132,564
edits
Changes
From TheBookbag
Jump to navigationJump to searchOn the Eve: The Jews of Europe before the Second World War by Bernard Wasserstein (view source)
Revision as of 12:32, 27 February 2018
, 12:32, 27 February 2018no edit summary
{{infoboxinfobox1
|title=On the Eve: The Jews of Europe before the Second World War
|author=Bernard Wasserstein
|borrow=Yes
|isbn=978-1846681806
|pages=576
|publisher=Profile Books
|date=May 2012
|website=http://www.profilebooks.com/bernard-wasserstein/
|summary=A comprehensive and lucid survey of the culture, conditions and situation of the Jewish people in Europe before the outbreak of the Second World War.
|cover=1846681901
|aznuk=1846681901
|aznus=1846681804
}}
The introduction to ''On the Eve'' begins with the controversial statement, ''Nor is anti-Semitism, by itself, a satisfactory explanation of the Jew's predicament''. The author has written a history of the post-war Jewry called the ''Vanishing Diaspora'' but this book examines the collective failure by the Jewish people before 1939 ''to attain at least some control over the threatening vagaries of fate''. It examines their failure to establish cohesive social links, political parties, hospitals, newspapers and schools. Jewish culture and religious practice weakened during the very period when they advocated loyalty to the states where they were citizens; the USSR, Poland, Germany and France. Their population too was in decline. Wasserstein, who is a master at pointing out intriguing and surprising detail, explains that on the brink of annihilation, there were actually more Jews held in camps outside the Third Reich than within it.
It should, however, be clearly understood that Wasserstein is not denying that anti-Semitism is deeply entrenched in European consciousness. Like other forms of racism, past history shows that this woefully to be have been the case. He is concerned to show the extent to which Jewish civilisation had to some degree already collapsed. Yiddish and Judeo-Espagnol were fading just as secular assimilation separated from religious practice. Wasserstein refers to the panoply of cultural values such as dance, song, dress and diet. His project is to question just how cohesive this entity really was.
Economic pressures were to exacerbate the difficulties of established international agencies' relief assistance, such as ORT and the American Joint Jewish Agency, especially after the Wall Street Crash. Reading this it is not difficult to wonder how all kinds of exiles may bear the brunt of current financial problems. However, in the pre-war period the Jewish population included gilded plutocrats, sweat shop workers and the beggars, or schnorrers as they were known in Yiddish. Was the result a universal culture or rather a set of subcultures?
[[A Senseless Squalid War: Voices From Palestine 1890s - 1948 by Norman Rose]]
{{amazontext|amazon=18466818041846681901}} {{waterstonestextamazonUStext|waterstonesamazon=87163381846681804}}
{{commenthead}}
