Gotowa bibliografia na temat „World War, 1914-1918, Jews”

Abstract: One of the enduring themes in German Jewish history has been the deep-seated desire of Jews to be fully accepted as equals by other Germans, including the right to worship freely. Their conscription and voluntary service in the military during both the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871) and World War I (1914–1918), provided an opportunity for Jews to demonstrate their fealty to the nation. Moreover, their requests for Jewish military chaplains were granted, enabling them to celebrate their traditional High Holy Days services. This article tells the story of Jewish religious worship on Yom Kippur during both wars as depicted by German artists. We examine contemporaneous accounts of the scenes depicted, and find that while some were accurate with respect to venue and mood, the most popular images of throngs of Jewish soldiers worshiping on open-air battlefields were fictionalized images of events that never took place. These pictorial images, exaggerated, romanticized, and idealized, portrayed Jews as patriotic Germans, fully engaged with the wartime goals of the German government while practicing their unique forms of worship. German Jews and Jews throughout the diaspora clung to these images which became widely available on postcards, lithographs, and cloth wall hangings. They continued to be proudly displayed in Jewish homes as symbols of Jewish patriotism, until the end of World War I when blatant antisemitism falsely blamed the Jews for Germany’s defeat.

After the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Rabbi Ya‘akov Landa was one of some 250,000 Russian Jews who had fled, or been forcibly expelled, from their homes in Russia's western provinces to settle in the country's interior. After Landa's exile, he spent several months traveling amid refugee communities in Voronezh, Tambov, Penza, Saratov, and Samara provinces. At the conclusion of his journey, he composed a detailed report about the state of religious observance among the refugees, which he sent to Rabbi Shalom Dov-Ber Schneerson of Lubavitch. Landa's observations during these months shocked his core sensibilities as a rabbi and an observant Jew. He noted that refugees were disregarding such fundamental aspects of Jewish practice as Sabbath observance and were living without the basic institutions that had traditionally defined religious and communal life.

As the First World War broke out in 1914, American Jews seemed far away from the upheaval in Europe. Yet their role as neutral spectators from the distance was questioned right from the outset because of their diverse transcultural entanglements with Europe. Seen from a specific Jewish perspective, the war bore the potential of becoming a fratricidal war. In particular at the Eastern front it was a likely scenario that Jewish soldiers fighting on either side would have to face each other in battle. For Jews, depending on how one defined Jewishness, could be regarded as citizens of a particular nation-state or multi-ethnic empire, as members of a transnational religious community or as members of an ethnic-national diaspora community. Against this background, this article attempts to shed fresh light on the still under-researched topic of American Jewish responses to the outbreak of the First World War. Although American Jewry in 1914 was made up of Jews with different socio-cultural backgrounds, they were often regarded as being pro-German. The war’s impact and the pressures of conformity associated with these contested loyalties for American Jews did therefore not just unfold in and after 1917, but, as this article emphasizes, already in 1914.

The outbreak of war in August 1914 marked a new era in the history of Vilna for all of the city’s inhabitants, but perhaps for the Jews most of all. The world war accelerated the processes of political and economic modernisation, to the detriment of local Jews. These processes were not, however, immediately evident to local residents, though the more far-seeing among them feared for the worst. After all, when had Jews gained from military action? In this short paper, I will give an overview of the impact of the First World War on Vilna, and highlight two specific, very different, sources: Paul Monty’s Wanderstunden in Vilna, a guidebook for German soldiers, and Hirsz Abramowicz’s Profiles of a Lost World, a memoir published later (in Yiddish) by a long-time Vilna resident.

That the Wehrmacht participated fully in a racial war of extermination on behalf of the National Socialist regime is indisputable. Officers and enlisted men alike accepted the logic that the elimination of the Soviet Union was necessary for Germany's survival. The Wehrmacht's atrocities on the Eastern Front are a testament to the success of National Socialist propaganda and ideological training, but the construct of “Judeo-bolshevism” originated during World War I and its immediate aftermath. Between 1918 and 1923, central Europe witnessed a surge in right-wing paramilitary violence and anti-Semitic activity resulting from fears of bolshevism and a widely held belief that Jews were largely responsible for spreading revolution. Jews suffered the consequences of revolution and resurgent nationalism in the borderlands between Germany and Russia after World War I, but it was inside Germany that the construct of Judeo-bolshevism evolved into a powerful rhetorical tool for the growing völkisch movement and eventually a justification for genocide.

The end of World War I marked the beginning of a new era in European migration to Brazil. The immigrants that had poured into the “país do futuro” (country of the future) now came at only a trickle and the number of entries fell by over fifty percent between 1913 and 1914 and by another sixty percent the year after. In 1918 fewer than 20,000 immigrants entered Brazil, a low that would not again be approached until 1936. Even so, between 1918 and 1919 the number of arrivals to Brazil's ports almost doubled, and in 1920 almost doubled again, reaching 69,000.Post-war immigrants to Brazil differed in many ways from the pre-war group, both in national origin and in their views of success and opportunity. Although Portuguese, Italians, Spanish, and German immigrants continued to predominate, between 1924 and 1934 East European immigration to Brazil increased almost ten times to more than 93,000, representing about 8.5 percent of the total. Most of the East Europeans who migrated to Brazil in the quarter century after World War I were those fleeing the upheavals created by the establishment of the state of Poland. At the same time quotas and other forms of restriction in the U.S., Argentina, and Canada increasingly led potential migrants to look towards Brazil. The frequently destitute East Europeans rarely enjoyed the support of their often powerless governments, a factor that made such immigrants attractive to Brazil's large landowners. In 1927, a contract between the Polish Government and Brazil's Secretary of Agriculture for the transportation of 2,000 Polish families was partially based on the belief that the mixing of “docile” East Europeans with more “volatile” Southern Europeans would “go a long way to obviate any labor trouble that might otherwise occur.” Whatever positive attributes the East Europeans might have presented to Brazilian elites in terms of “dividing and conquering,” the Lithuanian government complained that the condition of its 20,000 immigrants was “so pitiable … that (we) might be forced to repatriate them.”

The historical period of the so called “Liberal Empire” between the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867 and World War I was the Golden Age of integration and assimilation of Jews within the Viennese society and at the same time the period of a deep identity crisis of the Vienne Jewry. The demographic change of the Jewish group in Vienna as a consequence of mass immigration of Eastern Jews, the political fall of the liberal party, and the spraid over of a new antisemitic cultural code forced many Jewish Jews to redefine their own conception of Jewish identity. The political engagement in the social-democratic or in the Zionist movement was characteristic of an increasing number of Viennese Jews.

The military service of Jewish soldiers during World War I caused controversies, with the term“Jew” itself being problematic. In Austria-Hungary, a Jewish nationality was not recognized, andthe only criterium of identification was a declaration of practicing religion (Judaism). This isnot a problem for establishing the number of Jewish privates, but it disrupts the statistics of theofficer corps, where it was common to abandon Judaism. In the Austro-Hungarian Army, Jewshad the ability to acquire higher officer ranks (general), but in practice, this was only applicableto Jews assimilated to German culture. The percentage of Jews among reserve officers was higherthan average due to their high level of education. According to data from 1910, Jews constituted3.1% of all privates in the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. World War I took the lives of about25,000 Austro-Hungarian Jews, i.e. about 8.3% of all followers of Judaism mobilized to the army.This was a percentage slightly lower than for Christians, which became fodder to anti-Semitism.Jewish soldiers showed loyalty to the state and did not engage in military rebellions in 1918. After the war, the memory of Jewish soldiers was not cultivated in the Austro-Hungarian monarchy’s successor states. In contrast to Germany, however, they were not accused of acting to undermine the empire’s military potential during World War I.

Polish-Jewish relations in Lviv 1918 – 1919 (selected issues). During World War I Lviv became a field of struggle between Poles and Ukrainians for the possession of the city. During the conflict Jews declared to be neutral. Nevertheless, when the Polish army took over the city, anti-Jewish riots started. Jews were, mainly falsely, believed to support Ukrainians. The pogrom lasted for two days (Nov 22 – 23 1918) and had a strong negative effect on the Polish-Jewish relations. Another important issue was the question of equality for Jews. Most of the Jewish political parties in Lviv understood and supported the demand. Poles, for various reasons, could not agree to grant Jews with a national-cultural autonomy. For the public opinion in Poland, the Jewish struggle for equality was only another example of their hostility towards the Polish state.

What kind of country are we talking about when we speak of Poland from the perspective of the organized Jewish political leadership in Poland? What should the scope and characteristics of the new Polish state in their view be? What kind of relations should Poland have with neighbouring states, as well as within, among its various populations and societies? The paper explores the changing answers given by different political Jewish leadership in a period of liminality – the interval between two stages and two distinct situations: the imperial order (Austrian and Russian) and the Polish national state. It examines Galicia and the Congress Poland from 1914 to 1918 when the territory was disputed among different empires and nations and its fate was far from clear. The article claims that the different visions of Poland presented by the Jewish leadership were grounded in two assumptions. The first was that the Jews as an integral part of society were legitimately entitled to express their own vision of the future state, the second – that the Jews, as an integral part of society, were entitled to equality on all levels of social life. That is the reason, the article claims, behind the demands for a fair distribution of the state’s resources regardless the mother tongue, religion, or ethno-national identification. The efforts the leaders of the Polish Jewry made to include the Jews as a minority group equal to others in the Polish state took place in the framework of the ethno-national ethos as the constitutive principle of state-building. The changing political circumstances and the growing hegemonic discourse based on the nation and nationality brought, claims the article, to the raising of a new Jewish national leadership during World War I. This leadership became convinced that, in the light of the discriminatory policies and growing anti-Jewish violence, only a mechanism of minority rights could guarantee Jewish existence in Poland.