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ABSTRACT
This article reassesses the efforts by western Jews to rescue their imperilled European brethren in the years before and during the Second World War. It goes beyond the conventional question, “Could more have been done to rescue European Jewry?” Rather, the article explores what Jewish leaders learned about the global practice of philanthropic relief during the decades before the rise of European fascism and hyper-nationalism. It then asks how this accumulated knowledge may have informed their decisions once they understood the dangers faced by Jews in Germany, Poland, and Romania. This holistic analysis of actions taken by transnational leaders accounts for operational precedents, geo-politics, migration regimes, diaspora networks, organizational history, intra-communal relations, and economics and contemporary orientations toward aid. All these create a realistic reckoning of the strengths and limitations of Jewish transnationalism at the time, allowing us to transcend value-based judgements of this painful chapter in Jewish history.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Jonathan Dekel-Chen is a professor of Modern History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Notes
* This paper began its journey as a lecture presented at the Lavy Colloquium at Johns Hopkins University in December 2014.
1 To the best of my knowledge, Feingold (Citation2007, 296, Citation2009, 67) first used this phrase to analyze Jewish politics in North America. Joseph S. Nye, Jr. inaugurated the term “soft power” in his article by the same name in Foreign Policy 80 (Citation1990): 153–171.
2 From 1921 to 1938, slightly over 400,000 Polish Jews emigrated (Marrus Citation1985, 389–395, 400–401). Until the mid-1920s most chose to resettle in the United States. From 1929 to 1935, 43.7% of the emigrants went to Palestine (Shavit and Reinharz Citation2013, 16).
3 A derogatory euphemism applied to these olim taken from the name of the Polish Prime Minister (Władysław Grabski) who had imposed heavy taxes on commerce, leading many middle-class non-Zionists to seek emigration.
4 Polish Jews accounted for more than one-third of the total immigrants during these years. For the seminal account of the debates and trends (see Mendelsohn Citation1981, 256–285).
5 Until the early 1920s foreign philanthropies had limited engagement with urban kassas in Eastern Europe. By 1939 there were approximately 800 Jewish cooperative loan associations in Poland and adjacent countries funded from abroad. These kassas had a total membership of 350,000 and capital of $3.5 million (see Ussoskin Citation1975, 312–333). JDC's new kassas issued in 1933 a total of 135,600 individual loans amounting to approximately $2.17 million (approximately $50 million today); in 1938, they issued 221,226 individual loans amounting nearly $4 million (approximately $92 million today) (See Bauer Citation1974, 190, 196–199); American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee Archive, New York [henceforth, “JDC”] Poland Collection, folder 142 (“Overview of Activities in Poland, 1919–1939).
6 Many of the kassas funded by the JDC were administered on the ground by ORT. Others were managed by the American Joint Reconstruction Foundation and the national umbrella organization of kassas.
7 Few people took seriously David Ben-Gurion's pronouncement in 1935 that one million Jewish families would “take root in Eretz Israel” within 25–30 years (Marcus Citation1983, 406). Aside from Zionists who favoured Palestine as the site for refuge, small anti-Zionist Orthodox communities in Eastern Europe had always considered emigration to the Holy Land a worthy goal.
8 ORT-Farband (based in Berlin) and the Jewish Colonization Association (based in Paris) also supported Jewish agrarian resettlement in interwar Soviet Russia.
9 The JDC sent Rosen to survey possible sites. For a heartbreaking report, see JDC AR 21/32 – 52a (Rosen to Hyman and Morrissey, February 7, 1939).