Introduction – diverse perspectives on Jewish life in Southeast Europe: the Holocaust and beyond

Elie Wiesel, the Nobel Prize winner, journalist and activist originally from Romania who survived Nazi extermination camps, noted in his speech at the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz in 1995, the uniqueness of the occasion with the following words: ‘After Auschwitz, the human condition is not the same, nothing will be the same.’¹ By now, the Holocaust has become a cultural trauma that has left its indelible imprints beyond Southeast Europe. As Jeffrey Alexander suggests, it changed collective cultural consciousness and permanently marked both the Jewish community and the majority society (Alexander et al. 2004, 1). In this way, the Holocaust demonstrates a very specific example of collective destruction, ‘the apocalypse of genocide’ (Moses 2011, 91), which uniquely influenced the perception of a common trans-nationalized European past (Diner 2003, 36–44) based on the experience of joint trauma. In 2005, the United Nations designated the 27th of January as the International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust, and the EU immediately and fully supported the resolution. While some scholars describe the experience of the Holocaust as possibly the ‘paradigmatic European lieu de mémoire’ for Europe (Assmann 2007, 13), others go so far as to portray the event simultaneously as one-of-a-kind and general, unique and universal, fully unexplainable and a precedent to learn from (Chaumont 1997; Lagrou 2011, 281–288).

Nonetheless, as the existing research confirms, this topic did not get enough reflection in the academic sphere within some countries struck by the Holocaust, let alone local public discourses. Southeast European states indisputably belong among the countries that still struggle to come to terms with their past. Reasons for this could be found not only in the marginalization of formerly important Jewish communities, since the vast majority were annihilated, but also in the installation of non-democratic regimes after WWII. Though not the only ones, Balkan states attempted to suppress the exclusively Jewish experience involved in the memory of the Holocaust to a degree. Jews were, as elsewhere in Europe, incorporated among the victims of a collective national suffering (Lagrou 2005, 13–15), which obscured the uniqueness of the Holocaust and generalized the persecution of Nazi victims.

Historically speaking, Jewish studies on Southeast Europe go much further back than the Holocaust.² As American political scientist Daniel J. Elazar wrote in the very first synthetic book about Jews in the Balkans, including their fate after WWII, the Balkan Peninsula is a region with the longest history of Jewish settlement in Europe dating back to the Second Temple (Elazar 1984, 1). When speaking about the twentieth-century cultural developments of Southeast European countries, which importantly co-determined attitudes towards local Jewish populations (Romaniot, Ashkenazi and Sephardic), they have to be put in the context of two empires, the Habsburg and the Ottoman, before the constitution of national states.

The Sephardim, expelled from the Iberian Peninsula at the end of the fifteenth century, soon constituted the most numerous, compact and strongest community among the Jews in the Ottoman Empire, settling primarily in port cities and metropoles which were frequently referred to as ‘Jerusalems’.³ They integrated – nay absorbed – less numerous groups of precedent Jewish settlers belonging to Romaniots or Ashkenazim, who not only accepted their old-castilian traditions but in many cases also embraced their language. For two centuries after their arrival (also nicknamed ‘the Silver Age’), the Sephardic community quite importantly influenced these Jewish societies through both the Halakha and cabalistic teachings as well as through its time-unique messianic movement of Shabbatai Zevi.⁴

However, part of the Southeast European region had been ruled by the Habsburg Empire since the sixteenth century. The Jewish settlement there was renewed only after the Patent of Toleration in 1782 had been signed and gradual emancipation had taken place, especially after the full legal equalization in 1873. Nevertheless, the composition of Jewish communities remained quite heterogeneous as a result of several migration waves of Jews from various places all over the Habsburg monarchy.⁵

The dissolution of the Ottoman and the Habsburg Empires in addition to the emergence of national states and their gradual homogenization also changed the situation of Jews and their collective identity as a religious and ethnic group. In the beginning (regarding their own historical experience that varied regionally), the Jews had been either loyal at times to the local national movements or occasionally to the previous central administrations. For their loyalty, they were either rewarded by the new rulers, which was the case in Serbia, or massacred, as in Greece.⁶ However, as Andreas Guidi puts it in his article on inter-communal relations of Jews and non-Jews in the early twentieth century, Rhodes’ strong cultural, social and economic boundaries were far from exceptional.

Continuing their emancipation, the Jews began transforming into a more self-aware minority that kept their own religious as well as social and political representation. While the freshly founded national states did not offer any formal status to Jews and legal issues were solved ad hoc, over the course of time the Jewish communities were acknowledged by law. That led to their gradual restructuralization on a local and central level (Elazar 1984, 3, 4). With regard to the fact that Jews were granted a status of religious minority in many countries of Southeast Europe, they began to accept the national identity of the majority society in the framework of acculturation and language integration connected to modernization tendencies.⁷

In most states, the process of Jewish emancipation gained momentum during the interwar period; nevertheless, civil rights and the implementation of freedoms proceeded differently in each case. The principal centres of Jewish populations such as Istanbul, Thessaloniki, Sofia, Monastir, Sarajevo or Belgrade – formerly connected within one empire – were now separated by national borders (Elazar 1984, 4, 5). The majority societies became increasingly radicalized under the pressure of economic crisis and political turmoil (Stoianovich 1963, 326, 327). A previously traditional and religious anti-Judaism slowly changed during the interwar period into a more nationalistic anti-Semitism with political contours. In metropolitan conglomerations, this was also connected with the inclination of a Jewish proletariat towards socialist or communist ideas. The image of ‘Judeo-commune’ was gradually ingrained in the majority society (Brustein and King 2004, 447). It is Tobias Blümel’s article in this volume that explains the origins, settings and broader perspectives of anti-Semitism in his case study on Greece.

As for Zionism, Balkan Jews accepted the ideas more or less along political lines rather than as a nationalist movement aiming at the unification of all Jews into one Jewish state. While relatively benevolent states of Southeast Europe became corridors of Jewish emigration to Palestine in the beginning of WWII, most of the Balkan Jews remained in their communities. This fact turned out to be fatal for them during the first half of the 1940s.⁸

When Hitler seized power in 1933, 60% of all Jews were living on the European continent, 9.5 million persons in total. Their number reduced to 3.5 million by 1950, which corresponds to one-third of the worldwide Jewish population. The largest Jewish community in Southeast Europe before the war existed in Romania, where the total number of co-religionists amounted to approximately 756 thousand (respectively 4.2% of the total Romanian population). In other countries, Jewish communities with tens of thousands of members could be found as well: almost 80 thousand in Greece (1.2 %), roughly 70 thousand in Yugoslavia (0.49 %) and approximately 50 thousand in Bulgaria (0,8 %).⁹ Diverse scholars ranging from (Arendt 1964) to (Snyder 2010, 2015) observe a sharp division between the East and the West in the context of the Nazi’s ‘Final Solution.’ This volume, however, may suggest that Southeast Europe could be considered a middle ground between the schematically outlined Western-type and Eastern-type of Holocaust experience.

German historian Wolfgang Benz, who along with other authors attempted a reconstruction of the Holocaust’s full extent, compares Reitlinger’s and Hilberg’s data to Gutmans’s Encyclopedia of the Holocaust in his introduction (Benz 1991).¹⁰ The number of victims reached 287 thousand in Romania, 67 thousand in Greece, 65 thousand in Yugoslavia and more than 11 thousand in the Bulgarian occupation zones. Due to a lack of sources, little is known about the strategies, thoughts and emotions of those who did not survive. This niche is here being covered by Leon Saltiel, who reconstructs pre-deportation life in Thessaloniki based on the correspondence of three mothers that never returned from Auschwitz.

Nevertheless, the Holocaust was not the last blow that Jewish communities had to deal with. The post-war emigration soon importantly reduced the number of survivors who returned to their homes between 1944 and 1946. The exodus was generally stimulated by either fear of another military conflict or the installations of non-democratic regimes accompanied with renewed persecution against Jews. From almost one million Jews who once lived in Southeast Europe, only some tens of thousands remain today.¹¹ In her historical overview of Bulgarian-Israeli relations, Rumyana Marinova-Christidi explains the state policy of Bulgaria that, on the one hand, contributed to the survival of Bulgarian Jews and, on the other hand, caused the massive migration of Jewish survivors to Palestine/Israel.

Despite this, Jewish communities did not disappear completely, though they vastly reshaped their formal status. Newly emerging central organizations were often established at the expense of traditional religious, educational, cultural and linguistic structures. In regards to the low number of survivors but also the implemented centrist policy, differences among the traditional Jewish subcultures (Romaniote, Sephardic, and Ashkenazi) were subdued.¹² The postwar Jewish identity ceased to be determined on a religious basis; instead, outside of the majority society a Holocaust-dominated collective experience was shared in family circles and on a community level.¹³

Those who stayed in their motherland gradually identified more with their state as Greek, Yugoslav, Bulgarian and Romanian Jews. They increasingly perceived themselves as a group with similar shared values, understandings and interpretations of public and private spaces. Jewish consciousness was also stimulated by the (not necessarily anti-Semitic) attitude of the majority society (Liebman 2003, 344). Some Jews decided to renounce their Jewishness, or to hide it at least, because of either their historical experience or negative postwar recollections with a majority society (Gitelman 2000). The dynamics of attitudes succeeding the war towards negotiating a new Jewish identity and rebuilding the Jewish community are discussed in a case study on Yugoslavia written by Emil Kerenji.

The political representations of individuals in Southeast European states commonly supported the reconstruction of their Jewish communities, which was also legally confirmed; in spite of this, they approached Jews and their organizations in a different manner. As Elazar writes, the Jews in Yugoslavia were acknowledged as a national minority, while staunchly nationalist regimes in Greece and Turkey perceived them as a religious minority. In Romania, where the Jews had to face the most severe anti-Semitism, their status oscillated between a national and religious minority from 1944 until the rule of Ceauşescu.¹⁴ In Bulgaria, they were permitted to perform some activity only under the status of a cultural society (Elazar 1984, 7–9).

In the Balkans and elsewhere, antisemitism stemming mainly from the racial ideology of Nazi Germany during the war gradually took new forms (anti-Zionism, anti-cosmopolitanism, or, in the atmosphere of the Greek Civil War, anti-communism). Anti-Jewish moods were also often connected with the survivors’ material security and the restitutions of Jewish property (Gitelman 2000). The frustration of Jewish survivors frequently led them to either emigrate or regard their integration, if not assimilation, with the majority as necessary to coexist (Diner and Wunberg 2007).

As in other regions, the postwar majority society in the Balkans did not feel tied to the fate of Holocaust survivors (Alexander 2004, 14). In the public discourse, Jews foremost belonged to the collective category of Nazi victims represented under the communist regimes, mainly by the leftist partisan resistance (Lagrou 2005, 13–21). The memories of occupation in Greece were overshadowed by the experience of the civil war between 1946 and 1949 (Králová 2016, 13, 14). The polarization of society and the victory of the anti-communists led to a stigmatization of the leftist partisan movement as communist guerillas and traitors. The fate of Greek Jews, who were connected with the leftist resistance movement, is depicted in the article by Kateřina Králová.

The first historical works but also sporadic, mostly-autobiographic memories of the Holocaust written by its survivors began to be published as books at the end of the 1940s.¹⁵ In Romania (similar to the USSR), there were more works about the Holocaust printed by 1948 than during the whole Cold War period (Glass 2007).¹⁶ In Yugoslavia, the local Federation of Jewish Communities published a historical overview about the Nazis’ and the collaborators’ crimes committed against Jews in Yugoslavia in 1952 (Levntal and Vajs 1952). In comparison, the first publication tracing the fate of Jews in Bulgaria was published abroad (Arditti 1952). Filling in blank spaces in the research of early Holocaust records is nowadays attempted, in many cases successfully, by international research initiatives like the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI).¹⁷

In Southeast European countries under communist rule, postwar commemoration and the relative benevolence of leading elites at the end of the 1940s and the beginning of the 1950s surely coincided with attempts to define themselves against previous regimes. Nevertheless, their initiators were mostly the survivors. This also applies to the case of Northern Transylvania, where Holocaust survivors made every effort to keep the memory of those who perished alive as shown in the study by Zoltán Tibori-Szabó. During the 1950s, commemoration of the Holocaust in all of the analyzed countries moved exclusively into the realm of communities weakened through the previously discussed high rate of emigration. Southeast European countries began to come to terms with the traumatic past of the Holocaust at the de facto state level after the end of the cold war, but a lot of questions remain unanswered.

Yet with all of this considered, the research on contemporary Jewish history in Southeast Europe has still been negligible. For many years, post-Holocaust reconstruction was set outside the study of Holocaust historiography since its research priorities were directed at the documentation of the pre-war social life and the thriving Jewish communities around Europe in addition to the details of the unprecedented disaster of the Holocaust. This claim might also be supported by the low amount of comparative or synthetic research on war and postwar history of Jews in the Balkans, bearing in mind the few exceptions of aforementioned publications such as, for instance, Elazar, The Balkan Jewish Communities (1984) in English and Benz, Dimension des Völkermords (1991) in German. As of late, the international conference entitled The Holocaust as Local History: Past and Present of a Complex Relation, taking place in 2008 in Thessaloniki, should also be mentioned. Its selected contributions were published in a volume under the title of Holocaust in the Balkans in Greek (Antoniou et al. 2011). In addition, local projects such as the Czech publication Coming Back. The Post-war Reconstruction of Jewish Communities in the CE-, SE- and Eastern Europe (Králová and Kubátová 2016), which makes extensive use of the Visual History Archive collection, are emerging. Due to the language barrier, nevertheless, their impact is unfortunately far too limited.

Another remarkable effort in the German academic environment was a special issue of the Südosteuropäische Hefte 2, 1 (2013) focusing on anti-Semitism in Southeast Europe edited by Marija Vulesica. In January 2015, the Humboldt University in Berlin hosted a conference on the topic Inside and Outside Southeastern Europe. One of the panels was dedicated to aspects of Jewish life in the Balkans. Up until this time, Jewish history had been marginal in German research on Southeast Europe. Only a few months later in May 2015, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum together with the Elie Wiesel National Institute for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania organized a conference in Bucharest on the Holocaust in Southeastern Europe. Still, in the historiography of the Anglo-Saxon world, related regional comparative research was foremost an exception, such as in case of the volume on the reception of the Holocaust in post-communist Europe (Himka and Michlic 2013), which covers most of the Balkan countries. Currently, a new Network for South Eastern European Jewish Studies under the umbrella of the Association Internationale d’Études du Sud-Est Européen (AIESEE) is being established and the results of an international workshop The Balkan Jews & Minority Issues in South-Eastern Europe, which took place in Warsaw in November 2016, are forthcoming soon.

Moreover, the realization that the post-war recovery was directly linked to the extermination of Jews allots us not only a new set of research question related to the Holocaust, but also the pre-Holocaust memories and boundaries that are brought to light in this special issue. What were the main political, social, cultural and economic dimensions of this reconstruction? How were survivors reintegrated into the radically different postwar social reality? How did local societies receive the returning Jews, and to what extent was this approach related to the wartime through the attitudes of bystanders and collaborators within local populations? What was the fate of Jewish property, and what was the future of Jewish-gentile relations like given that the past of this relationship varied from peaceful coexistence and mutual distrust to open hostility?

The special issue at hand draws conclusions regarding new scientific approaches to Jewish history in the Balkans presented by scholars involved in many of the discussed initiatives. In doing so, it certainly fails to represent the entire scope of topics, different approaches and methods that have been developed during the last few decades. It is, however, a characteristic example of the recent trends focusing on the post-1945 period and the reconstruction of Jewish communities across Europe. We are aware of the fact that the degree of scientific research in general and the exploration of Jewish history in particular differs by country. Variations in sociopolitical sentiments, as well as in economic successes and developments, collectively determine the scope of research. The history of Southeast Europe, with the concentration here on Jewish history, is very versatile, and the Holocaust in particular has not been a high priority. Perhaps this is due to the fact that Jewish history has not yet come to be understood as a part of national histories, or perhaps the failure to investigate Jewish history can be explained by the reluctance to explore topics that will undoubtedly reveal painful and unprocessed aspects of these national histories. However, the exploration of Jewish history, anti-Semitism and the Holocaust is gradually gaining more attention, and we hope that this special issue can be an important contribution to this endeavour.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Funding

This work was supported by the Czech Science Foundation [grant number 16-16009S].

Notes

1. Elie Wiesel: First Person Singular. Liberation of Auschwitz, Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), available at http://www.pbs.org/eliewiesel/life/auschwitz.html (accessed December 21, 2016). Wiesel de facto followed up on Adorno in this statement (Adorno 1955), and further (Rubenstein 1966). The necessity of Holocaust reflection as an indispensable component of European identity was later confirmed by e.g., Judt (2006, 803).

2. Cf., e.g., Chasiotis (1997).

3. Piatra Neamţ called ‘Jerusalem of Romania’ Ancel et al. (1969, 210); Czernowitz labelled as Jerusalem of Bukowina, see e.g., Hrenciuc (2012), Sarajevo then ‘little Jerusalem’ Friedman (2013, 88); and most importantly Thessaloniki – ‘Jerusalem of the Balkans’, on behalf of all (Naar 2016, 9).

4. More for instance in Scholem (1973) or Goldish (2004).

5. Compare e.g., Švob (1997, 19–21).

6. While Jews in Serbia supported Serb emancipatory efforts, for which they soon gained legal equalization, Jews in Greece remained mostly loyal to the Ottoman Empire, which led for instance to anti-Jewish massacres in Peloponnesus briefly after the declaration of Greek independence. Comp. Sorić (1989, 103) or Fleming (2008, 15–17).

7. For Greece e.g., Fleming (2008, 6–8), for Yugoslavia e.g., Birri-Tomovska (2012, 127–270).

8. Compare e.g., Ofer (1990).

9. ‘Jewish Population of Europe in 1933: Population Data by Country’, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. ‘The Holocaust.’ Holocaust Encyclopedia, available at http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005161 (accessed November 20, 2015).

10. Benz refers to Reitlinger (1956), Hilberg (1990), and Gutman (1990).

11. For current situation of the communities see World Jewish Congress, available at http://www.worldjewishcongress.org/en/communities (accessed December 21, 2016).

12. Compare for instance situation in Romania, in American Jewish Yearbook 51 (Philadelphia: American Jewish Committee, 1950), 371, available at http://www.ajcarchives.org/AJC_DATA/Files/1950_13_SouthEastEurope.pdf, American Jewish Yearbook 52 (Philadelphia: American Jewish Committee, 1951), 352, available at http://www.ajcarchives.org/AJC_DATA/Files/1951_12_EastSouthEastEurope.pdf and in Yugoslavia, in American Jewish Yearbook 53 (Philadelphia: American Jewish Committee, 1952), 349, available at http://www.ajcarchives.org/AJC_DATA/Files/1952_10_EastEurope.pdf (accessed December 21, 2016).

13. Compare especially (Gitelman, Kosmin, and Kovács 2003).

14. For more on anti-Semitism in Romania see e.g., American Jewish Yearbook 47 (Philadelphia: American Jewish Committee, 1945–1946), 435, available at http://www.ajcarchives.org/AJC_DATA/Files/1945_1946_7_Europe.pdf and American Jewish Yearbook 50, 365–66 (Philadelphia: American Jewish Committee, 1948–1949), available at http://www.ajcarchives.org/AJC_DATA/Files/1948_1949_10_SouthEastEurope.pdf (accessed December 21, 2016).

15. For Greece Molho and Nehama (1948); for Romania Brunea-Fox (1944), Marcus (1945), (1947a), (1947b).

16. Of utmost importance was trilogy of Matatias Carp from the end of 1940s called collectively the Black Book (Carp 1946/1948).

17. European Holocaust Research Infrastructure, available at https://ehri-project.eu/ (accessed January 5, 2017).