JEWS.

The history of the Jews in Europe since 1914 is centrally dominated by the Nazi Holocaust of 1933 to 1945, and especially by the "Final Solution," Adolf Hitler's attempt, between 1941 and 1945, literally to exterminate all of the Jews of Nazi-occupied Europe. As well, the historical evolution of European Jewry was shaped in major ways by World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia of 1917, and by the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 and the impact of this event on the self-perception and identity of Jews around the world. Many internal trends—religious, socioeconomic, and political—also figured strongly in the transformation of the Jewish people in Europe in this period.

A number of factors set the Jews apart from nearly all other peoples in Europe and, indeed, elsewhere. For nearly two millennia Jews lacked a homeland of their own, always living as a separate community among the nations where they lived. Religious Jews always looked to Palestine, their ancient homeland from which they had been driven into worldwide exile by the Romans; from the mid-nineteenth century, many secular and some religious Jews favored the re-creation of a Jewish state in Palestine, a movement known as "Zionism." Nearly everywhere they lived, Jews attracted a good deal of hostility, often expressed in violent fashion. Anti-Semitism—hostility to Jews—was traditionally based in religious prejudice but, from the mid-nineteenth century, was reoriented in the form of ethnic and racial hostility to Jews, who were increasingly seen by anti-Semites as a malign and hostile ethnic community in their host nation. Jews themselves were also deeply divided. Most Jews in eastern Europe still spoke Yiddish, a dialect of German written in Hebrew letters, although the Zionist movement was in the process of reviving Hebrew (a Semitic rather than an Indo-European language) as the "authentic" language of the Jews. Millions of Jews had, through immigration, become acculturated to their homelands, and regarded themselves as English, French, German, or some other nationality, and were, by 1914, often indistinguishable from any of their fellow citizens. Jews spanned the political spectrum, although they were often seen as typically on the left. In eastern Europe, many Jews practiced the strictly Orthodox form of Judaism, although many forms of "modern Orthodoxy" or non-Orthodoxy were also practiced, especially in western Europe.

INTERWAR EASTERN AND CENTRAL EUROPE, 1914–1939

On paper, World War I produced considerable gains for the large Jewish populations of eastern and central Europe. Tsarist Russia, the main oppressor of Jewry before 1914, was swept away during the war, as were the multinational empires of central Europe where considerable anti-Semitism existed. Officially, their successor states were all democracies, and were all committed in their constitutions to granting equality for their minorities, including the Jews. The communist ideology of the Soviet Union attacked organized religion and the traditional economic role of the Jews, but also outlawed anti-Semitism and regarded the Jews as a distinctive nationality.

The reality proved to be quite different. Interwar eastern and central Europe saw a continuing decline in the political and economic status of the Jews, especially after 1929, while in 1933 Germany gave supreme power to the most fanatical and murderous anti-Semite in history.

Throughout eastern and central Europe, most of the post-1918 successor regimes were impoverished and increasingly hallmarked by ultranationalistic hostility to their Jewish minority (and to other ethnic minorities). The dream presented in 1918 by Wilsonian liberal idealism soon proved utterly chimerical.

By far the largest Jewish population in interwar Europe was found in Poland, whose Jewish population numbered about 2.9 million in 1921, 3.1 million in 1931, and about 3.3 million in 1939. While most lived in cities, even the largest Jewish urban centers were surprisingly small—there were about 353,000 Jews in Warsaw, the largest center, in 1931, and about 202,000 in Lodz, the second largest. Many Jews continued to live in shtetls, small Jewish towns or villages. Most Jews were engaged in commerce as small tradespeople, or in manufacturing, especially in the clothing trade. There was only a tiny Jewish professional class but a very large, often impoverished, working class. Apart from Galicia (where many Jews spoke German), about 90 percent of Poland's Jews spoke Yiddish.

Initially, the new Polish government was fairly friendly to its Jews, but it became increasingly and openly anti-Semitic, especially after about 1929. Jews were almost entirely excluded from government employment, even in the school system. During the 1930s, a plethora of extreme right-wing movements, many openly anti-Semitic, arose, and there emerged an endemic problem of constant anti-Semitic violence by right-wing thugs. Jews at university lectures were often forced to sit in so-called ghetto benches, segregated from Gentiles. Nevertheless, face-to-face relations between Jews and Poles were often good, and Poland was virtually the only eastern European country in the 1930s not to enact legislation to reduce Jewish participation in the economy or the professions. To Polish nationalists, the problem was that there were simply too many Jews in Poland, an unassimilable mass with an entirely different language, religion, and culture from the Polish majority. Many Polish nationalists therefore supported the Zionist movement, the aims of which included the emigration of large numbers of Jews from Poland. Only the emergence of Nazi Germany—whose racial ideology saw Poles as scarcely better than the Jews—as the main threat to Polish independence in the late 1930s brought the two groups together, on the eve of the destruction of most of Polish Jewry.

The Polish Jewish community responded to its situation by producing a range of political parties with radically differing ideologies, and it must be stressed that Polish Jewry (and, indeed, world Jewry) was extraordinarily disunified during the interwar years and had no consensual view on its endemic problems. There were three main ideological groupings among interwar Polish Jewry, whose views were totally distinctive. Probably the largest of these groupings was the Bund, the Jewish socialist party founded in 1897. The Bund sought an alliance between the Jewish and Polish working classes and was committed to Marxism, although it opposed Soviet communism. It advocated a secular, Yiddish-based culture in Poland and strenuously opposed the Zionist solution of mass migration to Palestine. Second in size were probably the Zionists, themselves divided into many rival factions with differing ideologies. Zionism viewed anti-Semitism as a constant feature of European society, caused by the "abnormal" social structure of Jewry, and sought to create a "normal" Jewish society in Palestine, founded in a Hebrew-based culture. The moderate mainstream advocated the gradual growth of a viable Jewish community there, while a right-wing faction headed by Vladimir Jabotinsky, the Revisionists, sought immediate large-scale Jewish settlement and independence. Another major faction in Zionism, Mizrachi, sought to create a largely religiously based society in Jewish Palestine. The third major grouping in Polish Jewish life was Agudas Israel, the strictly Orthodox party, which represented Poland's traditionally Orthodox community. Socially conservative, it (unlike Mizrachi) was also opposed to the creation of an independent Jewish state in the Holy Land, viewing its creation by secular politicians as sacrilegious. Polish Jewry was often said to be divided between advocates of "hereness" (doikeyt) and "thereness," that is, between those wishing to oppose anti-Semitism and poverty in Poland, and those advocating emigration.

While not as large or ideologically fractured as Polish Jewry, nearly all the other Jewish communities of eastern and central Europe met very similar problems. Hungary's 450,000 Jews were relatively assimilated and westernized, especially in Budapest, and were often prosperous. In the 1930s their situation rapidly deteriorated, as Admiral Miklós Horthy's right-wing regime increasingly came under Nazi influence. A series of laws enacted in 1938 and 1939 sought to place severe limits on the participation of Jews in managerial positions and the professions. Many on the Hungarian right never forgave the Jews for forming so prominent a part of the Marxist regime of Béla Kun, which had briefly come to power in 1919. Similar attempts to limit Jewish economic power and Jews' role in the professions during the 1930s, in the context of a Europe-wide rise in anti-Semitism, occurred in Romania, where 750,000 Jews lived; in Lithuania, where there were 160,000 Jews; and elsewhere. In this region, perhaps only democratic Czechoslovakia (with 350,000 Jews) was largely immune from these trends, especially what is now the Czech Republic. The almost universal deterioration of the condition of Jews in interwar central and eastern Europe was caused by traditional anti-Semitism greatly enhanced by the Great Depression, which in turn was enormously magnified by the support given by local fascists to Nazi Germany and the apparent success of the Hitler regime. As well, the closing of immigration barriers, especially to the United States from 1921 to 1924, meant that impoverished Jews (and Gentiles) could seldom emigrate, greatly increasing tensions.

By 1939, virtually all of central and eastern Europe was in the hands of fascist regimes friendly to Nazi Germany and bitterly hostile to Jews. In addition, between mid-1939 and the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, vast tracts of eastern Europe, including eastern Poland and the Baltic states, were forcibly incorporated into the Soviet Union as a consequence of the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact (1939). There, the Jewish populations were compulsorily Stalinized, entailing a large measure of what would now be termed cultural genocide. Nevertheless, right-wing anti-Semitism was also outlawed, and full employment raised living standards for the poorest Jews. Overall, however, the highly unsatisfactory situation of eastern and central European Jewry showed no signs of being ameliorated when the Nazi conquest of most of Europe brought about the mass murder of Europe's Jews.

JEWS IN WESTERN EUROPE, 1914–1939

The situation of Jews in the democratic states of western Europe—Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Belgium—was obviously better than that of Jews elsewhere in Europe. Assimilationist trends had been greatly enhanced by the participation of hundreds of thousands of Jews in World War I (as had occurred throughout Europe) and by the lack of vast numbers of alien-seeming strictly Orthodox Jews or Jewish revolutionaries. Britain, with 300,000 Jews, victorious in the war and with a prosperous middle class, largely eschewed extremism. The local fascist movement, the British Union of Fascists, headed by Sir Oswald Mosley, enjoyed only limited popular support. There was, in fact, little overt anti-Semitism in interwar Britain, and newsreels of Hitler's demented rantings genuinely appalled the British "establishment." In 1917 the British Cabinet, motivated by philo-Semitic as well as strategic factors, issued the Balfour Declaration, promising the creation of a Jewish national home in Palestine, which it was in the process of conquering from the Turks. During the interwar period, many of the leaders of the international Zionist movement were located in Britain, especially Chaim Weizmann, the head of the mainstream World Zionist Organization, who was an academic in Manchester. Nevertheless, many aspects of British policy toward the Jews have been questioned by historians, especially the pro-Arab stance the British government increasingly assumed toward Jewish immigration to Palestine, and the much-debated issue of whether more could have been done to rescue Jews from the Nazis. Anglo-Jewry was also itself deeply divided, with many of its assimilated leaders opposing more than a token commitment to Zionism.

France, with about 280,000 Jews, was host to a largely assimilated community. Its most prominent Jewish politician, Léon Blum (1872–1950), was premier of France from 1936 to 1937 and in 1938 was head of the "Popular Front" socialist government, which introduced many social reforms. Nevertheless, France was still deeply divided between those who accepted the legacy of the 1789 Revolution and those who rejected it. It had many more anti-Semites than Britain, centered in Action Française, an extreme right-wing authoritarian movement. The Vichy regime, which ruled as a Nazi puppet government for four years after the fall of France in June 1940, was marked by extreme anti-Semitism, although most French Jews managed to survive the Holocaust. Other western European democracies also experienced rising anti-Semitism, although, paradoxically, the Netherlands, which had a long history of toleration for its Jews, saw 80 percent of its Jewish population deported and murdered by the Nazis during the war, a higher percentage than elsewhere in western Europe.

THE HOLOCAUST: NAZI GERMANY, 1933–1939

Hitler and his National Socialist German Workers' Party, the Nazis, came to power in January 1933 in coalition with other right-wing parties whose leaders wrongly assumed that they could keep the worst excesses of the Nazis under control. Within a year or so Hitler had made himself the absolute dictator of Germany, assuming the title of Führer (leader) on the death of President Paul von Hindenburg in August 1934. Hitler's rule brought about an anti-Semitism as thorough and, eventually, as murderous, as any in history. Nevertheless, it is important to keep in mind that there was (in Karl Schleunes's phrase) a "twisted road to Auschwitz," and that the actual genocide of the Jews did not begin for more than eight years after the Nazis came to power. While Germany had always had a potent element of anti-Semitism, its Jewish community of 500,000 certainly did not feel itself living in a nation of pervasive anti-Semitism. The constitution of the Weimar Republic, which existed from 1918 until 1933, had removed all barriers to the full participation of Jews in German life, and the Weimar period was something of a golden age of Jewish achievement in science and cultural life. Hitler's anti-Semitism, which eventually brought about the murder of millions of Jews not merely in Germany but throughout Europe, was also categorically more extreme than any form of anti-Semitism in modern history. Jews figured in Hitler's worldview as a demonic force, a vast, all-powerful international conspiracy everywhere working to control the world and undermine Germany and its "Aryans." Historians simply cannot fully explain insanity of this kind and have also been baffled as to how a civilized nation came to embrace a madman with a demented ideology, resulting in millions of ordinary Germans losing their lives in the war of conquest that Hitler unleashed.

It is customary to point to three major turning points in the deterioration of the Jewish position in Nazi Germany. First, shortly after Hitler came to power, most Jews were removed from the German civil service and from the universities. This began the exodus of Germany's renowned Jewish scholars and scientists such as Albert Einstein to the English-speaking world, to the immense advantage of the latter. Second, in September 1935 the so-called Nuremberg Laws were enacted. These defined who was legally considered to be a Jew (broadly, anyone with two or more Jewish grandparents), excluded Jews from German citizenship, and prohibited all extramarital relations between Jews and non-Jews. The process also began of systematically removing Jews from the German economy and the professions. The most decisive prewar turning point came in early November 1938 with the so-called Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass). Following the shooting of a German official in Paris by a Jewish youth, the Nazis unleashed an orgy of anti-Semitic violence throughout Germany, in which nearly two hundred synagogues (previously untouched) were set on fire and hundreds of Jewish shops burned and looted. At least ninety Jews were killed and thousands taken to concentration camps (that is, to prison camps such as Dachau in Germany used by the Nazis to hold their political opponents; these were not the same as the wartime extermination camps such as Auschwitz, where millions were deliberately murdered, which were in Poland). Germany's Jews rightly took Kristallnacht as a signal that no future existed for them in Nazi Germany, and tens of thousands emigrated as quickly as they could. (Previously, emigration was surprisingly limited.) Probably no more than 185,000 Jews (out of the 500,000 there in 1933) remained in Germany in its 1933 boundaries by the outbreak of the war.

Between March 1938 and the outbreak of World War II in September 1939, Austria and the Sudetenland (comprising a large portion of what is now the Czech Republic) were annexed by Germany, adding about 320,000 additional Jews to Hitler's anti-Semitic realm. About two-thirds of Austrian Jewry managed to emigrate in the short period after March 1938 and the outbreak of the war, as well as about 26,000 Czech Jews.

THE HOLOCAUST: THE FINAL SOLUTION, 1939–1945

The period between September 1939 and the end of 1941 saw Nazi Germany secure hegemony throughout almost the whole of continental Europe, ruling directly, or through puppet or allied governments, virtually the entire continent from the Pyrenees to the gates of Moscow. As a result, millions of Jews fell into Hitler's hands or lived in regimes under his thumb, probably eight or nine million Jews in all. This situation was quite different from that of the 1930s, when the Nazis ruled only in Germany and had no direct control over Jews elsewhere. In contrast, by the end of 1941, nearly every center of Jewish life in Europe had become subject to the will of Hitler and the Nazis.

By May 1945, when Nazi Germany surrendered, at least five million Jews had died at the hands of the Nazis, the greatest catastrophe in Jewish history and the defining event in European Jewish life in modern times. The Holocaust, as it is generally known (it is also widely known by the term the Nazis gave it, the "Final Solution," that is, of the "Jewish question in Europe," and it is also known as the Shoah, the Hebrew term for "catastrophe"), has become one of the best-known events in modern history and certainly the most infamous. Nevertheless, historians have endlessly debated almost all aspects of the Holocaust, many of which remain controversial and contested.

Because so much has been written on the Holocaust, only a brief summary of its main events will be given here. Between the start of the war and the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, most Jews in Poland were herded into sealed ghettos, where tens of thousands died of disease and malnutrition. Almost everywhere else in Europe subject to Nazi influence, the situation of the Jews also deteriorated still further, Jews becoming subject to an ever-increasing flood of anti-Semitic legislation in countries ranging from France to Romania. At this stage, it appears that the Nazis intended to deport all of Europe's Jews to Madagascar. With the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, however, the Nazis, working through the SS and its accomplices, began a campaign of the mass murder of Jews (and other groups such as the Gypsies), initially restricting these killings to adult males but, by late 1941, encompassing all Jews who fell into Nazi hands in the USSR. The mass killings of Jews, generally in fields and pits at the edges of towns and cities, were carried out by the SS Einsatzgruppen, generally by machine-gunnings. The number of Jews who perished at the hands of the Einsatzgruppen has been estimated at between 600,000 and 1.3 million. From early 1942, Hitler and the Nazis embarked on a program of the total annihilation of Jewry in Europe, killing Jews in vast numbers by transporting them to gas chambers at six extermination camps in Poland, of which Treblinka, Belzec, and, above all, Auschwitz in southern Poland were the largest and most infamous. Certainly 2.5 million or more Jews—as well as tens of thousands of Gypsies, Poles, Russians, and others—were murdered in these six camps, among them an estimated 960,000 at Auschwitz. The Nazi SS, headed by Heinrich Himmler, was chiefly responsible for carrying out the Holocaust. Jews perished in other ways as well: in German concentration camps such as Buchenwald, in slave labor camps, and in pogroms carried out independently by regimes allied to Nazi Germany such as in Croatia and Romania.

As noted, many aspects of the Holocaust remain contentious. For instance, there is no consensus understanding of Hitler's role in directing the Holocaust, although he must certainly have instigated it and ordered the diversion of considerable resources necessary to carry it out in wartime. Nor is there an agreed understanding of when the decision to kill literally all of Europe's Jews was undertaken, although a consensus has emerged among historians writing since about 1990 that this decision was not made until some months after the invasion of the Soviet Union, or possibly later. (It was previously believed that the so-called Wannsee Conference of January 1942, held by senior Nazis in suburban Berlin, was crucial to this decision, but most historians now discount its key importance.) Jews often resisted, and, in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of April to May 1943, put up a heroic struggle. Nevertheless, terrorized and lacking military leadership or armaments, successful resistance proved impossible.

As a general rule, the closer one comes to the Polish-Russian heartland of eastern European Jewry, the more comprehensive the slaughter became. In general the survival rate of Jews in western Europe (apart from the Netherlands) and the Balkans was higher. There, anti-Semitic fascist regimes often drew the line at genocide and offered some measure of protection to their Jews, although only the liberation of Europe in 1944 and 1945 allowed the survival of any Jews at all. That any Jews survived World War II in Nazi-occupied Europe was ultimately due to the success of the Allied armies at destroying the Nazi regime.

European Jewry was so decimated by the Holocaust that it has arguably never recovered and arguably never will. At the end of World War II, large Jewish communities remained only in the Soviet Union in areas not conquered by the Nazis; in Romania and Bulgaria; in Budapest; and in France and Belgium. Probably 80 to 90 percent of Polish Jewry, the largest in Europe, perished in the Holocaust, as well as the bulk of the Jewish population in most other continental European states. After 1945, European Jewry ceased to play a leadership role in the Jewish world, which was increasingly bifurcated between American Jewry and the State of Israel, founded in 1948, with an entirely new set of contexts and conflicts.

JEWS IN THE SOVIET UNION

Although much reduced in size by the granting of independence to Poland and other states, in the 1920s the Jewish population of the Soviet Union totaled about 2.6 million. Jews formed a disproportionate component of the leadership elite of the new Soviet regime, with figures such as Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) considered to be powerful and highly visible members of the new government. The large number of Jews in the Bolshevik government was seized upon by right-wingers and anti-Semites as evidence of a Jewish conspiracy, and was one of the main factors in Hitler's ideology. Nevertheless, the new government showed itself to be anything but friendly to the interests of most Jews. It vigorously persecuted Orthodox Judaism, closed down most synagogues, confiscated Jewish property, and suppressed Zionists and Bundists. To be sure, the new regime also improved the situation of Jews in some ways. All forms of institutionalized anti-Semitism, ubiquitous under the tsars, now vanished, and many opportunities opened for Jews for the first time. To be "Jewish" was legally regarded as being a member of a distinctive nationality such as "Ukrainian," and some forms of Yiddish cultural life were allowed to continue. There was considerable growth in the Jewish populations of Moscow, Leningrad, and other large cities as Jews took advantage of opportunities in these locales. The negative trends in the Soviet treatment of Jews were greatly accentuated under the rule of Joseph Stalin (c. 1928–1953), who emerged as the Soviet Union's all-powerful ruler. Under Stalin, the Jewish proportion of the Soviet leadership elite declined sharply, although Jews continued to be overrepresented in managerial positions. Along with millions of others, tens of thousands of Soviet Jews certainly perished in Stalin's purges. By 1941, thanks to its annexation of large parts of eastern Europe as a result of the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact, the Jewish population of the USSR had risen to over five million.

The Holocaust and the tremendous losses suffered by the Soviet army during World War II meant that, in its post-1945 boundaries, the Jewish population of the Soviet Union totaled about 2.3 million in the 1950s. In the last years of his rule, Stalin's paranoid anti-Semitism, always present, increased markedly, and there was severe repression of most remaining Jewish institutions and activists during the so-called Black Years, from 1946 to 1953. While the Soviet Union had supported the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, Stalin turned sharply against pro-Zionist Jews, considering them disloyal. There is some evidence that Stalin wished to deport large numbers of Jews from Moscow and Leningrad to Siberia when he suddenly died in March 1953.

The years after Stalin's death saw a softening of the condition of Jews under Nikita Khrushchev, but then another worsening of their condition under the rule of Leonid Brezhnev (1964–1982), a period that came to be marked by open anti-Semitism in such areas as the admission of Jews to universities. Many Soviet Jews rediscovered their roots and wished to emigrate to Israel or to the West. The USSR consistently favored the Arabs in the Middle Eastern conflict, especially after 1967, and most Jews who expressed a wish to emigrate to Israel lost their jobs. These "refuseniks" (as they were known in the West) attracted worldwide support during the 1970s and 1980s. The fight against Soviet anti-Semitism became a rallying point for Western Jews, liberals, and conservatives.

Although 250,000 Soviet Jews were allowed to emigrate in the early 1970s thanks to an agreement made by U.S. President Richard Nixon, real relief for Soviet Jewry had to await Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika in the mid-1980s and the overthrow of the Soviet Union in 1991. The new Russian Federation and other successor states to the USSR adopted liberal constitutions and permitted unlimited emigration. In the decade or so after 1991, over one million Jews left the former Soviet Union, making for a much-reduced Jewish presence, although those remaining were now free to practice their religion and culture for the first time in generations.

The course of Jewish life in the Soviet Union's Eastern European satellites followed much the same course as in the USSR. The Communist regimes that seized power at the end of World War II often contained disproportionate numbers of Jewish Communists, who were almost all removed from power during the Black Years. Some, such as Rudolf Slánský, the former secretary general of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, were executed for being "Zionists." Most of the remaining Jewish populations of countries such as Romania fled to Israel in the years after 1948, or following the abortive revolutions such as in Hungary in 1956. Only tiny numbers of Jews remained when a free Jewish life became possible in the 1990s.

THE POST-1945 ERA IN EUROPE

The remnant of European Jewry that managed to survive the Holocaust was more numerous in some parts of Europe than in others. About 500,000 Jews survived in Romania and Bulgaria, 200,000 in Hungary, 200,000 in France, and up to 400,000 of Poland's 3.3 million Jews. In 1945 and 1946 many survivors, especially Poles, streamed into displaced persons camps in western Germany, temporarily increasing Germany's Jewish population to 250,000. The creation of the State of Israel altered the Jewish problematic in a fundamental way, giving the Jews an independent national existence they had lacked since Roman times. About 500,000 European Jews, chiefly from Poland and the Balkans, migrated to Israel during the first few years of its existence. Further waves followed, as well as considerable emigration to the English-speaking world. As a result, by 2004 Europe's Jewish population was only a fraction of what it had been even during the immediate postwar stage. The largest Jewish communities in Europe in 2004 were in France (700,000), the former states of the USSR (500,000), Britain (350,000), and Germany (120,000). In contrast to the general trend, considerable Jewish immigration to France from North Africa occurred during the late 1950s and early 1960s, as well as from Russia to Germany after 1990.

Knowledge of the unparalleled horrors of the Nazi period discredited old-style racist anti-Semitism in western Europe, and was increasingly made illegal. The period from about 1950 until the 1970s in fact saw something of the near-universal championing of the Jews in western Europe, which peaked at the time of the Six-Day War between Israel and the Arabs in 1967, when Israel's very existence appeared threatened.

The period since about 1970, however, has seen the growth of a new form of hostility to the Jews, virulent anti-Zionism that is intensely critical of Israel's actions toward the Palestinians and, in its extreme form, opposed to Israel's existence. This anti-Zionism has been strongly associated with the political far left, as well as with the ever-increasing Muslim presence in Europe. It is also closely associated with virulent anti-Americanism and was obviously linked with it during such events as the Iraq War launched in 2003.

On the other hand, life for individual Jews and for Europe's Jewish communities was not marked by endemic anti-Semitism. In 2004 the leader of the British Conservative Party and the premier of Russia were Jews, as had been a recent premier of France and a head of the European Parliament. Paradoxically, while in some respects Jewish life in Europe had become freer than ever before in history, there were fewer Jews there to enjoy this freedom, and a pervasive sense that all was still not well.

See alsoAnti-Semitism; Holocaust; Israel; Minority Rights; Nazism; Zionism.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Browning, Christopher R. The Origins of the Final Solution. Lincoln, Nebr., 2004. Authoritative account of the period from 1939 to 1942.

Friedländer, Saul. Nazi Germany and the Jews. Vol. 1: The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939. London, 1997. Much-praised account of what Nazi rule meant for Germany's Jews.

Hilberg, Raul. The Destruction of the European Jews. 3rd ed. 3 vols. New Haven, Conn., 2003. The most comprehensive account of the Holocaust.

Kochan, Lionel, ed. The Jews in Soviet Russia since 1917. 3rd ed. Oxford, U.K., 1978. A wide-ranging collection of essays by experts.

Levin, Nora. The Jews in the Soviet Union since 1917: Paradox of Survival. 2 vols. London, 1990. Comprehensive account of Soviet Jewish life.

Lindemann, Albert S. Esau's Tears: Modern Anti-Semitism and the Rise of the Jews. Cambridge, U.K., 1997. Very comprehensive, controversial history of modern anti-Semitism.

Marcus, Joseph. Social and Political History of the Jews in Poland, 1919–1939. Berlin, 1983. Sophisticated account of Polish Jewish life; very valuable.

Mendelsohn, Ezra. The Jews of East Central Europe between the World Wars. Bloomington, Ind., 1983. Truly outstanding account of interwar European Jewry.

Rubinstein, Hilary L., Dan Cohn-Sherbok, Abraham J. Edelheit, and W. D. Rubinstein. The Jews in the Modern World. London, 2002. Comprehensive textbook on Jewish history since 1750.

Rubinstein, W. D. A History of the Jews in the English-Speaking World: Great Britain. Basingstoke, U.K., 1996. Focuses on the post-1850 period and Britain's relative lack of anti-Semitism.

Ruppin, Arthur. The Jewish Fate and Future. Translated by E. W. Dickes. London, 1940. Immensely valuable demographic and socioeconomic account of world Jewry on the eve of the Holocaust.

Schechtman, Joseph B. The Vladimir Jabotinsky Story. 2vols. New York, 1956–1961. Reprint, as The Life and Times of Vladimar Jabotinsky, with a foreword by Menachem Begin. Silver Spring, Md., 1986. Excellent biography of Zionist leader; describes interwar Poland well.

Schleunes, Karl A. The Twisted Road to Auschwitz: The Nazi Policy towards German Jews. Urbana, Ill., 1970. Examines the many changes in Nazi policy toward the Jews.

Vital, David. A People Apart: The Jews in Europe, 1789–1939. Oxford, U.K., 1999. Lengthy general account covering all of Europe.

Webber, Jonathan, ed. Jewish Identities in the New Europe. London, 1994. Essays on contemporary European Jewry.

William D. Rubinstein