Chapter 9: From War to War, 1914-1939
Study Questions
1) What precipitated the “Lithuanian expulsion” of 1915?
2) Some Austrian Jewish intellectuals championed acquisition of national minority
rights as an alternative to both Zionism (that is to say, emigration) and assimilation.
How was this alternative approach to Jewish affairs greeted in the various countries
(France, Britain, the United States, the Habsburg Empire, and Russia)?
3) What did the Balfour Declaration of 1917 promise the Jews?
4) Gartner suggests that far from being motivated by “blood and iron”
Realpolitik (in short, a foreign policy based on opportunistic cost-benefit
analysis), British statesmen – having “been brought up on biblical
prophecies of the return to Zion” (page 275) – were motivated by
more sentimental and altruistic reasons in their approach to Jewish settlement
in Palestine. Would you agree or disagree?
5) What were some of the most important factors which led to the transformation
of the United States from a respectable Jewish “outpost” of some
260,000 individuals in the 1880s into one of the rival centers of world Jewry
by the First World War?
6) How did such a thing as a specifically Jewish labor movement in
the United States in the early twentieth century come about? Why did it decline?
7) Why did the Jews become an especial target of “counter-revolutionary”
troops (with the greatest atrocities occurring in the Ukraine) during Russia’s
civil war from 1917 to 1921?
8) How would you characterize Jewish cultural expression in Russia from the
1920s up until its liquidation under Stalin by 1952?
9) According to Gartner, Jews were relatively prominent in the Russian Communist
Party up until the 1930s. What evidence does Gartner provide? And what reasons
does Gartner give for Russian Jewish Communists’ subsequent reversal of
fortune?
10) Reviewing Garnter’s description of Jewish participation in German
political life during the Weimar period (bottom of page 305 and page 306), how
would you describe the status of German Jewry in the 1920s? Does Gartner include
comparisons to other countries? Why does he entitle this subsection “Germany
at the Center”?
11) What is the tone of Gartner’s discussion of the Nazi seizure of power
in Germany in 1933 (beginning on page 309)? Inevitability? Amazement/incredulity?
12) Why might many Jews in Germany – although fully cognizant of the
Nazi regime’s virulent anti-Semitism – have been slow to recognize
it as a moral danger? (Include discussion of Jewish response to the 1935 Nuremberg
laws.)
13) In what ways did the 1938 “pogrom” known as Kristallnacht
in Germany differ from those which occurred in Russia and the Ukraine some two
decades earlier?
14) Why might “legality” (note Gartner’s discussion of the
many “laws” passed) and “order/control” have been so
important to the Nazi hierarchy in their murderous policies towards the Jews?