—a discussion in which the metropolitan denounced the murder of the Jews in no uncertain terms— he also agreed with Dr. Frederic's observation that the Jews had sworn the destruction of Christianity.48 Rabbi David Kahane, who was hidden by Sheptytsky, recorded in his memoirs the following encounter: The metropolitan fell silent for a moment and continued: "Have you ever thought about it and asked yourself, what is the source of the hatred and savage persecution of the Jewish people from ancient times until the present? What is their origin?" He pointed at the bookshelves, asked me to find the New Testament in Hebrew translation and locate chapter 27, verse 25 in the Gospel according to Matthew: "It says there 'And the whole people answered and said His blood will be on us and on our children.'"49

Other clerics were unable to harbor such views and yet oppose the murder of the Jews in word and deed as Metropolitan Sheptytsky did. When Kurt Lewin, the son of a rabbi, sought refuge in a Greek Catholic monastery, the hegumen refused to accept him, arguing that the fate befalling the Jews was God's will and that he did not wish to act against this will.50 According to one source (tainted, however, by an anti-Ukrainian bias), the Greek Catholic pastor of Saints Peter and Paul in Lviv told the faithful from the pulpit to turn all Jews over to the Germans.51 There is a scene in Claude Lanzmann's film Shoah in which the director coaxes from a group of Poles gathered outside a church an explanation of the Holocaust as the result of the Jews' crucifixion of Jesus. If a French director could coax this out of simple people some forty years after the Holocaust, how much more readily such an explanation must have come to mind during the actual events themselves. Still, it would probably be a mistake to place too much emphasis on religious factors in the concrete case of the Ukrainians. Most of them had just lived through two decades of state-sponsored atheism, and even in Galicia the secularization of the worldview, in connection with the diffusion of the national movement, had proceeded very far

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("politics without God" was but one symptom of this). In the anti-Jewish articles submitted to Krakivs'ki visti in 1943, religious motifs are notably absent. The final factor to be considered among the set of very long-term factors is best posed as a question: Was there some strand of anti-Jewish violence within the Ukrainian folk culture? Before the Second World War, Ukrainians had engaged in mass violence against Jews at least three times: during the Khmelnytsky uprising (mid-seventeenth century), the Haidamaka uprisings (eighteenth century) and the struggle for statehood led by Symon Petliura (1919-1920). (One might also argue that the pogroms of 1881-1882 and 1905-1906 should be counted here.) Did these moments encode a possibility of behavior that facilitated Ukrainian participation in the pogroms of the summer of 1941? The pogroms were largely inspired by the Germans, but there was also an element of spontaneity in them.52 Moreover, there were isolated incidents of pogroms against the Jews in 1939, when the Soviets, not the Nazis, invaded Western Ukraine.53 Certainly there were continuities throughout the incidents of mass anti-Jewish violence: the Jews in each case were regarded as exploiters and as allies of the Ukrainians' enemies. Was it these continuities of the situation alone that produced several historically discrete episodes of anti-Jewish violence, or did they also leave some cultural sediment? There are at least some elements in the folk culture that suggest the existence of a violent animosity, such as the proverb Kozhdyi zhyd shybenytsi vart ("every Jew deserves the gallows").54 More substantially, there was a belief current among some Galician Ukrainian peasants in the second half of the nineteenth century that a day of reckoning was coming when all the Jews would be slaughtered. This belief figured prominently in the myth about the Moskal' (the Russian tsar) who was supposed to conquer Galicia and institute a radical agrarian reform,55 and it was also expressed by a peasant who was exposed to socialist propaganda.56 The belief in this day of reckoning did not translate into action during the period of Austrian rule and seems to have disappeared or lain dormant in the interwar era, but it may well have resurfaced, and assumed a more active character, during the Nazi occupation. It should be noted, nonetheless, that these reflections do not actually prove the existence of a strand of anti-Jewish violence within the highly complex Ukrainian folk culture, but rather suggest the possibility of its existence.

Conclusions The investigation so far has sorted out the factors facilitating collaboration into three large time frames. It remains to reflect upon the importance of each time frame in the production of the final result: the participation of sectors of the Ukrainian population in the murder of the Jews. The factors originating within the time frame most remote from the Holocaust are also the most difficult to weigh. Both the religious and folk-cultural elements identified as germane to collaboration were marginal within the total complex of the systems within which they were found. Both Christianity and the Ukrainian folk culture were rich and complex systems, the content of which can be judged, for the most part, to be humane and valuable. The strands of anti-Judaism and violent anti-

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Jewish animosity were not at all prominent in the tapestries as a whole. In fact, they were contradictory (particularly in the circumstances of the Holocaust) to much else in their respective systems. The attitudes of Metropolitan Sheptytsky bring this out in relief. On the one hand, he was unenlightened enough to preserve archaic Christian anti-Judaic attitudes into the mid-twentieth century; on the other hand, the elements central to his Christian worldview (love, compassion, justice) worked against any collaboration in the destruction of the Jews and motivated him, in fact, to save Jews and protest against their slaughter.57 Similarly, in the case of the folk culture, if a strand of anti-Jewish violence did indeed exist within it, it was quite tangential in comparison to such central elements as hospitality and generosity (hostynnist', shchedrist'), which would demand that a Jew seeking aid should be fed and helped. The point here is that it was not the religion or the folk culture of the Ukrainians that led to collaboration; it was the collaboration itself that tapped or activated particular, peripheral elements of these two—historically primary—cultural systems. That is, the direction of the dynamic was back from the 1940s, not forward from the Middle Ages or early modern era. The same backward-directed dynamic was clearly evident with respect to the third factor identified as having roots before the nineteenth century: the socioeconomic antagonism between Ukrainians and Jews. The actual socioeconomic relations that had produced such hostility had almost disappeared in the two decades preceding the Holocaust, and it was therefore waning as the 1940s approached. It was the Holocaust that recalled the antagonism, not a preexisting animus that then summoned up Ukrainian participation in the Holocaust. However, in the case of the socioeconomic factor (in contrast to the cases of anti-Judaism in Christianity and putative anti-Jewish violence in the folk culture) there was another element at work: its codification within the nationalist image of the Jews. It is this codification that probably accounts for its otherwise not easily explicable salience during the Holocaust. This brings the analysis to the temporally closer set of long-term factors: those connected with the formation and diffusion of the nationalist worldview. Nationalism could be assimilated to the purposes of Nazism, because Nazism was a virulent mutant of nationalism (as, mutatis mutandis, Stalinism was of socialism). Certain assumptions and propositions were held in common, such as in-group solidarity and even primacy, the identification of certain out-groups as enemies and the definition of these in- and out-groups on the basis of nationality. But Nazism activated the dark side of "the modern Janus." East European nationalisms also had their positive side: the assertion of emancipation, self-empowerment and human dignity on the part of oppressed, marginalized and despised peoples. This side was useless to Nazism and not only irrelevant to, but contradictory to, the collaborative impulse. What was enlisted from the nineteenth century for collaborative purposes resulted from the demands of the Holocaust, not from the entelechy of the national worldview formed in the nineteenth century: the direction of the dynamic was, again, clearly from the 1940s back. The radical dissociation of Christian ethics from politics that occurred during the formative period of Ukrainian nationalism in Galicia was a most unfortunate development, with evil consequences.58 Here, too, however, the importance of the con-

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junctural moment was crucial. For one thing, the dissociation was only one possibility within Ukrainian nationalism; there were also competing possibilities as well as contradictory impulses (for example, although Christian ethics were largely removed from the political culture, the concept of honor certainly was not). A moment that expressed the other possibilities occurred when the Ukrainians of Galicia proclaimed the Western Ukrainian National Republic on November 1, 1918, and took control of Lviv. The Ukrainians at that moment failed to behave in a truly twentieth-century manner by neglecting to arrest the Polish leadership and intelligentsia en masse, with the predictable result that the latter organized a successful rebellion and evicted the Ukrainians from their capital two weeks later. The failure of the movement for independence and the incorporation of Ukrainian-inhabited Eastern Galicia into the restored Polish state tipped the balance in favor of a more ruthless, fanatical nationalism in the 1920s and 1930s. The Ukrainian nationalists in Galicia drew the same conclusions from the failure of the independence movement in Dnieper Ukraine: they rejected the heritage of the soft, democratic Central Rada and lionized either the armed struggle of Petliura (the majority, radical nationalist view) or the authoritarian rule of Hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky (the minority, conservative view). Furthermore, until the Second World War, "politics without God" found expression in acts of political terrorism—armed attacks against Polish institutions and assassinations. From many perspectives, not just that of Ukrainian nationalism, these acts can be ultimately evaluated as heroic. Even if one does not share a perspective that permits a positive evaluation of politically motivated killing, the terrorism of the interwar era appears relatively harmless by comparison with the actions that an ethically indifferent politics facilitated in the Second World War, namely mass murders among the Polish population in Volhynia and in certain districts of Galicia, and participation in the mass murder of the Jewish population. Again, the conjunctural was paramount. Ultimately, the participation of Ukrainians in the extermination of the Jews was a result of the Nazis' recruitment of them to this end. The Nazis used persuasion and force to facilitate recruitment. They took advantage, too, of the Ukrainians' opposition to and brutalization by Soviet rule. And they, or rather the process of destruction they initiated, activated whatever could be found in general human nature or in specifically Ukrainian traditions that would reduce inhibitions to or even motivate complicity in murder.

Notes I thank the Central Research Fund of the University of Alberta for a grant to conduct research at the Yad Vashem Archives, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem for hosting me during my stay. For their insights and patience, I also thank the students who participated in my seminar on historical controversies surrounding the Holocaust. A special debt is owed to those who read an earlier draft of this article and, by their astute comments, helped to refine the argument: Chrystia Chomiak, Myrna Kostash and Alan Rutkowski.

1. See David Matas, "Bringing Nazi War Criminals in Canada to Justice" and Roman Serbyn, "Alleged War Criminals, the Canadian Media, and the Ukrainian Community," in

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Ukraine During World War II: History and Its Aftermath: A Symposium, ed. Yury Boshyk (Edmonton: 1986), 113-120 and 121-130. The 60 Minutes segment "The Ugly Face of Freedom" was aired on 23 October 1994; numerous reactions to it appeared in The Ukrainian Weekly (Jersey City) over the next several months. 2. Classic texts are those of Taras Hunczak, "Ukrainian-Jewish Relations During the Soviet and Nazi Occupations," in Boshyk (ed.), Ukraine During World War II, 39-57; Aharon Weiss, "Jewish-Ukrainian Relations in Western Ukraine During the Holocaust," in Ukrainian-Jewish Relations in Historical Perspective, ed. Peter J. Potichnyj and Howard Aster (Edmonton: 1988): 409-420. 3. David Kahane, Lvov Ghetto Diary (Amherst, Mass.: 1990), 76. 4. For this aspect of the story, see M.V. Koval', "Natsysts'kyi henotsyd shchodo ievreiv ta ukrains'ke naselennia (1941-1944 rr.)," Ukrains'kyi istorychnyi zhurnal, no. 2 (1992), 2532. 5. The Wehrmacht executed several Ukrainians for looting during the pogrom in Drohobych. See Harry Zeimer, "Report from Drohobych, Fall 1942," Yad Vashem Archives (YVA), M20/136, 1. Also see "Operational Situation Report USSR No. 43" (5 Aug. 1941), in The Einsatzgruppen Reports: Selections from the Dispatches of the Nazi Death Squads' Campaign Against the Jews, July 1941-January 1943, ed. Yitzhak Arad, Shmuel Krakowski and Shmuel Spector (New York: 1989) (henceforth: The Einsatzgruppen Reports), where the following quote appears: In some places measures had to be taken against the Ukrainian militia and its leaders as looting and ill treatment occurred regularly. ... In many places, the local and field commandants disarmed and dissolved the militia and arrested their leaders. Part of the militia behave in such a way that even the Ukrainian peasants call them "Bolshevik hordes" (66). The Wehrmacht itself, however, was not above looting. During the pogrom in Uman (August 1941), "Jewish apartments were completely demolished and robbed of all utensils and valuables. In this action, too, members of the Wehrmacht almost exclusively took part." Ereignismeldung UdSSR, no. 119 (20 Oct. 1941), 5 (copy preserved in YVA, 051/14). (The previous passage is mistranslated in The Einsatzgruppen Reports, 196.) On German and Ukrainian looting in the Uman pogrom, see also Yehuda Bauer, A History of the Holocaust (New York: 1982), 199-200. 6. Referring, it seems, to 1942, a Jewish partisan noted in his memoirs: The last remnants of the Horodenka Jews, seeing no other way out for themselves, decided to cross the Dniester and head for the towns of Tlust and Buczacz. Not all made the journey safely. Some were robbed on the way by bands of Ukrainians, and arrived penniless. . . . [Later,] all the unarmed Jews in nearby forests concentrated themselves around our [partisan] group. They were in constant danger of attacks, mainly by the local Ukrainian population. The Ukrainians would lie in wait for them along the roads that led to the villages. Every unarmed Jew was beaten mercilessly, robbed of his money and clothing and left completely naked. See Joshua Wermuth, "The Jewish Partisans of Horodenka," in They Fought Back: The Story of the Jewish Resistance in Nazi Europe, ed. Yuri Suhl, 2nd ed. (New York: 1975), 226-227. 7. The guard unit at the Ianiv concentration camp was said to have been composed of "Soviet prisoners and deserters and various Ukrainian fascists from the Kyiv region" who were "attracted by the relatively bearable standard of living and the opportunity for dirty revenue." Tadeusz Zaderecki,"Gdy swastyka Lwowem wladala. . . (Wycinekzdziejowokupacjihitlerowskiej)," 144. (A copy of the Polish original of Zaderecki's memoirs are preserved in YVA, 06/28; they have been published only in Hebrew translation. There are some problems with the memoirs' reliability [sec Kahane, Lvov Ghetto Diary, 156-157] and they have a pronounced antiUkrainianbias [see, for example, the general slurs on Ukrainian intelligence on pp. 35-36].)For a discussion of how the Polish police profited from bribery and extortion, see Adam Hempel, Pogrobowcy kleski: Rzecz o policji 'granatowef w Generalnym Gubernatorstwie 1939-1945

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(Warsaw: 1990), 172-180. Bribing of Ukrainian guards was so common that Jewish resistance organizations in the camps felt that this was the best way of acquiring weapons. See Shmuel Krakowski, The War of the Doomed: Jewish Armed Resistance in Poland, 1942-44 (New York and London: 1984), 240 (on Treblinka), 252 (on Plaszow). 8. [Andrei Sheptys'kyi], Psy'ma-poslannia Mytropolyta Andreia Sheptyts'koho ChSVV. z chasiv nimets'koi okupatsii (Yorkton, Sask.:1969), 225-226. I have assumed that the words printed here as prokliattia and prokliata ("curse" and "cursed") are errors for prolyttia and prolyta ("shedding" and "shed"); otherwise the passage does not make sense. For the background to this pastoral letter, see Shimon Redlich, "Sheptyts'kyi and the Jews during World War II," in Morality and Reality: The Life and Times of Andrei Sheptyts'kyi, ed. Paul Robert Magocsi (Edmonton: 1989), 145-162. 9. See Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: 1992). See especially the passages on the changes that transpired in Lieutenant Gnade; the story of the Berlin musicians who took part in executions for the thrill of it (p. 112); and the conclusions in which the case of Reserve Police Battalion 101 is considered in light of various psychological and sociological experiments (particularly pp. 167-168). 10. Ibid., 52. This is a valuable but thoroughly "orientalist" study. After pointing out on p. 52 that Globocnik chose Ukrainians, Latvians and Lithuanians to become "Hiwis," Browning later says in defense of the Poles that "the large units of murderous auxiliaries—the notorious Hiwis—were not recruited from the Polish population, in stark contrast to other nationalities in pervasively anti-Semitic eastern Europe" (158). This is to ignore the rather crucial fact that the Poles were not offered the opportunity to serve as Hiwis—or else it is to assume that the ideas of Globocnik and other Nazis about various peoples and nationalities have validity. 11. In his final report on "The Solution of the Jewish Question in Galicia," SSGruppenfiihrer and General Lieutenant of the Police Fritz Katzmann singled out those who aided him in the difficult job of making the District of Galicia judenfrei. They were "the forces of the Security and Order Police, the Gendarmerie, the Special Service and the Ukrainian Police" (consulted in YVA, 06/28-1—originally USA. Exhibit 277, L-18, dated 30 June 1943, from the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg). Katzmann's authoritative report is quoted here because, in spite of the evidence of numerous German documents as well as eyewitness testimonies, the involvement of the Ukrainian police in the process of destruction is often passed over in silence or denied in Ukrainian circles. At the Conference on Jewish-Ukrainian Relations in Historical Perspective (McMaster University, 1983) a man who claimed to have served as a Ukrainian policeman under the Nazi occupation challenged statements made by Aharon Weiss and denied that the Ukrainian police took part in antiJewish actions. When, as co-editor for history of the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, I added a sentence about participation in the murder of Jews to the article on "Ukrainian Auxiliary Police," the sentence was stricken from the final version. 12. "The Ukrainians were used principally for dirty work—thus Einsatzkommando 4a went so far as to confine itself to the shooting of adults while commanding its Ukrainian helpers to shoot children" (Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews [Chicago: 1961], 205). After witnessing executions by Romanians, Otto Wohler, chief of staff of the Eleventh Army, noted that "because of the eastern European conception of human life, German soldiers may become witnesses of events . . . which violate German feelings of honor most deeply" (ibid., 213). 13. Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 204. 14. The locus classicus is the report of Franz Walther Stahlecker, commander of Einsatzgruppe A, in his report to Reinhard Heydrich concerning the pograms in Kaunas: "In the first hours after the entry of the forces we also persuaded, not without considerable difficulties, local antisemitic elements to start pogroms against the Jews. ... It was desirable, outwardly, to show that the first steps were made by the local population on its own initiative, as a natural reaction to the subjugation at the hands of the Jews for decades, to the recent communist terror." Cited in Bauer, A History of the Holocaust, 184.

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15. Einsatzgruppe C, stationed in Zhytomyr, complained that "carefully planned attempts made at an earlier date to incite pogroms against Jews have unfortunately not shown the results hoped for." See "Operational Situation Report USSR No. 47" (9 Aug. 1941), in The Einsatzgruppen Reports, 79. For months thereafter, and in spite of special measures to convince the local Ukrainians, Einsatzgruppe C continued to have difficulty with them; not only could they not be "persuaded to take active steps against the Jews," but they were not even willing to reveal the hiding places of Jews (Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 202). 16. Ereignismeldung UdSSR, no. 58 (20 Aug. 1941), 9-11, in Einsatzgruppen in der UdSSR und die Judenfrage, The Beate Klarsfeld Foundation (N.p.: n.d.) (YVA, 051/14a). This source consists of photocopied short excerpts from Ereignismeldungen UdSSR, Tatigkeits-und Lageberichten der Einsatzgruppen . . . in der UdSSR and Meldungen aus den besetzten Ostgebieten. The section on the Kieper incident is partially translated in The Einsatzgruppen Reports, 96-97, but the whole section on the propaganda aspect is omitted without either explanation or acknowledgement. 17. See, for example, The Einsatzgruppen Reports, 12, 29-33, 39-40, 80; Kahan, Lvov Ghetto Diary, 6-8; Shmuel Spector, The Holocaust of Volhynian Jews 1941-1944 (Jerusalem: 1990), 68; Zeimer, "Report, from Drohobych," 1. The same device was employed in the Baltic region. 18. See Henry Abramson, " 'This Is the Way It Was!' Textual and Iconographic Images of Jews in the Nazi-Sponsored Ukrainian Press of Distrikt Galizien," paper presented to the conference on "Journalism and the Holocaust, 1933-1945," Yeshiva University, New York, October 1995 (I am grateful to Dr. Abramson for providing me with a copy of his paper); John-Paul Himka, "Krakivs'ki visti and the Jews, 1943: A Contribution to the History of Ukrainian-Jewish Relations During the Second World War," in Ukraine: Developing a Democratic Polity: Essays in Honour of Peter J. Potichnyi, ed. Stefania Szlek Miller, (special issue of Journal of Ukrainian Studies 21, nos. 1-2 [Summer-Winter 1996], 81-95). 19. Krakowski, War of the Doomed, 264. 20. Krakowski, War of the Doomed, 246 (Plaszow), 250 (Sobibor). 21. Akten zur deutschen Auswdrtigen Politik 1918-1945: Aus den Archiv des Deutschen Auswartigen Amis, Serie D: 1937-1941, Band XIII. 1: Die Kriegsjahre, Sechster Bank, Erster Halbband: 23. Juni bis 14. September 1941 (Gottingen: 1970), 122. 22. The standard work on the nationalists during the war is John A. Armstrong's Ukrainian Nationalism, 2nd ed. (Littleton, Colorado: 1980). 23. From the viewpoint of some Ukrainians, the difference between Hitler and Stalin could be perceived in this way: Hitler may well be the more murderous of the two, but he murders fewer of us than Stalin does. Of course, this was not a viewpoint common to all Ukrainians, as evidenced by massive participation of Ukrainians in the Soviet partisan movement as well as in the ranks of the Red army, but it was one with a certain appeal, given the Ukrainians' negative experience with Stalinist rule and the inevitability of its return should the Germans be defeated. 24. "The Jewish Council of Elders [in Starokostiantyniv, about halfway between Ternopil and Zhytomyr] spread the rumor that the Russians were advancing again; whereupon the Jews publicly threatened and abused the Ukrainians" ("Operational Situation Report USSR No. 59" [21 Aug. 1941], in The Einsatzgruppen Reports, 100). "The Reds drop leaflets announcing their forthcoming return. They threaten to shoot that part of the population which is friendly to the Germans. The Jews are called upon to remain in hiding for the time being. Their rescue is said to be imminent" ("Operational Situation Report USSR No. 187" [30 March 1942], in ibid., 322). 25. The attitude of the Ukrainian partisan movement toward the Jews is discussed most fully in Spector, The Holocaust ofVolhynian Jews, 268-273. Unfortunately, the account is not reliable. For example, Spector states that "in the course of the operation it [the army of Taras Bul'ba-Borovets'] murdered the Jews of Olevsk and apparently also Jews in several other localities in that area." The sources cited in the footnote, however, do not contain this information. On Home Army units attacking Jewish partisans, see Krakowski, War of the

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Doomed, 14. From the memoirs of a Jewish partisan: "In the last months of the war our security was under constant threat. Large groups of armed Ukrainians, the well-known Bandara [sic] bands, were determined to wipe us out completely" (Wermuth, "The Jewish Partisans of Horodenka," 228). 26. "If the mass murder of Jews aroused little indignation, let alone resistance, it was not because it was carefully hidden but because its unique and absolute horror was submerged in an atmosphere of rampant naked violence" (Arno J. Mayer, Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? The "Final Solution" in History [New York: 1988], 273). "For Westerners the Jewish tragedy stands out more starkly than for East Europeans who witnessed the totality of the Nazi occupation" (Zvi Gitelman, "History, Memory and Politics: The Holocaust in the Soviet Union," Holocaust and Genocide Studies 5, no. 1 [1980], 34). 27. See John-Paul Himka, Galician Villagers and the Ukrainian National Movement in the Nineteenth Century (Edmonton, London and New York: 1988). 28. See Bohdan Krawchenko, Social Change and National Consciousness in TwentiethCentury Ukraine (London: 1985). 29. See Jan Gross, "The Jewish Community in the Soviet-Annexed Territories on the Eve of the Holocaust: A Social Scientist's View," in The Holocaust in the Soviet Union: Studies and Sources on the Destruction of the Jews in the Nazi-Occupied Territories of the USSR, 1941-1945, ed. Lucjan Dobroszycki and Jeffrey S. Gurock (Armonk, NY and London: 1993), 155-171; Ben-Cion Pinchuk, "Sovietisation and the Jewish Response to Nazi Policies of Mass Murder," in Jews in Eastern Poland and the USSR, 1939-46, ed. Norman Davies and Antony Polonsky (New York: 1991), 124-137. 30. See Wermuth, "The Jewish Partisans of Horodenka," 229-230. 31. An important essay on this question is Henry Abramson, "The Scattering of Amalek: A Model for Understanding the Ukrainian-Jewish Conflict," East European Jewish Affairs 24, no. 1 (1994): 39-47. 32. Crucial to the difference between these nations and the Ukrainian nation was that they were state nations with their own bureaucracies and landlords. Enmity toward the Jews played a role for them in national consolidation that had little relevance for Ukrainian society. 33. See John-Paul Himka, "Metropolita Szeptycki wobec zagadnien reformy wyborczej, 1905-1914," in Metropolita Andrzej Szeptycki. Studia i materialy, ed. Andrzej A. Zieba (Cracow: 1994), 146. See also: idem, "Sheptytsk'kyi and the Ukrainian National Movement before 1914," in Magocsi (ed.), Mortality and Reality, 37. 34. Sheptyts'kyi, Pys' ma-poslannia . . . z chasiv nimets'koi okupatsii, 225. 35. This incident is treated in depth in John-Paul Himka, Eastern Catholicism in Western Ukraine: The Greek Catholic Church and the Ruthenian Movement in Galicia, 1867-1900 (Kingston, Ont.: forthcoming). 36. See Armstrong, Ukrainian Nationalism, 148. 37. Meldungen aus den besetzten Ostgebieten, no. 4 (22 May 1942), 2 (YVA, 051/14). The relevant passages have been omitted from The Einsatzgruppen Reports. 38. Ereignismeldung UdSSR, no. 191 (10 April 1942), 38 (YVA, 051/14). This passage is not included in The Einsatzgruppen Reports. 39. "It is noteworthy that ... on the basis of a secret order from a militia leader, confiscated weaponry and munitions were not turned over to the German Wehrmacht, but were stockpiled by the militia station" (Meldungen aus den besetzten Ostgebieten, no. 4 [22 May 1942], 2 [YVA, 051/14]). The report does not mention specific contexts in which the weaponry was confiscated. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid., 4. This passage is included in The Einsatzgruppen Reports, 343. 42. Ereignismeldung UdSSR, no 187 (30 April 1942), 16-17. This passage is not included in The Einsatzgruppen Reports. 43. As Ivan L. Rudnytsky has pointed out, the Bandera underground held illegal conferences and published clandestine anti-German propaganda. "Thus there was no objective obstacle to the OUNr [the Bandera movement] condemning the genocide of the Jews and warning Ukrainians against taking part in Nazi beastialities" (ivan Lysiak-Rudnyts'kyi, "Nat-

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sionalizm i totalitaryzm [Vidpovid' M. Prokopovi]," Journal of Ukrainian Studies 7, no. 2 [Fall 1982], 85). 44. The socioeconomic antagonism undoubtedly contributed to the outbreaks of violence against the Jews in Russian-ruled Ukraine in 1881-1882 and 1905-1906 and to the more sustained violence of the revolutionary era. 45. These antagonisms and their reflection in the Ukrainian popular political press are examined in detail in John-Paul Himka, "Ukrainian-Jewish Antagonism in the Galician Countryside During the Late Nineteenth Century," in Potichnyj and Aster (eds.), UkrainianJewish Relations, 111-158. 46. Himka, "Krakivs'ki visti and the Jews." 47. See Gavin I. Langmuir, History, Religion, and Antisemitism (Berkeley, Los Angeles and Oxford: 1990). 48. Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 330. 49. Kahane, Lvov Ghetto Diary, 142. On the next day, the metropolitan regretted that he had said these things and apologized to the rabbi. "I ask you to forgive me. After all I am mortal and for a moment I let myself be distracted" (ibid., 143). 50. Ibid., 146. 51. Zaderecki, "Gdy swastyka Lwowem wladala," 256 (and mentioned again on p. 383). 52. This element is accented in Andrzej Zbikowski, "Local Anti-Jewish Pogroms in the Occupied Territories of Eastern Poland, June-July 1941," in Dobroszycki and Gurock (eds.), The Holocaust in the Soviet Union, 173-179. 53. See Jan T. Gross, Revolution from Abroad: The Soviet Conquest of Poland's Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia (Princeton: 1988), 32-33; Spector, The Holocaust of the Volhynian Jews, 23. 54. Himka, "Ukrainian-Jewish Antagonism," 155, n. 115. 55. See John-Paul Himka, "Hope in the Tsar: Displaced Naive Monarchisin Among the Ukrainian Peasants of the Habsburg Empire," Russian History 7, pts. 1-2 (1980): 125-138. 56. John-Paul Himka, Socialism in Galicia: The Emergence of Polish Social Democracy and Ukrainian Radicalism (1860-1890) (Cambridge, Mass.: 1983), 126-127. 57. The metropolitan was a compassionate man by nature, and one might think that his personality rather than his religious convictions were paramount in his actions on behalf of the Jews. However, he made several explicit statements about how participation in the murder of the Jews imperiled the salvation of the faithful entrusted to his care. On this important matter he was reasoning as a bishop, not just following the impulses of his character. 58. The focus here is on Christian ethics to simplify the analysis. Ukrainians associated with the socialist movement and democratic nationalism had their own secular ethics, but for the vast majority of Ukrainians the ethical background was Christian. To illustrate the possibilities within non-Christian ethics, two examples should suffice. Roman Rosdolsky was a nationally conscious Ukrainian and profoundly anti-Stalinist, but he was also a MarxistLeninist. He aided Jewish refugees from the Cracow ghetto and suffered terrible consequences. See his "Memoir of Auschwitz and Birkenau," Monthly Review 39, no. 8 (Jan. 1988), 33-38. The "Mitrynga group" within the Ukrainian nationalist underground was infused with democratic principles; it condemned the violence that other Ukrainian nationalists directed against the civilian Polish population. See Borys Levyts'kyi, "Natsionalistychnyi rukh pid chas Druhoi svitovoi viiny. Interv"iu," Diialoh, no. 2 (1972), 4-31.

Beyond Condemnation, Apologetics and Apologies: On the Complexity of Polish Behavior Toward the Jews During the

Second World War

Antony Polonsky (BRANDEIS UNIVERSITY)

/ have often found that man is human in human conditions, and I have always thought cruelly nonsensical the attempts to judge him by the deeds done in inhuman conditions—as if water could be measured by fire, and earth by hell.—Jozef Herling-Grudziriski, Inny Swiat

Poles and Jews On the eve of the Second World War, Poland contained the largest Jewish community in Europe, with a population of nearly three and a half million individuals. It was a Jewry with a long and distinguished history. By the middle of the eighteenth century, a Jewish community of some 750,000 people—representing at least one third of the total Jewish population worldwide—had established itself on the lands that made up the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth. This community had prospered as a result of a marriage of convenience with the Polish nobility, which dominated pre-partition Poland and which enabled the Jews to flourish both economically and spiritually in spite of outbreaks of anti-Jewish violence such as those that accompanied the crisis of the Polish state in the middle of the seventeenth century. Jews were allowed to participate in a wide range of trades, crafts and skills, and they very frequently managed the estates of the nobility. They were the indispensable craftsmen of the rural economy in the villages and towns (shtetlekh)—the carpenters, cobblers, blacksmiths, tailors, tarmakers, and wheelwrights—occupying, as a group, a position that was unique in Europe. A rich Jewish religious and intellectual life had also developed. The yeshivot of Poland became the models for talmudic study for the rest of Europe and Polish masters of halakhah became a dominant influence in Jewish life. Kabbalistic study was transformed in Poland from the 190

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domain of a small aristocratic elite into a mass movement; and it was on the Polish lands that Hasidism, the last mass Jewish religious movement to establish itself in the Jewish world, emerged and flourished. The situation of the Jews had begun to deteriorate in the middle of the seventeenth century, as the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth itself started to go into decline. Yet the community managed to maintain itself and even expand in the eighteenth century, in spite of growing Catholic obscurantism, on the one hand, and increasing pressure from Polish reformers (whose influence was greatly strengthened by the first partition of Poland in 1772), on the other. With the final partition of Poland in 1795, the occupying governments sought to have the Jews transform themselves from a community, linked by a common religious tradition and way of life and transcending national boundaries, into citizens of their respective states. This was a process to which Jews were subjected in all the areas of Europe in which they lived, and it proved relatively successful in the western and central parts of the continent where, in the course of the nineteenth century, the Jews became Englishmen, Frenchmen and even Germans "of the Hebrew faith." Because of the size of the Jewish population on the Polish lands, its resistance to the sort of transformation proposed and the growth of anti-Jewish sentiment, the "assimilationists," whether Polish or Jewish, who sought to make the Jews into "Poles of the Mosaic persuasion," largely failed in their efforts. A minority of Polish Jews, both in Galicia (Austrian Poland) and in the Kingdom of Poland (under Russian rule since the Congress of Vienna), accepted the assimilationist dream— linked as it was with political liberalism—and were fairly well integrated into Polish society. But in those parts of Poland that had been directly absorbed into the tsarist empire (the Pale of Settlement), the "maskilic" elite favored russification rather than polonization. In all these areas, and particularly in the Pale of Settlement, the late nineteenth century saw the emergence and increasing dominance of autonomist concepts of Jewish self-identification, in particular Zionism and Jewish autonomist socialism (Bundism). Modernized versions of traditional Orthodoxy also developed a significant following, among both mitnagdim and hasidim. A significant minority within the Jewish community was attracted to revolutionary socialism, with its vision of a world in which the old divisions of Jew and Gentile would be replaced by the creation of a new socialist humanity. Together with the newly emergent ideologies, Yiddish and Hebrew evolved as modern languages. These developments greatly complicated the issue of how to ensure equal rights for the Jews in Poland, since what was being demanded by many of the Jewish movements was not only individual equality before the law, but recognition of group separateness in a society committed to pluralism. As a consequence, Polish-Jewish relations, which were already tense in the period before the First World War, became increasingly envenomed in the interwar period and particularly in the late 1930s. Perhaps under happier political and social conditions a way could have been found to reconcile Polish national interests with those of the large, impoverished, diverse and nationally conscious Jewish community. The conditions of the 1930s, however, were not conducive either to political pluralism or interethnic toleration. Nevertheless, in spite of the economic and politi-

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cal difficulties that the community faced, particularly after the death of Marshal Jozef Piisudski in 1935, it remained a vital source of Jewish creativity—both secular and religious—in Yiddish, Hebrew and, increasingly, in Polish. The bulk of Polish Jewry lost their lives in the Nazi genocide. According to the records of the Central Committee of Jews in Poland (Centralny Komitet Zydow w Polsce [CKZP]), the principal Jewish body in postwar Poland, only 74,000 survivors had registered by June 1945. Of these, 5,500 had returned from concentration camps in Germany; 10,000 had been freed from such camps in Poland; 13,000 had served in the pro-Communist Polish Army, established in the Soviet Union after the withdrawal of the Anders Army; and about 30,000 had made their way back from the Soviet Union. This suggests that 20,000 Jews had survived on the "Aryan" side. The figure is certainly too low, since it does not include those who did not register with the CKZP, whether because they wished to stay away from Jewish organizations or because they were assimilated or baptized. But even if the figure is doubled, we still do not have more than 40,000 Jews who survived in hiding. During the next two years, 137,000 Jews returned from the Soviet Union, mostly people who had been deported or evacuated to the interior of the country.1 Between 1956 and 1957, several thousand more returned to Poland, while between 100,000 and 150,000 still remained in the Soviet Union. Thus, more than 90 percent of Polish Jewry perished in the Holocaust. Only in the Baltic states was the percentage of Jewish casualties higher.

"Bystanders" and the Holocaust The central issue in any discussion of the Jews' fate in Poland during the Second World War is why so few Polish Jews survived and what responsibility Polish society bears for this situation. This vexed question needs to be examined in the context of the part played by the "bystanders," an umbrella term popularized by Raul Hilberg. "Bystanders" is not a very easy term to define, since it includes so many disparate groups. Certainly many of those within the Nazi "New Order" were at different times "perpetrators," "victims" or "bystanders." In addition, the very word "bystander," with its echoes of the good Samaritan—or, rather, of the others who passed by—is morally loaded, carrying with it the implication that there was a clear choice open to those who observed the mass murder of the Jews. In recent years, partly in accordance with the assumption that the whole guilt for the genocide cannot be ascribed to the Nazis, a great deal of attention has been devoted to the responsibility of those who stood on the sidelines. Helen Fein, in her important and challenging book Accounting for Genocide, has argued that the Jewish fate can only be adequately accounted for by relating it to the success of prewar antisemitism among European nations.2 A similar view has been expressed by Istvan Deak in a long article in the New York Review of Books, in which he noted that: Recent Holocaust literature pays more attention than previously to the question of how widespread was the desire among Europeans to see an end to a large Jewish presence in

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their midst. All the evidence indicates that millions of Europeans, not only Germans, were keen for this to happen. No doubt, most of these people hoped for a non-violent solution of the Jewish question: they were even prepared to absorb a small number of Jews into Gentile society. Yet without a widespread consensus that it was desirable to be rid of most Jews, the Nazi extermination program would have been far less successful. Nor would it have succeeded to the degree it did without the callousness and even, in some cases, anti-semitism of British and American political leaders, foreign services, professional associations, trade unions, press and public.3

While conceding the importance of the issues raised, the assumptions that underlie this approach give rise to some serious reservations. One problem is methodological. Discussing the actions of the "bystanders," we are principally arguing not about what they did, which is well known and documented, but about "sins of omission"—what they did not do. Yet "counterfactual" history is highly problematic, and attempts to speculate on what might have been are open to serious question. More important is the tendency to shift the overwhelming responsibility for the genocide away from the Nazi leadership and its henchmen. There is a natural human inclination to search for "secondary responsibility." Because the guilt of the Nazis is so clear and has been so strongly emphasized, explanations that stress this factor to the exclusion of all others come to seem banal and oversimplified. Nonetheless, much valuable research has been conducted on the role of the Germans in the last ten years.4 It has greatly clarified the problems of how they came to adopt and implement their anti-Jewish genocide, and it mostly sustains the thesis that the overwhelming responsibility indeed falls upon the Nazis. The genocide was carried out in three stages. Its initiation was part of the radicalization of Nazi policy that accompanied Operation Barbarossa, and its final adoption accompanied the euphoria of victory in September and October 1941. In the first stage, mobile killing squads, the Einsatzgruppen, advanced behind the Wehrmacht, killing Soviet officials and Jewish adult men and then, after a period, also Jewish women and children. At least one million Jews were killed in this fashion between July and December 1941. This method of murder was abandoned because of its deleterious effect on the morale of those required to carry it out. It was replaced, in the second stage, by the creation of death camps, where assembly-line techniques of mass murder were developed, using first carbon monoxide and then an insecticide, Zyklon B. During this period of the genocide, which came to an end in late 1942, the Germans were operating in areas where there was no limitation on their absolute freedom of action. Their power was at its height, whereas there was minimal ability on the part of either the Allies or the subject populations under the control of the Third Reich to exercise influence on Nazi behavior. Most of the actual killing at this stage was carried out by Germans. It was during this period that at least another 2.7 million Jews were murdered, most of the victims coming from Poland in its pre-1939 borders. By the end of 1942, very few Polish Jews remained. In the third stage of the genocide, which lasted until the end of the war, the Nazis found themselves obliged to persuade or coerce their allies, satellites and puppets in the New Europe to hand over their Jews. By this time, the governments, the Western Allies and virtually everybody else in Nazi-occupied Europe knew that Nazi policy

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toward the Jews involved genocide, and they were thus obliged to articulate some sort of response.

The Poles and the Holocaust: Accusations, Apologetics, Apologies The facts outlined above have important implications for our assessment of the way in which the non-German peoples and governments in Nazi-occupied Europe reacted to the genocide. In the case of the Poles, the debate has been particularly bitter. This is partly because so much of the genocide took place on Polish soil—for Poles, there could be no illusions as to the intentions of the Germans once mass murder had begun. Moreover, Polish Jews formed a major portion of the Nazis' victims. And finally, although more than 90 percent of Polish Jewry perished in the Holocaust, the survivors were often enough ready to describe their own experiences, which, not surprisingly, tended to be embittered, marked by sharp accusations against what they viewed as Polish indifference, or worse, to the fate of the Jews. Poles, for their part—conditioned to regarding themselves as victims—were very sensitive to accusations of antisemitism that could "blacken" their country's name and hinder their struggle, supported by the anti-Communist majority, for national sovereignty. Thus, for the most part, they reacted angrily and defensively to criticism of their behavior toward the Jews during the war. These criticisms were certainly harsh. In his memoirs published shortly after the war, Mordekhai Tenenbaum, commander of the Jewish Fighting Organization in the Bialystok ghetto, wrote: Had it not been for the Poles, for their aid—passive and active—in the "solution of the Jewish problem in Poland," the Germans would never have been as successful as they were. It was the Poles who called out "Yid" at every Jew who escaped from the train transporting him to the gas chambers, it was they who caught these unfortunate wretches and who rejoiced at every Jewish misfortune. They were vile and contemptible.5 A somewhat more moderate but still strongly critical view was expressed by Emanuel Ringelblum in his Polish-Jewish Relations During the Second World War, which was written in hiding on the "Aryan" side in 1944: The Polish people and the Government of the Republic of Poland were not in a position to deflect the Nazi steam-roller from its anti-Jewish course. But it is reasonable to ask whether the attitude of the Polish people measured up to the scale of the catastrophe that befell their country's citizens. Was it inevitable that the last impression of the Jews, as they rode in the death trains speeding from different parts of the country to Treblinka or other places of slaughter, should have been the indifference or even joy on the faces of their neighbours? Last summer, when carts packed with captive Jewish men, women and children moved through the streets of the capital, was it really necessary for laughter from wild mobs to resound from the other side of the ghetto walls, was it really necessary for such blank indifference to prevail in the face of the greatest tragedy of all time?6 Ringelblum's view is echoed in the most important scholarly investigation of the problem, that of Yisrael Gutman and Shmuel Krakowski, 7 and is shared by the

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doyen of Holocaust historians, Yehuda Bauer, who has written: "The majority of Poles evinced an indifference, often rather hostile, to the fate of the Jews, expressed in a lack of basic human interest in their fate. A fairly large minority was actively hostile to the Jews, and a smaller minority was friendly and helpful."8 What of Polish responses to these accusations? For the most part, they have taken two forms: either attempts to justify Polish behavior or apologies for the failings of the Poles during this period. Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, until December 1995 the foreign minister of Poland, had a distinguished wartime record as one of the founders of the Council for Aid to the Jews (Rada Pomocy Zydom, code name Zegota), the organization established by the Home Army (Armia Krajowa [AK]) to aid Jews during the genocide. In recent years, he has become more critical of Polish behavior during the Holocaust. However, in 1968 (a significant date), he wrote the following in his introduction to Ten jest z ojczyznej mojej, a collection of testimonies of Jews saved by Poles: "The conditions of the occupation led to a considerable decrease in antisemitic sentiments in Poland, as compared with the prewar period. The common fate of the persecuted, the shared suffering and the common struggle contributed to a new sense of solidarity and a will to help those who were perishing."9 Jerzy Turowicz, editor of Tygodnik Powszechny, the principal Catholic weekly in Poland (who has also become more critical in recent years) could write in 1957: "The sense of community among persecuted, suffering, and fighting people effected quite a radical change in Polish-Jewish relations in our country. In a very large part of Polish society, the last vestiges of antisemitism disappeared to give way to a sense of solidarity. There came to the surface a will, very often effective, to help the persecuted."10 The most characteristic articulation of the whole complex of Polish attitudes on this subject was set out by the late Wladyslaw Sila-Nowicki, a prominent lawyer, opponent of the Communist regime, and former resistance fighter. In 1987, in his "A Reply to Jan Blonski," he attacked those (like Btonski, a literary critic) who argued that the Polish record vis-a-vis the Jews during the Second World War should be strongly assailed. Blonski and those who published his views, he claimed, were playing into the hands of Poland's enemies and lending credibility to "anti-Polish propaganda." Sila-Nowicki presented a familiar and not entirely inaccurate selection of facts that are still used to justify Polish behavior toward Jews before, during and after the Holocaust. For centuries, he asserted, Jews were able to settle in Poland while their coreligionists were expelled from many other countries, and their numbers increased remarkably. Before 1939, the Jews dominated certain professions and controlled a disproportionate part of wealth in Poland. During the war, no European nation did more to assist Jews than Poland, where the risk of such assistance was the greatest, the normal penalty being death—not only for the individual helper but for his or her family as well. Polish suffering during the occupation was enormous, second only to that of the Jews. There were no quislings in Poland, he argued, and the Polish underground sentenced to death those who betrayed Jews to the Nazis. It was the passivity of the Jews, more than anything else, that had led to their destruction. Habits of accommodation, presumably different from

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those of the rebellious, insurrectionary Poles, led them to go to their deaths without offering resistance. Sila-Nowicki's defiant (and inconsistent) conclusion was that I am proud of my nation's stance in every respect during the period of occupation and in this I include the attitude toward the tragedy of the Jewish nation. Obviously, attitudes toward the Jews during that period do not give us a particular reason to be proud, but neither are they any grounds for shame, and even less for ignominy. Simply, we could have done relatively little more than we actually did. 11

But there have also been voices much more critical of Polish behavior. Such views were first articulated in the immediate postwar period, though Communist cultural uniformity meant that they remained largely unheard until more recent years. Thus, in his contribution to a pamphlet denouncing antisemitism that was published in 1947, the Catholic writer Jerzy Andrzejewski observed: For all honest Poles, the fate of the Jews going to their death was bound to be exceedingly painful, since the dying . . . were people whom our people could not look straight in the face with a clear conscience. The Polish nation could look straight in the face of Polish men and women who were dying for freedom. It could not do so in the face of the Jews dying in the burning ghetto.12

A similar point of view was expressed forty years later by Jan Blonski. In his article "The Poor Poles Look at the Ghetto," Blonski observes that any attempt by Poles to discuss the Polish reactions to the Nazi anti-Jewish genocide, whether with Jews or with other people, very quickly degenerates into apologetics and attempts to justify Polish conduct. The reason for this, he claims, is the Poles' fear, conscious or unconscious, of themselves being accused either of participation in this genocide or, at best, of observing it with acquiescence. This fear cannot be easily evaded, even if the Poles share it with the rest of Europe. The only way to respond, he asserts, is for the Poles to "stop haggling, stop trying to defend and justify ourselves; stop arguing about the things that were beyond our power to do, during the occupation and beforehand. Nor to place blame on political, social and economic conditions. But to say first of all, Yes, we are guilty." Blonski's view, it should be noted, is that such guilt did not extend to any real involvement in the mass murder of the Jews. Rather, there was the fact that the Poles made an "insufficient effort to resist" and "held back" from offering help to the Jews. Such callousness, in turn, was related to the failure of the Poles in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to create the conditions that would have enabled Jews to integrate into the Polish national community: If only we had behaved more humanely in the past, had been wiser, more generous, then genocide would perhaps have been "less imaginable," would probably have been considerably more difficult to carry out, and almost certainly would have met with much greater resistance than it did. To put it differently, it would not have met with the indifference and moral turpitude of the society in whose full view it took place.13

Statements of this type are concerned above all with how one should respond to the past and deal with a shared but divisive memory. The emigre Polish Jewish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has written that:

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Equality in suffering unites and heals; "singling out" part of the sufferers for special treatment leaves hatred and moral terror in its wake. Far from dispersing the clouds of mutual suspicion and antipathy which hung over Polish-Jewish collaboration, the Holocaust made reconciliation more difficult than ever before.14

Blonski's article and the subsequent debate, however, did cause some softening of Jewish attitudes. Thus, at a symposium in Jerusalem in January 1988, Yisrael Gutman observed that: Sometimes I hear Jews accusing the Poles of deliberately not helping them even though they could have done so. Such observations are expressions of pain, which eclipse a sensible attitude. More could certainly have been done to save Jews, but the Poles in the conditions of the occupation could not fundamentally have changed the fate of the Jews. The Allies could perhaps have done so, but even that is not certain in the final phases of the murderers' insanity. I shall permit myself to say more—there is no moral imperative which demands that a normal mortal should risk his life and that of his family to save his neighbour. Are we capable of imagining the agony of fear of an individual, a family, who selflessly and voluntarily, only due to an inner human impulse, bring into their home someone threatened with death? Are we capable of understanding the pressure of those fears when a fugitive had to be kept out of sight of neighbours and relations, when a neighbour or friend dare not hear the cough of a sick person nearby, and those hiding the fugitive lived in an unending fear, when all that was needed was one house search for both hider and the hidden to have an end put to their lives? The Poles should be proud that they had so many just lights, of whom Ringelblum spoke, who are the real heroes of the deluge. And we can never do enough to thank these rare people. But by force of circumstances, such a willingness to sacrifice could have been only a marginal phenomenon.15

The entire debate encapsulated above is part of a process, painful for both Poles and Jews, of coming to terms with the past, with themselves, and with each other. Can one advance beyond these very generalized and moralistic observations? Can one move from the accusations, the apologetics and finally the apologies— apologies that have since found public expression in the letter of the Polish bishops in January 1991 and in President Lech Walesa's statement on behalf of the Polish people to the Israeli Knesset—to a sober historical analysis of the problem? It is not my intention to belittle the work that has been done on Polish-Jewish relations during the Second World War, above all by Yisrael Gutman, Wladysiaw Bartoszewski, Teresa Prekerowa, Shmuel Krakowski and David Engel. What I am attempting to do is to place the problem of Polish reactions to the Holocaust in a clearer and better-understood context.

Specific Features of the Holocaust in Poland There is virtually no debate on several key points concerning the background to the Nazi genocide of the Jews in Poland. First, as has already been described, the great majority of the Jews in Poland defined themselves and were regarded by the population as a separate national group—a fact that made it much more difficult to find for them an appropriate place in Polish society. And second, the years before the

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outbreak of the war were marked by a serious deterioration in the situation of Polish Jews. This was partly the result of the persistent and severe depression in Poland, where attempts to maintain the overvalued zloty delayed an economic recovery until 1936. Demagogic arguments that the Jews were responsible for Poland's economic difficulties and that their expropriation would alleviate the country's problems became much more widespread. The contagious effect of Nazi antisemitism was also significant. Antisemites in Poland were buoyed by the obvious defenselessness of the Jews and the ease with which the Nazis were able to disenfranchise and expropriate one of the wealthier and better integrated Jewish communities in Europe. Also significant was the death of Pilsudski in May 1935, which proved extremely damaging to the stability of the regime he had established. A section of his followers now attempted to strengthen their position by making common cause with the antisemitic right. The conflict between those who sought to return to liberaldemocratic norms and those who wished to establish some specifically Polish variant of the radical right-wing regimes that were mushrooming in Europe at the time had not yet been decided when the war broke out. Nevertheless, the government, reflecting widespread popular sentiment, now began to call for the emigration of a large part of the Jewish community. Anti-Jewish violence grew as attempts were made to enforce a boycott of Jewish stalls and shops, to exclude Jews from universities and to limit the number of Jews in the professions. Very few political groups resisted the antisemitic tide, the exceptions being the Socialists, the Democratic party and—for their own rather specific reasons, until the dissolution of their party in 1938 by Stalin—the Communists. Some qualifications should be made. Apart from some restrictions on shehitah (the Jewish method of animal slaughter), no antisemitic legislation had been introduced before the Nazi conquest. In addition, the Jewish community had shown some ability to resist the onslaught, both political and economic. Yet the largest Jewish community in Europe was clearly in peril. A cautious observer, Jerzy Tomaszewski, after pointing out that the mass emigration of the Jews had not been a feasible possibility, comes to the following conclusion: A lasting solution to the social and economic problems of the Jews had thus to be sought in Poland, in close association with the whole range of problems faced by the country. It is difficult today to estimate what were then the chances of finding such a solution, because the outbreak of the war made a break in the normal evolution of the country. If one takes into account the situation which prevailed at the end of the 1930s, it must seem doubtful whether lasting solutions could have been found.16 There were few organic ties between the two groups; most Poles did not regard the Jews as part of what Helen Fein has called "the universe of obligation . . . that circle of persons towards whom obligations are owed, to whom rules apply and whose injuries call for expiation by the community."17 True, in the days just before and just after the outbreak of war, there had been a brief Polish-Jewish rapprochement based on solidarity against the Nazi oppressor. This has been graphically described by Ringelblum: Anti-semitism disappeared as if at the touch of a magic wand. . . . The common danger, the common labour of Poles and Jews amidst the rain of projectiles, the

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reverberation of the exploding bombs and the bursts of shrapnel, united the tenants of each block in their fight against the common enemy, brought the two peoples closer together and bridged the gulf that had been created by the common enemy.18

But this reconciliation did not survive defeat. Even before the entry of the Nazis into Warsaw, Ringelblum commented on the "anti-semitic views expressed here and there, calls for the 'Aryan' clause in shelters, for instance at Dluga 16, quarrels in queues."19 In his Polish-Jewish Relations During the Second World War, he noted that "as early as October there was a considerable number of anti-semitic elements who collaborated with the Germans in waging war on the Jews."20 Another particular feature of the genocide in Poland was that the Poles saw themselves as faced by two mortal enemies, the Nazis and the Soviets. Polish diplomacy and underground political strategy were dominated by the desire to ensure the reemergence of the country as an independent state within the frontiers of 1939—something that could only be achieved by taking a very firm line, or even entering into a conflict, with the Soviet regime. The Soviets had already acted in a very brutal manner in 1939 to ensure the incorporation into the U.S.S.R. of the areas they described as Western Belorussia and Western Ukraine. The Germans did not seek Polish collaborators on an anti-Soviet basis until it was apparent that they were losing the war, by which time their own actions had created an almost insuperable wall of hatred between them and the Poles. But the fact that the Jews, by and large, did not accept Polish strategic thinking, taking a basically favorable view of the Soviets (particularly after June 1941), greatly complicated Polish-Jewish relations. The brutality of Nazi rule in Poland (and elsewhere in Eastern Europe) should also be stressed. The Nazis were not interested in collaboration at a political level in Poland. They kept the prewar Polish police in operation as a matter of convenience, but their long-term goal was to incorporate and colonize the conquered Polish lands, as they began to do almost immediately in the areas directly annexed into the Third Reich (Danzig, Warthegau, Upper Silesia). Their harsh policies aroused violent opposition and caused great devastation, suffering and loss of life. During the war, Poland lost 19.6 percent of its population (including 3,000,000 of its Jewish subjects, but also including another 3,000,000 Poles, many of whom perished at Soviet hands): most Polish journalists, 45 percent of Polish doctors, 40 percent of Polish professors, 45 percent of lawyers, 30 percent of technicians and 20 percent of priests did not survive the occupation. In the last years of the war, more than 100,000 Poles were incarcerated in German concentration camps and prisons.

The Widening Gap Between Poles and Jews in the First Two Years of the Nazi Occupation As noted, the Nazis embarked on a policy of genocide in the summer of 1941. Before that date, they were not sure how to proceed in relation to the Jews, whether they should be concentrated in some sort of reservation in Eastern Europe or expelled to an African penal colony, such as Madagascar. Throughout this period, Nazi policy was extremely harsh. The campaign of September 1939 had been

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accompanied by sporadic anti-Jewish violence in which approximately 5,000 Jews lost their lives and a number of Jewish institutions were destroyed. Once the Nazi occupation regime had been established, Jewish property was expropriated and the Jews were confined to ghettos, subjected to brutal forced labor and deprived of the means of subsistence—so that in Warsaw alone, nearly 85,000 Jews died from starvation or from diseases resulting from malnutrition and overcrowding in the first eighteen months of the occupation. Yet it was in this period that the Polish-Jewish divide grew even wider, leaving virtually no chance that Polish society could provide significant aid to the Jews once the policy of mass murder was launched. How is one to explain this further broadening of the gulf between Polish and Jewish society? The German authorities were determined to exacerbate Polish-Jewish relations. The numerous gratuitous acts of violence carried out against Jews, the seizure of Jews for forced labor, their subjection to humiliating physical punishment and the plucking off or cutting of the beards (and often the hair) of Orthodox Jews were all intended, in part, to show that the Jews had no rights and could be attacked and assaulted with impunity. So too was the widespread confiscation of Jewish property by German soldiers and the fact that those who sought the restitution of their goods were punished still further. As Henryk Bryskier, a Jewish activist in Warsaw, recalled: A few times at the beginning, victims turned to the Germans and complained that property had been confiscated from them without legal process or written authorization. The Gestapo man to whom the complaint was addressed would respond with a blow of his revolver butt to clear the complainant's head of any notion that the German rulers might be pilferers or thieves.21 And in his report sent in February 1940 to the Polish government (which had reestablished itself in exile in France, at Angers) Jan Karski quoted a statement by a member of the Gestapo to a Pole: Please acquaint yourself with our customs as quickly as possible. It is permissible to take everything from a Jew, because everything that the Jews possess comes from legalized robbery. We are even anxious to see the Polish population made aware [emphasis in original] that any Pole may go up to any Jewish store, remove the Jew from the premises and according to our law take it over in trusteeship. Whoever wishes may kill a Jew, and our law will not punish him for it.22 An important means of isolating the Jews was the obligation to wear an armband with the Star of David, which was introduced by Hans Frank, the head of the Generalgouvernement, on December 1, 1939. In Sefer hazavaot, a collection of testimonies gathered in 1940 by the United Jewish Committee for the Relief of Polish Jewry in Palestine, Apolinary Hartglas (a prominent Jewish politician who managed to leave Warsaw) explained that "the Jewish symbol on one's clothing was devised so that the Germans could distinguish a Jew easily and snatch him off the streets for forced labor, as well as to incite the Polish masses against the Jews."23 Another witness noted that "at first the Poles tended to express support for the Jews forced to wear armbands, but in time this feeling cooled, and Poles apparently avoided encounters in the streets with their Jewish friends wearing the bands."24

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Throughout the occupation the Nazis operated an extensive Polish-language "reptile" press, one of whose main tasks was to spread antisemitism. The Germancontrolled radio, public loudspeaker system, special exhibitions, brochures, leaflets and posters undertook the same function. According to Ringelblum: There was a general reaction against German propaganda, including antisemitic propaganda, as a matter of course. But the fact remains that it had its effect on the subconscious all the same, and perhaps even to a considerable degree. Thus the poster "Jews-lice-typhus" did its work and there was no shortage of poison in the atmosphere.25

Czeslaw Milosz, who lived in the area of the Generalgouvernement, has confirmed the influence of the Nazi-controlled newspapers. "Unfortunately," he wrote recently, "they had considerable success in fostering hatred of Jews, because some members of the Polish underground who had rightist and extreme rightist tendencies were spreading similar feelings."26 The Jews' isolation was increased by the regulations, operative until the creation of the ghettos, that Jewish shops were to be marked with a large Star of David, that Jews were to be barred from certain streets, public parks and trains. The constant stigmatization of the Jews as dirty and responsible for disease also had an effect. Once the ghetto walls had been erected, which of course further isolated Jews from Poles, they were plastered with warning notices equating the Jews with typhus and lice. Given the Jews' status as outcasts, there was nothing to stop the spread of antiJewish violence. Sometimes it was spontaneous, the work of antisemites or thugs, but generally it was inspired by the Nazi authorities, who cynically explained that they were not responsible for the hatred caused by Jewish exploitation. The general assumption of the Jews was that these assaults were instigated and controlled by the Nazis. This was strikingly confirmed when a delegation from the Warsaw Judenrat, headed by Adam Czerniakow, requested Dr. Fritz Arlt, head of the department of population and welfare in the Interior Ministry of the Generalgouvernement, to halt anti-Jewish violence. Arlt initially claimed that he was powerless to halt outbursts of Polish resentment against the Jews. When the delegation claimed that they could not continue the talks while Jews were being assaulted and the kehillah buildings vandalized, Arlt telephoned Warsaw and the attack stopped.27 Several Jewish witnesses have confirmed the Nazi involvement in the anti-Jewish violence. One of the testimonies in Sefer hazavaot, reads: The pogrom committed against the Jews of Warsaw during Easter [1940] lasted more than eight days. It broke out suddenly and ended just as suddenly. It was perpetrated by a bunch of thugs, about 1,000 of them, who spontaneously appeared on the streets of Warsaw. They hadn't been seen before and haven't been seen since. They were probably reckless and irresponsible youths who had come together for this purpose from all over the city. . . . For the most part the hooligans acted on their own, but there were also instances in which German soldiers joined in on their assaults.28

Another witness from the same source recounts: The Polish intelligentsia was enraged by the pogrom in March and especially by the fact that it was perpetrated by a mob of Poles, albeit under German direction. The Polish

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masses, on the other hand, were readily at the disposal of the Germans. . . . They continued to assault the Jews, maltreat, beat, curse and torment them ... in German.29

And Ringelblum commented on the wave of anti-Jewish violence: No one will accuse the Polish nation of responsibility for these constant pogroms and excesses against the Jewish population. The significant majority of the nation, its enlightened working-class and working intelligentsia, undoubtedly condemn these excesses, seeing in them a German instrument for weakening the unity of the Polish community and a lever to bring about collaboration with the Germans. We do, however, reproach the Polish community with having failed to dissociate itself, either in speech— for example, sermons in Church—or in writing, from the anti-semitic beasts that cooperated with the Germans. We reproach them for not having actively opposed the constant excesses and for having done nothing whatsoever to weaken the impression that the entire Polish nation of all classes approved of the behaviour of the Polish antisemites.30

Given the overwhelming power of the Germans, the Jews also felt unable to organize self-defense units, as they had done with some success in the interwar years. Several incidents showed that self-defense only provoked German reprisals. According to a testimony in Sefer hazavaot, "There was one incident on Franciszkanska Street in Warsaw when just as a Polish youngster was about to beat a Jew, some Jewish youths came along, got a grip on him, and turned him over to a policeman. Germans immediately arrived and beat the Jews for daring to lay hands on the Pole."31 Another factor widening the Polish-Jewish divide was the Polish belief that they were in fact more persecuted than the Jews. The Poles were certainly subject to savage repression, intended both to cement the incorporation of the Polish lands into the Third Reich and to deter attempts at resistance. By February 1940, for instance, more than 200,000 Poles and 100,000 Jews had been expelled from the Warthegau. In accordance with "Unternehmen Tannenberg," the plan to Germanize the incorporated areas, more than 50,000 Poles were executed in the lands annexed by the Third Reich in the first months of the occupation. As early as September 6, 1939, nearly two hundred academics from the Jagiellonian University and the Mining Academy were arrested and twenty were executed. At the end of April 1940, Heinrich Himmler ordered the incarceration of 20,000 Poles in concentration camps. Although Jews were also being savagely persecuted, many Poles perceived only the Jews' degree of (spurious) autonomy and the fact that Jewish political activity was not actively repressed. This seemed to confirm that the Jewish fate was not significantly worse than that of the Poles, and might even be somewhat better. The gap deepened still further because a significant part of the Polish population was benefiting from the Nazi expropriation of the Jews and their expulsion from Polish economic life. Before the war, the reduction of Jewish economic influence had been the objective of most Polish political parties of the center and right. The Peasant party, for example, although it had called for the maintenance of equal rights under the constitution and had opposed acts of violence against Jews, had also resolved at its conference in 1937 that the Jews could not be integrated into Polish society and that their continued presence obstructed the development of a native

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middle class. This problem, stated the resolution, could only be solved by the emigration of a large part of the Jewish population. The Nazis acted very quickly to reduce Jewish economic influence. According to a report of the Generalgouvernement in July 1940: fT]he second question is to what degree the active participation of the Jews should be allowed in the economy. There can be no doubt that Jews should not be given access to industry, the wholesale import and export trade, real estate transactions, banking, insurance, transport and warehouse management. We should examine—from a positive outlook—whether it is already practicable to remove the Jews altogether from middlelevel commerce. It seems that it is still not possible to drive them entirely out of smallscale [commerce] and wholesale trade, and particularly from the supply of raw materials. The situation in the crafts resembles that in the wholesale trade.32 The aim of the Germans was clear—the removal of the Jews as soon as possible from all significant participation in the economy of occupied Poland. Thus, in a different and more brutal manner, they were accomplishing what a significant portion of Polish society had long seen as a desirable objective. In this way they also created a large group of people who benefited from Jewish dispossession and who could be expected to fight to retain what they had received at Nazi hands. According to a memorandum sent in the summer of 1943 to the Polish government in London by Roman Knoll, a senior official in the Office of the Government Delegation for the Homeland (known as the Delegatura): In the Homeland as a whole ... the position is such that the return of the Jews to their jobs and workshops is completely out of the question, even if the number of Jews were greatly reduced. The non-Jewish population has filled the places of the Jews in the towns and cities; in a large part of Poland this is a fundamental change, final in character. The return of masses of Jews would be seen by the population not as restitution but as an invasion against which they would defend themselves, even with physical means.33 A more sympathetic witness, Kazimierz Wyka, described the process in a long article written in 1945: The central psycho-economic fact of the years of the occupation remains undoubtedly the disappearance from trade and intermediary occupations of the Jewish masses, previously several million strong. This disappearance, now that it is possible to count the survivors, is definitive and final. . . . Shielded by the sword of the German executioner, who was carrying out a crime never before seen in history, the Polish shopkeeper took possession of the keys to the till of his Jewish competitor and believed that he was acting in the most moral manner. To the Germans are left the guilt and the crime, to us the keys and the till. The shopkeeper forgot that the "legal" destruction of a whole nation was not staged by history so that the sign could be changed on someone's shop. The manner in which the Germans liquidated the Jews falls on their [the Germans'] conscience. The reaction to that liquidation, however, falls on our conscience [emphasis in original]. A gold tooth extracted from a corpse continues to ooze blood even though no one remembers its origin.34 Further, and somewhat ironically, antisemitic attitudes and policies were not seriously compromised by the establishment of Nazi rule in Poland. The Germans had no desire for genuine collaboration in Poland. Their aim was to destroy the

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Polish elite, force the remaining population to work for the Third Reich; and in the long run, colonize the Polish lands. Resistance to the Nazis, in consequence, had a broad base of support that included antisemites. In his fine analysis of the character of the Polish underground, Alexander Smolar notes that: Poland was unique in another respect: resistance against the invader served to unite organizations and parties that before the war had nothing at all in common. Democrats and totalitarians, liberals and socialists, nationalists and communists, freemasons and Christians were all engaged in the same struggle. In other Germanoccupied countries, antisemitism was the monopoly of quisling governments and parties. The resistance, as a rule, was anti-fascist, democratic, and anti-antisemitic. Antisemitism, for them, was part of the syndrome of treason. Only in Poland was antiSemitism compatible with patriotism (a correlation considerably strengthened under the Soviet occupation in 1939-1941) and also with democracy. The antisemitic National-Democratic Party was represented both in the Polish government in London and in the structures of the underground within Poland. Precisely because Polish antisemitism was not tainted by any trace of collaboration with the Germans, it could prosper—not only in the street, but also in the underground press, in political parties and in the armed forces.35

Jozef Cyrankiewicz, a socialist member of the resistance who was captured and sent to Auschwitz, defined the matter even more succinctly. In Auschwitz as a political prisoner, he had difficulty in explaining to prisoners of other nationalities the existence of antisemitism among the Polish inmates. But his exposition was as follows: "Germans, Austrians, and French [here] are all politically well-defined groups, for they are all anti-fascist; there are no fascists in their sections, for fascists work hand-in-hand with their Nazi friends. Only in our section are we together with reactionaries."36 Put somewhat differently, whereas the socialist and democratic organizations continued to advocate full equality for the Jews in a future liberated Poland, prewar antisemitic parties did not abandon their hostility to the Jews merely because the Nazis were also antisemites. The attitude of the Christian Democratic Party of Labor (Stronnictwo Pracy) has been investigated by Jacek Majchrowski. He has shown that it continued to advocate the removal of the Jews from Poland, on the grounds that the Jewish nation was the product of a religion of conscious evil that encouraged its adherents to be parasites on the bodies of other nations. According to party members, this issue could be resolved only by forced emigration. In order to achieve this, all Jews except those baptized before 1918, and a few other insignificant exceptions, should be deprived of their citizenship. (The first group to be forced out of the country would be those aged 18 to 40, in order to reduce the Jewish birthrate.)37 An article appearing in the party paper Narod, in January 1941—after the start of the genocide, but before its scale and implications had become apparent, contains this declaration: The Jewish question is now a burning issue. We insist that the Jews cannot regain their political rights and the property they have lost. Moreover, in the future they must entirely leave the territories of our country. The matter is complicated by the fact that once we demand that the Jews leave Poland, we will not be able to tolerate them on the territories of the future federation of Slavic nations [which the journal advocated]. This

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means that we will have to cleanse all of Central and Southern Europe of the Jewish element, which amounts to removing some 8 to 9 million Jews.

This, in fact, was a moderate antisemitic position. Szaniec, the organ of the Rampart group, formed by members of the prewar fascist National Radical Camp, published the following on January 31, 1942: Jews were, are and will be against us, always and everywhere. . . . And now the question arises, how are the Poles to treat the Jews. . . . We, and certainly 90 percent of Poles, have only one answer to this question: like enemies. . . . The basic mistake that both previous Polish constitutions had in common was to give equal rights to all its citizens, including national minorities. The only right and effective, authentic and noncowardly solution to this problem is to grant political rights to no one but Poles.

As noted earlier, another factor exacerbating Polish-Jewish relations was Polish resentment at Jewish "collaboration" with the Soviet authorities, which came about after the occupation of eastern Poland in September 1939. It is certainly true that a fair number of Jews (like the overwhelming majority of Belorussians, a considerable number of Ukrainians and even some Poles) welcomed the establishment of Soviet control. In the Jewish case, the feeling was understandable; compounded as it was of a desire to see an end to the insecurity caused by the collapse of Polish rule in these areas; fear of the Nazis; belief that the Soviets were a lesser evil; and resentment at Polish anti-Jewish policies in the interwar period. And then, of course, there was the minority that supported the Communist system. Although the Soviets did offer new opportunities to individual Jews, they acted to suppress organized Jewish life, both religious and political—dissolving kehillot, banning virtually all Jewish parties and arresting their leaders. Jews made up a bit less than one third of the close to a million people deported by the Soviets from the areas they annexed. Finding themselves in foreign and generally far more difficult conditions, the overwhelming majority of the Jews quickly lost whatever illusions they had about the Soviet system. This, however, was not how most Poles perceived the situation. They were affronted by Jewish behavior in 1939, probably exaggerated Jewish participation in the new system (because a Jewish presence in the apparatus of government was so unprecedented in Poland) and accused the Jews of disloyalty at a moment of national crisis. The Polish belief that many Jews had behaved treacherously in a national crisis was articulated in a moderate and nuanced manner by Jan Karski in his report to the Polish government in Angers in February 1940: The attitude of Jews towards the Bolsheviks is regarded among the Polish populace as quite positive. It is generally believed that the Jews betrayed Poland and the Poles, that they are basically communists, that they crossed over to the Bolsheviks with banners waving. Indeed in most cities, Jews greeted the Bolsheviks with baskets of red roses, with submissive declarations and speeches, etc. However, one needs to insert here certain reservations. Certainly it is true that Jewish communists regardless of the social class from which they came adopted an enthusiastic stance towards the Bolsheviks. The Jewish proletariat, small merchants, artisans, and all those whose position has at present been improved structurally, and those who had

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formerly been exposed primarily to oppression, indignities, excesses, etc., from the Polish element—all of these responded positively, if not enthusiastically, to the new regime. Their attitude seems to me quite understandable. However, there are worse cases, when they [the Jews] denounce the Poles, Polish nationalist students, and Polish political figures; when they direct the work of the Bolshevik police force from behind their desks or are members of the police force; when they falsely defame the relations [between Poles and Jews] in former Poland. Unfortunately it is necessary to state that such incidents are quite common, more common than incidents which reveal loyalty toward Poles or sentiment toward Poland. In contrast, I have the impression that the intelligentsia, the wealthiest Jews and those of the highest level of culture (with, of course, certain exceptions, and not counting those who are making a pretense), rather think of Poland often with a certain fondness and would happily greet a change in the present situation [leading to] the independence of Poland.38 Others were more unbridled in their condemnations. According to General Stefan Grot-Rowecki, commander-in-chief of the Home Army, the resistance movement linked with the Polish government-in-exile, many Poles greeted the invading Germans in July 1941 as "liberators from the Bolshevik oppression in which Jews had played a great part."39 General Anders, commander of the Polish army that was created in the Soviet Union after the Nazi invasion (it consisted of Polish citizens who had been deported there after September 1939), wrote in his memoirs that "I was greatly disturbed when at the beginning, large numbers from the national minorities, and first and foremost Jews, began streaming toenlist. As I have already mentioned, some of the Jews had warmly welcomed the Soviet armies that invaded Poland in 1939."40 And Stanislaw Kot, the Polish ambassador to the Soviet Union, and a close confidant of the Polish premier-in-exile, General Wtadyslaw Sikorski, noted that "[t]he Poles feel very bitter toward the Jews for their behavior during the Soviet occupation—their enthusiastic welcome of the Red Army; the insults that they directed toward the Polish officers and men who were under Soviet arrest; their offers to help the Soviets, their informing on Poles and other such actions."41 The intent here is not to discuss at length the truth of these allegations (elsewhere, I have attempted to show that they were at best half-truths, reactions to national humiliation and to the sense that it would be very difficult to establish the Polish claim to most of the territories incorporated by the Soviets).42 Attention should rather be drawn to the widespread acceptance of the stereotype of the pro-Soviet and anti-Polish Jew, which certainly widened the gulf between the two communities. A quite different factor in the Polish attitude toward the Jews was the numbing brutality of the Nazi occupation, which inhibited the ability of ordinary individuals to rise above their own predicament. The situation has been graphically described by Slawomir Mrozek: What was happening to the Jews was a cause of horror, not amusement, but this horror was just one factor in the general horror of war and occupation. After all, what the Germans did to the Jews was a matter between Germans and Jews. No concern of ours, no need to stick your head out. A very, very unpleasant business, perhaps even more than unpleasant, perhaps even horrible, but not ours.43 The shock of their defeat and the effect of the Nazi onslaught served to reinforce such attitudes. In the battle and siege of Warsaw, for example, about one quarter of

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the city's buildings were destroyed or badly damaged and it has been calculated that fifty thousand people were killed or seriously injured. In the aftermath of such destruction, Poles were filled with outrage. Many blamed the prewar government; many looked for other scapegoats. While some people were moved to take a more positive view of the Jews, others felt an intensified antisemitism. It should be noted that some antisemites did attempt (sometimes even while retaining their antisemitic beliefs) to aid Jews. Such individuals included Zofia Kossak-Szczucka, one of the organizers of Zegota, the Council for Aid to the Jews, created in late 1942; the right-radical activist, Jan Mosdorf, who helped Jews in Auschwitz; Father Marcel Godlewski, who assisted Jews in the Warsaw ghetto; and the novelist Jan Dobraczyriski. But in general, the growth in hostility toward the Jews seems to have been a fact that was beyond question and widely commented on by political figures and taken into account in their political calculations. In a report compiled for the Polish government in Angers in February 1940, Jan Karski wrote: With regard to the Germans, the Jews are docile, submissive, treated roughly; they live in perpetual fright, terror. . . . The attitude of the Jews toward the Poles is similar to their attitude toward the Germans. Usually one gets the sense that it would be advisable if the Poles, in their attitude to the Jews, were to understand that in the end both peoples are being unjustly persecuted by the same enemy. Such an understanding does not exist among the broad masses of the Polish populace. . . . Their attitude toward the Jews is overwhelmingly severe, often without pity. A large percentage of them are benefiting from the rights the new situation gives them. They frequently exploit those rights and often abuse them. . . . This brings them, to a certain extent, nearer to the Germans. . . . "The solution of the Jewish Question" by the Germans—I must state this with a full sense of responsibility for what I am saying—is a serious and quite dangerous tool in the hands of the Germans, leading toward the "moral pacification" of broad sections of Polish society. It would certainly be erroneous to suppose that this issue alone will be enough to win over the population to the Germans. However, although the nation loathes them mortally, this question is creating something akin to a narrow bridge upon which the Germans and a large part of Polish society find themselves in agreement. What is certain is that the narrower the bridge, the greater the desire of the Germans to strengthen and reinforce it. Moreover, this situation threatens to demoralize broad segments of the populace, and this in turn may present many problems to the future authorities endeavouring to rebuild the Polish state. . . . Furthermore, the present situation is creating a twofold schism among the inhabitants of these territories—first a schism between Jews and Poles in the struggle against the common enemy, and second a schism among the Poles, with one group despising and resenting the Germans' barbaric methods (conscious of the danger in this), and the other regarding those methods (and thus the Germans, too!) with curiosity and often fascination and condemning the first group for its "indifference toward such an important question."44 A year later the situation had most likely deteriorated. In a dispatch to London sent on September 30, 1941, General Grot-Rowecki of the Home Army wrote: Please take it as an established fact that the overwhelming majority of the population is antisemitic. Even the socialists are no exception. There are only tactical differences about what to do. Hardly anybody advocates imitating the Germans. German methods

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provoke compassion, but after the merging of the occupation zones, on learning how the Jews behaved in the east, this is now considerably reduced.45 Such attitudes inevitably affected the policy of the political organs of Polish society. As noted, it was not until much later in the war that Germans became interested in maintaining any form of Polish political authority or in creating a collaborationist government. But after the Polish defeat, the forces that had opposed the post-Pilsudski regime succeeded in staging a coup, bringing into existence a government-in-exile under the moderate centrist and pro-Western General Wladyslaw Sikorski. Recognized by the Western allies as the legal government of Poland, it reconstituted itself in London after the fall of France in 1940. It was a coalition of the main forces from right to left that had opposed the Pilsudski regime, and it also included a number of the less discredited followers of the marshal. This coalition was committed to the establishment of a liberal and constitutionalist regime in liberated Poland, as was made clear in Sikorski's numerous public pronouncements. It also held firmly to the view that postwar Poland should expand not only to the west but also—with the reestablishment of the frontier set by the Treaty of Riga in 1921—to the east. This, of course, would have meant incorporating areas that were inhabited primarily by Ukrainians and Belorussians, although also by a substantial Polish (and Jewish) population. In order to carry on the struggle for Polish independence and an Allied victory, the Polish government-in-exile created armed forces outside Poland, first in France and the United Kingdom and later in the Soviet Union (Anders' Army, which withdrew to the British-controlled Middle East during the second half of 1942). In addition, the government in London established an underground movement in occupied Poland. This was composed of a political directorate, the Delegatura, composed of the political parties represented in the government-in-exile; and a military wing, first called the League of Active Struggle (Zwiazek Walki Zbrojnej) and later, the Home Army. What was the attitude of these groups toward the Jews in occupied Poland during the pregenocide stage? The policy of the government-in-exile has been subjected to intensive examination in two large and extremely well-researched books by David Engel.46 He shows that in this period, the Polish government—which was under strong pressure both from the Allied governments and Western Jewry—did issue a declaration on November 5, 1940, that guaranteed full equality to the Jews in a liberated Poland of the future. The key paragraph reads: The Jews, as Polish citizens, shall in liberated Poland be equal with the Polish community, in duties and in rights. They will be able to develop their culture, religion and folkways without hindrance. Not only the laws of the state, but even more the common sufferings in this most tragic time of affliction will serve to guarantee this [pledge].47 Engel argues that this declaration was issued unwillingly and that its implementation was regarded as conditional: the Jews were expected to support the Polish war effort, including the restoration of the Riga frontier. Under these circumstances, not surprisingly, the declaration did not achieve its goal of a genuine improvement in Polish-Jewish relations. 1 agree that there was opposition to the adoption of the declaration and that there were a fair number of people both in the government and

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in the National Council (the parliament-in-exile) who were unfriendly to the Jews. Yet the actual adoption of the declaration does seem to be significant. More important than the strict conditionality, which Engel sees as crucial to the results of the declaration (disappointing to the Poles), were the mutual suspicions that had been created by the deteriorating position of the Jews in Poland throughout the 1930s. Neither side was able to rise to the very difficult moment, and the declaration was not followed by a concerted propaganda effort by the Polish government in occupied Poland to stress "the common sufferings in this most tragic time of affliction." No pressure was brought to bear on the underground organizations, whether political or military, to include Jewish groups in their activities. Very little was done to educate Polish opinion, on the lines suggested by Karski, regarding the dangers of Nazi antisemitism. Indeed, the reaction to the declaration in the occupied country was not calculated to encourage the government to take bold steps to change attitudes toward the Jews. Janusz Radziwill wrote to Stanislaw Kot, most likely at the end of November or the beginning of December, that the declaration had "made a disastrous impression in Poland even among workers belonging to the Polish Socialist Party," and had loosened the already shaky hold that the London government maintained over the loyalties of the Poles under occupation.48 Reference must also be made to the attitude in this period of the Catholic Church, which certainly claimed significant moral authority. The prewar view of the Polish Church, which did not differ significantly from that of the Catholic Church in much of continental Europe, had been articulated by the Polish primate, Cardinal Hlond, in a pastoral letter in 1936: The Jewish problem is there and will be there as long as Jews remain Jews. . . . It is a fact that Jews oppose the Catholic Church, that they are freethinkers, the vanguard of godlessness, Bolshevism, and subversion. It is a fact that they exert a pernicious influence on public morality and that their publishing houses spread pornography. It is true that Jews are swindlers, usurers, and that they are engaged in fostering immoral earnings. It is true that the effect of the Jewish youth upon the Catholic is—in the religious and ethical sense—negative. This does not apply to all Jews. There are very many Jews who are believers, honest, righteous, merciful, doing good works. The family life of many Jews is healthy and edifying. And there are among Jews people morally quite outstanding, noble and honorable people.49

This was the mainline position, with its classic statement of traditional antiJudaism, coupled with a rejection of anti-Jewish violence and a refusal to link all Jews with the negative behavior of the majority. There was also within the church a more strongly antisemitic element that adopted near-racist positions, linked with extreme populism and nationalism and best represented by the Catholic periodicals Rycerz Niepokolanej, Pro Christo and the daily Maty Dziennik. Under these circumstances, those Catholic groups that espoused liberal and humanistic attitudes, including the center at Laski near Warsaw (which published the periodical Verbutri) and the Association of Catholic University Students (Odrodzenie) were small, isolated and uninfluential. The views of the church remained basically unchanged until the genocide was in full force. The only initiative it adopted in the first years of the Nazi occupation seems to have been to intercede on behalf of converts. This inter-

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vention was not always efficacious. A list of converts was handed over to the Gestapo so that they could be exempted from wearing the armband with the Star of David. It was later used by the Gestapo when establishing the Warsaw ghetto to ensure that all those on the list were confined within the ghetto walls.

Polish Society and the Holocaust During the first two years of the occupation, then, virtually all the links between Polish and Jewish society had been broken. The moral authorities that claimed to speak on behalf of Polish society had either felt themselves too weak to protest strongly against the vicious anti-Jewish policies of the occupying regime, or else believed that strong protest would not necessarily be in the Polish interest. Moreover, by 1942 the strategic position of Poland (as represented by the government-in-exile) had deteriorated significantly. The Polish-Soviet rapprochement did not prove lasting and disputes over the Polish eastern frontier, the amnesty for Poles imprisoned by the Soviets and the formation of a Polish army in the Soviet Union soon soured relations. In autumn 1941, the Soviets gave permission to Polish Communists in the U.S.S.R. to reconstitute the Polish Communist Party, which had been dissolved on Stalin's orders in 1938. The new party, called the Polish Workers' Party (Polska Partia Robotnicza [PPR]), was intended to serve both as a means of putting pressure on, and so winning concessions from, the London government and also as the nucleus of a pro-Soviet government in Poland should an accommodation with Sikorski prove impossible. The PPR pursued a "popular front" policy in occupied Poland, but soon found itself in bitter conflict with the underground forces linked to the London government. It also established its own underground military force, first called the People's Guard (Gwardia Ludowa) and then the People's Army (Armia Ludowa). Finally, in April 1943, Stalin broke off relations with the Polish government in London, using as a pretext the claim that the Poles were accusing the Soviets of being responsible for the murder of 4,000 Polish officers found by the Nazis at Katyn (they had in fact been murdered by the Soviets). And as previously noted, in the summer of 1941, after a series of further disputes, the Polish army created and commanded by General Anders left for the Middle East. Efforts by the Western allies to heal the breach, especially after the Teheran Conference (December 1943), failed. The Soviets thus proceeded unilaterally to declare the Curzon line the eastern frontier of Poland and incorporated the areas east of it into the Soviet Union. In July 1944, they established what was in effect a Polish provisional government in Lublin, the first large town taken west of the Curzon line. These developments preoccupied the government in London and dictated the strategy of the underground it controlled. The Communist-controlled groups, which were quite weak, advocated an immediate confrontation with the Nazi forces both to take the pressure off the Soviet Union and in order to radicalize the Polish population by provoking savage German reprisals. In contrast, the Home Army sought to avoid a major confrontation, partly to spare the civilian population, but above all because it wanted to conserve its strength until the decisive moment when German

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power was on the verge of collapse. Its aim was to use that juncture in order to take power in Poland and then confront the Soviets with the alternatives of either negotiating with the London government and its forces in Poland or else crushing those forces before the eyes of the world. This risky strategy, as is well known, failed disastrously and was followed by the sovietization of Poland. At the time, however, it was dictated by the desperate strategic position and by the realization on the part of the leaders in London that they had little chance of returning to their country. As a result, when the Jews of Poland were being murdered en masse, the minds of the Polish politicians in London and in the underground movement were firmly concentrated on what was to them the central issue of how to regain the independence of their country. The tragic fate of the Jews did arouse considerable sympathy in the central bodies of the underground. This was clearly expressed in its principal paper Biuletyn Informacyjny (a weekly that appeared throughout the war), which reflected the views of its civilian leadership, namely the Delegatura. Its print run reached approximately 45,000 copies—a considerable achievement for an underground periodical —and its principal editor was Aleksander Kaminski, a well-known Polish educator and Scout leader, who before the war had become friendly with Mordecai Anielewicz, later the leader of the Jewish Fighting Organization (Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa) in the Warsaw ghetto. On September 17, 1942, the paper carried the following editorial comment: Along with the tragedy that Polish society is forced to endure, being decimated by the enemy, for nearly a year now Jews have been brutally butchered in our land. This mass murder has no precedent in the history of the world, and all other atrocities known to history pale alongside it. Babies, children, young people, adults, the old, cripples, invalids, men, women, Jewish Catholics and Jews practising the Mosaic faith are murdered in cold blood, poisoned by gas, buried alive, thrown out of windows of highrise buildings, forced to endure agonies before their death, the hell of homelessness and the anguish of cynical ill-treatment at the hands of their executioners. The number of victims killed in this way has passed a million and is growing with every day. Although we are not able actively to resist this crime, the League of Active Struggle protests in the name of the entire Polish nation against the mass murder that is being perpetrated on the Jews. All Polish political and social groups join in this protest. Just as in the case of Polish victims, the physical responsibility for this crime will fall on the executioners and their accomplices.

But among the political parties that made up the underground state, genocide did not lead to a fundamental revision of attitudes toward the "Jewish question." At the end of 1943, the information and propaganda bureau of the Home Army undertook a study of the parties linked with the Delegatura. They found that four groupings (the Convention of Independence Organizations; the Syndicalists; the Democratic party; and the breakaway section of the prewar Socialist party, "Freedom-EqualityIndependence") favored full equality for the Jews; eight other parties, some of them very small, were still in favor of the emigration of all or most Polish Jews; and one (the Confederation of the Nation) favored "liquidation."50 Opposition to the genocide and sympathy for the Jews was also expressed by the liberal Catholic Front for the Rebirth of Poland (Front Odrodzenie Polski (FONj),

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albeit with some of the characteristic ambiguities of most Catholic thinking about the Jews before the Second Vatican Council. In August 1942, one of the group's founders, Zofia Kossak-Szczucka (who was later, as already noted, a member of Zegota), published a pamphlet with the title Protest that, with all its contradictions, enables us (in the words of Jan Btonski) "to penetrate the thoughts and feelings of an important (perhaps dominant) section of Polish society at that time."51 Because of its significance, I will quote extensively from it: In the Warsaw ghetto, cut off by a wall from the world, several hundred thousand condemned prisoners wait for death. There is no hope of rescue, no help comes to them. The executioners scour the streets, shooting anyone who dares to leave his house. They even shoot at those who show themselves in the windows. Unburied corpses cover the pavements. The daily requirement of victims is between eight and ten thousand. The Jewish police is required to deliver them to the German executioners. If they do not do this, they die themselves. Children too weak to walk are loaded onto wagons. This is done in such a brutal fashion that few of them make it alive to the ramps. Mothers who witness this lose their wits. The number of those driven mad by grief and terror rivals those shot. . . . What is occurring in the Warsaw ghetto has been taking place for six months in Polish villages, small towns and cities. The total number of murdered Jews already surpasses a million, and this number is increasing every day. All are dying. Rich and poor, the old, women, men, young people, infants. Catholics dying with the Name of Jesus and Mary on their lips as well as Jewish believers. All have been declared guilty because they have been born into the Jewish nation, condemned by Hitler to be wiped out. The world observes this crime, more terrible than any seen by history—and it is silent. The massacre of millions of defenseless people is taking place amid a universal, ominous silence. The executioners are silent, they do not boast of what they are doing. Neither England nor America raises its voice. Even international Jewry, so influential and formerly so sensitive to injuries to its own, is silent. Poles are also silent. Polish politicians sympathetic to the Jews limit themselves to writing articles in newspapers. Polish opponents of the Jews demonstrate a lack of interest in a matter to which they are indifferent. The dying are surrounded on all sides by Pilates washing their hands. This silence can be tolerated no longer. Whatever the motives for it, they are base and ignoble. He who is silent in the face of a murder—becomes an accomplice of that murder. He who does not condemn—assists. We therefore raise our voice, Polish Catholics. Our feelings towards the Jews have not undergone a change. We have not stopped regarding them as the political, economic and ideological enemies of Poland. What is more, we are well aware that they hate us more than the Germans, that they hold us responsible for their misfortune. Why, on what basis—this remains a secret of the Jewish soul, but it is a fact constantly confirmed. Our awareness of these feelings does not free us from the obligation to condemn the crime. We do not wish to be Pilates. We do not have the means to act against the German murders, we cannot advise, we can save no one—but we protest from the depths of our hearts, overcome with pity, indignation and dread. This protest is demanded of us by God, God who does not permit murder. It is demanded by Christian conscience. Every being who is called human has the right to the love of his neighbor. The blood of the defenseless cries out for vengeance to heaven. He among us who does not support this protest is not a Catholic. We also protest as Poles. We do not believe that Poland can derive any advantage

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from the German cruelties. On the contrary. In the stubborn silence of international Jewry, in the efforts of German propaganda attempting to shift the odium of the massacre on to the Lithuanians and . . . the Poles, we sense the planning of an action hostile to us. We know also how poisonous are the seeds of this crime. The compulsory participation of the Polish nation in the bloody spectacle that is taking place on Polish soil can easily breed indifference to crime, sadism and above all the perilous conviction that it is possible to murder one's neighbor without punishment. He who does not understand this, who dares to link the proud, free future of Poland to base joy at the misfortune of his neighbor—he is indeed neither a Catholic nor a Pole. It is not clear why the author included jarring anti-Jewish sentiments in this otherwise moving appeal. Some have argued that this was because she could not overcome her own basic dislike of the Jews. Others have seen their inclusion as the result of her belief that only in this way could she persuade her Catholic audience, of whose hostility to the Jews she was well aware, to heed her appeal. Certainly, the striking combination of a call for sympathy combined with distaste for the victims was not untypical in occupied Poland. Prawda. the organ of the Front for a Reborn Poland, dealt with Jewish issues on a number of occasions, as in this article of May 1942: The problem of demoralization and barbarity that the slaughter of Jews has inflicted on us is becoming a burning issue. It is not only Latvians, Volksdeutsche and Ukrainians who are being used to perform these monstrous executions. In many places, the local population volunteers to take part in the massacres. One must try and keep such ignominious actions in check by every available means. One must bring home to people that they will earn the name of hired assassins, they must be condemned in the underground press, one must exhort people to boycott the butchers and to promise severe sentences for the murderers once Poland is free. In March 1943, it denounced the blackmailing of Jews: We have already expressed our attitude toward the Jewish community. Today, we wish emphatically to underline that we are witnessing the most despicable form of rapacity, which is feeding on their calamity. There can be no justification for this. No antisemitism can change the fact that the blackmailer is a scoundrel. The Warsaw ghetto uprising provoked an upsurge of sympathy for the Jewish insurgents, partly because it seemed to negate the widespread stereotype of Jewish passivity in the face of persecution. According to Aurelia Wytezynska, writing in Nowy Dzien (a paper that appeared daily in occupied Warsaw) on May 14, 1943: Gloria Victis!. . . Pockets of resistance are still holding on in the hopeless battle. ... I approach the front line. It is rather one great cemetery. No natural disaster has ever produced such a mass grave. They have even surpassed the record of the Bolsheviks. Near the freshly demolished wall, some German soldiers are practicing target shooting. Haven't they practiced enough? . . . The defense of Warsaw's Nalewki Street will pass into history alongside the defense of Saragossa, Alcazar, Westerplatte, and Stalingrad, every one of them held with blood. The defenders of the ghetto succumbed not only to the brutal violence and overwhelming strength of the enemy. They have gone through an inferno of suffering, through every torment that man can inflict on man. . . . They depart, victims of a holocaust, in the literal meaning of this term. The civilized world will remember them forever.

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At the same time, the mass murder of the Jews did not lead to any significant rethinking in the mainstream center and right-wing parties—the Christian Democratic Party of Labor, the Peasant party (Stronnictwo Ludowe) and the National Democrats, all of which were usually represented in the London government. (The National Democrats withdrew in July 1941 but one of its factions, headed by Marian Seyda, reentered the government in early 1942, while the other, led by Tadeusz Bielecki, regarded itself as a "loyal" opposition.) Even the relatively moderate Peasant party, as has been noted, was in favor of "voluntary emigration." On August 15, 1942, Narod, organ of the Christian Democratic Party of Labor, combined a call to provide help to Jewish fugitives with expressions of crass antisemitism: At this moment, from behind the ghetto walls, we can hear the inhuman moans and screams of the Jews who are being murdered. Ruthless cunning is falling victim to ruthless brutal power and no Cross is visible on this battlefield, since these scenes go back to pre-Christian times. If this continues, then it will not be long before Warsaw will say farewell to its last Jew. If it were possible to conduct a funeral, it would be interesting to see the reaction. Would the coffin evoke sorrow, weeping or perhaps joy? In one of our previous issues, we urged kindness, but today, we are faced with the following question. For hundreds of years, an alien, malevolent entity has inhabited the northern sections of our city. Malevolent and alien from the point of view of our interests, as well as our psyche and our hearts. So let us not strike false attitudes like professional weepers at funerals—let us be serious and honest. . . . We pity the individual Jew, the human being and, as far as possible, should he be lost or trying to hide, we will extend a helping hand. We must condemn those who denounce him. It is our duty to demand from those who allow themselves to sneer and mock to show dignity and respect in the face of death. But we are not going to pretend to be grief-stricken about a vanishing nation, which, after all, was never close to our hearts. And Walka, one of the papers published by the underground National Democrats, commented shortly after the suppression of the Warsaw ghetto uprising on July 28, 1943: From a biological point of view the Jews have lost a great deal of their power. The decline of Israel . . . foretold by Roman Dmowski as determined by the liquidation of international trade, has come much closer because of the great biological catastrophe of that nation . . . namely, the destruction of millions of its most racially pure representatives. And another National Democratic paper, Warszawski Dziennik Narodowy, could declare: "It will do us no harm if our Western allies are weakened by the war. Then their role as tools in the hands of Jewish Freemasonry will be of lesser significance in Poland." The views of the fascist groups that were independent of the Delegatura—the Rampart group (Grupa Szanca), Awakening (Pobudka), the Confederation of the Nation (Konfederacja Narodu) and the National Armed Forces (Narodowe Sily Zbrojne)—were even more hostile to the Jews. The young men who composed these groups have been accurately described by the historian Wladyslaw PobogMalinowski as hot-headed dynamic youths, mostly town bred, among them many supporters of "national radicalism" perhaps not quite a kind of Nazism, but characterized by many of its

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features—brutally uncompromising in striving for power and domination; devoted to hard terrorist methods, verging on banditry; utterly chauvinistic; vehemently hostile to the national minorities, above all the Jews—and finally, moved by a totally uncompromising, aggressive attitude toward Communism. . . ,52

In the summer of 1942, the paper of the Confederation of the Nation, Do Broni, could note, during the deportation of nearly 300,000 Jews to their deaths in Treblinka, "The Germans and the Jews have set the world on fire; therefore they must burn together." In March 1943, another of the group's papers, Barykada, claimed that "the liquidation of the Jews on Polish soil is of great significance for our future development, since it will free us from several million parasites. The Germans have greatly aided us in this matter." Gtos Polska, a paper created by members of Pobudka, a group of former supporters of the prewar fascist group Falanga, carried the following in September 1943: Before the war, the Jewish question was a matter of propaganda. Now the situation has changed radically. The measures taken by the Germans have removed the Jews not only from our territories, but most importantly from our mentality. The Poles—peasant, landlord, merchant and industrialist—have seen for themselves how they can survive on their own without help from the Jews, even under the worst kind of conditions created during the occupation. In this way, the foundation has been set for a real solution of the Jewish problem. And from Szaniec, organ of the Rampart group, on April 15, 1942: There are nations which are degenerate and sick, who must be kept under a tight hold so as not to cause disaster to civilization. These include, first and foremost, Jews, Germans and Muscovites. ... We have had to fight the Jews and Muscovites ourselves but the Germans are liquidating them both much better and more effectively than anyone else could do, particularly us. ... There is no need to dwell at length on the Jews, we know them only too well. There is not much hope of their joining the nations of goodwill until they [the Germans] totally cleanse "the eternal revolutionary Jews" by fire, and fertilize the sterile and fallow realms of the Jewish soul with the ashes.

These fringe elements aside, what was the reaction to the genocide of those organizations that claimed to speak for Polish society as a whole? The government in London was well aware of the divisions in Poland on the "Jewish question." But, as previously noted, it was also preoccupied with regaining Polish independence and with the increasing complexities of its diplomatic position. Nonetheless, on February 24, 1942, it reaffirmed its commitment to Jewish equality. The future Poland would be "a democratic and republican state" in which "the rights and liberties of all loyal citizens, regardless of national and religious differences" would be guaranteed.53 The two Jewish representatives on the National Council were not entirely satisfied with this reassurance, alarmed as they were by the return of the National Democrats to the government and by the strength of antisemitic groups in the underground state in Poland. The government began to receive information about the genocidal onslaught against the Jewish population in the summer of 1942. The slowness of its reaction seems to have been less the result of its reluctance to take up Jewish issues, as has

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been claimed by Engel, and more the consequence of communication problems and of the difficulty in internalizing the appalling implications of what was happening (an issue that has been extensively treated by Yehuda Bauer). By October, however, the government understood well what was taking place and made the news public in a protest meeting it organized at the Albert Hall on October 29, where Polish, Jewish and British figures all spoke and the chair was taken by the Archbishop of Canterbury. In his address, Sikorski assured Polish Jews that "on an equal footing with all Polish citizens, they will benefit fully from the victory of the Allies."54 The government set out its position in a declaration on November 27: The Polish government, in full consciousness of its responsibility, has not neglected to inform the world about the mass murders and bestialities of the Germans in Poland and has, at the same time, done everything in its power to counteract that terror. We are well aware that the fundamental condition for effectively counteracting German activities— which in relation to Poland can be summarized as an attempt to destroy the Polish nation and wipe out any trace of its existence—can only be to shorten the period of suffering and struggle of Polish citizens in the country and the speedy defeat of the enemy. Thus, the earlier call from the country for a Second Front and the present appeals to speed up, at all cost, the course of the war are basic guidelines for the Polish government and its activities. The development of the military situation in recent weeks, symbolized by the passage of the Allies to the offensive and their victories, has been received with great relief and true joy—the country reacted immediately by sending congratulations to President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill. A special page in the martyrology of Poland is constituted by the persecution of the Jewish minority in Poland. Hitler's decision that the year 1942 is to be the year in which at least half of Polish Jews are to be done away with is being implemented with an utter ruthlessness and barbarity the like of which is unknown in human history. The figures speak for themselves. Of the more than approximately 400,000 Jews in the Warsaw ghetto, 260,000 have been liquidated starting on 17 July and in a little less than three months. Mass murders are taking place over the whole country; Polish Jews are being exterminated along with Jews from other occupied countries who have been brought to Poland for this purpose. Forceful protests are coming from the country against these murders and against the pillage. Protest is accompanied with fellow feeling and a cry of one's own powerlessness in the face of what is taking place. Poles in the country are fully aware, as is revealed in reports, that the accelerated pace of murder, which today is taking place in relation to the Jews, will tomorrow affect the remainder of those who are left.55 Engel has argued that this declaration reflects both the Polish desire to subsume the Jewish tragedy within its own narrower political objectives and an unwillingness to acknowledge the scale of what was happening. In one sense, this is simply to state the obvious, since it would have been very surprising if the Polish government had not been primarily concerned with its own national interest. More persuasive is the view that the declaration reflected a basic unwillingness to take any meaningful action other than to protest. Certainly the government did speak out strongly. It reissued Zofia Kossak-Szczucka's "Protest" without its anti-Jewish sections (which obviously gave it a much greater impact). But the constant stress on its own powerlessness, even if it was largely true, encouraged the failure to act. The government

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may also have been unwilling to press the underground authorities on a matter concerning which there were such divided counsels in Poland. When Foreign Minister Edward Raczynski wrote to Chaim Weizmann on December 3, he stressed his "heartfelt compassion with the martyrdom which the German barbarians have inflicted upon the Jewish nation"; but as for action, he chose to await the hour of victory: "I can assure you that the Polish government is determined that the dehumanized perpetrators of these dreadful crimes shall receive a punishment commensurate with their guilt."56 Under these circumstances, the initiative for responding to the genocide fell to the underground authorities in Poland, both civilian and military. The Delegatura and its head were basically sympathetic to the Jews, but realized that they lacked the power to impose their will on the various groupings that made up the underground. It was only in April 1943 that Stanislaw Jankowski, then the head of the Delegatura, issued an appeal calling on Poles to hide Jews. Sometime before this, however, at the end of 1942, Zegota had been set up by representatives of the Front for the Rebirth of Poland and some underground socialist and left-wing groups, and it succeeded in obtaining a degree of support from the London government. Between 1942 and the end of the war, Zegota was granted a total of nearly 29 million zlotys (more than $5 million), which it used to provide monthly relief payments to a few thousand Jewish families in Warsaw, Lwow and Cracow. According to Teresa Prekerowa, one of its historians, by the middle of 1944, between 3,000 and 4,000 individuals were benefiting from Zegota's financial support. In addition, it provided Jews with the false documents they needed to survive on the Aryan side and established a network of "safe houses" where those who had an "unfavorable appe nce" could hide.57 Zegota's successes—it was able to forge false documents for some 50,000 persons—suggest that, had it been given a higher priority by the Delegatura and the government in London, it could have done much more. We have the testimony of one of its members, Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, that the organization was regarded as a "stepchild" by the central underground authorities. According to Yisrael Gutman, Zegota's achievements were "very little considering the dimensions of the tragedy," but "considerable in light of the conditions and spirit of the times."58 This assessment was shared by Emanuel Ringelblum, who wrote: "A Council for Aid to the Jews was formed, consisting of people of good will, but its activity was limited by lack of funds and lack of help from the government."59 Under these circumstances, most of those who hid Jews were individuals acting on their own initiative, whether impelled by human considerations or by the hope of financial gain. As argued earlier, there could hardly have been more than some 40,000 Jews who survived thanks to Polish assistance.60 Of course, many other Jews who received assistance were eventually murdered whether because of denunciations or because they were discovered in random searches. Teresa Prekerowa estimates that only half of those who moved onto the "Aryan side" lived to see liberation. She has also attempted to assess how many Poles were involved in the rescue efforts. According to her reckoning, since a number of Poles were usually engaged in saving each individual Jew (although some Poles saved

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more than one Jew), one should multiply the number of survivors four to six times in order to arrive at a rough estimate.61 This gives us a figure of between 160,000 and 240,000 Poles who, at the risk of their own lives and those of their families, helped rescue Jews. We do not know how many people died in the attempt. Yisrael Gutman has argued that this number is probably in the "hundreds."62 How, in ethical terms, is one to assess the meaning of these figures? Only one who was prepared to risk his life in this way is in a position to do so. Such a person is Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, who has written: "The moral issue remains. From a moral point of view it must be stated clearly that not enough was done either in Poland or anywhere else in occupied Europe. 'Enough' was done only by those who died."63 One of the main problems facing Jews attempting to hide were the blackmailers and szmalcownicy (informers) who battened on Jewish misery. What did the underground attempt to do about this problem, whose moral consequences were alluded to in a number of the newspapers cited in this article? The Delegatura ordered the trial and execution of a fair number of collaborators. Yet it was only in April 1943 that the Delegatura issued a warning condemning the blackmail of Jews—a threat, Ringelblum wrote, that "remained on paper."64 From September 1943, death sentences began to be meted out to szmalcownicy. According to Prekerowa, between 1943 and 1944, five blackmailers were put to death in Warsaw and a few in Cracow and its environs.65 Ringelblum was certainly correct when he observed: "A large number of death sentences for blackmailers, together with public announcements of these executions, would certainly have some effect."66 The attitude of the military underground to the genocide is both more complex and more controversial. Throughout the period when it was being carried out, the Home Army was preoccupied with preparing for Plan Storm (Burza), the strategy (mentioned above) of seizing power as Nazi rule in Poland collapsed. It was determined to avoid premature military action and to conserve its strength (and weapons) for the crucial confrontation that, it was assumed, would determine the fate of Poland. Its position was clearly set out on November 10, 1942, in an order of its commander-in-chief, General Stefan Rowecki: 1. Polish society is apprehensive that in the aftermath of the current extermination of the Jews, the Germans may proceed to apply similar methods of extermination against the Poles. 1 call for restraint and for counteracting these apprehensions with reassurances. The principal German objective in relation to us could be described as the absorption of our nation. Attempts to exterminate the resistant segments of our nation by the methods applied against the Jews cannot, however, be ruled out. 2. In the event that the Germans do indeed undertake such attempts, they will encounter our resistance. Irrespective of the scheduled timing of our uprising, the units under my command must proceed to armed struggle in defense of the life of the nation. In the course of this struggle, we shall switch from defense to attack, with the aim of undercutting the entire network of enemy lines to the Eastern front. This decision is mine and will be communicated to all ranks of the clandestine forces.67

This document makes clear the principal lines of the Home Army's strategy. It also brings out the fact that to the Home Army, the Jews were not a part of "our nation" and that action to defend them was not to be taken if it endangered its other objectives. Certainly the Home Army was not willing to absorb the Jewish partisan

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groups formed in the forests by fugitives from the ghettos, regarding them as unreliable and potentially Communist in sympathy. (There was one exception. In Volhynia, which was wracked by a brutal ethnic conflict between Poles and Ukrainians, it was eager to cooperate with Jewish partisans to defend Polish villages.) The Home Army was also not very willing to accept Jews as individuals, though here too there were exceptions, such as the propaganda and information bureau of the High Command. It should also be emphasized that the Home Army, like the civilian underground, was made up of adherents of different political orientations, some of them sympathetic and others hostile to the Jews. In general, though, the Home Army tended to see individual Jewish fugitives as security risks that were likely to endanger its own position. Local commanders and the High Command often referred to these people (and also to Communist partisans) as "bandits," an echo of the language used by the Nazis themselves. The view of the army command emerges clearly in an order issued on August 31, 1943 by Rowecki's successor, General Tadeusz Bor-Komorowski: Well-armed gangs roam endlessly in cities and villages, attack estates, banks, commercial and industrial companies, houses and apartments and larger peasant farms. The plunder is often accompanied by acts of murder, which are carried out by Soviet partisan units hiding in the forests or ordinary gangs of robbers. The latter recruit from all kinds of criminal subversive elements. Men and women, especially Jewish women, participate in the assaults. This infamous action of demoralized individuals contributes in considerable degree to the complete destruction of many citizens, who have already been tormented by the four-year struggle against the enemy. . . . In order to give some help and shelter to the defenseless population, I have issued an order—with the understanding of the head of the Delegatura—to the commanders of regions and districts regarding local security . . . instructing them where necessary, to move with arms against these plundering or subversive bandit elements. I emphasize the need to liquidate the leaders of the bands rather than entire bands. I recommend to the local commanders that they assure the cooperation of the local population and of the representative of the Delegatura in organizing self-defense and a warning system.68

This document is striking because it conflates Communist partisans ("criminal subversive elements"), ordinary robbers and Jews. Nothing in the order (which was later withdrawn in the wake of protests from within the Home Army) indicates any sympathy for fugitives from the Nazi genocide; no appeal is made to villagers to provide them with the food and shelter that otherwise they could only seize by force; and no understanding is shown of their predicament. These attitudes (the desire to avoid a premature uprising, suspicions about the Jewish sympathy for Communism and a belief that the weapons provided would not be used efficaciously) largely explain the meager supply of arms to the Warsaw and other ghettos. In the case of Warsaw, more weapons were supplied after the confrontation with the Nazis in mid-January 1943 had demonstrated the willingness of the Jewish Fighting Organization to undertake armed action. The smaller Jewish Military Union (Zydowski Zwiazek Wojskowy), which was controlled by the Revisionist Zionists—who had some prewar links with the Polish military and who were impeccably anti-Communist—had more initial success in obtaining weapons.

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The military formations linked with the various fascist groups, the National Armed Forces and the Rampart group were openly hostile to the Jews and frequently murdered both Jewish partisans and Jews hiding in the villages. This situation continued even when the National Armed Forces became more closely linked with the Home Army toward the end of the war. The People's Guard and its successor, the People's Army, were much more willing to absorb Jews, both because in their isolation they needed any support they could obtain and also because their ideology stressed the importance of transcending national divisions. This was, of course, a mixed blessing, because the more Jews supported these groups, the more they seemed to confirm the belief of those in the Home Army (and elsewhere in Poland) that they were essentially siding with the Communists. Discussions about the role of the Polish resistance take place in a sort of time warp. Elsewhere in Europe the myth of the powerful resistance has been subjected to harsh and largely convincing criticism. In an article in the Financial Times of November 11-12, 1995, Paul Abrahams, writing of a particularly brutal reprisal committed by the Maquis in the French Alps, observed: The attack was just one small incident in the bloody guerrilla wars that raged through much of occupied Europe during the Second World War. These conflicts, whether in France, northern Italy, the Balkans or eastern Europe have been romanticised and idealised. In popular memory they represent the triumph of patriotic will over the Axis invaders, the triumph of anti-fascist forces—whether Soviet or democratic—against the evils of Nazism. But as ceremonies of remembrance take place this weekend, it should be also remembered that the reality of the resistance movements was darker and more tragic. They were, in fact, seldom popular, numerous or militarily effective. Where resisters were active, they were generally considered at best a nuisance, at worst a potentially lethal menace. In part this was because their activities could trigger a hideous series of reprisals.

It is probably unrealistic to have expected the Home Army—which was neither as well armed nor as well organized as its propaganda claimed—to have been able to do much to aid the Jews. The fact remains that its leadership probably did not want to do so. Throughout the period of genocide the Catholic hierarchy in Poland made no statement on the fate of the Jews. This was partly because, persecuted as it was, the leadership of the church feared to expose itself to additional repression. The fate of the converts (on whose behalf the church had intervened) may have contributed to this caution. Moreover, as has been noted, nearly one fifth of Poland's priests were killed by the Nazis. Many monasteries and nunneries were closed, several thousand monks and nuns were imprisoned and nearly 900 lost their lives. Different Catholic groups expressed views on the genocide, often in radically divergent ways. One area where the church did act was in the rescue of Jews in the nunneries. In all, two thirds of those institutions in Poland took part in hiding Jewish children and adults. The fact that the action was on such a large scale suggests that it had the support and encouragement of the church hierarchy. There exists no accurate record

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of how many people were saved in this way, but it was certainly not less than 1,500. Two sisters of the Order of the Immaculate Conception and eight Sisters of Charity were shot by the Germans for assisting Jews and their children.69 What conclusions can we draw from these tragic and painful events? Success in implementing mass murder rested on persuading both victims and bystanders that it was more sensible to cooperate than to resist, whether by false claims that what was involved was merely resettlement, by holding out the hope that some would survive or by stressing the penalties for non-cooperation. As Zygmunt Bauman has written: By and large the rulers can count on rationality being on their side. The Nazi rulers twisted the stakes of the game so that the rationality of survival would render all other motives of human action irrational. Inside the Nazi-made, unreal and inhuman world, reason was the enemy of morality. Logic required consent to crime. Rational defence of one's survival called for non-resistance to the other's destruction. This rationality pitched the sufferers against each other and obliterated their joint humanity. This rationality absolved them from immorality. Having reduced human life to the calculus of survival, this rationality robbed human life of humanity.70

This is why the dispute between the "accusers," the "apologists" and the "apologizers" will not go away. The questions they raise may be uncomfortable for a historian seeking merely to explain "how things actually were," but they involve moral issues that are central to any understanding of the Holocaust. The participants in this dispute operate on different planes—they do not argue so much with each other as past each other. Those who reason as Blonski does are concerned above all with moral shame, not the shame associated with a job inefficiently done or with a task uncompleted. What the apologists are concerned with is to explain the rationality of self-preservation, the lack of alternative possibilities of action, irrespective of the ethical consequence of this self-preservation and the failure to act. To quote Bauman again: No one calls into question the earnestness and industry of Polish resistance; no one doubts that not much more practically could have been done without incalculable cost. This does not mean, however, that moral qualms can be put to sleep. Neither does it mean that a moral person's feeling of shame is unfounded (even if, as could be claimed, it is "irrational"). To this feeling of shame—our ultimate victory over the pernicious legacy of the Holocaust—the most scrupulous and historically accurate computation of numbers of those who "could" and those who "could not" be helped, are irrelevant.71

This leads us to a more fundamental issue. Blonski is clearly right to stress the significance of the emergence of two separate societies in the Polish lands—Polish and Jewish—and to draw attention to the way in which the gulf between them widened in the 1930s and in the first two years of the Nazi occupation of Poland, leading to mutual incomprehension, suspicion and even hatred. The fact that the Jews were not part of the "universe of obligation" of most Poles made it easier for the Germans to implement their policy of genocide and made it much more difficult for those Poles who wished to assist the Jews. We live in a world increasingly divided by race, nationality, social and economic disparities. We cannot say, however, that we are ignorant of the potential consequences that follow when we fail to

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widen our own "universe of obligation" to include the ethnic and national "other." Following Hillel's dictum, what is hateful to oneself, one should not do—or allow to be done—to one's neighbor.

Notes 1. Jozef Adelson, "W Polsce zwanej Ludowa," in Najinowsze Dzieje Zydow w Polsce, ed. Jerzy Tomaszewski, 388-399. 2. Helen Fein, Accounting for Genocide: National Responses and Jewish Victimization During the Holocaust (Chicago and London: 1979). 3. New York Review of Books, 8 Oct. 1992. 4. This is usefully summarized in David Cesarani (ed.), The Final Solution: Origins and Implementation (London: 1994). 5. Mordekhai Tenenbaum-Tamaroff, Dapim min hadelekah (Tel-Aviv: 1947), 49-50. 6. Emanuel Ringelblum, Polish-Jewish Relations During the Second World War, ed. and annotated by Joseph Kermish and Shmuel Krakowski (Evanston: 1992), 7-8. 7. Yisrael Gutman and Shmuel Krakowski, Unequal Victims: Poles and Jews During World War Two (New York: 1968). 8. Ringelblum, Polish-Jewish Relations, xliv. 9. Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, Zofia Lewinowna, Ten jest z ojczyzny mojej (Cracow: 1969), 72. 10. Jerzy Turowicz, "Antysemitizm," Tygodnik Powszechny, 24 March 1957. 11. Wladystaw Sila-Nowicki, "Jan Blonski w odpowiedzi," Tygodnik Powszechny, 22 Feb. 1987. For an English translation, see Antony Polonsky (ed.), "My Brother's Keeper?" Recent Polish Debates on the Holocaust (London: 1990), 59-68. 12. Jerzy Andrzejewski, "Zagadnienia polskiego antysemitzmu," in Martwa fala (Warsaw: 1947). 13. Jan Blonski, "Biedni Polacy patrzg na ghetto," Tygodnik Powszechny, \ 1 Jan. 1987. For an English translation, see Polonsky (ed.), "My Brother's Keeper?" 34-52. 14. Zygmunt Bauman, "On Immoral Reason and Illogical Morality," Polin 3 (1988), 296. 15. Yisrael Gutman, "Contribution to Discussion on Ethical Problems of the Holocaust in Poland," held at the International Conference on the History and Culture of Polish Jewry in Jerusalem, 1 February 1988," reprinted in Polonsky (ed.), "My Brother's Keeper?" 296-298. 16. Jerzy Tomaszewski, "Niepodlegla Rzeczpospolita," in Najinowsze Dzieje Zydow w Polsce, ed. Jerzy Tomaszewski (Warsaw: 1993), 215. 17. Helen Fein, Accounting for Genocide, 33. 18. Ringelblum, Polish-Jewish Relations, 24, 27. 19. Emanuel Ringelblum, Ksovimfun geto, vol. 1 (Warsaw: 1963), 29. 20. Ringelblum, Polish-Jewish Relations, 39. 21. Henryk Bryskier, manuscript diary, in the possession of the author, 17. 22. "An Early Account of Polish Jewry under Nazi and Soviet Occupation Presented to the Government-in-Exile, February 1940," ed. David Engel, reprinted in Norman Davies and Antony Polonsky, Jews in Eastern Poland and the USSR, 1939-46 (London: 1991), 262 (henceforth cited as Karski, "Report"). 23. Cited in Benjamin Mintz, Yisrael Klausner, Sefer hazavaot (Jerusalem: 1965), 54. 24. Ibid., 52. 25. Ringelblum, Ksovimfun geto, vol. 1, 228. 26. Czeslaw Milosz, New York Review of Books, 11 May 1995. 27. On this incident, see Michael Weichert, "Zikhronot 'al Adam Czerniakow," Molad, 9:219 (1969), 310-332. 28. Sefer hazavaot, 46-48. 29. Ibid., 52. 30. Ringelblum, Polish-Jewish Relations, 53.

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31. Sefer hazavaot, 52-53. 32. Tatiana Berenstein, Artur Eisenbach, Adam Rutkowski (eds.), Eksterminacja Zydow na ziemiach polskich: Zbior dokumentow (Warsaw: 1957), 154. 33. Memorandum by Roman Knoll, Head of the Foreign Affairs Commission in the Office of the Government Delegate for the Homeland, reprinted in Ringelblum, Polish-Jewish Relations, 251. 34. Kazimierz Wyka, Zycie na niby. Szkice z lat 1939-1945 (Warsaw: 1957), 197, 199. 35. Aleksander Smolar, "Jews as a Polish Problem," Daedalus (Spring 1987), 41. 36. Jozef Cyrankiewicz, "Oswiecim walczacy," in Michal Borwicz (ed.), Organizowanie wscieklosci (Warsaw: 1947), 18. 37. Jacek Majchrowski, Geneza politycnych ugrupowan katolickich (Paris: 1984), 69. 38. Karski, Report, 265-266. 39. From a report to London of 8 July 1941, cited in Krystyna Kersten, Namdziny systemu wladzy. Polska 1943-1948 (Paris: 1986), 172. 40. Wladyslaw Anders, Bez ostatniego rozdzialu. Wspomnenia z lat 1939-1946 (Newton: 1950), 99. 41. Stanislaw Kot, Listy z Rosji do Gen. Sikorski (London: 1965), 163. 42. The introduction to Davies and Polonsky, Jews in Eastern Poland and the USSR, 1431. 43. Slawomir Mrozek, "Nos," Kultura, 7-8 (Paris: 1984), 176. 44. Karski, Report, 269. 45. In the report to London of 8 July 1941, cited in Krystyna Kersten, Namdziny systemu wladzy, 111. 46. David Engel, In the Shadow of Auschwitz: The Polish Government-in-Exile and the Jews, 1939-1942 (Chapel Hill: 1987); idem, Facing a Holocaust: The Polish Government-inExile and the Jews, 1943-45 (Chapel Hill: 1993). 47. Engel, In the Shadow of Auschwitz, 80. 48. Ibid. 49. Quoted in Bohdan Cywinski, Z dziejow Kosciola katolickiego w Polsce niepodleglej (Warsaw: 1980), 210. 50. For this report, see Jan Rzepecki, "Organizacja i dzialanie Biura Informacji i Propagandy Komendy Glownej Armii Krajowej," Wojskowy Przeglqd Historyczny, no. 4 (1971), 147-153. 51. Jan Bionski, Biedni Polacy patrza na ghetto (Cracow: 1994), 41. The "Protest" is reprinted in full in this volume, which also contains the most penetrating discussion of the issues raised by the document. 52. Wladyslaw Pobog-Malinowski, Najinowsza historia polityczna Polski, vol. 3 (London: 1960), 356-357. 53. Dziennik Polski (London), 25 Feb. 1942. 54. Ibid., 30 Oct. 1942. 55. Ibid., 28 Nov. 1942, emphasis in original. 56. Quoted in Gutman and Krakowski, Unequal Victims, 97. 57. Teresa Prekerowa, Konspiracyjna Rada Pomocy Zydom w Warszawie 1942-1945 (Warsaw: 1982); idem, "The Relief Council for Jews in Poland, 1939-1942," in The Jews in Poland ed. Chimen Abramsky, Maciej Jachimczyk and Antony Polonsky (Oxford: 1986), 161-176. 58. Yisrael Gutman, "Polish and Jewish Historiography on the Question of Polish-Jewish Relations During World War II," in ibid., 186. 59. Ringelblum, Polish-Jewish Relations, 212. 60. See Jozef Adelson, "W Polsce zwanej Ludowa," 388-399. 61. Teresa Prekerowa, "'Sprawiedliwi' i 'bierni,'" Tygodnik Powszechny, 29 March 1987. 62. Sec Gutman and Krakowski, Unequal Victims, 196. Others have given much higher figures but these do not seem believable. 63. Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, "Polish-Jewish Relations in Occupied Poland, 19391945," in Abramsky, Jachimczyk and Polonsky (eds), The Jews in Poland, 160.

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64. Ringelblum, Polish-Jewish Relations, 216. 65. Teresa Prekerowa, "'Sprawiedliwi' i 'bierni.'" 66. Ringelblum, Polish-Jewish Relations, 216. 67. Quoted in Gutman and Krakowski, Unequal Victims, 74-75. 68. Polskie Sify Zbrojne w Drugiej Wojnie Swiatowej. Ill Armia Krajowa (London: 1950). 531-532. 69. On this question, see Ewa Kurek-Lesik, Gdy Klasztor znaczyhycie (Cracow: 1992). 70. Zygmunt Bauman, "On Immoral Reason and Illogical Morality," 296. 71. Ibid., 296-297.

Understanding the Jewish Dimension of the Holocaust Dan Michman (BAR-ILAN UNIVERSITY)

The Problem Holocaust historiography, by now unimaginable in its extent, deals with fragments or subtopics of the event itself. Few studies have been devoted to an effort to set the Holocaust "as a whole" within, as Arno Mayer put it, "the singular historical context in which it was conceived and executed."1 Moreover, on examining those studies, one discovers that what is usually being "set in history," what is usually being explained, is the persecution of the Jews—their expropriation, forced emigration and, ultimately, their murder. The paths of explanation differ, emphasizing variously Hitler's will to world power; rabid eliminationist antisemitism; racism; the almost apocalyptic clash between Bolshevism and fascism; the modern bureaucratic state and economic modernization; and modernity itself; but all these theories share one characteristic: the subject of the analysis is one-dimensional—the issue of persecution or murder—and the explanation is placed linearly in German and/or European history. The Jews are thus perceived as an object, as "raw material," and of minor importance in any explanation of the "event" as such.2 As we know, however, the lot of the Jews in the various occupied countries was not identical; and it should be clear that these differences in outcome resulted not only from factors relating to the German side, or to the varying interactions between the Nazi perpetrators and the local bystanders,3 but also from the specific "input" of the Jews themselves. Thus, if one wants to see the full picture of the Holocaust, one must avoid the historiographical pitfall of envisioning it as a clearly defined and tightly bound event comprising "Judeocide" or persecution alone; it must be perceived as an evolving, multilayered and multidimensional development that encompassed, among many subthemes, the continued daily life of the Jews, of Jewish society and of Jewish institutions throughout Europe and North Africa. This aspect of the tragedy can only be analyzed within the context of modern Jewish history prior to the Holocaust. This particular issue, of course, has never been entirely neglected. Especially 225

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well known are the observations by Raul Hilberg on the Jewish reaction to Nazi policies: If we ... look at the whole Jewish reaction pattern, we notice that in its two salient features it is an attempt to avert action and, failing that, automatic compliance with orders. Why is this so? Why did the Jews act in this way? . . . They hoped that somehow the German drive would spend itself. This hope was founded on a twothousand-year-old experience. In exile the Jews had always been in a minority; they had always been in danger; but they had learned that they could avert danger and survive destruction by placating and appeasing their enemies. . . . This experience was so ingrained in the Jewish consciousness as to achieve the force of law. ... A twothousand-year-old lesson could not be unlearned; the Jews could not make the switch [to resistance when their leadership realized] . . . that the modern machine-line destruction process would engulf European Jewry.4

These statements provoked, as we know, many reactions. However, without going into the details of the discussion itself, it is important to point out that Hilberg and his opponents were interested only in the issue of the Jewish response to the destructive intentions and actions of the Nazis,5 and they all spoke in general terms about "the Jews," "the reactions" or "the destruction." Other historians, such as Yehuda Bauer, David Biale and David Vital, have dealt—in indirect relation to Hilberg's statements—with the issue of the political power and the powerlessness of the Jewish people throughout the ages, and especially in modern times, trying to understand the role those factors played in the Holocaust (as well as the role of the Holocaust in the transformation of Jewish behavior afterwards).6 Many other studies have described and analyzed the fate of different Jewish communities under the Nazi regime, relating these, in one way or another, to the local situations existing prior to the occupation. In this context, for instance, a certain amount of attention has been paid to the question of continuity in the leadership of Jewish communities spanning the pre-Nazi and the Nazi periods.7 Another corpus of historical literature has contributed much to our understanding of the history of the Jews in the twentieth century, especially in the period between the two world wars.8 In a somewhat different domain, certain traditional Jewish religious metahistorical approaches—by leading haredi (ultra-Orthodox) rabbis, on the one hand, and by Nobel Prize laureate Shmuel Yosef Agnon, on the other—have emphasized the causal role of Jewish sin in invoking the Holocaust (be it secularization and the embrace of Enlightenment; the internal enmity dividing Jew against Jew; or Zionism's drive for man-made and hence premature redemption), "the Holocaust" being perceived in this context as God's wrath.9 But historiographical attempts to examine how major developments in modern Jewish history actually influenced the lot of the Jews during the Holocaust period have not been undertaken, and the Holocaust tends to be presented—even in comprehensive studies of modern Jewish history— as a distinct theme, not really interwoven into the larger fabric. Shmuel Ettinger, for instance, who some twenty years ago contributed the section on the modern period to Haim Hillel Ben-Sasson's A History of the Jewish People, sandwiched the chapter on "The Second World War and the Holocaust" between two others on the development of the Zionist movement; and in the section devoted to "The Holocaust in Jewish History," he related only to the uniqueness of the Holocaust in the annals of

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persecution, to the attitude of the European states and churches toward the fate of the Jews, and to the meaning of the Holocaust as having "destroyed European Jewry, which, until the outbreak of the Second World War, had been the largest concentration of Jews in the World."10 Thus, the challenge posed by Yehuda Bauer in the first volume of this annual, namely, that the Holocaust "has to be dealt with within the context of Jewish life in our era,"11 has still to be met. It is the purpose of this article to do no more than shed some light on the broader issues involved in this particular form of contextualization.

Major Factors in Modern Jewish History My starting point will be a definition of the Jews on the eve of the modern era: in the seventeenth century. Jewry was perceived at that time by its members as well as by the surrounding population as a nation defined by its religion (meaning both that this was a corporate group belonging to a singular faith whose basic rules were unanimously accepted, and that the religion itself had a national character);12 as a people living dispersed in many countries; and as a corporate group organized in communities with a special legal, and partly autonomous, status. Most of these communities were governed by certain broadly similar bodies—the lay community councils supplemented by the spiritual authority of the rabbis.13 A set of developments set in motion throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries transformed Jewry entirely and in every aspect. These developments included emancipation; secularization (skepticism, agnosticism, atheism); democratization; economic modernization; migration; modern national awareness; and modern antisemitism. Interacting, they radically changed the modes of Jewish selforganization, self-understanding and cohesion, producing that Jewish world that from 1933 onward had to face the Nazi threat. How, in more concrete terms, did these trends make their impact felt? Some specification is needed. The emancipation of the Jews, a legal process set in motion late in the eighteenth century, gradually spread and became accepted everywhere in Europe and the Western world by the end of the First World War. Even though the process differed radically from state to state,14 depending largely on the extent of secularization, the acceptance of the Jews into the given national society always meant that the community lost its status as an autonomous legal entity. The communal organization turned into a (largely or totally) voluntary one, and the grip of the Jewish leaders and rules over the individual Jew were markedly loosened. The paths to acculturation and integration into the majority nation now opened wide. And in consequence, the interest of the Jews in the well-being and fate of the dominant society and strata grew steadily; this fact tended to reduce what had been an almost exclusive involvement in the Jewish community. The shift of interest found expression, among other things, in the adoption of the dominant, in place of the Jewish, language (usually Yiddish). The success of the entire process of emancipation and integration—often referred to by the vague term of "assimilation"—would define to what extent Jews developed faith in the good intentions of the local authorities.

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We know, of course, that there were many obstacles; that social did not proceed as fast as legal emancipation; and that even the process toward legal emancipation was "tortuous and thorny."15 Nevertheless, the identification of Jews with the given society and state—and the influence of the majority culture on the Jews—grew everywhere. Consequently, Jews in large measure adopted the local characteristics and mentalites.16 This chain of development brought with it the emergence, first, of the well-known schism between Westjuden and Ostjuden, basically deriving from the differing pace of emancipation;17 and, second, of the even more specific subdivision between Jewish communities in different countries: "French," "German," "Dutch," "Hungarian" Jewry, as the case might be, or even sub-subdivisions within one state between various Jewish groups with different historical backgrounds.18 Additionally, there were also the conversions: even though legal emancipation advanced, the "secularized" surrounding societies remained basically Christian; consequently, conversion—usually without the converted Jews turning into practicing Christians—served to advance integration.19 All these developments confronted Jews with the basic question of the modern period: their own group identity. And from the point of view of integration into a civil—but national—society, the most obvious answer (if one wanted to remain Jewish and to adhere to some form of Jewishness) was to abolish or minimize the national aspect of Judaism. This led many to define Judaism in strictly religious terms, as was demonstrated both in the different branches of reformed Judaism and in neo-Orthodoxy.20 In fact, the trend was triggered not only from within Jewish society but by the states themselves: envisioning the continuation of Jewish existence only within the parameters of religion, they pressed to create national organizational frameworks for the "Jewish Church" or the "Mosaic religion" that they could supervise and with which they could negotiate (the Consistoire in France and Belgium or the Israelietische Kerkgenootschappen in the Netherlands). This, of course, was the background to the new terminology that emerged in the nineteenth century: Israeliten in German and Dutch; or Israelites in French.21 Many Jewish communities, in this context, not only became voluntary organizations, but also changed their nature and limited their activities to the "religious domain," which could, at most, include certain cultural and social issues22 (only interwar Poland and the Baltic states presented a somewhat different, more national and political type of Jewish community).23 At this stage, Jewish communities increasingly tended to divide themselves in accordance with state or national lines, even at the levels of custom (minhag) and rabbinical authority.24 Religious skepticism developed part passu with emancipation and democratization. It affected Jewish society first and foremost in its subversion of the traditional basis for Jewish existence: the definition of Judaism and Jewry (and hence Jewish cohesion) in terms of heavenly writ. This, in turn, translated into an erosion of authority of traditional Jewish institutions and leaders, such as the synagogue and the rabbi, which inevitably encouraged the individualization and atomization of Jewish society. The growth of skepticism was especially problematic in combination with the emancipation process. As we have seen, an emancipated Israeli! could define himself as a German (or French, or Dutch, or Hungarian) national adhering to the israelitische (or mosaische) Kultus—but what if he was an atheist as well?

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This situation gave rise to a new albeit very vague form of Jewish identity: one expressed in modern forms of philanthropy. From about the mid-nineteenth century, national and international Jewish organizations dedicated to philanthropic aid sprouted everywhere in emancipated Jewish settings. (Many of the best-known organizations—the Alliance Israelite Universelle, the Joint Distribution Committee, ORT—still exist today.)25 These functioned independently of the communities, and many of them became quite powerful. On the one hand, they contributed to the decomposition of former modes of organization; on the other, they gave rise to new kinds of leaders and created new bonds among Jews, both within local Jewries as well as worldwide. The issue of atheism/emancipation and its relation to the search for an interpretation of Jewish identity took on a special dimension during the interwar period in the Soviet Union. Under the distinctive circumstances of the Soviet Union, the former Jewish modes of organization could not survive. Nonetheless, some alternative means allowing for adherence to Jewishness were pursued.26 But the confrontation of "atheization" with the question of Jewish identity led to two further developments. First, there was the rise of Orthodoxy. From the second quarter of the nineteenth century, Jews who remained committed to religious observance began to close ranks and strengthen themselves both ideologically and organizationally versus the "assimilationists" with their growing influence and power. This meant that for those who remained religious, the authority of the rabbis and the halakhah became—voluntarily—increasingly dominant in every aspect of life.27 The second development was the emergence of modern Jewish nationalism. If increasing numbers found themselves alienated from Judaism as a religious faith, there still remained to them the option of redefining Jewishness in terms of secular Jewish culture and/or national consciousness. And indeed, such answers—in various competing forms: Autonomism, Territorialism, Zionism—emerged during the second half of the nineteenth century, and were even partially implemented before the Second World War.28 Clearly the emergence of these new interpretations of Judaism derived not only from internal Jewish processes but was encouraged as well by the rise of nineteenth-century European national movements (especially influential were the examples of the "classical" nations now resurrected—the Greeks and the Italians, with whom the Jews, descendants of another ancient nation, could identify) and by modern antisemitism, whose intensity and widespread acceptance in the period of "progress" were all the more shocking. The new ideologies created their own organizational structures, which tended—by the nature of their national Jewish outlook—to be worldwide and not dependent on what remained of the community structure. And then, of course, there was migration, yet another factor of major importance. True, migration had been a constant ingredient in Jewish existence and perseverance throughout Jewish history. However, the huge migrationary waves starting in the second half of the nineteenth century, after the division of world Jewry into different local "types" and after the development of the philanthropic ethos, had a qualitatively different impact from those of earlier times. These mass movements of people from the 1880s until the First World War, in the wake of the war and in the 1930s—all resulting from economic misery, limited social and economic options in

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Eastern Europe, population growth, wars and persecutions—triggered the creation of an additional type of Jewish organization dedicated to aid for migrants and refugees. Such organizations could be local in focus (those that limited their activities to a particular country of absorption or transition), or international, as were HIAS, JCA and Emig-direkt (three organizations that later merged and established the HICEM).29 But within the specific geographic context of the Holocaust, I would like to emphasize the impact of migration within Europe, from the East westwards. Thus, Ostjuden—mainly Polish, but also Hungarian or Romanian, for example, with different traditions and with different experiences than the Westjuden in their relationship to the authorities—settled in Germany, Austria, Belgium and France. They created their own organizations and reacted in their own way to certain developments. Tensions and animosities between the various groups rose.30 Nevertheless, in spite of the antagonisms, aid to the newcomers was still extended on a considerable scale, and this fact tended to slow down the integration of the "veteran" Jews into the general society, especially in the 1920s and the 1930s: Gentile society perceived both groups as belonging to one and the same foreign entity. And indeed, the aid extended to the migrants and refugees actually renewed contacts between Jewish groups that had grown apart in the preceding period.31 The democratization of European political life was another crucial factor in the transformation of Jewish life. As the Jews became increasingly interested in the life of their surrounding societies—in Western Europe as part of the emancipation process and in Eastern Europe too, even before having achieved full legal emancipation—they adopted and internalized the emerging rules of political activity. In the West European countries, Jews entered progressive parties that sought to apply the logic of integration to the fullest extent;32 in tsarist Russia before the First World War, and even more in Poland during the interwar period, a significant number of Jews tended to join general left-wing revolutionary parties in order to achieve real emancipation in a just society of the future. But the Jews also established their own parties, which reflected a wide range of differing interpretations of contemporary Judaism.33 The loyalties of Jews were thus everywhere split, as were their various leaderships. Finally, mention must be made of the economic modernization process: the Industrial Revolution and its aftereffects. Many Jews benefited from this process and were quick to make the most of new opportunities. As a direct result, however, they often tended to become very visible professionals and entrepreneurs— socioeconomic functions that were identified with breakneck change. Consequently, Jews became a preferred target of movements opposing modernity and modernization (or, at least, of the ways in which modernization had developed).34 The combined processes of socioeconomic development and migration additionally encouraged the intensive urbanization of the Jews,35 while industrialization caused a significant process of proletarization among the Jewish masses, particularly in tsarist Russia and in interwar Poland, but also in several West European countries (Great Britain, the Netherlands, France, Belgium). Consequently, all varieties of socialism found willing ears in Jewish society, and it became in fact a decisive factor in Jewish politics.36

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To sum up, then, one can say that, on the eve of the Nazi era, Jews were still everywhere a distinct group, with many social and cultural threads connecting them among themselves both within their own countries and internationally.37 However, the former structures of Jewish life had almost entirely atrophied; the old patterns of leadership had lost their hold; a wide variety of new political elites had emerged; and—most important—there remained no central and commonly accepted source of authority. Moreover, there was no longer any consensus as to what "Judaism" and "Jewishness" meant, or what would constitute the ideal future for the Jews.

The Impact of Modern Jewish History on the Life and Fate of the Jews During the Nazi Period One fact thus stands out very clearly: in contrast to antisemitic and Nazi perceptions of the Jews as an internationally orchestrated, well-organized people based on race and having clear goals,38 the true situation was one of disunion and lack of common purposes. This discrepancy between the myth that the Nazis had of the Jewish people and the reality would be fatal for the Jews. But, as we have seen, the fact of disunion constituted only one aspect—and that, in itself, multifaceted—of Jewish existence on the eve of the Nazi period. Within the limits of this article it is impossible to touch upon the entire range of consequences produced during the Holocaust by the above-described characteristics of modern Jewish history. I will, however, focus on several cardinal issues.

Integration As we have seen, emancipation had furthered integration of Jews into surrounding societies. This process had several results. First, Jews in a number of West European states tended to cling fiercely to their newly acquired status as citizens, identifying with their states and/or societies even when they encountered the demise of democracy and liberalism. Thus, before and even more so after the ascendancy of National Socialism in 1933, several Jewish groups in Germany—Hans Joachim Schoeps' Der Deutsche Vortrupp and Max Naumann's Verband nationaldeutschen Juden—tried to combine volkisch nationalism with Jewishness, in spite of the Nazi rejection of the Jews.39 Similarly, members of the Consistoire, the official organization of the veteran French Jews and the Chief Rabbi, Isai'e Schwartz, continued to declare their full loyalty to the Petain regime not only in 1940 but also in 1941, when a series of anti-Jewish steps had already been taken by the Vichy government and its close alliance with the Germans had become clear.40 Such attitudes usually faded away after a short dose of Nazi rule—but not always. More significant was the legalist approach of the Jews in those countries that had granted them far-reaching emancipation and their firm faith in their progressive compatriots—governments, political parties, individuals—whom they were sure would fight with them for their rights and aid them when needed. Such an attitude, seen in retrospect, bred naive behavior and expectations. In one instance, reacting to the Zionist call for "Jewish self-help" (Judische Selbsthilfe) published in the Judische

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Rundschau the day after Hitler's appointment as Reich chancellor, the Judischliberale Zeitung demanded "cooperation with all the more noble parts of the nonJewish German population . . . who suffer no less than we do."41 In the proclamation of the Reichsvertretung der Juden in Deutschland upon its establishment in September 1933, its leaders declared that "we hope for the understanding assistance of the authorities, and the respect of our Gentile fellow citizens, whom we join in love for, and loyalty to, Germany."42 The Orthodox Jews in Germany went even further, declaring in their memorandum of October 1933 to Hitler that "Orthodox Jewry is unwilling to abandon the conviction that it is not the aim of the German government to destroy the German Jews. Even if some individuals harbor such an intention, we do not believe that it has the approval of the Fuhrer and the government of Germany."43 At the time, and in spite of the horrors already experienced in 1933, this was not mere flattery: it was simply hard for Jews to believe that a modern government, "in the twentieth century," had so firmly turned its back on a group that was so anxious to integrate. A similar Jewish reaction was to be found in Holland in 1940. After the German invasion the Dutch government and queen fled the country, and a forum of senior civil servants (College van Secretarissen-Generaal) subsequently served as a substitute government under the Nazi occupation authorities. Judge Lodewijk E. Visser, the Jewish head of the Supreme Court, had been removed from his position (his fellow judges did not protest) in the wake of German legislation forbidding the employment of non-Aryans in the public sector. In December 1940, he accepted the chairmanship of the Jewish Coordinating Commission (Joodsche CoordinatieCommissie), a voluntary body claiming to represent Dutch Jewry. This organization, however, had differences with the Jewish Council (Amsterdam Joodsche Raad)—which was established two months later—over the issue of how to properly lead the Jewish community. The Joodsche Coordinatie-Commissie's stance was that, being equal citizens, the Jews should conduct all business with the German authorities only through the Dutch authorities, and not directly. In other words, Visser assumed that the Dutch would be willing to fight for the principles of emancipation precisely at a time of crisis. In spite of his efforts, the Dutch authorities did not meet his demands.44 Dutch Jews were also disillusioned by the stand of the Dutch Union (Nederlandsche Unie), a movement created in the summer of 1940 by Dutch Gentiles eager to find some suitable response to the new situation. The movement, perceived as an expression of patriotism versus the occupation, gained much support among the Dutch during the first months of its existence, and was joined by Jews as well. But its protests against the persecutions were minimal.45 Finally, the Jews' excessive faith in legalism was demonstrated in 1941, when Dutch Jews were ordered to register for a special Jewish census: the number of people who decided not to appear was almost nil.46 Similar reactions could be found among integrated Jews in other West and Central European countries, such as Belgium, France and Hungary47— and not only there. Poland, too, was home to a special brand of Jewish "assimilationists" who both adhered to some form of Judaism and perceived themselves as full Poles, and who did not abandon this approach even during the Nazi persecutions. Janusz Korczak is one of the most illuminating examples of this tendency.48

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The grant of formal equality and the integration of the Jews into the general ranks of society took on special significance in the German-occupied territories of the U.S.S.R., both in the Soviet Union proper and in the territories occupied by it in 1939. The fact that the Soviet regime had crushed the former Jewish organizational infrastructure made Jews all the more dependent on Gentile society. Expectations of "fraternity" were perhaps lower than in many other countries because Jews were aware that Soviet rule had not deeply changed old attitudes; nevertheless, such expectations did exist, especially as many Jews had become active in administrative functions and in the Communist party.49 But the special fate awaiting the Jewish population at Nazi hands was not acknowledged by the Soviet authorities on the official level; and on the pragmatic level—especially insofar as assistance from the partisan movement was required—Jews usually encountered intense antisemitism, a lack of special efforts on their behalf and, not uncommonly, the most violent enmity (though it should be added that some Jews did find their way into Communist partisan units).50 As has been previously described, Jews had become heavily involved in socialist and Communist movements in every Jewish setting. This involvement has to be understood as part of the Jews' longing for full emancipation—which they felt had not yet been achieved—in a just society to come. Many of the left-wing Jewish activists remained true to this goal even after being confronted with Nazi antisemitic atrocities, continuing to believe that the liberation of all would also redeem the Jews, such that no separate organization of Jewish resistance was needed. Thus, many Jews under Nazi rule in such countries as Poland, France, Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands continued to act within and as part of various left-wing movements (some even joined those movements precisely during this period) and did not abandon them for Jewish organizations.51 Such a situation might not be surprising with regard to the West European countries; but even in some of the major ghettos in Poland, the socialist/Communist universalist and emancipatory ideology retained its strength, and its Jewish adherents did not relinquish their old faith in the face of the isolated situation of the Jews. This fact was expressed most clearly in the relations between the Communist and the Zionist underground organizations in 1941-1942.52 Any discussion of Jewish adherence to the emancipationist faith must also encompass the policies of certain overseas Jewish aid organizations, such as the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (the Joint), toward German Jewry in the 1930s. The Joint invested huge sums in assisting German Jewry after 1933, partly to aid emigration but also in order to strengthen German Jewry in its struggle for continued existence in Germany. One of the leaders of the Joint, James Marshall, was quoted in April 1935 as arguing that the emigration of the Jews was a concession to the Hitler theory that Jews must get out. . . . [Emigration] helped only a few people, whereas the bulk of the problem has to be handled in Germany itself. . . . Moreover, there were other groups in Germany that have seriously suffered. Mr. Marshall felt that in trying to emigrate, German Jews tended to set themselves off from other groups who in the long run would be helpful to them. These were issues of fundamental importance, and it was not worth the price of losing out on them to get a few thousand Jews out of Germany.S3

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A month after the proclamation of the Nuremberg Laws, The Jewish Chronicle expressing the views of liberal Jews in Britain, wrote in a similar vein: Are [we] to confess ourselves, as well as the cause of tolerance, beaten, and evacuate the German Jews, nearly half a million of them, to God knows what other country. . . . Repulsive? Yes, indeed it is scuttling! . . . Jews will fight on. There is no other cause. Better help them than beckon them to a surrender which would disgrace them in the eyes of history and be denounced by all lovers of progress—even, perhaps, by a future regenerate Germany—as a betrayal of humanity.54

These examples, and others, make it clear that many Jews both in Europe and overseas did not want to forsake the cherished goals and achievements of emancipation and integration, even if this hampered (sometimes fatally) the prospect of rescue. In the postwar balance sheet, it was too often apparent that the Jews' expectations of their compatriots—based on the fact that emancipation in the preNazi period had apparently worked, and that Jews had proved themselves to be loyal citizens—had been fulfilled neither in Germany, nor in Holland, Hungary, Slovakia or even France.55 Moreover, and in sharp contrast, Jews had in certain cases found support in circumstances that hardly fitted the emancipationist model. Many people in all echelons in Fascist Italy, for instance, particularly those in government circles, had assisted and rescued significant numbers of Jews, even in Italian-occupied areas.56 In the case of Belgium, where about 25,000 Jews out of some 66,000 found hiding places among the population, the country had indeed been democratic before 1940, but most of the Jews (more than 90 percent) had been recent immigrants, with many not even able to speak the local language properly.57 In these cases, it was more a question of humanity, rather than either adherence to liberal political principles, or Jewish integration, that was the decisive factor motivating aid to the Jews.58

Jewish Identity and Solidarity The crisis resulting from the inevitable confrontation with the Nazi regimes served to accentuate longstanding problems of Jewish identity and unity. Thus, Schoeps in Germany still tried to emphasize that Judaism was strictly a religion—which conception, he hoped, would enable the Jews to remain part of the German nation even after the rise of National Socialism.59 While less extreme than Schoeps, LiberalReligious and Reform Jews in Germany, especially those belonging to the Reformgemeinde in Berlin, held similar views in the early days of Nazi rule.60 In France too, as Richard Cohen has shown, the veteran French Jews still believed in religion et patrie during the first period of Nazi occupation.61 The reality, however, was that Nazi policies tended to undermine this interpretation of Judaism by ignoring the religious aspects of Judaism in order to define the "Jewish problem" in racial terms alone.62 Consequently, the character of Reform and Liberal Judaism changed very rapidly during the Nazi period, and national Jewish awareness became sharply apparent in the Liberal and Reform milieu.63 This was the factor that enabled liberals of the Central Verein deutscher Staatsbiirger jiidischen Glaubens (CV) to join ranks with Zionists and other groups in establishing the Reichsvertretung in September 1933.64 At the same time, though, the preexisting animosities between the religious streams continued to dominate the

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scene, and the independent Orthodox Jewish organizations in Germany refused to join the Reichsvertretung: they were not ready to cooperate with secular nationalists such as the Zionists, any more than with Liberal and Reform Jews.65 Similarly, Orthodox rabbis in Holland opposed rapprochement with the Liberal Jewish community when, in the face of intensified restrictions, they were asked by the Joodsche Coordinatie-Commissie in April 1941 to join forces. They even succeeded in preventing the Liberal community from attaining equal status with the two Orthodox groups.66 (One should keep in mind that all this took place at a period in history when most of the members of the Orthodox communities in the Netherlands were themselves nonobservant.) Thus, in both the German and the Dutch cases, religious differences undermined attempts to create a united front even in the face of the Nazi assault on the Jews. Of course, with the rise of Hitler to power and still more with the coming of war, the national Jewish idea—especially Zionism—and nationalist organizations inevitably gained everywhere in strength. Zionists attained new influence and often won leading roles in many communities where they had formerly constituted an often marginal minority, as in Germany, Austria, Bohemia-Moravia, Slovakia, Belgium and Holland.67 In the Polish ghettos, the influence of Zionists and Bundists in daily life grew constantly,68 becoming decisive in the final period of the uprisings. Even among Jews in the free world, the importance and status of the Zionist movement grew constantly during the twelve years of the Third Reich; by the end of the Second World War, Zionism had emerged as the most powerful interpretation of Jewish identity in the Jewish world (even though the Zionist organizations did not win a majority in every Jewish community), and the Zionist struggle for Jewish independence in Palestine was supported by most Jews throughout the world.69 In dealing with the issue of Jewish solidarity, two levels must be considered: organizational and individual. In spite of many criticisms that have been leveled against Jewish welfare organizations and refugee committees with regard to their activities on behalf of European Jewry, their general balance of achievement in aiding Jews under Nazi domination and refugees who had succeeded in leaving the area (both in the 1930s and in the 1940s) is impressive.70 Attempts to reorganize the Jewish community in Germany in response to the crisis began shortly after the Nazi and-Jewish boycott of April 1, 1933. On April 13, the Central Committee of German Jews for Relief and Reconstruction (Zentralausschuss der deutschen Juden fur Hilfe und Aufbau) was established (it was later integrated as a department into the Reichsvertretung) and soon demonstrated its importance in providing welfare, vocational and agricultural retraining and other activities both to Jews remaining in the country and to those seeking to emigrate.71 In the occupied countries in the 1940s, it was the welfare departments of the Judenrate and Judenvereinigungen 12 that were usually the most active and appreciated. In the Generalgouvernement in Poland, Yidishe Sotsiale Aleynhilf (YISO) was not only a major force in Jewish life but also the only Jewish roof organization to be permitted by the Germans.73 And in the 1930s, committees to aid the incoming refugees were established everywhere in the countries bordering on Germany.74 Jewish protest, aid and relief activities were also widely developed and deployed on the international level. Frequent protest meetings were held during the period

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from 1933 until 1945, starting with those on the eve of the anti-Jewish boycott of April 1, 1933. (The protests caused Herman Goring to invite German Jewish leaders to a special meeting on March 25, 1933, at which he called on them to work against the international protests; eventually, the boycott was limited to a single day.)75 Jews were a driving force behind the League of Nations' decision to establish the High Commission for Refugees (Jewish and Other) Coming From Germany at the end of 1933; and they afterwards served as the main financial sponsors of that institution.76 The World Jewish Congress (WJC), which started its activities in the mid-1930s, intervened in many affairs of critical importance, and its leader, Nahum Goldmann, applied on behalf of the Jews to many governments and world leaders (Maxim Litvinov, Cardinal Paccelli and others), even succeeding in arranging a formal meeting with Benito Mussolini in Rome on March 4, 1937.77 In the 1940s, the WJC organized aid activities through the Relico organization, and prepared plans for postwar reconstruction.78 Much effective work was undertaken as well by the Joint and HICEM, which had decades of experience in coping with welfare and migration problems.79 It is impossible in a few lines to depict the vast scale of organization and activity engaged in by these—and other—groups. But one important remark should be made concerning all these efforts: impressive as they were for an "imagined community" without a state, they expressed exactly the patterns of mutual philanthropic aid that had developed in the former period of modern Jewish history. It expressed real and sincere concern for fellow Jews, but usually no political awareness from a national point of view.80 Aid of this type was basically conservative and traditional; and the leaders who orchestrated it frequently failed to grasp and analyze the novel dimensions of the Nazi threat. Thus, the funds that were invested in Germany in the 1930s, for instance, delayed emigration instead of encouraging it, with disastrous results for many German Jews.81 On the personal and pragmatic level, the split within European Jewry between Westjuden and Ostjuden and between Jews originating in different countries was often of great significance in coping with the Nazi threat.82 Western Jews generally found it psychologically difficult to transgress laws and decrees, even if these were openly antisemitic and decreed by the Germans. In contrast, the Ostjuden, traditionally suspicious toward authorities, often had a greater level of alertness and more efficient modes of evasion. In Belgium, for instance, where most Jews were of East European origin, a considerable portion of the community did not show up for the obligatory census of the Jews,83 in marked contrast to Holland, where those few Jews who did not appear also tended to be of East European origin.84 In several cases it is even possible to compare the two types of Jews in their way of coping with physical hardships. In Kosel, in the district of Oppeln, the German commander received permission to take Jews off the deportation trains heading for Auschwitz in order to place them in forced labor camps. The death rate of Dutch Jews, as compared with that of other Jews in these camps, was considerably higher.85 A similar picture emerges in the case of the Lodz ghetto. Jews from Germany, Prague and Luxemburg were deported to Lodz from early in the winter of 1941-1942. They constituted and remained an entirely separate group, not integrating into the general population of Polish Jews. Here too, their death rate was considerably higher—16 percent between October 1941 and May 1942, compared

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to 8.4 percent of the Polish Jews.86 It is also notable that the Jewish armed resistance movements—Zionist and non-Zionist alike—were founded and manned almost entirely by East European Jews (not only in Eastern but also in Western Europe). Apart from anything else, the "veteran" local Jews in the West found it difficult to agree on a common front and common action with Jewish immigrants. This phenomenon is what Stephen Shuker, writing about France, called "the perpetuation of ... quarrels even in the face of Nazi persecution [which] should alert the observer to the presence of long-standing grievances."87 It should be emphasized that the German authorities themselves distinguished between German and other Jews. This can be seen, for instance, in many of their antisemitic cartoons. Even in the 1940s, they maintained this distinction in several cases (though not with regard to the Jews' ultimate fate). The most conspicuous example was that of Riga, where two ghettos were established, one for the local Jews, the other—the "German ghetto"—for the Reichsjuden, or Jews who had been deported in November 1941 from Germany, Austria and the Protectorate of Bohemia-Moravia.88 Even in some of the extermination camps—before the actual annihilation—the German authorities tended to adopt a more moderate mode of behavior toward West European, and especially German, Jews.89 But the divisions went beyond that separating Ostjuden from Westjuden: there were, as noted before, major distinctions between Jews resulting from the specific influence of their country of origin. This was demonstrated in the many concentration camps where Jews from different states met and were forced to live together. Much documentary and literary material has been published, for instance, relating to the Austauschlager at Bergen-Belsen, where Jews from Holland, Hungary, Greece and Libya were concentrated; and to Theresienstadt, which formed a microcosm of West and Central European Jewry, with Jewish inmates from Bohemia, Germany, Austria, Denmark, Luxemburg and Holland (there were also some Polish Jews). A picture of animosity and even enmity, resulting from the lack of a common language and from the different mentalities, emerges from the extensive documentation left behind by the various groups.90 Such divisions were often crucial, because in many cases they prevented effective cooperation. This state of affairs was not static, however. The common fate in extremis of all Jews tipped the scales toward solidarity in most communities during the course of the Holocaust. For instance, in France from 1943 onwards, the Consistoire closed ranks with the East European Jews.91 In Hungary, Polish and Hungarian Zionist youth cooperated in underground activities.92 And after the war, when Jews returned to their countries of origin, they discovered everywhere the metamorphosis they had undergone and how different was their outlook from that of their fellow citizens. Generally speaking, the special fate of the Jews during the Nazi period was not acknowledged by governments and populations in the democratic countries;93 while in Eastern Europe, an upsurge of antisemitism in almost all countries made it clear that the Nazi period had by no means discredited that phenomenon for good. Far from clearing the way to improved Jewish-Gentile relations, the war had exacerbated them still further. Consequently, the sense of common bonds linking Jews everywhere was vastly deepened in the wake of the Holocaust. This, too, contributed to the massive support for the Zionist enterprise in the immediate post-

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Holocaust period, even among those Jews who had no intention of migrating to Palestine or actively joining the Zionist movement.

Jewish Leadership In no country, indeed nowhere in the Jewish world, was there a unanimously accepted Jewish leadership in the pre-Holocaust period. In certain places something close to such a central leadership was achieved during the Nazi period: the Reichsvertretung in Germany and its leader, Rabbi Leo Baeck, was a case in point.94 Much attention, of course, has been concentrated on the organizations imposed by the Nazis, the Judenrate, which not only transmitted German orders but took many initiatives of their own.95 However, it would be wrong to define these bodies as constituting the Jewish leadership during the Holocaust, as has often been the case, especially since the publication of Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem.96 The decomposition of modern Jewish society into so many political and religious factions was a major factor working to prevent the emergence of any single authoritative leadership even during the period of Nazi rule. The decline in the status of the rabbis, for instance, was illustrated by the fact that, in spite of Reinhard Heydrich's order to include rabbis in Judenrdte everywhere,97 this actually happened in a very limited number of cases. There was no decision taken on principle by the rabbis against collaboration with the German regime (even though the contrary is sometimes claimed); they were simply not accepted by most of the Jews as representative leaders of the community, or as capable of coping with the situation. Hence, the chairmen of the Judenrdte preferred not to include rabbis in the councils. Fragmentation similarly characterized the armed resistance movements. Here political factionalism played a major role. From various sources we learn that even when a decision was taken to revolt against the Germans, not all organizations could overcome their ideological differences in order to unite behind the leadership of an individual from a rival group. In the Warsaw ghetto, the left-wing Zionist movements cooperated among themselves and could even create an alignment with the Bundists and others, but they found no real common language with the Revisionists.98 In Belgium, Hashomer Hazair was not willing to join a unified underground resistance group because its young leaders thought it wasteful to fight on European soil; their goal was, first, to escape Belgium, and from there attempt to reach Palestine.99 Lack of central leadership was apparent as well among Jews in the free world. This is too wide a topic to be examined in any detail here; but it should be emphasized that no Jewish group anywhere perceived itself as being the leading force for rescue. Each organization tried to act through those channels it found the most accessible. Ideological movements or groups with other kinds of close attachments—such as the Orthodox, the Zionists or landsmanshaftn—naturally tended to give priority to rescuing their own leaders, rabbis, well-known activists, members or followers.100 Some organizations worked together while others, out of rivalry, refused. This sectorial pattern of rescue attempts is often depicted as one of the great "failures" of the Jewish people during this period. And indeed, there can be no doubt that in many cases greater cooperation—especially when funding was a critical issue—probably

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would have led to better results. However, if we accept the historical reality of noncohesion among the Jews—the result both of the fact that a "nation" or a "people" (especially one without its own state or territory) is an abstract (though not an inauthentic) idea, and also of the particular realities of the pre-Holocaust period— then it seems that Anita Shapira's conclusion concerning the positive aspect of competition between the different Zionist parties' emissaries among the survivors in Europe should be considered relevant for the entire Holocaust period: Had it not been for the intermovement competition for the souls of the survivors, had it not been for the fear of each and every movement that it would somehow lose out and find itself without manpower reserves, it is difficult to imagine that they could have been motivated to mobilize themselves as they, in fact, did. Thus, while they set out to fulfill a particularist, separatist, and even self-interested mission, and even sow the seeds of unrestrained politicization among the survivors, they also fulfilled a humane, Zionist and Jewish mission.101

It is a basic human feeling to have more affection for relatives, for countrymen, or for members of the same ideological movement. Had the different Jewish organizations not acted intensively first of all (but not only) for the people to whom they were most committed, probably much less would have been done.102 But more should be said in this context. It is clear from this picture that leaders of the World Zionist Organization and the Yishuv in Palestine did not perceive themselves, and were not perceived by others, as a leadership responsible for the entire Jewish people. Rather, they viewed themselves as the vanguard of the national Jewish revolution;103 not until 1942 did they begin to realize that their position was hardly defensible if the bulk of the Jewish people, for whom the Zionist enterprise was planned in the first place, would not survive the war. This perception gradually led them to focus on the large-scale evacuation of the Jews from Europe (toward the end of the war and immediately after it) in order to bring them to their final haven, as they understood it.104 Increasingly in the immediate post-Holocaust years, and culminating with the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, the central position of Zionism and its leadership in the Jewish world became generally acknowledged.

The Internalization of Modern European Values The last issue I wish to consider here is the Jews' internalization of modern values and concepts from European society and culture. Throughout history, Jews had been influenced by their surrounding societies; as noted in my introduction, this was also true of the modern period. For this discussion, the example of the youth movements, both Zionist and non-Zionist, is of special importance. These movements undoubtedly reached the apex of their impact on Jewish society and history during the Holocaust, when they became the main vehicles of Jewish armed revolt in the ghettos. However, it should be emphasized that the phenomenon of the ideological youth movement originated in Germany at the end of the nineteenth century, within the sphere of romantic nationalism. Much of the spiritual content of European romantic nationalism was adopted by the Zionist youth movements, and it was in this way that armed "heroism" and "national honor" became important values in their ethos.105 In the Bundist youth movement, socialist avant garde ideas were internalized and served

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as the basis for their resistance to "German Fascism."106 It is not that Jewish history in the diaspora as such was a history of compliance and servility, as has usually been claimed in Zionist ideological literature and as has been accepted by some historians;107 the novelty was rather the militant nationalist motivation for engagement in armed resistance and rebellion as presented by these youngsters. Indeed, the option of armed resistance as advocated by the youth movements sometimes led to physical clashes between their members and the general ghetto population.108 And finally, it must be emphasized that the international political activities undertaken during this period by Jewish organizations—the interventions of the WJC;109 the Transfer (Ha'avarah) Agreement between the Zionist movement and the Third Reich;110 the Bernheim petition against Germany in 1933;111 the negotiations by Territorialist organizations to establish a haven somewhere in the world for Jews;112 Ze'ev Jabotinsky's talks and efforts concerning his "evacuation plan";113 and many other political activities involving lobbying and the use of mass media and public relations—were all clear features of modern Jewish behavior that had been adopted by the Jews under the influence of Western democratic models and values, which did not reflect traditional modes of action such as intercession (shtadlanut) on the part of individual Jewish notables.

Conclusion In the beginning of this chapter, Hilberg 's depiction of Jewish behavior during the Nazi period was quoted. Hilberg spoke of a "Jewish reaction pattern" of averting action— and, failing that, "automatic compliance with orders." Such a mode of behavior, which was characteristic of "the Jewish leaders," was, according to Hilberg, "founded on a two-thousand-year-old experience." I have tried to show that this and similar types of analysis are entirely wrong. On the eve of the Nazi period, "Jewry" and "Judaism" were fundamentally transformed and diversified, as were traditional attitudes. Consequently, no "two-thousand-year-old experience" or any generalized "reaction pattern" can be ascribed to the Jewish people per se. On the contrary, Jewish behavior and reactions—diversified as they were—were shaped by the conditions, possibilities and contexts specifically characteristic of modern Jewish history.114 Moreover, as I have attempted to show, it is erroneous to approach Jewish life during the Nazi period simply as an issue of atrocities and the reaction to those atrocities. The crisis situation as a whole served, inter alia, as a sort of laboratory where the results of modern Jewish history came into play on different levels and in different settings. Jewish life during the Holocaust, as well as the varied responses to it at that time and afterwards, can be properly understood only in the context of two hundred years of profound change.

Notes 1. Arno Mayer, Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? The "Final Solution" in History (New York: 1988), 3. Also see Dan Michman's review of this book: "The High Price of Audacity," Holocaust and Genocide Studies 6, no. 3 (1991), 293-305.

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2. See Dan Michman, "The Holocaust in the Eyes of Historians: The Problem of Conceptualization, Periodization and Explanation," Modern Judaism 15, no. 3 (Oct. 1995), 233264; Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca: 1989); David Bankier, "On Modernization and the Rationality of Extermination," Yad Vashem Studies 24 (1994), 109129 (dealing with Gotz Aly and Susanne Heim's theses); and most recently, see the heated debate in the wake of the publication of Daniel J. Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: 1996). 3. These aspects are usually emphasized to one extent or another; one of the most extreme expressions of the second approach can be found in Helen Fein's cliometric study, Accounting for Genocide: National Responses and Jewish Victimization During the Holocaust (New York: 1979). 4. Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (New York: 1973), 666. 5. It should be noted that when Hilberg wrote his study in the first half of the 1950s, the term "Holocaust" was not yet used in popular discourse. 6. Yehuda Bauer, The Jewish Emergence from Powerlessness (Toronto and Buffalo: 1979); David Biale, Power and Powerlessness in Jewish History (New York: 1986); and David Vital, "Power, Powerlessness and the Jews," Commentary 89, no. 1 (1990), 23-28. 7. See, for example, Shaul Esh, "Nituk urezifut beva'adei hakehilot batkufah hanazit," in his 'lyunim beheker hashoa veyahadut zemaneinu (Jerusalem: 1973), 292-295; and Isaiah Trunk, Judenrat (New York: 1972), esp. ch. 2. 8. The literature is so extensive and encompasses so many countries that it would be pretentious to offer even a basic list. A number of works are mentioned in notes 23-25, below. See also the articles by Mordechai Breuer, Gershon Bacon, Emanuel Melzer, Jerzy Tomaszewski and Symon Rudnicki in Major Changes Within the Jewish People in the Wake of the Holocaust, ed. Yisrael Gutman (Jerusalem: 1996) and the sections on the interwar period in each volume of Pinkas hakehilot, 14 vols. (Jerusalem: 1972-1996). 9. For haredi attitudes, see Yoel Schwartz and Yitzchak Goldstein, Shoah: A Jewish Perspective on Tragedy in the Context of the Holocaust (New York: 1990), parts 2 and 4; and [anonymous], "Mi ke'amkha yisrael, goy ehad baarez," Toda'a (leaflet of Lithuanian ultraOrthodox circles containing discussion of each week's parashat hashavu'a, distributed in synagogues), no. 277 (Parashat Korah 5757/June 1996). On Agnon's view of the Holocaust, see Hillel Weiss, "Agnon vehashoa" in Ot, ed. Walter Zwi Bacharach, Daniel Carpi, Dan Michman and Judith Baumel (Ramat-Gan: forthcoming). 10. See Haim Hillel Ben-Sasson (ed.), A History of the Jewish People (Cambridge, Mass.: 1976), 1017-1039, esp. 1033-1035. 11. Yehuda Bauer, "The Place of the Holocaust in Contemporary History," in Studies in Contemporary Jewry, vol. 1, Ostjuden in Central and Western Europe, ed. Jonathan Frankel (Bloomington: 1984), 220-221. 12. This understanding or definition of Jewish identity has recently been disputed, mainly by the so-called "post-Zionists," among them sociologists and some historians. Under the impact of the writings of Benedict Anderson and Eric I. Hobsbawm on nationalism (for example, their introduction of the concepts of "imagined communities" and "invented traditions" in Imagined Communities [1991] and Nations and Nationalism Since 1780 [1991]), some post-Zionist scholars maintain that no Jewish nationhood existed after the destruction of the Second Temple, and that Jewish communities thereafter must be perceived merely as religious denominations that were parts of the mosaic of local societies. See Dan Michman, "Los 'demoledores del sionismo': En derredor de la ideologia 'post-sionista' en la actual sociedad israeli," Dialogo 20, no. 26 (1995), 33-40; History and Memory 1 no. 1 (SpringSummer 1995, special issue: "Israeli Historiography Revisited"); and, most recently, Dan Efrati, "Veshuv: hadash asur?," Meimad 7 (May-June 1996), 26-27.1 believe, however, that this view is untenable, as it counters mounting historical evidence of the Jewish selfperception throughout late antiquity and the Middle Ages. See, for instance, Eliezer Schweid, Leumiyut yehudit (Jerusalem: 1972), 21-32; Amos Funkcnstein, Perceptions of Jewish History (Berkeley, Los Angeles and Oxford: 1993), 1-3; B. Isaac, "Ethnic Groups in Judaea Under Roman Rule" and Aharon Oppenheimer, "Ethnic Groups and Religious Con-

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texts in the Talmudic Literature," both in Dor Le-Dor: From the End of Biblical Times Up to the Redaction of the Talmud. Studies in Honor of Joshua Efron, ed. Aryeh Kasher and Aharon Oppenheimer (Jerusalem: 1995), 201-208 and 209-214; as well as the depiction of the communication web among Jews on the eve of the modern period—see Sophia Menache, Communication in the Jewish Diaspora in the Pre-Modern World (Leiden: 1996). 13. Jacob Katz, Masoret umashber: hahevrah hayehudit bemozaei yemei habeinayim (Jerusalem: 1963), 11-18. 14. See Pierre Birnbaum and Ira Katznelson, Paths of Emancipation (Princeton: 1995). 15. Reinhard Rurup, "The Tortuous and Thorny Path to Legal Equality—'Jew Laws' and Emancipatory Legislation in Germany from the Late Eighteenth Century," Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 31 (1986), 3-33. 16. For the problematics of this issue see Michael R. Marrus, The Politics of Assimilation (London: 1971), esp. 2-3. 17. See Jacob Katz, "From Ghetto to Zionism, Mutual Influences of East and West," in Danzig, Between East and West: Aspects of Modern Jewish History, ed. Isadore Twersky (Cambridge, Mass. and London: 1985), 37-48. 18. See, for instance (for the Netherlands), Dan Michman, "Migration versus 'Species Hollandia Judaica': The Role of Migration in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries in Preserving Ties Between Dutch and World Jewry," Studia Rosenthaliana (special issue published with vol. 23, no. 2 (Fall 1989), 56-64; (for France), Simon Schwarzfuchs, "L'apparition du Judaisme Alsacien et la revolution Francaise," Yod 27-28 (1988), 21-26, and Vicki Caron, "Between France and Germany: Jews and National Identity in Alsace-Lorraine, 1871-1918," (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1983); (for heartland Hungary), Ezra Mendelsohn, The Jews of East Central Europe Between the World Wars (Bloomington: 1987), 85128. The situation in other East European countries was more complex; nevertheless, the same process affected many Jews, albeit to a lesser extent. Thus, Mendelsohn emphasizes that "one cannot speak of a single 'Polish Jewry' in the interwar period, just as one cannot speak of a single 'Czechoslovak Jewry,' 'Romanian Jewry,' or 'Latvian Jewry'" (ibid., 1718). 19. The conversions of Heinrich Heine and Gustav Mahler are, of course, well known. But the process was much broader—see Jacob Katz, "Religion as a Uniting and Dividing Force in Modern Jewish History" in his Jewish Emancipation and Self-Emancipation (Philadelphia, New York and Jerusalem: 1986), 20-33; Todd E. Endelman, Radical Assimilation in English Jewish History, 1656-1945 (Bloomington and Indianapolis: 1990); Cynthia S. Heller, On the Edge of Destruction: Jews of Poland Between the Two World Wars (Detroit: 1994), ch. 6. 20. See Michael A. Meyer, The Origins of the Modern Jew: Jewish Identity and European Culture in Germany, 1749-1824 (Detroit: 1967); Mordeehai Breuer, Judische Orthodoxie im Deutschen Kaiserreich 1871-1918. Sozialgeschichte einer religiosen Minderheit (Frankfurt: 1986). 21. For Germany, see Meyer, Origins of the Modern Jew, for France, see Jay R. Berkovitz, The Shaping of Jewish Identity in Nineteenth-Century France (Detroit: 1989), esp. part 4. 22. See Robert Liberles, "Emancipation and the Structure of the Jewish Community in the Nineteenth Century," Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 31 (1986), 51-67. 23. Heller, On the Edge of Destruction, 162-168—but note her emphasis on the internal schisms in the kehilla and the loss of authority as compared to other organizational structures. See also Samuel D. Kassow, "Community and Identity in the Interwar Shtetl," in The Jews of Poland Between Two World Wars, ed. Yisrael Gutman, Ezra Mendelsohn, Jehuda Reinharz and Chone Shmeruk (Hanover and London: 1989), 207-208. 24. See Jay R. Berkovitz, "The French Revolution and the Jews: Assessing the Cultural Impact," American Jewish Studies Review 20, no. 1 (1995), 83. 25. For an excellent analysis of this development, see Jacob Toury, "Irgunim yehudiyim vehanhagotehem bearzot haemanzepaziyah," Yalkut moreshet 2, no. 4(July 1965), 118-128. Toury's description focuses on Germany, but it is applicable as well to other countries.

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For the centrality of philanthropy and its extent in Jewish life see, for instance, two examples—for the Netherlands, Jaarboek (van de Centrale Organisatie voor de religieuze en moreele verheffing van de Jooden in Nederland) van 5674 (Amsterdam: 1913-1914); and for the United States, B.D. Bogen, Jewish Philanthropy: An Exposition of Principles and Methods of Jewish Social Service in the United States (New York; 1917). 26. Yehoshua Gilboa, "Hatarbut ha'ivrit bivrit hamo'azot, mereshit hamishtar hasovyeti 'ad sof shenot ha'esrim" (Ph.D. diss., Tel-Aviv University, 1975). 27. Jacob Katz, Goy shel shabbat (Jerusalem: 1983), 180-182; and Gershon Bacon, "Agudath Israel in Poland, 1916-1939: An Orthodox Jewish Response to the Challenge of Modernity" (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1979). 28. For the short-lived experiments in nonterritorial national autonomy of Jews in Eastern Europe see Mendelsohn, The Jews of East Central Europe, 32-39, 133-138, 152-157, 219224, 246-247, 257. Territorial proposals were legion: one imposed experiment was the Soviet "Jewish" state of Birobidzhan. 29. See Michman, "Migration versus 'Species Hollandia Judaica'," 61-66; Yehuda Bauer, My Brother's Keeper: A History of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee 1929-1939 (Philadelphia: 1974); Mark Wischnitzer, Visas to Freedom: The History of HIAS (Cleveland and New York: 1956). The name HICEM was formed from the acronyms of its three founding organizations: HIAS, ICA—that is, the Jewish Colonization Association— and Emig-direkt). 30. Ian Greilsammer, "Challenges to the Institutions of the Jewish Community of France During the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries," in Comparative Jewish Politics, vol. 2, Conflict and Consensus in Jewish Political Life, ed. Stuart A. Cohen and Eliezer Don-Yehiya (Jerusalem: 1986), 41-46; Shulamit Volkov, "The Dynamics of Dissimilation: Ostjuden and German Jews," in The Jewish Response to German Culture—From the Enlightenment to the Second World War, ed. Jehuda Reinharz and W. Schatzberg (Hanover, N.H.: 1985), 195211; and Steven E. Aschheim's masterly Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German Jewish Consciousness, 1800-1923 (Madison: 1982). 31. See, for instance, Vicki Caron, "The Politics of Frustration: French Jewry and the Refugee Crisis in the 1930s," The Journal of Modern History 65 (June 1993), 311-356; Klaus Voigt, "Jewish Refugees and Immigrants in Italy, 1933-1945," in The Italian Refuge: Rescue of Jews During the Holocaust, ed. Ivo Herzer (Washington, D.C.: 1989), 153-158; Dan Michman, "Temurot beyahasam shel haholandim laihudim 'erev hashoa," in Mehkarim 'al toledot yahadut holand 3, ed. Jozeph Michman (Jerusalem: 1981), 247-262. 32. Johannes C.H. Blom and Joel J. Cahen, "Joodse Nederlanders, Nederlandse joden en joden in Nederland (1870-1940)," in Geschiedenis van de Joden in Nederland, ed. Johannes C.H. Blom, Rena G. Fuks-Mansfeld and Ivo Schoffer (Amsterdam: 1995), 278-282; Pierre Birnbaum, "Between Social and Political Assimilation: Remarks on the History of the Jews in France," in Birnbaum and Katznelson (eds.), Paths of Emancipation, \ 15-121. 33. Ezra Mendelsohn, On Modern Jewish Politics (New York and Oxford: 1993); Jonathan Frankel, Prophecy and Politics; Socialism, Nationalism, and the Russian Jews, 1862-1917 (Cambridge: 1981); Gershon Bacon, "Prolonged Erosion, Organization and Reinforcement: Reflections on Orthodox Jewry in Congress Poland (up to 1914)," in Gutman (ed.), Major Changes Within the Jewish People, 71-91, esp. 88-90. 34. Fritz Stern, "The Burden of Success: Reflections on German Jewry," in his Dreams and Delusions: The Drama of German History (New York: 1989), 102-109; Werner Jochmann, Gesellschaftskrise und Judenfeindschaft in Deutschland 1870-1945 (Hamburg: 1988), 94-95; Jacob Katz, Sinat yisrael: misinat hadat lishlilat hageza' (Tel-Aviv: 1979), 278-279. 35. Evyatar Friesel, Atlas of Modern Jewish History (New York and Oxford: 1990), 1215. 36. See Frankel, Prophecy and Politics; Eli Shaltiel (ed.), Yehudim bitnu' ot mahapkhaniyot (Jerusalem: 1982); Rudi van Doorslaer, "Kinderen van net getto. Joodsie immigratie en communisme in Belgie, 1925-1940" (Ph.D. diss., University of Ghent, 1990); idem, "Le enfants du ghetto. L'immigration juive Communiste en Belgique et la quete dc la modernite (1925-1940)," in Les Juifs de Belgique. De I'immigration au Genocide 1925-

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1945 (Brussels: 1994), 59-77; Nancy L. Green, "The Contradictions of Acculturation: Immigrant Oratories and Yiddish Union Sections in Paris Before World War I," in The Jews in Modern France, ed. Francis Malino and Bernard Wasserstein (Hanover and London: 1985), 54-77. 37. For a balanced view of the conflicting historiographical approaches, either overemphasizing Jewish cohesion, on the one hand, or the insisting on the nonexistence of any national traits or bonds, on the other, see Shulamit Volkov, "Hayehudim behayei ha'amim: sipur leumi o historiyah meshulevet," Zion 61, no. 1 (1996), 91-111; see also the picture emerging from the articles in Jonathan Frankel and Steven J. Zipperstein (eds.), Assimilation and Community: The Jews in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge: 1992). 38. See, for instance, Hitler's statements in his first political memorandum of 16 Sept. 1919 (quoted in Ernest Deuerlein, Der Aufstieg der NSDAP in Augenzeugenberichten [Munich: 1978], 91), in his Mein Kampf (relevant extracts in English in Yitzhak Arad, Yisrael Gutman and Avraham Margaliot [comps.], Documents on the Holocaust [Jerusalem: 1981], 23-24), in his well-known speech before the Reichstag on 30 January 1939 (in ibid., 134-135) and in his political testament of 29 April 1945 (in ibid., 162-163). For the same view as held by the Jewish Department (11/112) of the SD and used by it for operational antisemitic purposes, see Michael Wildt (ed.), Die Judenpolitik des SD 1935 bis 1938. Eine Dokumentation (Munich: 1995), esp. 94-105. 39. George L. Mosse, Germans and Jews (London: 1971), 105-115; Avraham Margaliot, Bein hazalah leavdan (Jerusalem: 1990), 165-182. 40. Richard I. Cohen, "Religion and Fatherland: The Central Consistory in France During the Second World War," in Shmuel Almog, et al. (eds.), Bein yisrael laumot (Jerusalem: 1987), 309-312; idem, "The Jewish Community of France in the Face of Vichy-German Persecution: 1940-44," in Malino and Wasserstein, The Jews in Modern France, 180-213, esp. 185-186. 41. Judisch-liberale Zeitung, 15 Feb. 1933; quoted by Yehuda Ben-Avner, Vom orthodoxen Judentum in Deutschland zwischen zwei Weltkriegen (Hildesheim, Zurich and New York: 1987), 28. 42. Judische Rundschau no. 78 (29 Sept. 1933), quoted in Arad, Gutman and Margaliot (eds.), Documents, 58. For a similar approach by the Reichsbund judischer Frontsoldaten, see Ulrich Dunker, Der Reichsbund judischer Frontsoldaten 1919-1938 (Dusseldorf: 1977), 113-153. 43. Yad Vashem Archives, JM/2462; quoted here from the English translation in Arad, Gutman and Margaliot (eds.), Documents, 61. 44. See Jozeph Michman, "The Controversial Stand of the Joodsche Raad in the Netherlands. Lodewijk E. Visser's Struggle," Yad Vashem Studies 10 (1974), 9-68; Louis de Jong, Het Koninkrijk der Nederlanden in de Iweede Wereldoorlog, vol. 5 (The Hague: 1974), 508528, 573-583. 45. Ibid., vol. 4 (1972), 766-768. 46. Ibid., 874-876; Statistiek der Bevolking van Joodschen Bloede in Nederland (The Hague: 1942). 47. See Randolph Braham and Nathaniel Katzburg, Toledot hashoa: hungariyah (Jerusalem: 1992), 208-209, 335. 48. See Alexander Guterman, '"Al ba'ayat zehuto haleumit shel Janusz Korczak," Yalkut moreshet 50 (April 1991), 61-71. 49. Ben-Tsion Pinchuk, Yehudei brit hamo'azot mul penei hashoah (Tel-Aviv: 1979); Dov Levin, Tekufah besogerayim, 1939-1941: temurot behayei hayehudim baezorim shesuphu librit hamo'azot bithilat milhemet ha'olam hasheniya (Tel-Aviv: 1989), esp. ch. 2. 50. Mordechai Altshuler, "Soviet Union," in Encyclopedia of the Holocaust (New York: 1990), 1383-1390 (esp. 1384). 51. Shmuel Krakowski, Lehimah yehudit bepolin neged hanazim (Tel-Aviv: 1977), 179186; Renee Poznanski, "Reflections on Jewish Resistance and Jewish Resistants in France," Jewish Social Studies 2, no. 1 (1995), 124-158; Maxine Steinberg, L'Etoile et le Fusil, vol. 2, 1942, Les cent jours de la deportation de Juifs de Belgique (Brussels: 1984), 76-78; K.

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Kwiet, "Nach dem Pogrom: Stufen der Ausgrenzung," in Die Juden in Deutschland 19331945. Leben unter nationalsozialistischer Herrschaft, ed. Wolfgang Benz (Munich: 1988), 585-586 (about the so-called "Baum group" in Berlin); Ben Braber, Passage naar de Vrijheid. Joods Verzet in Nederland (1940-1945) (Amsterdam: 1987), 25, 110-114; and idem, Zelfs Als Wij Zullen Verliezen. Joods Verzet en Illegaliteit 1940-1945 (Amsterdam: 1990), 82-90, 142 (on Gerhard Badrian and others in the resistance group of Gerrit van der Veen in Amsterdam). 52. For the case of Warsaw, see Yisrael Gutman, Ba'alatah uvema'avak (Tel-Aviv: 1985), 180. Even when Jewish Communists cooperated with other underground organizations, they kept their separate organizational framework and did not abandon their ideology and separate contacts with Communists outside the ghetto—see Yitzhak Arad, Vilna hayehudit bema'avak uvekilayon (Tel-Aviv: 1976), 198 sequence; see also Isaiah Trunk, Jewish Responses to Nazi Persecution (New York: 1982), 47. 53. Memorandum by Hyman to Baerwald, 23 April 1935, JDC Archives, New York, 1446, quoted in Bauer, My Brother's Keeper, 116; for the extent of financial aid of the Joint to German Jewry throughout the 1930s see ibid., 127, 258. 54. Jewish Chronicle, 11 Oct. 1935, quoted in ibid., 116. 55. See, for instance, David Weinberg, "The Reconstruction of the French Jewish Community After World War II," in Yisrael Gutman and Avital Saf (eds.), She'erit hapeletah 1944-1948: Rehabilitation and Political Struggle (Jerusalem: 1990), 174-175. It is interesting to see that even in Britain, Jewish faith in the firmness of the liberal principle in Western Europe was undermined in the postwar period as a result of the Holocaust. See quotations in Tony Kushner, The Holocaust and the Liberal Imagination: A Social and Cultural History (Oxford and Cambridge, Mass.: 1994), 222. 56. Daniel Carpi, Between Mussolini and Hitler: The Jews and the Italian Authorities in France and Tunisia During World War II (Hanover and London: 1994). 57. Dan Michman, "Hahistoriografiyah shel hashoa bebelgia: agadot vehidushim," Proceedings of the Tenth World Congress of Jewish Studies, Section B, vol. 1, The History of the Jewish People (Jerusalem: 1990), 510; see also idem, "Belgium," Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, 160-169. 58. For recent literature on the issue of altruism and other motivations for rescue, see (among other works), Nechama Tec, When Light Pierced the Darkness: Christian Rescue of Jews in Nazi-Occupied Poland (New York: 1986); Samuel P. Oliner and Pearl M. Oliner, The Altruistic Personality: Rescuers of Jews in Nazi Europe (New, York: 1988); Gay Block and Malka Drucker, Rescuers: Portraits of Moral Courage in the Holocaust (New York: 1992); Eva Fogelman, Conscience and Courage: Rescuers of Jews During the Holocaust (New York: 1994); Milton Meltzer, Rescue: The Story of How Gentiles Saved Jews in the Holocaust (New York: 1988); Mordecai Paldiel, The Path of the Righteous: Gentile Rescuers of Jews During the Holocaust (Hoboken: 1993). Most of this literature is anecdotal, sociological or psychological. For some historical remarks, see M. Dworzcecki, Yerushalayim delita (TelAviv: 1948), 326-327; Israel Gutman, The Jews of Warsaw: Ghetto, Underground, Revolt (Bloomington: 1982), 265; Louis de Jong, Het Koninkrijk der Nederlanden, vol. 6 (The Hague: 1975), 339-354; and vol. 7 (1976), 461-477. As for cases of rescuers who endangered their lives by hiding Jews, but concurrently kept their anti-Jewish views, see Elma Verhey, Om het Joodse Kind (Amsterdam: 1991), 80, and also Jacques Presser, Ashes in the Wind: The Destruction of Dutch Jewry (Detroit: 1988), 388. 59. Confronted with Volkism, Schoeps tended to define the Jews as a "tribe" like the Prussians, Bavarians and others. His understanding of the nature of this "tribe," however, followed Samson Raphael Hirsch's teachings about the Jews as a moral community carrying a universal message. See his article "Der Jude im neuen Deutschland," Der Deutsche Vortrupp 1 (Oct. 1933). 60. Yehuda Ben-Avner, "Religious-Liberal Jewry in Germany During the First Year of Nazi Rule," in Religious Jewry and Religious Thought During and After the Holocaust, Proceedings of an International Conference held at Bar-Han University, May/June 1986 (forthcoming).

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61. Cohen, "Religion and Fatherland." 62. Dan Michman, "Jewish Religious Life Under Nazi Domination: Nazi Attitudes and Jewish Problems," Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses 22, no. 2 (1993), 147-165. 63. After the Holocaust, Liberal and Reform Jewry worldwide accepted the national component of Judaism, and in the 1970s the World Union for Progressive Judaism even joined the World Zionist Organization. See Dan Michman, "The Impact of the Holocaust on Religious Jewry," in Gutman and Saf (eds.), Major Changes Within the Jewish People, 659707. 64. Margaliot, Bein hazala leavdan, 196. 65. Esriel Hildesheimer, Judische Selbstverwaltung unter dem NS-Regime (Tubingen: 1994), 47. 66. Dan Michman, "Problems of Religious Life in the Netherlands During the Holocaust," in Dutch Jewish History, vol. 1, ed. Jozeph Michman and Tirtza Levie (Jerusalem: 1984), 397-398. 67. For Germany, see Gunter Plum, "Deutsche Juden oder Juden in Deutschland?" in Benz (ed.), Die Juden in Deutschland, 60-62; for Austria (where the intervention of Adolf Eichmann played a role in the promotion of the Zionists), Herbert Rosenkranz, "Austrian Jewry: Between Forced Emigration and Deportation," in Patterns of Jewish Leadership in Nazi Europe, 1933-1945, ed. Israel Gutman and Cynthia Haft (Jerusalem: 1979), 65-74; for Bohemia-Moravia, Livia Rothkirchen, "Bohemia and Moravia, Protectorate of," Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, 227-230; Avigdor Dagan, et al. (eds.), The Jews of Czechoslovakia, vol. 3 (Philadelphia: 1984); Ruth Bondy, "Elder of the Jews": Jakob Edelstein of Theresienstadt (New York: 1989), chs. 11, 12; for Slovakia, Yeshayahu Jelinek and Robert Rozett, "Slovakia," Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, 1367-1369, and Ladislav Lipscher, Die Juden im slowakischen Staat 1939-1945 (Munich: 1980), 47; for Belgium, Dan Michman, "Belgium," Encyclopedia of the Holocaust (par., "The Jewish Community"); for Holland, Jozeph Michman, Hartog Beem and Dan Michman, Pinkas: Geschiedenis van de Joodse Gemeenschap in Nederland (Ede and Antwerpen: 1992), 168-174. In Hungary, where the Zionist movement had about 5,000 members out of a Jewish population of 450,000, the rescue activities of the "Assistance and Rescue Committee," which had started in 1943 (before occupation), made it of major importance in the deportation period, when it negotiated with the Germans in the so-called "Kasztner Affair." 68. Trunk, Jewish Responses to Nazi Persecution, 32-50. 69. The literature supporting this statement is legion—see, for instance, David Weinberg, "Reconstruction of the French Jewish Community," and Ze'ev Mankowitz, "Zionism and She' erit Hapletah," both in Gutman and Saf (eds.) She'erit Hapletah 1944-1948, 168-185, 211-230; Chaya Brasz, Removing the Yellow Badge: The Struggle for a Jewish Community in the Postwar Netherlands, 1944-1955 (Jerusalem: 1995); Aaron Berman, Nazism, the Jews and American Zionism 1933-1948 (Detroit: 1990), esp. ch. 6; Yehoshua Freundlich, Mihurban litkumah (Tel-Aviv: 1994). For the strengthened position of Zionism in the postHolocaust period, even in Hungary, see Asher Cohen, The Halutz Resistance in Hungary, 1942-1944 (Boulder: 1986), 280. 70. Research on the issue of refugees and Exil (political exiles from Nazi Germany) has been quite intensive, especially during the last two decades, and it would be impossible to encompass it here. For a partial overview updated until the beginning of the 1990s, see Dan Michman, "Ba'ayat hapelitim hayehudim migermaniyah bearzot eiropah hashekhenot," Dapim leheker tekufat hashoa 11 (1994), 43-65; for the intensity of the Joint (JDC) assistance efforts, see Bauer, My Brother's Keeper. 71. Clemens Vollnhalls, "Juedische Selbsthilfe bis 1938," in Benz (ed.), Die Juden in Deutschland, 314-411; and Margaliot, Bein hazala leavdan, 37-76. 72. For the differentiation between those two types of imposed bodies, see my entry on the "Judenrate" in The Yale Encyclopedia of the Holocaust (New Haven: 1997). 73. Bauer, American Jewry and the Holocaust, 67-92. 74. See above, n. 70.

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75. On the boycott, see Karl Schleunes, The Twisted Road to Auschwitz: Nazi Policy Toward German Jews 1933-1939 (Urbana and Chicago: 1990), 77-83. 76. Norman Bentwich, The Refugees from Germany, April 1933 to December 1935 (London, 1936); Dan Michman, "Hapelitim hayehudiyim migermaniyah beholand bashanim 1933-1940" (Ph.D. diss., The Hebrew University, 1978), 62-64, 440-441; Leni Yahil, The Holocaust: The Fate of European Jewry 1932-1945 (New York and Oxford: 1990), 94. 77. MeirMichaelis,Mussolini vehayehudim(Jerusalem: 1990), 179-183; Shmuel Frimerman, "Pe'iluto shel hakongres hayehudi ha'olami," 1938-1946 (M. A. thesis, Bar-Han University, 1996), 31-35; Monty Penkower, "Dr. Nahum Goldmann and the Policy of International Jewish Organizations," in Organizing Rescue: National Jewish Solidarity in the Modern Period, ed. Selwyn I. Troen and Benjamin Pinkus (London and Portland: 1992), 141-153. 78. Frimerman, "Pe'iluto shel hakongres hayehudi ha'olami," chs. 3-5; and Raya Cohen, "Solidariyut bemivhan hashoah: pe'ilut hairgunim hayehudiyim ha'olamiyim bezheneva, 1939-1942" (Ph.D. diss., Tel-Aviv University, 1991), passim. 79. Yahil, The Holocaust, 615-618. 80. On this issue, see especially Henry L. Feingold, "Rescue and the Secular Perception: American Jewry and the Holocaust," in Organizing Rescue, ed. Troen and Pinkus, 154-166. 81. Dan Michman, "Leveirur hamunah 'hazalah' bitkufat hashoah'," Yalkut moreshet 28 (Nov. 1979), 55-76. 82. See, for instance, the anecdote told by Jonah Emanuel about his meeting with a Hungarian Jewish boy several days after liberation in 1945. As he had lost the proper counting of days, he had put on his tefillin on Shabbat. The boy said to him: "I didn't know West European Jews were so ignorant!"—see Emanuel's Yesupar lador (Jerusalem: 1994), 179. 83. Maxine Steinberg, L'Etoile et le Fusil, vol. 1, La Question Juive 1940-1942 (Brussels: 1983), 83-84. 84. De Jong, Koninkrijk, vol. 4, 875. 85. Jozeph Michman, Hartog Beem and Dan Michman, Pinkas hakehilot: Holland (Jerusalem: 1985), 129. 86. Trunk, Jewish Responses to Nazi Persecution, 11-12; Avraham Barkai, "Between East and West: Jews from Germany in the Lodz Ghetto," Yad Vashem Studies 16 (1985), 271332; for the data on death rates, see p. 236. 87. Stephen A. Shuker, "Origins of the 'Jewish Problem' in the Later Third Republic," in Malino and Wasserstein (eds.), The Jews in Modern France, 167. 88. Dov Levin, et al., Pinkas hakehilot: latvia veestonia (Jerusalem: 1988), 282; Henry R. Huttenbach (comp.), Introduction and Guide to The Riga Ghetto Archive Catalogue (New York: 1984), esp. 1-8. For a personal account of the profoundly different conditions in the two ghettos (and the comparative advantage of the "German" one) see Max Kaufmann, Die Vernichtung der Juden Lettlands (Munich: 1947), 89, 167, 169. 89. See Leon Feldhandler's testimony on the arrival of West European Jews to Sobibor, as quoted by Yitzhak Arad in Mivza' Reinhard: Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka (Tel-Aviv: 1988), 191-192. 90. For the tensions between Dutch and German Jews preceding their arrival at BergenBelsen, see descriptions of life in the Westerbork transition camp in Holland—for instance, in Presser, Ashes in the Wind, 446-450. On Bergen-Belsen itself, see Shlomo Samson, Heemanti ki adaber (Jerusalem: 1990), 222; and the author's late mother's testimony (private files). On Theresienstadt, see Hans G. Adler, Theresienstadt, 1941-1945. Das Antlitz einer Zwangsgemeinschaft (Tubingen: 1955), ch. 10; Siegfried van de Bergh, Kroonprins van Mandelstein (Leiden: 1982), 127-129; Michman, Beem and Michman (eds.), Pinkas hakehilot: Holland, 130-131; and Miroslav Karny, "Deutsche Juden in Theresienstadt," in Theresienstaedter Studien und Dokumente, vol. 1, ed. Miroslav Karny, Raimund Kemper and Margita Kama (Prague: 1944), 36-53. 91. Asher Cohen, Persecutions et Sauvetages. Juifs et Francais sous I'Occupation et sous Vichy (Paris: 1993), 467-470.

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92. Cohen, The Halutz Resistance in Hungary, 1942-1944, 244-245. 93. Renee Poznanski, Etre juif en France pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale (Paris: 1994), 670-675; Joel S. Fishman, "The Reconstruction of the Dutch Jewish Community and Its Implications for the Writing of Contemporary Jewish History," American Academy for Jewish Research 45 (1978), 67-101; Conny Kristel, " 'De moeizame terugkeer'. Derepatriering van de Nederlandse overlevenden uit de Duitse concentratiekampen," Oorlogsdocumentatie '40-45' [1] (1989), 93-94. Central issues that caused friction between Jews and nonJews were economic restitution and war orphans. 94. Much as been written about the Reichsvertretung, its establishment and problematics; some literature has been mentioned above. See also Esriel Hildesheimer, Judische Selbstverwaltung unter dem NS-Regime. Der Existenzkampf der Reichsvertretung und Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland (Tuebingen: 1994). 95. See Aharon Weiss, "Judenrat," Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, 762-771. 96. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: 1964). 97. See the well-known instructions by Reinhard Heydrich on policy and operations concerning Jews in the occupied territories in Poland, 21 Sept. 1939, par. II-1, Nuremberg Documents PS-3363 (translation in Arad, Gutman and Margaliot [eds.], Documents on the Holocaust [Jerusalem: 1981], 174). 98. Chaim Lazar Litai, Mezadah shel varshah: hairgun hazevai hayehudi bemered ghetto varsha. Z.Z.W. (Tel-Aviv: 1983), introduction; and the important article by Catriel BenAryeh, "Politikah umered—geto varshah," Dapim leheker tekufat hashoah 12 (1995), 97120. 99. Shlomo Kles, "Pe'ulot hameri vehalehimah hayehudit bebelgiyah bitkufat hashoah," Zion 42, no. 4 (1982), 479, n. 132. 100. See most of the articles in Asher Cohen and Yehoyakim Cochavi (eds.), Zionist Youth Movements During the Shoah (New York: 1995), esp. Asher Cohen, "The Rescue Operations of the Zionist Youth Movements," 117-143; Efraim Zuroff, "Attempts to Obtain Shanghai Permits in 1941: A Case of Rescue Priority During the Holocaust," Yad Vashem Studies 13 (1979), 321-351; Esther Farbstein, "Hazalat admorim bitkufat hashoa" (M.A. thesis, The Hebrew University, 1984); Zerach Warhaftig, Refugee and Survivor: Rescue Efforts During the Holocaust (Jerusalem: 1988). 101. Anita Shapira, "The Yishuv's Encounter with the Survivors of the Holocaust," in Gutman and Saf (eds.), She'erit hapeletah 1944-1948, 105. 102. The problem of setting priorities in rescue—because it was impossible to rescue everybody—was a recurrent issue in discussions not only among members of the Judenrdte, but also among members of underground groups (see the account of the well-known meeting of Dror-Freiheit members in Bialystok, found in Arad, Gutman and Margaliot [eds.], Documents of the Holocaust, 296-301) and rescue organizations (see Michman, "Ze'ev Jabotinsky—The 'Evacuation Plan'"; and Cohen, Solidariyut bemivhan hashoah, 244). 103. Dan Michman, "Heker 'haziyonut' lenokhah hashoah: be'ayot, pulmusim umunahei yesod" in Bein hazon lereviziyah: hahistoriografiyah shel haziyonut (Jerusalem: 1997). 104. Yehiam Weitz, Muda'ut vehoser onim: mapai lenokhah hashoah, 1943-1945 (Jerusalem: 1994). 105. Yehoyakim Cochavi, "The Motif of 'Honor' in the Call to Rebellion in the Ghetto," in Cohen and Cochavi (eds.), Zionist Youth Movements During the Shoah, 245-253. 106. Daniel Blatman, Lema'an heruteinu veherutkhem: habund bepolin 1939-1949 (Jerusalem: 1995), 110-111; idem, "No'ar ziyoni ubundai vehitgabshut ra'ayon hamered: nisayon livhina mehudeshet," Dapim leheker tekufat hashoa 12 (1995), 144. 107. See above, notes 4 and 6. 108. Haike Grossman, Anshei hamahteret (Merhavia: 1950), 320-321. Another significant trend that was well advanced by the time of the war was the growing equality of women in the younger generations of East European Jewry—a process most conspicuous in the socialist and youth movements. It was in the underground activities within the ghettos that the role of women reached its apogee. See Gershon Bacon, "The Missing 52 Percent: The State

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of Research on Jewish Women in Interwar Poland," in Women in the Holocaust, ed. Dalia Ofer and Lenore J. Weitzman (New Haven: forthcoming); and Sarah Bender, "Ze'irot yehudiyot bebialystok bivrit lohma 'im germanim anti-nazim," Yalkut moreshet 61 (April 1996), 75-82. 109. See Frimerman, Pe'iluto shel hakongres hayehudi ha'olami, and Penkower, "Dr. Nahum Goldmann." 110. Yoav Gelber, "Ha'avara Agreement," Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, 639-640. 111. Yahil, The Holocaust, 97. 112. Eliyahu Binyamini, Medinot layehudim (Tel-Aviv: 1990). 113. Dan Michman, "Zeev Zhabotinski—tokhnit haevaku'aziyah uve'ayat zefiyat hashoah," Kivunim 7 (May 1980), 119-128. 114. For an answer to Hilberg on this issue, see Funkenstein, Perceptions of Jewish History, 309-310.

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Essay

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The Origins of the Myth of the 'New Jew": The Zionist Variety Anita Shapira (TEL-AVIV UNIVERSITY)

Every revolution that has attempted to destroy the existing order and make a new start in the life of the individual, the nation or humanity in general has based itself on the belief that the core of the human problem lies in the human psyche. The myth of the "new man"—German, Russian, Chinese or Jewish—was an inseparable part of the heroic attempts made over the last two centuries to cast humanity in a new mold, a humanity in which the values of the revolution would become inborn as it were, rather than merely acquired. The Zionist movement sprang from the European culture of the revolutionary era. Its aspiration to create a "new Jew" reflected the values of that world, as did the models according to which it sought to mold this transformation.

Origins of the Myth The concept of the "new Jew" had its roots in those general ideological trends aimed at changing the nature of Jewish society, which first emerged toward the end of the eighteenth century, in the wake of the early encounters of the Jews with European culture in its modern, secular version. That the Jews should change in order to be able to integrate into the host society was a prerequisite accepted by all those who were captivated by the lure of modernity. The ideal of the Haskalah was a Jew freed from the bonds of religious coercion, who acquired and internalized the mores of European behavior, and who expressed "enlightened" ideas in his daily life. Freedom of conscience and economic productivity were the two slogans characterizing the ideals of Enlightenment in general, and they were likewise adopted by the Haskalah movement. The gradual absorption of these ideals preceded Zionism and underpinned the trend that espoused the integration of Jews into the surrounding society— the rising trend in Jewish society during the last decades of the nineteenth century. The myth of the "new Jew," as opposed to that of the Jew as simply a "new man," could not be created until the underlying premise—that the existence of the Jew as a separate national entity was both desirable and possible—had begun to take hold. From the outset this myth was connected not only with Jewish national self253

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consciousness but also with the land of Israel. A basic assumption emerged, at times implicit and at times overt, that a mystical link existed between the people and the land: only in the land of their fathers, where the Jewish people had first emerged, could there occur the desired transformation of its character. Only there would it be able to renew its youth, both as individuals and as a nation. In his poem "Credo," Saul Tchernichovsky speaks of the earthly renewal of national life by a native generation, by the new Jews who would be molded by the direct encounter with the land.1 At the Zionist Congress in 1905, Vladimir Jabotinsky argued that the "Palestinian personality," formed while the Jewish people had lived on its land, had suffered arrested development since the exile. "The undisturbed development of our Palestinian uniqueness," he declared, "is not possible except on the same ground and in the same natural environment in which this uniqueness was once created."2 Michah Yosef Berdichevsky, illustrating the age-old link to the land, put the matter even more sharply: "No man or people can exist forever without land, without land to settle."3 The belief in the existence of a mystical link "between the people and its land" was also the basis of Martin Buber's Zionist ideology: "It was a consummation that could not be achieved either by the people or by the land alone, but only by the faithful cooperation of the two together . . . just as to achieve fullness of life, the people needed the land, so the land needed the people."4 A dissenting voice with regard to the mystical connection between the rejuvenation of the individual and the acquisition of the land of the fathers was that of Hillel Zeitlin. He described the ideal land with pointed irony—after singing, as it were, its praises, he mockingly portrayed the transformation for which the Zionists yearned: There, there in that land, the giant will stride upright, there raise his head, return to his youth, sing his new song; there will he fashion his universal creation . . . find the meaning of his troubles and the justification for his sorrows; there the eternal wanderer will find his final destination. There he will express to the creatures of the world the great word, the great dream, the grand vision.5

The relationship between the views satirized here and neo-Romantic ideas, which were widespread in Europe at the turn of the century, is self-evident. Another implicit assumption made at this time was that the contemporary generation constituted the "generation of the desert," a transitional generation unable to muster up the psychological traits and physical strength needed for a great endeavor of colonization: it remained to "the sons"—and this distinction was already made by Zeitlin—to build up the land. It was not coincidental that Hayim Nahman Bialik wrote two works about "the dead in the desert"; the myth of the Exodus, of the generation unworthy of entering the promised land, suited the Zionist mood, as it expressed the distance dividing the ambitions from the capabilities of a national movement that was then still in its infancy. Leading Zionists were sensitive to this gap between dream and reality, between plans and possibilities. Confronting a reality that demanded heroic deeds, those who had left the shtetl felt a sense of impotence, which in turn gave birth to the convention that the sons would realize what the fathers could not.6 The phenomenon of parents piling the burden of their hopes and aspirations on the shoulders of their children is typical of immigrant societies, in which the first generation sacrifices itself in order to open the way for the second. The assumed

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superiority of the children to their parents is also a common feature in the social fabric of immigrant societies, and provides as well a widespread literary motif. For the Jews arriving in Palestine, an additional factor was at work: the transition from "exile" to "homeland," from the mentality of a minority group to that of statebuilders. The break between the two generations was quite sharp, strengthening the implicit but fundamental premise that the fathers would remain the "generation of the desert," and that the sons alone would gather the strength to conquer the land. How was the transition from the old to the new Jew to occur? This issue was not fully clarified at the time. The widespread assumption was that the transformation would come about almost automatically, a result of the radical transformation in the status of the Jew as he became master of his own land. The myth of the "new Jew" was by no means confined to Zionist circles. Every movement that had incorporated the idea of change and progress wished the Jews to adapt accordingly. The more revolutionary the desired change, the greater the impact exerted by one version or another of the myth. The Bund and other Jewish socialist movements thus had their own image of the "new man," although the link to the land was, of course, typical of the Zionist image alone.

Models of the "New Jew" The period in which the myth of the "new Jew" really came into its own was toward the end of the nineteenth and at the beginning of the twentieth century. Four images of the paradigmatic "new Jew" could then be differentiated, though they were all preceded by the Haskalah model of the Jew as a "new man" to be smoothly integrated into European civilization. The maskil was meant to find his place amid a society carried forward by the momentum of progress, with the linear unfolding of history promising a continuous improvement in the status of the Jews, just as it promised the positive development of humanity as a whole. This approach was based, ostensibly at least, on liberal-empiricist principles. Toward the end of the century, however, this faith in progress began to be eroded. A measure of doubt was not uncommon in European society and culture at the turn of the century, and the Jews—in the tsarist empire, at least—were no exception. The last quarter of the nineteenth century saw the rise of modern antisemitism in Western and Central Europe, as well as the discontinuation, and partial reversal, of Alexander II"s reforms in Russia. The pogroms in southern Russia in the early 1880s greatly strengthened the sense of disillusionment and served to undermine belief in the possibility of political partnership with the non-Jewish intelligentsia. The "maskilic" ideal was hardly in accord with the new atmosphere; and its declining hold made possible the emergence of alternative, nationalist models. Two of the models of the new Jew, however, belonged to the same world of ideas that had nurtured the maskilic model of the "new man." One of them was linked to the self-effacing figure of Ahad Ha'am, and the second to the larger-than-life figure of Theodor Herzl. The common denominator shared by these two men was their attachment to rationalism as a guiding principle and their belief in progress. Ahad Ha'am's spiritual world was formed by the Jewish tradition that he ab-

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sorbed in his parental home, and by the European literature that he studied assiduously from adolescence. Although he adopted a distinctly hasidic model of leadership (as we learn from Steven J. Zipperstein's book, The Elusive Prophet),7 Ahad Ha'am was by nature a rationalist. He was not given to romantic soul-searching or vague yearnings for something transcending reality. There was a distinctly "Lithuanian" (or "mitnagdic") element in his personality, in his patterns of thought and analysis, in his restrained form of expression and in his emphasis on clarity and consistency. He read widely in European philosophical literature, adopting from it the ideas of such British philosophers as John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer. The empiricism of these philosophers, devoid of prophetic visions, aroused his positive response, whereas neither Russian literature nor German philosophy, with its metaphysical tendencies, moved him. The image of the "new Jew" according to Ahad Ha'am was that of an educated, secular individual absorbed in the culture of the Jewish people—as Ahad-Ha'am and his followers understood that culture and its values. The difference between the maskilic and the Ahad Ha'amian ideals was to be found, of course, primarily in the Zionism of the latter. The sense of inferiority that the educated Jew had tended to feel toward the general culture was dissipated in Ahad Ha'am. He had no doubts about the superiority of Jewish over general culture, and his point of departure was not only the desire to adapt Jewish culture to modernity but also—and even more so—to protect it from the prevailing winds. For him, the uniqueness of the Jewish national identity lay in a moral worldview, epitomized in the biblical verse "not by might nor by power, but by My spirit" (Zach. 4:6). His stress on the ethical and his aversion to the use of force were accompanied by a worldview based on moderation, on the golden rule, on opposition to all extremism, exaggeration and shortcuts. For him the new Jew would shape himself according to a synthesis of what was best in the worlds of both Jewish ethics and European liberalism, as a worldview and as a culture. Those inducted into Bnei Moshe (the order he founded) were expected to adapt their conduct to this ideal type, a typical product of the educated middle class: its members were to dedicate themselves to Jewish nationalism, devoting their efforts and money to advancing the cause of Hebrew secular culture.8 This model of the "new Jew" could not excite the imagination of broad strata of society. It spoke to the class of (now disillusioned) maskilim who had recently emerged from traditional society and who wished to integrate much of age-old Jewish culture into their new national-secular awareness. These views found their political expression in the emergence of the Democratic Faction under the leadership of Leo Motzkin and Chaim Weizmann at the Fourth Zionist Congress of 1901. It also attracted important "post-emancipationist" Jews in Central Europe who had received a Western secular education and who wished in their maturity to find a way back to Judaism qua culture. For them, Ahad Ha'am's ideology symbolized what they perceived as the essence of Judaism, without a commitment to Orthodoxy. Despite important differences between their various philosophies of life and his, Martin Buber, Hugo Bergman, Gershom Scholem and Ernst Simon all saw in Ahad Ha'am the epitome of the new Jewish identity. A number of both labor and also socalled "bourgeois" factions that identified with the political center in the Yishuv

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also looked for inspiration to Ahad Ha'am's ethical emphasis, his evolutionary approach and his fundamental dislike of revolutionary shortcuts.9 The second model that drew from the liberal and rationalist European tradition was the Herzlian. I include in this category those images of the new Jew as anticipated not only by Herzl but also by Leon Pinsker, Max Nordau and Jabotinsky. These ideologues and leaders came to Zionism not from the world of traditional Judaism, but from that of Western culture. Their perspective was not that of the Jew emerging from traditional society, dazzled by the vast cultural wealth of Europe, but that of the European intellectual who turns back to his people and sees it with alien eyes. The culture to which they belonged was German—and additionally, in the case of Pinsker and Jabotinsky, Russian. Anyone who observed the Jews with non-Jewish eyes focused on their shortcomings from the perspective of the surrounding society. Thus, Herzl and his colleagues considered as most important the values of human dignity and national honor (matters that were of little concern to Ahad Ha'am) when it came to reshaping the figure of the Jew. The Jew behaved in a manner that non-Jews did not respect. Or, as Nathan Birnbaum put it: "[The Jews] lack personal courage, external dignity, tact and an aesthetic sense."10 Herzl was disturbed by the image of Jews as swindlers involved in international scandals. Pinsker bewailed the loss of the creative genius among the Jews. The new Jew, who would arise in the land of his fathers, was to be the antithesis of the despised Jew, who did not stand upon his honor and whom the world did not respect. The rationalist view, which attributed the weakness of the Jews to external circumstances, thus found expression in the convention that a normal life in their own land would rid them of these negative traits. It is instructive that the faults observed by this group were primarily aesthetic, weaknesses of which the traditional Jew was almost unaware, and to which he certainly attributed no importance. The "new Jew" was to adopt the norms internalized by German students. The heroes of Herzl's and of Nordau's plays fight duels in order to defend the honor of the Jews vis-a-vis the non-Jews. And the manners and customs of the hero of Herzl's Utopian novel, Altneuland, exemplify the strict code of manners valued by the educated German Jew. When Jabotinsky defined "dignity" (hadar) as one of the necessary qualities of the "new Jew," he meant primarily the external aspects of behavior, in the spirit of the English gentleman: order and cleanliness, good manners, manliness, bravery and integrity. Nordau called for what he termed Muskeljuden (literally, "muscled Jews"). Jews, he insisted, were despised in German society because of their physical deficiencies: flabbiness, weakness, shortness of stature. Exercise and gymnastics would improve the appearance of the Jews and their carriage, buttress their sense of self-esteem and security, and enhance their status in the eyes of the non-Jew.11 The new Jew should be as strong physically as he was spiritually, punctilious with regard to his appearance and his manners, honest and tolerant, brave and ready to defend his honor to the death. The scene of a group of horsemen riding out to greet Herzl and his entourage when he visited the colony of Rehovot brought tears of joy to his eyes: the metamorphosis in the image of the Jew was already taking place!12 Although the political approach of Herzl and his disciples was revolutionary, not

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evolutionary, in nature, their image of the new Jew was cast in an essentially liberal mold. Their built-in assumption was that the world would accept the Jews as worthy equals if only they improved themselves. They wished to adopt the social and aesthetic norms of the educated bourgeoisie; they were characterized by their moderation and tolerance as well as openmindedness toward the other, the alien. Their "new Jew" was to be an inseparable part of a social fraternity that crossed national barriers and united all within a framework of shared universal values. His particularity would lie in the possession of a national identity that would find its political expression in a nation-state. However, in all the other facets of his life, he would not differ from the best of humanity—that is, from the European middle class. It is difficult to point to any political group that adopted this model in its entirety. The Betar movement took it as its own, but only to some extent, and with substantial changes. The distance between this model and the actual character of the emerging Jewish nationalism in Eastern Europe, with its strong ethnic particularism and its emphasis on Jewish culture, reflected Herzl's superficial acquaintance with his own people. The third model belonged to an entirely different cultural world, and the sources of its inspiration were diametrically opposed to the two already mentioned. It can be termed vitalistic, Nietzschean; it was connected first and foremost with the figure of Michah Yosef Berdichevsky and his circle. A shift occurring in European culture at the end of the nineteenth century, from the predominance of positivist ideas to an emphasis on vitalistic trends, greatly affected Jewish youth. "The discomfort with culture" shared by Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur Schopenhauer and Sigmund Freud found its expression in a sense of alienation from the rationality of the Enlightenment and in a turn toward instinct and the senses, and toward the hidden impulses that direct man's activity (enchained by Reason from the time of Socrates). In literature, these new influences were expressed in the works of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Henrik Ibsen; in philosophy, in the writings of Henri Bergson, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. This last thinker was the most influential. Although his work was not translated into Hebrew until the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, Nietzsche was well known (mainly via intermediaries) to a large circle of Hebrew writers, in particular to those who flocked to study in the universities of Germany and Switzerland. The interpretative works of Georg Brandes and Georg Simmel served as a channel through which Nietzsche's work was brought to the attention of Jewish readers.13 Nietzsche had a magnetic influence on the fin-de-siecle generation. Interest in his ideas, cutting across the boundaries of geography and language, shaped the contours of intellectual debate. The myth of man freed from the bonds of tradition and from the burden of past generations, who thus autonomously confronts his destiny, was extremely powerful. As David Ohana has noted in his work on the nihilists,14 with Nietzsche's appearance on the scene, the focus of the cultural-political debate shifted from the universal, the rational and the historicist to the particular and the mythic. Throwing off the burden of history as understood by Hegelian Idealism, this school of thought glorified the creative spontaneity of the individual who dared to see himself as the focus of creation and its goal. In place of the norms imposed by

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the Judeo-Christian ethic, it raised the banner of the instinctive authenticity of the individual. Against the attempts to harmonize, Nietzsche and those following him propounded the principle of conflict as a constant and desirable state. Human vitality, in their view, is born of the heroic clash between opposing forces; struggle, war and conflict redeem the individual from passivity, fuel his creative activity and possess a beauty of their own. Confrontation was an existential state sought for its own sake, expressing the "will to power" of the "new man"—a man without obligations to the past or the future, to the nation or the society, but only to himself and his own genius.15 Berdichevsky was the writer who served as the primary mediator between Nietzsche and the Hebrew reader.16 A student of the yeshivah at Volozhin who rebelled against religion and received a secular education in Germany, Berdichevsky became the spiritual leader of those Hebrew writers and poets (known as "the youngsters") who early in the century rejected the philosophical tradition of the Haskalah and were strongly attracted to the vitalistic school: Tchernichovsky, Zalman Schneour, Yosef Hayim Brenner, Uri Nissan Gnessin, Hayim Hazaz. Parallel to the intellectual debate provoked by Nietzsche in Germany (and elsewhere in Europe) was that between Berdichevsky and Ahad Ha'am. The exchange ostensibly revolved around the proper nature of Hebrew literature. Ahad Ha'am did not assign aesthetic or independent value to belles lettres, arguing for the didactic and national mission of Hebrew literature. In contrast, Berdichevsky and his disciples called for the autonomy of literature as a sphere of aesthetics. They expected Hebrew literature to express the alienation and uprootedness of the Jew who was cut off from the world of tradition and had not yet found his way in the modern world. Berdichevsky adopted as his hero the person caught between two worlds who rebels against his existential reality. Thus, the focus of the debate shifted from those theoretical problems that interested Ahad Ha'am to existential and instinctual questions—including that of the repressed Eros. The topic of the debate, in other words, was no longer "Judaism," but simply Jews of flesh and blood, their disappointments and their struggle to free themselves from the yoke of their history. Berdichevsky challenged the attempt to present Jewish history as a linear story of the Jewish people guided by the Torah. He emphasized the internal contradictions, the divisions, the struggles, with which the national history was replete.17 He sought to break away from the Jewish tradition of past centuries and return to ancient Hebrew myth, "the primal past before the giving of the Book," when man identified with his basic instincts and was at one with nature.18 The creative eras in Jewish history, he insisted, were those in which the people "did evil in the eyes of the Lord," when life triumphed over the Law. Morality, which according to Ahad Ha'am was the essential characteristic of the Jewish people, was viewed by Berdichevsky as an expression of the constraint forced upon the people by its leaders, a coercion bought at the price of vitality and one that undermined the ability of the nation to fight its wars. For Berdichevsky, "national morality" meant one thing, "the self-love of the people, for its own sake and for its own interests."19 Yavneh, the symbol of the spiritual life revitalized after the loss of earthly power, was for Ahad Ha'am the symbol of the best of Judaism. For Berdichevsky it represented a negative reevaluation of values, the victory of the Book over life

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itself, of submission over struggle, of surrender over self-sacrifice. It was then that the Jews distanced themselves from nature, gave up their instinct for power, their thirst for revenge and for heroism, and their readiness for battle.20 Berdichevsky demanded that the burden of the past be shaken off: Give me myself, my being, my life . . . my own hopes, and do not make me into a guardian of my fathers' inheritance. I want to conquer my land and work the virgin soil. ... I want to begin everything not from yesterday, but from today. . . . Every past, in that it is the past, buries the present, and everything old swallows up the new.21 Berdichevsky's connection to Nietzsche was conscious. He took Nietzsche's slogan ("In order to build a temple one must destroy a temple") as the motto of his article on the relationship between past and present. In it, Berdichevsky announced that "we are the slaves of our memories," and concluded with a paraphrase from Nietzsche, declaring: "There is no construction that is not preceded by destruction and there is no existence without extinction."22 No longer a mere object of history, the Jew had to mold his own fate; draw close to nature; till the land; give precedence to beauty over morality, earthliness over spirituality, might over love, pride over meekness, creativity over rationality, emotion over reason. Berdichevsky was the spokesman for an entire generation of young Jews who were drawn by the novelty, by the form and style as well as the content, of Nietzsche's message. His mysterious, obscure and enigmatic style, which Ahad Ha'am chose to mock,23 did not detract from the general enthusiasm, but rather enhanced it: its strange and mysterious quality fired the imagination. The impression made by this style even in outlying hamlets is evident when one reads the memoirs of Shlomo Zemah, a native of Plonsk, the hometown of David BenGurion. He describes how he and his friends would walk on the streets of the town "quoting the Nietzschean phrases taught us by Berdichevsky, and wondering about life as death and death as life, not understanding much of all this, but nonetheless absorbing something of its message."24 The context of the Hebrew cultural debate was thus completely transformed. Ahad Ha'am ceased to be the ultimate judge and arbiter of taste in matters pertaining to modern Hebrew literature, and became overnight the leader of a cultural school of thought that to a large extent belonged to the past. The new cultural heroes were Berdichevsky and Tchernichovsky, who in one of his most famous poems adopted Apollo as the symbol of ancient mythology, the god of life, heroism and beauty—three distinctly Nietzschean motifs. The glorification of power was an integral part of this message, which presented Apollo as the "God of the conquerors of Canaan in the storm, but they bound him up in straps—phylacteries."25 Violence, war, might—all were perceived as the external manifestations of vitality and a strong masculine impulse for life. Battles between national entities with strong existential wills were viewed as a moving, aesthetic phenomenon, as a sort of lifegiving drug as opposed to the mediocrity of tranquillity. The new Jew was meant to embody these qualities. It should also be noted that Berdichevsky contributed yet another cornerstone to the image (as visualized by him) of the "new Jew." During a polemical attack on

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Herzl, he sharply criticized those who believed that the land could be obtained by diplomatic means. Eretz Israel, he wrote, would be acquired not by those Zionists who sat in the diaspora and discussed the promised land in their conferences, but only by those men who put their packs on their backs and were ready to abandon the land of their birth.26 Berdichevsky himself did not reach the shores of Palestine, but this concept became embodied in the ideal of the pioneer, or "halutz": only those superior individuals who were ready to cut the Gordian knot of the diaspora and establish a stake in Palestine could create the Jewish society of the future. Brenner continued this line of thought: despite the laws of reason, according to which the Jewish nation had no basis for its existence, there remained the hope that the course of Jewish history could be diverted by individuals willing to sacrifice themselves for the cause. Berdichevsky's ideas won adherents during the Second Aliyah. Those who wished to base Zionism on the spontaneity of the individual, self-searching and personal redemption found there the perfect formula. Add the themes of courage and heroism, human dignity and national pride, and one has encompassed many of the components that attracted the members of the Second Aliyah. It was not surprising that the three founders of the Ahdut Ha'avodah party (with its revolutionary, avant-gardist views)—Berl Katznelson, Yitzhak Tabenkin and David Ben-Gurion— considered Berdichevsky one of the thinkers who had most influenced them. In contrast, members of Hapo'el Hazair tended to identify with Ahad Ha'am, a fact reflected in their evolutionary views and their roots in the rationalistic Haskalah. Ben-Gurion internalized Berdichevsky's disgust with Jewish history during the period of the galut with none of the ambivalence that characterized Berdichevsky's criticism.27 Tabenkin emphasized in Berdichevsky the emancipation from the past, his challenge to traditional society, and the deliverance of the individual from the chains of society. For Tabenkin such emancipation was a preparatory stage for "a new life in the country." Katznelson considered Berdichevsky to be one of his major mentors and often used terms taken from Berdichevsky's thought. "Impulses," "power" and "will" were prevalent concepts in Katznelson's writings in the formative years that followed the First World War. When Berdichevsky died in 1921, Katznelson wrote a eulogy in which he presented him as both the teacher of a generation and its leader.28 With the passing of time, Brenner and Berdichevsky became part of the ideological canon for those circles that, starting out as "non-affiliated" groups during the Second Aliyah, were subsequently integrated into the Ahdut Ha'avodah party (in the 1920s) and then into Mapai (in the 1930s). Berdichevsky and Brenner were treated as the foremost authorities on Jewish history in the youth movements (Hamahanot Ha'olim or Hano'ar Ha'oved, for example) associated with these circles. The image of the new Jew as the direct descendant of the ancient Jew, and as the antithesis of the diaspora Jew, was imparted to the youth of the Yishuv by way of their works. In the seminars conducted by these youth movements, the works of Berdichevsky, including his Sefer haagadah, were presented as source material to glorify the rebellious, powerful heroes of the past, and as a positive contrast to Bialik's anthology of the same name, which portrayed a harmonious past without a sense of conflict.29

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Correspondingly, one can find the traces of Berdichevsky's influence on the radical right in the Yishuv, from Brit Habiryonim under the leadership of his admirer, Abba Ahimeir, through the Lehi ("Stern gang") circles. It is no coincidence that Yisrael Eldad, one of the leaders of the Lehi, chose to translate Nietzsche into Hebrew. The fourth model of the "new Jew" was that propounded by socialist groups. From its inception, the socialist movement attributed great importance to education, viewing the recruitment of believers and the remolding of their worldview as one of its most important tasks. The establishment of a society founded on justice and equality; the elevation of those on the lower rungs of the social ladder; the economic transformation of both individual and society, all required the neutralization or elimination of deeply rooted human urges: egotism, competitiveness, envy. Through the systematic inculcation of altruism, man would be brought to relinquish personal gain and to subjugate his personal desires to the volonte generale. All this was to be achieved by the use of symbols, images and concepts in which the mythic element was dominant. The myths of the revolution as all-embracing panacea, the general strike, the proletariat as "Prometheus bound," were transmitted to the masses through literature, poetry and songs; through powerful symbols (the red flag, for example) at demonstrations and public meetings. This appeal to the emotions molded the consciousness of the generation more than any scholastic argumentation on the part of theoreticians. A similar process occurred in the Palestinian branch of the socialist movement. The paradigm of the "new Jew" that developed there was a unique synthesis between universalist images of the socialist "new man" and particularistic, local components. This amalgam had its origins in the Second Aliyah, whose members drew the models they wished to imitate mainly from narodnik voluntarism. Influenced by Russian literature and by the revolutionary atmosphere that prevailed in Russia in the early years of the century (until the revolution of 1905, a time when they were in their formative teens), many internalized the concepts of the debt owed by self-selected elites to society; of individual responsibility for the attainment of the ultimate goal; and of personal commitment—in other words, the obligation of the individual to implement his beliefs in his daily life. In the revolutionary context of the times, this meant a decision to emigrate to Palestine and to engage in manual labor there, preferably in agriculture. This was their "going to the people." The actualized model of the "new man" was the halutz: the Jewish youth who abandoned his parents' home and land of birth, burned his bridges to the past and went to the new land. This figure was immortalized in Yitzhak Lamdan's poem Masada.30 The halutz comprised many of the components of Berdichevsky's "new Jew," but with socialist additives. Underlying the code of the halutz was the assumption that words had to be matched by deeds; that the individual had responsibility for the collective; and that manual labor could serve as a therapeutic process for the individual Jew and for Jewish society. With the passing of time, a further obligation was added: the assumption by the halutz of a key role in Zionist colonization. Combining national and socialist missions, the member of the kibbutz came to symbolize the "new man." With the growing

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importance of sernimilitary activities in the late 1930s, combat readiness grew in importance as yet another facet of this image. Tabenkin described the new Jew as one who had a spade in his hands (associated with the "sacred spade" of A.D. Gordon, from the time of the Second Aliyah) and a rifle on his shoulder.31 Following the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917—and over the subsequent decades—the Soviet influence also made itself felt. Communist literature and propaganda steadily disseminated images of the Soviet "new man" as the ideal creation of the socialist order. Just as Brenner had been nourished by the narodnik and Slavophile images of the Russian muzhik with his simplicity and honesty, closeness to nature and to God, so now many in the intelligentsia of the Yishuv were nourished by the literature, films and journalism appearing in revolutionary and postrevolutionary Russia. Alexander Blok's poem, "The Twelve," translated into Hebrew by Yosef Tal and published in Brenner's journal, Haadamah, as early as 1920, portrayed a Red Army soldier, simple and vulgar, cruel and dedicated, as heralding the arrival of the new order. Vladimir Mayakovsky's poetry, impregnated with vitality and ruthlessness, was internalized by the youth of Labor Palestine. The kolhoz was viewed as the Soviet equivalent of the kibbutz, and the tractor drivers in the Yezreel Valley were perceived as twins of the Stakhanovite workers whose pictures appeared often on the pages of the Soviet monthly Ogonek. The colonization of Palestine was compared to the intensive construction taking place in the Soviet Union. Leaders and pedagogues also found parallels in the shared aspiration to mobilize the youth through education and indoctrination. The Palestinian labor movement's attempt to combine a national with a universal revolution was likewise perceived as not so radically different from Stalin's theory of "socialism in one country." And during the Second World War, the image of the partisan, as presented in Russian war literature, was considered a model to be imitated in the ranks of the Palmach. The Berdichevsky-Nietzschean and the socialist-Soviet models of the new man were major themes in the education provided to those members of the youth movements affiliated with the left wing of the Mapai party. But this mixture of Nietzscheanism and socialism calls for comment: there are essential conflicts between the messages of vitalism and those of socialism. While the first system upholds the creative egotism of the individual, freeing him of responsibility for society, the second calls for individual interests to be subordinated to those of society. Moreover, while Nietzschean thought frees man from the bonds of morality and grants the strong an unlimited sphere of activity, the socialist idea speaks of protecting the weak from the mighty. Whereas Nietzscheanism rebels against the Judeo-Christian ethic, socialism is rooted in it. But there were several points of contact between these two modes of thought, especially once they had undergone the process of simplification and vulgarization, a fate common to theoretical systems when translated into guiding principles of action. Politics as theater—addressing the impulses, exciting the senses and activating nonrational systems of receptivity—was employed by the adherents of both systems. The assumption that existing social orders and conventions must be swept away and upon their ruins a fundamentally new world order be erected was also common to both. There was no real difference between Nietzsche's declaration that

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in order to build a new temple an old one must be destroyed and the call from the left to "raze the old world to its foundations." The hatred of the middle class, with its self-righteous morality and bourgeois (or, still worse, petit bourgeois) lifestyle; of smug self-satisfaction; of the tranquillity that underpins the existing social order; of what was called "philistinism"—all these were shared. Pessimistic assumptions regarding the masses, their loyalty and their rationality were widespread among those socialists who adopted avant garde (and Leninist) views, just as they were in the Nietzschean camp. The disdain for parliamentary rule, for democracy, served as an additional similarity. The distance between the Ubermensch, freed from the bonds of morality, and the revolutionary, whose mission liberated him from "conventional" morality, was not all that great. The socialist revolutionaries—and this was the self-image of those in Ahdut Ha'avodah—regarded the use of violence as a legitimate method in the service of the cause. The show of force that Berdichevsky valued as an expression of national vitality was desired by the socialists as an expression of revolutionary commitment. Socialist and Nietzschean heroism went hand in hand and called for the same psychological traits. Thus, there were few discernible differences between the two models in their analysis of the past and in their prescriptions for action in the present. They were divided primarily in their vision of the future, but this fact was largely downplayed. The education based on Berdichevsky's doctrine, on Marxism or on the narodnik ethos was presented in Ahdut Ha'avodah as all of one piece. It is no coincidence that Berdichevsky's ideas were most widely employed by those sections of the Labor movements that were not strictly Marxist in their doctrine but rather tended toward narodnik voluntarism. The Marxist Hashomer Hazair did not accord recognition to either Berdichevsky or to Brenner, while in the youth movements associated with Tabenkin and Katznelson, they were both the objects of admiration.

Differences Between the Models There were, then, many similarities between the various Zionist models of the "new Jew" described above. He was to be secular and modern, love his people and homeland, draw close to nature, have clean hands and a courageous heart. The points of contrast involved three central issues: history (and the diaspora); the nonJewish world; and morality and power. The Herzlian school of thought related to Jewish history and to the exile as an accident to be escaped as efficaciously as possible. It did not devote much energy to the past, instead concentrating on a critique of the present and an outline of the future. The realities of the diaspora were perceived as a function of non-Jewish attitudes toward the Jew and not as a consequence of Jewish actions or failings. There was no hostility to Jewish tradition in this model, but neither was there a sense of involvement or of deep empathy. Contrasting with this attitude was the model originating in Ahad Ha'am's thought, where a central place was assigned to Jewish history. Modern Jewish nationalism was perceived to be a direct continuation

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of the Jewish collectivity as it had crystallized throughout the ages. This historical continuity was viewed by Ahad Ha'am and his disciples as a basic tenet of Zionism. Therefore, his attitude toward the diaspora was also relatively positive: he saw its history as expressing the vitality and spirit of the nation and believed that it would continue to exist alongside the national center in Palestine. The "new Jew" in Berdichevsky's version, though, was a rebel against historical continuity and viewed Jewish existence in the diaspora as a miserable, unhealthy deviation from the heroic standards of the original nation. The socialist model was also constructed on the dual principles of rejection and a fresh start. But the socialist attempt to integrate the history of the Jews within the general framework of historical determinism (an undertaking very different from Berdichevsky's) robbed it of any uniqueness by presenting it merely as another chapter in the history of human injustice and religious prejudice. Another issue upon which there was no agreement involved the relationship of the Jewish people to the non-Jewish world. Ahad Ha'am's attitude to this world was determined by his fear lest the unique Jewish culture be eroded. He strove to erect boundaries between Jewish and non-Jewish society, reversing the Haskalah motto ("be a man outside and a Jew at home") to "be a man at home and a Jew outside." The emphasis on Jewish particularism, amounting to an animosity toward the threatening non-Jewish world, was an important facet of the implicit message he sent. His doctrine lacked any universal pretensions. As for the Herzlian model, it was grounded on the assumption that Jewish nationalism would be molded in accordance with the most impressive of the examples then dominant in Europe. The implicit goal was to transform the Jews into a nation "like all the nations." There was no tendency here toward national isolationism. On the contrary: Zionism was to be the bridge to the world, the key to the acceptance of the Jewish people as a member in the fraternity of nations. Berdichevsky, too, depicted the new Jew as one who would break out of isolation. His extreme particularism and individualism notwithstanding, he demanded complete openness toward the non-Jewish world and the destruction of all barriers erected by the Torah between Jews and non-Jews. In reference to the verse "thou shall not follow in their ways," he stated, "I view this principle as the most oppressive for Israel and the spirit of Israel."32 And, of course, the socialist model, by its very definition, upheld the principle of international fraternity and the shared destiny of the workers of the world. The primacy of class over nation endowed this model with an extra-Jewish dimension and an ideological commitment to universalism. Finally, there was the issue of violence. In this sphere, Ahad Ha'am was unequivocal. He opposed the use of force under almost all circumstances and viewed it as radically alien to the spirit of Judaism. In the Herzlian model there was no emphasis on the issue of force but, at the same time, there was no display of aversion to it. There were hidden longings for pride and dignity, but not for brutal aggression. In contrast, there can be no denying that in the vitalistic model there was a stress on force; on "the will to power" of Nietzsche; on struggle, heroism and even amorality as of the essence in conflict between nations. Finally, socialist ideology projected an ambiguous message: on the one hand, antimilitarism and international solidarity; on

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the other, the anticipation of inevitable and violent confrontation between the powers of light and those of darkness. Until the arrival of that day, the socialist movement nurtured the ethic of the workers' struggle involving the use of violence, if necessary. In sum, revolutionary socialism endowed the use of force with the halo of an ethical value. All the models described above were employed in the Zionist educational systems—formal and, still more, informal—established in Palestine and in the diaspora. As already mentioned, the youth movements each adopted a model of the "new Jew" that was close to their worldview: Gordonia identified largely with Ahad Ha'am; Betar adopted the Herzlian model with Berdichevskian additions; Hehalutz, Hanoar Haoved and Hamahanot Ha'olim simultaneously absorbed the Berdichevskian and the socialist models. And similar patterns can be traced in the sister movements active in the diaspora. The influence of the socialist and Nietzschean models on youth-movement education in Palestine was greater by far than that of the rationalist models, whether of the Ahad Ha'amian or the Herzlian variety. As a result, the youth imbibed a mixture of contradictory messages: universalism and national particularism; love of humanity and hostility toward the non-Jew; tolerance and militant fanaticism; devotion to the Jewish people and disdain for the Jews of the diaspora; a vision of peace and an overt aspiration to power. The way in which these conflicting values were internalized by the graduates of Jewish Palestine was not uniform. People with different personalities reacted in different ways. Moreover, it would seem that reactions may well have changed with age: in their youth, when the tendency was to depict the world in black and white, the members inclined strongly toward socialist and nationalist militancy, admiration of force and disdain for the "old Jew." With maturity came the influence of moderating values, both on the national and on the universal level, and the revolutionary fervor of youth made way for more tolerant evolutionism. After a relatively short period of nationalistic extremism and militancy in the decade preceding the establishment of the state, a plurality of positions emerged among the first Sabra generation. In the final analysis, the "new Jew" was not characterized by a single set of values, but rather by a generational "style" that was common to members of the cohort that grew up in the country in the 1940s. This style, which distinguished the young from their parents, and which came to symbolize the identity of the new Jew, was expressed in body language and in dress; in the strong affinity between members of the same age group; in their great attraction to the open spaces of the country and their need to explore it; in their unpolished behavior, which disdained the manners of polite society and which found any display of emotion distasteful; in their emphasis on physical, at the expense of intellectual, activity; in their preference for action over words; and in their Hebrew dialect and aversion to polished rhetoric. The solidarity of this generation arose from a sense of this shared ethos rather than from any strictly ideological unity. Just as it was the poets and writers who created the myth of the "new man" at the beginning of the period, so now it was the writers who immortalized this "style" in what was termed "the literature of the Palmach generation." Thanks to this literature, that generation came to be accepted

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as the embodiment of the "new Jew." The debate over the Palmach generation, which continues to this day, is at one and the same time a debate about literature, society, culture and identity. Did there ever exist a new Jew close to the model that became entrenched in our memory, or was he but a creature of the literary imagination?

Notes 1. Saul Tchernichovsky, "Credo," in his Selected Poems, trans. Maurice Samuel (New York: 1944), 8. 2. Zeev Jabotinsky, "Ziyonut veerez yisrael," in his Ketavim ziyoniyim rishonim (Jerusalem: 1949), 124. 3. Michah Yosef Berdichevsky, "Adamah" in his Kol kitvei Mikhah Yosef Berdichevsky: maamarim (Tel-Aviv: I960), 63. 4. Martin Buber, "Zion and the Other National Concepts," in The Writings of Martin Buber, ed. Will Herberg (New York: 1956), 303. 5. Hillel Zeitlin, "Hamashber," Hazeman (Vilna) (July-Sept. 1905), 260. 6. See, for example, Ahad Ha'am, "Nisayon shenikhshal," in his 'Al parashat derakhim (Berlin: 1930), vol. 4, 200-201, 204. 7. Steven Zipperstein, Elusive Prophet: Ahad Ha'am and the Origins of Zionism (Berkeley: 1993). 8. Ahad Ha'am, "Nisayon shenikhshal," 200-205. 9. On the special connection of the above-mentioned intellectuals to Ahad Ha'am, see Shalom Razabi, "Ishei mercaz eiropah be 'Brit shalom': ideologiyah bemivhanei meziyut, 1925-1948" (Ph.D. diss., Tel-Aviv University, 1995). 10. Quoted in Joachim Doron, Haguto haziyonit shel Natan Birnbaum (Jerusalem: 1988), 43. 11. Max Nordau, "Yahadut hasheririm," Ketavim, vol. 2 (Jerusalem: 1960), 187-188; "Mah mashma'utah shel hahit'amlut legabeinu hayehudim?" ibid., 82-86. 12. Herzl, The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl, ed. Raphael Patai (New York and London: 1960), vol. 2, 742 (29 Oct. 1898). 13. See Dan Miron, Bodedim bemo'adam (Tel-Aviv: 1987), 361-370; 382-388. 14. David Ohana, Misdar hanihilistim (Jerusalem: 1993). 15. Ibid., 5-64. 16. For an extensive discussion of Berdichevsky's thought, see Marcus Moseley, "Between Memory and Forgetfulness: The Janus Face of Michah Yosef Berdichevsky," in Studies in Contemporary Jewry, vol. 12, Literary Strategies: Jewish Texts and Contexts, ed. Ezra Mendelsohn (New York: 1996), 78-117. 17. Berdichevsky, "Torah ahat," in Maamarim, 122-123. 18. Berdichevsky, "Zorerei yisrael" in ibid., 96. 19. Berdichevsky, "Hamusar haleumi," ibid., 106. See also Menahem Mendel Feitellesohn, "Batalah ve'avodah," Hazeman, vol. 1 (Jan.-March 1905), 404-414. 20. Berdichevsky, "Tarbut umusar," "Hirhurim," and "Hamusar haleumi," in Maamarim, 37_38, 44-48, 106-107. 21. Berdichevsky, "Mahshavot," ibid., 22. 22. Berdichevsky, "Ziknah uvaharut," ibid., 32-37. 23. Ahad Ha'am, "Derekh haruah," in 'Al parashat derakhim, 163. 24. Quoted by Avner Holtzman, Hakarat panim: masot 'al Mikhah YosefBerdichevsky (Tel-Aviv: 1993), 163. See also Hillel Zeitlin, "'Arakhim vezikhronot," in Y.H. Brenner: mivhar divrei zikhronot, ed. M. Kushnir (Tel-Aviv: 1971), 24, 31-32. 25. Saul Tchernichovsky, "Before the Statue of Apollo" in L.V. Snowman, Tchernichovski and His Poetry (London: 1929), 41. 26. Berdichevsky, "'Al devar Theodore Herzl," in Maamarim, 76.

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27. On this subject, see Holtzman, Hakarat panim, 162-175. 28. See Yitzhak Tabenkin, "Mekoroteha hara'ayoniyim shel ha'aliyah hasheniyah" in his Neumim, vol. 1 (Tel-Aviv: 1972), 20-31; Berl Katznelson's articles, "Mibifnim," "Litnu'at hehaluz," "Likrat hayamim habaim" and "Mikhah Yosef Berdichevsky," all in his Ketavim, vol. 1 (Tel-Aviv: n.d.). See also Anita Shapira, Berl (Tel-Aviv: 1980), 117-126; and idem, Land and Power: The Zionist Resort to Force, 1881-1948 (New York: 1992), 17-29. 29. For an elaboration of this topic, see Anita Shapira, "The Fashioning of the 'New Jew' in the Yishuv Society," in Major Changes Within the Jewish People in the Wake of the Holocaust, ed. Yisrael Gutman (Jerusalem: 1996), 427-442. 30. Yitzhak Lamdan, Masada (Tel-Aviv: 1927). 31. See Anita Shapira, Land and Power, 351-376. 32. Berdichevsky, "Mitokh sheelot vehe'arot," in Maamarim, 378; and see another version of the same remark in ibid., 54.

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Hannah Arendt: The Public and the Private Hannah Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine. Ed. and with an interpretive essay by Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott and Judith Chelius Stark. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996. xx + 217 pp. Richard J. Bernstein, Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996. xv + 223 pp. Carol Brightman (ed.), Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, 1949-1975. London: Seeker and Warburg, 1995. xxxvi + 396 pp. Elzbieta Ettinger, Hannah Arendt/'Martin Heidegger. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995. x + 139 pp. In her life and work, Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) seemed to thrive on controversy: best known, perhaps, as the author of Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), a work that angered many by its strong criticism of the way the Eichmann trial was conducted, by its charges that the Jewish councils had too willingly cooperated with the Nazis in facilitating the Final Solution, and by its suggestion that Adolph Eichmann embodied what Arendt named "the banality of evil." The Eichmann controversy was anticipated on a much smaller scale when, in 1959, she published "Reflections on Little Rock," a short piece opposing the compulsory integration of public schools in Little Rock, Arkansas, thereby outraging liberal opinion in the United States. More recently, there has been considerable public discussion of her close personal relationship with Martin Heidegger, including the way that she, on some accounts, minimized Heidegger's involvement with National Socialism. One difficulty about coming to grips with Arendt lies in the fact that her interests were so various. She first gained intellectual attention with The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), an extended historical meditation on what she claimed was the uniquely modern phenomenon of totalitarianism. But her highly contentious claims in the Eichmann book, along with the waning of Cold War fervor, led to the relative neglect of The Origins of Totalitarianism from the mid-1960s. Discussions of her work increasingly emphasized her importance as a political philosopher, one who developed powerfully relevant notions of "politics," "freedom" and "action" in The Human Condition (1958) and On Revolution (1963). Most recently attention has shifted once again: to her early life and to the sources of her thought in theology as well as philosophy. It is to the complex, often tortured relationship between her life and thought that most of this review will be addressed. 271

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Arendt herself would have been distressed at the amount of attention recently paid to her personal biography and to her intimate relationships with others, particularly with Martin Heidegger. Both her thought and her life were organized around a rigid separation of the public and political from the private and intimate sphere. She was convinced that one of the contributing factors to the emergence of totalitarianism had been the destruction of the public realm and the triumph of what she referred to as "the social," combined with a general retreat into the private sphere. Put another way, Arendt tended to regard political action as a way of confirming one's existence in "the world." As Elzbieta Ettinger's Hannah Arendt I Martin Heidegger makes clear, Arendt was deeply wounded by her abortive affair with the philosopher, she being a relatively sheltered, fatherless but brilliant eighteen-year-old student of philosophy and theology, while the thirty-five-year-old Heidegger was already considered a savior of German philosophy when the affair began in 1924. Given the general circumstances and Heidegger's unstable and unreliable personality, it is hard to see how the affair could have ended otherwise than in failure, as it finally did in 1928. Only the later ministrations of Heinrich Blucher, her second husband, brought Arendt out of her shell and helped heal the hurt caused by her involvement with Heidegger. It was no wonder, then, that Arendt zealously guarded her own privacy and tried to demarcate it from a more public role as an intellectual and thinker. Symptomatically, she rejected psychoanalysis as a "modern form of indiscretion"1 and as politically dangerous because it devalued public speech and actions as forms of what psychoanalysts call "acting out." In particular, she feared the politicization of the personal, the use of politics as a way of working out, or working through, individual and group identities. Analogously to T.S. Eliot on poetry, then, Arendt saw politics not as an expression of, but as an escape from, personality. Yet the Arendt who emerges in the correspondence with Mary McCarthy, collected by Carol Brightman as Between Friends, is far from the shy, vulnerable young woman and the still eager to please, though decidedly more wary, older woman Ettinger reconstructs from the Arendt-Heidegger relationship. Unfortunately, though Ettinger was apparently permitted to quote directly from Arendt's letters to Heidegger (and others), she was only allowed to paraphrase Heidegger's responses. As a result, the embarrassing excesses of romantic involvement are all on Arendt's side, while Heidegger always seems in control. The Ettinger text reenacts the imbalance in the Heidegger-Arendt relationship, which (in contrast to the rough equality between Arendt and McCarthy) was one in which the teacher-student, mentor-apprentice, older man-younger woman relationship was never entirely left behind, even after their reunion in 1950 and until their deaths in the mid-1970s. Understandably, comparisons of Heidegger with the Pied Piper of Hamelin or characterizations of Arendt as the "sorcerer's apprentice" or as Heidegger's "muse" come all too easily to mind. Indeed, the philosopher and one-time student of Heidegger, Karl Lowith, later recalled that Heidegger was known back in the 1920s as the "magician of Messkirch" and described him as "a dark little man who knew how to cast a spell" (Ettinger, p. 11). Whatever the exact case, Heidegger's capacity to seduce and to corrupt by the very power of his thought is manifestly evident. One of the surprising—and I think disappointing—aspects of Between Friends is

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the lack of extended discussion between the two women of either Heidegger or of the Eichmann case. There is a fascinating passage in a letter of September 20, 1963, in which Arendt offers an illuminating, if truncated, comparison between The Origins of Totalitarianism and Eichmann in Jerusalem and notes several areas where the two books are at odds. For instance: "Eichmann was much less influenced by ideology than I assumed in the book on totalitarianism" (Brightman, p. 147). McCarthy's comment on Arendt's collection of profiles, Men in Dark Times (1968), as a "series of fairy tales of the Northern forests" (p. 225) seems quirky at first, but soon reveals itself as a masterpiece of literary and cultural analysis. In general, McCarthy comes across as more vulnerable and constantly in need of advice about her personal life, while Arendt plays Ms. Worldly-Wise, the dispenser of sound common sense. Their gossip about friends and enemies is both catty and entertaining. (Arendt, for example, registers guilt at having turned away the bedraggled W.H. Auden from her door when he came to propose after the death of her husband.) Overall, the letters are a pleasure to read, though they are hardly the intellectual event that was the publication of Arendt's correspondence with philosopher Karl Jaspers. Of course, Arendt and McCarthy talked fairly often by phone between New York and Paris (where McCarthy lived most of the year) and visited each other periodically. Intimate and extended conversations were probably saved for those occasions. Whatever the nature of the friendship between Arendt and McCarthy, the relationship with Heidegger, which was extremely complex, distasteful and fascinating, commands most attention. Ettinger's basic claim is that Heidegger used Arendt as his way back to philosophical and moral respectability after the war, though this was combined with the "need to be her idol" (p. 3) and later, with the need for "her forgiveness" (p. 6). Most damning is Ettinger's claim that "Above all she [Arendt] did what she could to whitewash his Nazi past" (p. 78). Though the matter is more complex than this, it is undeniable that Arendt hardly went out of her way, after their reunion and despite her own awareness of Heidegger's tendency to lie, to apprise herself fully of the extent of Heidegger's involvement with the Nazis or to admit what her trusted mentor, Karl Jaspers, finally told her about the full extent of that involvement. How are we to explain Arendt's entanglement? Ettinger's various explanations ring plausibly, I suppose: "She [Arendt] needed him to need her" (p. 77) and "She exculpated him not as much out of loyalty, compassion, or a sense of justice as out of her own need to save her pride and dignity" (p. 79). This also suggests that Arendt was exacting a kind of revenge against Heidegger, one based on the usual strategy of the vulnerable—passive aggression. There must have also been something resembling a repetition compulsion at work, a return to a traumatic past relationship in order to work through and master it. To an extent, it may have even been successful on a personal level. Ettinger records Arendt's unwillingness after the first flush of their reunion between 1950 and 1952 to let Heidegger have everything on his own terms. There were long periods when Arendt's annual visits to Germany included no visit with the Heideggers nor any exchange of letters. Though she made a kind of peace with Heidegger's wife, she tended to attribute Heidegger's distasteful behavior to the influence of Elfride.

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Overall, it is difficult to begrudge Arendt's efforts to get Heidegger's work translated and published, though I suspect others would have spared her that task. Philosophers, psychoanalysts and poets, including Paul Celan and Jacques Lacan, all made the pilgrimage to the Schwarzwald or wrote about Heidegger with respect, even veneration, in the postwar years. Except for one claim—and it is a big "except"—Arendt's major public statement on Heidegger ("Martin Heidegger at Eighty") in 1971 was one of her most powerful pieces.2 There, she marvelously evoked Heidegger's "passionate thinking" with its ability to unsettle settled truths and fixed systems. Indeed, she offered a clearly pointed analysis of the incapacity of thinkers such as Heidegger (and Plato) to deal with politics, since as thinkers their "abode" was elsewhere than in the world and their genius lay in clearing new "pathways" of thought rather than in understanding and judging public affairs, including politics. Along the way, Arendt also revealingly evoked the story of the young peasant girl who laughed at the philosopher Thales' inability to remain in touch with reality. Finally, in this piece, Arendt discussed Heidegger's "error," a term she placed in quotation marks to signal her awareness of the inadequacy of that term and the fact that she was using it as a form of deliberate understatement.3 According to Arendt, Heidegger, like others, had never read Mein Kampf and had thus avoided the most elementary confrontation with the essence of Nazism. But the unreality of his thought had been even more apparent in the way Heidegger and others had "escapfed] from the reality of the Gestapo cellars and torture-hells of the early concentration camps into ostensibly more significant regions" (p. 53). Never convinced that ideas or philosophical systems had been primarily responsible for National Socialism, Arendt also took a polemical swipe at those unnamed analysts (Karl Popper? Theodor Adorno?) who saw National Socialism as essentially a problem in the history of ideas.4 Up to this point, it would be unjust to say that Arendt was "whitewashing" Heidegger's past; far from it. But Arendt had ominously prefaced this polemical paragraph (all the discussion of the "error" was in a long footnote) with the claim that Heidegger had corrected his " 'error' more quickly and more radically than many of those who later sat in judgment over him—he took considerably greater risks than were usual in German literary and university life during that period" (p. 54). This is the claim about Heidegger that is so distressing, above all because it is factually incorrect. It can only be seen as a species of willful ignorance, and of complicity in Heidegger's efforts to rewrite his own past—since, as mentioned, Jaspers had informed her of Heidegger's misdeeds during the Nazi period. Other writers and thinkers have said and done worse than Arendt did here, but it is quite bad enough, given her stature and her lifelong moral engagement with the very historical horror at issue in the Heidegger affair. Moral assessments aside, do any of these revelations concerning Arendt's relationship with Heidegger matter for our understanding of Arendt's (or Heidegger's) thought? This important question, raised by George Steiner, is difficult to answer.5 After reading Ettinger, it is tempting, for instance, to read Arendt's dissertation, now published as Love and St. Augustine and originally submitted in 1929, as a disguised effort to work through her personal and intellectual relationship with

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Heidegger. The editorial work and commentary are often helpful; and Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott's preface identifies the intellectual importance of the doctoral project: "Arendt's dissertation is her own respectful declaration of independence, which points the way to her later, explicitly political works" (p. vii). Yet the published text itself is a hermeneutic nightmare, because several versions of the dissertation have here been melded together and because it incorporates the substantial revisions that Arendt undertook in the 1960s before abandoning the project altogether. Thus, Love and St. Augustine is far from the original: what we have represents the mature Arendt's rewriting of her younger self some three decades later. Nevertheless, Arendt's engagement with the first and perhaps the greatest Christian philosopher-theologian is important. Most interesting is the way we can see Arendt beginning to free herself from the direct influence of Heidegger and of Jaspers, her Doktorvater. Where Heidegger stressed anxiety in the face of our (future) death and Jaspers emphasized life's "boundary conditions," Arendt used Augustine to develop her focus upon beginnings, what she later called "natality," the biological basis of escaping the predictable and habitual. As Scott and Stark observe, Arendt saw it as absolutely necessary to recover not Being (as Heidegger would have it) but "contingent political action" (p. 184). Not anxiety but memory itself became the central capacity in reclaiming those crucial instances from the past for the present. Nor did she reject community in Heideggerian fashion as das man (the "They"), but instead evoked "caritas" (rather than tradition or Gemeinschafi) as the informing principle of genuine community. This stood in contrast with "cupiditas," the "surrender to habituated behavior" (p. 191), which the editors link to the central claim Arendt made about Eichmann: his failure to "think what we are doing." But though, as mentioned, the hermeneutic issues are formidable, the publication of Love and St. Augustine is still to be welcomed. Aside from this possible answer to the question of relevance raised by Steiner, I would tentatively suggest two others. First, one of the puzzles about The Origins of Totalitarianism has always been the relative lack of importance that Arendt attributed to the totalitarian leader, to those such as Hitler and Stalin. Her own stated reasons are convincing as far as they go, at least in her own terms. She refused to see totalitarianism as just an extreme form of tyrannical, one-man rule with Hitler or Stalin as a sort of hypertyrant. Nor was she a believer in the "great man" theory of history; rather, she emphasized the importance of the movement and particularly of ideology in the triumph and flourishing of National Socialism and Stalinism. Hitler was so powerful, contended Arendt in one of the pieces in a valuable collection of her previously unpublished writing, Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954 (1994), not because of his much touted charisma but because he always had an opinion in a situation where people were confused, and because "Hitler's greatest gift . . . was one of pure logic."6 My own hunch is that Arendt the public thinker may have downplayed the charismatic power and sheer fascination of Hitler the totalitarian leader because Arendt the private woman needed to deny Heidegger's one-time power over her. Lowith's characterization of Heidegger as "a dark little man who knew how to cast a spell" comes to mind here. Still, none of this is straightforward. Where Eichmann was a cipher, a onedimensional man characterized by "complete 'thoughtlessness,'"7 Heidegger was,

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Arendt suggested in a letter to Jaspers in 1949, without "character in the sense that he literally lacks one, not even an especially bad one. With all that, he lives at a depth and with a passion that is not easily forgotten."8 This private characterization foreshadows the less negative but still hardly complimentary words about Heidegger in "Martin Heidegger at Eighty," where Arendt asserts that passionate thinking, which she clearly identified as Heidegger's most salient trait, "seizes the person . . . annihilates his 'character' which cannot hold its own against this onslaught" (p. 52). The differences are obvious, but the similarities or at least intimated connections among the three figures of Eichmann, Hitler and Heidegger are intriguing. The other area of Arendt's thought upon which the intimate relationship between Arendt and Heidegger sheds light is the responsibility of the Western tradition for the Holocaust. For instance, Ernest Gellner and Richard Wolin have contended that Arendt exonerated the Western tradition from prime responsibility for the Holocaust so as to exculpate Heidegger as the prime modern heir of that tradition.9 In addition, Wolin charges that, considering "their common mistrust of the political capacities of ordinary men and women, the political thought of both [Heidegger and Arendt] was profoundly undemocratic."10 Though Arendt's attitude toward the Western tradition was enormously complex and did attribute the causes of Nazi totalitarianism to "subterranean" forces and to "the gutter" rather than to philosophical systems or ideas, charges of the kind leveled by Wolin and Gellner give reductionism a bad name. Moreover, Arendt clearly acknowledged the inadequacies of the Western tradition in the face of the totalitarian challenge, particularly its failure to recognize or understand the veil drawn over totalitarianism and its failure to value the world and action in the world highly enough. Specifically in The Origins of Totalitarianism, as Richard Bernstein emphasizes in Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question, she stressed the deep inadequacy of the Enlightenment notion of natural rights to provide any guarantee for minorities and stateless peoples. Indeed, it was precisely Heidegger's inability to take the world seriously enough that Arendt identified as the source of his incapacity to comprehend what Nazism was about. No doubt Arendt underestimated the central place that the idea of one-man rule or the negative essentializing of certain groups (for example, Aristotle on the natural slavishness of some people) had assumed in Western thought. But she was right, I think, to stress the unprecedented nature of Nazi totalitarianism insofar as neither the classical tradition nor the modern Enlightenment tradition—nor Heidegger for that matter— had envisaged an ideologically driven implementation of genocide nor considered what the "transvaluation of values" might lead to when brought into the political realm. Moreover, to group Arendt with Heidegger as "undemocratic" is far too simple. Bernstein rightly identifies a "radical populist strain in her thinking" (p. 61) and the fact is that Arendt became more, rather than less, democratic the older she became and the longer she lived in America.'' Another crucial theme in recent Arendt studies concerns her links to Jewish tradition. For an understanding of this issue, Bernstein's Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question is essential. It is particularly welcome for two reasons: first, it should put the Eichmann book into a larger and more illuminating context by focusing on Arendt's intellectual roots in a certain sort of Jewish thought and experience; and, second, it scotches the idea that, suffering as she did from "polis

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envy" and from the oft-mentioned "tyranny of Greece over Germany," the Greek experience was the sole source of her own political inspiration. It is the purpose—and the achievement—of Bernstein's study to lay these distorted views of Arendt's thought and loyalties to rest. As his central thesis has it: "Virtually all the elements of her [Arendt's] understanding of action, freedom, public spaces and politics" in her central political texts "are implicit [in] and emerge from her study of Nazi totalitarianism" (p. 11). For instance, Arendt's critique of the Enlightenment emphasis on natural rights arose not from an opposition to the idea of rights as such but because that idea (so she believed) asked the Jews to give up their identity as Jews. Indeed, her powerful idea that we all have "the right to have rights" shows, according to Bernstein, that it was her historical experience as a Jew, not the Greek polis, that led to her seminal concern with action and politics and to an insistence on equality as a political rather than a natural or social fact. To paraphrase Auden on Yeats, after "mad Germany hurt Arendt into politics," she praised the Zionists in the 1930s as the only group who had a strong sense of the Jews as a political group and who saw that "the project of social assimilation" was "a complete disaster" (p. 103). Yet Arendt objected to the view that she identified with Zionism, according to which antisemitism was inevitable and ineradicable; she supported a Jewish homeland rather than a Jewish state in Palestine. The polity there, she wrote in the heated atmosphere of 1948, should be binational and based on a federated structure of councils involving Arab and Jewish participation, since a conventional nation-state, implying a homogeneous population, as Bernstein notes, "meant that minority populations were always problematic" (p. 109). Thus, for Arendt, the right to have rights did not imply the necessity of a Jewish state but rather a state where Jews would be at home and have their rights protected. Bernstein also sees a deep ambiguity at the heart of Arendt's life and thought arising from the fact that she never really clarified the relationship between "Judaism" as a set of religious traditions and institutions and "Jewishness" as the term referring to the shared psychology of modern Jews. Neither religiously trained nor inclined herself, Arendt in a sense became a Jew, mainly by defending herself as such when she was attacked as one. Though this bore a certain resemblance to Sartre's notion of the Jew as the pure creation of the antisemite, she rejected this view as inadequate. But aside from seeing her Jewishness as a political and social affirmation of Jewish identity, it is hard, contends Bernstein, to see what was her basis "for claiming that Jews are a distinctive people or nation who ought to be acknowledged and recognized. What is the basis for claiming rights as Jews (and not solely as individual citizens)?" (p. 28). Arendt's preference was to see the Jew as a "pariah," her positively charged term for the marginal position occupied by what Isaac Deutscher called the "non-Jewish Jew." This she contrasted with the parvenu who lusted for assimilation into Gentile society. But to Bernstein, Arendt's pariah position is less an answer than an evasion, since there is nothing inherently Jewish about occupying a marginal position vis-a-vis the dominant society. One must admire Bernstein for raising and clarifying those issues that inevitably arise from considering the ways in which Arendt's life and thought intersected. At the same time, his claim that all of Arendt's political thought is present in a strong sense in The Origins of Totalitarianism might be challenged. The idea of "the right

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to have rights," the right to be a citizen of a political body, is there strongly asserted as a kind of political ontology, but her later, less defensive emphasis upon the centrality of political speech and action as embodiments of political freedom is hard to find in her first book. One of Arendt's great achievements was the way her political thought emerged over the course of the 1950s, not as a theoretical justification for suspicion of political action—a common reaction of much political thought in the postwar world—but as the occasion for reviving and rethinking participatory politics for the first time in quite a while. Bernstein's fascinating exposition of the differences and similarities between, on the one hand, the idea (in The Origins) of radical evil, which seeks to render human beings "superfluous," and, on the other hand, the banality of evil (in Eichmann), which refuses to "think what it is doing," is also somewhat problematic. Rendering masses of people superfluous, eradicating their recognizable humanity, is an effect—while Eichmann's "thoughtlessness," his lack of moral imagination, is a form of consciousness, a way of being in the world. This is a difference that, it seems to me, makes a lot of difference; in fact, it mirrors the point of Arendt's discussion of Eichmann: how monstrous evil could be organized by a man who seemed decidedly ordinary. Still, Bernstein does seem to be essentially correct in claiming that if secular Jews lack religious belief or commitment and if we refuse, as we certainly should, to attribute essential, inherited racial characteristics to Jews, then it is difficult to see upon what basis Jewish difference can be asserted in the long run. Considering the central place she made for plurality, Arendt's thought provides a powerful justification for continuing to think and talk about the sources and enduring possibilities of difference. But thinking through the concrete matter of Jewish difference will have to find guidance elsewhere than in her thought. RICHARD H. KING University of Nottingham

Notes 1. Hannah Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewish Woman, rev. ed. (New York: 1974), xviii. 2. Hannah Arendt, "Martin Heidegger at Eighty," New York Review of Books 17, no. 6 (21 Oct. 1971), 50-54. 3. When "Martin Heidegger at Eighty" appeared in 1971, I wrote Arendt a letter not of outrage but puzzlement at what seemed to be her exoneration of Heidegger. Her essay "Thinking and Moral Considerations" had also just appeared in Social Research 38, no. 3 (Autumn 1971), 417-446. Arendt responded quite courteously with a short letter of 22 November 1971, in which she said: "As far as Heidegger is concerned, I put the word 'error' into quotation marks by which I wanted to indicate that I think this was more than an error— although one could interpret error in Heidegger's sense, in which it means more than in our usual use." 4. Arendt loathed Adorno and suspected that he and the Frankfurter group were behind the accusations floating around in the mid-1960s about Heidegger's alleged antisemitism. One reason for Arendt's distaste for Adorno was the latter's dropping of his father's (Jewish) surname "Wiesengrund" in the mid-1930s and, more seriously, Adorno's moderately favorable review of a piece of choral music dedicated to the Nazi Baldur von Schirach in 1934.

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5. George Steiner, "The New Nouvelle Heloise?" Times Literary Supplement (13 Oct. 1955), 3-4. 6. Hannah Arendt, "At Table with Hitler," in Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954 (New York: 1994), 294. 7. Arendt used this phrase in reference to Heidegger in the letter to me mentioned above and referred also to her "Thinking and Moral Considerations" piece. 8. Hannah Arendt, Hannah Arendt-Karl Jaspers Briefwechsel, 1926-69, ed. Lotte Kohler and Hans Saner (Munich: 1985), 178. The term Arendt used for lack of character is "Charakterlosigkeit." 9. Richard Wolin, "Hannah and the Magician," The New Republic (Oct. 1995), 27-37; and Ernest Gellner, "From Konigsberg to Manhattan (or Hannah, Rahel, Martin and Elfride or Thy Neighbor's Gemeinschaft)" in his Culture, Identity, and Politics (Cambridge: 1987), 75-90. 10. Wolin, "Hannah and the Magician," 36. 11. One example may suffice to cast doubt on Wolin's claim. Arendt's explicit claim in "Thinking and Moral Considerations" is that thinking, which she tentatively links with the operations of conscience and which she opposes to knowing, is within the capacities of any and everyone.

Israeli Foreign Policy:Documenting the Past, 1947-1953

Gedalia Yogev (ed.), Political and Diplomatic Documents, December 1947-May 1948. Jerusalem: Israel State Archives, 1979. xl + 888 pp.; Companion, Hi + 227 pp. Yehoshua Freundlich (gen. ed.), Documents on the Foreign Policy of Israel: Vol. 1, 75 May-30 September 1948, ed. Yehoshua Freundlich. Jerusalem: Israel State Archives, 1981. xlviii + 711 pp.; Companion, Ixix + 214 pp. Vol. 2, October 1948-April 1949, ed. Yehoshua Freundlich. Jerusalem: Israel State Archives, 1984. xlvi + 680 pp.; Companion, lxvi + 251 pp. Vol. 3, Armistice Negotiations: December 1948-July 1949, ed. Yemima Rosenthal. Jerusalem: Israel State Archives, 1983. liv + 758 pp.; Companion, Ixxv + 229 pp. Vol. 4, May-December 1949, ed. Yemima Rosenthal. Jerusalem: Israel State Archives, 1986. Ixiii + 835 pp.; Companion, Ixxiii + 367 pp. Vol. 5, 7950, ed. Yehoshua Freundlich. Jerusalem: Israel State Archives, 1988. li + 786 pp.; Companion, Iviii + 324 pp. Vol. 6, 7957, ed. Yemima Rosenthal. Jerusalem: Israel State Archives, 1991. Iviii + 916 pp.; Companion, Ixxxvi + 427 pp. Vol. 7, 7952, ed. Yehoshua Freundlich. Jerusalem: Israel State Archives, 1992. liii + 774 pp.; Companion, Ixxi + 384 pp. Vol. 8, 7953, ed. Yemima Rosenthal. Jerusalem: Israel State Archives, 1995. Ixvi + 1076 pp.; Companion, Ixxxiii + 578 pp. In 1976, Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs began publishing a series titled Israel's Foreign Relations: Selected Documents, edited by Meron Medzini. Clearly planned for general appeal, it was not burdened with careful notation of the archival files from which the originals were drawn and where related evidence might be found. The documents and papers themselves, though treating external affairs, came from the files not of the Foreign Ministry alone but of all other concerned government agencies, not least the Prime Minister's Office and the State Council (which functioned as the legislature of the provisional government from May 1948 through January 1949), and later from those appearing in the records of the Knesset (Divrei hakeneset). A chronology of the period under review enhanced its value for the user, as did an accompanying bibliography. The theme of the selected papers, however, was sharply focused on the unsettled and unsettling Arab-Israeli dispute. 280

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The publication seems to have been inspired by American Foreign Policy: Current Documents, which had started appearing in 1956 as an annual prepared by the Historical Division of the State Department. The latter publication offers "the principal messages, addresses, statements, reports, diplomatic notes, and treaties . . . which indicate the scope, goals, and implementation of the foreign policy of the United States." Unlike either of the preceding publications, the chronological series under review, titled Documents on the Foreign Policy of Israel (DFPI), concentrates on the planning, framing and execution of Israel's foreign policy. Prepared by the Israel State Archives (ISA), an arm of the Prime Minister's Office in Jerusalem, the DFPI is designed primarily for use in the practice and study of diplomacy in its widest sense: as a profession or for its legal or political application, or for academic research and training. The overall six years and one month comprised in the present review offer a basis for judging its likely long-term quality, direction and promise. The first obvious conclusion is the apparent intention of its editors to establish the DFPI as an annual annotated assemblage of selected declassified documents. Among the most likely steady users will be the foreign ministries of concerned governments, above all regional neighbors, not least those in Israel's immediate vicinity. Otherwise such reference works tend to attract mostly diplomats, international lawyers, scholars and doctoral candidates specializing in Middle East regional and global politics, and an occasional inquisitive journalist. Nor can DFPI fail to entice an ample flow of combative enthusiasts, whether champions of Israel or of the PLO and its factions; or simply connoisseurs of the on-again-off-again peace process that has stretched across most of the twentieth century under variable patronage. Such addicts rarely, if ever, miss a chance in the quest for fresh testimony to confirm their fixed prejudices. The series, it should be noted, opens with a preliminary review of the last five and a half months in the life of the British Mandate, titled Political and Diplomatic Documents: December 1947-May 1948. The main volume and its companion—the relationship between the two is explained below—were assembled by the Israel State Archives jointly with the Central Zionist Archives, also in Jerusalem and still the depository for such records. It covers the transition from the final phase of Jewish autonomy under the Mandate to the provisional government that proclaimed Israel's independence. Despite the vagaries of British mandatory rule—and, on balance, its repressive style after Parliament's approval of the White Paper of 1939—Jewish leaders in the Yishuv had made solid progress in cultivating a sense of national identity among immigrants from across the globe while at the same time fashioning institutions of self-rule. The abrupt transition to sovereignty, on the adoption of the UN General Assembly partition plan, proved institutionally (though not politically) far less traumatic than for any other liberation movement in the post-1945 era. Consequently, the editors decided to launch the series on the evolving diplomacy of the new state with documents drawn from the nerve-wracking six months leading up to the declaration of statehood in May 1948—a period consumed by the simultaneous challenge of waging a civil war and preparing for the exercise of sovereignty.

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In close harmony with the UN Palestine Commission, as laid down in General Assembly resolution 181(11) of November 29, 1947, the Jewish leaders in Palestine framed a detailed blueprint for selectively expanding the role of both the autonomous Jewish Agency, which had integrated, worldwide, Zionist and non-Zionist support for the Jewish National Home, and the Va'ad Leumi, which had served as the executive for domestic affairs in the self-ruling national home, into a provisional (yet sovereign) government that in turn could give way to an elected successor. As the tense weeks passed, those planning for the projected state also became engulfed in organizing the Yishuv for a self-defensive civil war, ignited by Palestinian Arab guerrillas and reinforced by volunteers under Arab League sponsorship crossing over from Syria. The opening tome and its accompanying volume carry their own title, since they do not treat the affairs of a sovereign state. Instead, they address the transition from Jewish autonomy in an expired Mandate awaiting some agreed global decision on its future status. The Mandate had been created in 1920-1923 and overseen until 1939 by the Council of the League of Nations. On the outbreak of the Second World War the League went comatose, never to revive, and formally passed out of existence in 1946. Once the mandatory power departed two years later and the state of Israel proclaimed independence under UN auspices, it became at birth a second sovereign successor of the Mandate, two years after Transjordan (renamed Jordan in 1949). Between 1979, the publication date of the earliest records, and 1995, that of the latest, the Israel State Archives had completed six years and one month of documentation (from December 1, 1947, through December 31, 1953), yet filled eighteen bound books. The seeming numerical discrepancy requires clarification. Each main volume is accompanied by a companion offering in English for users lacking fluency in Hebrew: a translation of the editor's informative, analytical introduction; a full list of the Hebrew entries; summaries of its primary Hebrew instruments with notes to related documents; and a detailed sections index that, starting with Volume 8, is divided into two separate sections—one for persons and the other for topics and places. Altogether, the first four pairs of volumes charting action by a sovereign Israel embrace only nineteen and a half months (from mid-May 1948 through December 1949). The third link in this series is a paired volume that details exclusively the negotiation of the armistice agreements (December 1948-July 1949) and thus overlaps in time with Volume 2 (October 1948-April 1949) and Volume 4 (May-December 1949). Understandably, the Israeli government assigned the task of constructing an armistice regime to the Defense Ministry as well as to the Foreign Ministry. The decision to separate these records from the regular flow of diplomatic traffic was reinforced by the fact that it was the only set of Israel's exchanges with each of its four adjacent Arab neighbors to culminate in the creation of regulatory bodies. Every Mixed Armistice Commission (MAC) was staffed jointly by Arab and Israeli soldiers, two apiece, drawn from the armed forces of the signatories. They served under the chairmanship of the Chief of Staff of the voluntary UN Truce Supervision Organization, or under one of the organization's senior officers, to assure observance of the armistice and settlement of recurrent disputes. The four agreements that together constituted the armistice regime were framed

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as instruments of the signatories, not of the UN, and thus placed on them the primary burden of enforcement. (The texts may be found in English with Hebrew translations as annexes in Main Volume 3.) Still, in formally taking notice of the instruments, the Security Council expressly reaffirmed its cease-fire order under Article 40 of the UN Charter and kept the Palestine question on its agenda. This explained the mounting frequency in the years 1950 to 1953 of referral to the Security Council of disputed issues that the Mixed Armistice Commissions had failed to settle in the field. The series' planners and editors have clearly been inspired by Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS), which the State Department introduced at the start of Abraham Lincoln's administration (1861-1865). Preparation of the series is the responsibility of the Office of the Historian. It remained an annual publication with special multivolume sets such as records of the Paris Peace Conference (1919) after the First World War; and the summit (and other major) multilateral conferences during and after the Second World War. In 1984 FRUS was transformed into a triennial, starting with the years 1952-1954. Israel's archival custodians were also guided by the thirty-year declassification rule that Britain adopted in 1968. Before then, the Public Record Office (PRO) in London, the custodian of Britain's official papers dating back to the eleventh century, had enforced a fifty-year rule for free access to all preserved files, those of the intelligence agencies excepted; the latter were not opened to the public, if at all, in less than seventy-five or a hundred years, with a handful banned for even longer. Nor does the PRO regularly publish its accessible documents. Exceptional was its issue, after each of this century's world wars, of a multivolume collection of pertinent major documents assembled by eminent diplomatic historians and published by His/Her Majesty's Printing Office. Yet note this: at the PRO, the declassified cabinet minutes (a genre of records initiated in December 1916 by the government of David Lloyd George) and the associated cabinet papers sit on open shelves in a reference room for users to consult at pleasure. In contrast, the Israeli Cabinet has expressly disallowed access—even for researchers at the State Archives—to the bulk files of cabinet papers; to those of sensitive ministries other than Foreign Affairs; and to the classified papers of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee of the Knesset. Given the continuing formal state of war with the Arab governments or of guerrilla war with Palestinians residing across the armistice lines, the Ministry of Defense, which has a major input into foreign policy-making, could hardly have been expected freely to share even past secrets with Israel's self-proclaimed enemies. A general exception was the selective release of those papers deemed necessary for recording the negotiation of the armistice and for monitoring its later execution by the Mixed Armistice Commissions. (The MACs were dissolved after the June 1967 war, on Israel's unilateral denunciation of the armistice regime.) The external concerns of the "average" small state, it is commonly assumed, rarely wander beyond its immediate neighborhood. Israel did not fully fit the pattern. On the one hand, it is true, the new state had no choice but to look inward. The Ben-Gurion cabinets, which spanned the period under review (except for the last five weeks of 1953, when Ben-Gurion voluntarily resigned his cabinet posts as

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prime minister and defense minister, but retained his seat in the Knesset), gave highest priority to "ingathering the exiles" under the Law of Return and to their speedy integration; to modernizing the economy and the society with a fitting infrastructure (in 1949-1950 the U.S. authorized Israel to borrow from the ExportImport Bank up to $135 million, of which it had drawn all but $25 million by June 1952); and, not least, to reshaping the Israel Defense Forces into a well-equipped and well-trained modern citizen army. While ever mindful of the need for caution in sharing state secrets on all aspects of national security, the editors could hardly keep the outlines of Ben-Gurion's overall strategy concealed. Given the implacable hostility of its immediate neighbors even under the armistice and their refusal to conclude formal peace on mutually acceptable terms, Israel had to contend with mounting border violence. The pattern of Arab raid and Israeli retaliation, most serious on Jordan's ragged West Bank demarcation line, threatened to get out of hand by the fall of 1953. To this extent, as attested by the series under review, Israel's external concerns were indeed either local or regional. However, among small states that had won independence after the Second World War, Israel was clearly unique among its regional neighbors—at least until the energy crisis of the 1970s catapulted OPEC members into the role of global actors—in the ramified, wide-ranging presence and interests it had inherited from an autonomous Yishuv. At birth Israel was already interacting with the industrial West (chiefly the U.S., Britain, the British Commonwealth, and democratic Western Europe), the U.S.S.R. and its East European allies, much of Latin America, and even, if also cautiously and indirectly, those Arab and Islamic countries with Jewish communities. Israel's uniquely long diplomatic reach, in the formative years under review, could be credited largely to the Jewish communities of the diaspora on which it continued leaning for immigration, financial aid and the search for diplomatic support. For researchers on these themes, the DFPI offers a combination of basic evidence mixed with anguishing omissions. Throughout the period under review, Israel was still living, if confidently, nonetheless precariously. The armistice, it is true, suspended the formal war at the governmental level, but not the political violence, which was mounted (often with the silent collusion of the host governments) by guerrillas dedicated to a variety of factions with political and religious ideologies that called for the destruction of Israel. Other marauders, notably from Jordan's West Bank, were fellahin protesting the allocation of their abandoned properties to immigrant settlers, a process that could hardly be concealed from the peasants on the other side who had worked the same land. All along the line, in order to reinforce Israel's claims in the eventual peace negotiations and to prepare for a possible breakdown in the armistice, Israel was already giving high priority to populating its side of the armistice frontier with dedicated citizens—among them a growing portion of newcomers—whose loyalty could not be questioned. By 1952, Israel, in effect, had already opted to live with the ever-challenging condition of no war and no peace, with its dangerous pattern of raid and counterraid. Pragmatic purposiveness shines through the record of the first fourteen months of sovereignty. The first to recognize Israel, if only conditionally, was the United

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States, which did so within minutes of the final lowering of the Union Jack. In less than forty-eight hours, the Soviet Union followed with full recognition. Thereafter the Foreign Ministry tenaciously pursued international recognition, mainly in the British Commonwealth and across Europe and Latin America. In these countries, it used the offices inherited from the Jewish Agency, which blossomed into consular and diplomatic missions once the host government recognized the new state. The Foreign Ministry mounted a simultaneous campaign for changing each de facto acknowledgment of Israel into a de jure one. The foreign minister, with the representative and staff of Israel at the United Nations, simultaneously coordinated yet another campaign—one for Israel's admission to membership. Israel became the 59th member, by a vote in the UN General Assembly of 37 to 12 with 9 abstentions, on May 11, 1949, just a year after the expiry of the Mandate (indeed, with four days to spare), even while the armistice system was still in the making and awaiting the conclusion of the agreement with Syria, signed two months later. Israel's persistent diplomacy in search of recognition (as closely recorded in twin volumes 2 and 4) revealed its sophisticated communications network linking the ministry with missions in widely strewn capitals as well as at Lake Success, then the temporary seat of the United Nations. Israel's skillful diplomacy was perhaps best tested as it confronted vigorous pressure from Washington openly to join the Western camp in the first global invocation of the Truman Doctrine on the outbreak of the Korean War in the early summer of 1950. Until then, Israel was pursuing its strategy of neutrality in the Cold War, so as to assure the maximum retrieval of Holocaust survivors in Eastern Europe. At the time, Israel even managed to keep its foot in the closing door of emigration from the U.S.S.R. And even after June 1950, in the period under review, Israel kept clinging to its own doctrine of "non-identification in the Cold War" in whatever attenuated form the superpowers tolerated. Along similar lines of diplomatic versatility, consider Israel's aggressive pursuit of informal diplomacy, skipping no opening to chat with fellow diplomats in Arab and Islamic delegations in order to convey messages and swap information. Such constructive informality was productively used by the armistice-seeking teams in the negotiations mediated by Ralph Bunche in 1949. Later it was also used by the Mixed Armistice Commissions to cut through impasses in recurrent conflict. Note, for example, General Moshe Dayan's suggesting to Lt.-Col. Ghasan Jadid (Syria) that they resume interrupted talks to settle a dispute in January 1953 by convening with or without the UNTSO chairman. However, such records were often related only marginally to ongoing formal talks and are thus passed over by researchers, precisely because they did not ripen into signed accords. The practice, however, is at least as old as modern diplomacy, reaching back to the Italian city-states of the fifteenth century. In the mid-twentieth century, the annual meetings of the UN General Assembly have accustomed all delegations to the idea of quiet and informal exchanges among themselves—particularly between those of Israel and the Arab states—to curtail an unneeded rise in tension. Israel's diplomats from the outset did not have to wait for the General Assembly to convene. In the early years of independence, they were constantly striving to widen their country's legitimacy in the global community. In November 1949, for

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instance, Mordecai Namir, Israel's ambassador in Moscow, sounded his Afghan colleague on the prospects of Afghanistan's following Turkey's example of recognizing Israel, since his country was "remote from the Israeli-Arab conflict." The response, though negative, was not unfriendly: "His government had nothing against Israel, b u t . . . fanatical public opinion, with all its religious solidarity with the Arabs, was not yet favorable." This raises an intriguing question: did the governments represented by such practitioners of informal diplomacy—whose data was often lost in intelligence files—also keep records on their side? If so, future scholars may be able to infuse a more generous measure of reality and persuasion into the analysis of informal discourse on the hostile track. In the early volumes of the series, the editors slavishly avoided the inclusion of documents other than those of the Foreign Ministry. But the Foreign Ministry itself, in the years under review, also had to turn for input to the prime minister, the cabinet, the Knesset Committee on Foreign Affairs and Defense, or to all three, before adopting a new, or overhauling an existing, diplomatic strategy. In the earlier volumes such classified documents were rare or mentioned only sparingly. By the twin set of 1953, the citations from such classified series receive much more generous attention and reinforce the usefulness of the series in reconstructing the foreign policy-making process. One final thought on the value of the series as a whole for its user. The main volumes, by their very nature, are far more detailed, even when the document is not reproduced in full in the Hebrew original, than are the summaries in the companion. For those who use only English or only Hebrew in research, there is no choice and therefore no problem. Both are invaluable to the users. For those who conduct research in both languages, the process may become cumbersome, as they ponder the likely reasons for the omissions in the condensing process. Cumbersome or not, the series, the first from a government in the Middle East, measurably enriches the overall body of available governmental evidence on the interplay of global, regional and domestic politics in the Middle East since the Second World War. J.C. HUREWITZ Columbia University

Book Reviews

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Antisemitism, Holocaust and Genocide

Michel Abitbol, MiCremieux lePetain: antishemiyut bealgeriyah hakoloniyalit (1870-1940) (From Cremieux to Petain: Antisemitism in Colonial Algeria [1870-1940]). Jerusalem: The Zalman Shazar Center for Jewish History and the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism, 1993. 209 pp. This book, which is based upon both published and archival sources, provides a valuable survey of one of the most virulent, widespread and long-lasting regional brands of antisemitism outside Europe. What makes the history of this particular antisemitism so important—as Michel Abitbol rightly points out—is that it was not a mere carbon copy of contemporary French or European Jew-hatred, but was rather the product of a unique social and political colonial climate that would continue all the way down to the collapse of French rule and the departure of both the piedsnoirs and the Jews in the 1960s. However, as the subtitle indicates, this book only takes the story down to the fall of France and the establishment of the Vichy regime, when for nearly two years the aspirations of Algerian antisemites were more than fulfilled. The book opens with a good, brief review of the transformation of Algerian Jewry during the forty-year period between the French invasion and the promulgation of the Cremieux Decree, which by fiat of the provisional government of 1870 granted citizenship to the Jews of the colony. Of all the Jews in the Islamic world, including the territories that came under direct European hegemony in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, those of Algeria offer the closest parallel to the European model of Jewish modernization—a fact not really emphasized here. The lion's share of the book is devoted to the turbulent years of the late nineteenth century. In the first two chapters, Abitbol outlines the various social, political and economic factors that contributed to the rise of antisemitic paranoia among the European settler population, which was composed not merely of transplanted Frenchmen, but of Spaniards, Italians and Maltese, all of whom brought with them their own traditional versions of antisemitism. He skillfully distinguishes the complex tensions that developed between the settlers and the native Muslims, between the settlers and the French military and administrative authorities, and between the genuine Gallic French and the neo-French settlers. During the 1870s and 1880s, Algerian antisemitism underwent various metamorphoses. Its earliest foundation was in the settlers' objection to the breach of classical colonialist hierarchy, in which the native Jews were suddenly transformed into the civil equals of the colonists. In the eyes of the pieds-noirs, Jews, after all, were only "Arabs of the Mosaic faith." 289

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Although only a small minority, the ability of the Jews to provide a swing vote in some municipal elections made them appear all the more threatening. Thus, there developed a number of antisemitic articles of faith among the French settlers: namely, that the Jews formed a disciplined voting bloc, that they followed the dictates of their consistorial leaders, and that they voted only on the basis of their own selfish and often corrupt interests. The most significant stage in the development of Algerian antisemitism came in the mid-1880s when it was espoused by the radical branch of the Republican party, which was considered a "progressive movement." These two chapters are marked by a wealth of statistical data in tabular form highlighting the demographic, social and economic realities of the period, which were in marked contrast to the myths of the time. During the first two decades of its development, Algerian antisemitism remained—as Abitbol is careful to point out—a minority movement, even in such bastions of Jew-hatred as Oran. It was in the 1890s that it was transformed into a mass movement that displayed violent tendencies and for a while achieved some notable political successes. In addition to its own particularistic notions, the ideology of late nineteenth-century Algerian Judeophobia was nourished by the new racialist antisemitism of Europe, whose principal propagator in France was the notorious Edouard Drumont, author of the libelous La France Juive (1886) and editor of the scurrilous newspaper La Libre Parole, which played an important role in fanning the flames of hatred in metropolitan France during the Dreyfus affair. Dozens of Algerian antisemitic newspapers and magazines with such blatant names as L'Antijuif, Le Nouvel Antijuif, and Le Reveil Antijuif played their part in disseminating Judeophobia. The third chapter chronicles in considerable detail the mounting storm of antiJewish activism, which culminated in the riots that plagued the large and medium-sized urban centers in Algeria between 1897 and 1899. During this period, several mayors, municipal council members, and representatives to the French parliament were elected on specifically antisemitic platforms. In the following chapters, the author analyzes the antisemitic movement in the context of the colonial phenomenon and examines its form of organization. Abitbol discusses the major personalities in the Algerian antisemitic movement, such as Emile Morinaud, Firmin Faure, Charles Marchal, and the brothers Max and Louis Regis. The most attention is lavished on the personality and career of the flamboyant Max Regis, who was the darling of the antisemitic mobs that he incited to violent rampages; who edited no less than two antisemitic newspapers; who was elected mayor of Algiers; and who was described by one contemporary as "a combination of false messiah and pop singer." Regis' meteoric rise marked the zenith of the antisemitic movement. His equally spectacular fall likewise marked its decline and is traced in detail in chapter 6. Just how the Jews of Algeria reacted to the antisemitic onslaught of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century is the subject of chapter 7. Despite internal crises within the Jewish community at the time, caused by conflicts between the imported French rabbis and the native Jewish leaders, on the one hand, and between conservative and modernizing elements within Algerian Jewry, on the other, the

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Jews were able to muster a considerable measure of solidarity against their external foes. Abitbol reveals that during the height of the crisis, French Jews, who had always taken a patronizing attitude toward Algerian Jewry and who were themselves bearing the brunt of antisemitic agitation in the wake of the Dreyfus affair, actually libeled their Algerian coreligionists—employing some of the very antisemitic accusations that were currently being leveled against them. In trying to be more French than the French, they accused their Algerian brethren of being "more like Arabs than Frenchmen." The last three chapters of the book (which make up the shorter "Second Part") deal with the period between the two world wars. This period was marked at first by a notable decline in Jew-baiting in the colony. Abitbol points to a variety of factors, including an improvement in the economic and political situation. He also entertains the possibility that the outstanding record of Algerian Jews in the First World War served to reinforce this trend. But as he points out, this was only a brief interlude. Some newspapers began publishing anti-Jewish attacks once again in the early 1920s; and Abitbol describes the rapid upsurge of renewed antisemitism during the decade leading up to the Second World War. In addition to the international economic crisis and the rise of antisemitic fascism in Europe, there was now the "Palestine question," which began to have a place of mounting importance in the consciousness of nascent Muslim nationalists everywhere, including Algeria. Although he does touch on this latter factor, the author does not give it as much weight or consideration as, in my opinion, it deserves. He does, however, provide a very clear picture of the anxieties and the opposition that were stirred up among the pieds-noirs by the installation of Leon Blum's left-wing Popular Front government and by its policies for improving the civil status of the Muslim population. The single event that comes in for the most detailed discussion (all of chapter 9) is the bloody pogrom that took place in Constantine on August 3-5, 1934, and about which a good deal has already been written. Abitbol also traces the activities of a new generation of Jew-baiting agitators, most notably the defrocked priest Pere Gabriel Lambert. Veteran antisemites such as Morinaud reappear in these pages too. Compared with the richness of detail and sharpness of individual characterizations in the first part of the book, this section seems somewhat more cursory. The years of the Vichy regime, with their abrogation of the Cremieux Decree and the systematic abolition of all Jewish civil rights (a period about which Abitbol has previously written an important and meticulously detailed book),' are relegated here to a brief epilogue. As he wryly notes in the concluding sentence: "It is doubtful whether Regis or Morinaud ever dreamed that one day France would realize their ideas in so complete a fashion." This book is a welcome addition to the existing body of literature on Algerian antisemitism. Most of the significant works on the subject, such as those of Genevieve Dermenjian, Emmanuel Sivan (inexplicably absent from the bibliography), Carol lancu and Zosa Szajkowski (also ignored in the bibliography),2 have dealt exclusively with the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Abitbol writes with considerable narrative skill, and the reading is further enlivened by the

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numerous, well-chosen citations from newspapers and documents. It is to be hoped that sometime in the not too distant future there will be a French or English translation of the book so that it can reach the wider audience it deserves. NORMAN A. STILLMAN University of Oklahoma

Notes 1. See Michel Abitbol, Les Juifs d'Afrique du Nord sous Vichy (Paris: 1983); English trans. The Jews of North Africa During the Second World War (Detroit: 1989). See my review of both editions in Studies in Contemporary Jewry, Vol. 3, Jews and Other Ethnic Groups in a Multi-ethnic World, ed. Ezra Mendelsohn (New York: 1987), and Vol. 7, Jews andMessianism in the Modern Era: Metaphor and Meaning, ed. Jonathan Frankel (New York: 1991), 239-240 and 235-237, respectively. 2. See Genevieve Dermenjian, Juifs et Europeens d'Algerie: I'antisemitisme oranais, 1892-1905 (Jerusalem: 1983); Emmanuel Sivan, "Stereotypes antijuifs dans la mentalite pied-noir," in Les relations entre juifs et musulmans en afrique du nord, XIXe-XX" siecles (Paris: 1980), 160-172; Carol lancu, "Du nouveau sur les troubles antijuifs en Algerie a la fin du XlXeme siecle," in ibid. 173-187; and Zosa Szajkowski, "Socialists and Radicals in the Development of Antisemitism in Algeria (1884-1900)," Jewish Social Studies 10 (1948), 257-280.

Paul R. Bartrop (ed.), False Havens: The British Empire and the Holocaust (Studies in the Shoah, vol. 10). Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1995. xiv + 293 pp. Paul Bartrop wrote the preface to his edited work "False Havens: The British Empire and the Holocaust" in a belligerent, polemical mood. "It is not," he tells us, "a pretty story" (p. vii). He makes no attempt to hide his deep contempt for the policies pursued by the countries under discussion. His style is not always felicitous, and occasionally he stretches his analysis of the facts way beyond the limits of feasibility and good judgment. But, as the stories unfold, one has increasing sympathy for his sense of outrage. The title of the book is somewhat misleading. This is not a comprehensive survey of the policies of Britain and its vast empire. In fact, it concentrates solely on the self-governing dominions, those parts of the empire most independent of Britain— Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Newfoundland and the Irish Free State. Following the Statute of Westminster of 1931, these had effectively become arbiters of their own destiny. The degree of autonomy varied, but it could be absolute. Ireland maintained a neutral stance throughout the war, with a German embassy in Dublin. Shamefully, its Taoiseach (prime minister), Eamon de Valera, even made a much-publicized visit to the home of the German minister, Edouard Hempel, to express his condolences upon the death of Hitler in May 1945. In

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contrast, Australia and New Zealand maintained no representations abroad other than their High Commissions in London. The degree of loyalty to the old country seemed to depend on the requirement for the physical security offered by the British fleet. In Ireland's case, because of obvious British self-interest, this could be taken for granted. Despite this variety, several common themes emerge. Governments, politicians and bureaucrats rarely appreciated "the needed skills and cultural enrichment which would have come with a refugee influx" (p. 71). In some strands of society the attitude toward Jewish refugees was one of "hostility, prejudice and sheer indifference" (p. 104). The medical profession was a persistent offender in this regard, as was the Roman Catholic Church. In her well-argued contribution, Rachael Kohn supplies plenty of sordid evidence of Catholic antisemitism in New South Wales. She demonstrates how this was linked to a consuming hatred of Communism, the Spanish Civil War having played a large part in securing widespread Catholic support for fascist regimes. Dermot Keogh recounts a more traditional anti-Jewish conspiracy theory, revealing how S.A. Roche, secretary of the Irish Department of Justice, was of the opinion that Jews "do not assimilate with our own people but remain a sort of colony of a world-wide Jewish community. This makes them a potential irritant in the body politic" (p. 222). From Keogh's contribution it would seem that what actually antagonized Roche was the reluctance of the Jews to become Catholics. In Canada, the center of Jew-hatred was in francophone, Catholic Quebec— spearheaded, as Lois Foster shows, by the newspaper editor Adrien Arcand and the publisher Joseph Menard in the pages of Le Goglu, Le Miroir and Le Chameau (p. 92). Indeed, Foster paints an altogether grim picture of Jewish life in Canada, particularly in Montreal. F.C. Blair, director of the immigration branch of the Canadian government, comes in for particular criticism from several of the book's contributors. As Marilyn Nefsky observes, even the country's sympathetic church leaders realized that "Hitler had touched the soul of the German people far more deeply than Canadian churches had touched the hearts of their constituents" (p. 107). Consequently, they believed that "a successful appeal for refugee aid depended on convincing the nation that the majority of the Nazis' victims were not Jews" (p. 104). Rachael Kohn, however, sounds a salutary note, writing that "Christians were not alone in their resistance to a large migration of refugees" (p. 178). Jews too, fearful of antisemitism and anxious not to jeopardize their own situation, expressed their reservations. Their insecurity, writes Ann Beaglehole, and their consequent, almost universal, policy of "'ethnic inconspicuousness' meant that it was on the whole easier to divert energy into fund-raising and into clothes drives for refugees than into attempting to influence government policy" (p. 193). According to Paul Bartrop, at the Evian Conference of 1938—which would demonstrate to Hitler "that the Jews he did not want were also unwanted throughout the rest of the world" (p. 69)— the Jews were hampered not by fear but by overoptimism. According to Bartrop, they "put too much faith in the concept of an international conference. . . . Jewish hopes were misplaced and their expectations too high" (p. 64). Despite these depressing findings, one should not assume that refugees and the

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Jews of Europe were totally without support. There is much evidence that popular attitudes toward Jews (as opposed to those of officialdom) were often sympathetic. The secular press, as Cyril Levitt and William Shaffir show in their occasionally naive yet well-documented and useful essay surveying Toronto newspapers, provided extensive and detailed reports of Hitler's Jewish policy from the earliest days of his chancellorship. This fact seems to surprise the authors, which, given the extensive secondary literature on the subject dating back to Andrew Sharf's excellent study of 1964, "The British Press and the Jews under Nazi Rule," is a little disconcerting. Some Anglican churchmen, most notably Bishop Charles Venn Pilcher of Sydney, were very actively pro-Jewish. One should also not lose sight of the fact that Australia did take in ten thousand Jewish refugees. This may not be a very large number, but it was relatively high compared with most other countries. The most extraordinary episode related in the book is found in its final chapter. It concerns the mountainous dominion of Newfoundland, in northeast Canada. Between 1934 and 1948 (when it joined the Canadian federation), Newfoundland was governed by a commission containing three British and three Newfoundland officials and headed by a British-appointed governor. Democracy had been suspended in the wake of the chronic crisis in the fishing industry after the First World War, the consequent collapse of the economy with attendant high unemployment and a series of political scandals. Poverty was extreme and desolating. Gerhard Bassler tells us that many outposts had no trees, roads, running water or electricity. In these remote settlements, drinking water was fetched in pails. There were no toilets, not even outhouses, and no sewers. Of Recontre West's population of 250, only seven could read or write; school lasted for three months; and the teacher had the only batterypowered radio. In short, there was a "desperate need for economic development and for the skills conducive to it" (p. 254). Jewish refugees from Europe offered a potential solution. There was even some popular support for the idea. The Observer Weekly suggested in 1939 that "the oppressed people of Europe would be welcomed" and, more specifically, the Daily News printed correspondence stating that "we need doctors badly" and that it should be possible to assign German Jewish doctors to various territories (p. 261). Furthermore, the Dominion had a fifty-year-old official policy of asylum for people persecuted on religious or political grounds. Yet it was in Newfoundland that we find evidence of the most extreme anti-Jewish policy. Admission of refugees was extremely rare. The treatment of the nine who did arrive was so appalling that they all left before or shortly after the end of the war. During the brief service of Lisbeth Redlich (a thirty-year-old physician from Austria) in the St. John's General Hospital, sixteen members of the hospital staff offered signed statements to the constabulary accusing her of sending light signals from her room in the Newfoundland Hotel. A twenty-three-year-old German Jewish refugee, Franziska Mayer, was forced to remain in the settlement of St. Anthony's, since the chief of police contended that in Labrador she would be able "to assist any German submarine that might try to establish a base or supply shelter" (p. 272). The secretary of justice only restored her right of unrestricted travel on July 7, 1945, seven weeks after the end of the war. Even Rabbi Max Katz was put under regular police

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surveillance as an enemy alien in August 1940, with a weekly report of his activities going back to the Department of Justice. Paul Bartrop has collated a useful collection of essays on countries whose political systems were based on British traditions of parliamentary democracy, and which were believed to have "an untainted freshness devoid of the prejudices of the Old World." In most cases, their recent history "had been founded on immigration" (p. 71). The tortured Jews of Europe looked to these countries and their vast open spaces as potential places of refuge. Yet, where this valuable compendium of primary history lets the facts speak for themselves, the story is depressingly familiar. Bureaucratic hostility and traditional antisemitism proved their hopes unjustified—false havens indeed. RICHARD BOLCHOVER London

Lucjan Dobroszycki, Reptile Journalism: The Official Polish-Language Press Under the Nazis, 1939-1945. Trans. Barbara Harshav. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995. xiii + 199 pp. This volume is for the most part a translation of the author's 1977 German work, Die legate polnische Presse im Generalgouvernement, which was in turn based on a Polish manuscript rejected for publication (surely for political reasons) by the Polish state-run academic publisher PWN in 1967. Despite the fact that the research is now some three decades old, it remains definitive, and in light of the burgeoning of studies during the past few years about Poland under the German occupation, its appearance in English is most welcome. The story of newspapers and periodicals published in Poland with German approval during the occupation touches necessarily upon the broader issue of Polish cooperation or noncooperation with the occupiers. It has been a point of pride to Poles that Poland produced no quislings, even though at the outset of the war the Germans made several efforts to establish a collaborationist Polish rump state. Dobroszycki examines how these issues were reflected in what came to be known among Poles as the "reptile press" (prasa gadzinowa)—a term whose etymology is discussed in the book's introduction (unfortunately without explaining that the Polish word gadzinowy, denoting literally "pertaining to reptiles or amphibians," also carries a popular connotation of craven obsequiousness). He demonstrates that early German efforts to locate collaborators indeed influenced German press policy in Poland prior to the establishment of the Generalgouvernement in November 1939. Characterizing the first three months of the war as a period of negotiation between German military authorities and Polish publishers to see if a mutually satisfactory arrangement could be found that would permit at least some prewar Polish newspapers to continue to appear, he notes that although results varied throughout the country, on the whole neither side was satisfied with the negotiations' outcome.

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Hence, beginning in November 1939, all publication in the Generalgouvernement was subjected to prior German censorship, and only six Polish newspapers were approved for circulation. This development also coincided with the abandonment of the broader German search for political collaborators and with the formulation of the overall German policy of destroying all vestiges of Polish nationhood. The new official Polish press, as Dobroszycki shows, was intended to serve as an instrument of that policy. It was staffed almost exclusively by Polish-speaking Germans, whether Volksdeutsche or Reichsdeutsche; about one hundred ethnic Poles were involved in its operation, and only about twenty of these had worked as journalists before the war. Dobroszycki maintains that in most cases "this collaboration was based neither on firm conviction nor on ideological motives"; but rather "working on an occupation paper . . . was quite simply a well-paid job offering relative security and a sense of stability in difficult times" (p. 75). Moreover, the Germans did not make serious efforts to recruit Poles to work in the official press. The function of the press was to persuade Poles of the Third Reich's might and to reconcile them to their fate as helots of the master race. For these purposes Polish participation was neither necessary nor desirable. Nevertheless, Dobroszycki demonstrates that, contrary to the national myth, Poles read the reptile press to about the same extent that they read newspapers before the war. Although the Polish underground endeavored to bring about at least a partial boycott of official papers, it was never able to achieve this aim. Circulation figures for the Nazi-controlled press remained about equal to prewar levels on a fairly constant basis throughout the war, and the official newspapers proved to be profitable ventures. Speculating on the reasons for these phenomena, Dobroszycki points out that the official newspapers constituted the only legal source of information for the Polish population throughout the war and that failure to purchase a paper regularly at a local newsstand might be observed and reported as suspicious behavior. He also suggests that the newspapers were especially valued by Poles for their classified advertising. Dobroszycki thus does not appear to believe that the reptile press was an especially effective tool for the dissemination of German propaganda, except in inciting public opinion against Jews and Bolsheviks. A third change in occupation strategy, which began in the spring of 1943, was also reflected, according to Dobroszycki, in press policy. German defeats on the Eastern front and in North Africa made the occupiers feel less secure and caused them to try to win over their subject populations. In Poland, an effort was made to draw the Poles onto the German side in the struggle against impending Soviet domination of their country. To this end the Germans tried to initiate a truly collaborationist Polish press. From April 1944 a number of such journals appeared, most notably the biweekly Przelom, in which a handful of renegades from National Party circles openly espoused the formation of a German-Polish anti-Bolshevik front. These newspapers, however, did not replace the earlier reptile press but merely complemented it. Dobroszycki's work is characterized by a thorough mastery of the extant archival sources and an acute awareness of their limitations. He has provided both a mine of factual information about specific newspapers, their circulation, their editors, their

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dates of appearance as well as a convincing demonstration of how an examination of the reptile press makes it possible to assess both the changing nature of overall German occupation policy in Poland and the extent of Polish resistance to, and acquiescence in, that policy. Sadly, Lucjan Dobroszycki will not be able to develop these themes in future work. He died shortly after the book under review here appeared in print. Above all, this work demonstrates how great a loss is his death to the entire historical community. DAVID ENGEL New York University

Eugenia Gurin-Loov, Shoah-Suur Having: Eesti Juutide Katastroof 1941 (The Holocaust of Estonian Jews, 1941). Tallin: Eesti Juudi Kogukond, 1994. 240 pp. Estonia, the northernmost and smallest of the three Baltic countries, numbered a million and a quarter residents on the eve of the Second World War. The minute Jewish community in this country (4,381 in 1934) enjoyed broad cultural-national autonomy and a vibrant Jewish life. The situation changed in August 1940, when Estonia was annexed by the Soviet Union and a process of coercive sovietization affected the Jewish community as well as the general population to varying degrees. About 500 Jews (owners of factories or large companies and active members of Zionist and other parties) were exiled to Siberia in an operation that the Soviet authorities directed against those they termed "socially dangerous elements" or "enemies of the people." Shortly after the eruption of war between Germany and the Soviet Union in June 1941, German troops reached Estonia, but for diverse reasons the conquest took nearly two months. Thanks to this, two thirds of Estonian Jews were able to escape to the interior of the Soviet Union. Thus, only about a thousand Jews who could not or did not want to flee to the Soviet interior remained under German-Nazi occupation. Virtually all of those who remained were murdered within just over half a year by the German Sonderkommando of Einsatzgruppe A and members of the Estonian "Self Defense" (Omakaitse). Even after Estonia was declared Judenfrei, thousands of Jewish forced laborers were transported thither from around Europe. When the Germans were evicted by the Soviet army in the autumn of 1944, only about a hundred of them were still alive together with fewer than a dozen local Jews who had also somehow survived. Many books and articles on this subject have been published in various languages in Israel and elsewhere. In most cases, Estonian-Soviet historiography has lumped the Jews together with the other victims of the Nazi occupation. But now, fifty years after the war's end, with Estonia an independent state, a book has appeared that for the first time has as its sole topic the fate of the Jews of that country under Nazi occupation. The author is the daughter of Shmuel Gurin, a

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leading figure in the Jewish community of Estonia between the two world wars and the principal of the Gymnasium in Tallinn. She spent the war years in the Soviet interior. In the introduction, Gurin-Loov discusses the main reasons that led her to bring to public attention what she calls "the tragic events" that befell Estonian Jewry. She wants to let the Estonians know more of what happened to the Jewish population during the war; to provide the survivors with all the available information about the fate of their friends and families; and finally, to perpetuate the memory of the victims. The 240-page book is mostly written in Estonian. However, an English-language translation of the introduction and the prologues (one on the history of Estonian Jewry and the other on their fate in the Holocaust) appears at the end of the book. An English translation of the two tables containing statistical and demographic data related to those murdered is, inter alia, also provided, as is a brief summary of the contents of each of the 127 documents pertaining to the fate of specific Jews during the first fifteen months of Nazi occupation. The original documents written in German or Estonian are presented in the form of facsimiles. A series of documents (nos. 71-79) describes the case of a resident of Tallinn, Salomon Epstein, born in 1885, who like many other Jews was imprisoned at the beginning of the Nazi occupation (September 1941) and accused, among other things, of what was euphemistically termed "endangering the public order," or in other words, Communist activities and similar forms of subversion. His German wife, Helena, who was a pure Aryan with two brothers serving in the German military, came to his aid. She claimed that the Soviets had been about to exile their only son to Siberia on the charge that he was a "fascist," and that her husband had never tried to prevent their son from verbally attacking Communists or Jews. Another document contains a commendation of Epstein by fourteen former co-workers from the period of the Soviet regime. It seems that such documentation was to no avail, since Epstein's name appears on list 1 in the book, which notes the names of 929 Estonian Jews who were executed by various means. Dozens of other documents presented in the book testify to the similar fate met by at least six other Jews despite efforts made by their Estonian acquaintances to plead their cause. Only the odd document mentions names of Estonians who participated to varying degrees in the murder of local Jews. For instance, document no. 22 is a facsimile of a letter that the commander of the Bafernau prisoner camp directed to his superiors. This letter, which is written in Estonian and is dated October 1941, refers to a member of the Omakaitse, Georg Pohjakas, who gunned down a Jewish woman, Eide Maszkin. In the margins of five other documents (nos. 24, 25, 26, 28, 94), which contain results of an investigation conducted by the Tallinn police force, a note appears identifying the signature at the bottom of each of them as that of the police officer Evald Mikson. The note also states that this officer was later listed as a war criminal by the Simon Wiesenthal Center. However, there is no mention of the fact that he was notorious for torturing Jewish prisoners and that he fled to Iceland, where he resided until his death in 1994. This circumlocutory reference to the guilt of a man with such a record is more than puzzling and may indicate that in independent Estonia today, just as in Soviet Estonia in the past, there is avoidance of

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a sensitive issue: the participation of Estonians in the murder of their Jewish compatriots. This despite what is known from other sources about the active part taken by no small number of Estonians in murdering their Jewish neighbors or turning them in to the authorities. In the absence of detailed information about the final days of the local Jews of Estonia, the 127 documents presented here constitute a substantial contribution to the historiography of the Holocaust in general and its manifestation in this northern country, in particular. Yet it is hard to escape the impression that this collection of documents is not entirely impartial. One could ask, for instance, whether it is by chance that there is nothing here to suggest that any of the Jews were indeed Communists. For there were most definitely such Jews in Estonia and some of them remained there under Nazi occupation. The question that then arises is whether they were subsequently murdered as Communists or Jews. In any case, there is room to wonder which criteria were employed in the selection of the 127 documents. My impression is that in the current political situation in Estonia, it is awkward to discuss the participation of the Jews in the rearguard action waged by the Red Army during its retreat from Estonia in 1941 and the recruitment of Jewish refugees to the Red Army, once they received asylum in the interior of the Soviet Union. One can sense an apologetic tone in the two prologues when the author states that Jewish soldiers serving in the Estonian corps of the Red Army had to fight against Estonian soldiers serving in the Nazi army during the war. It seems that she tries to balance this fact with her explanation of the fact that many Estonian Jews chose not to flee to the Soviet interior at the beginning of the war. In her opinion, the reason was their vehement feelings of hostility toward the Soviets. At the end of the first prologue, the author tries to create an overt balance between the political forces that determined the fate of Estonian Jewry: "In the early 1940s, two fatal blows were successively dealt to the Jewish community: the destruction of their national education and culture because of Soviet oppression (1940-1941); and the total physical destruction of the Jews who remained in Estonia under Nazi occupation (1941-1942)." This is the place to point out that symmetrical formulae of this sort are generally de rigeur not only in Estonia today but also among members of the establishment and media in the other Baltic states, who hesitate to discuss the Jewish Holocaust in their countries. To be fair to the author, it should be added that in the prologue on the Holocaust in Estonia, she states the facts, if only briefly, regarding the criminal role of the Estonian police and members of the Omakaitse, as well as their joint commander, Colonel Johannes Soodla. Beyond the problematic nature of the commentary appearing in the book, one must note with great appreciation the impressive contribution made by the author in compiling most of the full names of Estonian Jews who were massacred in the second half of 1941 and the beginning of 1942. She provides six lists in this book, the most important being the first, which includes in alphabetical order all the names and personal details (sex, age and place of residence) of the 929 victims. Nearly all of them (805) lived in the three major cities: the capital, Tallinn (518), Tartu and Paernu. The remaining 124 resided in about 20 towns and villages. Although the figure 929 pales in comparison with the overwhelming toll in

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Jewish lives in other European countries under Nazi occupation, it constitutes nearly 100 percent of the Estonian Jews who were murdered during the Holocaust. In any event, the number of victims in no way detracts from the significance and value of this work of commemoration initiated and realized by the diligent author with the assistance of Victor Boikov. The other lists are also of considerable importance: the list of 101 children and youths aged 18 and younger who were in most cases murdered together with their parents; the list of 137 Jews (women and men, young and old) who were murdered in Paernu; and the shortest list, 12 Jewish men who in the not so distant past (19181919) had actively fought for Estonian independence. In an attempt to understand the "purpose" of providing this very short list, one can point to two different, probable motivations, which complement each other: the first being yet another reminder of the civic loyalty of the Jews of Estonia; the second being an indirect reproach directed at the Estonian authorities for their shameful behavior in making no effort to defend their patriotic citizens at the moment of truth, as did, for instance, the neighboring Finnish authorities. As with other sensitive issues, Gurin-Loov appears to prefer presenting the facts—which speak for themselves—rather than entering into polemics about Estonian behavior then and attitudes now. She does suggest that this subject should also be taken up by Estonian historians. It seems likely, however, that Gurin-Loov will be able to expand her own research on this subject, given her success in uncovering material from Estonian and other archives. Dov LEVIN The Hebrew University

Israel Gutman, Resistance: The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1994. 277 pp. There is no dearth of books on the Warsaw ghetto and its denouement, ranging from personal reminiscences to scholarly studies. The last few years alone have seen the publication of Yitzhak (Antek) Zuckerman's remarkable A Surplus of Memory; the brief memoir by his friend and comrade, Simha (Kazik) Rotem—still very much alive in Israel today—called Memoirs of a Warsaw Ghetto Fighter; another searing memoir, / Remember Nothing More, by the recently deceased doctor Adina Blady Szwajger; Jaroslaw M. Rymkiewicz's The Final Station: Umschlagplatz; several Polish volumes published under the aegis of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw; and several works in Hebrew. Why, then, another history of the ghetto and of the uprising, especially if it comes from the author of the classic The Jews of Warsaw, 1939-1943? The answer is, first, that the directors of the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., which sponsored the book, wanted a volume that would incor-

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porate some new material and perhaps offer some of Gutman's new reflections on this subject. Moreover, unlike the earlier volume (published in 1982), this one was to be not of a determinedly scholarly nature, but rather more accessible to the general reader. Of the two, the second goal has certainly been accomplished. No book dealing with the murder of a whole nation can conceivably be called "easy reading," but Resistance does tell the story simply and effectively, and the translation (with a few exceptions, which I discuss below) by Ethel Broido is a marked improvement over the earlier volume. In addition, Resistance contains some new illustrative material, drawn mainly from personal memoirs. Nevertheless, some caveats, I am afraid, are in order. OZON should not have been translated as "camp of consolidated nationalists" but as "Camp of National Unity." In 1936, the then prime minister of Poland, Slawoj-Skladkowski, did not say that, while his government rejected violent methods against Jews, "economic sanctions were mandatory"; rather, his comment was that a boycott of Jewish stores—"an economic struggle"—was "altogether acceptable" (owszem). What should have been "mandatory" (in the book, not in Poland circa 1936) were references to quotations cited by the author; the assumption that simple footnotes clutter a book and make it unreadable is simply wrong. And "youth movement" is too generic a term: it would be more helpful if the given youth movement (there were not a few of them in Warsaw) was identified when referred to. Furthermore, I must say that I would be much happier if Gutman did not in effect provide an alibi for the "sickening tasks" performed by the Jewish police by saying that "they must be kept in context," inasmuch as the Jewish police "were following orders, not initiating them." There were indeed crucial differences between the Jewish police and the SS, but these did not lie in the by now almost farcical formula of "just following orders." Finally, Shmuel Zygelbojm did not, as the book seems to suggest, commit suicide in May 1943 by "setting himself on fire in front of the British Parliament" (which might indeed have been his original plan), but by swallowing cyanide. This said, I can only pay tribute to Gutman for producing a book that does, indeed, shed new light on the story of the Warsaw ghetto, presenting it in a way that makes it compulsively readable for anyone, specialist and nonexpert alike. He is excellent in comparing the Warsaw revolt with uprisings in other ghettos, showing both the similarities (primarily that its actors were almost exclusively members of youth movements), and the differences (only in Warsaw did the uprising finally gain the admiration and support of the remaining population of the ghetto). Gutman also offers examples of the kind of tortuous ideological differences dividing the various political groupings—from the Poale Zion to the Bund and the Communists—which were surmounted only at the eleventh hour to make it possible to create the united Jewish Fighting Organization (ZOB). The agreement still provided for auxiliary political bodies that were of no practical significance but that satisfied the doctrinaire needs of the various groups, even when they represented hardly anyone but themselves. (1 recall reading in Zuckerman's book a description of a meeting of the "Central Committee" of the Left Poale Zion that turned out to

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number only two people—there were no others by that time.) The Jewish Fighting Union (ZZW) of the Betar never joined the ZOB and in fact left the ghetto on the second day of the uprising, not to be heard of again. Resistance is also useful in reminding us once more of the appalling behavior of most Poles during the ghetto years and particularly during the uprising. Repeated requests for weapons to the Jewish underground went unheeded, either on the theory that Jews were incapable of handling them, or because they would fall into the hands of the Communists—or, for that matter, because they were not "available." Neither the Polish underground nor the Polish government-in-exile could bestir themselves to ask Poles to extend help to the Jewish victims: the most, for instance, that the "leaders of the Civilian Struggle," representing the civilian arm of the Polish underground would do was to "protest the crimes which are being committed against the Jews" (p. 232). This was in the middle of September 1942, after about three hundred thousand Warsaw Jews had already been deported to Treblinka. The residual antisemitism even among Poles who were shocked by the Nazi brutalities, the tendency to think the worst of the Jews, is perhaps best illustrated by the London-based minister of security, who in June 1943 inquired in a message to Warsaw, "whether there is any truth in the claim that the opposition of the Jews in Warsaw . . . was led and organized by Soviet officers and other ranks." During the uprising, the official journal of the Home Army wrote that "helping the Jews escaping from the burning ghetto is a Christian obligation." It was a "humane document," Gutman observes, but "what is missing from [it] is the simple and basic statement that Polish Jews are citizens of Poland and not just the proposed beneficiaries of a 'Christian obligation,' and that the Polish citizen has a patriotic duty to aid his countrymen" who were being murdered by the Nazi (p. 232). After the fighting was over, isolated groups of fighters managed to escape through the sewers to the Aryan section of Warsaw, but just as the Home Army made no efforts to provide meaningful help during the uprising, so now it made "no offers to rescue the remaining fighters" (p. 247). A number of ZOB members, under the leadership of Antek Zuckerman, managed to survive and even to form a unit that fought a year later, during the Warsaw uprising—but it did so under the aegis of the Armia Ludowa, the Communist-led army. As Gutman notes, this group had its own political reasons for fighting the Germans, but the fact remains that it was the only armed organization that genuinely tried to aid the Jews during and after the ghetto uprising. There were others, too, notably the Zegota, a group of mostly Catholic intellectuals set up at the end of 1942 to find shelter for Jewish victims, and the Polish Boy Scouts, which—thanks to their close prewar ties with Hashomer Hatzair—provided singularly selfless aid to the ZOB. There were small groups from the Polish Socialist Party, also with prewar ties, in this case with the Bund, and there were thousands of individual Poles who risked their lives to help the Jewish victims. Unhappily, these were the exceptions to the rule, and if in today's judenreinem Poland this subject is still capable of arousing so much emotion—as it does—it is because it remains a painful event that for many young Poles is cause for profound selfexamination and for others the ground for shrill attempts at self-exculpation.

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All told, then, Gutman has written a strong, useful book which, together with his earlier volume, is bound to remain the most comprehensive source on one of the most shattering chapters in contemporary Jewish history. ABRAHAM BRUMBERG Washington, D.C.

David A. Hackett (ed. and trans.), The Buchenwald Report. Bouder and San Francisco: Westview Press, 1955. 397 pp. Immediately after the liberation of Buchenwald in April 1945, a special intelligence team from the psychological Warfare Division of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF), comprised of German-speaking Americans under the leadership of Albert G. Rosenberg, was assigned the task of drawing up a report on the camp. Working together with a prisoner group whose most famous member was Eugene Kogon (later, the author of the widely respected The Theory and Practice of Hell), they compiled an important document that has only recently been rediscovered. Translated, edited and introduced by David Hackett, the report is now fully accessible to the English-speaking readership. The Buchenwald Report is essentially divided into three unequal parts. First there is a detailed history of the camp, which places Buchenwald in the context of the entire German concentration camp system and which presents precise observations on the behavior of the SS. The second section contains numerous succinct reports provided by individual prisoners in affidavit-like format, which, taken together, touch on every aspect of life in the camps. This detailed depiction—topic by topic—reveals the marked individuality of the survivors' perceptions. Their objectivity, both in tone and in substance, is a marvel. Finally, the report concludes with individual reports on the aspects of the Holocaust (then still unnamed) observed by prisoners whose fate had brought them to Buchenwald after witnessing, as the case might be, the Warsaw ghetto uprising, Auschwitz, Treblinka, Natzweiller, and the ghettos of Radom and Riga, among others. Reading such reports, we gain a clear picture of what was known to at least some prisoners while incarcerated at Buchenwald. The collective Report bears the imprint of Eugene Kogon, one of the most astute observers of concentration camp life. It is fascinating to read this account side by side with The Theory and Practice of Hell, thus gaining an appreciation for both the immediacy of his insight and the constraints composed by the process of joint composition. Such constraints notwithstanding, the Report is powerful—more impressive still for when and how it was written. Essentially, it foretold what was to happen once the war was over: survivors would seek a measure of revenge through testimony. They had been aware, some keenly so, of the importance of their fate, and now they were to choose reflection and documentation as a means of dealing with it.

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The Report is best read as a preliminary document, rich in detail and insight, most important in the specificity of the information as well as in the intensity and unreflective quality of the perceptions. However, it is not by any means a final statement on Buchenwald. Holocaust scholarship now presents a more complete picture of the whole enterprise of murder than was available to those imprisoned in the camps. We know of the evolution of genocide; both the Wannsee Conference and the Aktion Reinhard death camps were unknown to the authors of this report. We have a greater sense of the impact of death marches and of the transition from prewar to wartime camps operating during the Final Solution. This should not surprise the reader, for the endless pursuit by the scholars has yielded a more complete picture of the whole. And one must read this document as an initial articulation, so essential when first composed, remarkably durable even fifty years later. It forms one piece in the puzzle. A question that still remains open is whether proximity to the event or the passage of time yields greater accuracy in the testimony and a more coherent picture. David Hackett's translation is readable and clear. His introduction is helpful, the organization is tidy, and thus we have the feeling of reading not a translated document but rather an original text of considerable merit. Scholars of the Holocaust will be grateful to gain access to this long-lost document, more grateful still for the determination of the liberators and the survivors to document and bear witness. So much is gained from their early insights. MICHAEL BERENBAUM U.S. Holocaust Museum

Esriel Hildesheimer, Juedische Selbstverwaltung unter dem NS-Regime. Tubingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1994. 258 pp. This historical survey of the struggle for survival waged by the Jewish communal organizations in the Third Reich—the Reichsvertretung (Reich Representation of Jews in Germany), which was transformed in 1939, because of changes in its structure and legal status, to the Reichsvereinigung (Reich Association of Jews in Germany)—is based on new sources that, combined with others, justify a study that was originally a doctoral dissertation. However, as is often the case with dissertations, the sheer mass of detailed information sometimes makes it difficult for a reader to see the whole picture. (I am puzzled, incidentally, by the author's remark [p. ix] that this published version should be of use not only to scholars but also to the "broad German public" ["fuer das breite Deutsche Publikum"]. Surely he meant the German-speaking public?) Two interrelated historical themes are traced throughout the study: on the one hand, the autonomous, independent activities of the Jewish leaderships in both organizations; on the other, the Nazi policy toward them. Hildesheimer stresses that the Jewish leadership possessed a degree of autonomy rather than being simply

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dependent on Nazi initiative. It would be wrong, he states, to assert that the Nazis had established the Reichsvereinigung to use it as a mere instrument in the execution of their anti-Jewish policies (p. 81). But is it not an oversimplification to present these two concepts (Jewish versus Nazi initiative) as mutually exclusive? Even assuming (as the author does) that the establishment of the Reichsvertretung and the Reichsvereinigung was at first a Jewish initiative, does this exclude the possibility that the Nazis later made instrumental use of these organizations in their genocidal plans (cf. pp. 107, 108)? It seems to me that, for all the author's efforts to correct conclusions reached by "other scholars" (who remain unnamed), the view that the Reichsvereinigung became a tool in the Nazis' hands remains valid. Hildesheimer discusses how the Nazi authorities sought ways to further Jewish emigration from Germany (p. 83). What interest, then, the author asks, did they have for keeping the Reichsvereinigung in existence as an institution to support German Jewish invalids? He himself answers that the Nazis had no intention of themselves supporting the association; they saw it, rather, as an institution that enabled them "to free themselves of the burden" of maintaining these Jews (p. 83). Thus, the author himself admits that the Reichsvereinigung served Nazi—as well as Jewish—ends. In another instance, Paul Eppstein's brave stand in front of Adolf Eichmann is quoted by the author (p. 88) as an expression of both Jewish pride and the Reichsvereinigung's independence. But this interpretation is questionable; Eppstein's honorable behavior can easily be explained as a personal act of bravery and hardly proves the association's autonomy. When dealing with the finances of the association, Hildesheimer's conclusions are similarly dubious and contradictory. He states that the Nazis generally strove to limit the Reichsvereinigung's budget, fearing that otherwise they might end up with the association's financial burden. At the same time, however, he doubts the opinion of "some scholars" (again unnamed) who maintain that the real intention of the Nazis was simply to rob the Jews. Such an opinion, he writes, cannot be sustained, and he promises to elaborate this theme later on (p. 128). Subsequently, though, he declares that there can be no definite answer when it comes to explaining the goals of the authorities (p. 141, and see p. 147). Looking back today at the Nazis' policy and knowing its tragic outcome, one must ask whether there can be any doubt about their intentions toward the Jews. Does history not prove categorically that it was robbery and, in the final stages, murder that they had in mind? Even if, as argued by the author, the Nazis showed some flexibility here and there in their attitudes toward the Reichsvereinigung, was this anything but a tactical decision? Hildesheimer expresses his wonder at the "extraordinarily strange" steps taken by the Nazi bureaucracy (p. 164). Had he consulted Eberhard Jaeckel's penetrating study on the Nazi bureaucracy, he would have found an answer in the following passage: According to my interpretation there is no contradiction between monocracy as I have defined it and polycracy. On the contrary, polycracy is the very condition of monocracy. The monocrat comes to power on a polycratic basis, supported by conflicting groups that paraly/e each other, and he maintains his power by ruling polycratically—that is, by playing the conflicting groups against each other.'

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In sum, Hildesheimer's study, rich in detail, raises doubts regarding its conceptual framework. WALTER Zwi BACHARACH Bar-Ilan University

Note 1. Eberhard Jaeckel, Hitler in History (Hanover and London: 1984), 30.4),30.

Harold Kaplan, Conscience and Memory: Meditations in a Museum of the Holocaust. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. 213 pp. Harold Kaplan takes the idea of "a crime against humanity," formulated by the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal, as the center of his text and asks what moral force lies behind that concept. Inspired by Jean Amery's plea that "the criminal be swept into the truth of his atrocity," Kaplan contends with the problem that the Nazis thought they were redeeming humanity. He counters Nazi ideology by calling for a "viable" concept of humanity "founded on a contract of faith, a principle of being" (p. 14). Kaplan imagines himself in Europe before its political and moral indoctrination by the Nazis, and argues against them, warning against a "redemptive apocalypse" and the "idolatry of group self-worship." Treating "genuine evil with intellectual respect," Kaplan warns against dismissing Nazism as some form of insanity or natural catastrophe. He reminds us that the Nazis' ideology had its roots in modern culture, and asks: What moral and rational empirical authority did the Nazis acknowledge? Which ideas in modern thought served as a basis for Nazi thought? And which ideas can be revised in light of the Holocaust? Kaplan's book is a metaphysical, moral response to the Holocaust that is more than a meditation. It is a polemic. He seeks to define human rights as a doctrine that goes "so deep that it leaves ideology and politics behind and touches the premises of existence" (p. 20). Kaplan probes the unanswered questions, the mystery and the abyss, displaying an impressive grasp of the relevant literature. He weaves together the ideas of Elie Wiesel, Emil Fackenheim, Elias Canetti, Emmanuel Levinas, Theodor Adorno, Terence Des Pres, Robert Lifton, George Steiner, Raul Hilberg, Lucy Dawidowicz, Saul Friedlander and Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe, to name but a few. He engages in a posthumous dialogue with the victims: Jean Amery, Primo Levi, Chaim Kaplan, Emmanuel Ringelbaum and Etty Hillesum. Kaplan ponders the meaning of their murder and/or their suicide as evidence of violence done to "moral reality." In the first two chapters of his book, Kaplan explores "lessons for memory," the transmission of which he understands to be the purpose of Holocaust museums

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around the world. He searches for a concept of the "human" as an existential reality with which to counter Nazi racism. Chapters 3, 4 and 5 deal with concepts of history, nature and power as "myths of modernity" that made the Holocaust possible. Chapter 6 explores the concept of the "victim" and the "metaphysical Jew." The final two chapters examine the possibility for redemption. "Meditations in a Museum of the Holocaust" is a misleading subtitle, since the museum as a site is peripheral to Kaplan's arguments. In fact, Kaplan seems to have been more inspired by a conference on "Writing and the Holocaust" that was held in Albany in 1987, references to which appear repeatedly throughout the work. Kaplan's text is a haunted, somewhat obsessive, meditation on the relationship between myth, power, murder, suicide, sacrifice, death and redemption. He envisions an "American" museum of the Holocaust that serves as a "political and cultural antithesis to the world of the Holocaust" (p. xvi). The book has two major weaknesses: a tendency toward both melodrama and self-contradiction. For example, Kaplan acknowledges that there is no standard narrative of the Holocaust and warns against a single monothematic interpretation. Nevertheless, he urges that the Holocaust must have interpretation, a grand-scale hermeneutics. He believes such an interpretation could be a gospel of politics and public conduct, "a doctrine of the state and its power." He writes: "The questions held before us are, how does this story instruct the future? How does it discover important values? How does it decide what is human?" (p. 8). The Holocaust forbids a particularist view, he argues, because "human nature" is at risk, civilization is under judgment, and "all men a part of that judgment." For Kaplan, the Holocaust is the "true Original Sin" from which we can redeem ourselves, through imagination and moral sensibility, as heirs of the murderer's lost and betrayed conscience. Kaplan's voice, although very articulate, tends toward hyperbole. It is not clear who is meant by the repeated use of the generic "us," "we" and "one." Phrases that allude to "the world of the Holocaust" as "a voice of meaning that can only be grasped by one who still lives at the border of a human memory" (p. 144) sound poetic but do not say much. Kaplan should perhaps have paid more heed to his own warnings against intellectual melodrama and the dangers of moral abstraction. He does not reflect enough upon his own discourse, which is one of dichotomies, good and evil, human and inhuman, moral destruction and redemption. He asks, "would it not be true that if the whole world accepted the clearest simplest message of the Holocaust, a light would be cast unlike any we have known over the field of conflict where nations, races, societies meet?" (p. 10). How does he reconcile this rhetorical question with his own warnings against embracing redemptive apocalyptic thinking, monothematic interpretation and "final solutions" to the problems of society? Kaplan suggests that if redemptive meaning is to be found in the Holocaust, it should be "mundanely ethical (and political) and sternly secular" (p. 131), yet his own approach is grandiose, metaphysical and metaphoric. Kaplan's repeated metaphorical reference to "nature," "instincts," and "animalistic" behavior is another disturbing example. Kaplan criticizes Levi-Strauss for referring to the Holocaust as a "natural catastrophe." He points out that attributing the Holocaust to "nature" and the "natural" removes the discussion from issues of "moral concern." He emphasizes that the Holocaust was a human catastrophe, a

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"degree of evil in which humanity stands alone, in its responsibility" (p. 9). Yet Kaplan describes the Nazi regime as "a force of nature, beyond explanation or negotiation" (p. 111). The Nazis might have agreed with such a description, but what does it serve here? How does Holocaust discourse represent the natural and the animal? Kaplan describes the Nazi regime as an effort to "reduce mankind to animalistic nature, and exercise power in its purest most elemental form, focused on survival, the taking of prey, and ingestion of other lives" (p. 108). What is power in its "elemental" form? In his discussion of power, Kaplan implies that instinct and power move inevitably toward violence. Does this leave any validity to the concept of the "abuse of power"? As much as Kaplan disagrees with Foucault and would like to differentiate between "knowledge" and "power," crime remains a partner in human civilization and we need to understand this relationship, not mystify it. The tribunal at the Hague, currently investigating the war crimes committed in Bosnia, attests once again to the reality of this nexus. For all the melodrama of Kaplan's book, he does sincerely probe difficult and sensitive questions. Too often, shame inhibits such discussions. Fear of causing hurt imposes silence; resistance masks our sense of helplessness; modesty tells us to hold our tongue. Kaplan reminds us that the Holocaust illustrated the breakdown of personal character and the human bond. He suggests that it can also teach us what it is that can maintain character and community. Not everyone will agree with his need to find meaning in the Holocaust. A scholar of Holocaust studies will appreciate Kaplan's exploration and synthesis of ideas but might look for more analysis. The layperson will find it dense reading, but nonetheless a challenging introduction to the subject of moral responses to the Holocaust. LUCIA RUEDENBERG-WRIGHT Ben-Gurion University

Lawrence Langer, Admitting the Holocaust: Collected Essays. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. 202 pp. Lawrence Langer, Art from the Ashes: A Holocaust Anthology. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. 694 pp. For the past twenty years, Lawrence Langer has relentlessly pursued and exposed every last consoling version of the Holocaust for what he believes it is: a betrayal of the "actual" degradation and hopelessness at the heart of events. Beginning with his groundbreaking study The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination (1976) and continuing through The Age of Atrocity (1978), Versions of Survival (1982) and his award-winning Holocaust Testimonies (1991), Langer has sought to show that the most profound responses to the Holocaust have been those that were pointedly antiredemptory and took no consolation in their art. Both Admitting the Holocaust

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and Art from the Ashes are direct descendants of his earlier works. In Langer's own words, the essays collected in Admitting the Holocaust "represent [my] attempt over nearly a decade to wrestle with the rupture in human values as it really was—a rupture that after the war left stunned minds staring blankly at alien modes of living and dying in the monstrous milieu of ghettos and camps" (p. 3). While the themes and issues in such a disparate collection of pieces might not be expected to hold together, an overarching leitmotif can in fact be heard beating steadily throughout this book. "I am convinced," Langer writes in his second chapter on "Beyond Theodicy: Jewish Victims and the Holocaust," "that trying to 'read' the Holocaust through the values implicit in the stories of Jesus and Job leads us from the uncharted waters of that atrocity back into the safe channels of a sheltered world, where harbors are well-lighted and voyagers disembark feeling that the human journey has had a purpose" (pp. 25-26). Though each subsequent essay concentrates on a slight variation of this theme—from questioning what he calls the myth of heroism in the Warsaw ghetto to the Americanization of the Holocaust on stage and screen—the issue at stake is always the same: what he calls "the poverty of traditional moral vocabulary when we address the subject of human conduct during the destruction of European Jewry" (p. 32). This governing insight has led Langer to posit a clear-cut distinction between "Holocaust truth" and "Holocaust myth," those accounts that tell the Holocaust "as it was" and those that turn events into affirmations of our most comforting myths of redemption and justice. On the one hand, nobody has been more vigilant than Langer in calling attention to the ways certain works romanticize and sanitize the Holocaust for consumption after the fact. At the same time, however, we need also to recognize that many victims and survivors saw themselves in these heroic figures—and acted on that basis. For the fact is that much art and literature of the Holocaust does indeed aim to redeem events with messages of continuity, faith and rebirth, whether or not we think they should. Rather than looking only for the possible antiredemptory themes in otherwise redemptory books, therefore, we might also acknowledge the literature "as it really is"—a vexing mix of breach and tikun ' olam. Langer, however, picks painstakingly through the ghetto diaries of Emmanuel Ringelblum and Abraham Lewin in order to peel away every last shred of redemptory potential in them. Even when the diarists' own language evokes the heroic, Langer would ask us to read it unheroically. Why? "Because, unlike other crucial episodes in history such as the French and American revolutions, the Holocaust is an event without a future," he writes, "that is, nothing better for mankind grew out of it—memory is sentenced to confront it without any relief from expectation" (p. 38). With this dictum in mind, he goes on to show in later chapters how Cynthia Ozick's stories ("The Shawl" and "Rosa") are far preferable to Bernard Malamud's rosecolored vision of the Holocaust; and how Charlotte Delbo's demythologized literature of the Holocaust radically departs from the traditional epic encounters with death as related by Odysseus or Aeneas. Given Langer's single-minded devotion to the antiredemptory potential in Holocaust literature, it is not surprising that this would also be the central vision inspiring his selections for Art from the Ashes: A Holocaust Anthology (which sounds some-

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what redemptory to my ears). Until recently, only two other anthologies of Holocaust literature (one compiled by Albert Friedlander, the other by Jacob Glatstein, Israel Knox and Samuel Margoshes) were well known. Then David Roskies meticulously assembled a massive collection of responses to catastrophe in Jewish literature—The Literature of Destruction—which placed Holocaust literature in the longer continuum of Jewish culture and history, and which brought many pieces into English for the first time. Now Langer has added his own hefty compilation, which he divides into sections entitled "The Way it Was," diaries and memoirs, fiction, poetry and painting. As a teaching text, this selection may work very well. Not because it is exhaustive but because in bringing it out some fifty years after the Holocaust, its editor knows which works have best borne the test of time, and which have worked best in the classroom. The first section on "The Way it Was" opens with Jankel Wiernek's account of his year in Treblinka, a passage from the darkest part of the deadliest of death camps. To the voices of other survivors in this section—including Charlotte Delbo, Primo Levi, Jean Amery and Elie Wiesel—Langer adds that of historian Christopher Browning in his gripping account of "One Day in Jozefow." In so doing, Langer bravely suggests that one need not have been there to narrate "the way it was," both a salute to the writings of historians like Browning and an affirmation of the future of Holocaust history in the hands of the next generation. Like ten of the fourteen collected essays in Admitting the Holocaust, the extracts in Art from the Ashes have appeared elsewhere before. This fact alone does not discredit his inclusion of Abraham Lewin, Jozef Zelkowicz, and Avraham Tory in his section on diaries and journals. But neither does it explain his omission of classic accounts by Chaim A. Kaplan, Emmanuel Ringelblum and Zelig Kalmanovitsch. One suspects that these diarists may have been a little too firmly anchored in the Yiddish and Hebrew traditions on which they drew for their explaining myths and countermyths. Among novelists and short story writers, Ida Fink, Sara NombergPrzytyk, Tadeusz Borowski, Alexander Kluge, Arnost Lustig, Jakov Lind, Pierre Gascar and Isaiah Spiegel are well represented here. Moreover, Aharon Appelfeld's novel Tzili is reprinted in its entirety. All are preceded by short but pithy introductions attempting to return these fragments to the literary and historical milieux from which they were torn. Finally, from a teaching point of view, the poets may be best served of all: eighteen poems by Abraham Sutzkever and twelve poems by Miklos Radnoti add unmistakable historical authority to the hauntingly elliptical, now classic postwar poetry by Dan Pagis, Paul Celan, Nelly Sachs and Jacob Glatstein. After the coherence of narrative, poetry draws readers into a realm where meanings and significance dart in and out of the shadows of mind, where they remain as elusive as they are necessary. In fact, once deposited into this poetic netherworld between memory and history, readers might wonder why Langer has chosen to conclude his anthology with an interesting but seemingly unrelated section on the "Painters of Terezin." Reproduced in black and white and much reduced in scale, these pieces by Leo Haas, Karel Fleischmann, Peter Kien and Fritz Taussig (Fritta) still retain an extraordinary power to testify to the peculiar reality of Terezin as apprehended in these artists' eyes. But in the end, it may be the impossible plight of the artists as

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recounted in Leo Haas' narrative that moves Langer to include these images at all. For only here can readers actually see the ways that art can represent the Holocaust while steadfastly refusing to redeem it with consoling—and lying—beauty. JAMES E. YOUNG University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Mortimer Ostow, Myth and Madness: The Psychodynamics of Antisemitism. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1996. 191 pp. Some forty or so years ago, a young man came to me for psychiatric consultation. He had been recommended by a female colleague and was possibly going to enter psychoanalytic treatment with me. After some introductory remarks he asked me whether I was Jewish. 1 replied that while there was no obvious reason for not answering his question, it seemed to me more relevant at that point to find out why this matter was of such importance to him. To my astonishment he declared: "If you were Jewish or a woman I couldn't go into treatment with you." I then answered: "The importance of this issue will most likely become focal in our discussions once treatment has been agreed upon." I do not recall now what further remarks were exchanged, but shortly thereafter he left my office. I cannot deny that I felt frustrated. He, of course, never called for another appointment. I preface my review with this account in order to emphasize one of the chief obstacles faced by the seventeen psychoanalysts whose experiences are described in this book in their "clinical" attempt to fathom the psychodynamics of antisemitism. A person who is frankly antisemitic is highly unlikely to present himself for psychoanalytic treatment with this trait as a chief complaint. Thus, even though antisemitism was the theme of the nine-year research project here described, it was at best only a side issue in the treatment of the patients, which these analysts were conducting and describing to each other in their frequent meetings. Mortimer Ostow, whose book is a personal account of what he learned about the subject in the course of this shared and far-ranging enterprise, indicates that patients spoke only reluctantly or shamefully of their prejudices. Moreover, because the issue of confidentiality and anonymity is of such overriding importance in psychotherapy, the development of prejudices in a specific individual could not be revealed in its real-life context. The author is therefore much impeded in portraying the psychodynamics of the patients' antisemitism. He has been able to provide us with only brief vignettes drawn from the clinical reports submitted to the study group. To make up for this paucity of original material, Ostow summarizes the generally available historical, psychoanalytical and sociological data on the subject of antisemitism. The opening chapter, entitled "The Project, the Background and its Presuppositions," gives us an excellent survey of what psychoanalysts and sociologists have written hitherto about antisemitism, its presumed psychological sources and social

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origins. It anticipates what is discussed in detail later in the book. In chapter 4, Ostow makes his central points. He recounts the first antisemitic episodes as recorded in the Bible. In Exodus 1:9-10, the new Pharoah points to the Jews living among the Egyptians as potential enemies. Declaring them to be untrustworthy, he enslaves them. A similar accusation that the alien Jews cannot be trusted reappears in the book of Esther, where Haman proposes to King Ahasuerus that they be eliminated. It would thus seem that "stranger-anxiety" was at the core of and-Jewish sentiments and actions at that stage. Ostow holds that antisemitism follows an ontogenetic, developmental pattern. The "infantile separation and individuation phase" goes hand and hand with "stranger-anxiety." The tensions and contradictions of adolescence—the need for group identification, and the rebellion against the parental group—are resolved by ascribing all rebellious drives to the Jews. The distinctive behavior of the Jews facilitates such projective "splitting off." The Romans tolerated the presence of the Jews in their empire, but in Latin literature the Jews were nonetheless considered to be "depraved" because they regarded as profane "what the Romans hold sacred" and because they did "not tolerate infanticide" (p. 98). Basically, the Jews were criticized for keeping themselves separate. A quantum leap occurred with the advent of Christianity. Initially, its antisemitism, or so it would seem, stemmed from the struggle of a deviant minority, the early Christians, trying to hold fast to its own identity and to its belief that the Messiah had already arrived. Everything that threatened this belief derived from the devil—that is, from the Pharisees. The guilt for killing Christ thus came to rest entirely upon the shoulders of the Jews, while the benefits deriving from his self-sacrificial death accrued only to those who believed in his divinity. Such were, and are, the ideological underpinnings of the ongoing tensions between official Christianity and Judaism, a theme most thoroughly developed in Rudolph Loewenstein's book, Christians and Jews (1951). Ostow makes repeated reference to this fundamental psychoanalytic and historical analysis of the subject. He also draws on a variety of sources, somewhat arbitrarily selected, in order to illustrate (rather repetitively) the ubiquitousness of church-supported antisemitic attitudes and actions over the centuries. He stresses the mythology of antisemitism and the magic power ascribed to the Jews, for which they were feared and despised. Unfortunately, the individual sources of such feelings and opinions, rooted in depth psychology, are not demonstrated in extenso through the use of clinical case material. The penultimate chapter of the book, entitled "The Pogrom Mentality," begins with a lengthy description of Leni Riefenstahl's Nazi propaganda film, The Triumph of the Will. The emphasis here is on the intimacy—the spiritual, quasi-physical union—of Volk and Fuhrer. Ostow reports here specifically on the observations of one participant in the project (Jacob Arlow) who noted how people, losing their individual identity in the mass, can gain an increase of power by taking on the group identity. Ultimately, two issues stand out for Ostow: the nature of the antisemitic group and its apocalyptic faith. He holds that all antisemitic beliefs and actions are rooted in the fundamentalist view that when the apocalypse comes, possibly brought about

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by the antisemites' own actions, the Jews—representative of all evil—will perish, leaving only the righteous to survive. While Ostow here and there admits that antiJewish prejudice and action are easily mobilized at times of social crisis, he never adopts a socioeconomic perspective with any fervor. Ostow thus holds a position diametrically opposed to that which I have repeatedly stressed.1 Ostow, in fact, sees no way in which the tendency toward antisemitism can be effectively eliminated. In citing the view of the great twelfth-century Jewish scholar, physician and philosopher, Maimonides, that only with the coming of the Messiah will the persecution of the Jews come to an end, Ostow seems to be summarizing his own belief. MARTIN WANGH Jerusalem

Note 1. See Martin Wangh, 1962: "Psychoanalytische Betrachtungen zur Dynamik und Genese des Antisemitismus und des Nazisrnus," Psyche 5 (1962), 273-284; idem, "National Socialism and the Genocide of the Jews: A Psychoanalytic Study of a Historical Event," The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 45 (1964); 323-387, idem, "A Psychogenic Factor in the Recurrence of War," The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 49 (1968), 319-323.

Alison Owings, Frauen: German Women Recall the Third Reich. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, xxxix + 494 pp. In this book, Alison Owings gives accounts of interviews she conducted with twenty-nine women who lived through the National Socialist regime and who were prepared to talk about their experiences. With a few exceptions, these women were young adults during the period between 1933 and 1945. The variety of characters and situations canvassed is remarkable; this is what gives the book its value for scholars as well as lay readers. The subjects include women who were active in resistance of various kinds, enthusiastic Nazis (among them a concentration camp guard) and those whose experience of Nazism was essentially one of adaptation and survival. Representing a range of classes and social groups, regions and confessions, the interviews provide valuable source material for any seminar on daily life in Nazi Germany. Some of the women interviewed are figures already known to the interested reading public such as Countess Freya von Moltke and Charlotte Muller (the Communist activist who published her memoir of Ravensbruck in the GDR in 1981), but in each case the insights elicited in the context of an interview add something to what we already know. Less familiar are the ambiguities in the experience of women like Karma Rauhut, who continues to insist that active resistance was impossible although her family systematically evaded participation in official organizations and her father was in close contact with some of those involved in the plot of the 20th of

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July. Another subject, Dr. Margret Blersch, was stamped an enemy of the Reich by virtue of being an anthroposophist and thus became a regular practitioner of smallscale resistance: failing to report mental patients as potential candidates for "euthanasia," treating Russian slave laborers humanely, sheltering and employing nuns, refusing to accept the "Mother's Cross" awarded to her for bearing many children, and offering moral support to a Jewish woman who was attempting to escape to Switzerland. Yet she also colluded in keeping the "secret" of the euthanasia program, and she is convinced that her husband, a doctor on the Eastern front who witnessed and was appalled by scenes of mass murder, would not have been moved by his indignation to abandon his comrades, had he not died of typhus while on active service. It is in illuminating the ambiguities of life under Hitler that the book is most successful; it is the more remarkable in that it succeeds almost in spite of the author's expectations. This is not a work of professional scholarship, and readers familiar with German culture and the historiography of Nazi Germany will find much in it that is irritating: some of the translations from the German are unidiomatic to the point of being misleading (often a case of Owings' sensitivity to nuance spilling over into overinterpretation), and the secondary literature she cites to support or challenge information provided by her subjects is rarely the most recent or authoritative work. More regrettable is the fact that the volume (like too many studies of twentieth-century Germany before it) is manifestly designed to appeal to an American readership for whom the entire history of Germany is subsumed in the fact of Nazism and the whole experience of Nazism is equated with the Holocaust. This is signaled by the title itself—a calculated invocation of psychological associations between anything German and the crimes of Nazism. And this is the attitude with which the author admittedly embarked on her interview project, as becomes clear both in her introductory chapters and in the lively and self-reflective commentary in which each interview is framed—these are not simply transcriptions, but narrative accounts of the encounters between Owings and her subjects. Owings' curiosity about women in Nazi Germany grew out of her perception of Nazism as an essentially criminal regime, where the mass murder of Jews was not so much the system's worst crime as its defining moment; and the question that guided her work combined this presumption about the character of Nazism with some presumptions about the character of women: "Goddesses, nest-makers, Uberfrauen, Lysistratas in waiting, why did the women not stop the Nazis?" (p. xxv). As a result, the situation of Jews in Nazi Germany is a central theme of the book, even though there are only three women interviewed who experienced the Third Reich as Jews: one the daughter of a Mennonite mother and a father descended from baptized Jews; one raised an observant Jew whose mother was "Aryan" by birth (and whose account of the notorious events in the Rosenstrasse following the roundup of Berlin Jews for deportation in 1943 is particularly fascinating); and the would-be refugee who received help and advice from Margret Blersch and finally returned to Germany to survive underground. In each interview, the author makes a point of questioning her subject about her personal perception of Jews and her own experience of their persecution and murder. The result is that the speakers often disclose more than they thought they

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remembered about their Jewish neighbors and reveal more than they meant to about their attitudes toward Jews and their own place in the process that ended in the Holocaust. At the same time, the author (and, with her, the reader) begins to learn about where the Holocaust fits into the complexity of experience, the cacophony of messages, the baffling combination of danger and promise that Nazism represented for those Germans who were not marked for death. For all the naivete of Owings' approach, the fact that this much is revealed in answer to questions she had hardly thought to ask at first is a tribute both to her honesty and to her journalistic skill. There is an instructive contrast here with Daniel Goldhagen's recently published study of "ordinary Germans" and the Holocaust, Hitler's Willing Executioners (1996), which has succeeded in finding resonance with the same public at which Frauen is targeted. Despite more grandiloquent claims to scholarly rigor and moral righteousness, Goldhagen fails to convince, and thereby provides evidence of how difficult it really is to do what Owings does: to move beyond confirming naive prejudices to illuminating the conditions under which ordinary humanity can be silenced by the dictates of inhumanity. EVE ROSENHAFT

University of Liverpool

Efraim Zuroff, Occupation: Nazi Hunter—The Continuing Search for Perpetrators of the Holocaust. New York: Ktav and the Simon Wiesenthal Center, 1994. xxi + 384 pp. Efraim Zuroff is an angry man, and understandably so. He has devoted his energies over the past fifteen years to what has been—with but few exceptional bright spots—a seemingly futile enterprise. He has spent himself both emotionally and intellectually tracking down Nazi war criminals and trying to convince other nations—including his own adopted country, Israel—to prosecute them. In most cases he has come up against obstacles both open and clandestine. Within a short time after the war, it was clear to most observers that the notion of punishing Nazi war criminals—particularly criminals from countries that were allied with Nazi Germany—was politically troublesome. Most of the Allied countries spent little if any effort tracking down the various Lithuanians, Estonians, Ukrainians and others who had assisted the Nazis in their brutal acts of murder. Some treated them as anti-Communists who were better left alone. Many countries, the United States included, used some among them as sources of information. This was particularly the case with the German scientists who found in America not only a safe haven but also professional honor and economic rewards. The American immigration law was designed to favor displaced persons from the Baltic and other Communist-dominated countries. Many Nazi criminals managed to enter the country under the guise of DPs. Zuroff began his efforts to find Nazis by working (in Israel) with the Office of

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Special Investigations of the American Justice Department. Eventually, frustrated by the bureaucracy and politics that he felt were hampering the pace of progress, he joined the staff of the Simon Wiesenmal Center. He treats his work as far more than a job. For him—as for many who work in this area—it is a calling. And he has answered that calling from the outset with the passion of the religious novitiate. Even when it seemed that all roads were blocked, Zuroff continued in the effort to bring these criminals to justice. There were a few trials that ended in deportations from America. In a number of cases, individuals left the country rather than face the justice system. Then there was the deep disappointment of such cases as that involving Ivan Demjanjuk, whose initial conviction was overturned by the Israeli Supreme Court. For all the work that has been invested by Zuroff and others, one could argue that the actual payoff has been quite meager. This is true if one measures success solely by the number of convictions that have been obtained. However, if one sees this effort within a broader context, as Zuroff does, then it is possible to conclude that the task has not been futile. Zuroff believes that, just as he asked his parents, "what did you do when you learned that the holocaust was occurring in Europe," his children will ask him, "what did you do when you knew that these criminals were living out their lives secure in the knowledge that no one—including the victims' fellow Jews—seemed to care?" For Zuroff the mission of bringing Nazi criminals to justice goes beyond the question of whether these criminals pose a danger to society. Clearly, they no longer do. Nor is it just a matter of elementary justice: the principle that individuals must be held accountable for the harm they cause to others. The real danger is that if these criminals are allowed to go unpunished for their part in one of the worst atrocities in history, others in similar situations will conclude that they too can participate in mass murder and genocide at no cost. One cannot help but wonder whether the recent atrocities in the former Yugoslavia or in Rwanda might have been avoided if the perpetrators had had real reason to fear an international court of justice. Would they have so heedlessly murdered and raped if they had believed that there might be a price to pay? Ultimately Zuroff holds not only the German government and the former Allies responsible for the failure to bring the criminals to justice. He also blames something he calls the "Jewish Establishment" (the capital E is his). Still to be fully evaluated is the role of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, an institution that does not consider itself part of that Establishment. It is possible that without the Sturm and Drang it so unself-consciously created, some of the governments pilloried by the Center—including Australia, Britain, Sweden and Canada— would not have even made a halfhearted attempt to apprehend the criminals in their midst. Perhaps there was a need for an organization that did not mind being considered less than diplomatic, and it probably has a just claim to some of the credit for the little progress that has been made. But Zuroff also implies that at times the Wiesenthal Center's reputation as a group of "street fighters" ready to usurp the role of local Jewish communities might have actually set the cause back. It should be noted that this book was originally scheduled for publication in 1988 but that Antony Grecas, a Lithuanian Nazi war criminal living in Scotland, obtained an injunction barring its distribution. During the years in which publication was

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delayed, Zuroff fought back on two fronts: trying to ensure both the appearance of his book and the prosecution of Grecas. Zuroff's book is a breathless account of an uphill battle. Its strengths and weaknesses stem from the same source: the author's close personal involvement in the effort to apprehend Nazis. The book demonstrates how much of this work entails tedious, meticulous research in archives and libraries. Zuroff's subject still awaits the scholar who, with the proper distance, will step back and analyze whether anything could have been done to achieve a different end to this sorry affair. DEBORAH E. LIPSTADT Emory University

History and the Social Sciences

Steven E. Aschheim, Culture and Catastrophe: German and Jewish Confrontations with National Socialism and Other Crises. London: MacMillan, 1996.210pp. Fifty years after Nazism's collapse and the liberation of the death camps, one would think that some measure of consensus would exist about the causes of the Holocaust as well as the contributory role of antisemitism. In eight well-researched and informative essays, Steven Aschheim surveys a vast amount of literature pertaining to this subject, not so much in an effort to resolve the deep-seated interpretive disagreements, as to gain some overall clarity and understanding. Throughout the book, Aschheim's mastery of the vast stores of secondary literature is impressive. One of the book's leitmotifs concerns the limitations of the strictly functionalist or circumstantial account of the origins of the Holocaust. To this end, on at least two occasions, he cites the historian Dan Diner's adage, proffered at the time of the German Historikerstreit, that "Auschwitz is a no-man's land of understanding, a black box of explanation, a vacuum of extrahistorical significance, which sucks in attempts at historiographic interpretation. ... As the ultimate case, and thus as an absolute standard of history, this event can hardly be historicized." At the same time, Aschheim recognizes along with other historians that to fail to historicize can also constitute an abnegation of responsibility. For in lieu of historicization, myth can proliferate. Aschheim chronicles several myths that have imprinted themselves on Israeli national consciousness as a result of the failure to historicize the Holocaust (e.g., the myth of eternal antisemitism). Thus, it is not really a question of whether to historicize the Holocaust or not. Instead, it is a question of historicizing it in a responsible manner; that is, in a way that does intellectual justice to Diner's apparently "anti-intellectual" claim that, ultimately, it is a "black box of explanation, a vacuum of extrahistorical significance." It would seem that the most fitting attempts to account for the unaccountable are those that work within the parameters established by this conundrum. One of the most effective aspects of Aschheim's treatment of Holocaust historiography is his discussion of the limitations of narrowly functionalist explanations—for example, in the volume's concluding essay, "Small Forays, Grand Theories, and Deep Origins: Trends in the Historiography of the Holocaust" (originally published in vol. 10 of this annual). One can see that the very word choice one employs to describe the Shoah—from the Nazi-Deutsch Endlosung, to the theological "Holocaust," to Arno Mayer's preferred term, "Judeocide" (a term that is in itself highly objectionable)—is already fraught with major interpretive consequences. Functionalist explanations have the unintended (though often unconsciously in318

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tended) consequence of diverting blame from the perpetrators. Instead, responsibility is shifted to impersonal factors—the dislocations of modern society—that suggest the Holocaust could have happened anywhere. That it befell the Germans was almost a bit of bad luck, aBetriebsunfall, as it were. As a result, the ideological pivot of National Socialism—biological antisemitism, which was virtually its defining feature—is drastically downplayed in such accounts. Ironically, though perhaps unsurprisingly, "non-Jewish" German Jewish emigres played a major role in facilitating the popularity of the functionalist paradigm following the war: Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Franz Neumann, Hannah Arendt, Raul Hilberg. Perhaps Aschheim, who is also very much concerned with the contradictions of German Jewish identity in the volume, could have explored the reasons for this tendency at greater length in his study. Other themes Aschheim treats in Culture and Catastrophe are the Jewish retreat from liberal humanism during the Weimar republic, the myth of the Judaization of Germany, and the ambivalences of Hannah Arendt's conception of Jewish identity as brought out in her fascinating correspondence with Karl Jaspers. One of the more interesting chapters in the book treats the question of Nietzsche's status as a forerunner of National Socialism. Many of Aschheim's readers will probably already be familiar with his superb earlier study, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 1890-1990. However, in "Nietzsche, Anti-Semitism, and Mass Murder," it seems that Aschheim has upped the ante in comparison with his earlier volume. In The Nietzsche Legacy Aschheim took pains to show the wide variety of ways in which Nietzsche's teachings were received: by socialists, feminists and anarchists, as well as by German nationalists, concerning whom Nietzsche had few words of praise during his life. In Culture and Catastrophe, Aschheim makes a very strong case for the absolute centrality of Nietzsche's role in the worldview of National Socialism. Nietzsche's musings on breeding, power politics, the right of the strong, and so forth, are seen as having had a key role in according respectability to views that otherwise existed on the right-wing fringes of German society. According to this perspective, Nietzsche's real intellectual legacy manifested itself only in the aftermath of the First World War, when the foundations of German conservatism had been shaken and the German right looked for a new weltanschaaung, predicated on extreme positions, in order to regenerate itself. Many readers will wish that Aschheim had provided a concluding summary of his main arguments, or that he had made more of an attempt to systematically integrate the various chapters. These caveats aside, his study proves relevant and illuminating on a variety of counts. RICHARD WOLIN Rice University

Pierre Birnbaum and Ira Katznelson (eds.), Paths of Emancipation: Jews, States, and Citizenship. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995. x + 308 pp.

After a long period of dormancy, the subject of Jewish emancipation has returned to the center of interest. The present book, Paths of Emancipation, exemplifies the renewed

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attention. Its origin in a seminar course in New York, followed by university meetings supported by foundation grants in Fiesole, Italy, and Paris, itself points to the broad interest that the subject now attracts. Everything has changed since a few generations ago, when Jewish emancipation was exalted as the opening of a new age in Jewish history, the end of Jewish rightlessness and oppression. The nations, so it was once believed, had taken the Jews to their bosom as equals. Such a benign view was bound to produce a reaction, especially when the blemishes of emancipation became clearer and more numerous, and when the course of history mocked the new age that emancipation had supposedly ushered in. Not only emancipation but its forerunner, the Haskalah, was widely repudiated in Western as well as in unemancipated Eastern Europe. It became an accepted view that the goals of emancipation were illusory and the Jews' welcome among the nations was self-delusion. The true result of emancipation, many thoughtful Jews came to believe, was the collapse of Jewish community life and farreaching but ultimately aborted assimilation. Zionism was to a significant extent founded on disillusion with the promise of emancipation. Most sober historians held simply that ema ipation was not final redemption but only a substantial improvement, the opening of any, but not all, opportunities to Jews. However, scholars such as Simon Dubnow and Ben-Zion Dinur—historians who were both East Europeans and Jewish nationalist ideologists of different persuasions—and their many followers went further in questioning the value or the viability of emancipation. Still, in England and in the United States, Jewish emancipation was never seriously challenged and the optimistic view continued to be held. Cecil Roth, the leading Anglo-Jewish historian of his generation, who died in 1970, continued to hail emancipation in England, especially when horrific events were occurring just across the English Channel. A notable American example was the prominent historian Oscar Handlin, whose history of American Jewry, published in 1954, expressed the celebratory tone implied in its title, Adventure in Freedom. Handlin's viewpoint, while perhaps extreme to contemporary taste, still holds the field. The recent five-volume collective work, The Jewish People in America, edited by Henry L. Feingold, implicitly upholds emancipation as definitive and benign. The five volumes do not even discuss it, although their authors do display some concern over the way in which unrestricted freedom may have affected Judaism. In Britain, a younger generation of aggressive, talented historians has redrawn Roth's halcyon picture. One of them, Tony Kushner, has even speculated seriously how the British people would have acted in the event of a Nazi conquest and the extension of the Final Solution to Great Britain.1 On the continent, bitter reevaluation of Jewish emancipation was inevitable. The largely negative view of Dubnow and Dinur, shared by many others, has not been superseded, but questions have been raised, as in the work under review here, about their conception of Jewish emancipation as a single process drawn across Europe (and America, of which they knew little). This negative view obviously regarded emancipation as a snare and an invitation to an ultimately futile attempt at assimilation. The new critical evaluation, in the view of Pierre Birnbaum and Ira Katznelson, starts with Jacob Katz's book of 1973, Out of the Ghetto: The Social Background of Jewish Emancipation, 1770-1870, although he too looks upon emancipation as a single long process that lasted over a century. In fact, the reevaluation might have begun with Katznelson's illustrious predecessor at Columbia University, Salo W. Baron, whose article "Jewish

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Emancipation" appeared in Volume 8 of the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences in 1932. Baron long held that Jewish emancipation was the necessary result of the abolition of social and legal privilege by the European revolutions. He thereby reduced the importance of Jewish ideological thought in achieving emancipation. Katz's work, in contrast, focuses largely on ideological developments within the Jewish world, mainly in Germany, while taking little notice of external developments or social and economic history.2 Katz's conception of the social, as used in his title, is approximately a society's self-consciousness. Todd M. Endelman's respected study The Jews of Georgian England, 1714-1830 (1979) argues to the contrary, that emancipation and a modern Jewish community came about, in the English case, not through ideology but through the establishment of modern Jewish social and educational institutions. The German model is by no means the necessary one. The present authors likewise differ with Katz's almost exclusive focus on Germany, the incubator of ideologies. They particularly dispute his view of emancipation as basically a single movement playing itself out in many countries. In the collective work that Katz edited some years after Out of the Ghetto, entitled Toward Modernity: The European Jewish Model (1987), he sought to buttress this conception. The authors of its generally excellent articles duly fulfilled the assignment allotted to them, analyzing the influence of German Jewry upon their respective countries, but the plurality of emancipations was accepted—to some extent even by Katz himself. Emancipation as a plural phenomenon is forcefully presented in the recent work edited by Jonathan Frankel and Steven J. Zipperstein, Assimilation and Community: The Jews in Nineteenth Century Europe (1992), especially in Frankel's introduction. Plurality can be taken too far, though none of the authors does this. Jewish emancipation was not one movement, yet the movements in various lands certainly had links and a common intellectual basis. Readers of R.R. Palmer's masterly and influential work, The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760—1800, which argues for an "Atlantic revolution," will naturally expect to find not only general but also Jewish links in the countries that fall under Palmer's rubric—most of Europe and America. The Frankel-Zipperstein work, as well as Toward Modernity, originated in scholars' conferences. All these volumes concentrate on the fruits of emancipation more than on its process. They take due account of research since 1945 on Jewish history after emancipation, and seek to show how some Jews took the way out of the Jewish community or even out of Judaism itself, and how those who remained within redefined Jewish life and loyalty. As one of course expects, Paths of Emancipation contains chapters on Germany (Werner E. Mosse), France (Pierre Birnbaum), Italy (Dan. V. Segre), Britain (Geoffrey Alderman) and Holland (Hans Daalder). Probably less anticipated are its chapters on the United States by Ira Katznelson and Russia by Michael Stanislawski. Aron Rodrigue's contribution on Turkey, where emancipation was accompanied by neither liberalism nor the end of communal autonomy, is a welcome novelty. It is impossible not to write ideologically about Jewish emancipation. That is, can anyone write about most of the countries listed without having in mind, even when not mentioning it, the vast tragedy that overwhelmed them? The authors try.

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Mosse provides a fully informed, well-balanced presentation of German Jewry's fitful movement toward incomplete emancipation and how it was undercut even while it was progressing. He fuses felicitously both legal and social trends. Birnbaum, writing on France, pays comparatively little attention to the revolution and Napoleonic period and concentrates effectively on the economic progress and faltering integration of the upper Jewish bourgeoisie. Of particular originality is his work on Juifs d'Etat, those Jews at the higher level of the army and the civil service (the level that really ran France). Segre on Italy stresses the leading role played by the Jewish bourgeoisie of Piedmont in the movement for Italian unification, which brought emancipation to the Jews of the entire peninsula, while Hans Daalder probes into the reception of the emancipated Jews into the segmented society of Holland. Both scholars concentrate on the generations that followed the acts of emancipation. Britain, together with Holland and Italy, have been seen as shining examples of successful emancipation. Geoffrey Alderman, however, stresses the "obsession" of British Jews with their carefully cultivated image as model citizens and their anxiety about anything that might bring this image into question, whether it was an unflattering novel or mass immigration. The Jews of the United States did not require legal emancipation; but immigrants arriving from Europe underwent emancipation existentially by crossing the ocean. The United States, founded upon liberalism and Enlightenment—which were never subjected to reactionary romanticism as happened in France and Germany—"also furnished a site where the outer limits placed upon entry [into American society] . . . were revealed with unusual clarity" (p. 159). And "the particularities of the American state, economy and culture made it especially permeable to Jewish, and other white, newcomers, albeit not without a price" (p. 163). This is Katznelson's theme: the promise versus the menace of America. He declares his intention "to inquire about the degree to which citizens remained strangers" (p. 158, n. 2). The Jews were free yet never "insiders." Accepted only partially and reluctantly into civil society, American Jews established a civil society with their own community and institutions. Yet, as emphasized by Katznelson and countless observers, they constituted an unparalleled success story—whatever the price they had to pay—in the history of the diaspora. Paths of Emancipation, alongside Assimilation and Community, Toward Modernity and Out of the Ghetto, leads us to a view of Jewish emancipation without illusions or bitterness. Yet now, following the cataclysmic events of the twentieth century—the complete opposite of what emancipation taught us to expect—do we yet understand what emancipation really meant? LLOYD P. GARTNER Tel-Aviv University

Notes 1. Sec Tony Kushner, The Persistence of Prejudice (Manchester: 1989), 198-202. 2. Sec Lloyd P. Gartner (review of Out of the Ghetto), American Jewish Historical Quarterly (Dec. 1975), 179-182.

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Rose Cohen, Out of the Shadow: A Russian Jewish Girlhood on the Lower East Side. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995. xxi + 313 pp.

In 1918, when Rose Cohen's autobiography was originally published, a New York Times reviewer wrote: "This is the story of a Russian Jewish immigrant girl who came to this country at the age of 12, and who, after years of hard work, privation and perplexity, found a settled life. ... It leads to no conclusion of arresting prosperity. ... It is just such a record as may be true of thousands of immigrant girls. Therein its greatest value lies."1 That value endures more than seventy-five years later. Out of the Shadow, though the work of an author only recently schooled in English, is a vivid depiction of many themes in Jewish life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including the East European shtetl experience and the vicissitudes of uprooting, leaving Russia, crossing the Atlantic and transplanting in an alien culture. Rose Cohen also reports in a remarkably unself-conscious way her impressions of life in the tenements of New York City's Lower East Side, the working conditions of the garment shops and the influence of settlement-house staff and volunteers. Thirty-eight when she wrote her story, Cohen is able to give us a valuable sense of immediacy rather than a selective "looking back" at the process of acculturation from the perspective of old age. Also, unlike other better-known immigrant memoirists such as Mary Antin or Morris Raphael Cohen, Rose displays no need to fit her narrative to the myth of an untroubled acculturation, free of significant trials and costs.2 And unlike the more ideologically oriented "autobiographers," Elizabeth Hasanovitz and Theresa Malkiel, for example, Rose Cohen is less inclined to reduce her life to "class struggle" or to the dynamics of gender,3 Instead she tells the relatively simple, unvarnished story of a life still very much in process. Encouraged by her instructor in night school, Rose Cohen wrote a personal memoir that reflected the broader experience of Jewish immigrants in New York at the turn of the century. Her rendition reinforces the idea that there were powerful links between secularized Jewish ethics and disproportionate Jewish labor militancy. In Eastern Europe, Cohen absorbed the social justice views of the Prophets by saturating herself in Hebrew scripture and religious literature. "Besides the Bible we had a few religious books," Cohen said. "I read these again and again" (p. 13). In the United States, unwittingly mirroring the rhetoric of Karl Marx, Cohen asked her father, "does everybody in America live like this? Go to work early, come home late, eat and go to sleep? And the next day again work, eat, sleep? Will I have to do that too always?" (p. 74). Her father implied tha the solution for Cohen was marriage; but he also encouraged his daughter to j n the union, which she did, coming to count her "little red union book" as a prized possession, and going on to become herself a labor activist in the garment shops. Her story also illustrates just how complex and difficult it was to do the great American balancing act of acculturating while remaining Jewish. Rose Cohen rejected much of her parents' lifestyle, as well as the suitor her parents tried to arrange for her, and as time passed she looked toward her own development as a writer and "as a person." Her development as a writer appears to have ended, curiously and

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sadly, in 1922, but her development as a person, though incomplete at the time of the publication of the autobiography, borrowed supports from two worlds—that of Jewish tradition and that of American newness. When Rose Cohen first landed in the United States, she found that her father— who had preceded her by only a few months—had changed. "I saw a ... man with a closely cut beard and no sign of earlocks. ... I could scarcely believe my eyes. Father had been the most pious Jew in our neighborhood." Now he "touched coin on the sabbath. ... I wondered was it true, as Mindle said, that 'in America one at once becomes a libertine?'" (pp. 69, 78). Not at once, and not entirely. Cohen described life on the Lower East Side as if "on the whole we were still in our old village in Russia" (p. 246). Yet in relating incidents of antisemitism, Cohen implied that the maltreatment of Jews was the only "familiar thing" in America "where there were so many new and strange things for me to understand" (p. 104). Apparently both "worlds" were available and influential. And the American world became increasingly accessible with public schooling, garment work and night school. When Cohen grew ill she also discovered the wider cultural context of Lillian Wald's Henry Street Settlement, and of the Educational Alliance where she could borrow books. At the uptown Presbyterian Hospital she met wealthy, educated non-Jews who sponsored summer outings for downtown children. She also saw more of—and was attracted to—a broader American civilization when for several summers running, she worked at a Connecticut retreat for immigrant children. America was appealing but Jewish tradition and values remained important. Rose Cohen's story illustrates that, over time, without jettisoning the whole Jewish past, one could become an American and still retain the consciousness of a religiously authenticated ethnic identity. Rose herself put it best: when she attended public school in New York City in the early 1900s, she "had a glimpse of the New World," and it produced in her a powerful "desire to get away from the old order of things." For a time she "went groping around blindly," but later, having come "to see that the Old World was not all dull and the new not all glittering," Rose stood between them "with a hand in each" (p. 246). Given the inability of several diligent researchers to reconstruct the facts about her death, and the possibility of a suicide attempt—sensitively explored by Thomas Dublin in a serviceable introduction to the 1995 edition of this 1918 work—it is not clear that Cohen continued to perform the balancing act with success. But "uncertainty" and unresolved conflict were also part of the experience of the immigrant generation along with accommodation and acculturation, and all were part of the life of Rose Cohen that is so powerfully expressed in this memoir. GERALD SORIN SUNY at New Paltz

Notes 1. New York Times, 1 Dec. 1918, sec. VII, 7. 2. Mary Antin, The Promised Land (Princeton: 1969, rpt. of 1912 edition); Morris Raphael Cohen, A Dreamer's Journey (Boston: 1949).

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3. Elizabeth Hasanovitz, One of Them (Boston: 1918); Theresa Malkiel, Diary of a Shirtwaist Striker (New York: 1910).

Lynn Davidman and Shelly Tenenbaum (eds.), Feminist Perspectives on Jewish Studies. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994. xi + 280 pp.

Some twenty-five years after scholars began turning their professional attention to the experience and expression of women in Jewish society from biblical times to the present, Lynn Davidman and Shelly Tenenbaum have gathered a collection of essays gauging the impact of that scholarship on the field of Jewish studies. The authors of the essays are some of the scholars who have pioneered the study of women and gender in Jewish society despite incomprehension, at best, and rigid opposition, at worst, from their mentors and colleagues. Almost all of the eleven authors—the exceptions are Tikva Frymer Kensky on biblical studies and Susan Sered on anthropology—testify that the study of women and of gender in Jewish society, the latter meaning the study of men as much as women, has not been integrated into the mainstream of Jewish studies. This is so despite the significant corpus of writing that has accumulated and despite the fact that the study of gender and women is a matter of course in the rest of the academic world. The bias that underlies such resistance and its expression in such crucial areas as graduate admissions and the awarding of grants, not to mention jobs, is itself worthy of study ("If you want to succeed in [Jewish studies], do not write your dissertation on a woman's topic. Wait until you have tenure," as Paula Hyman [history] paraphrases the advice.) The notion that Jewish gender studies or the study of Jewish women is any more subjective or biased than studies that focus exclusively and unconsciously on men and ignore gender would be laughable, were it not still so serious an impediment to the pursuit of knowledge. As Hava TiroshRothschild notes in her essay on philosophy, Jewish studies itself has an undeniable nonacademic agenda: cultural propagation. Luckily, the editors and authors of this volume, and those whose work they assess, were able to overcome systematic discouragement and the lack of prior models in Jewish studies and proceed with their work. This volume is a superb statement on the ways in which feminist perspectives enrich our knowledge about Jewish society. First, of course, is the sheer discovery of new information about half of the Jewish population, women. Women are mentioned in the Bible and rabbinic writings but have not been the traditional focus of scholarly investigation. Feminist scholars study women's economic activities, their place in the family and community, their actual religious universe and the ways in which they have chiseled out spheres of ritual power in gender-bifurcated traditional societies—a far cry from stereotyped treatises about "The Woman" in rabbinic law. Such "women-centered" inquiry highlights the ways in which Jewish women's belief and observance differ from that of men and, as Joyce Antler (American

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Jewish literature), Naomi Sokoloff (Hebrew literature) and Sonya Michel (cinema) show, it illustrates the distinctiveness of women's perceptions and expression. It also demonstrates the pitfalls of generalizing about Jewish experience from data solely about men. For instance, in their essay on sociology, Davidman and Tenenbaum cite a leading scholar's own realization (their paraphrase) that by neglecting to control for gender, studies measuring the effects of Jewish education on identity reached the counterintuitive conclusion that those who had ... no formal Jewish education scored higher on measures of Jewish identity than those who had considerable instruction. This finding only makes sense when one takes into account. . . that Jewish women, including those from highly observant homes, generally have significantly less exposure to Jewish education than men. . . . Therefore, the correlation between education and identification is different for women than for men (pp. 145-146).

Studying women, then, not only teaches us about women but uncloaks the gender-specificity of male Jewish experience, revealing that all Jewish experience is shaped by gender. This is one of the most important contributions of Jewish feminist scholarship. The power relationships between women and men expressed in biblical and rabbinic texts, depicted in Jewish fiction and film, formalized in philosophical treatises, or actualized in the family and in communal institutions are prime subjects for feminist research, as are the manifold ways in which women are made subordinate to men. The resulting insights into gender and power relations in Jewish society also constitute a major new contribution to Jewish studies. The essays in this book are uniformly excellent. They are immensely informative (the notes are extremely rich), well conceived and well written. The authors argue important substantive issues in their disciplines: history, literature, theology, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, film. They make trenchant analyses of the ways that masculinist bias in Jewish studies has constructed particular avenues of study and obstructed others. The essays of Judith Plaskow and Hava Tirosh-Rothschild in particular are models of incisive thought and expression; Tirosh-Rothschild is especially broad and thorough in her assessment of her field. Susan Sered performs a great service in bringing the fruits of Hebrew-language anthropological research on various populations of Israeli women to broad scholarly attention. The authors are all passionately engaged in their feminism and their specific areas; it was bemusing, for instance, to read Frymer-Kensky (Bible) and Judith Hauptman (rabbinics) each maintain that the other's sources harbored the more fundamental sexist bias. In effect, this book is a complement and companion to Shaye J.D. Cohen and Edward L. Greenstein's edited collection, The State of Jewish Studies (1990). It is a profoundly important collection, a superb introduction, as well as a contribution, to feminist Jewish studies. It should be read by everyone in Jewish studies. SHULAMIT S. MAGNUS Stanford University

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Gertrude Wishnick Dubrovsky, The Land Was Theirs: Jewish Farmers in the Garden State. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1992. 250 pp. Robert Alan Goldberg, Back to the Soil: The Jewish Farmers of Clarion, Utah and Their World. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1986. 196 pp. The last fifteen years in American Jewish studies have witnessed a shift of paradigm—practiced, to be sure, rather than spelled out in a systematic fashion— from the search for the common patterns in the experience of the American Jews toward a focus on historical contingency and the diversity of their economic, political and communal activities. The two books under review here provide new evidence to illustrate this diversity, and for anyone who, like me, views the history of human groups and societies as inherently "polyphonic," this alone constitutes a welcome contribution to scholarship. The gain is augmented by the fact that both books deal with Jewish farmers in rural America: a type and a location that thus far have been studied very little. Back to the Soil examines the Jewish colony of Clarion, Utah, during its shortlived, five-year existence. As told by Robert Alan Goldberg, the Clarion Jewish story began in 1911, when some eighty immigrant families of "heterogeneous radicals" moved by the idea of a Jewish "return to the soil" left eastern cities to farm in the West. All their efforts to succeed in this venture—they were assisted by the Utah government and the Mormon church—were ultimately frustrated by a buildup of adverse circumstances such as a harsh climate, poor soil, persistent financial difficulties and, not the least, destructive dissension within the group caused partly by personality conflicts and partly by ideological battles among socialists and radicals of different persuasions. In 1916 the experiment was abandoned, although a dozen or so families remained "privately" on the land until the mid-1920s. Goldberg's purpose is not to present a mere narrative of the Clarion Jews' history: he sets out to identify, through the investigation of this particular case, the causal factors ("variables" as he calls them) responsible for the survival or failure of Jewish agricultural colonies in general, in the United States as well as elsewhere in the world. Five such factors are farming experience, environmental conditions, capital availability, the morale of the colonists, and existence of (employment) alternatives (see p. 134). It is in this attempt to construct a general model that the study is the least convincing, and for two equally important reasons. The duration of the Clarion project—five years—is much too short to allow for generalizations about the changing "causal weights" of the various factors involved (especially farming experience). Furthermore, the comparative cases that are cited to confirm the proposed model are based on evidence that is much too sparse (information about the colonies in the United States comes mostly from very short and general articles fcf. pp. 137— 141, 171-172]) or much too anecdotal rather than analytical (regarding the moshavot and kibbutzim in Palestine; cf., pp. 142-148). Two more weaknesses of the Clarion study, one substantive, the other methodological, detract from its value. The first is the virtual absence of women and thus any reference to possible gender differences—even though this factor could have been significant, considering Goldberg's passing references (e.g., pp. 103, 106) to

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the women's exhaustion and unhappiness on the farms. The second problem concerns the reliability of the sources used in gathering information. For example, of the forty-two interviews, six were conducted by phone, and nine by persons other than the author. Were those people research collaborators or, perhaps, relatives of the informants? Did the agenda of the interviews and their scope differ depending on who conducted them and on the methods used? While it does not invalidate the entire project, such cavalier treatment of the accepted rules of reporting on fieldwork diminishes the scholarly level of the study. Dubrovsky's The Land Was Theirs explores the history of American Jewish farmers in Farmingdale, New Jersey, from the period of 1919 until the mid-1970s. It is a study of the ethnographic kind: close to the ground and rich in the details of the Lebenswelten of the settlers—a book made livelier by the fact that the author herself grew up in this colony and can provide the subtle insights of an insider. Dubrovsky's engaging prose adds to the attractiveness of her story. Starting with an informative overview of different Jewish agricultural colonies in America, her study describes the physical and social environment of Farmingdale and the pioneers who settled there in 1919-1920 (like the Clarion group, they were mostly secular "Jewish Jews," but unlike the former they ventured onto the land individually). In the following sections, the book depicts—in the voices of Dubrovsky and her interviewees— the sociocultural profiles of the five subsequent categories of people who joined the colony: East European immigrants; refugees from Germany; professionals from the big cities rendered jobless by the Great Depression or seeking a life "close to nature;" DP's; and in addition, the second generation descendants of all the above. There follows next a description of the farmers' daily pursuits: their economic activities, their social life (organized and informal) and the education of their children. The last part of the book, entitled "Growing Up in Farmingdale," is a personal memoir of the author, focused, as she informs the readers, on those themes that "illustrate the preoccupations and mores of the larger community" (p. xv). In addition, Dubrovsky provides in the preface a cogent account of the fieldwork, including a brief but interesting discussion of possible epistemic gains and biases deriving from the author's position as a former actor in the reconstructed story. The main weakness of the book is the opposite of that to be found in the study of Clarion. Whereas Goldberg "oversystematizes" his limited evidence, Dubrovsky lets her information flow, as it were, in a stream of consciousness, with no attempt to analyze and order it in some fashion. As a result, her study is characterized by informational confusion: for example, we are told that the Farmingdale colony was riven by multiple splits (pp. 62, 83, 218), but at the same time that its members shared a strong feeling of communal togetherness (pp. 71, 92, 101, 111). If what characterized this Jewish minisociety was "social order through fighting"—a phenomenon well known to the social scientists—it would have been helpful if the author had elaborated on the specific issues dividing the various sociocultural groups, generations and age cohorts. Related to this lack of discipline in the story's narrative is one other shortcoming in this otherwise informative and enjoyable book. Again, it involves gender. Although (in contrast to the study of Clarion), The Land Was Theirs contains a good deal of information about women, it too remains silent on the possible importance of gender differences in the experiences of the

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Farmingdale Jewish farmers. This silence is rather puzzling, because the personal account of the author's own gradual "woman's liberation" clearly indicates that she is aware of the issue and could have included it in the interviews she conducted. On a more general level, as told by Dubrovsky, the story of the birth, life and eventual demise of the Farmingdale colony illustrates the considerable variety of the American Jewish experience, with divergences not only between urban and rural Jews but also among Jewish agricultural communities. It suggests, too, that more than the five "variables" identified by Goldberg were at play in keeping some of those colonies alive. In this case, such additional factors were the kind of agriculture practiced by the colonists; the proximity of large Jewish sociocultural centers (which helped remedy loneliness and isolation); and the specific goals of the settlers. Both studies invite further investigation—comparative projects would seem particularly challenging—on the diversity of the American Jewish experience; it is their unquestionable contribution that they stimulate the desire for more. EWA MORAWSKA

University of Pennsylvania

Gerhard Falk, American Judaism in Transition: The Secularization of a Religious Community. Lanham: University Press of America: 1995. xv + 411 pp. Findings from the 1990 National Jewish Population Study have generated both consensus and debate among students of the American Jewish community and communal leaders. Most scholars and community leaders agree that relatively high intermarriage rates, low organizational affiliation rates and low rates of Jewish religious observance mean a substantial segment of American Jewry is assimilating. However, disagreement exists over the policies Jewish institutions and communal leaders should undertake to maintain a vibrant and cohesive community. Some argue for stopping the flow of Jews at the margin by working to bring assimilating Jews back into the community. Others suggest that communal resources should be directed toward Jews who are actively engaged in the community, particularly in its religious institutions, because they are the community's current and future source of vitality.! Gerhard Falk's American Judaism in Transition: The Secularization of a Religious Community suggests that both sets of policies are desirable, that both secular and religious sectors of the community are important. Unfortunately, the uneven quality of the book limits Falk's success in attempting to reconcile the two views. For most of the book, Falk seems to doubt the continued viability of the American Jewish community. Implicit in his argument is the claim that, historically, the practice of Judaism as a religious system set Jews apart from others and provided Jewish communities with their strength. Secularization—the displacement of religion from public to private life and the marginalization of religion in private life— has wreaked havoc on American Jews and their community. Falk devotes separate

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chapters to detailing the deleterious impact of secularization on American Jewish families, Jewish education, Jewish religious observance and the organized Jewish community, drawing the conclusion that the indifference of American Jews to Judaism and to the distinctive obligations and joys surrounding a religious life are leading to an enhanced probability of Jews vanishing into American society. "Secularization is now the greatest threat to Jewish survival because that attitude must lead to the disappearance of Jews into the mainstream of non-Jewish culture and the disappearance of Jewish life from the United States," Falk writes. "Except for the Orthodox Jewish community . . . Jews are nearly indistinguishable from the surrounding peoples among whom they live" (pp. 317-318). Falk follows these chapters on the secularization of the Jewish community with a chapter explaining why secular societies and institutions in general, and secular Jewish institutions in particular, cannot provide the transcendent meaning to life that humans require and that only religious institutions and worldviews can furnish. Yet the concluding chapter takes the opposite approach. Claiming that religious divisions in American Judaism are harmful to the Jewish community, Falk praises the secular sector of the community: "Since the secular organizations do not suffer from denominational wrangling and disagreements but seek to work towards a common cause, it can be argued in conclusion that secularization is the very strength of American Jewishness and Judaism and that its perpetuation is assured precisely because American Jews have become largely secular" (p. 375). Beyond the fact that secular Jewish organizations do indeed experience conflict among themselves (consider, for example, the discord that develops among various secular Jewish political organizations), the most baffling aspect of this sudden turnaround is that Falk has devoted so much of the book to lamenting the secular nature of American Jewishness. He has also just spent a chapter explaining why humans require religious systems by which to live their lives in meaningful ways. The positive assessments of both the religious and the secular sectors of the community appear to be in direct contradiction to each other and consequently the attempt to reconcile the two views is not subtle and complex, but rather disjointed, jarring and confusing. Other aspects of the book vary in their quality as well. Studies of ethnic and religious minorities should be conducted broadly, not myopically, and Falk should be credited for placing his examination of American Jews within a larger investigation of the society in which American Jews live and the historical patterns that have shaped this society. Secularization is a general process in Western society, even as variations in the impact of secularization on different groups can be observed. Falk makes clear that what has happened to American Jews is part of a larger story of what has happened to people living in Western societies generally and to the people who reside in the United States specifically. Having established that context, however, Falk's explanation of the determinants of secularization generally, and of American Jewish secularization specifically, is unconvincing. Falk details the contributions of intellectuals—Jews and Christians, Europeans and Americans, philosophers and natural scientists and novelists—to secularization. Central to his argument is the claim that the disproportionate tendency of American Jews to receive higher education and to be exposed to the main

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currents of Western intellectual history, particularly its secularizing and anticlerical emphasis, accounts for the high rates of secularization among American Jews. While there is no doubt that intellectual ideas have consequences, Falk's explanation is incomplete. Missing from his account is any substantive discussion of the other generally recognized determinants of secularization: industrialization, urbanization and the emergence of large-scale economies; political development and the rise of centralized states; mass migrations and the spread of communication technologies, all of which have served to dissolve traditional social bonds based on religious worldviews and institutions. Similarly, the author's use of evidence is inconsistent. Falk extensively cites the cogent overview by Barry Kosmin and his colleagues of the National Jewish Population Survey of 1990,2 the first representative survey of American Jews in twenty years and an important source of data on American Jewish behavior, but he conducts no additional analysis of the data. Furthermore, the validity of other evidence that Falk brings to his arguments is questionable. The basis for a discussion about the role of women in Jewish families is a single book published in 1969, and a single newspaper article serves as evidence for arguing that Jewish social service agencies, motivated by the requirements of organizational survival, often jettison Jewish religious practices in order to attract non-Jewish clientele. In still other instances, claims are made without supporting evidence. At a time when students of American Jewry and Jewish communal leaders debate which policies will be most beneficial to the Jewish community, Falk's assertions of the importance of both the secular and the religious sectors of the community should be a welcome reminder that an ethnic community has multiple bases of cohesion and strength.3 Unfortunately, Falk's claims are entangled in analytical contradictions, partial explanations and somewhat fragmentary evidence rather than flowing smoothly from an analytical synthesis, fuller explanations and more valid data; and these deficiencies make his arguments considerably less valuable than they might otherwise have been. LAURENCE A. KOTLER-BERKOWITZ Brown University

Notes 1. See Jack Wertheimer, Charles S. Liebman and Steven M. Cohen, "How to Save American Jews," Commentary (Jan. 1996), 47-51. 2. Barry Kosmin, Sidney Goldstein, Joseph Waksberg, Nava Lerer, Ariella Keysar and Jeffrey Scheckner, Highlights of the CJF 1990 National Jewish Population Survey (New York: 1991). 3. See Calvin Goldscheider and Alan S. Zuckerman, The Transformation of the Jews (Chicago: 1984).

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Sylvia Barack Fishman, A Breath of Life: Feminism in the American Jewish Community. Hanover: Brandeis University Press, 1993, 320 pp. Described by Paula E. Hyman as "the first comprehensive and balanced analysis of the impact of feminism on contemporary American Jewish life," Sylvia Barack Fishman's work is indeed an eye-opener, an up-to-date work on all aspects of this new social movement that touches the lives of every member of the community, male and female alike. In preparing her work, Fishman conducted 120 interviews with American Jewish women aged 18 to 80. Replete with data and statistics, the book is nonetheless very readable, in part because Fishman also draws examples from the visual arts to shed light on her topic. Feminism has challenged women to reshape their identity, to absorb messages of equality and free choice, and to integrate these with more traditional "feminine traits" and "natural" behavior. This has not been an easy process in general; for American Jewish women there has also been the issue of how to deal with their religious identity, while conforming to the American environment in which they live. Family life has been the area most affected by this new social movement. The statistical data tells the story: in the 1940s, more than four out of five Jewish women were married by the age of 25—more than any other ethnic group in the U.S. But by 1990, only 12 percent of women in the 18 to 24 age group were married; 25 percent of Jewish women aged 35 to 64 were not. In the past, married couples made up 95 percent of the Jewish community; the change is dramatic. The delay in marriage has been accompanied by an increase in intermarriage. Women who delay marriage until they establish their careers tend to "marry out" more than younger women. Moreover, hesitations concerning the question of intermarriage often cause further delays. Increase in the divorce rate is another feature characteristic of recent decades, caused in part by changing attitudes toward married life in general and more specifically by women's attitudes toward work and children. In all, not only the Jewish woman but the whole Jewish family has undergone profound changes in the last twenty to thirty years. In Fishman's words, "if Jewish tradition called the woman 'the cornerstone of the household,' today's Jewish women have the opportunity to participate in the architecture of their homes as well" (p. 43). The decreasing number of households in the American Jewish community presents new challenges to Jewish society, which traditionally has been composed primarily of families. Today's community has somehow to learn to adapt to the needs of singles and one-parent families. Change is also evident in more traditionally structured families. As Fishman notes, "many women speak warmly of the positive impact of feminism on family relationships, particularly its encouragement of men to participate actively and lovingly in their children's lives from infancy onward" (p. 63). Although, as she shows, the proclaimed desire of Jewish women to have families has not lessened, feminism has caused them to rethink the timing of childbearing and basic family lifestyles. A topic that has led to considerable debate is the Jewish woman's participation in religious life in general and in the synagogue in particular. The exclusion of the

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Jewish woman from numerous religious commandments has caused many women to drift away from the practice of their religion. Paradoxically, feminism has brought some Jewish women more centrally into the world of "public" Judaism—by means of women's prayer groups, for example, thus bringing new vigor into some sections of the American Jewish community. Another cardinal change has occurred in the sphere of education for Jewish women. Fishman comprehensively describes such changes, concluding that through education, "Jewish feminism is providing Jewish women with the intellectual tools with which to fully appreciate, participate in, and understand the richness and complexity of their own heritage" (p. 198). Throughout the book, the author's enthusiasm for feminism and the opportunities it has opened up for women is evident. Fishman does not ignore the disadvantages that feminism has brought to women's lives, nor does she overlook the risks that feminism has brought to Judaism. Her conclusion, however, is optimistic: "Fortunately, Jewish feminism has not only posed keen challenges to American Jewish life but has also provided powerful new tools with which creatively to forge a vibrant future" (p. 249). MARGALIT SHILO Bar-Han University

Reena Sigman Friedman, These Are Our Children: Jewish Orphanages in the United States, 1880-1925. Hanover: Brandeis University Press/University Press of New England, 1994. xv + 298 pp. When the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Newt Gingrich, called for a renewed emphasis on the institutionalization of orphans and the children of "dysfunctional" families, his proposal conjured up Dickensian images of harsh treatment and rigid discipline in forbidding Victorian mansions. Since the affected children seemed likely to come disproportionately from ethnic and racial minorities, some also saw the speaker's program as a threat to the demographic and cultural integrity of those communities. Few on either side of the debate bothered to investigate the impact of orphanages on their inmates and on the surrounding society during their heyday in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Reena Sigman Friedman's examination of how one ethnic and religious group took care of children whose parents were unable to do so is thus very timely. During the period that she discusses, this problem became particularly acute for the Jewish community, as burgeoning immigration and widespread poverty disrupted family life. As it turns out, only a small minority of the children at Jewish orphanages were full orphans. Most had one or two living parents who, because of poverty, illness or desertion, could or would not take care of them. According to statistics presented by Friedman, nearly half of the youngsters in Jewish childcare institutions were the children of widowed or deserted mothers (not a clear majority, as she states). But

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large numbers of fathers with absent or disabled wives also handed their children over to the orphanages for varying periods of time (pp. 156-158). These statistics, together with formal admissions policies and the actions of the disrupted families themselves, suggest just how necessary it seemed at the time for families to have two fully functioning parents. Focusing on the Hebrew Orphan Asylum of New York, the Jewish Foster Home of Philadelphia and the Cleveland Jewish Orphan Asylum, Friedman places the institutions in the context of the struggle waged by the established American Jewish community to assimilate the newer arrivals and their offspring. The homes, she writes, were "Americanization agencies par excellence" (p. 9) in which administrators had complete control over the socialization of their charges. The author argues that the leaders of the homes sought to remake the children "in their own image" (pp. 95, 97, 125, 132, 144), indoctrinating them into a liberal form of Americanized Judaism and educating them in the duties of citizenship. She fails, however, to differentiate adequately between the wealthy businessmen who sat on the boards and the professionals—in later years, these were often graduates of the homes— who staffed the institutions. Moreover, Friedman argues that the Jewish orphanages aimed "to train productive, reliable and obedient members of the industrial workforce" (p. 124), an image that resembled neither leadership group. Friedman demonstrates that the Jewish orphanages fit very much into a larger American social context. They flourished together with other similar institutions after the Civil War in response to increased need and changing ideas about appropriate childcare. They followed, in part, the example set by Catholic institutions, and like them were motivated by the desire to keep children out of Protestant homes. New theories about education and childrearing also influenced methods at the Jewish orphanages, which after the turn of the century put less emphasis on rigid discipline and more on individual development. Friedman is less successful in demonstrating her assertion that the Jewish orphanages "exerted a major impact on both the American child welfare field and their respective Jewish communities" (p. 7; see also pp. 1, 10, 11). She shows that administrators hoped that children who left the homes would have an Americanizing effect on the families to which they returned, and she describes how some discharged children did, in fact, feel alienated from their immigrant parents. She does not, however, explore the nature and extent of the institutions' influence on the Jewish community at large. (The impact of Jewish communal politics on the institutions comes through more clearly.) Although the Jewish homes were sometimes more "progressive" in their methods than their non-Jewish counterparts, Friedman ultimately agrees with Gary Polster, another historian of Jewish orphanages, that there was "little original about the Jewish effort" (p. 184). Friedman's writing is not always easy to read, the mass of details frequently overpowering the narrative and analytical structure. Moreover, the facts as Friedman presents them sometimes seem at odds with each other and with her conclusions. For example, she portrays vividly a situation of widespread neglect, serious malnutrition, unsanitary conditions and rampant disease in the Jewish orphanages of the late nineteenth century, but concludes that their "health records . . . were impressive" (pp. 42-43). Likewise, she describes them as "totalizing institutions" that

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strove to isolate their inmates from the outside world, but notes that "most" Jewish orphans attended local public schools (p. 52). The exceptions often seem more numerous or more compelling than the examples Friedman marshals to support her general contentions. By the 1920s, Jewish communal leaders and social workers were coming to the conclusion, shared by Friedman, that the orphanages drove an unnecessary wedge between the children and their families. Increasingly, they favored maintaining dependent children in families, preferring foster homes and adoption over institutionalization. The orphanages gradually closed, transforming themselves, for the most part, into more generalized child welfare agencies. If the comments made by the Speaker of the House are any indication, however, the question of how best to care for unfortunate children has still not been completely resolved. Books like These Are Our Children will help give Jews and other Americans the benefits of past experience as they grapple with the complex issues ahead. DANIEL SOYER Lower East Side Tenement Museum

Gregg Ivers, To Build a Wall: American Jews and the Separation of Church and State. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995. 272 pp. The study of interest-group involvement in the evolution of constitutional policy in the United States is a potentially rich area for scholarly pursuit. Gregg Ivers has realized a big chunk of this potential in his exploration of the role of Jewish organizations in the Supreme Court's construction of a wall of separation between church and state. Relying heavily on archival material from the three principal organizations—the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Congress (as well as the personal papers of its leading counsel, Leo Pfeffer)—he has produced a useful history of an important chapter in American constitutional history, and a welcome refinement in our understanding of the dynamics of interest group participation in constitutional change. What he has not done, however, is explore the implications of his findings for the separationist debate within the Jewish community. Ivers is largely successful in demonstrating that "litigation occurs in an environment surrounded by a phalanx of social, political, and legal forces" (p. 207). While this may seem an obvious point, the theoretical literature has not devoted much attention to the question of how the convergence of these various forces shapes the behavior of organized interests in terms of specific strategic choices in the litigation process. Ivers' detailed attention to the socioeconomic roots of the leading Jewish interest groups, and to their intraorganizational dynamics, fills in some of the gaps in our understanding of the politics underlying constitutional reform. And while his focus on the Jewish community does not waver, one of the considerable virtues of the work is that its analysis would appear to have some obvious application to other similar attempts to advance communal interests through the legal process.

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Much of the analysis in To Build a Wall concentrates on the efforts of the three Jewish organizations to develop a coherent and consistent strategy for dealing with the challenges of minoritarian politics. Ultimately the "assimilationist" American Jewish Committee and Anti-Defamation League both came to accept the potential benefits of litigation, an approach long championed by the more ethnocentric American Jewish Congress. While continuing to devote resources to winning battles in the court of public opinion, they concluded that appealing to the collective conscience of the Christian majority was not a sufficiently powerful means to protect Jewish interests. Over time, their worries about provoking a backlash among the Christian population (against legal strategies that could be portrayed as antireligious and even anti-Christian) diminished as a factor in these organizations' strategic calculations. And with the mounting legal successes of Leo Pfeffer, the American Jewish Congress' chief counsel, the arguments for a less confrontational approach acquired an increasingly hollow ring. Pfeffer is clearly the principal player in the story told by Ivers; indeed, it is "impossible to overestimate the impact that Leo Pfeffer had on the constitutional development of church-state law during the latter half of this century" (p. 222). It is, however, possible to overstate the extent to which his doctrinaire absolutism on the establishment clause of the First Amendment ("Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion . . .") represents a Jewish consensus on "what's best for the Jews." To be sure, Ivers mentions the split between Orthodox and nonOrthodox American Jewry over the commitment to "separationism" (that is, between church and state), but his discussion provides only a superficial sense of the nature of the issues involved in this dispute. Orthodox Jews have certainly been a principal source of anti-"separationist" dissent, but emphasizing their understandable reluctance to participate in the erection of the proverbial wall between church and state may obscure other important considerations in the more recent reassessment of the role religion should play in American public life. Thus, many advocates of Reform and Conservative day schools have joined Orthodox critics in questioning Pfefferian assumptions regarding the wisdom of establishment-clause purity. In so doing, they tend to attach greater significance to the First Amendment's "free exercise" clause, which inevitably means a more permeable wall of separation. Moreover, not all of this critique is motivated by the desire to feed at the public trough. Some of it grows out of an alternative minoritarian concern, namely the fear that the privatization of religion will further marginalize the Jewish presence, not so much within American society as within the Jewish community itself. This of course is a highly debatable issue, but one whose increasing prominence in the last couple of decades deserves fuller consideration. More directly relevant to the history detailed in Ivers' account is the accommodationist view that has, since the 1970s, been articulated with increasing frequency by prominent Jews within the neoconservative political movement. The "assimilationist" position of the early American Jewish Committee had emphasized the oneness of the American people as a way of defending Jewish particularity. The critique of separationism voiced by many influential (usually non-Orthodox) Jews in recent years is rooted in the alternative understanding that nonpreferential government support for religion facilitates the integration of Americans into a common culture

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of ideas, which ultimately serves the interests of Jews as a minority religion. Ivers' important study would have been enhanced had the author pursued the political and theoretical implications of these two approaches to "assimilation." It may well be the case that Leo Pfeffer's many victories in establishing the constitutional orthodoxy of his church-state position contributed mightily to the more hospitable climate that encourages Jews to espouse accommodationist sentiments. If so, then this too is part of the story of American Jews and the separation of church and state. GARY JEFFREY JACOBSOHN Williams College

Jacob Katz, With My Own Eyes: A Historian's Autobiography. Hanover: Brandeis University Press, 1995. 168 pp. Should historians write their autobiographies? As Jacob Katz puts it, such a book may provide the critical reader with clues in assessing the measure of the historian's objectivity or in gauging the impact of his personality upon his historical interpretations. Katz's autobiography is of special value precisely because his background and education have had a direct impact upon his major contributions to the study of Jewish history, and specifically on the way in which we now view the process of Jewish emancipation. As a youth and young man he experienced two very different worlds firsthand—that of the East European yeshivah and that of the modern assimilated Jews. The combination of these experiences, strengthened by his study of the sources, enabled him to rewrite the history of those vital decades when the Jews emerged from the ghetto. The first half of the book, which is set initially in the isolated world of his native Hungarian village and its Jews and subsequently in the perhaps still more selfcontained world of the yeshivah, is the more original and lively part of this autobiography. Here there is no romanticization of ghetto life. Instead, Katz tells us what it was like to grow up in the world of the Talmud, in a calm atmosphere dominated both by the rigid reading of texts and respect for the authority of the learned. This was an education that was to make the study of sources the test of historical analysis; an approach that in his case did not derive from the nineteenthcentury "science of Judaism," but from his training since childhood. Although this world had few cultural ties to Christian society, it did not exist in complete isolation. A keen young yeshivah boy like Jacob Katz could pore over Schiller's dramas and Herzl's diaries, and throughout this account the pull of a more secular and largely German culture is evident. Later, at the University of Frankfurt and as a student of Karl Mannheim, the famed sociologist, he came to feel at home in the world of secular studies influenced by the Enlightenment. However, the seeds of such a departure from strict Orthodoxy had been sown within the yeshivah itself, which was opposed not only to assimilation but also to the Zionism that Katz attempted to champion. It is no coincidence that Katz, the influential and insightful

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historian of tradition in crisis, came from the closed world he describes so well and with so much understanding. Two societies, the Christian and the Jewish, confront each other in Katz's historical writings, as indeed they do in his autobiography. At work here were not only the changes, such as the Enlightenment, within Christian society, but also the transformations that took place within the Jewish world, lowering the barriers to Jewish emancipation. Prior to Katz, historians had concentrated by and large upon the changes in Gentile society that were thought to be solely responsible for Jewish assimilation. Katz rectified this equation: Jewish society and Jewish religious thought were not fossilized but actively interacted with the process of change in Gentile society. Someone unfamiliar with the world described in the first part of the book will be struck, contrary to its stereotype, by how alive it was—how, in fact, different approaches competed on the basis of textual interpretation. Katz's major contributions to modern Jewish history rest upon his deep knowledge of both Judaism and secular history. His analysis of Jewish assimilation keeps a fine balance between the two, but when it comes to the history of antisemitism his approach is not always as persuasive. Antisemitism is seen by Katz as a religious, Christian phenomenon, with the modern secular orgins and transformations of antisemitism receiving little attention. Thus, racism as such in his view is not (contrary to most scholarly opinion) a modern ideology on an even footing with liberalism or Marxism, but rather part of the ancient Christian hatred of the Jews. Here, Katz's great advantage of having come from the world of the Talmud may have proved a barrier to the consideration of alternative interpretations. At any rate, it seems significant that the important visual and stereotypical dimension of antisemitism is not at the forefront of his work on this topic. Such criticism does not touch upon the significance of Katz's principal contributions to Jewish historiography. The textual analysis in which yeshivah students were trained was detailed and rigorous, and yet, as his autobiography stresses, he always had the larger picture in view, seeking out the general trends that, for example, determined the history of the kehilla or the family. His books address even wider themes, such as changes in the Jewish society at the end of the Middle Ages, and rarely deal with mere matters of detail. Katz's fate once he attempted to enter the world of historical scholarship is instructive. His approach was too new and disturbing to be accepted in a discipline where only detailed work counted, where subjects had to be small and "manageable." As a result, he taught at primary and high schools for many years once he had emigrated to Palestine, failing to obtain a position at the Hebrew University until he was middle aged. Even then his appointment was not in general history nor mainly in Jewish history, but instead in the new field of sociology, where he taught social history. Today it seems almost incredible that Katz should have been denied a position in history despite the fact that he was, and quite rightly considered himself, primarily a historian (and writes here that, in matters of chronology, historical criteria must have precedence over the Talmud). Moreover, his method, as he explains in this autobiography, is to determine the activity and broad characteristics of institutions through the critical study of the historical sources. Most historians today would take

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such a method for granted, but at the time the "science of Judaism," based on traditional German scholarship, predominated among scholars of Jewish history at the Hebrew University. The large scope of research practiced in the first generations of the "science of Judaism" had been dropped for a belief that the narrower the focus of research, the more professional it was.1 Though some historians at the Hebrew University, like Jacob Talmon, did not fit this pattern, they apparently could not or did not want to take in Jacob Katz. Paradoxically, to historians of Talmon's type, Katz's concentration on the archives might have seemed unduly conservative. As he entered the world of professional history, Jacob Katz, like other innovators, fell between all stools. That he was never admitted to the Israel Academy, however, still comes as a distinct shock—though it becomes more comprehensible after reading the second half of his book. Yet in looking back over the years in Palestine and Israel, Katz reveals no bitterness. Eventually he did become Rector of the Hebrew University. However, one factor that no doubt played a role in his exclusions is omitted from this account. The Hebrew University at this time was an Ordinarien Universitar, a university structured on the German model where every professor ruled his own kingdom. Surely personal jealousies were involved here, just as they always played their part where academic life was dominated by such dictatorships. Though this kind of university organization has been replaced in Israel over the last decades by more democratic departmental structures, even in the humanities where it lasted longest, Jacob Katz was clearly one of its many victims. The second part of this autobiography, though less compelling than the account of youth and young manhood, is nevertheless of intrinsic interest for what it can tell us about the state of historiography and the educational establishment of the Yishuv. However, it is here that one feels the lack of the personal. Katz throughout keeps his main focus upon the public persona: the historian and the objective difficulties of a career. What did Katz think of the work of some of his colleagues or even their character? Those he does mention receive only praise, but where, for example, are all those who blocked his appointments? That Jacob Katz chose to write his autobiography in such a restrained fashion does not make it less interesting, but it does deprive his account of life in Palestine of that dimension where personal relationships and official life interact. Yet this is an important book written by one of the few historians who, through the course of his life and the power of his intellect, has been able to reconfigure for us just how we entered the modern world. GEORGE L. MOSSE University of Wisconsin, Madison The Hebrew University

Note 1. See David N. Myers, Reinventing the Jewish Past (New York: 1995), 24.

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Diane Lichtenstein, Writing Their Nations: The Tradition of Nineteenth-Century Jewish Women Writers. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. x 176 pp. In this masterful analysis of a seldom discussed chapter of American Jewish literary and cultural history, Diane Lichtenstein explores the world and works of precontemporary American Jewish female writers. Descended from wealthy, aristocratic Sephardic families who had lived through the formative decades of the country or from German Jewish families who had come to the United States and established themselves financially and socially during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, these cultivated middle- and upper-class American Jewish women produced primarily poetry, devotional verse, hymns and memoir-type literature, in addition to personal correspondence. Their writings conformed to what they perceived to be the ideals of feminine behavior: women were placed firmly in the domestic realm and in the extended domesticity of communal good works. One prototype of such early literary Jewish women is Rebecca Gratz (17811869), whose words blend American and Jewish family ideals. Lichtenstein discusses both the influence upon Gratz of the reigning cultural Christian "myth of true womanhood," and also Gratz's promotion of the image of Jewish women as the equals of their Christian sisters in piety, spirituality and literary sensitivity. The daughter of a wealthy, socially prominent, well-traveled entrepreneurial Philadelphia German Jewish family, Gratz quickly moved from youthful attempts at poetry to a prolific, wide-ranging correspondence with family members, writers, educators, actors, friends and acquaintances. Her voracious and diverse reading habits and thoughtful analysis of literature contributed to her lively correspondence with a variety of English and American writers; many letters express concern about the image of the Jew and the depiction of Judaism in the literature of her time. Perhaps best known as a highly energetic social activist, Gratz never married, but devoted herself instead to caring for family members and forcefully initiating and maintaining communal institutions to meet the needs of the underprivileged, both Jewish and non-Jewish. She supported Jewish education, especially for girls and women; she created a coeducational Hebrew Sunday School in Philadelphia in 1838 and encouraged women to establish similar schools in other cities. Gratz is reputed to have given up an early romantic attachment to a non-Jewish man out of loyalty to her Jewish heritage, and thus to have served as the indirect model of Sir Walter Scott's character Rebecca in the novel Ivanhoe. Lichtenstein argues convincingly that other nineteenth-century American Jewish women writers from similar milieus reflect parallel concerns and influences, and she provides detailed examples to support her thesis. Penina Moise (1979-1880), a Southern Jewish woman of Sephardic and German ancestry who, like Gratz, never married and was devoted to caring for sickly family members and to Jewish education through Sunday schools, wrote what is believed to be the first American book of poetry by a Jew, Fancy''s Sketchbook (1833). Moise's published poems and hymns did not challenge contemporaneous upper-class female norms; on the contrary, the choice of poetry as a medium was deemed acceptable for cultured women, since it might be

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entered into sporadically enough not to interfere with familial and communal responsibilities. Her poetry champions traditional female roles: the "jewels of a gentle mind . . . brightened by love, by faith refined / And set in chastest mould"—and dedicated to the "tender task" of caring for "Child, husband, brother" (p. 72). Not all of the dozens of women described in this book remained unmarried. Many were mothers, like Rebekah Gumpert Hyneman (1812-1875), daughter of a Jewish father and Christian mother, who was deeply devoted to her Jewish husband and sons. Her poetic output, including The Leper and Other Poems (1853), represents biblical women such as the matriarchs and female prophets and judges as valiant but meek and gentle angels of the hearth. Despite provocative titles and heroic characters who might have been depicted quite differently, Hyneman's poetry encourages women to be strong, but only behind the scenes; in "Woman's Rights," for example, Hyneman asserts that the true woman is "a flower that blossoms best, unseen / Sheltered within the precincts of her home." Should anyone imagine another role, Hyneman warns, "Let her not scorn to act a woman's part / Nor strive to cope with manhood in its might" (p. 67). Similarly, the posthumously published verses by Octavia Harby Moses (18231904), mother of seventeen children (fourteen of whom survived) deal primarily with feminine responsibilities and family life. Many of the genteel writers in Lichtenstein's repertoire were Southern patriots. Hyneman, for example, was the daughter of one of the founders of the Society of Reformed Israelites in South Carolina, the first Reform congregation in the United States (1824), and she vehemently urged loyalty to her "native" Confederate "beautiful land" (p. 70). North Carolina evoked similar loyalty and praise from Rachel Mordecai Lazarus (1788-1838), who began her professional career by teaching in her father's academy for young ladies in Virginia; later, as a North Carolina matron, Lazarus wrote glowingly about "the spirit of unity and benevolence" that animated the relationship between Jews and non-Jews in antebellum Wilmington, although she did note that some non-Jews seemed to feel some "regret" at her religious persuasion (p. 100). However, as increasing numbers of Jews began to arrive at America's shores during the second half of the nineteenth century, Lichtenstein explains, American Jews—and the women writers—expressed their awareness of seemingly growing levels of conflict between Jews and non-Jews, including overt antisemitism. Hostility to Jews evoked in female Jewish authors two responses, to defend the Jewish "race" and/or to rid fellow Jews and Jewesses of "undesirable" qualities, as defined by Christian culture. In essays, poetry, correspondence and the occasional piece of fiction, Jewish women writers turned their discomfort with Christian anti-Jewish feeling both inward and outward. Still influenced by societal preferences for the domestic angel, they were less able than the women who preceded them to assume serene harmony between Christians and Jews and their respective systems. Emma Lazarus (1849-1887), the most talented, accomplished and renowned of American Jewish female writers emerging from the cocoon of upper-class respectability into creative interaction with a changing world, came from—and transcended—a background much like the lesser-known writers who preceded her. Bom into a patrician New York family with a Sephardic Portuguese father and an upper-class German Jewish mother, she became an accomplished translator of poetry from European languages while still in her teens and published her first book of poetry when she was eighteen.

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Lazarus, unlike some earlier Jewish female writers, did not feel tentative about her literary activities nor self-conscious about any perceived conflict between femininity and public utterance. She proceeded confidently and explored several genres. Lazarus began her career rather removed intellectually from her Jewish heritage, declaring herself to be a transcendentalist and a humanist. As the years passed, however, several factors contributed to her growing intellectual fascination with Jewish history and with the fate of Jews worldwide: her own personal interactions with antisemities; the much-publicized vulnerability and suffering of Jews both in pogrom-afflicted Europe and also as new immigrants in America; and literary influences such as Heine's Jewishly conscious writings. Lazarus' increasing interest in Jewish subjects was demonstrated in essays, poetry, her Song of a Semite (1882), a drama about medieval persecution of the Jews and, most memorably, in her sonnet, "The New Colossus," which was inscribed on Bartholdi's Statue of Liberty, given to the United States by France in 1883. Lazarus' approach to Jewish refugees and immigrants was compassionate and strikingly free from the kind of contempt and/or condescension that marked the attitudes of some other established American Jews. The attitudes of some of Lictenstein's writers toward women's roles, needs and expectations are of great historical interest precisely because they appear restrictive by today's standards. However, vis-a-vis Jewish issues, contemporary readers may well experience a shock of recognition when reading passages from the pages of both the best and the least known of Lichtenstein's authors. Like most American Jews today, for example, Lazarus approved of the idea of Palestine as a home for oppressed Jews, although she never believed that American Jews would have to take advantage of such a haven. Similarly, for Lazarus the creative rediscovery of the Jews was a passage into peoplehood rather than an overtly spiritual journey, a "sympathy of race but not creed" (p. 47). This expressed preference for social responsibility rather than religious intensity is one reason that Lichtenstein's wellcrafted book has important implications for readers outside the realm of literary scholarship—although scholars will certainly find this work compelling. The literary imagination of American Jewish women from Gratz to Lazarus, essentially syncretizing in nature, not only reflected the attitudes of their own patrician classes but also anticipated those of the secularized Jews who would dominate the American scene half a century later, with their cult of sacred civic survival and their acculturated vision of a Westernized Jewish tradition. SYLVIA BARACK FISHMAN Brandeis University

Edward T. Linenthal, Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America's Holocaust Museum. New York: Viking Penguin, 1995. 336 pp. In his Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America's Holocaust Museum, Edward T. Linenthal demonstrates how the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in

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Washington, D.C. represents the resolution of political and ideological conflicts stretching over some fifteen years. From the time that President Jimmy Carter placed the idea of a national Holocaust memorial on the agenda of the federal government in 1978 until the museum opened on April 22, 1993, there was a changing cast of characters who struggled with the profoundly complex issues involved in its creation. Elie Wiesel, who was chairman of the project until December 1986, is given a great deal of credit for serving as the moral driving force behind the museum. However, as Linenthal recounts, Wiesel at times caused delays in the project's implementation because of his reluctance to present a clear-cut story. "I believe," Wiesel declared, "that we are dealing here with something so sensitive, something ... so sober, so austere as an ancient prayer. Now how do you translate ancient prayers into something visual? I think everything must be pure" (p. 116). Despite this idealistic statement, the Washington Holocaust Museum—in this respect no different from every museum everywhere—was not and could not be "pure." Its very inception, Linenthal explains, was the product of political calculation, since Carter at the time was putting together his reelection campaign. Furthermore, once it was placed adjacent to the Washington Mall, it was by definition required to tell the story of the Holocaust from an American point of view. As Linenthal writes, the ownership of the memory became "pluralistic," and the commemoration of the Holocaust, part of American culture. Michael Berenbaum, the project director and the first head of the museum's research institute, has written that one purpose of the museum is to teach the core values of American democracy. According to Linenthal, the council responsible for creating the museum believed that "the implicit message was that the Holocaust clarified the importance of adhering to democratic values, and offered a stark historical example of what happened when such values failed" (p. 67). One major controversy that the book details was the attempt by non-Jewish groups who perceived themselves as victims of the Holocaust to be included in the museum. Among those who lobbied powerfully for inclusion were Ukrainian Americans and Polish Americans. Jewish survivors resented the idea of representation in the museum by nationalities that included both victims and victimizers, and tremendous battles for ownership of the memory ensued. These conflicts, as well as the compromises regarding the museum's portrayal of Gypsies, or Romani, and the earlier Armenian genocide, are likewise discussed. Linenthal introduces the reader to the professional and lay leaders behind the project, explaining how some of the most prominent personalities arrived on the scene during the course of its gestation, while others left or changed roles. In addition to Wiesel and Berenbaum, the team responsible for creating the museum included the first museum director, Jeshajahu "Shaike" Weinberg (formerly of Beth Hatefutsoth); the architect, James Ingo Freed; the exhibit designer, Ralph Appelbaum; Miles Lehrman, himself a survivor; and the developer, Harvey "Bud" Meyerhoff. The book analyzes not only the genesis of the museum, but also its contents and how they are displayed. Linenthal demonstrates that the Holocaust Museum, like all such institutions, shapes memory in accordance with specific political inclinations,

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ideological considerations, interpretations of meaning and artistic visions. The frame into which the story of the Holocaust is placed and the way that the historical facts are presented is related to the governmental status of the museum. For example, the exhibit begins with the liberation of Holocaust victims by American soldiers. Even though liberation was by no means an American priority, it is featured as though it had been one of the prime reasons for America's involvement in the Second World War. On such issues, I tend to be more critical than Linenthal, who states charitably that "the desire to commemorate occasionally clashed with the desire to present an accurate and moving historical narrative" (p. 192). I would go further, arguing that the memory portrayed in the Washington museum is deliberately filtered through a lens that enhances the positive role played by America during the Holocaust. The exhibit not only highlights the liberators, but it also plays down America's shoddy immigration policy during the war and avoids the issue of its use of Nazi war criminals afterward—two decidedly American elements in the full picture of the Holocaust. Linenthal finds the omission of mention of the Nazi war criminals who entered the United States "surprising" (p. 216), but I believe it to be deliberate. While the museum, as Linenthal so competently relates, is certainly a significant contribution to Holocaust memorialization, it must be understood in the context of its locale and its sponsorship by the U.S. government. According to the official visitor's guide, its primary mission is "to inform Americans about this unprecedented tragedy, to remember those who suffered, and to inspire visitors to contemplate the moral implications of their choices and responsibilities as citizens in an interdependent world." After reading this book, one has a better appreciation of the museum, its origins and mission, and some of the compromises and emphases that have shaped its presentation of the Holocaust. ROCHELLE G. SAIDEL University of Sao Paulo

Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab, Jews and the New American Scene. Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1995. 239 pp. It is not clear why Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab, two longtime and astute observers of American Jewish life, decided to write this book, revisiting territory familiar to them and to many who follow current Jewish affairs. Perhaps the National Jewish Population Survey of 1990 with its new data on intermarriage, affiliation, religious practices and politics inspired such reflections on "the conundrum of individual Jewish success amidst the dissolution of the Jewish community" (p. 7). Those who seek new insights will be disappointed; those who want innovative methodology will be frustrated; those who expect attention to gender will be unhappy; those who desire to review current statistics in historical context will be

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pleased. Lipset and Raab elegantly recycle their interpretations of American Jewish life to incorporate recent statistical trends. It is a weakness of reviewers to blame authors for not writing a different book from the one they chose to write, so it behooves us to stop complaining and pay attention to the content of Jews and the New American Scene. Lipset and Raab sidestep the entanglements of ethnicity and race by adopting the term "tribal" to "deromanticize the pervasive term 'ethnic'" (p. 50). Thus Jews, as well as Irish, Italians, Latinos, Asians and African Americans become "tribes." This temporary solution evades complex issues of American group identity and cultural constructions of race. Lipset and Raab assume, for example, that Jews are "white." Recent historical research indicates that the political and cultural process of labeling Jews "white" occurred over time and was completed relatively recently, after the Second World War. Jews, they report, have achieved remarkable educational and economic success and integration into American society. This accomplishment reflects the exceptional political and cultural character of America, which provided an open field for Jewish energies. Lipset and Raab chart the rapid decline of antisemitism from its peak during the 1930s and 1940s, though they note enduring Jewish defensiveness despite the reality of American acceptance. They recognize that there will always be some endemic antisemitism but argue that constraints preventing its expression grow more powerful with each passing year. If this sounds remarkably like Charles Silberman's A Certain People, it is. However, Lipset and Raab eschew Silberman 's optimism about American Jewry's future because of high intermarriage statistics, low levels of religious observance, weakness of organizational affiliation, and absence of structural separation. Even Israel and political liberalism may not continue to exert the cohesive power they did in the past, though Lipset and Raab acknowledge a steadfast commitment by most American Jews to both Israel and liberalism. Thus, they present the first half of Silberman's book without the second half, the American success story minus the Jewish success story. Jews have achieved the American dream but along the way, Lipset and Raab suggest, they have lost sight of the Jewish dream. Such assimilation afflicts all American tribes and Jews are far from alone in their inability to resist amalgamation with others. Once a group loses its need for "defense against disadvantage," cultural belonging, and distinctive traditions, it "ceases to exist as a cohesive" tribe (p. 51). All American Jews have not quite reached this point, in part because of Judaism and the centrality of peoplehood to Jewish religion, but at least a quarter of them have. Thus the American Jewish tribe is shrinking, though Lipset and Raab are confident that it will not completely disappear. They estimate that half of American Jews will leave within two generations, barring any unforeseen surprises. For the half remaining Jewish, "the religious dimension is the key to continuity" (p. 71). Given this conclusion, it is quite surprising that the next three chapters largely ignore religion and examine the defensive Jew, Israel and liberal politics. Lipset and Raab may be convinced that the Jewish future lies with religion, but they also seem uncomfortable exploring what this might mean in terms of American Judaism. It is easier to discuss politics, despite their readiness to dismiss politics as a reliable source of future group cohesion and identity.

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The last chapter imagines a twenty-first-century melting pot, in which black and white, Asian and European, Latino and Native American, all gradually lose their distinctiveness and separateness. Jews, too, will be part of the new American mix, although some will remain apart by virtue of their religious observance and belief. Around them will congregate some religious fellow travelers who find occasional meaning in Jewish practice and appreciate the tribal identity that comes from such activity. However, most American Jews who would like to retain their Jewish identity "will not relinquish their place in an integrated society" (p. 205). When push comes to shove, the fleshpots of Egypt will win hands down. Maybe each century evokes its own vision of the melting pot. Lipset and Raab have surely written a book that will serve future historians as a fascinating document of ambivalence. Returning to past verities even as they pronounce them inadequate for the present (let alone the future), Lipset and Raab deftly straddle a fence of their own construction. DEBORAH DASH MOORE Vassar College

Lara V. Marks, Model Mothers: Jewish Mothers and Maternity Provision in East London, 1870-1939. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. xxi + 320 pp. The proverbial Jewish mother is too busy with washing, cleaning and cooking and with bringing up baby to have time to think that she could possibly be an object of interest for scholarly research. As Lara Marks demonstrates, however, motherhood and the domestic skills are a very serious business indeed. Mass Jewish immigration to Britain coincided with a national preoccupation with the physical deterioration of the nation. Military recruitment during the Boer War (1899-1902) highlighted public health deficiencies such as the fall in the birthrate and high infant mortality. Childbirth was still a very hazardous event in a woman's life: the second biggest killer after tuberculosis. Social Darwinist thinking underpinned the desire to build up the British "race" in order to survive in an increasingly hostile world, to encourage "national efficiency" and to ensure the defense of the empire. Ironically, Jewish immigrants, derided by anti-alienists as carriers of poverty and disease, were discovered to be exemplary when it came to the art of motherhood. Not virgins and vamps, but mothers and prostitutes, were the dual images of the Jewish woman. Edward Bristow effectively dealt with the phenomenon of Jewish prostitution in Prostitution and Prejudice: The Jewish Fight against White Slavery, 1870-1939 (1982). In a very different work, Lara Marks investigates the late nineteenth-century stereotype of the Jewish mother and measures it against the realities prevailing in the East End of London and the levels of maternity care available to Jewish women there. Model Mothers is primarily an essay in medical history, but one that treats ethnicity, rather than merely "class" or "gender" as the determining factor.

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Marks' painstaking research, summarized in copious statistical tables, maps and figures, demonstrates that the "model mother" stereotype was actually well founded. Jews experienced a significantly lower incidence of both infant and maternal mortality than did the general population, despite the fact that they often lived in the most depressed inner-city slums in Britain. She attributes this to factors operating both within and outside the Jewish community. Despite, or rather because of, the deprivation prevalent in East London, the area enjoyed a wide range of medical services provided by a variety of institutions from early in the nineteenth century. Marks devotes the bulk of her book to studying the nature of these services and their impact on the health of Jewish mothers and babies. Voluntary hospitals set up by private charities, infirmaries created in conjunction with the workhouse under the 1834 Poor Law, midwifery and nursing charities, dispensaries, and even medical missions established by Evangelical churches, existed side by side in the East End. The care that these institutions provided changed and became more comprehensive over time. Increasingly, midwives came to attend women in labor in hospital rather than at home; and midwifery as a calling became professionalized. Gradually, more attention was paid to the welfare of the infant after birth, although only later to the health of the mother postpartum (antenatal care was the final development). Preventive health education in the form of mothers' meetings and child-rearing courses also became more common. With the coming of the welfare state, local government became involved in maternity provision. Antenatal clinics, infant welfare centers, health visitors, creches, home help and maternity benefit payments were introduced. Maternity care moved decisively into the secular realm. If any criticism may be leveled against Marks' meticulous research, it is that it places more emphasis on the external provision of maternity care than on conditions and attitudes within the Jewish community. Such an emphasis may no doubt be explained by the fact that external provision is more easily quantifiable in terms of documentation and statistical evidence. This is not to underestimate the difficulty of trawling through the medical records of Victorian voluntary hospitals and Poor Law infirmaries to dig out information on the treatment of Jewish patients—especially when their ethnicity is never overtly stated. Marks is to be commended on her patience in undertaking this task, as the diverse archival sources listed in her bibliography testify. It is undoubtedly even more difficult to prove the influence of religious and cultural factors on health. Common sense tells both Marks and the reader that kashrut and mikveh—Jewish religious laws regulating food preparation, consumption, diet and marital relations—might well encourage hygiene and therefore benefit bodily health, both in mothers and children. However, no satisfactory methodology exists for determining the actual level of religious observance among immigrant Jews in the late nineteenth century. Traditional attitudes that place a high premium on a woman's obligation to her home and family surely encouraged behavioral patterns such as early cessation of work outside the home during pregnancy and prolonged breastfeeding after the birth of the baby—whatever the economic pressures that might have determined otherwise. Moreover, informal family, neighborhood and communal support networks operated to reduce isolation and loneliness

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for mothers in the immigrant quarter. Oral history is the best way to gain some idea of the influence exerted by such intangible factors. Nevertheless, Marks deploys it sparingly, a pity in a study devoted to a largely hidden aspect of women's lives. Jewish cultural attitudes certainly did influence the establishment of formal welfare structures in the Jewish community, which were in some respects more advanced than those set up by general governmental, voluntary and church agencies. The Jewish Board of Guardians (1859), Alice Model's Sick Room Helps Society (1895) and the Jewish Maternity Home (universally known as Mother Levy's) all articulated the Jewish desire to "look after our own." They provided Yiddishspeaking personnel and kosher food, operating as an alternative to Gentile institutions that often had a strongly Christian religious bias. The Jewish organizations have been criticized by social historians for their paternalistic, "middle-class" attitudes, but as Marks demonstrates, they had a loyal and grateful following in the East End that persisted until well after the establishment of the welfare state. Upper-class Anglo-Jews also sought to improve conditions for Jews in general hospitals or "on the parish" by securing positions for themselves as hospital governors or Poor Law guardians. As a result of Jewish patronage, the London Hospital, the biggest teaching hospital in the East End, established Jewish wards and its own kosher kitchen. This is a serious book on an important subject. Marks' Model Mothers may certainly be recommended as an antidote to the neglect of health matters by AngloJewish historiography. SHARMAN KADISH The Hebrew University

J. Sanford Rikoon (ed.), Rachel Calof's Story: Jewish Homesteader on the Northern Plains. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995. ix + 158 pp. Rachel Calof's Story is a memoir. Resurrected from a trunk by her daughter thirty years after her death, the manuscript, written originally in Yiddish, was presumably intended for her children's eyes. It is a human document of great power that I consumed at a single reading simply because I could not put it down. Its personal nature notwithstanding, history exudes from every line even though its author probably had no concern with that dimension of its meaning. Indeed, she seldom appears to be aware of a world outside of her home and its immediate surroundings. The account begins in the 1880s in a small shtetl in the Ukraine. The death of her mother when she was four, her concern for siblings, her father's remarriage and subsequent divorce and her early years spent with various relatives form the setting of her early life. A much larger portion of the narrative is set in the second setting, in North Dakota, where she went at the age of eighteen as the bride of a young Jewish man who was already in America and had asked her family to choose a suitable wife for him. She arrived in America in 1894.

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There, on the northern great plains of the United States, she encountered the hardships associated with rural pioneer existence. Living with her husband's extended family, she experienced the grueling labor of creating a homestead amid the rigors of isolation and climate. The absence of all amenities in the early years of settlement led her to feel that she had descended nearly to the level of the farm animals. The personal nature of the narrative, however, derives from Rachel Calof's reaction to the world around her. Of all her tribulations, none pained her more than the absence of privacy for herself and her husband. The seeming contradiction of endless open spaces and the stifling proximity of relatives offers an interesting dimension in human perception and need. Of exceeding interest, too, are her accounts of the difficulties of childbirth and infant care with only the barest support of family and without the presence of any of those helpful agencies to which modern society has become accustomed. In describing the efforts made to maintain a traditional Jewish way of life under such conditions, Rachel Calof provides insights that are rare. Unlike the betterknown pattern of the lonely Jewish peddler in the West who frequently gave up the struggle for his religion through intermarriage, she and her family maintained their ways against all odds. The memoir may be said to exemplify human endurance fully stretched to maintain one's beliefs. To Rachel, their sheer survival and the gradual improvement in their living conditions after a number of years must have seemed nearly miraculous. Even so, the unforgiving plains could rapidly take back with one hailstorm or cyclone what years of work had produced. Nonetheless, experience brought with it the capacity to rebuild more quickly. In the end, Rachel and her family lived to see much better times, overcoming not only hunger and cold, but even loneliness. In 1917, the family moved to St. Paul, where Rachel's husband opened a grocery story. In an epilogue Rachel's son describes briefly the toll taken on his parents by twenty years on the plains and their growing remoteness from each other in their new surroundings. It was as if, once released from the common tribulations that had bound them, each sought to find elsewhere in their lives what had been denied them together for so long. In addition to the memoir and the brief epilogue, the volume contains two essays describing the historical context of Jewish life on the plains and the gender-driven dimension of Rachel's life. The first essay, by J. Sanford Rikoon, traces the agrarian idealism that drew some Jews to farming in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, even though they had no experience in the occupation and little knowledge of actual conditions on the scene. Although Rachel made no mention of support from Jewish agricultural aid societies, Rikoon's research reveals that the family had connections with both the Jewish Agriculturalists' Aid Society of America in Chicago and with the Jewish Agricultural and Industrial Aid Society of New York. In 1907, the Calofs were denied a loan from the latter organization on the grounds that they "could very well get along without further assistance" (p. 115). Why did they leave the farm? Rikoon suggests that the Calofs, having achieved a measure of well-being, found the rigors and loneliness of farm life too unsatisfying to be endured indefinitely. Beyond that lay the issue of how their children could

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maintain Jewish lives in a barely conquered wilderness, and whether, after receiving their education, they would stay on the farm. It could well have proved impossible to preserve their cultural values in the next generation. Rikoon's essay is thoughtful and convincing as well as enlightening. In her essay on Rachel Calof 's memoir, Elizabeth Jameson of the University of New Mexico undertakes the difficult process of placing the life of a traditional Jewish woman in the unusual context of the frontier. She reconsiders the images of the frontier as a male place and the Jewish immigration as a heavily urban one. She also sees commonality in the role of women who faced the hardships of the frontier as women, more than as members of distinct ethnic or religious groups, even if specific cultural practices imposed different experiences on them. So diverse and personal are the factors involved that her experience seems, in Jameson's eyes, to call for a new form of interpretation—a history written from the inside out—rather than as in traditional history, from the perspective of public policy or the nation-state. Her essay opens up new historical perspectives in which the personal narrative gains meaning beyond the existence of the single individual, and it provides a better understanding of the larger process. Jameson's essay is thought-provoking, throwing light on as unique a document as I have encountered in some time. HENRY J. TOBIAS Albuquerque

Moses Rischin and John Livingston (eds.), Jews of the American West. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991. xiii + 226 pp. Henry J. Tobias, A History of the Jews in New Mexico. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1992. 294 pp. Most studies of American Jewry have focused on the large metropolitan centers of the eastern and midwestern regions of the United States. During the past decade, however, scholars have increasingly turned their attention to the Jewish experience in the American West. Their research has altered some of our earlier perceptions of the American Jewish community. The two books under review augment this trend. Divided into six chronological chapters, A History of the Jews in New Mexico details the growth and development of a small Jewish enclave from its beginnings, in the nineteenth century, to 1980. Since the vast majority of the state's Jews lived in three cities, Albuquerque, Santa Fe and Las Vegas, the study concentrates primarily on these communities. Readers will learn about the history and geography of New Mexico and how the Jews adapted to and interacted with the existing social and geographic environment. They will also learn the ways in which Jews made their living, their economic achievements, the contributions they made to the general community, how they perceived themselves as Jews and the manner in which they expressed their Jewish identity. Tobias has examined a wide variety of sources to construct his story: the general

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and English-Jewish press; federal and local government reports, records and census data; city directories; published and unpublished family and personal papers and memoirs; Jewish organizational and congregational minute books and records; Jewish communal surveys; histories of New Mexico and American Jewry; unpublished dissertations and theses; and a selected number of personal interviews. Compared to the burgeoning Jewish communities of the American East and North, New Mexico's Jewish population remained minuscule. In 1860, the territory's Jewish population stood at thirty-two souls, mostly single men. This figure increased to 180 in 1880 and to 403 by 1900. Forty years later, Jews numbered about 1,200 persons out of a statewide population of 532,000. As late as 1980, Jewish New Mexicans totaled only 7,155 in a population of 1.3 million. By then, 90 percent of New Mexico's Jews lived in one city, Albuquerque. At no time did Jews ever comprise more than half of one percent of the state's total population. Although Tobias commences his story with a discussion of the crypto-Jews who came north to escape the Mexican inquisition in the sixteenth century, New Mexico's Jewish history truly begins with the arrival of German Jews in the 1840s. They came as part of the general German migration to the territory. Once settled, these Jews attracted relatives and kinsmen and provided them with jobs. First-generation New Mexico Jews identified with the Anglo segment of the population, achieved prominence and success as owners of general stores, and lived in harmony with their non-Jewish neighbors, both Anglo and Hispanic. Business and the family, not the synagogue (none existed) or the ethnic community, remained the cornerstone of the Jewish community. In 1880, the railroad came to New Mexico, bringing change to the state and its Jewish community. As economic specialization increased, Albuquerque and Las Vegas experienced rapid urban growth. By 1900, both cities contained more than one hundred Jews. In 1883, Albuquerque's Jewish community organized New Mexico's first B'nai B'rith chapter. Three years later, the Jewish community of Las Vegas founded the territory's first synagogue. During the years of the Great Immigration, few East European Jews migrated to New Mexico and the character of its Jewish community remained Germanic. As a consequence of low immigration and few births, the Jewish community grew slowly from 1900 to 1940. Since New Mexico Jewry had been minimally affected by the East European immigration, the community remained insulated from the class, religious and ideological distinctions that characterized American Jewish life at the time. Nevertheless, some innovations did occur. Albuquerque became the state's major Jewish center, and its community established a Zionist Organization of America chapter in 1920, and an Orthodox congregation in 1921. Jewish economic life also became more diversified, with smaller Jewish enterprises predominating. The most rapid change transpired after the Second World War. New Mexico had been home to numerous military installations and the A-bomb site. When the war ended, many scientists and technicians—some of whom were Jews—remained in the state. They contributed to its growth in population and the diversification of its economy. In 1960, Albuquerque claimed more Ph.D.s per capita than any other city in the country, as well as a higher proportion of Jews with graduate education than New York City or Chicago.

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Consequently, the economic structure of the Jewish community underwent a radical transformation. The number of Jewish merchants and proprietors declined and Jewish professionals became the largest Jewish occupational group. The economic changes encompassed women as well. By 1981, 62 percent of Jewish women between the ages of 21 and 30 worked full-time. Most of the Jewish newcomers by then came from East European Jewish backgrounds, and they broadened the range of Albuquerque's Jewish communal life. The community created new Jewish cultural institutions, such as a Yiddish club, raised money for Jewish causes at home and for Israel, and became more actively involved in Jewish-related issues. However, the continued smallness of the Jewish population and the relative openness of the surrounding society led to a rise in intermarriage. By 1980, one-third of all Albuquerque's married Jews had a nonJewish spouse. In general, Tobias' book is lucidly written and highly informative. One problem, however, is its lack of maps; it would have been useful to see exactly where the Albuquerque and Las Vegas Jews lived during the various chronological periods. Jews of the American West is the product of a conference devoted to western Jewish history. This slim volume contains nine original essays that offer fresh interpretations of the twentieth-century Jewish experience in the trans-Mississippi West. In a perceptive introductory chapter, John Livingston analyzes how and why changing methods of inquiry, beginning in the 1960s, led to the evolution of what he calls "the New American Jewish History," including serious studies in western Jewish history. He insists that the history of the Jews in the West largely followed its own pattern of development. As he sees it, the customary periodization of American Jewish history—comprising the Sephardic period (1654-1820), the German Jewish period (1820-1881), the East European period (1881-1924), and the American period (1924 to the present)—is inappropriate for the history of the Jews in the West. The Sephardic period is "irrelevant"; the German period "must be seen as broadly Central, if not all European" (p. 20); and the East European period "did not have the same impact" that it had in the Northeast and Midwest. Instead, he proposes a three-period stage of development for western Jewish history: an initial period, 1848-1890; a second period, 1890-1941; and a third period, 1941-present. According to Livingston, two other themes differentiate western Jewish history from that in the East: the relative absence of East European Jewish immigrants at the very time that they were establishing a formidable presence in metropolitan centers of the East and Midwest; and the relative absence of antisemitism in the West. It is noteworthy that the history of the Jews in New Mexico fits well into Livingston's framework. The volume also features several studies that utilize the methodology of the "New American Jewish History." These include Robert Goldberg's piece on the settling of Jewish Utopians in Utah; Jeanne Abrams' article on the founding of Denver's Jewish Consumptive Relief Society; Fred Rosenbaum's depiction of the battle between Zionists and anti-Zionists in San Francisco in the 1940s; and Leonard Dinnerstein's survey of Tucson Jewry since 1950. Other essays offer a wider perspective. Moses Rischin presents a perceptive and

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broad overview of the Jewish experience in the West. Marc Raphael argues that New York has been accepted for too long as the model of what was "typical" for all Jews, and as a consequence, American Jewish history has been distorted. What distinguished early western Jews from their eastern co-religionists, contends Raphael, was a desire "to start a new life, not to repeat the patterns of the past" (p. 58). An essay by William Toll exploring intermarriage in the West, and Earl Pomeroy's article comparing the western Jewish experience with that of the Chinese, Scandinavians, Irish, Italians and Anglo-Americans, complete the book. The range of its subject matter and the manner in which it challenges long-held stereotypes and myths makes this book significant. Jews of the American West and A History of the Jews in New Mexico are notable additions to American Jewish historiography. ROBERT A. ROCKAWAY Tel-Aviv University

Yaakov Ro'i, Jews and Jewish Life in Russia and the Soviet Union. Cummings Center Series. London: Frank Cass, 1995. xiii + 432 pp. With its sophisticated conceptualization of the Jewish experience in Russia over the course of the twentieth century and with its pioneering effort in bringing together both Western and Soviet-trained scholars on this theme, Yaakov Roi's collection, Jews and Jewish Life in Russia and the Soviet Union, makes an important contribution to the literature on this community. By taking the whole of the century as one unit, Ro'i focuses the reader's attention on the theme of continuity in the history of Russian Jewry. Students of Jewish communal life who examine its religious, political and demographic developments have long appreciated that trends dating back to the 1880s continued to dominate these aspects of Jewish life through the first decade of Soviet rule. Therefore, by opening his collection with the important and challenging studies by Eli Lederhendler and Shaul Stampfer on the community and patterns of Jewish migration within the empire in the pre-Soviet period, Ro'i signals to us that Jews of that region were already grappling with issues many would have associated with the post-1917 era. Furthermore, Abraham Ascher's essay on the pogroms of 1905-1906 reminds readers of the ever-present threat of mass violence that cast its shadow over the Jews in the last decades of the nineteenth century through the First World War and the ensuing civil war. At the same time, John Klier's essay on aspects of Ukrainian nationalist thought at the end of the nineteenth century reveals that the threat to Jewish life was not just physical: an enmity based on a combination of religion and ethnicity was already an integral part of Ukrainian cultural life before the dawn of the twentieth century. Once again, the ideological shift associated with the Soviet takeover appears within a broader frame. In the section on post-1917 developments, Ro'i organizes the material the-

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matically and chronologically. He presents studies on ideological and popular antisemitism, the Holocaust and the immediate postwar period, the emigration movement, cultural trends among Soviet Jews, and the contemporary face of the community both in Russia and in its diaspora. Based on materials and testimonies that have only recently become available, these studies offer fresh perspectives and insights. It is in this section that the editor brings together Soviet and Western-trained scholars. The contributions of Soviet scholars Rozalina Rykvina, Nina Sementchenko and Sergei Mirokhin are particularly interesting. Trained in Soviet social science and demographics as well as Oriental studies, they employ data from within their own area of expertise in order to illuminate, and place into a broader context, critical aspects of the contemporary Jewish experience. With its comparative and interactive approach, this volume offers a broad and nuanced presentation of the issues and themes under consideration. Ro'i's effort is to be commended: it should serve as a model for future scholarly projects. ALEXANDER ORBACH University of Pittsburgh

Silvia Schenkolewski-Kroll and Leonardo Senkman (eds.), Judaica Latinoamericana: Estudios Historico-Sociales II. Jerusalem: Editorial Universitaria Magnes, Hebrew University, 1993. 298 pp. For the past dozen years, a group of Israeli scholars who work under the collective name AMILAT (Asociacion Israeli de Investigadores del Judaismo Latinoamericano) have organized sessions on Latin American Jewry for the quadrennial World Congress of Jewish Studies. This is their second volume of edited essays based on papers delivered at the Congress, and like the first, it adds incrementally to our knowledge of the subject. The scope of the topics covered marks the amorphous boundaries of Latin American Jewish studies: in just under 300 pages, we move from Chilean colonization to the Hebraist movement in Argentina, from Brazilian fiction to the Evian Conference. The essays appear in three languages: thirteen are in Spanish, four in English and two in Portuguese. In terms of academic discipline, twelve of the essays can be categorized as historical, three deal with communal matters such as education and the Zionist organization, three are in the area of literary criticism, and there is one contribution in intellectual history. While at least ten of the contributors occupy academic positions in Israel, their origins are varied, most having been born and educated in Latin America (Argentina, Uruguay and Chile). Scholars from the United States, Brazil, Germany and Mexico are also represented here, which certainly emphasizes the importance of international conferences in bringing scholars together face to face. Inevitably, because it is the largest of the communities and has produced the largest cohort of intellectuals, Argentina occupies the attention of a majority of the book's contributors—nine out of nineteen essayists. Two of the essays deal with the presi-

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dency of Juan Peron of Argentina. In "Failure in Argentina," Ignacio Klich continues his self-imposed task of reorienting our perception of Peron, who entered diplomatic history through the skewed lens of U.S. Ambassador Spruille Braden. Of course, the Argentine military had been mentored by Germans; and of course, the General President was surrounded by officers who were in thrall to Nazism, none of whom were interested in entering the Second World War on the Allied side. This is no proof, Klich maintains, that Peron was a Nazi, much less that his political opponents were democrats in any of the senses in which this term is understood in Europe or the United States. Klich leads the reader through the labyrinth of Argentine politics to emerge with a picture of self-deception on the part of Jewish Agency representatives, from Moshe Tov on down, who thought they had succeeded in gaining Argentine support for the creation of a Jewish state. Peron stuck to Argentina's traditional neutral posture with respect to foreign quarrels in which the country had nothing to gain or lose and, Klich concludes, "regardless of who occupied the ... Casa Rosada, this position was invariably considered to serve Argentine interests, not just Peron's" (p. 258). Leonardo Senkman's essay on "Peronism as Seen by the Israeli Legation" extends further our understanding of the way in which Peron dealt with the Argentine Jewish population. Between 1949 and 1954, the president sponsored the Organizacion Israelita Argentina (OIA) as an alternative to the older Delegacion de Asociaciones Israelitas Argentinas (DAIA), whose members mistrusted Peron, believing him to represent a recrudescence of the fascism that had just been vanquished in Europe. Formation of the OIA represented the first time in Argentine history that a regime had attempted to capture the Jewish vote, an effort that included, on Peron's part, the proclamation of an antiracist ideology and the muzzling of the antisemites among his more thuggish followers. Despite fears among DAIA leaders that the president was planning some sort of Gleichschaltung for the community, Peron appears to have had a different end in mind: to create a loyal Jewish space from which he could launch his efforts to alter his fascist image abroad. The essayists are all experienced researchers in their field, though they may not yet have made a mark in Euro-centered Jewish history (nor, for that matter, in Latin American history). Alberto Spektorowski in "Nacionalista Images of the Jew" analyzes the political thought of three Argentine nationalists—all of whom were influential in their day, all of whom decried antisemitism, and each of whom contributed to creating an atmosphere inhospitable to Jews. Concerned with the formation of an authentic Argentine identity, these thinkers rejected the nineteenthcentury liberalism that had opened their country to foreign immigration. Reacting against earlier philosophers such as Sarmiento, who believed that the country's native stock needed to be improved by infusions of European blood, twentiethcentury nacionalistas rejected not only the immigrants but the liberal and cosmopolitan ideas they imported from abroad. Capitalism, Communism and freemasonry were their special betes noirs, and so were Jews, carriers of these foreign heresies. The special hallmark of these men was their willingness to accept Jewish individuals who divested themselves of their Jewishness and plunged into an unalloyed argentinidad. It is worthwhile distinguishing these philosophical trends from those espoused by right-wing Catholic nacionalistas, for whom a Jew could never distance himself sufficiently from his Jewish origins.

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Margalit Bejarano continues her exemplary work on Cuban Jewry with "Cuba as America's Back Door. The Case of Jewish Immigration." In this essay, she fortifies the conclusions of other scholars who have identified the island primarily as a way station for Jewish refugees en route from Europe to the United States, which had been closed to them by the U.S. Quota Act of 1924. Only in the face of this legislative interdiction did Jews finally make their peace with Cuban life, however indignantly homesick "Jubans" now exiled in Miami may protest that it was love at first sight. Mario Sznajder's "Chilean Jewry and the Unidad Popular Government" clarifies the several crises that engulfed Chilean Jews following the election of Salvador Allende to the presidency of that country and shows how the result was a decrease in the size of the community there. Judit Bokser-Liwerant turns the lens of a political scientist on the "discovery" of Mexico by the world Zionist movement in the wake of the destruction of European Jewry. In a nuanced analysis, Bokser-Liwerant examines the motives of the Mexican government in abstaining on the United Nations resolution for the partition of Palestine. She quotes Chancellor Torres Bodet, who balanced his "personal sympathy" for the persecuted Jews against his government's reluctance to violate the Arabs' right of self-determination, especially in light of Mexico's own experience of the loss of Texas. The partition vote, she shows, came at a time when, on a larger scale, Mexico was attempting to define its role as a developing nation vis-a-vis the United States, the Panamerican alliance and the postwar world economy. Thus, despite numerous statements of adhesion to the Zionist cause, Mexico abstained. Literary studies by Regina Igel, Naomi Lindstrom and Sabine Horl Groenewold reveal the synergy that has developed from the mixture of Latin and Jewish literary traditions. In what other tradition could we find, as does Groenewold, that "in our age when truth, shredded and reduced to the dimensions of dogma, has been converted into an instrument of compulsion, lying has become the ultimate expression of autoemancipation" (p. 294)? The Latin American Jewish communities appear to be suffering from that frightful genetic disease that causes children to age to maturity and then to decrepitude within a period of a few short years. Jose Itzigsohn, now in his eighties, recounts in his essay on medical care in the Argentine Jewish agricultural colonies how his mother arrived in 1911, fresh from medical school in Russia, to work with Dr. Noe Yarcho—the first real doctor the colonists had had. In the space of three lifetimes, Argentine Jewry went from days of penury and hope, through years of maturity and relative well-being, to its present state of stagnation and alienation. Many of its most talented members—like Itzigsohn himself and half the contributors to this volume—have left their native land to remake their lives in Israel or elsewhere. Some aspects of this collection read more like a zikherbukh than like the record of a living, creative community. One wonders how many other Latin-American Jewish communities will go the way of the long-vanished Jewish colony at Remire, French Guiana, whose fragments Zvi Loker has not been able to reassemble. JUDITH LAIKIN ELKIN University of Michigan

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Ismar Schorsch, From Text to Context: The Turn to History in Modern Judaism. Hanover and London: Brandeis University Press, 1994. xv + 401 pp.

Wissenschaft des Judentums, that very special German brand of Jewish studies, has had a notoriously bad press. In one of his most biting essays, Gershom Scholem attacked the practitioners of Wissenschaft as being no less than the gravediggers of Judaism. He pointed out the inner contradiction in their work and clearly detested what seemed to him their apologetic tone, their concurrence with reform and, still worse, their tacit acceptance of assimilation. Indeed, in much of Jewish history, men like Isaac Jost, Leopold Zunz, Abraham Geiger or Moritz Steinschneider are hardly mentioned. Their project of making Judaism a subject matter of research in the hope of thereby rejuvenating it while at the same time rendering it more palatable to the demands of contemporary bourgeois culture never seemed meaningful to Zionist historians, nor was it as such acceptable to the non-Zionists. Liberals saw the integration of Jews within the culture of the surrounding modern world as the main theme of nineteenth-century German Jewish history, not their efforts to uphold traditional ties. Despite the great outpouring of historical writing on nineteenth-century German Jewry, only very few historians have been willing or able to attend to the issues raised by Wissenschaft. None is better equipped to do so than Ismar Schorsch. His essays on the nature of modern Jewish scholarship in Germany have been published during the last two decades, primarily in the pages of the important albeit not very widely read yearbooks of the Leo Baeck Institute. The fact that they are now reprinted in a book form, in an elegant, faultless edition, is a festive occasion for those, like myself, who have read them before with admiration and repeatedly relied upon them. Each one of these essays is, no doubt, worth reading again. They are as unique and useful today as when they were first written, and reading them together considerably enhances their effect. One may perhaps question the centrality and significance Schorsch accords the work of that small, often obscure group of scholars from the 1820s until the late 1890s who, according to him, "reshaped the Jewish mind" (p. I). Their legacy is surely less meaningful for secular modern Jews than for those who maintain a religious posture; it is far more influential within the American Jewish context than in Israel. Yet the publication of this book is a great occasion for all who deal with modern Jewish history, regardless of ideology or geography. Collecting Schorsch's essays—though it does create some inevitable repetitions— clarifies both his line of thought and his basic ideological commitment. Only a few of the twenty-one essays collected here do not fit well into the general theme of the book, noticeably the essay on the historiography of antisemitism (no. 7) and perhaps also the one on the nature and development of the Leo Baeck Institute Year Book itself (no. 19)—both somewhat dated by now. Other essays have lost none of their freshness and originality. Despite the division of the book into two parts, "Emancipation and Its Aftermath" and "Thinking Historically," the book deals in fact with one topic only: the meaning of Wissenschaft des Judentums, its history, its internal differentiation and its function for modern Judaism—then as well as now.

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Some essays contain general, overall presentations of this central theme; others deal with various aspects within it—focusing either on the changing phases in the development of Wissenschaft or on individual scholars and particular groupings within the movement. Schorsch's two major essays are the ones on the "Ethos of Modern Jewish Scholarship" and the "Emergence of Historical Consciousness in Modern Judaism." The first lays bare the fundamental principles upon which a new science of Judaism was built. To begin with, Schorsch explains, one had to be free of the pious attitude toward Jewish tradition and texts. Indeed, it is this characteristic of Wissenschaft that made for a new departure during the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Jewish scholars were now capable of studying Judaism neither with nor for piety. In contrast to earlier scholars, including historians such as Azariah de Rossi and David Gans (the "Zemach David"), the Wissenschqftler were no longer bound by traditional exegesis, nor by canonical rules of selection and interpretation. Piety did not stand in the way of seeking new sources—both Jewish and non-Jewish; it no longer restricted them to a preoccupation with religious life; it could not obstruct their borrowing from the budding historical science of their time, nor from applying new methods and posing new questions to their material. Relying on the new Romantic notion of the individual and on Historicism, by then dominating German scholarship around them, they were now able to think of Judaism both as unique and as a part of a larger cultural context. Being free of prejudice, they believed they were in a position to present Judaism to the outside world much better than earlier— Christian—historians, while at the same time battling the "halakhists" within, opening the way to new thinking and to various forms of reform. Schorsch explores Wissenschaft's links to both Jewish and German scholarship at the time. For him, Wissenschaft was "the intellectual equivalent of political emancipation" (p. 161). It coincided with "the classic age of the German university" to produce a fundamental transformation and modernization of Ashkenazic Judaism (p. 177). In adopting a truly historical mode of thought, he claims, Judaism changed from within while it was adjusting to the dominant ways of Western thinking. It thus became more comprehensible—and palatable—for modern Jews and modern Germans alike. In a neatly complementary fashion, the synchronic analysis of the first article is supported by a diachronic presentation in the second. Here the emphasis is no longer on the features shared by Wissenschaft as a whole but rather on the process of its development and the tensions within it. Schorsch admits that there had been a gradual turn from tradition in earlier years too, but clearly seeks to underline the revolution inherent in the work of the Culturverein. Theirs was a "breakthrough into the past," as he brilliantly defines the contribution of its members. Although their project finally seemed partial and unsatisfying even to the members themselves, the Verein did start a new phase in the search for a modern Judaism. And that search, Schorsch convincingly argues, has been common to all the modernizing movements in Jewry ever since. Historical thinking was surely essential for reform. Both Jost's stern rejection of "Rabbinism" and Zunz's gentle critique of contemporary Judaism fed upon it. It has played a major role in legitimizing every kind of practical reform. While relying on history was natural enough for men such as Zachariah Frankel and

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Heinrich Graetz, who defended a moderate, gradual change and the preservation of popular Jewish customs, Abraham Geiger likewise used historical arguments in advocating his more radical renovations. For reformers of all persuasions a historical notion of Judaism served to stress its dynamism and adaptability. Interestingly enough, though perhaps with a time lag, it also attracted the conservatives. Even those belonging to the strictly secular element within German Jewry sought spiritual support and concrete meaning for their own type of Jewishness within it. Gradually, Schorsch argues, all Jews have developed some kind of historical consciousness and have demonstrated at least a measure of interest in the emergent Wissenschaft des Judentums. The many facets of the entire project are beautifully presented by Schorsch in some of the essays before us. His piece on "The Myth of Sephardic Supremacy" discloses an aspect of Wissenschaft that affected Jewish life in various, fascinating ways. Here scholarship, indeed, may have followed other impulses rather than being in the lead. With the early urge to reject strict rabbinical control, German Jews, Schorsch argues, developed "a lively bias for the religious legacy of Sephardic Jewry" (p. 71). It fitted only too well both their cultural and their political pretensions. This "Sephardic mystique" was expressed in the liturgy, in synagogue architecture, in literature and finally in scholarship. Schorsch is sympathetic even when he is critical. After all, his most admired figure among the German Jewish Wissenschaftler is Leopold Zunz, and it was precisely Zunz who was never quite taken in by that "Jewish equivalent of the Tyranny of Greece over Germany" (p. 87). The tone of Schorsch's writing about Zunz is reverent, almost touching. The book is dedicated to him. Schorsch writes on Jost and Graetz, on Hirsch and Geiger, but never with the same admiration. Even the tone of his essay on Frankel, the "European originator of Conservative Judaism"—surely a man close to his heart—is not as respectful as that apparent in his article on Zunz, fittingly entitled "History as Consolation." Zunz's special balance between piety and progress clearly appeals to Schorsch, intellectually—perhaps even emotionally. Zunz, according to him, paved the way for "a religious leadership by historians," that very road taken by Schorsch himself. It is that rare combination of originality, scholarship and commitment that attracts Schorsch to Zunz, and it is the reflection of the same combination that will attract many readers to Schorsch's book. SHULAMIT VOLKOV Tel-Aviv University

Naomi Shepherd, A Price Below Rubies: Jewish Women as Rebels and Radicals. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1993. 336 pp. Whether revolutionaries or Zionists, populists or philanthropists, women stand in the shadows of men in most studies of social movements. When Jewish women are studied, as in the case of revolutionaries such as Rosa Luxemburg and Anna

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Kuliscioff, their Jewishness is minimized or ignored. In A Price Below Rubies, Naomi Shepherd focuses on the lives of six women, presenting some key options for social activism open to Jewish women in this century. The women are Kuliscioff, Luxemburg, Esther Frumkin, Many a Shochat, Bertha Pappenheim and Rose Pesotta. Shepherd spotlights the significance of her subjects as women and Jews. Her scholarship is impressive and includes sources in English, Hebrew and Yiddish, Russian, Italian and German, as well as previously ignored archival materials and personal interviews with family and friends of the women. She is well versed in Jewish as well as European history. Beginning with a survey of the position of Jewish women in the European and American diasporas and in Israel, Shepherd argues that women's status changed from relative equality in biblical times to that of "protected inferiors" in the diaspora. The attention to context is a significant part of Shepherd's contribution, and she provides it in a way that is both scholarly and intelligible to the general reader. Important information about the six women who are the primary subjects of this book is integrated into a discussion of their contemporaries, thus placing their activism and actions in a larger historical context. For example, the sketch of Frumkin's life describes other radical women in the Russian Jewish community, including such Bundist activists as Sara Fuks, Mariia Zhaludskaia, Anna Heller and Pati Srednitskaia. The chapter on Pappenheim includes information about the Jewish feminist activists Lily Montagu, Aletta Jacobs and Rosika Schwimmer. And an epilogue discusses the anarchist Emma Goldman. The inclusion of this extra dimension makes the work an even more useful resource. Shepherd had no easy task. Half of her subjects denied or minimized the significance of their Jewishness. Yet by skillful sleuthing she weaves together a persuasive case for the largely "elusive Jewish component" in many of their lives. All of the six women highlighted in Shepherd's book came from Central and Eastern Europe, the great center of world Jewry. All were daughters of merchants; all rebelled against traditional Jewish notions of the woman's place. Their life choices varied—three of the six pursued their activism far from their birthplaces, Pesotta as a labor organizer in the U.S., Kuliscioff in Italy and Shochat in Palestine. Shepherd provides the first substantive treatment in English of the lives of Frumkin, a leading Soviet Jewish woman activist and Shochat, a pioneering Zionist, and the first anywhere of Pesotta, an activist in the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU). She persuasively argues for a reassessment of traditional assertions about Luxemburg's relationship to her Jewishness. And she is the first of Kuliscioff's biographers to look seriously at her Jewish and Russian roots. Each woman discussed by Shepherd confronted in her own way the question of combining activism with love, home and family. Pappenheim, in her youth Anna O., credited by Freud's biographer with discovering the "talking cure," devoted her life to bettering the lot of Jewish women and especially to the fight against prostitution among Jews. She rejected offers of marriage but in a moment of weakness lamented: "I am not necessary. For nothing and to no one" (pp. 236-237). Manya and Israel Shochat were married and had two children, but they often lived apart, and had little to do with their children. Moreover, her husband's womanizing led her

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to attempt suicide. Frumkin had two short marriages, the second to a rabbi. For most of her life she lived in an extended family with her nieces, her daughter, and the child of her wet nurse. Some sought a "free union" with an enlightened male. Kuliscioff's partnership with Filippo Turati was most successful, but they only sporadically lived together as she practiced medicine in Milan and he served as the Socialist leader in the Italian parliament. Pesotta had a succession of bittersweet love affairs, the longest with the married labor organizer Powers Hapgood. Goldman had several long love affairs but constancy and children, which she desired, ultimately eluded her. Rejecting the traditional roles of women, these activists had mixed responses to the women's movement and to women's role in society. Frumkin first praised and then attacked as "backward" women's attachment to Jewish traditions. Pappenheim criticized the "frivolity" of many female intellectuals, praised motherhood as the "essential goal of the Jewish woman's existence," but remained single and childless. Shochat advocated full equality between the sexes in all tasks; collective childrearing in children's houses on kibbutzim was her idea. The pioneer feminist, Anna Maria Mozzoni, introduced Kuliscioff to Italian feminism and to her life partner Turati. Women's suffrage was to be the one point of public disagreement between Kuliscioff and Turati. Pesotta rose to be an ILGWU vice president but protested bitterly against her status as a token woman. Shepherd illuminates the contradictions in the lives of these rebels and revolutionaries, pointing out the conflicts just below the surface of their revolutionary fervor. Kuliscioff, for example, was happy to marry her daughter into a conventional Catholic family, commenting: "I rebelled against everything and everyone ... my daughter, in recompense, will respect all the laws and all the conveniences" (p. 99). In general, the women's attitude toward their Jewishness varied from open hostility to critical pride. All except Pappenheim were Marxists or anarchists and rejected Jewish religious traditions, yet they probably knew more about Judaism and Jewish culture than many observant Jews today. All faced open antisemitism, but their reactions differed. Frumkin, the daughter and granddaughter of rabbis, advocated a Jewish identity based solely on the Yiddish language and culture, and articulated the concept of schools grounded on such principles (yidishe folkshule). As a leader of the Jewish section (Evsektsiid) of the Soviet Communist party, she penned a pamphlet entitled "Down With the Rabbis," and she argued that Jews had to be more "ruthless with rabbis" to avoid charges of partiality. The anarchist Emma Goldman was remarkably indifferent to the fate of the Jews, even in the 1930s when the Nazi threat was palpable. Pesotta supported Zionism and spoke out against antisemitism, fearing for the fate of the European Jews, including her family in the Soviet Union. Kuliscioff generally showed little interest in Judaism or Jews. Nevertheless she rejoiced at the Balfour Declaration and sympathized with the creation of a "place of refuge from all pogroms, including those carried out by the Russian revolutionaries." Shochat fought to transcend religion in Israel and Palestine. One of the most complex of Shepherd's portraits is that of Luxemburg. Luxemburg had a problematic fifteen-year relationship with the Jewish revolutionary Leo Jogiches, during which they tried to preserve a facade of bourgeois respectability by presenting themselves to Luxemburg's family as married, while at the same

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time hiding their liaison from others—fearing negative publicity for the revolutionary movement. Jogiches supported Luxemburg, served as her intimate confidant and adviser, but refused to live with her or father a child with her. Strongly sexual, she claimed at one point to have "enough temperament to set a prairie on fire," and had shorter, less intense liaisons with several other men, including Kostia Zetkin, the son of her contemporary, the German socialist activist Klara Zetkin. Shepherd deconstructs Luxemburg's own depiction of her life, accepted by subsequent biographers, and provides an especially nuanced portrait of Luxemburg's relationship to her Jewishness. Luxemburg portrayed her family as assimilated; in fact, her mother was the pious child of a rabbi and the family was observant. The most famous of Jewish revolutionaries dismissed "special Jewish sorrows," astonishingly discussing the Dreyfus case without a word about Dreyfus' persecution as a Jew. A particular target of antisemities, she reacted to the numerous slurs directed her way with "silent contempt." At the same time, she delighted in mercilessly criticizing other Jews, often in Yiddish. Shepherd disputes the label of Jewish self-hatred applied to Luxemburg by Jewish historians. Instead, she argues that Luxemburg, who as a child in Russian Poland experienced antisemitism in many forms, from school quotas to the Warsaw pogrom of 1881, sought to escape her special place as a Jew by promoting a rigidly exclusive vision of proletarian internationalism. Unlike the others portrayed in this book, Pappenheim remained an observant Jew, albeit critical of her religion and her coreligionists. She scorned religious sexism, writing that "the people of books locked women out of Jewish spiritual life." The famous biblical passage praising women, "A woman of worth, who can find / for her price is above rubies," evoked Pappenheim's sardonic response that it was "a lovesong with gefilte fish" (p. 230). Striving to save East European Jewish women from prostitution, she—like many German Jews—criticized their "crude manner" and lack of secular education. Lionized and vilified in their lifetimes, these women rebels and revolutionaries left a mixed legacy. Luxemburg was murdered in 1919 by right-wing German military forces after the failed Spartacist revolution. Her death was the ultimate sacrifice for the revolution, but to Shepherd it echoes the personal "sacrifice" expected of Jewish women. Frumkin died soon after her release from a Stalinist labor camp, her dream of a resurgent Jewish secular culture destroyed by Nazism and Soviet antisemitism. Kuliscioff died soon after Mussolini's ascent to power; her funeral cortege was attacked by Fascist gangs. The work of others bore bitter fruit. Pappenheim lived long enough to see her critique of Jewish prostitution used in Nazi propaganda. She died in 1936. Shochat drew upon the examples of the Russian peasant commune and the Canadian Dukhobor communities to establish an early prototype of what would later develop into the kibbutz. But Zionist leaders, fearing her radicalism, marginalized her. Pesotta, angered at the lack of recognition within the ILGWU for her organizing achievements, returned to factory work. There are a few factual inaccuracies in this otherwise excellent book. All socialist parties did not boycott the first Russian Duma elections in 1906. Archangel (Arkhangel'sk) is in European Russia, not in Siberia. But these are minor matters given the wide range of Shepherd's work. Overall this is an extremely significant contri-

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bution to our knowledge and understanding of Jewish women activists in the first half of the twentieth century. Naomi Shepherd deserves accolades for this pathbreaking work of scholarship. ROCHELLE GOLDBERG RUTHCHILD Norwich University

Melford E. Spiro, Gender and Culture: Kibbutz Women Revisited. New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1996. xi + 115 pp. Transaction Books has been performing a very useful service by reprinting significant books published originally by a different press. Each reprint contains a new introduction by the author, who thus has a chance to restate or modify his or her views as well as to react to the reviews. Melford Spiro's Gender and Culture: Kibbutz Women Revisited is one such contribution. At the time of its earlier publication in 1979, Spiro was already an established anthropologist at the University of California at San Diego, well known for his books Kibbutz: Venture in Utopia (1955) and Children of the Kibbutz (1958). When Gender and Culture appeared, two endorsements graced its back cover. The first was from political commentator Midge Decter, who called the book "brave" because Spiro "had not blinked at his discovery that there is after all a 'human nature.'" The second endorsement, excerpted from a review in Science, came from anthropologist Judith K. Brown, who did not label Spiro "brave." Rather, Brown wrote that Spiro's book was a "refreshingly brief, clear description and analysis of some of the changes that have taken place in the kibbutz." I mention these positive remarks because in the seventeen years since Gender and Culture first appeared, it has received only ten reviews in professional journals (according to the Journal of Book Review Abstracts, which did not include the Science review), and even fewer positive reviews. Worse yet, according to Spiro, Gender and Culture is almost never cited. Most scholars whose books are "ignored" would tend to hide that fact. Not so Spiro. In the introduction to the Transaction edition, he complains that "this study of women and gender in the Israeli kibbutz movement has the dubious distinction of having virtually never been cited or referenced in the veritable library of books, articles, collections, bibliographies, and review articles dealing with the comparative study of women and gender." Spiro sees in the "dismissal" of his book evidence that the academic community has a strong political bias. In a lecture given at Brandeis University in 1996, which I attended, Spiro elaborated this point. Insisting that his research, which he described as both meticulous and thorough, had demonstrated that women "by nature" want to mother, he argued that readers simply do not want to accept such a position. There are similar negative reactions to his two other "findings": attempts to modify women's roles in ways that conflict with "women's nature" are doomed to failure; and the kibbutz has

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proved to be an excellent test case demonstrating that it is all but impossible to successfully defy "women's nature." Insisting that his methodology was sound, Spiro explains the poor reception given his book as resulting from "prejudice" and "politics." I agree with one aspect of his argument—if someone disagrees with research that lies squarely in one's field, one should cite it and mention the disagreement. But I do not agree with his claim that his research methods were thorough. There are only four tables in this book: one displays the committee work of women, but does not show that of men; and the other three tables concern children's play. And with regard to meticulousness, in many places Spiro simply asks us to believe him. For example, he writes in the preface, the results [of a follow-up study of sixty people] were unambiguous: the interview data from these kibbutzim provided strong support for the conclusions derived from my participant-observation study of Kiryat Yedidim. Nevertheless, since the longitudinal data are derived exclusively from the latter kibbutz, the ethnographic descriptions found in this volume are primarily based on observations made in Kiryat Yedidim.

In other words, he says he has other corroborative data, but he does not share them with the reader. Similarly, Spiro quotes material without providing a reference (for example, see p. 6). This is particularly important since the original material in many cases (including the one just mentioned) was written in Hebrew, and the translation should be checked. In this particular unreferenced quotation, a male kibbutz member writes that "we have given [the woman] equal rights; we have emancipated her from the yoke [of domestic service] . . ." In my view, this very language undermines the author's contention. The kibbutz fieldwork on which the book is based was conducted in 1951 and 1975. Spiro considers 1951 the period of feminist revolutionary ideas, a time when gender roles were being de-emphasized. According to Spiro, kibbutz children were then raised in the context of feminist thinking—yet, as adults in 1975, they had become counterrevolutionaries, rejecting the feminism of their parents. He believes that the occurrence of this counterrevolution proves that the true nature of women is nonfeminist. I would like to offer a different explanation for Spiro's data, assuming that they are accurate. It can be argued that the issue is not "female nature," but rather men's propensity to dominate women, to distance themselves from women, and to attempt to hoard high-status positions. (In another publication, I have playfully given this propensity a label: "ltmdt," or "low threshold for male-dominance theorizing.") The history of humankind is the history of women's rebellion (successful or not) to free themselves from this oppression. The kibbutz women's energy for the fight seemed low in 1975, though it was high in the 1950s. Right now it is quite high again, with many kibbutzim being led by female as well as by male leaders. Manya Shohat, the formulator of the original kibbutz ideology and founder of the original Yishuv collective at Sejera in 1907, wrote that she was able to accomplish many things on the collective. Her only failure was the struggle for gender equality. Hashomer, for example, a paramilitary organization formed by members of Sejera, excluded women, with only two exceptions. Jewish women could not find work in

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Palestine; their concerns were always given low priority. Early kibbutzim actually had a very low proportion of women (a situation deleterious to gender equality), and used them only as cooks. This is why some women joined together to form a women's training farm. The kibbutz ideology of equality could have worked only if men had participated fully in child care, thus leaving women, as a group, free to engage in other activities. They never did that.1 What the kibbutz ideologists attempted to do was to generate gender equality in a different fashion: in order "to relieve the mother of the responsibility of caring for her children . . . the system of 'collective socialization' (chinuch meshutaf) [was developed], in which children are assigned from birth to age-graded children's houses, where the responsibility for their socialization is delegated to child care specialists" (p. 12). But who were these "child care specialists"? Other women, of course. So the kibbutz women were "freed" from caring for their own children by being compelled to care for other women's children. Spiro uses biological argumentation throughout—he writes that the high rate of miscarriage (no source given), the weaker physique of women, and breastfeeding kept women away from physically demanding work and steered them into the kitchen and child-care facilities. He rejects the argument that male chauvinism played a role, and says these decisions were made by women and men together (no source given). He does not say if there was a discussion about what was more important, gender equality or higher income. When I studied a kibbutz in 1979-1980,1 witnessed two relatively young families having their membership rescinded. In both cases, the parents of one member of the couple were kibbutz founders, and one would have thought that this relationship would have protected the younger people from expulsion. In one case, the family was rejected because the man was not a good worker and did not mix well with his peers. In the other case, however, the family was voted out because the wife had refused to work in the children's house. The rule in the kibbutz at the time was that women had to "give service" in the children's houses every few years. The rule did not apply to men. During my year of field study at the kibbutz, there was only one man involved in any aspect of child care. He was an American volunteer—is biology different in the United States? A true revolution in gender relations on the kibbutz—and everywhere else— will come about only when men raise children; when the vast majority of single parents are not mothers; when day-care workers and elementary-school teachers are equally divided among men and women; and when the work one does is not correlated with one's gender. This will take a concerted effort by the powerful to give up their power. The true revolution in gender relations has never occurred in the kibbutz—there was never an ideology there that gave priority to the issue of equality between men and women. There were only superficial changes: the elimination of the word husband or wife; dispensing with a marriage ceremony. The kibbutz society has never freed itself from the tendency to evaluate women and men according to different yardsticks. Equality between the sexes is a goal yet to be achieved. The fact that we have not yet achieved it, though, does not mean that it is biologically interdicted. Early on, the kibbutz was used as proof that humans could create an egalitarian society. Despite Spiro's passionate argu-

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mentation, the kibbutz cannot now be used to prove that a society of equals is biologically impossible. SHULAMIT REINHARZ Brandeis University

Note 1. As psychoanalytic sociologist Nancy Chodorow has written in The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley: 1978), it is only when men start caring for the children that we will have significant social change leading to gender equality.

Henry Felix Srebrnik, London Jews and British Communism, 1935-1945. London: Vallentine Mitchell, 1995. xiii + 258 pp. Phil Piratin, the only Jewish Communist ever to be elected to the British Parliament (in 1945), died at the age of 88 in December 1995. His death occurred almost four years to the day after the collapse of the wellspring of his political faith: the Soviet Union. The era of Communism in Europe is passing into history. The "love affair with the Left" (as Geoffrey Alderman once called it) that was conducted by East End Jews in the 1930s, and bore fruit in the electoral successes of 1945, may be explained not so much by ideological conversion to the Communist cause as by a short-lived confluence of practical interests. Thus argues Henry Srebrnik in London Jews and British Communism. In the 1930s and throughout the Second World War, the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), perhaps a third of whose members at that time were Jewish, established itself as the most active voice for issues of Jewish concern. Often working through Popular Front organizations, it was at the forefront of the fight against poverty in the East End, orchestrating rent strikes against "slumlords," campaigning for proper Air Raid Precautions (ARP) and for the provision of better housing at the end of the war. On all of these bread-and-butter issues the Communists proved themselves more effective than the Labour party on the Stepney Borough Council, which had acquired a reputation for corruption and was dominated by the Irish. Above all, the Communists fought against fascism in both its domestic and international manifestations. The famous Battle of Cable Street (October 1936) became a byword for the struggle against Oswald Mosely and antisemitism in general. Street activism appealed to working-class Jews dissatisfied with the lukewarm approach of the established political parties (including Labour) and the "low profile" adopted by the Board of Deputies of British Jews. Abroad, the British Communist party condemned Franco in Spain and the Polish ultra-nationalists and sang the praises of Soviet Russia as the best insurance against Nazi Germany (an image little dented by the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact of 1939-1941). After the inva-

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sion of Russia, the party called for the opening of a second front in the west in order to divert German troops away from the titanic battles in the east. The Red Army would then be able to advance across Eastern Europe and, incidentally, save the Jews from the Nazi genocide. Thus, the defense of the Soviet Union and of European Jewry went hand in hand. The party was able to present an image of Soviet Russia that recommended itself to Jews in the East End and beyond. Stalinist Russia's ideological opposition to Nazism was unrivaled in Europe. Moreover, it was the only state on earth that had outlawed antisemitism and was endeavoring to improve the economic condition of the Jewish proletariat. The regime was actively promoting Yiddish culture through the World Jewish Cultural Union (1937) and the creation of the Birobidzhan Jewish Autonomous Region in the Soviet Far East. Pro-Soviet feeling in the East End of London peaked with the formation in the U.S.S.R. of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and the visit to Britain of its two leading spokesmen, Shloyme Mikhoels and Itzik Feffer, late in 1943. The Communists set out to enlist Jewish support in unabashed "ethnic" fashion, and did so very successfully. Committed Jewish Communists were undoubtedly sincere in their belief that, through a synthesis of Communist and Jewish ideas, they were making "a positive contribution to Jewish life" (p. 14). Nevertheless, in so doing they somehow "managed to ignore much of Marxist-Leninist doctrine, including its analysis of the Jews and their ultimate place in society—an analysis highly unfavourable to any long-range Jewish ethnic ambitions" (p. 4). And in the afterglow of the triumphs of 1945, Piratin and his supporters failed to acknowledge the compelling truth, which patently did not fit their ideological construct, that it was ethnicity rather than class consciousness that had made their victory possible. In the late 1940s and the 1950s, the constellation of circumstances that had given rise to the Jewish-Communist alliance began to dissipate. Fascism had been defeated—and in the process six million Jews had lost their lives. The Iron Curtain descended; initial Soviet support for the nascent state of Israel turned into hostility and was accompanied by revelations of Stalin's own crimes against the Jews. Zionism was now in the ascendant. In Britain, the second generation was leaving the "ghetto," their flight having been hastened by the Blitz. Upward social mobility meant that Jewish identification with working-class causes inevitably lessened. Srebrnik charts his territory with confidence, underpinned by sound research. He makes particularly strong use of the wealth of pamphlet and propaganda literature produced by the period, and does not ignore important Yiddish as well as English sources. (Only very minor errors occasionally creep in, such as the anachronistic references to Greatorex Street, London El [Great Garden Street] and the United Nations [League of Nations] before 1945, pp. 29 and 107, pp. 78-79). Perhaps the most valuable source for his study are the interviews that he conducted with veteran Jewish socialists in the late 1970s and early 1980s. (I was privileged to meet some of the same remarkable people in the course of my own research for Bolsheviks and British Jews). Many of them, including the trade unionist Mick Mindel and the Yiddish writer, I. A Lisky, as well as Piratin, have since died. Srebrnik sticks resolutely to the historical record, for the most part preferring to quote from congress speeches rather than to probe psychology. Only in the last few

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pages does he hint at the traumatic disillusionment that many lifelong Jewish Communists experienced following the revelation of Stalin's atrocities in 1956. The most tragic case was that of Hyman Levy, professor of mathematics at Imperial College, London University, who almost suffered a nervous breakdown after being hounded out of the party for writing a defense of the Jews entitled Jews and the National Question in 1958. However, the personal dimension is largely absent from Srebrnik's account: What made Jewish Communists "tick"? Why, for instance, did Professor Chimen Abramsky rebel against his father, the leading talmudic scholar, Dayan Yehezkel Abramsky (who had spent two years in a Siberian labor camp before overseas protests achieved his release and emigration to Britain in 1932), and become a secular pro-Soviet Communist—only later to lose his political faith? Abramsky junior subsequently became Goldsmid Professor of Jewish Studies at University College London. (I am a former student of his.) London Jews and British Communism does not answer such questions, but it certainly proves itself as a political history of the period. SHARMAN KADISH The Hebrew University

Language, Literature and the Arts

Mark Anderson, Kafka's Clothes: Ornament and Aestheticism in the Habsburg "Fin de Siede. " Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. 231 pp. The first three chapters of Mark Anderson's study, arguably the most original and most valuable section of his book, offer a detailed contextualization of Kafka's earlier works in relation to the aesthetic movements of the turn of the century, including Jugendstil, the cultural politics of the Kunstwart (a journal to which the young Kafka subscribed), J. P. Miiller's gymnastic system (which Kafka followed), clothing, reform and nudism. Kafka's intellectual development, Anderson suggests, had its roots in the aesthetics of ornament before moving to a rejection and "purge" of such aesthetics. This change mirrors a general move toward "reform aesthetics" in Europe in the first decade of the century; even his vegetarianism and interest in rural life are part of this larger cultural phenomenon, echoes of whose volkisch undercurrents are to be found in his writings. One of the questions raised in this study is that of Kafka's entanglement in "Jewish selfhatred." His texts often seem to have absorbed the antisemitic discourse of the age: perhaps this is what Kafka meant by "the negative," and by his remark about being either an end or a beginning. Anderson starts from the observation that clothes are important to Kafka, and that this fact has largely been ignored by critics because it does not neatly fit in with the conceptions of him as a modernist, existentialist or "spiritual" writer. Anderson elevates clothing to the status of a controlling metaphor, "a matrix for reading the work as a whole . . . the master trope" (p. 3). Of equal significance as a critical tool, however, are the multiple resonances of the word Verkehr (traffic/intercourse), which Anderson uses as a recurring and seemingly inexhaustible interpretive key. These two critical concepts are combined to good effect in the discussion of the "traffic of clothes" in Kafka's "Description of a Struggle" and Meditation. Clothes, it is argued, "insert the individual into a social context of set values," but for the young Kafka this semiotic was an "unreadable surface" (p. 32), no longer amenable to realist or naturalist investigation, so that surfaces themselves became spiritual sites—the aesthetics of decadence, and of fragmentation. Clothing and Verkehr are powerful metaphors, but they also function metonymically, repeatedly evoking the presence of the father's fancy goods business in the fictional world and marking out "a paternal realm in which [the narrator] has no fixed place" (p. 35). This paternal realm is shown to extend to the dominant forms of social intercourse—to the Verkehr of economic, sexual and discourse relations, all of which are approached with suspicion. Anderson's readings of these two early works break new ground and are perhaps 369

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the most illuminating to be found in the critical literature. Subsequent chapters, while building on these methods and findings, typically follow well-trodden paths, offering some illuminating insights on the way, even if the speculativeness of some lines of inquiry tends to be played down. Chapters 4-7 are devoted to works produced between 1912 and 1914-1915. The novel Amerika is read as a "cinematographic" study of the "aesthetic spectacle and metaphysical dilemmas" of the modem city in constant motion, with its attendant "destabilization of character" (p. 107). The Metamorphosis is seen as an essay in the aesthetics of a body liberated from the various forms of Verkehr in a way that "fulfills the dreams of every fin-desiecle aesthete: to become . . . the artwork, the visual icon, itself" (p. 135). The Trial is found to be informed both by a "denunciation of authority in the family and the state" (p. 155), and by a critical reflection on "the physiognomy of guilt"— specifically on contemporary pseudoscientific attempts (with radical and volkisch overtones), familiar to Kafka, to "type" criminals physiologically. "In the Penal Colony" is read principally as an introverted reflection on Kafka's own "writing system," situated on an "island of tropes," which, like its inspiration, Mirbeau's Torture Garden, is a critique of European decadence. Kafka, Anderson suggests, was on the side of those struggling against "the ornate forms of fin-de-siecle culture—a struggle he waged . . . from clothing and handwriting to his gymnastic regime and literary struggle" (p. 181). The final chapter jumps forward ten years to 1924 and "Josephine the Singer," offering an insightful reading that suggests that after years of ambivalence, Kafka finally "takes back" any subscription to Jewish self-hatred. Drawing on then current influential theories of women and Jews as "soulless" (Weininger, Wagner), Anderson persuasively reads Kafka's last story as an ironic and understated meditation on his own situation as a (self-elected) representative of the generation of "Western Jews" caught problematically between emancipation and Zionism (p. 205f.). This last story of Kafka's does not merely absorb the contemporary discourse of antisemitism but reflects playfully and ironically on it, as it does on the discourse of contemporary misogyny. The argument draws heavily on two established critical axioms: Kafka's technique of realized metaphor and the self-referential nature of his writing. Anderson is generally adept at drawing out the connections between these internal meaning systems and the historical social context, particularly with regard to Kafka's problematical relationship to German and Jewish identities. For example, the "Luftmenschen" thinly concealed in "Investigations of a Dog" leads him both to Max Nordau's famous characterization of down-and-out East European Jews in 1901 and to Kafka's own idealized metaphor of the writer as a gymnast, trapeze artist, tightrope walker (p. 90f.). The discussion of "In the Penal Colony," however, seems less balanced, too one-sidedly self-referential, and it is noticeable that here Anderson appends a postscript acknowledging the existence of (historically equally valid) external referents—one thinks of the First World War, oppressive regimes, ritualistic executions and scapegoats. The fact that his interpretation of this story conspicuously ignores the crucial perspectival figure, the traveler, suggests that his reading, though pertinent, is at best partial. Curiously, these reservations do not apply to Anderson's discussion of The Trial.

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On the whole, Anderson writes clearly and confidently, combining historical research and interpretive flair. His study has significantly changed our picture of Kafka, who now appears more integrated into the currents of Central Europe at the turn of the century. Above all, the continuities from the early Jugendstil Kafka to the late mature writer are clearer, as are certain features of the historical context to which his oeuvre belongs. The nostrum of Kafka's sudden and magical appearance as a (serious) writer in the "breakthrough" of 1912 has surely been laid to rest. W.J. DODD

University of Birmingham

Alan Cheuse and Nicholas Delbanco (eds.), Talking Horse: Bernard Malamud on Life and Work. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. xxiv + 220 pp. Of the writers who, for the greater part of the twentieth century, have dominated the scene of Jewish American writing (Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow, Cynthia Ozick and Philip Roth), Malamud is in many ways both the most and the least Jewish. He is the most Jewish in that, not only does he regularly populate his fiction with recognizably Jewish characters (as do Bellow, Ozick and Roth), but many of these characters are European refugees who still remember the old traditions and speak Yiddish. Their stories, furthermore, are deeply embedded within paradigms of Jewish folklore and myth. Maiamud is also, however, the least Jewish of these writers because for him the Jew is not so much an individual who lives a Jewish life (even, as in Roth's fiction, an American Jewish life) as "a kind of universal man" and "a symbolic one." "Every man is a Jew though he may not know it," Malamud quotes himself as saying in an essay entitled "Jewishness in American Fiction"; and he continues: What I mean ... is that the Jewish drama is prototypic, "formed," and symbolically understandable. If you understand it you realize it is your own, whether you are a Jew or not; and I suppose what I hope by saying that is that recognition of this drama should ally human beings to one another, should ally them, even strangers, to those who have as a people for historical reasons lived through it recurrently (p. 137).

In Talking Horse, Alan Cheuse and Nicholas Delbanco have collected lectures, essays, notes, parts of interviews and other musings (many of them unpublished) by this very private writer who had "no need to 'talk shop'" (p. xiii) and yet left a legacy of insights into his literary art, which both supplement his fictional writings and have merit in their own right. What emerges most powerfully in the portrait of the artist produced by Talking Horse is the universal humanist that Malamud endeavored to be, nowhere more insistently than in his multifarious depictions of the "drama" of the Jews. As Malamud put it in his 1959 National Book Award address, included in the

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volume, what "animates" his writing is his weariness with the "colossally deceitful devaluation of man in this day." It is this view of man that, according to Malamud, "the writer dare not accept"; the "most important task is to recapture his image as human being as each of us in his secret heart knows it to be, and as history and literature have from the beginning revealed it" (pp. 215-216). This Malamud does through his constant recurrence to the figure of the Jew, whose condition in the modern world (alongside that of the "American Negro," who also deeply concerns him), reflects that "greatness" within "ugliness and beauty" which Malamud defines as the subject of art (p. 216)."It's a lucky break to be a member of a minority group," says Malamud in "Jewishness in American Fiction," making reference to black as well as to Jewish writers; but "universality comes out of one's response to the totality of [one's] experience . . . and I won't tie up achieving art with having been born Jewish" (p. 141). One can only celebrate Malamud's universality, both in his fiction and in his critical assertions. Yet one might also feel that there is a problem in his refusal to tie his art to his Jewishness, as one might also, for all of Malamud's considerable nobility of purpose and remarkable achievement as a writer, have concerns regarding his depiction of the Jew-as-sufferer in this fiction. "I'm an American, I'm a Jew, and I write for all men," Malamud tells us in one interview: A novelist has to be ... or he's built himself a cage. I write about Jews, when I write about Jews, because they set my imagination going. I know something about their history, the quality of their experience and belief, and of their literature, though not as much as I would like. Like many writers, I'm influenced especially by the Bible, both Testaments. I respond in particular to the East European immigrants of my father's and mother's generation; many of them were Jews of the Pale as described by the classic Yiddish writers. And of course I've been deeply moved by the Jews of the concentration camps, and the refugees wandering from nowhere to nowhere (p. 19).

Not only is the Jew as Malamud presents him or her more material or metaphor than unique individual, but there is a Christian tone to Malamud's thinking that pervades both his fiction and his prose. "One day I began to write seriously," Malamud begins the introduction to a 1983 reprinting of his stories: "Years of all sort had gone by. The annunciation had long since tolled and the response was slow awakening. . . . Some are born whole; others must seek this blessed state" (p. 5). Talking Horse is an intelligently compiled set of writings interlaced with the editors' personal reminiscences, which will be of interest to anyone who is concerned with Malamud in particular or with American Jewish authorship in general. It throws into vivid relief both what is immensely appealing about Malamud's writing and also what could trouble the contemporary Jewish reader who may feel that Jews and their experience constitute more than a figure for some general human condition. Of course, what must be taken into account here is the cultural moment at which Malamud was writing—a period in which the idea of Jewish assimilation as part of the general integration into American culture of all of its minority populations (notably, of course, African Americans) dominated the literary scene. Yet one may use just this historical contextualization not simply to accept the terms of Malamud's philosophy of literature, but to query both its bases and its consequences

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for Jewish identity and for Jewish art in the United States. The value of Talking Horse, then, may well transcend its being a Malamud celebration, though certainly one does not want to eliminate the celebratory element of this volume dedicated to the thinking and writing of a very admirable (Jewish) human being. EMILY BUDICK The Hebrew University

Lawrence Graver, An Obsession with Anne Frank: Meyer Levin and the Diary. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. xx + 254 pp. Shivering in the cold of typhus-ridden Bergen-Belsen, covered with only a blanket and reduced to bones and tears, the fifteen-year-old Anne Frank could scarcely have foreseen that her terrifyingly brief life would be remembered at all, that her diary would be rescued from the indifference of the security police and converted into sublime and poignant testimony to momentary survival under barbarism. No other document has matched the impact of Het Achterhuis in enabling millions of readers to sense the unfathomable enormity of the Holocaust; and perhaps because the tortures to come are unimagined, the book made bearable the unprovoked suffering of seven rather ordinary people living with one extraordinary adolescent. Born into a comfortable family that subscribed to Reform Judaism, Anne Frank had told "Kitty" that, were any Jews to remain alive after the war, their endurance might inspire humanity to uplift itself. Thus, even as the furies outside were encircling her, she could envision her people as a light unto the nations, which is why her father— the only member of the beleaguered family not to perish—could discern in the diary a voice of universalism, and not (or at least not only) a record of the catastrophe that befell the Jews. Enter Meyer Levin (1905—1981), who first read Het Achterhuis in a French translation in 1950 and would be doomed for the rest of his life to be ensnared in the diary. Lawrence Graver calls him "a neglected but important writer" (p. xvi), although the latter adjective is an exaggeration. The course of American Jewish fiction, to say nothing of American literature in general, would have been unaltered had The Old Bunch (1937) and The Settlers (1972) never appeared; and even a bestseller like Compulsion (1956) may now be of interest for the singular legal oddity of having provoked a lawsuit from Nathan Leopold, whose crime inspired the novel. (Only in America does a thrill-slayer sue for libel.) As a social realist of the Chicago School, Levin might be remembered, if at all, as a less energetic James T. Farrell— were it not for a heroic devotion to honoring The Diary of Anne Frank and a selfdestructive overinvestment in trying to stage it. Indeed An Obsession with Anne Frank is as much about legal entanglements— contracts and breaches of contract, accusations of plagiarism, defamations of character, verbal understandings and misunderstandings and the like—as it is about the mysteries of the creative process. Levin even hauled Otto Frank into court, which

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the novelist's friend Harry Golden once likened to suing the father of Joan of Arc, and which was therefore a public relations blunder of downright craziness. Perhaps the novelist was crazy, as another friend, Rabbi Joachim Prinz, surmised, because Levin seemed addicted to repudiating an agreement (a renunciation of rights) he had voluntarily signed: "It might very well be that you need some psychiatric help because you have made yourself sick" (quoted on p. 184). Since Graver is a layman whose speciality is twentieth-century literature, he takes no position on Levin's sanity. But in a nonclinical way, the social realist who wanted to write a successful commercial play was manifestly afflicted with paranoia, blaming self-hating Broadway producers and self-hating Jewish allrightniks and apparatchniks, and also Communist sympathizers (during the Red Scare!) and finally New York-based book reviewers—just because his own Diary-based drama had never been mounted. Even his second wife, Tereska Torres, pleaded with him to desist, as she watched his downward spiral into the endless, embittered recriminations of a crank. "It is yourself you should be suing for damages," she told him (quoted on p. 135), an interpretation that Graver essentially seconds. The rejection slips that other authors might accept, however reluctantly, as commonplace, Levin cunningly interpreted as signs of silencing and censorship, as evidence of a conspiracy to consign him to oblivion. Even as the list of persecutors kept growing, one name remained conspicuously absent: his own. And yet even though Levin behaved so appallingly and so obnoxiously that he succeeded in creating enemies, transforming his suspicions into reality, Graver is judicious enough to entertain the case for the defense. Though Levin had failed to turn a fundamentally interior document, choking with claustrophobia, into a drama of conflicting wills, Graver grants the validity of his protagonist's complaint that the distinctly Jewish part of the Diary was reduced or erased in the version that the team of Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich wrote—the version that won the Pulitzer Prize and in translation stunned audiences in West Berlin and numerous other German cities. Hackett and Goodrich ignored the Zionism of Anne's sister Margot, jettisoned the Hanukah hymn "Rock of Ages" and, most disturbingly, perverted the diarist's own realization of the singularity of the Jewish fate into a spurious, one-size-fits-all claim that "we're not the only people that' ve had to suffer. There' ve always been people that' ve had to. Sometimes one race. . . . Sometimes another. . . . " A child in Amsterdam had been sensitive enough and brave enough to face the horrifying ordeal from which no Jew was intended to be spared. But this acknowledgment of harrowing particularity was presumably beyond the grasp of audiences on Broadway and elsewhere. No wonder then that, with one minor exception, the only staging of Levin's dramatization has been (illegally) in the state of Israel. An Obsession with Anne Frank merits praise for the lucidity, fairness and poise with which its author recounts how the Diary could haunt Levin for three decades. Graver has drawn upon a dozen archives in the United States, in Israel and in Amsterdam; and he has conducted interviews with twice as many figures who brushed against the agon of an ardent Zionist whose two wives happened to be Gentiles, a serious novelist who was desperate to score big on Broadway, an "ethnic" writer who was so deeply moved by the Holocaust and yet could grotesquely compare his stalled literary career to the fate of doomed Jews in Nazioccupied Europe. Graver's book does not pretend to deepen historical knowledge of

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Anne Frank—much less of the Holocaust itself. But this admirably balanced book portrays an eccentric victim of his own need to highlight his people's suffering and to vindicate his own appreciation of what Anne Frank represented. Graver is most adroit in weaving his way through texts: the drafts of the plays, the exchanges of letters, the launching of legal missiles, and even the volumes that Levin wrote partly to assuage his own self-inflicted wounds, like The Fanatic (1964) and The Obsession (1973). But their author was also trapped within his nation's culture, and here An Obsession with Anne Frank might have treated more extensively the problem that is generated when the sales department of Doubleday (the U.S. publisher of the Diary) was told to stress its "beauty, humor and insight" (p. 24), and when Broadway reviewers praised the Hackett-Goodrich play because "there is nothing grim . . . about it," and because "The Diary of Anne Frank is not in any important sense a Jewish play. ... It is the story of the gallant human spirit" (quoted on p. 94). STEPHEN J. WHITFIELD Brandeis University

Hannan Hever, Bishvi hautopiyah: masah 'al meshihiyut upolitikah bashirah ha'ivrit beerez yIsrael bein shtei milhamot ha'olam (Captives of Utopia: An Essay on Messianism and Politics in Hebrew Poetry in Eretz Israel Between the Two World Wars). Sde Boker: Ben-Gurion University Press, 1995. 196 pp. In his present work, Hannan Hever continues his research into the political function of Hebrew poetry in prestate Israel as an expression of competing Zionist ideologies and political interests. Following upon his studies of Uri Zvi Greenberg (1977, 1994) and Avraham Ben Yitzhak (1993), Hever now utilizes poetry, together with other texts authored by different writers, in order to demonstrate the centrality of utopian-messianic traits in the character of pre-Israeli Zionist culture. Hever argues that while the idea of Zionism as a messianic movement was repeatedly contested in the realm of ideological discourse—and summarily rejected by many representatives of socialist Zionism—it continued to be widely cultivated in the hothouse of Hebrew poetry. Regardless of the poet's party affiliation, this conception of Zionism was shared (albeit in different versions) by Greenberg, who moved ever further to the right, and by Avraham Shlonsky on the left. Hever traces the origins of different messianic conceptions in Hebrew literature back to the 1880s, finding its roots in the romantic concept of the Prophet and in such early modernist European literary trends as symbolism and expressionism. Describing a phenomenon already well known in Zionist thought and historiography, Hever's claim to originality lies in revealing what he sees as a surprising consensus about the idea of Zionism-as-messianism among poets from both the right and left, and in the explanations that he assigns to this phenomenon. His theoretical starting point is a fashionable fusion of new Marxism with post-Zionism. He sees poetry and all other forms of artistic activity as a vehicle for the advancement of political interests by way of

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ideology, and ideology as a manipulative distortion of reality in the service of politics. In contrast to traditional Zionist thinkers such as Joseph Klausner and Gershom Scholem, who saw in Zionism a modern reification of a historical drive toward national redemption, Hever understands it as an omen presaging Israeli aggression against the Arabs. Likewise, Hever explains the fact that messianic motifs were common to poets both on the right and on the left as indicative of a common effort to build a national culture, and as proof of latent chauvinism or even fascism (p. 84) common to prestate Zionist culture as a whole. Certainly, a new look at messianism and at the apocalyptic motif in the Hebrew poetry of the first half of the twentieth century is a worthy subject for literarycultural-ideological research, especially if it employs comparative methods. Indeed, this is Hever's intention, but the results are questionable. The materials he marshals in support of this thesis actually demonstrate the opposite: they show that in Zionist ideology and Zionist high culture—in poetry as elsewhere—there was constant opposition to the messianic conception of Zionism, which was seen as a dangerous romantic myth, detached from reality. Even when poets struck a messianic note, as in the case of Shlonsky and others in the Mapam circle, theirs was an appropriation of the Christian mythification of suffering rather than aggressive apocalyptics. Natan Alterman's poems, "Joy of the Poor" and "The Ten Plagues of Egypt," could have provided stronger evidence for the argument that the Hebrew poets' conception of Zionism as an apocalyptic event gained force toward the 1940s; but strangely enough, Hever chooses to analyze Alterman's essays on ars poetica without revealing the end of the story, namely, the rejection of apocalyptic Zionism by the great majority of Israeli poets in the mid-1950s. Neither does he mention the fact that prestate women writers—Rachel, Esther Raab and especially Lea Goldberg—were conspicuously indifferent to messianism. Likewise, Hever neglects Hayim Nahman Bialik's attacks on apocalyptic messianism as a non-Jewish phenomenon in his Scroll of Fire (1905) and The Days Grow Longer (1909) as well as in extraliterary documents. Bialik ought to have received more attention, not only because of his centrality in Hebrew poetry but also because his political thinking was far from the left. In fact, Bialik's views, in clear contrast to Klausner's, could have served as a proper beginning to the story of apocalyptic messianism in Hebrew poetry. In marking the tradition of Zionist messianism in Hebrew poetry, Hever seems to jump too quickly from "utopia" to "messianism," "apocalypse," "prophetical rhetoric," "political aggression" and "fascism," as if all these terms were fully congruent or at least tightly and logically linked. Supported by stereotypes from psychoanalysis, he sees "repressed aggression" everywhere, ignoring the differences between utopianism, Christian messianism and apocalyptic thought regarding the means by which redemption was to be achieved. After all, not all the versions of the ancient and universal human dream of redemption are aggressive. This confusion of terms renders even the title of the book misleading, for its main theme is not Zionist Utopian poetry, such as that produced by supporters of Hibbat Zion, but rather Zionist apocalyptic poetry. Clarification of this confusion could have improved both the argumentation and the formal structure of the book, which has no table of contents or subtitles, although Hever's diachronic approach is clear. Chronologically, David Frishman's The Prophet (1896) is the first example of the

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messianic tradition in Hebrew poetry to be closely examined (pp. 26-28). However, despite the prophetic rhetoric of this poem, it is very difficult to locate in it any sign of national aggression, or even other evidence of nationalism. Frishman, hardly a Zionist, was an opponent of nationalist poetry; his messiah is the non-engage artist. "The messiah presents a political alternative to the governing establishment," Hever writes (p. 27). But what is the connection between Frishman's battle on behalf of aestheticism and Zionist aggression against the Arabs? And why should Frishman's poem be used as the first example of the prophetic motif in Hebrew poetry, rather than the early Bialik or any other (even minor) Hibbat Zion poet or, perhaps, the Jewish-Russian poet Semion Frug, who in the 1880s used prophetic rhetoric to protest against Jewish suffering? Hever argues that messianism was a result of the 1881 pogroms; but in fact the nonaggressive romantic and even aestheticist poetry written in the 1880s-1890s only shows how far the roots of Zionism were from instinctive aggressive reactions. Another troubling source of confusion concerns Hever's attempt to trace the literary sources of modern Hebrew messianism in European poetry. Comparative research of Zionist literature against the background of European culture is now in its early stage, national movements naturally tending to emphasize their uniqueness. Hever could have done much to revise the traditional view of historians, who have looked mainly to Jewish precedents for modern messianic sensibilities. But here he reveals only a partial knowledge, especially of Russian symbolism, which leads him to a series of dubious conclusions. Was expressionism truly the first movement to offer an apocalyptic view of modern history, as Hever assumes (p. 132)? As early as the 1880s, apocalyptic poems (such as Panmongolism) were being written by Vladimir Solovev, the prophet of Russian symbolism, followed by his influential lectures (such as "On the End of World History," 1900); Dmitry Merezhkovskii's essay "The Coming Kham"; Leonid Andreev's story "The Red Laughter"; Andrey Biely's novel Petersburg and his essay "Apocalypse in Russian Poetry" (1905)—and these are only examples of the centrality enjoyed by apocalyptic thought in Russian symbolism, which was greatly influenced by popularized Nietzscheanism. Likewise, the neo-Christian motifs Hever finds in the poetry of Shlonsky and Ezra Zussman, such as the idea of Godmanhood, are clearly inspired by the symbolist-Solovevian tradition, not by ancient Christianity. It was from symbolism that Hebrew poetry inherited its inclination toward paradox and oxymora, which Hever finds in Greenberg 's poetry. The whole complex of rhetoric, structure and style described by Hever as the artistic form of Hebrew apocalyptic messianism is in the tradition of Russian (and Polish) symbolism, which can serve as a better explanation of the common ground shared by prestate Hebrew poetry, rather than Hever's argument of common aggression toward the Arabs. One can argue that, philosophically, the symbolist point of view was potentially totalitarian. Last but not least, the book suffers from unprofessional editing. Hever's style is sometimes distorted by oversophisticated formulations and is at times awkwardly unpolished, sounding too much like a translation of American academic discourse. The editor, Hamutal Tsamir, has left the reader without a bibliographical reference for certain citations in the text (Hever's work of 1991, mentioned on p. 8; and Berdichevsky's work, cited on p. 9, do not appear in the bibliography), and she did not

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delete repetitions of the same citation (pp. 127,132) or even of the same word (bottom of p. 132; beginning of p. 133). The dates of the Hebrew publications are mentioned sometimes by numbers (the Christian year) sometimes by Hebrew letters (the Jewish year). Such oversights create an uneasy impression of negligent haste, and they inspire the hope that modern Jewish apocalyptic messianism and its expressions in Zionist literature and culture will be reexamined more carefully in the future. HAMUTAL BAR-YOSEF Ben-Gurion University

Lawrence A. Hoffman and Janet R. Walton (eds.)., Sacred Sound and Social Change: Liturgical Music in Jewish and Christian Experience. Notre Dame and London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993. 352 pp. This set of essays, mainly focused on the recent and current state of liturgical music among American Protestants, Catholics and Jews, is a daring exercise in anthologymaking. The editors have deliberately chosen to blend not only a variety of religious and denominational voices but also to mix academics and liturgists with composers and cantors, going so far as to include actual musical compositions alongside scholarly and polemic commentary. For this alone they deserve the thanks of a reading public all too used to either monochromatic monographs or hodgepodge "readers" on trendy topics. A multilateral approach best suits the subject. Liturgical music is rarely the province of liturgists, and musicologists tend to focus more on historical development than lived experience. Yet every week tens of millions of North Americans attend services for which music serves as continuity, solace and inspiration. While the volume under review hardly includes the experience of all Jewish and Christian congregations, it offers a lively sense of liturgical life both "in the trenches" and from afar. By concentrating on what the editors call "mainstream" practice, the book avoids a completely diffuse approach, since there are threads that tie together the scattered experiences and commentators. Overall, Sacred Sound and Social Change offers a broad array of possible responses to the current condition of liturgical music in North America. Buttressing the enterprise on one side are four introductory essays: historical surveys of "sacred sound from the Bible to reform," by highly qualified scholars: Eliyahu Schleifer and Geoffrey Goldberg on Jews, Margot Fassler and Peter Jeffery on early Church music history, and Robin Leaver on post-Reformation Christian music. On the other side of the scholarly commentary stand four settings of Psalm 136, commissioned for the conference from which this volume springs. The contemporary Roman Catholic, Methodist, Episcopal and Jewish traditions are very well represented by the four composers—respectively, Nansi Carrol, Don E. Sailers, Alec Wyton and Ben Steinberg—whose comments on their works enrich the discussion. Though the editors sought to "free" the composers for their "greatest possible musical creativity" by not impeding their "creative energies with detailed specifications," they nevertheless insisted on gender-free language, a

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setting close to the needs of actual performance in synagogue or church, and a basic sense that "liturgy ... is to be celebrated publicly without a cognitive concern for reinterpretation getting in the way" (p. 216). Despite this ingenious and creative structure, the main thrust of the book is to lay bare the problems confronting the current creation and practice of liturgical music in North America (Canada being included). The writers assume that faiths and denominations are highly fragmented today, often using cover terms like "pluriformity of the worshipping community" (p. 149) to signal the context in which any commentator or liturgical music practitioner must work. The daily musical practice of even the once liturgically monolithic Catholic Church has ramified into conflicting and competing branches. Jewish sacred life is particularly fractious and factional; a "synagogue" may consist of several subgroups of congregants that hold their own separate services weekly, with music as a major definer of their individualistic attitudes toward worship. A conservative-minded Protestant, Horace T. Allen Jr., blames "secularization" for a breakdown of basic liturgical values, hoping communities will move "back to forms of praying" (p. 185). Further examination of this troubling complexity might have completely defeated the book's attempt to stitch together varied experiences into a coherent pattern. Jeffrey Summit's recent dissertation, "Melodic Choice in Contemporary Jewish Worship: A Cross-denominational Study of the Kabbalat Shabbat Service" (Tufts University, 1995), has shown just how complicated the picture becomes when a study is based not only on liturgical leaders, but also on the congregants themselves. Staying within the confines of five subgroups within a single metropolitan area, Summit demonstrates the power of participation that the book under review continually emphasizes as the main motivating force in recent liturgical musical change. A successor volume to Sacred Sound and Social Change might well try to follow up on this need to start from the broad masses of congregants as its starting point. Lawrence Hoffman's conclusion suggests that what really links the assembled authors is the uneasiness felt by scholars, liturgical leaders and composers in the face of so much flux. In this context, he sees the whole book as "a report by a team of physicians called upon to diagnose the ensemble's health" (p. 326). It appears that a consensus approach to liturgical music, forged by Protestants in the nineteenth century, accepted by Jews step by step through the twentieth century and eventually joined by Catholics since the 1960s, is now endangered. The dissidence of congregants, and the encroachment of competing sources, from folk rock to hasidic, have breached the perimeter of a center that can no longer hold. Marginalized groups, from left-wing Jews through "ethnic" Catholics and evangelistic Protestants, have either left the encampment or (to continue my metaphor) are setting up their own tent cities. The editors speak to this issue frankly, Hoffman admitting that the echoes of ethnic churches go unexamined. We have no chapters on Pentecostals, Catholic Charismatics, or Evangelicals. . . . And a book on sacred music with no mention of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir? Omitted too is Orthodoxy, both Christian and Jewish. The chavurah, womenchurch, new age and other . . . countercultural religious phenomena are also missing except in passing (p. 324).

How do the contributors confront this challenge to the mainstream? The practi-

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tioners in the volume tend to speak generously of inclusiveness, of a need to "strive for a sacred music that is both inclusive and transcendent, ancient yet contemporary, stately yet inviting, practical yet inspired" (Benjie-Ellen Schiller, p. 211). The more scholarly contributors tend either to fault perceived trendiness or speak on behalf of "transformation," or, as the other editor, Janet R. Walton, puts it, of "the indispensable need for sacred music to help congregations 'live into a new way of thinking'" (p. 6). The only explicit attack on the consensus forms of expression comes in Jon Michael Spencer's Afrocentric critique of current practice. He finds that "the black church is captive to the theological, doctrinal, and social hegemony of Eurocentrism" (p. 307) and urges African Americans to use "the vehicle of our religion towards gender, race, and class liberation" (p. 307). This language suggests that a broader contextualization of today's liturgical life might be relevant to the book's concerns. The "mainstream" represents an American social order conceptually controlled by ideals of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Protestantism to which generations of non-Protestants and non-" Anglo" worshipers have had to respond, either by a drive for inclusion—often marked by reshaping their own ways of worship—or by self-conscious separatism. The hegemonic thrust of the Protestant center might have been more closely examined to understand the evolution of liturgical music described in Sacred Sound. This mainstream began as a radical, countercultural force, but became increasingly identified with a white middle-class value system that appeared normative to marginal and subordinate American groups seeking upward mobility. As those groups joined the comfortable center of American society, they began to enjoy and to defend the consensus approach to sacred sound. It would have been helpful if the editors and contributors to the book had placed the practice they so carefully describe and critique more firmly within the context of the social, economic and cultural realities of North American societies. Of course, an editorial stance of skepticism toward the mainstream might have eroded the really useful summary of central trends, issues and creativity the book presents, so my remarks here are not meant so much as a rebuke as a reflection on how hard it is to separate musical practice from social history, as ethnomusicologists know all too well. As it stands, Sacred Sound and Social Change is a brave, innovative and thoughtful contribution to a little-studied subject and represents a path-breaking approach to a broad, ecumenical understanding of religious practice in North America today. MARK SLOBIN Wesleyan University

Astrid Starck (ed.), Westjiddisch: Mundlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit—Le Yiddish occidental: Actes du Colloque de Mulhouse. Aarau, Frankfurt and Salzburg: Sauerlander, 1994. 180 pp. This volume is based on a conference that took place at the University of Upper Alsace (Mulhouse) in 1989. While the articles, in French and German, range widely

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over linguistic and literary topics connected with Western Yiddish, special attention is given to the dying Alsatian Jewish dialect, which is the editor's area of expertise. Astrid Starck ends the volume with a bibliography of Alsatian Yiddish, and she has also reprinted some samples from the pen of the French Jewish writer Claude Vigee. Related to Alsatian Yiddish is the now extinct Swiss Jewish dialect. The outstanding expert in this area, Florence Guggenheim-Griinberg, passed away at the age of ninety soon after the 1989 conference. The volume honors her with a biobibliographical article by Robert Schlapfer, followed by Dieter Thommen's "Das Surbtaler Jiddisch." Thommen supplements Guggenheim-Griinberg's fieldwork with materials from the linguistic atlas of German-speaking Switzerland (SDS). Among other contributions, we note Claus Jurgen Hutterer's "Jiddisch in Ungarn," an unusual topic, though too much of the article is given over to a historical survey of Jewish settlement in Hungary; and Erika Timm's report on her ongoing study of Yiddish bible translations. Timm, the leading Yiddish scholar in Germany today, here crosses the boundary between Western Yiddish (whose right to be called a language has been questioned) and the more familiar Eastern Yiddish, which is still alive as a means of day-to-day communication. The book unfortunately lacks an index, and some linguistic articles would have benefited from the use of Hebrew type, which was evidently not available. AVRAHAM GREENBAUM The Hebrew University

Religion, Thought and Education

Shulamit Soloveitchik Meiselman, The Soloveitchik Heritage: A Daughter's Memoir. Hoboken: Ktav, 1995. 260 pp. This is a fascinating but sometimes problematic book. The title suggests that it is a family memoir. Given the author's famous rabbinic family, such a document could be valuable: while family traditions and memories are not necessarily the best historical source for reconstructing what actually occurred, they are an excellent source for discovering what people believe to have happened. However, in her introduction the author points out, with great honesty, that she made extensive use of various written sources, thanking those who assisted her in tracking them down. Unfortunately, she usually does not cite these sources, nor does she provide a bibliography. Thus, the reader can never know what is a family tradition as opposed to material the author has gleaned from written works—whether early or late, more reliable or less so. The problem of sources is probably most acute in the first third of the book, which deals with the early history of the Feinstein and Soloveitchik families. The stories of Volozhin are a delightful description of the popular image of the yeshivah, though the reality was far more complex. The description of Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik in Slutsk—the righteous leader—is an unintentional but illuminating illustration of the decline of the traditional community structure and the rise of the charismatic rabbinate. The choice of stories is selective, of course. Rabbi Soloveitchik 's activities in support of the poor are well described, while his reasons for leaving Slutsk go unmentioned. The most valuable part of the book is the firsthand description of what the author saw and heard. She has many observations on the development of the Jewish community in Russia at the end of the nineteenth and in the early twentieth centuries. The author is particularly aware of changing trends in education among the Orthodox. What is unintentionally revealing is her description of the almost instantaneous collapse of traditional Jewish life in a Belorussian Jewish community after the Bolshevik Revolution and the absence of a clear explanation for the phenomenon. Perhaps the most interesting element in the book is the detailed description of the active role played by rabbinical wives in the decision-making process and the intellectual growth of their husbands. This comes as no news to readers of Chaim Grade's Rabbis and Wives, but it is particularly vivid in the form of a memoir. The Soloveitchik Heritage does not significantly change the historical picture of this key family. However, it gives us a woman's-eye view of Orthodox life in Eastern Europe, and for this reason, many readers will find the book worth reading. The descriptions of the variety of behavior patterns within the traditional Jewish 382

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community should also interest many, especially those with a yeshivah background. The author is frank and deals with remarkable grace and honesty with issues that, for her, are no doubt delicate. She notes for example, that Chaim Soloveitchik, the bitter opponent of the Haskalah, studied Maimonides' Guide to the Perplexed even though he prohibited his son from reading the book. The reason he gave was that the book was superfluous for someone, like his son, whose beliefs were "unswerving." The author is clearly aware of the significance of this story but leaves it to the reader to conclude that the father had doubts for which he was seeking answers. The Solveitchik Heritage has been carefully edited and it reads well. It is also very attractively laid out. These facts all add to the pleasure of reading the book. SHAUL STAMPFER The Hebrew University

Gloria Wiederkehr-Pollack, Eliezer Zweifel and the Intellectual Defense of Hasidism. Hoboken: Ktav, 1995. 254 pp. There are certain problems in reviewing a book that came out in 1995 whose most current bibliographic reference is to a book published in 1978. This would not be so serious were it not for the fact that a new edition of one of Zweifel's major works was published in Jerusalem in 1972, and that in 1986, a major study of Zweifel (by Shmuel Feiner) appeared.1 Moreover, there are numerous other new studies of East European Jewish history, Hasidism and the Haskalah. These lacunae are a pity because this volume is a useful one for the English reader and deals with a topic that until recently has been neglected. A quick check in the library revealed that this book is based on Gloria Wiederkehr-Pollack's Columbia University doctoral thesis of 1980; it has been rewritten but not at all updated. (This fact explains a small mystery. On p. 67 the author states that "Zweifel's photograph . . . indicates a need for better personal grooming." The photograph is in the thesis but not in the book.) The first chapter of the book is devoted to Zweifel's biography. The author carefully collates references to events in Zweifel's life though she does not try to compare the events of his youth, as he described them, to the literary conventions of the time. She quotes at length from the sources, which is useful for readers who do not read Hebrew— albeit a bit tedious for those who can check the original. The second chapter deals with Zweifel and the Haskalah. It contains a catalog of Zweifel's views on topics typical of the Haskalah. However, because there is no reference to the significant Haskalah studies published in recent decades, the author cannot build on the achievements and insights of others. The third chapter, entitled "The War Against Zweifel," is a bit of an exaggeration. It deals with reactions to Zweifel's views, mainly his "tolerance" for Hasidism, and consists largely of summaries of articles written pro and contra Zweifel, in which Mendele Moykher Sforim (Shalom Abramowitch) appears as a central figure among the critics. The next chapter is an interesting summary of the views of various maskilim on Hasidism—almost entirely negative.

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Wiederkehr-Pollack's final chapter is a summary of Zweifel's book Shalom 'al yisrael, which deals mainly with Hasidism and the hasidic movement. The author carefully analyzes Zweifel's views and compares them to the opinions of other scholars. Here, as well, no reference is made to recent developments in hasidic historiography. Hence, the author refers the reader on p. 130 to the Hebrew version of Mahler's study of Hasidism and Haskalah without noting that it has come out in the meantime in an English translation. The book ends abruptly without a closing chapter to discuss the rest of Zweifel's career. There are, for example, seven references (see the index) to Zweifel's last book, Sanegor, which he regarded in many respects as his crowning achievement, but nowhere does the author tell us what the topic of the book is (a defense of Judaism). The detailed picture of Zweifel's thought and of many of his contemporaries makes this a valuable book for the nonspecialist. Wiederkehr-Pollack clearly has great understanding for Zweifel though she usually maintains a critical stance. One exception is on p. 89 where she notes "Zweifel's revolutionary insight into the Haskalah's spiritual bankruptcy." There are those who would beg to differ. It is a pity that the publisher did not insist on the study being brought up to date. SHAUL STAMPFER The Hebrew University

Note 1. See Eliezer Zweifel, Shalom 'al yirael, ed. Abraham Rubinstein (Jerusalem: 1972); Shmuel Feiner, "Hamifneh beha' arakhat hahasidut—Eliezer Zvifel vehahaskalah hemetunah berusiyah," Zion 51, no. 2, 167-210.

Walter S. Wurzburger, Ethics of Responsibility: Pluralistic Approaches to Convenantal Ethics. Philadelphia and Jerusalem: The Jewish Publication Society, 1994. 156 pp. As soon as one learns to appreciate the distinction between morality and other rules of behavior, it becomes clear that Judaism—that is, the Bible and the Talmud— contains a moral code. However, what was never clarified was the relationship in Judaism between what we call moral rules and the many other types of rules, all of which are equally called "commandments" in the Bible. Are the moral imperatives of the Bible totally absorbed in the lawlike system called halakhah or are they in any sense independent? Related to this question are two others: How, according to Judaism, does man get to know his moral obligations? Are the moral rules found in Judaism considered to be binding on all men? Although obviously fundamental, there have been few attempts by Jewish scholars in the past to address these questions systematically—probably because few individuals have had both the interest and the knowledge of Judaism to care and

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the philosophic background to appreciate the problem. Fortunately, within the last decade or two there have appeared rabbinic scholars trained in the Western philosophical tradition who have started to explore the issue. The slim volume before us, which is perhaps the latest of such attempts, makes an important contribution to the subject. Walter S. Wurzburger, the longtime editor of the journal Tradition, was ordained at the Rabbi Isaac Elhanan Theological Seminary of Yeshiva University and holds a doctorate in philosophy from Harvard University, and is thus admirably suited to undertake such a study. Wurzburger characterizes the morality of Judaism as "covenantal ethics," by which term he wishes to combine the revelational or covenantal character of the divine imperatives of the Torah with the concept of an intuitionist ethic. He seeks "to reconcile unconditional acceptance of halakhah as the supreme normative authority with the recognition that our intuitive moral judgments, even when they cannot be grounded in explicit provisions of the halakhah, possess religious significance" (p. 14). The term "ethics of responsibility" (borrowed from Erich Fromm) is used to express the notion that, in addition to obedience and a sense of duty, moral experience includes a response from man himself, a conscious apprehension emanating from his own moral intuitions (p. 15). According to Wurzburger, the role of intuition is "merely complementary" to the halakhah and may function in the following areas: first, to discern the will of God in situations that do not come within the purview of explicit legal norms; second, as a hermeneutical principle to help ascertain the meaning and range of ambiguous laws (p. 29); and finally, to establish "that a given situation is an instance of a general rule" (p. 34). The author is quite thorough in marshaling the requisite sources to demonstrate, quite convincingly, that there is room within Judaism—alongside the explicit halakhah—for the functioning of some human faculty. Wurzburger calls this human faculty "moral intuition," which he characterizes as "subjective" and influenced by historical factors. It seems to this reviewer that he has not adequately explicated this concept of "moral intuition." Does it provide immediate moral awareness like "conscience," and what is its role in casuistry and in the ordinary reasoning used in legal argumentation, in historical analysis and in weighing contradictory scientific theories? A most important feature of the book is its claim that Judaism is concerned not only with what a person does (act-morality) but with what kind of person one is, that is, one's thoughts, emotions and character traits (agent-morality). This concern is, of course, already reflected in such biblical commandments as "Do not hate your brother in your heart" (Lev. 19:17) and "Do not desire . . ." (Deut. 5:18), and is developed in the Book of Proverbs and by the Rabbis: "Envy, desire and pursuit of honor drive a man out of this world" (Pirkei Avot 4:28). Wurzburger's comprehensive treatment of Maimonides' teachings on the subject is original and highly illuminating. The concept of personal morality in Judaism has unfortunately been neglected both in terms of theoretical study and practical training. It might come as a surprise to many that "the cultivation of an ethical disposition is an outright religious obligation" (p. 112). This work is not only enlightening but challenging. For example, Wurzburger

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claims that "there is a distinctive, uniquely Jewish ethics" (p. 7) and yet "it is perceived as having universal validity" (p. 8). Taken together, these two assertions are certainly in need of further clarification. A notable feature of this work is its constant referring to the theories of both classical and modern philosophers, with Wurzburger bringing them into fruitful dialogue: Aristotle, Hume and Kant with Saadiah and Maimonides; Martin Buber and Hermann Cohen with G.E. Moore and W.D. Ross. In all, Ethics of Responsibility is a significant addition to the ongoing exploration of the interrelationships between philosophy, ethics and Judaism. SHUBERT SPERO Bar-Ilan University

Zionism, Israel and the Middle East

Uri Bar-Joseph, Intelligence Intervention in the Politics of Democratic States: U.S., Israel and Britain. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995. 392 pp.

The relationship between intelligence services and political decision makers constitutes one of the most fascinating and troubling topics in the field of modern political science. Uri Bar-Joseph makes an important contribution to the already substantial corpus of literature in his book Intelligence Intervention in the Politics of Democratic States. The book, which is divided into three sections, begins with a discussion of normative theory, focusing on the relations that ought to exist between directors of intelligence and the political establishments that they serve. This is followed by a thorough and exhaustive examination of four historic case studies drawn from the United States, Israel and Great Britain. The author describes in great (and, at least in the Israeli case, superfluous) detail how the directors of intelligence in these countries abused their positions by striving to influence and dictate foreign policy counter to the will of the political leadership. In the third and final section of his book, Bar-Joseph attempts to understand the conditions that yield distortions of this kind, and suggests as well a number of principles and ways with which to minimize the risk of such phenomena recurring. Bar-Joseph's writing flows freely, and the book is exciting to read. The four case studies have been carefully selected, with each providing support for the author's thesis. The first case described is the plan of the Central Intelligence Agency to mobilize a group of Cuban exiles to launch an assault on the Bay of Pigs in 1961, with the aim of toppling Fidel Castro's regime. The upper echelon at the CIA took advantage of the inexperience of the newly elected president of the United States, John F. Kennedy. It seems that in their forecasts, the officials intentionally overestimated the exiles' military capabilities and chances of success. They did so on the assumption—and with the hope—that should the operation fail, Kennedy would have no choice but to send in U.S. troops to support the invasion. The second case is that of the Lavon affair, which occurred in Israel in 1954. At the time, the Israeli leadership feared that Britain would reach an agreement with the Egyptian government and evacuate its military bases along the Suez Canal. Such a move would have meant the elimination of a neutral buffer between Israel and Egypt. To prevent this development, the head of Israeli military intelligence devised a plan involving a secret network of saboteurs that would promote instability in Egypt, 387

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thereby causing Britain to delay its withdrawal. Carried out in amateurish fashion, this operation ended in abysmal failure: the entire network was exposed and its members arrested—and there was no effect whatsoever on the date of withdrawal. Bar-Joseph states unequivocally that the head of military intelligence made a unilateral decision to establish the network. This is an extremely puzzling statement, given the fact that extensive research on the subject has failed to tip the scale one way or the other. Was this an instance of unauthorized initiative or did the head of military intelligence receive a green light from the minister of defense? In any case, even if the plan was authorized, Israeli Prime Minister Moshe Sharett certainly had no knowledge of it. The remaining two affairs described in the book took place in Britain during the 1920s, when British intelligence was attempting to thwart Communist infiltration. Each of the affairs involved the intentional leaking of highly sensitive information regarding various infiltration plans (which, in the process, gave away the codebreaking capabilities of the British). After reading the book, several questions come to mind concerning Bar-Joseph's theory and the conclusions that he has reached. I say this without any certainty that my questions contain the potential to undermine the author's thesis. Rather, I raise these points because Bar-Joseph ignores the broader context enveloping the issues involved. It is therefore possible that the real source of the problem (independentminded directors taking unauthorized courses of action) is not specific to intelligence services nor a corollary of the secrecy that they enjoy and may at times abuse. The book examines the complexity of the relationship that evolves between the director of an intelligence service and his superiors in the political sphere. This, however, is the place to ask whether there is anything that sets intelligence services apart from other civil and military establishments that answer to the political level. Anyone who has watched the fascinating BBC series "Yes, Minister" and its sequel, "Yes, Prime Minister," knows—if only through satire—that the problem is not unique to intelligence services or to the defense establishment but extends to the entire state bureaucracy. One often finds that the long-ensconced civil servant is rather contemptuous of the elected politician, stubbornly waylaying his superior's policy through the use of an infinite number of arguments and explanations. From my own personal experience, at least in the Israeli context, few are the ministers or statesmen who are capable of imposing their will and policy on their subordinates at the senior administrative level. This is true for the domains of security and finance, social affairs, education and health—in short, for each and every domain. If this is indeed the situation, then singling out a case of unauthorized initiative that took seed in the upper echelons of intelligence is insufficient. Instead, one must study the differences between an abuse of position of this kind and similar actions that occur in the rest of the state bureaucracy (if such differences exist). Bar-Joseph chose four intelligence affairs that all ended in dismal failure, yet nowhere is it indicated how these failures fit into the broader picture. We can easily bring examples of cases where • intelligence made unauthorized moves that ended in success and the political leadership had no hesitations about adopting the policy retroactively;

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• intelligence opposed adventurous and misguided government policies, and the political leadership, heedless of the warnings, took action that led to disastrous results; • intelligence rightly intervened in government policies that showed poor judgment, thus saving the situation. For example, in contrast to the Lavon affair of 1954, Israeli intelligence spearheaded an attempt a year later to form a military and political alliance with the French government. The alliance proved successful, rescuing Israel from strategic isolation. Just as important, the Israeli air force and army were able to renew their arms purchases, which paved the way to Israel's resounding victory in the Six-Day War. In 1956, France, Britain and Israel made a failed attempt to take over the Suez Canal. Since the strategy behind the operation was anachronistic, it is not surprising that the military strike ended in a political fiasco. Intelligence, however, was not responsible for this affair. In the 1970s, Israeli intelligence fostered close ties with the royal family of Morocco. These ties laid the groundwork for the first contact—on a very senior level—between Israel and Egypt, which in turn led to Sadat's visit to Israel in November, 1977. And seven years later, the United States and Israel became embroiled in the "Irangate" affair. In both countries, the political leadership ignored the advice of intelligence officials who opposed the plan—with serious but very different consequences in each case. These examples aside, I would like to offer a few comments on Bar-Joseph's conclusions and recommendations. Bar-Joseph rightly distinguishes between two types of intelligence officers: those with an operational as opposed to an analytical, research-oriented background. He also warns against appointing officials with an operational background to direct intelligence, as they might promote adventurous and dangerous policies. But in reality, the conditions are far more complex. In his fascinating article, "Disturbed Hierarchy: Israeli Intelligence in 1954 and 1973,"1 Aluf Har Even discusses the leading figures involved in the Lavon affair in 1954 and in the disastrously mistaken reading of the situation on the eve of the Yom Kippur War in 1973. Drawing general conclusions, he finds that the problem lies not in the personality of the director of intelligence but in the degree of compatibility that exists among several figures at the intersection of politics, the military and intelligence. These include the prime minister, the defense minister, the chief of staff and the director of intelligence. The balance of personalities—the extent to which they conflict or complement each other—determines whether the end result will be effective or not. Bar-Joseph's recommendation regarding the selection of a director of intelligence becomes largely irrelevant if the problem lies in the compatibility of three or four people at the top of the hierarchy. Moreover, these figures include elected officials and appointees who are selected on the basis of wholly different considerations and personality traits. Despite the questions I have raised, I recommend the book, primarily because of the intellectual challenge it poses. I hope it will encourage further research into this

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subject, with the aim of placing the issue in a broader context and filling in the gaps Bar-Joseph has left. SHLOMO GAZIT Ramat Hasharon

Note 1. Aluf Har Even, "Disturbed Hierarchy: Israeli Intelligence in 1954 and 1973," Jerusalem Quarterly 9 (1978).

Yaacov Bar-Siman-Tov, Israel and the Peace Process, 1977-1982: In Search of Legitimacy for Peace. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994. xi + 338 pp. Of books about the Egyptian-Israeli peace process there is apparently no end. Many of the protagonists have given their own perspectives in autobiographies, memoirs and retrospective analyses. On the American side, these have included Jimmy Carter, Cyrus Vance, Zbigniew Brzezinski, William Quandt and Samuel Lewis. Ismail Fahmy, Mahmoud Riad and Mohamed Kamel have presented Egyptian viewpoints. And Israeli contributions include those by Moshe Dayan, Ezer Weizman, Elyakim Rubinstein and Avraham Tamir. In addition, a host of academics and practitioners have used the Egyptian-Israeli process as a database from which to elaborate theories of mediation, conflict resolution, conflict management, prenegotiations, negotiations and postnegotiations. Indeed, the literature on this subject is so vast that the innocent reader might reasonably ask whether there is anything left to be said. There is, of course, and Yaacov Bar-Siman-Tov makes good use of the existing literature to do it. At the interface between domestic politics and foreign policy, BarSiman-Tov finds an important lacuna, which he seeks to fill with an analysis of the domestic conditions of the Israeli transition from war to peace. In particular, he seeks to explain how Menachem Begin sought and achieved domestic legitimacy for the formulation, negotiation and implementation of his peace policy. While much has been written since Max Weber about the question of governmental legitimacy, Bar-Siman-Tov argues that "policy legitimacy" is a conceptually different issue that must be explored if radical policy shifts, including war-to-peace transitions, are to be properly understood. In doing so, he breaks no new historical ground, but he does plow the empirical record thoroughly in an attempt to demonstrate the peculiar challenges at each stage of the transition and the specific response—including the means and mechanisms employed—that Begin relied on to achieve his objectives. The result is a skillful reconstruction of the domestic battle for peace with Egypt, with much emphasis on Begin's effective use of rhetoric in his

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confrontations with his own government, the Likud party, the Knesset and extraparliamentary movements. This tale includes a poignant evocation of Begin's desperate but ultimately unsuccessful struggle to convince the extraparliamentary opposition, for which he himself felt much empathy, of the Tightness of his cause. In the end, however, Bar-Sirnan-Tov's reach exceeds his grasp. Most critically, his central organizing concept of "policy legitimacy" remains highly elusive. While a government can retain "legitimacy" while losing "support," Bar-Siman-Tov does not really show how the same distinction applies to policy; indeed, he tends to use the two terms interchangeably. Furthermore, while he raises important theoretical issues about the role of the domestic context in conflict resolution and peacemaking, the result is not wholly persuasive. In particular, there is a disappointing inability to answer the main questions he himself poses: "How do domestic factors serve as conditions affecting when and whether a peace initiative occurs, and what role do they play after such initiative has been decided?" (p. 261). Instead, he falls back on residual psychological explanations—"What made the change of attitudes and beliefs possible . . . was both sides' realization . . . that the only way to achieve [some of their goals] was by conflict resolution" (p. 264, my emphasis)—without explaining why the realization occurred when it did (was it Gestalt?), rather than sooner or later. It is perhaps inevitable, but regrettable nonetheless, that Bar-SimanTov, like most political scientists (of whom I am one), is unable to bring his creative hypotheses to the safe haven of definitive conclusions. Still, Bar-Siman-Tov does a major service by providing a timely reminder of the nature of the debate that surrounded the first Israeli-Arab peace agreement. Many of the same problems have arisen, in even more virulent fashion, with respect to the value-complexity inherent in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, and they are certain to intensify if and when an Israeli government decides to push this process through. In this context, perhaps the most relevant section of Bar-Siman-Tov's book is that which deals with the evacuation of the Sinai settlements, which provoked a clash between two types of legitimacy and two concepts of the Jewish state—one essentially secular and based on the rule of positive law, and one essentially religious and based on traditional legitimacy derived from a higher, divine law. "Once evacuation of the settlements was defined as illegal by Gush Emunim and the MSW (The Movement to Stop the Withdrawal)," writes Bar-Siman-Tov, "this difference between 'legal-rational' legitimacy and 'traditional' legitimacy made the task of legitimizing for the evacuation not just more difficult but almost impossible" (p. 215). Despite Begin's own ambivalence, which resulted in procrastination, denial and reassurance through political theater (the Jerusalem Law, the Golan Law), he was unable to reconcile the irreconcilable and secure the acquiescence of those inspired by traditional legitimacy, many of whom continued to accuse him of treachery and betrayal and to resist physically the implementation of the agreement even after it had secured political approval through constitutional processes. Ultimately, it was "Begin's determination" (p. 242) that made implementation possible. As Bar-Siman-Tov correctly points out, most of the extraparliamentary opposition was really focused not on Sinai, but rather on Judea and Samaria. The opposition

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did not share Begin's belief that a peace treaty with Egypt would consolidate and perpetuate Israel's control of the West Bank, and its actions were intended as a warning of what would happen if any future Israeli government dared contemplate concessions there for the sake of another peace agreement. Subsequent events have shown that their fears were more realistic than his hopes, and the extraparliamentary reaction has proceeded from the logic of those unmoved by "legal-rational" legitimacy: some have endorsed and promised physical resistance to any evacuation from Judea and Samaria; many have accused advocates of the Israeli-Palestinian process of treachery and betrayal; and one, moved by a higher calling, assassinated an Israeli prime minister. Any Israeli leader who is convinced or compelled to undertake further withdrawals will undoubtedly, try, like Begin, have to try to weave as wide a web of public support as possible. However, he too will come up against an opposition that is inspired by different concepts of the Jewish state and of legitimacy. If Bar-SimanTov's case study is relevant—and it most certainly is—there will again be no meeting of minds, only a trial of strength. MARK A. HELLER Tel-Aviv University

Boas Evron, Jewish State or Israeli Nation? Trans. James Diamond. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. xiv + 269 pp. This is a slightly revised version of Boas Evron's Haheshbon haleumi, which appeared in 1988. It is a provocative analysis of Zionism and of Israeli policy from a post-Zionist perspective. It is understandable why most Israeli intellectuals prefer to ignore the book rather than struggle with its central thesis. Less comprehensible to me is why post-Zionists have by and large also ignored it; perhaps because Evron is not a neo-Marxist, does not assign colonialist motives to the Zionists or benign motives to the Arabs. To those like myself who are passionately committed to maintaining the state of Israel as a Jewish state and who take pride in Judaism as an ethnoreligious tradition, Evron is part of the enemy camp. But it would be churlish not to concede the intellectual daring of the author's enterprise—an effort to understand the essence of Judaism from biblical times until today—and the brilliance of the author's critique of Judaism in general and Zionism in particular. If one is able to distance oneself from one's own ideological convictions, reading this book becomes an intellectual treat. Evron argues that Judaism is a religion. Jews have only one feature in common, their religion, and "Jewish nationhood is in constant danger of slipping back and being reabsorbed by the nonnational and even antinational religious structures of the age-old Jewish community" (p. 58). One group of Jews (in Eastern Europe), at one period in time (the nineteenth and early twentieth century), bearing the traits of nationhood (common language and territorial propinquity), developed a form of

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Jewish nationalism (Zionism), and established a Jewish state whose purpose was "to normalize and to naturalize the Jewish people in the family of nations" (p. 204). Partially as a result of their own intellectual shortcomings and partially for tactical reasons, they refused to recognize the bitter fact that their enterprise had little to do with Judaism. Conditions within Israel, both the need for diaspora support and the need to integrate the immigrant population, but primarily the need to maintain their own power base, led the Zionist leadership to promote the false notion that all Jews were one people ("The slogan 'We are all one people' is a cliche that hides from both sides their problem of identity" [p. 131].) This situation not only harms Israelis because it prevents their normalization, but creates the false consciousness among diaspora Jews that they have a real relationship with Israel. It is not clear why this is a matter of concern to Evron since, in his opinion, all but the Orthodox among diaspora Jews will assimilate anyway. "In the absence of a positive spiritual significance to contemporary Judaism, it may be assumed that the assimilation and fading away of Jews into the surrounding populations will continue, until only the small, closed Orthodox communities are left" (p. 249). Whereas the survival of Judaism is a fairly hopeless prospect, Evron's prescription for Israelis is the severance of all ties to Judaism and the transformation of Israel into a territorial state (that is, a state of its citizens rather than a state of the Jews), and its incorporation into some type of regional federation. But Evron has little confidence in this taking place. For if Israel is weak, its neighbors will continue to seek its destruction. "Only a strong Israel can join a regional federation. And only with such a federal structure will it be possible to overcome the self-segregating, communal, and protofascist tendencies gathering strength in Israeli society" (p. 247). But a strong Israel is unlikely to see the need for such a federation. Evron, as the previous quote demonstrates, is not above introducing doses of hyperbole. Nevertheless, even in many places where Evron exaggerates—for example, his analysis of antisemitism; the use that Israel has made of Arab enmity and the connection it has drawn between antisemitism, the Holocaust and Arab enmity; the manipulation of diaspora Jews; or the "conjecture" that the fundamental motivation of the Zionist system is a will to power (p. 169), his analysis is invariably suggestive and a stimulus to thought. My feeling was not that Evron is wrong but that he overstates his case and attributes devious motives where they did not necessarily exist. One exception is his analysis of religious Zionism in general and Gush Emunim in particular. In this case Evron's bias overcomes his judgment and leads him into statements that are as silly as they are vindictive. Gush Emunim, he says, . . . has remained what religious Zionism has always been: a parasitic hanger-on to the body of pragmatic, secular Zionism. Its expropriatory settlements are a nightmarish caricature of the raison d'etre of Zionist settlement, the melting away of an ideology that has lost all meaning and functions in a vacuum. The emptiness of the settlements stage setting is but a reflection of the inner emptiness of the messianic movement and its secular adherents. It is a movement without any social or moral vision (p. 241). One is entitled to dislike religious Zionism in general and Gush Emunim in particular. But to suggest that it lacks social or moral vision is absurd. Part of

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Evron's problem, reflected throughout the volume, is that despite his intellectual brilliance and erudition, he is religiously tone deaf and tends to overlook the subtlety that is often involved in commitment to the Jewish tradition. He has a tendency to reify labels and definitions that may have been appropriate in one time and place but not in another. Indeed, the major shortcoming in Evron's analysis is that he seems unable to appreciate the kinds of unself-conscious transformations in ethnoreligious identity that Jews and Judaism in both Israel and the diaspora have undergone in the past and are likely to undergo in the future. In addition, perhaps because he is not a social scientist, he takes the prognoses or contemporary fads within social science too seriously. Neither the continued strengthening of supranational entities nor the continued decline of religious and ethnic loyalties are the forgone conclusions that Evron seems to assume. In summary, this is a painful book for a committed Zionist to read, but well worth the effort. CHARLES S. LIEBMAN Bar-Han University

David Garnham and Mark Tessler (eds.), Democracy, War, and Peace in the Middle East. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995. xxv + 294 pp. Edited by two professors of international relations at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, this volume discusses several important issues debated by political scientists and historians of the contemporary Middle East. The editors and authors focus on the analysis of democracy and its relationships with patterns of governance and interstate conflict in the Middle East. This they do both on the theoretical level and in selected case studies. In their introduction (p.x), Garnham and Tessler point out that movement toward meaningful political change has been slow and uneven. Most Arab countries . . . continue to impose limits on political competition, usually with a view toward ensuring that expressions of dissent do not develop into challenges which might lead to the replacement of existing regimes. There has also been backsliding in some instances . . . there is at least as much continuity as change in Arab political life (p. x).

The far greater part of the volume examines continuity and change in the context of the impact of democratization and liberalization in the Middle East. The overall presentation suffers, however, from each author's different grasp of what democracy and its essentials mean to him or her. Not all take time to define the term and follow this up throughout their contributions. Indeed, some create new terms, such as "full democracy," without defining them. Thus, Jo-Anne Hart accuses Israel of being "fully democratic only for its Jewish inhabitants" (p. 45). Maybe so, but could she really point out substantiated instances of states anywhere that are flawlessly and fully democratic?

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The following authors have written on well-defined subjects: James Lee Ray on the future of international war (global trends and Middle Eastern implications); Hart on democracy and deterrence; I. William Zartman on the search for security and governance regimes; Robert L. Rothstein on democracy in the Third World (definitional dilemmas); Jamal al-Suwaidi on Arab and Western conceptions of democracy; Shukri B. Abed on Islam and democracy; Mark Tessler and Marilyn Grobschmidt on democracy in the Arab world and the Arab-Israeli conflict; Zeev Maoz on domestic political violence, structural constraints and enduring rivalries in the Middle East; Michael C. Hudson on democracy and foreign policy in the Arab world; Ann M. Lesch on domestic politics and foreign policy in Egypt; Emile F. Sahliyeh on democracy among the Palestinians; and Gabriel Sheffer on Israel and the liberalization of the Arab regimes. This is rich fare; many papers offer important insights. Within the limits of a book review, I shall focus on several of the main motifs. Hart asserts, among other points, that "authoritarian regimes do not necessarily have the upper hand in military capability" (p. 40). Her main proof is that democracies are typically wealthier (are they?) and thus have more resources for military expenditure. But what about the allocation of such resources? One knows that in democratic societies there are strong pressures to earmark funds for many other needs—a factor that authoritarian rulers can ignore in favor of military investments. Rothstein opines that fundamentalist Islam impedes the formation of a democratic culture (p. 79), in its Western sense, of course. Al-Suwaidi examines the prospects for democracy in the Arab states, with particular emphasis on the United Arab Emirates, where he has recently conducted a survey of public opinion data. The survey shows strong support for increased political participation, thus creating an opening toward democratization. Al-Suwaidi doubts, however, whether a conservative Islam and democracy are compatible (he suggests that they are not). Abed, writing on the same topic, is less certain about this incompatibility. While granting that some governments, as in Algeria and Tunisia, have mistrusted Islamic political groups, and that recent events in the Sudan have increased such suspicions (pp. 128-129), current Islamic theologians consider democracy in terms of the shari'a rather than in terms of Western thought. (This analysis begs again the question about the definition of democracy.) Finally, Sahliyeh assumes that the pluralism, diversity and competition already being exhibited will strengthen the democratic orientation of mainstream Palestinian elites (p. 264). This is undoubtedly true, considering the impressive political participation of numerous Palestinians. The issue that remains unclear is what will be the impact of Yasir Arafat's opponents (the "rejectionist groups") and, no less, of the Islamic movements (Hamas, Jihad) that Sahliyeh dismisses. One can only hope that his expectations are realistic. Such comments notwithstanding, this is an important collection of challenging papers. It would have been even more useful had fuller reference been made to North African states and societies as well as to Turkey and Iran—even at the risk of expanding the volume. JACOB M. LANDAU The Hebrew University

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Yael Zerubavel, Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995. xx + 340 pp.

Israeli Jews have created something that was not in existence for almost two millennia: a rich, valuable and complex secular culture. In this book, Yael Zerubavel looks at some of the nonmaterial elements of this culture from the point of view of a folklorist. Her main interest is the revival of the Hebrew language, different historical events and symbols created by this culture, and its emphases. Anyone concerned with the way cultures are structured and crystallized will find this book a real gem. The core of Recovered Roots is Zerubavel's dissertation of 1980 on the transformation of symbols in Israel. Like the dissertation, Recovered Roots focuses on three events in the past and how they were utilized by Jewish Israelis in the process of creating a new culture. Zerubavel here offers a greater number of empirical cases (and thus a broader perspective), as well as utilizing a conceptual framework that did not exist in 1980. Such additions make a difference not only in the breadth, depth and scope of the original work, but in the theoretical focus and in the author's position. The three main cases, or "myths," dealt with by Zerubavel are the battle of Tel Hai (1920), the Bar Kokhba revolt (132-135 CE) and the fall of Masada (73 CE). Each of these historical events, she shows, was molded by secular Zionism into heroic tales. This construction of heroism was necessary both because the emerging secular culture needed such tales in its awesome struggle for political independence and because the heroism in the original historical accounts was actually quite questionable. Charting the ways in which these historical narratives were transformed into myths forms the second part of the book, while the third section focuses on the ways in which the three historical events were used in the invention of tradition, in conjunction with the revival of the Hebrew language and literature. The theoretical framework is contained in the opening and concluding sections, parts one and four. This particular structure enables the author to create an interesting sandwich: a theoretical introduction, detailed case studies and a theoretical summary. The major analytical emphasis of the book is on collective memory and commemoration. Although Zerubavel is interested in the ways we "remember" the past, she gives more attention to commemoration than to collective memory. She suggests that "the concept of commemoration emerges as central to our understanding of the dynamics of memory change" (p. 5) and argues that "each act of commemoration reproduces a commemorative narrative, a story about a particular past that accounts for this ritualized remembrance and provides a moral passage for the group members" (p. 6). When put together, commemorative narratives form what she refers to as a "master commemorative narrative that structures collective memory ... a broader view of history, a basic 'story line' that is culturally constructed and provides the group members with a general notion of their shared past" (p. 6). This concept of a "master commemorative narrative" is central to Zerubavel's approach. While it is new, innovative and suggestive, its use is not problem-free.

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For example, Zerubavel writes that "cultural texts serve different groups and political agendas at one and the same time or at different points in history" (p. 147). If so, the very concept of a "master commemorative narrative" (say, in the form of a national myth) becomes problematic. Moreover, the use made in the book of the term "myth" (as on pp. 63, 79, 147, 229) is not sufficiently clarified. For example, it is not made at all clear why, and in what sense, Masada is a myth. As against the potential hegemony of a master commemorative narrative, Zerubavel posits the existence of what she refers to as a countermemory (p. 10), an alternative narrative. The analytical play between the master and the alternative narratives provides a rich theoretical weave—and one that (intentionally or not) creates the impression that in a given society the same historical event is subjected to different, competing narratives. The place of what some people refer to as "truth" (and its meaning) thus becomes problematic, casting doubt on the very usefulness of the term "master commemorative narrative." To apply this concept to Israeli culture requires some qualifications. Which Israel? Secular? Religious? Arab? Sephardic (or, in the new terminology, Mizrahi [Eastern])? Ashkenazic? Basically, the heroic myths described by Zerubavel were created by Ashkenazic and secular Jews, first of all for themselves, and later for others. Hence, the basic view of the book is Western. What Zerubavel essentially does here is contrast the secular Zionist interpretation and construction of the past with the traditional (Orthodox) Jewish view. However, one must be reminded that with the lack of what can be referred to as a real, or true, or historically verified, version as a base line, the Zionist narrative is no "better" or "worse" than the traditional or Orthodox. To a large extent, both versions invented, recovered, suppressed and fabricated narratives. Zerubavel, however, often leaves the reader with the impression that Zionism invented culture while tradition did not. It is imperative to emphasize that "Jewish tradition" is just as political as "Zionism" and that both had a very strong interest—for moral, ideological and political reasons—in constructing their own versions of history (see, for example, p. 96). The creation of culture by "Jewish tradition" can be subjected no less than the Zionist equivalent to this type of analysis. Indeed, in a recent work, Doron Mendels makes exactly this point.1 What creates this book's lack of symmetry is Zerubavel's choice of words and placement of statements. Let me illustrate this with two examples. First, there is the use of the word "amnesia" (for example, on p. 25)—as if Jews "forgot" some of their past. However, amnesia is a term referring to a passive state, something that caused loss of memory. Clearly, however, there were instances in which traditional Judaism did not forget but deliberately suppressed the past: Masada, for instance. Another such case is Bar Kokhba (fortunately, the revolts of 66-73 CE and 132-135 CE are described by Josephus and Dio Cassius, respectively). The second example relates to the effort invested by the Romans in overpowering the Bar Kokhba revolt. This is an important issue if we are to assess the heroism of the rebels; but in her description of the Roman actions, Zerubavel does not relate to it (pp. 48-49). However, later on (p. 54), she describes what she refers to as the Zionist version. In that particular context she quotes archaeologist Yigael Yadin as stating that in his message to the Roman Senate, Hadrian—commander of the

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Roman forces who crushed the revolt—omitted a customary formula, "I and the legions are in health" (quoted on p. 55). Yadin interpreted this omission as significant because he felt it was an indirect indication of the heavy casualties suffered by the Romans. Now, Yadin's version can be checked, and indeed if a customary formula was omitted, this could be significant. However, Zerubavel's touching on the issue only in the context of a "Zionist version" creates the impression of a simple invention. Historical scholarship cannot simply be reduced to one more aspect of myth-making. Reading the book and pondering the issues it brings into focus leads to other questions—in relation to Masada, for example. First, the description of the Masada myth relies heavily on the analysis of texts and neglects the social context. Thus, Zerubavel puts a very strong emphasis on the translation of Josephus into Hebrew in 1923 and on the publication of Yitzhak Lamdan's poem, Masada, in 1927. (It is interesting, by the way, that Lamdan never visited Masada.). However, these texts in themselves were not enough to create the Masada pilgrimage and "myth." It took a very arduous effort (sometimes against ideological opposition) to make Israeli Jews embrace Masada (inter alia, through the youth movements, the prestate underground groups, the Israeli army and the Israeli educational system). Second, Zerubavel does not seem to pay enough attention to the significant differences between the version provided by Josephus and the narrative created by Israelis. For example, when discussing the archaeological expedition to Masada in the early 1960s, she writes that "as a result of the publicity about the expedition, Masada's history became better known" (p. 67). What became known, clearly, is not the history of Masada, but rather that history fabricated by secular Zionism. Her use of the term "Masada's history" is thus problematic. Which history? That of Josephus, or the mythical account? What became known to the overwhelming majority of Israelis was the mythical narrative and not that left by Josephus. A number of other issues connected with Masada are either not dealt with at all, or in perfunctory manner—for example, the fact that the timing of the annual pilgrimage to Masada was moved from Pesach to Hanukkah because of the more comfortable weather (see p. 126). Similarly, the ideological debate regarding the burial of bones found in Masada (p. 130) is a fascinating topic and much more complex than described by Zerubavel. The connection that Zerubavel makes between Masada and the Holocaust (p. 196) is almost impossible to accept. Her claim that the two events "share more than the national Hebrew culture was ready to acknowledge" needs some tangible substantiation, since a radically opposing claim can be easily defended. (It can be noted, for example, that Masada is only mentioned once, and in a tangential context, in Torn Segev's landmark book about Israelis and the Holocaust.2) Finally, Zerubavel expresses surprise as to why Betar was not picked as a site for heroic rituals and pilgrimages (p. 142). Clearly, one reason is that the Betar site is geographically and experientially flat, and thus totally inappropriate for moralelifting ceremonies. At various points throughout the narrative, Zerubavel draws connections between the Masada myth and modern Israel's violent history. To take just one example, she claims that "the Israeli-Palestinian conflict grew out of the clash between their

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respective memories and their refusal, until quite recently, to acknowledge the problems inherent to their divergent reconstructions of the past" (pp. 215-216). It is not too difficult to disagree with this unsubstantiated statement, which attributes such prime importance to narratives. It is probably more accurate to state that the Israeli-Arab conflict was about rights, power, territory, control. But on the symbolic level, the rhetoric around this core involved constructions of history, and in this sense narratives do count. It should be apparent by now that reading Zerubavel's book is an intellectually stimulating experience. It throws a broad beam of light on the development of Israeli secular culture; it is both firmly grounded and fascinating. Moreover, it is well written and well documented, extensively footnoted and set in a contemporary and thought-provoking conceptual framework. Anyone interested in the way cultures materialize will find this challenging book a rare intellectual pleasure. NACHMAN BEN-YEHUDA The Hebrew University

Notes 1. See Doron Mendels, Zehut yehudit batekufah hahelenistit (Tel-Aviv: 1995). 2. See Tom Segev, Hamilyon hashevi'i: hayisreelim vehashoah (Jerusalem: 1991); in English, The Seventh Million (New York: 1993).

Recently Completed Doctoral Dissertations Henry Maurice Abramson University of Toronto, 1995 "Jews and Ukrainians in Revolutionary Times: Autonomy, Statehood and Civil War, 1917-1920" Ella Alfa Bar-Han University, 1996 "Arkhitipim nashiyim beshirat Izik Manger" ("Women's Archetypes in the Poetry of Itsik Manger") Yona Altschuler The Hebrew University, 1996 "Gibush darko shel Y.B. Berkowitz keaman hasipur hakazar" ("The Development of Y.B. Berkowitz as a Master of the Short Story") Sara Alspector-Caspi The Union Institute, 1995 "The Role of the Occupational Welfare Department of the General Federation of Labor in the Development of Occupational Social Work in Israel, 1982-1992" Donna Areli-Horowitz The Hebrew University, 1996 '"Bein politikah veestetikah': hanazional-soziolizm vehaomanut haplastit" ("Between Politics and Esthetics: National Socialism and the Plastic Arts") Katya Gibel Azoulay Duke University, 1995 "Black, Jewish and Interracial: It's Not the Color of Your Skin, But the Race of Your Kin" Michael Beizer The Hebrew University, 1996 "Yehudei Leningrad (Petrograd) bein milhamot ha'olam" (The Jews of Leningrad [Petrograd] in the Inter World War Period") Yigal Benjamin Bar-Han University, 1996 "Hatenu'ah hahaluzit vehahakhsharot beholand mereishitan ve'ad leahar hakamat medinat yisrael, 1917-1950" ("The Halutz Movement and the Hachsharot in Holland from Their Beginning Until After the Establishment of the State of Israel, 1917-1950") Gila Benjamin-Kurz Bar-Han University, 1996 "'Amadot, ha'arakhot udefusei pe'ilut shel gevarim venashim bemerkazei miflagot beyisrael" ("Attitudes, Perceptions and Behavior Patterns of Men and Women in the Central Committees of Israeli Political Parties") Catherine Bischoping University of Michigan, 1995 "Papers in Holocaust and Genocide Studies" Mary (Miri) Bitton City University of New York, 1995 "Reformist Third Parties: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Party in the United States and the Democratic Movement for Change in Israel" Zachary Joseph Braiterman Stanford, 1995 "Theodicy and Anti-Theodicy: Tradition and Change in Post-Holocaust Jewish Theology" 400

Recently Completed Doctoral Dissertations

401

Yisrael Brand The Hebrew University, 1996 "Leidato uzemihato shel hinukh hamizrahi, 1902-1925" ("The Beginnings and Growth of Mizrachi Education, 1902-1925") Lee T. Bycel School of Theology at Claremont, 1995 "The Transformation of the Rabbi's Role: Curricular Implications" Asher Cohen Bar-Ilan University, 1996 "Medinat hatorah—hazori umeziut: temurot behityahasutah shel hatenu'ah haziyonit-datit lir'ay on medinat hatorah vedarkhei hagshamato bitkufat ha'izuv, 1947-1953" ("The Torah State—Vision and Reality: Changes in the Attitude of the Religious-Zionist Movement to the Concept of a Torah State and Its Implementation in the Formative Period, 1947-1953") Nathan Cohen The Hebrew University, 1996 "Hamerkaz hasifruti veha'itonai hayehudi beVarshah bashanim 1920-1942 beaspeklariyah shel igud hasoferim veha'itonaim" ("The Jewish Literary and Journalistic Center in Warsaw Between 1920-1942 as Reflected in the Association of Jewish Writers and Journalists") Arlette Siboni Corcos University of Montreal, 1995 "Montreal, Les Juifs et 1'ecole" Joel Carl Dickstein Columbia University Teachers College, 1995 "Jewish Special Education and the Quiet Revolution" Shoshanah Dietz University of Texas, Austin, 1995 "Jewish-Marxist (Re)presentations: A Study of German and Russian Jewish Writers During the Interwar Years" Hana Elkad-Lehman Bar-Ilari University, 1996 "Temurot poetiyot beshirat Yisrael Efrat" ("Poetic Changes in Israel Efrat's Poetry") Paul Arthur Flexner Columbia University Teachers College, 1995 "Facilitating Adult Jewish Learning" Joseph B. Glass The Hebrew University, 1996 "Yehudei arzot habrit vekanadah beerez yisrael: hityashvutam veyozmatam lefituah hanof hayishuvi bamahazit harishonah shel tekufat hashilton habriti, 1917-1932" ("American and Canadian Jews in Eretz Israel: Settlement and Initiatives for the Development of the Landscape During the Beginning of British Rule, 1917-1932") Zeev Goldberg The Hebrew University, 1996 "Gezel Zelikoviz: maskil ve'itonai yehudi bemifneh hameot" ("Getzel Zelikovitch; A Maskil and a Jewish Journalist at the Turn of the Century") Shmuel Gordon The Hebrew University, 1996 " 'Ozmah zevait—tekhnologiyah zevait umilhamah konvenziyonalit bamizrah hatikhon" ("Military Technology and Conventional War in the Middle East") Tresa Lynn Grauer University of Michigan, 1995 "One and the Same Openness: Narrative and Tradition in Contemporary Jewish American Literature" Aviva Halamish Tel-Aviv University, 1996 "Mediniyut ha'aliyah vehaklitah shel hahistadrut haziyonit, 1931-1937"

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Recently Completed Doctoral Dissertations

("Immigration and Absorption Policy of the Zionist Organization, 19311937") Naomi Hannes The Hebrew University, 1996 "Hamesaper kesofer besifrut hamuda'at leazmah (beroman basifrut ha'ivrit)" ("The Narrator as a Writer in the Literature of Self-Consciousness: The Novel in Hebrew Literature") Tzila Hersco Bar-Han University, 1996 "Zarefat, hayishuv hayehudi beerez yisrael veyahadut zarefat: 1945-1949" ("France, the Jewish Community in Palestine and French Jewry: 1945-1949") Ariel Hirschfeld The Hebrew University, 1996 "Hasemel bizirato shel Y.H. Brenner" ("Symbolism in the Writing of Y.H. Brenner") Rosemary Horowitz University of Massachusetts, 1995 "Literacy and Cultural Transmission in the Reading, Writing, and Rewriting of Yisker bikher" Martin Michael Japtok University of California, Davis, 1995 "Growing Up Ethnic: African-American and Jewish-American Literary Perspectives Compared" Sandra Berliant Kadosh Columbia University, 1995 "Ideology Versus Reality: Youth Aliyah and the Rescue of Jewish Children During the Holocaust Era, 1933-1945" Idit Kanfi Tel-Aviv University, 1996 "Miromantikan naivi leromantikan mefukah: mipui veifyun shirat hateva' shel Shaul Tchernihovsky berezef hazeman" ("From a Naive to a Sober Romanticist: Characterization and Mapping of the Nature Poetry of Saul Tchernichovsky Along a Time Sequence") Amnon Kartin Tel-Aviv University, 1996 "Behinah geografit shel hashpa'at yahasei shekhenut 'oynim 'al demut ikhlusan shel rezu'ot sefar beyisrael" ("A Geographical Study of the Impact of Hostile Relations Between Neighboring Countries on the Characteristics of Settlement in Their Common Frontier Zones: The Case of Israel's Frontier Zone") Orith Landau Yeshiva University, 1995 "Family Patterns of Second-Generation Holocaust Survivor Women" Martha Calvert Lannoch Case Western Reserve, 1995 "A Critical Story: Western Humanism, Jewish Humanism and the Case of Melville's Ishmael" Eleonore Lappin The Hebrew University, 1996 "Monografiyah 'al ketav ha'et Der Jude, 1916-1928" ("Der Jude: A Monographic Study, 1916-1928") Shlomo Leibovici Bar-Han University, 1996 "Tehiyatam ve sulam shel hahayim haleumiyim hayehudiyim beromaniyah: yahadut romaniyah mul mishtar mishtaneh" ("The Revival and Liquidation of Jewish National Life in Romania: Romanian Jewry Versus a Changing Regime") Andre Levy The Hebrew University, 1996 "Yehudim bckerev muslamim: tefisot uteguvot lekez hahistoriyah shel

Recently Completed Doctoral Dissertations

403

yahadut Kasablanka" ("Jews Among Muslims: Perceptions and Reactions to the End of Casablancan Jewish History") Nili Levy The Hebrew University, 1996 "Hasiporet shel Yehoshua' Kenaz" ("The Narrative Art of Joshua Kenaz") Andrea Liss University of California, Los Angeles, 1995 "Trespassing Through Shadows: History, Memory and Photography in Contemporary Representations of the Holocaust" Ilan Natan Magat University of Alberta, 1995 "Home as the Meeting of Heaven and Earth" [Israeli immigrants in Canada] John Peter Miglietta New York University, 1995 "Influences and Constraints on American Alliance Politics: The Case of U.S. Alliances in the Middle East" Julia Mirsky The Hebrew University, 1996 "Histaglut psikhologit shel studentim 'olim mibrit hamo'ezot leshe'avar beyisrael: heibetim psikhodinamiyim" ("Psychological Adjustment of Immigrant Students from the Former Soviet Union in Israel: A Psychodynamic Perspective") Beverly Mizrachi The Hebrew University, 1996 "Giyus nashim letafkidei elitot leumiyot asteretegiyot beyisrael" ("The Recruitment of Women into Strategic National Elite Positions in Israel") Benjamin Molov Bar-Han University, 1996 "Haheibet hayehudi shel hayav ve'avodato hamadi'it shel Hans J. Morgenthau" ("The Jewish Aspect of the Life and Work of Hans J. Morgenthau") Benjamin Ira Nathans University of California, Berkeley, 1995 "Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Russia, 1840-1900" Ora Nebenzahl Columbia University, 1996 "Public Library Legislation in Israel: A Study in Public Policy Process" Rina Peled The Hebrew University, 1996 "'Headam hehadash' shel hashomer haza'ir mereishitah shel hatenu'ah beeiropah be!913 ve'ad hakamat mifleget hashomer haza'ir beerez yisrael be!946" ('"The New Man' of Hashomer Hazair from Its Beginnings in Europe [1913] to the Foundation of the Hashomer Hazair Party [1946]") Carole Ann Audrey Reed University of Toronto, 1993 "Building Bridges: The Anti-Racist Dimensions of Holocaust Education" Sondra Lee Ricar University of California, Santa Cruz, 1995 "A Portrait of Russian Revolutionary Women" Rachel Rojanski Tel-Aviv University, 1996 "Mifleget hapo'alim hayehudit hasozialistit 'po'alei ziyon' beamerika, 19051931" ("The Jewish Socialist Labor Party 'Poalei-Zion' in America, 19051931") liana Rosen The Hebrew University, 1996 "Hashoah bemerkaz hahayim: nituah folkeloristi shel sipurei hayim mipi nizolei shoah doverei hungarit" ("The Holocaust at the Center of Life: A Folkloristic Analysis of Life Histories Told by Hungarian-Speaking Holocaust Survivors")

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Recently Completed Doctoral Dissertations

Zeev Rosenhek The Hebrew University, 1996 "Mekorotehah vehitpathutah shel medinat revahah dualit: haokhlusiyah ha'aravit bimdinat harevahah hayisreelit" ("The Origins and Development of a Dualistic Welfare State: The Arab Population in the Israeli Welfare State") Michael Phillip Rothberg City University of New York, 1995 "Documenting Barbarism: Memory, Culture and Modernity After the 'Final Solution'" Yochai Rudich University of Haifa, 1996 "Yeshivat 'Merkaz Harav': hitpathutah umegamotehah hahinukhiyot, 19211982" ("The 'Mercaz HaRav' Yeshivah: Its Development and Educational Trends, 1921-1982") Debra L. Schultz The Union Institute, 1995 " 'We Didn't Think in Those Terms Then': Narratives of Jewish Women in the Southern Civil Rights Movement, 1960-1966" Malka Shabtay Ben-Gurion University, 1996 "Havnayat zehut bekerev hayalim 'olim mietyopiyah: tahalikhim shel parshanut umaavak" ("Identity Reformulation Among Ethiopian Immigrant Soldiers: Processes of Interpretation and Struggle") liana Shamir Tel-Aviv University, 1996 "Andartot lenoflim bema'arakhot yisrael: hanzahah vezikaron" ("Memorials for the Fallen in the Wars of Israel: Commemoration and Remembrance") Marc B. Shapiro Harvard University, 1995 "Between East and West: The Life and Works of Rabbi Jehiel Jacob Weinberg" Zipora Shavitzky Yeshiva University, 1995 "Teaching Jeremiah in the Framework of History: A Hebrew Curriculum" [Heb.] Hadassah Ruth Singer University of Kansas, 1995 "Hebrew-English Code Switching in Four Israeli Families Living in the U.S." Shoshana Sitton Tel-Aviv University, 1996 "Hinukh beruah hamoledet': hatokhnit hahinukhit shel 'mo'ezet hamorim lema'an hakeren hakayemet leyisrael'" ("'Education in the Spirit of the Homeland': The Curriculum of the 'Teachers Council for the Keren Kayemet'") Gideon Stachel The Hebrew University, 1996 "Ha'aliyah hayehudit megermaniyah leerez yisrael bashanim 1933-1939 umifgashah 'im hahevrah hayishuvit minkudat mabatem shel ha'olim" ("The Jewish Immigration from Germany to Palestine During the Years 1933-1939 and Its Meeting with the People of the Yishuv from the Immigrants' Point of View") Hayim Stern Bar-Han University, 1996 " 'Agnon ke'orekh lashon mekorotav" ("Agnon as a Linguistic Editor of His Literary Sources") Tali Tadmor-Shimony The Hebrew University, 1996 "Sheelat hazehut haleumit shel hasozializm hayehudi haamerikani bashanim 1917-1924" ("National Identity and American Jewish Socialism, 19171924")

Recently Completed Doctoral Dissertations

405

Jakob Taitelbaum Tel-Aviv University, 1996 "Hahinukh hatikhoni hayehudi bein shtei milhamot ha'olam, 1919-1939" ("Jewish High School Education Between the Two World Wars") Shaul Webber The Hebrew University, 1996 "Temurot baidiologiyah hahinukhit shel tenu'ot hano'ar beerez yisrael klapei hagolah bemahalakh milhemet ha'olam hasheniyah uleaharehah, 1939-1948" ("Changes in the Educational Ideology of Youth Movements in Eretz Israel Relating to the Diaspora During the Holocaust and Its Aftermath, 19391948") Yaffa Weisman University of Southern California, 1994 "Grotesque Transformations of the Mythical Woman: From August Strindberg to Nissim Aloni" Tamar Wolf-Monzon Bar-Han University, 1996 "Gibush hapoetikah haerez-yisreelit shel Uri Zvi Greenberg, 1924-1927" ("The Formation of Uri Zvi Greenberg's Eretz-Israel Poetics, 1924-1927") Kenneth Wolk New York University, 1995 "New Haven and Waterbury, Connecticut Jewish Communities; Public Response to the Holocaust, 1938-1944: An Examination Based on Accounts in the Public Printed Press and Local Jewish Organizational Documents" Tamar Zemach The Hebrew University, 1996 "Sikur hashoah be'itonut hayisreelit ba'et mishpatei Nuremberg, Kasztner, Eichmann, Auschwitz veDemjanjuk" ("Coverage of the Holocaust in the Israeli Press During the Nuremberg, Kasztner, Eichmann, Auschwitz and Demjanjuk Trials")

STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY JEWRY

XIV Edited by Peter Y. Medding

Symposium—Families and Family Relations Among Jews in the Twentieth Century Carmel Chiswick, Economics of Contemporary Jewish Family Life Sergio DellaPergola and liana Ziegler, Family Growth Among Jews in Israel Menahem Friedman, The Changing Orthodox Jewish Family and Its Replacement by Community Dalia Ofer, Jewish Family Life in Extremis: The Holocaust Bruce Phillips, Children of Intermarriage Riv Ellen Prell, Marriage, Americanization and American Jewish Culture, 19001920 Shaul Stampfer, The Myth of the Extended Jewish Family Meira Weiss, "We Are All One Bereaved Family": Israeli Jewish Society and the Families of Fallen Soldiers Stephen J. Whitfield, Making Fragmentation Familiar: Barry Levinson's "Avalon" . . . Plus essays, review essays, book reviews and a listing of recent doctoral dissertations

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Note on Editorial Policy Studies in Contemporary Jewry is pleased to accept manuscripts for possible publication. Authors of essays on subjects generally within the contemporary Jewish sphere (from the turn of the century to the present) should send two copies to: The The The Mt.

Editor, Studies in Contemporary Jewry Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry Hebrew University Scopus, Jerusalem, Israel 91905

Essays should not exceed thirty-five pages in length and must be double-spaced throughout (including intended quotations and footnotes).

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