The problem of nationalities held an important place in central and eastern Europe before the First World War. At the time, central Europe (Mitteleuropa) — a term more or less forgotten today — covered a geographical area extending from the Rhine to the Poznań region and from East Prussia to the marches of Romania. As for eastern Europe, it covered all the regions east of the Reich and of Hungary. For our purposes, the limit — wholly theoretical and arbitrary — scarcely went beyond the Pale of Settlement, a few cities excepted. That is, roughly, one hundred and fifty million individuals.
The periodization that is the object of this study extends from the last third of the nineteenth century to 1914, with an extension up to the Second World War. It is at once historical and sociological, simple and complex. It is simple because it is not a matter of retracing in its entirety the question of nationalities in central Europe, but of focusing our gaze on the Jewry of these regions — that is, roughly four million souls around 1880, six million at the turn of the century, and more than double that before the Shoah (see box).
The Jewries of central and eastern Europe do not necessarily coincide with what is called the yiddishland, but chiefly with the central Europe of before 1914. Curiously — and we shall see this later — the theories were born in central Europe and saw attempts at application in eastern Europe. In other words, and simplifying to the extreme, the concept of extraterritoriality was born in central Europe and its will to realization in eastern Europe. For it was in the Russian Empire — a conglomerate of Balts, Poles, Belarusians, Great Russians, Ukrainians, Moldavians, and so on — that the Jews worked out a sheaf of lines, to use a geometric term, that is, a set of converging or parallel lines. In fact, the Jewry of these regions “forged” itself a linguistic concept, in other words the “territory” of Yiddish.
It is obvious that other languages — German, Hungarian, and to a far lesser degree Russian, Polish or Romanian — were spoken by Yiddish-speaking Jews. It is no less obvious that Yiddish was no longer the vernacular idiom of the whole of German, Austrian or Hungarian Jewry. The point is above all to show the intellectual effervescence of Jewry, the ferment of ideas that led to the birth and development of nationalitarian and nationalist ideologies. The chosen setting comes from the dual-headed Austro-Hungarian Empire and the tsarist Empire — multinational, multiethnic and multireligious states.
From the outset, let us note that Jewry, seen from the national angle, presented characteristics different from those of the “territorialized” nationalities. Even though the national question, for certain peoples, could take on an explosive character if one considers, for example, that the Magyars were a minority in the Romanian part of the Empire, the Sudeten Germans in relation to the Czechs, and even the Russian ethnic group in certain regions of deepest Russia.
Paths and detours of a Jewish nationality
To return to the Jews: although they had resided for several centuries on a soil that might with good reason have been their own, Jewish theoreticians worked out — some may think cobbled together — ideologies modeled on those of the Polish, Czech or German surroundings. But these ideologies presented particularities owing to different economic structures. Added to this was a virulent antisemitism in most countries, notably in the Russian autocracy, that “Prison of Peoples,” that “Empire of Darkness.” Finally, the Jewish communities were scattered across Europe and formed, more or less, a “non-territorial nation.” To this abnormal, unusual and sometimes dramatic situation, folkism, Bundism and Zionism — to name only those — attempted to bring answers to the Jewish problem by introducing the notion of a Jewish national minority in the diaspora.
Without entering into the perspective of a division between Westjuden (Jews of the West) and Ostjuden (Jews of the East), which would risk weighing down the argument, let us note that the former were part of the dominant nation, even if some displayed a tenacious “Israelitism.” As for the latter, dwelling in multiethnic lands, they laid claim to their belonging to a Jewish “nation,” religious (Orthodox Judaism) or secular (Maskilim, then secular Bundists or Zionists).
Let us recall, for the record, that the period in question is characterized by a rapid increase in the Jewish population owing to a very high birth rate, and that cities such as Warsaw, Łódź, Berlin, Vienna, Lemberg, Czernowitz or Budapest are veritable Jewish metropolises. Let us also recall that a rapid industrialization, with the appearance of a capitalism and of a Jewish proletariat, brings about a perceptible mutation owing to the galloping urbanization of Jewry. The exodus toward the cities in search of work is reflected in the slow and sure decomposition of the shtetl, the Jewish small town in a rural setting. Note that the Jews form the majority in certain medium-sized cities of the Pale of Settlement — Pinsk, Białystok for example.
But let us also recall that eastern Europe, in relation to the West, still lags behind on the economic and social plane even if industrialization is rapid. Essentially rural, the Polish, Lithuanian or Belarusian population has but a thin fringe of intellectuals. The Jewish intelligentsia, in the process of secularization, prefers to adopt and steep itself in German and then Russian culture. The Jewish urban settlement therefore depends on economic factors, sometimes for reasons of security — which will not prevent the Russian pogroms of 1881, 1905 and 1919. The Jewish populations often dwell within the non-Jewish communities, that is, they live together and separately. In one and the same town, one and the same neighborhood, one and the same street, one and the same house, different ethnic groups may dwell, knowing one another without for all that mixing. The most striking example, at the turn of the century, is Vilna in Lithuania.
As Ezra Mendelsohn very rightly observes, “all these factors — the multinational context, the social and economic backwardness, the demography, the autocracy and the antisemitism — contributed without any doubt to preserving Jewish separatism in eastern Europe.”
These basic facts were understood neither by centralizers of the Lenin type, nor by theoreticians as diverse as Leon Trotsky, Jules Guesde, Julius Martov, Rosa Luxemburg, Adolf Warski. But it is true that the evolution of Jewry somewhat modified the process of acculturation of the Jews — a dynamic apparently paradoxical, which consisted in conserving the particular while laying claim to the universal. And that, finally, there is no sociological law as there are mathematical postulates or theorems.
The premises of a non-territorial autonomy
If, to simplify, a people is defined by language, territory, religion and a community of destiny (or of fate), and if one holds to these definitions, the Jewish people (Am Yisroel) could conceivably obey these criteria. But this is not the case, for the reasons set out below. Consequently, the Jewish intelligentsia of central and eastern Europe had to adapt its system of thought to the specific conditions of the Jewish communities.
In reality, if the Jews practiced one and the same religion (in fact an orthopraxy), the vernacular languages were different: Yiddish in the yiddishland, Yiddish and the language of the country elsewhere. Some spoke Yiddish and Hebrew, very few spoke only the Hebrew language. Sometimes they used solely the Russian, Polish, German, and so on. As for territory, on a state plane (army, diplomacy, customs) they possessed none. To be sure, the Jewish patriots laid claim to their country of residence as their own. Such was the case of the German Jews. Thus Jakob Wassermann and other assimilationists called themselves “Germans and nothing but Germans.” The same among the very “Magyarized” Hungarian Jews. For the others, Judaism was not only a religion but, it must be repeated, a nationality. The national feeling sometimes even became a national consciousness, for hundreds of thousands of Yiddish-speaking Jews and chiefly in Poland, where they formed a compact group. In Warsaw, for example, in 1910, there were 230,000 Jews — that is, three times more than in all of France (Alsace excepted, annexed by the Reich of Wilhelm I).
As for the community of destiny or of fate, according to Otto Bauer’s formula — who, moreover, recognized a Jewish nation but not a Jewish nationality — it was dependent on the situation of the Jews in the midst of the majority populations. For if the Jews were indeed tolerated in certain countries, the same was not true elsewhere. Tsarist Russia was, alas, the most flagrant example (pogrom is a Russian word).
Without retracing even in broad strokes the history of Jewry in central or eastern Europe, the idea of a future Europe in which the Jews would be recognized as such made its way. Over the years, cosmopolitanism was little by little supplanted by Marxist internationalism and the hope of a socialist Europe. The Austro-Hungarian Jewish humanists, without reference to any precise ideology, dreamed of a more fraternal continent with frontiers less hermetically sealed.
The Jewish intelligentsia was perfectly conscious of this. It drew inspiration from the Austro-Marxist theoreticians. It is known that in the Empire of the Habsburgs there resided, or cohabited, Austrians, Germans, Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Ukrainians, Hungarians, Romanians, Serbs, Croats, Jews, and so on. It had to propose solutions adapted to the Jewish people.
Chaim Zhitlowsky, a die-hard Yiddishist, attending the socialist congress of Brünn (today Brno in the Czech Republic) in September 1899, examined the various proposals — those based on territory and others on the criteria of a nation without territory. A motion emanating from the South Slavs was founded on the principle of a non-territorial national autonomy, stating: “Each nationality living in Austria-Hungary, without regard to the territory occupied by its members, constitutes an autonomous group which regulates its national affairs of language and culture […]. The territorial divisions are purely administrative and must not prejudice national status. All languages will have equal rights in the State.”
When one thinks of the fanaticism that currently rages in the Balkans and in the world, one remains struck by the maturity of the final resolution, which in its preamble affirms: “The maintenance and development of the national particularities of the peoples of Austria are possible only with the complete equality of rights and the absence of all oppression. Hence one must above all reject the system of democratic state centralism as well as feudal privileges.”
At the same period, the Austrian socialist Karl Renner, in Staat und Nation (State and Nation), then in 1902 in Der Kampf der Nation um den Staat (The Struggle of the Nation for the State), held that the nation was “an association of men thinking and speaking in the same manner […], the cultural community of contemporary men who are no longer bound to the soil.” Having studied the modern states, he rejected the centralizing system that constrained all its subjects to a common measure without taking account of their specificity. It was necessary to create a federal state, an “organic system,” in any multinational state, as was the case in Austria-Hungary. He showed that “State and nation are antinomic in the same way as State and society. The State is a territorial authority of law. Society is one association, or several associations, of persons in fact.” It was therefore necessary to organize the personal status of people while avoiding the domination of the majority group over the minority.
This very elaborate theory was complex. It bore witness, however, to a generous will to promote the equality of opportunities, of rights and of duties of each collectivity — it being understood, of course, that the central government took charge of the vital interests: defense, foreign affairs, currency and customs.
The Jewish answers according to the various perspectives
Already, in a pamphlet titled Farvos Davke Yiddish (Why Precisely Yiddish), published in 1898, Zhitlowsky held that each nationality should furnish itself the means to reinforce its national unity within multinational states. For the Jews, Yiddish was the essential element, a kind of cement. Carried away by his lyricism, he wrote: “If three million Swiss manage to maintain ten universities, seven to eight million Yiddish-speaking Jews are capable of maintaining ten […]. In the new world, the rule will be: a people is its culture, its education…”
A part of the Jewish intelligentsia, and notably the most politicized among them, reasoned identically. In place of a reductive and faceless cosmopolitanism, this doctrine suited the Yiddishists perfectly, give or take a few details, whatever their religious, political and cultural options.
One can set down a few markers. Taking up again the somewhat arbitrary definitions I stated at the beginning of this study, one is forced to note that the most significant element — the one that best allows the affirmation of a Jewish specificity — is language. Yiddish constituted, over several generations, a “substitute for territory” and a rampart against assimilation (examples: the Germans, the Hungarians and even the Poles of the Mosaic confession). This is so true that as early as 1895 the Committee of the Jargon made the Yiddish language and culture an instrument of revolutionary propaganda.
In 1908, it is the conference of Czernowitz in Bukovina — Cernăuți in Romania, today Chernivtsi in Ukraine — that, after impassioned discussions, gives Yiddish a status of Jewish national language on a par with Hebrew, and serves as a driving element for the creation of the first Yiddish schools during the First World War. These private educational establishments will develop in the east of central Europe. For some twenty years, primary, secondary and even higher schools (the University of Minsk or of Kiev) will multiply in Poland, in the Baltic countries and in the Soviet Union. A literature and a press flourish, which will develop considerably. The creation of the YIVO (the Jewish Scientific Institute) in Berlin, then transferred to Wilno in 1925, gives the language its credentials and a definitive status. One can never say enough to what extent Yiddish became the “vehicle” of a modern literature of great richness in which, as Rachel Ertel writes, all the literary genres telescoped into one another in less than three generations. Consequently, it is thanks to this linguistic support that the vectors of a Jewish identity could be worked out and the various doctrines of Jewish extraterritoriality in central Europe constituted.
The folkism of Simon Dubnow It is first of all the action of the historian Simon Dubnow. A political scientist and militant, he opened up about it in his various works and particularly in his Letters on Old and New Judaism, published from 1897 to 1907, where he sets out Jewish autonomism in the diaspora. He starts from the principle that, like the other collectivities — and undertaking an attentive reading of Jewish history — Jewry can with good reason lay claim to its specificity and set itself up as a minority no longer merely religious but national-cultural. His contemporary examples are Vilna and Odessa, then other centers where Jewry deploys an intense cultural activity. In the West, Judaism and citizenship are conflated, and in the centralized states the problem is solely religious. The concept of nationality does not exist there, or is only embryonic. It is not at all the same in central and eastern Europe.
Dubnow recalled the importance of the “hegemonic centers” that set the tone for the whole of the diaspora. He examined Jewish autonomy, notably the Vaad Arba Aratzot (Council of the Four Lands) and the Vaad ha-Medina d’Lita (Council of the Jewish Nation in Lithuania). He showed that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the Jews were able to organize their own affairs — education, religion, taxes — provided they were not in opposition to the central Polish power. He thus demonstrates that in the European mosaic there exists a non-state Jewish nationality.
He erects the principle of extraterritoriality, a legal personality, whereby its members by a voluntary act desire to attach themselves to their community while benefiting from the same rights as the populations backed by a territory. This doctrine is folkism. On the plane of ideas, folkism will play a preponderant role, for the Jewish political parties will draw on it to complete their own ideology. The Bund will thus “popularize” the Dubnowian conceptions.
Folkism creates a political formation, the Folkspartei, which will play a certain role in Polish and Ukrainian Jewry (the Faraynigte — the Unified). Movements such as the SERP — a non-Marxist organization created in 1906, or party of the Jewish socialist workers, more commonly known under the name of Seymists (from Sejm = parliament) — will lay claim to Jewish autonomism.
The Bund and its nationalitarian preoccupations
To its left, there is the Bund, the union of Jewish workers of Poland, Russia and Lithuania, founded in Vilna in 1897. After a rather hazy period in which the Jewish problem fades before proletarian internationalism and the class struggle, the importance of the national factor asserts itself from 1901. It is above all Vladimir Medem who lays down the markers of a doctrine that attempts to reconcile the national question and revolutionary ideology. For, contrary to the Marxist opinion, the proletarians have a homeland — the country in which they live — and specific economic problems. A Jewish worker who speaks only Yiddish cannot join a Polish or Russian section, for he does not understand the language. His demands are similar but not identical. Added to this is the antisemitism of the Polish or Russian workers (the role of the Catholic and Orthodox Churches must not be neglected).
If at the beginning, in 1903, Medem holds to a neutralism, a sort of waltz-hesitation between national feeling and the class struggle, he will evolve rapidly, showing that there is no antinomy, in the objective conditions prevailing in central Europe, between a socialist consciousness and a national consciousness. For him, there exists no community of interests between Jewish capitalism and the Jewish worker — in which he opposes Dubnow, who considers that antisemitism does not establish this differentiation; but Medem rejoins the latter on the problem of the practical organization of the status of the Jewish national minority, holding that the Jews must struggle in the country where they live. In Yiddish this is called Doykayt (a Yiddish neologism meaning to be here and now; in English one says “hereness”), thus opposing the nationalist Zionism that preaches the return of the Jews to Eretz Israel. He thus laid down the first markers of a national-cultural autonomy.
Medem examines Dubnow’s doctrine while studying the vectors of identity, of which Yiddish is the principal element. In 1916, taking as his example a multinational country, he holds that each nationality should create a separate movement and promote a special organization that would organize regional cultural assemblies and, for the whole of the country, a general assembly — what Dubnow calls a Vaad (council). But it is evident, Medem adds, that each citizen may belong to the group of his choice. When it is a matter of dispersed national groups, they must self-organize and form corporations of “subjective” public law, the nation itself becoming a moral person of public law.
But it is above all on the practical plane that this theory retains all its value, since this self-management is articulated around the creation of schools and cultural institutions. He rejoins the views of Zhitlowsky, even if Medem means to be resolutely socialist. The Yiddish schools that will open at the beginning of the 1920s with the CBK (Tsentral Bildung Komitet), encompassed within a broader organism, the CISHO (the central organization of Yiddish schools) founded in Poland, will gather tens of thousands of pupils while conserving a socializing character. The CISHO, created by the Bund, will attract the Folkists and the left Poalei-Zion.
One might however remark that the Bundists, despite their electoral successes in the Kehillot and in the municipal elections, never managed to impose their views upon the public authorities, both because the power was in no way tolerant toward them and because, on the other hand, the other Jewish political and religious formations were particularly critical of them, if not hostile.
Diasporic Zionism The third answer to extraterritoriality is left-wing Zionism. To be sure, the ultimate but still distant goal is a Jewish state. But in the meantime, Jewish identity must be reinforced by way of Yiddish and Hebrew wherever Jews live in the yiddishland. For even if the Jews involve themselves in reformist, social-democratic or Zionist movements, they will not leave immediately for Palestine. In other words, one remains in the diaspora while not losing sight of the fact that Aliyah must be envisaged.
At an international Congress held at Helsingfors (Helsinki) in 1906, the Russian Zionists borrow from Dubnowism and even from the Bund a part of their argumentation, for they accept the principle of a Jewish autonomy in the diaspora: the Gegenwartsarbeit. This German term signifies that present work is centered on concrete, short-term objectives. How can one take no interest in what is happening all around? The struggle on the spot is imperative. It is indispensable to give a national and social education to the young Jews, to those pioneers who will one day leave for the land of the ancestors. The preparation for emigration consists of the schools of the Tarbut (culture in Hebrew), the model farms, the initiation into agricultural work, the preparation for the kibbutz.
The Balfour Declaration, at the end of 1917, is hailed with transports of joy in all the Zionist sectors. For a “National Home” is the prelude, the embryo of a future Hebrew state. Nevertheless, a number of Zionists remain people of the diaspora. Zionism develops considerably thereafter, and in this respect the Balfour Declaration has an enormous impact on the popular strata, just as do the two Russian Revolutions of 1917. But there remain Zionists without Aliyah — which at first sight seems somewhat unusual — Zionists who pay their contribution to the Zionist movement, the shekel to the KKL, but remain in the diaspora. Let us be fair, however. Nearly two-thirds of the Yishuv in 1939 came from central and eastern Europe.
At the beginning of the century, Ber Borochov, the principal theoretician of labor Zionism, was conscious that Jewry possessed abnormal structures but that its members were more or less bound by feelings of kinship, of belonging, born of a common historical past. The solution lay in a new restructuring that only a Jewish land was able to bring it. He founded his hopes on a peaceful coexistence between Arabs and Jews. And above all on a “normalization” of the Jewish economic structures.
In the meantime, the minimum program of the Zionists — partisans of Jewish extraterritoriality and desirous that the Jews be recognized as a national minority, notably in the Poland of Piłsudski, with, if need be, the establishment of minority blocs in the Sejm — demonstrated, if not a certain diasporism, at any rate a conjunctural rootedness in the “host” country. Finally, Zionist propaganda was hardly carried out in Hebrew but in Yiddish, in Polish, in Russian or in Romanian. Yet, of these three principal components, the Zionist solution remained the most distant from the vision of a new Europe of nations, even if it admitted Jewish extraterritoriality on the continent. The repeated interventions of Leo Motzkin, an ardent Zionist and convinced autonomist, would — for a time — profoundly change mentalities.
In the aftermath of the First World War
The year 1919 was crucial. The war had ended and one witnessed a new configuration in central Europe. Austria-Hungary had flown to pieces, the western fringe of Russia had fragmented. New states had arisen: Poland, the three Baltic states, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, an enlarged Romania. On the ruins of these great state ensembles, the new territorial division — which modified the relations between the various populations — had attempted to resolve the problem of the national minorities. And that of the Jews most particularly, owing to their dispersion. A Jew of Galicia found himself a Pole. Another, formerly Russian, became a Latvian. Moreover, certain countries such as Romania considered the Jews as foreigners on their own soil, thus depriving them of their civic rights. Russia, by contrast, had granted them civic and national rights in 1917. For them this was a novelty. This delighted the partisans of Dubnow in particular.
But if this new redistribution, the creation of new states, could have given satisfaction to certain peoples, it was often otherwise. Even if Poland had a surface area of more than 350,000 km², even if it could pride itself on having wrested away new territories, 40% of its population was composed not of ethnic Poles but of allogenous peoples. We give this single example, but other countries found themselves in similar conditions. Hence, as one may suspect, a climate of perpetual tension, undermining the good Wilsonian resolutions.
A special organism was created to defend the Jews at the Peace Conference. This was the Committee of Jewish Delegations, which devoted itself to the defense of the Jewish populations. Leo Motzkin assured its presidency. Later he was one of the promoters of the World Jewish Congress. The Committee of Jewish Delegations undertook a thorough study of the situation of the Jewish communities in central and eastern Europe. It submitted a long memorandum to the Peace Conference, asking the countries concerned to recognize for the Jews the full and entire equality of rights, religious and cultural freedom on the same footing as for the other national minorities. The representatives of Poland (Paderewski, Dmowski) and of Romania (Brătianu) opposed it, for they feared that this provision would impair the sovereignty of their respective states. To a far lesser degree, the Alliance Israélite Universelle, under the direction of Sylvain Lévi, held that this could harm Jewish citizens of France, whereas the Jewish national problem did not arise there at all. The Poles and the Romanians ended by yielding. And in signing the Treaty of Versailles on June 28, 1919, with other countries concerned — Balts, Czechoslovaks, Hungarians — the Minorities Treaty was included in it.
In the interwar period
With Louis Marshall, Julian Mack and other American figures, this Committee was persuaded that it would do good work. Poland, with its three million Jews, and other countries, were bound to observe the egalitarian principles on the civic plane, to maintain autonomous schools at the partial expense of the state budget, to publicly accept the Sabbath, and so on. Thereafter, the committee sat at the League of Nations in Geneva.
We shall not develop here what actually came of it in the various countries. Theoretically, the Jews were recognized as citizens. Everything was provided for on paper. The Jews of the Soviet Union themselves thought that obtaining national rights would open new horizons to them. But the Poles engaged in a Polonization to excess, whether toward the Ukrainians (Lwów, for example) or the Jews (let us recall, for the record, the tenacious antisemitism of the Endeks and their like). Yet many Jewish intellectuals were seduced by the Polish language and culture — the Bruno Schulzes, Julian Tuwims, Antoni Słonimskis. But they constantly came up against the open hostility of the nationalist circles, who would never admit that their homeland was a “State of nationalities.” As for the Soviet Union, after a Yiddish heyday that lasted less than fifteen years, to be a Jew there became a frightful nightmare. The generous ideas of Dubnow turned against him. The concept of Jewish extraterritoriality in central and eastern Europe was — except in Estonia and Latvia, and in Lithuania during the first years of the postwar period — constantly called into question. The exception was Czechoslovakia, where the policy toward the Jews was relatively harmonious.
According to the constitutions of the various countries, the Jews enjoyed the plenitude of their civil and political rights, with an autonomous representation in the Assemblies (Parliament, Diet, Sejm, Rada, and so on). In reality, their liberties were flouted, the growing antisemitism and the rise of fascism in its various versions tore these somewhat utopian provisions to pieces. From then on, the theories of the Jewish leaders who had wished to reconcile the particular and the universal, to be specific while considering themselves European — all that was doomed to failure. Even those who felt themselves perfectly integrated and had more or less abandoned their Judaism, or retained only scraps of it according to a learned mixture of traditions and religiosity — all that foundered in the face of the rising perils. The right-wing regimes not only opposed the various remedies employed by one and another, but engaged more and more in a policy of destabilization, singularly increasing the precariousness of Jewry. As for the non-Jews, even the most democratic, even those most attached to the concept of extraterritoriality, they capitulated. On the eve of the Second World War, all that was relegated to the background. These preoccupations, often naïve though stamped with a real desire for peace, for tolerance and for a better understanding among men, vanished. They were swept away by the clatter of boots and the vociferations of Hitler. The murderous madness of men long erased these humanist considerations. The Shoah spread its shroud, and these doctrines were buried. They henceforth belong to history.
We can only give an account of them, while noting that here and there new doctrines on the rights of minorities are being constructed, drawing largely on the earlier writings and desirous of creating a new Europe. For these political considerations have lost nothing of their topicality. To be sure, the problems are posed differently. But solutions have been envisaged, and are even applied with felicity in various European countries (Estonia, Hungary, Catalan Spain). Not only in Europe but on other continents. Because extraterritoriality is not solely Jewish — it concerns other dispersed ethnic groups. But, conversely, the rise of nationalisms, the Balkanization of southern Europe, the national crises that border on racial madness — all that is most discouraging. It supposes that humanity ought to be more adult and more responsible. But, alas!
| Total Jewish population in 1939 (in millions) | Jewish population in some major cities in 1939 | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Germany – Austria | 0.5 | Warsaw | 350,000 |
| Poland | 3.3 | Łódź | 220,000 |
| Baltic countries | 0.5 | Berlin | 150,000 |
| Belarus | 1 | Lwów | 100,000 |
| Western Russia | 1 | Vienna | 160,000 |
| Czechoslovakia | 0.3 | Budapest | 150,000 |
| Romania | 0.8 | Minsk | 100,000 |
| Hungary | 0.6 | ||
| Other | 0.3 | ||
| Approximate total | 8.3 | ||
| Of whom Yiddish-speakers, roughly 6 million. |
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
Borochov, Ber, Classe et Nation (Class and Nation), Switzerland, 1945.
Collective — World Jewish Congress, La situation économique des Juifs dans le Monde (The Economic Situation of the Jews in the World), Paris, 1938.
Dubnow, Simon, Lettres sur le Judaïsme ancien et nouveau (Letters on Old and New Judaism), Paris, Cerf, 1989.
Le livre de ma vie — souvenirs et réflexions, matériaux pour l’histoire de mon temps (The Book of My Life — Memoirs and Reflections, Materials for the History of My Time), Cerf, Paris, 2001.
Frankel, Jonathan, Prophecy and Politics, Cambridge University, 1981.
Zhitlowsky, Chaim, Geklibene Schriftn (Selected Writings), New York, 1960.
Laqueur, Walter, Histoire du sionisme (A History of Zionism), Calmann-Lévy, Paris, 1973.
Medem, Vladimir, Ma vie (My Life), translated from the Yiddish by Henri Minczeles and Aby Wieviorka, Paris, Honoré Champion, 1999.
Mendelsohn, Ezra, “Intégration et citoyenneté : l’Europe des ethnies” (“Integration and Citizenship: The Europe of Ethnic Groups”), in Élie Barnavi and Saul Friedländer, Les Juifs et le XXe siècle (The Jews and the Twentieth Century), Paris, Calmann-Lévy, 2000.
Minczeles, Henri, Histoire générale du Bund, un mouvement révolutionnaire juif (A General History of the Bund, a Jewish Revolutionary Movement), Paris, Austral, 1995; Denoël, 1999.
Plasseraud, Yves, L’identité (Identity), Paris, Montchrestien, 2000.
Traverso, Enzo, Les Marxistes et la question juive (The Marxists and the Jewish Question), Paris, Kimé, 1997.
Weinstock, Nathan, Le Pain de misère (The Bread of Misery), 3 vols., Paris, La Découverte, 1984, 1986.