Jews in Eastern Europe

The articles Yiddishland and Jews in Eastern Europe overlap thematically. Help me to better differentiate or merge the articles (→ instructions ) . To do this, take part in the relevant redundancy discussion . Please remove this module only after the redundancy has been completely processed and do not forget to include the relevant entry on the redundancy discussion page{{ Done | 1 = ~~~~}}to mark. Wheeke ( discussion ) 10:33, Nov. 5, 2018 (CET)

Klezmorim in Ukraine, 1925

Ethnic Map of the Russian Empire (1875)

The Jews in Eastern Europe were up to the Holocaust , the world's most numerous population of Jews . They developed their own Jewish scholarship and special forms of religious practice.

The first Jews settled in the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, probably in the 12th century. In the early 16th century there were around 50,000 Jews in Eastern Europe, mostly in Poland, Lithuania , Moldova and Bukovina . In the Middle Ages, the old communities often emerged parallel to and in competition with Christian settlements in the east. In Poznan , Cracow , Lublin , Lemberg , and Vilnius , the Jews had privileges for far-reaching autonomous municipal administration, and so these cities had become conurbations for the Jewish population.

At the end of the 18th century, around 1.5 million Jews were already living in Eastern Europe. This increase was due to immigration from the west as well as the relatively favorable living conditions. The legal security of the Jews was greater in Eastern Europe than in the West, but the vast majority of Eastern European Jews remained very poor. Before the attack on Poland in 1939, over 3.4 million Jews lived in Poland, and another 4 million lived in the European territory of the Soviet Union . The west of today's Ukraine in particular was shaped by Jews. In many cities Jews made up up to 30 percent of the population; in Minsk, for example, in 1897 it was as much as 52 percent of the city population.

The vast majority of Eastern European Jews were killed during the Holocaust .

middle Ages

Ashkenazi Judaism

Władysław Łuszczkiewicz :
Casimir the Great visits his Jewish lover Esterka, 1870

In the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries, numerous Ashkenazi Jews fled in various waves from Western and Central Europe, mainly from Germany and Bohemia , to Poland and Lithuania . The resulting Jewish communities retained their distinctly Ashkenazi character until the Holocaust. The liturgy and religious traditions of the Jews from Poland and Lithuania, and later also from Russia and the Ukraine, were based on medieval traditions that originally came from the Franco-German area. In addition, by the 16th century, most of the leading Polish rabbis were emigrants from the West who had received their training in yeshivot in Germany and Bohemia.

In contrast to the Sephardic Jews, who developed numerous philosophical and literary traditions that were influenced by the surrounding culture in the partially tolerant and culturally open Islamic rule (see: Freedom of Belief in Islam ) (due to their dhimmi status ) , the Jews in Eastern Europe were separated from the Christian environment, which is largely hostile to them, more and more. For a long time, her intellectual interest was limited to rabbinical literature .

But despite their isolation from Christian society, Jews in Poland and Lithuania initially found much more security than in Western Europe. This is largely due to privileges granted to them by the Polish kings and Lithuanian grand dukes. The first "Jewish Charter" was granted by Duke Bolesław the Pious († 1279) of Greater Poland in 1264 and confirmed by Casimir the Great in 1334 and extended to the whole Kingdom of Poland . The first privileges of the Lithuanian Grand Duke Vytautas for the year 1388 are documented for Lithuania .

Khazars and Karaites

Another hypothesis ascribes the Eastern European Ashkenazim mainly to immigration of converts or their descendants from the former empire of the Khazars in southeast Europe and the Caucasus region. In the 19th century, the Austro-Hungarian orientalist Hugo von Kutschera argued that the Khazars moved to Eastern Europe after the Mongols had destroyed their empire and formed Ashkenazi Judaism there. In the 20th century, this view was taken up again by some historians and non-fiction authors. The Khazars were nomadic Turkic tribes whose rulers, the nobility and probably also parts of the common population demonstrably converted to Judaism at the end of the 8th century or in the early 9th century. The Chasar thesis is nowadays rejected by the majority in historical studies. Your critics also point out that Yiddish is closely related to Middle High German in grammar and vocabulary. Several scientific studies on the genetic origin and development of the Jews living today also come to the conclusion that almost half of the male Ashkenazim also inherited many genes from an original Jewish population group who lived around 3000 years ago in the eastern Mediterranean region known as the Levant . There are also indications of a "genetic intermingling" with the Khazars, but this influence is very limited from a scientific point of view. Today the Khazarenthesis is mainly spread by anti-Semites and anti-Zionists in order to question Israel's right to exist .

Furthermore, Karaites also settled in Eastern Europe , who, according to some ethnologists, now represent the actual descendants of the converted Khazars and Cumans . This myth of origin is partly shared by the Karaites themselves. The Karaite is a Turkic language. Historically and theologically, however, these are to be strictly separated from the Ashkenazim.

16th century: the golden age

During the 16th century Poland became an international center for rabbinical learning. From the Polish yeshivot, rabbis were now sent to France and Germany, so that the dependencies of earlier times turned into the opposite.

The founder of the first large rabbinical school in Poland was Jakob Polak. He was born and educated in Bavaria and was chief rabbi in Prague before emigrating to Poland. In 1492 he founded the first Polish Talmud Academy in Krakow . His student Shalom Shachna set up the second Polish yeshiva in Lublin . For nearly three centuries Lublin and Krakow were the world's most important centers of Talmudic learning. One of Shachna's most important students was Moses Isserles (1530–1572). After studying in the Lublin yeshiva, he became Chief Rabbi of Cracow and is known as the author of notes on Shulchan Aruch .

Persecution and messianism

Jan Feliks Piwarski:
Jewish merchants in Warsaw, 1841

Many Jews in eastern Poland and the Ukraine worked as small business people, innkeepers and tax collectors and therefore occupied an ungrateful middle position between the Polish nobility and the Ukrainian peasant population. Coupled with their religious, linguistic and cultural isolation, this led to open hostility on the part of the Ukrainians. The uprising of the Cossack leader Bohdan Khmelnyzkyj 1648–1649 was directed on the one hand against the Polish Catholic clergy and nobility, on the other hand against the Jewish population, of whom up to 100,000 were killed in the pogroms against the Jews .

Nevertheless, the Jewish population continued to grow. According to the 1764 census, there were almost 600,000 Jews in Poland, over 60 percent of whom lived in the eastern part of the country and in Ukraine. But the heyday of the 16th century was irretrievably over. Talmudic scholarship continued to exist, but was increasingly limited to an aristocratic circle of rabbis and wealthy parishioners. On the other hand, the uneducated masses gave themselves more and more to a superstition that was shaped by folk traditions. Numerous moralistic books with popular mysticism , such as Kav haJaschar ("The Straight Line"), were translated into Yiddish at this time .

The increased anti-Semitic persecution and pogroms in the 17th and 18th centuries paved the way for messianic expectations embodied in the person of the alleged messiah Shabbetaj Zvi (1626–1676), who later converted to Islam. The most famous religious enthusiast from Eastern Europe itself was Jakob Joseph Frank (1726–1791), founder of the Frankist movement, who in turn converted to Christianity.

Hasidim and fellow Nagdim

The interior of the synagogue of Baal Shem Tov in Medschybisch , Ukraine, photo taken around 1915

On the basis of growing superstition and messianic expectations , the Hasidic Movement grew from the second half of the 18th century in the regions of Podolia and Volhynia , which at that time belonged to south-east Poland , as its founder Rabbi Israel ben Eliezer , known as Baal Shem Tow ( “Master of the good name”), applies. Written records do not come from the Baal Shem Tov himself, but from some of his disciples. Among his most important followers were Rabbi Dow Bär , called " Maggid von Mesritsch", and Rabbi Jakob Josef von Polonoje , both of whom had important positions as rabbis before they were attracted to the mystical teachings. Rabbi Jacob Josef coined the term tzaddik , the righteous man who serves as a role model based on his lifestyle. The intimate relationship between the tzaddikim and the popular masses became the basis of Hasidic life in Eastern Europe. Rabbi Dow Bear introduced the model of the Hasidic court , in which the tzaddik as ruler determines the lives of his followers. This way of life has persisted in today's Hasidic communities in the United States and Israel.

During the 19th century, Hasidism spread throughout Russia, Galicia, and Poland, and eventually Hungary, Romania, Moravia, and Slovakia.

Lithuania, on the other hand, remained largely unaffected by Hasidism. This was mainly based on the hostile attitude of the Gaon of Vilnius , Elijah Ben Salomon Salman (~ 1720–1797), who lived in seclusion and had no official job, but led the rabbinical resistance against the spread of Hasidism in the last years of his life. In 1772 and 1782 he had the ban pronounced over the Hasidim, which all Lithuanian communities joined. He also called meat slaughtered by Hasidic rabbis mature and forbade marriages between Hasidic Jews and members of his community. Because of its hostility to Hasidism, its emphasis was on religious ecstasy at the expense of scholarship, which until then had been the center of Jewish life. The followers of the Vilna Gaon became "Mitnagdim", in Ashkenazi pronunciation "Misnagdim", d. H. Called "opponent". This movement has survived alongside Hasidism within Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Judaism.

Haskala and Yiddish culture

Nicolae Grigorescu , Jew with a goose, around 1880

The influence of the Vilna Gaon also laid the groundwork for the expansion of the Haskala in Eastern Europe. In contrast to Western Europe and Galicia, where the Enlightenment often led to radical reforms of the Jewish rite and assimilation , a specifically Eastern European secular character emerged in Lithuania and later also in Russia. The Maskilim - the Jewish enlighteners - refrained from attempting assimilation from the start. The cultural and political movements of Judaism in Eastern Europe always found their expression in Yiddish or Hebrew.

The Yiddish literature developed a flower, it was the Yiddish theater , it appeared the first Yiddish newspapers.

Zionism and the Labor Movement

Bundists with killed comrades, Odessa 1905

After the pogroms in Russia in 1881, a strong spontaneous wave of emigration began. Millions of Jews fled Russia for Central and Western Europe and the USA. The first Zionist organization, Chibbat Zion, came into being .

In 1897 the General Jewish Workers' Union (Bund) was founded as the first Jewish political party. From 1904 further socialist and Zionist parties emerged.

The pogrom of 1905 in Russia led to another mass emigration. In the small towns, especially in the Russian Pale of Settlement , the Jewish population decreased dramatically. With this, numerous so-called shtetls disappeared and with them many traditions of religious Jewish life in Eastern Europe.

Strange in the west

In the German Empire , the assimilated Jews perceived the Eastern Jews as an alien threat to their social recognition. In his contribution “Hear Israel!” Walther Rathenau wrote in the anti- Wilhelmine magazine Die Zukunft :

“The social and cultural question arises more threateningly. Those who want to hear their language can walk through Tiergartenstrasse at noon on Sundays in Berlin or look into the anteroom of a theater in the evening. Strange vision! In the midst of German life, a separate, alien tribe of people, shiny and strikingly decorated, of hot-blooded agile demeanor. An Asian horde on the sand of the Brandenburg region. "

- Walther Rathenau : 1897

literature

Non-fiction

The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe . Edited by Gershon D. Hundert, Yale University Press, New Haven 2008, ISBN 978-0-300-11903-9 .
The Encyclopedia of Judaism. Brill Verlag, Leiden-Boston-Cologne 2000, ISBN 90-04-10583-2 .
Predrag Bukovec: East and Southeast European Jews in the 19th and 20th Centuries. In: European History Online . Published by the Institute for European History (Mainz) , 2011, accessed on: July 13, 2011.
Ruth Gay : Narrele, what are you laughing at? Eastern Jews in America. (Original title: Unfinished People: Jewish Immigrants to the United States: 1880–1914. ) Siedler, Berlin 2001, ISBN 3-88680-717-7 ; Paperback edition: Berliner Taschenbuch-Verlag, Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-442-76141-7 (1997 awarded the National Jewish Book Award for non-fiction).
Heiko Haumann : History of the Eastern Jews. 4th edition, dtv, Munich 1998, ISBN 3-423-30663-7 .
Trude Maurer : Eastern Jews in Germany 1918–1933. Christians, Hamburg 1990, ISBN 3-7672-0964-0 .
Andrei Oişteanu : Constructions of the image of the Jews. Romanian and East Central European stereotypes of anti-Semitism. Frank and Timme, Berlin 2010, series: Forum Romania, Volume 6, ISBN 978-3-86596-273-7 .
Manfred Sapper , Volker Weichsel (ed.): Impulse for Europe. Tradition and Modernity of the Jews of Eastern Europe . Berliner Wissenschaftsverlag, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-8305-1434-3 .
Sybille Steinbacher : Auschwitz. History and post-history. Beck, Munich 2004, ISBN 3-406-50833-2 .
Claus Stephani : Was a ruler, carter ... life and suffering of the Jews in Oberwischau. Reminder conversations. Athenaeum Published by Frankfurt / M. 1991, ISBN 3-445-08562-5 .
Claus Stephani: return to tradition. Aspects of the change of identity and way of life in Romanian Judaism after the fall of the Wall in 1990. In: Klaus Roth (Hrsg.): Feste, Fiegen, Rituale im Eastern Europa. Studies on socialist and post-socialist festival culture. LIT Verlag, Vienna, Zurich 2008, pag. 331-342, ISBN 978-3-03735-265-6 , ISBN 978-3-8258-1708-4 .
Mark Terkessidis : Migrants. European publishing house EVA / Rotbuch , Hamburg 2000, ISBN 3-434-53504-7 .

Fiction

Samuel Josef Agnon : Just like a guest at night. Coron, Zurich 1970 (Nobel Prize edition, Hebrew original 1939).
Elie Wiesel : The Shamgorod Trial: As it happened on February 25, 1649. One piece in 3 acts. Translated from the French by Alexander de Montléart. Herder: Freiburg / Br. / Basel / Vienna 1987. N 3-451-21117-3.
Elie Wiesel: Hasidic Celebration: Stories and Legends. Translated from the French by Margarete Venjakob. Herder: Freiburg Br., Basel, Vienna, 1988. ISBN 3-451-21019-3 .
Elie Wiesel: Only the guilty are guilty. In: Martin Doerry (Ed.): Nowhere and everywhere at home. Conversations with survivors of the Holocaust. Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt: Munich, 2006. ISBN 3-421-04207-1 .
Isaac Bashevis Singer : Der Kunznmacher fun Lublin (The Magician of Lublin), Roman, 1960, German 1967.
Isaac Bashevis Singer: Jacob the Servant. Roman 1962, German 1965, with an afterword by Salcia Landmann . Rowohlt: Reinbek near Hamburg.
Manès Sparhawk : The water bearers of God. Novel. dtv: Munich, 1974.
Itzik Manger : The Book of Paradise (Doss book fun gan-ejdn). Translated and introduced by Salcia Landmann. Kossodo: Geneva, Hamburg, 1963.
Karl Emil Franzos : A victim. Narrative. Engelhorn: Stuttgart, 1893 (Engelhorn's novel library 10.8).
Karl Emil Franzos: The Truth Seeker. Novel. Cotta: Berlin, 1896 (2 vol.).
Claus Stephani : flower child. Novel. SchirmerGraf: Munich, 2009. ISBN 978-3-86555-067-5 .
Robert Flinker : Purgatory. Criterion: Bucharest, 1968.

Fairy tales, sagas, legends

The Golden Lane. Jewish sagas and legends. Fourier: Wiesbaden, 1996. ISBN 3-925037-84-5 .
Ulf Diederichs (Ed.): Your aschenes Haar Sulamith. East Jewish Stories. Fischer: Frankfurt, 1997. ISBN 3-596-13417 X .
Claus Stephani: East Jewish fairy tales. (Series: Die Märchen der Weltliteratur. Eugen Diederichs Verlag: Munich, 1998.) ISBN 978-3-641-13938-4 .
Claus Stephani: Fiabe e leggende ebraiche. Traduzione di Eleonora Marcello. Newton & Compton Editori: Roma, 2001 (Italian edition of “East Jewish Fairy Tales”). ISBN 88-8289-628-5 .
Claus Stephani: Fiabe e leggende ebraiche. Traduzione di Eleonora Marcello. Edizione Mondolibri: Milano, 2006 (Italian edition of the “East Jewish Fairy Tales”).
Claus Stephani: The Maiden of the Forest. Legends, Tales and Local History of Bukovina. Translated by Sophie A. Welisch. Published by The Bukovina Society of the Americas: Ellis / Kansas, 2008.
Claus Stephani: Aaron cel curajos. Povestiri popular evreieşti din zona Carpaților. / From the brave Aaron. Jewish stories from the Carpathian Mountains. Traducere din limba germană de Ruxandra G. Hosu (bilingual edition, German - Romanian). Editura Hasefer: Bucureşti, 2008. ISBN 978-973-630-171-1 .
Клаус Штефанй: Приказни на евреите од источна Европа. Приредил Клаус Штефани. Превод од германски Стефан Симовски. Огледало: Скопје, 2010 (Macedonian edition of “East Jewish Fairy Tales”). ISBN 978-9989-686-38-2 .
Claus Stephani: East Jewish fairy tales. E-Book (Kindle Edition) from Verlagsgruppe Random House Bertelsmann, 2014. ISBN 978-3-641-13938-4 .

Web links

Remarks

↑ Saul Friedländer : The Third Reich and the Jews. dtv, Munich 2000, ISBN 3-423-30765-X .

↑ Ingo Way: Genetics: Rhineland or Caucasus? In: Jüdische Allgemeine. January 24, 2013.

↑ Genetic ancestry. Abraham's Children Der Tagesspiegel on June 16, 2010, last seen on June 1, 2016.

↑ Do all Jews really share a certain gene? The world, as last seen on June 1, 2016.

^ Israel and the search for the "Jewish gene" Die Welt on September 1, 2010, last seen on June 1, 2016.