Changes

|title=On the Eve: The Jews of Europe before the Second World War

|author=Bernard Wasserstein

|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.

}}

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.