Book review: Tobias Grill,Jews and Germans in Eastern Europe,Shared and Comparative Histories

Jews and Germans in Eastern Europe, Shared and Comparative Histories is a collection of essays edited by Tobias Grill. The aim of the book is ‘to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of history of Jews and Germans in Eastern Europe’. ¹ To serve this aim, the chosen essays focus on different areas, from literature to linguistics, the sources varying from tax records to chronicles.

The initial essay by Shaul Stampfer focuses on the migration of Jews from the 1400s. Stampfer attributes Jewish migration to the region to economic pressures. ² Although the narrative of Jewish settled life seems like it could be about European peasantry anywhere, the chapter focuses well on different aspects of Jewish life and the migration.

In the second chapter, Jürgen Heyde examines Jewish representation in the chronicle of Dƚugosz composed in the fifteenth century in which the Jewish were treated as ‘the other’. ³ Overall, the chronicle is about the ideals and realities of Polish society in the middle ages. ⁴

In the next chapter, Krzemien focuses on Dubno’s work, Dubno being a renowned scholar of the early Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah), a poet and an expert in Hebrew grammar. ⁵ Throughout the chapter, she explains the process of Jewish secularisation and how a good command of German affected it.

In the fourth chapter, Rachel Manekin seeks to follow a comparative approach, but finds the Galician Haskalah to be uninfluenced by Austrian enlightenment.

Marie Schumacher-Brunhes (in Chapter V) focuses on different meanings of ‘daytsh’ in Yiddish and on comparison between Jewry in Germany and in Eastern Europe.

In Chapter VI, Steffen Krogh examines the influence of German on eastern Yiddish, giving us a detailed linguistic examination of the famous Jewish dialect.

Chapter VII by Martina Niedhammer is devoted to an examination of contacts between Yiddish Institute’s philological section and German-speaking academia,

In Chapter VIII, Tobias Grill treats a forgotten chapter of Jewish history during the First World War, when Jews in Eastern Europe were expected to advance German interests in East Europe, though ‘the idea of East European Jews as pioneers of Germanness in the East was a clear misconception’. ⁶

Philipp Nielsen (in Chapter IX) investigates the activities of the VDA (Association of Germandom Abroad) in relation to German Jews along with the growing influence of antisemitism. ⁷

Marija Vulesica (in Chapter X) focuses on the degree of ‘Germanness’ of the Ashkenazi Jews in southeast Europe. In view of the complexity of the theme, its treatment in this chapter is outstanding.

Maria Hausleitner (in Chapter XI) examines how ‘before 1933, Jews and Germans shared the goal of modernizing the underdeveloped region of Bukovina’. ⁸ However, with the Nazis in power in Germany, the cooperation between the two groups turned increasingly into mutual hostility.

Hannah Maischein (in Chapter XII) focuses on the vexed problems before ‘Polish witnesses of the Holocaust, who reflect themselves in an act of memory in their relation to Jews and Germans’. ⁹ She focuses on the same event from the eyes of different groups and concludes that the Polish memory discourses necessarily show a large variety of tendencies. ¹⁰

Kamil Kijek takes up the problem faced by the Jewish community in lower Silesia after the absorption of that German territory in Poland, 1945–50. He does so by analysing the German and Jewish narratives found in a Yiddish propaganda-documentary film. ¹¹ In the film, for the first time in modern history, Jews were shown to be not only victims of Polish nationalism but also participants in it. ¹²

Jews and Germans in Eastern Europe, Shared and Comparative Histories provides us with a more multi-dimensional and transnational perspective than in the case in works of this genre. Clearly, a collection of essays from pens of diverse experts can only give us varied insights into a range of diverse problems, without a single overarching concept behind it. One wonders how the Jewish-German relationship could have played out had there been no genocide of the Jews at the hands of the Nazis.