The Jews and Nationality Conflicts in the Habsburg Lands

Abstract

There have been few areas of the world during the past 150 years that have been as shaped by Jewish influences as East Central Europe. The prominent Czech writer Milan Kundera observed seven years ago that in the years before Hitler, the Jews were the “intellectual cement,” the essentially cosmopolitan and integrative element that forged the spiritual unit of this region. It was this small nation par excellence which added the quintessentially European color, tone and vitality to great cities like Berlin, Vienna, Prague, Budapest, not to mention Cracow, Lemberg and Czernowitz further to the east. The Nazi mass murder of the Jews, to which Stalin added his own macabre postscript after World War II, brought about the disappearance of this fructifying Jewish leaven and crushed for forty years the independence of the smaller East European nations sandwiched between Russia and Germany. Since the European revolutions of 1989, these nations, re-emerging from a semi-totalitarian deep freeze, have been recovering their national identities and historical roots long repressed under Communist rule.