My topic today will be about Eastern Europe. The way I lecture, I like to stop periodically and give people an opportunity to make comments. My outline will be that I will say something about Eastern Europe in the 20th century, in general. Then I will be talking about Poland and then finally, I will devote most of my time to talk about in Hungary. Now, it may seem to you that I spent too much time on Hungary and had some sentimental reason for it, but I think not. I think- >> He's Hungarian. >> I will make the argument why the history of the Hungarian Jewry is so important for us to understanding how the Holocaust came about. So this is my outline. The first point I would like to emphasize, that to what extent the Holocaust is an Eastern European story. Think about it. Poland had many more Jews than the entire Western Europe together. It is here, where the great horrors occurred. All their extermination camps, without exception, were in Poland. The percentages of people killed in Eastern Europe were much greater. German behavior in the East was different than in the West. From the Germans found it unthinkable setting up ghettos in the middle of Paris. This did not happen. The ghettos were mostly in Poland and in some of the other Eastern European countries, certainly in the territory of the ex-Soviet Union. Sometimes we forget that to what extent we are talking about Eastern Europe. This is where the vast majority of people who were ultimately killed came from. Well, it makes some generalizations about the Jewry in the decade in between the two World Wars. Well, talking about Eastern Europe, we can take it for granted that at the outset there was already a considerable degree of antisemitism in each and every one of these countries. And the story is that in the course of the following two decades, this antisemitism further increased. All of these countries, which you see here, were new, in one way or another. And all of them, at least in theory, started out as democratic countries. And as time went on in the 1920s and 1930s, they all, with the exception of Czechoslovakia, one always says well with the exception of Czechoslovakia, they all ceased to be democratic. And all, for different, but understandable reasons gravitated in the German sphere of influence. And all, with the exception of Czechoslovakia, established one kind or another of dictatorship, fascist, not necessarily fascist, but some sort of dictatorship, which we can take for granted. Now the other major point which I want to emphasize, it seems to be so important, that we talk about Jews. Jews who were ultimately the people who were killed. But this is a very heterogeneous group. I talk about anti-Semites and I want to make the point, i want to emphasize, that one anti-Semite was not like another. Different anti-Semites were antisemitic for different reasons and had a different set of beliefs, even though, of course, they shared something, that they were anti-Semites. The same point I'm going to make about the Jews. Of course, the Jews shared a great deal, otherwise we couldn't give such a course. There would be no point. At the same time, it's an enormously heterogeneous group we are talking about. Already we made the distinction, I think Murray was also talking about it, the Sephardim versus the Ashkenazi. In Eastern Europe we'll find Sephardic jewelry in Bulgaria and some in Yugoslavia. The vast majority, however, were the Ashkenazi Jews. You remember we were talking about the Sephardim were speaking a language which was derived from Spanish. Sepharad is the source and Ashkenazi spoke, well Murray was talking about it in detail, a fundamentally Germanic language, Yiddish, which was the [FOREIGN] to call attention to, but Murray said last time. Other distinction, the great distinction between the East and West. Indeed, a very good historian writing a book about the Jews of Eastern Europe in this period, someone by the name of Ezra Mendelsohn, was making the point that the two types of Jewry, the western type and the eastern type, and what he enumerates, how these groups are defined, the western Jewry were living in a politically, more or less, liberal environment. And consequently, acculturation was possible and likely. There was a degree, not much, but a degree of intermarriage. And the Jews in these countries, we are talking about Western Europe, made contribution to the national culture. This is so important. By this time, they're birth rate was actually declining. They were, well, thoroughly other religiously reformed, as opposed to the Hasidic Jewry, mostly in the east. But this it follows the Eastern limb, had an independent culture, Yiddish. They're, by and large, they were less impacted by religious modernization. I don't know how to call it. Now, they lived in a different political environment. Now, this really holds everywhere in Eastern Europe, with the exception of Hungary, with the exception of Hungary before 1918. Because the Hungarian Jewry, and this is going to be my main topic today, lived in an Eastern European type political environment However, it acted, and it seemed like a Western European type Jewry. Well, I will talk more about this when I come to my main topic for today.
