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The Jews and Nationality Conflicts in the HabsburgLands

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Robert S. Wistrich*
Affiliation:
The Hebrew University (Jerusalem)

Extract

There have been few areas of the world during the past 150 years that have beenas shaped by Jewish influences as East Central Europe. The prominent Czechwriter Milan Kundera observed seven years ago that in the years before Hitler,the Jews were the “intellectual cement,” the essentiallycosmopolitan and integrative element that forged the spiritual unit of thisregion. It was this small nation par excellence which added thequintessentially European color, tone and vitality to great cities like Berlin,Vienna, Prague, Budapest, not to mention Cracow, Lemberg and Czernowitz furtherto the east. The Nazi mass murder of the Jews, to which Stalin added his ownmacabre postscript after World War II, brought about the disappearance of thisfructifying Jewish leaven and crushed for forty years the independence of thesmaller East European nations sandwiched between Russia and Germany. Since theEuropean revolutions of 1989, these nations, re-emerging from asemi-totalitarian deep freeze, have been recovering their national identitiesand historical roots long repressed under Communist rule.

Information

Type
I Eastern Europe Reconsidered
Copyright
Copyright © 1994 Association for the Study of Nationalities of Eastern Europe and ex-USSR 

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