The day before Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany, 29 January 1933, Mark Wischnitzer, general secretary of the Hilfsverein der deutschen Juden (an organization dedicated to “promoting the moral, intellectual, and economic development of coreligionists …, especially in eastern Europe and Asia”Footnote ¹) reported that the previous year had brought “an increase in the distress and privation suffered by Jews throughout the world.” The major Jewish communities of eastern Europe, he observed – in the Soviet Union, Poland, Romania, Subcarpathian Ruthenia, and Lithuania – were beset by severe economic hardship, exacerbated in most places by discriminatory government policies and physical violence. In his assessment, possibilities for alleviating that distress had become more tenuous in the previous year, for the ongoing worldwide depression had significantly reduced remittances and charitable donations from Jews in the USA. He estimated that growing numbers of eastern European Jews would need to emigrate, but “the bars against immigration both in the Continental and overseas countries had been made more rigorous” than in previous years. In short, he concluded, “emigrant aid and advice is now more urgently necessary than ever before.”Footnote ²

Germany was absent from Wischnitzer’s list of trouble spots, even though observers in several countries had been expressing significant concern for the well-being of German Jewry ever since the federal parliamentary election of 1930 had catapulted the National Socialist German Workers’ (Nazi) Party to second in size among factions in the Reichstag.Footnote ³ Paix et droit, the organ of the Paris-based Alliance israélite universelle, warned in June 1932 that the Weimar Republic was effectively dead, that Jewish merchants in the smaller German provincial towns had ceased to enjoy effective police protection against boycott agitation, and that, even though Hitler had not assumed power, his Third Reich “appears today … like an active volcano.”Footnote ⁴ From the volcano’s slope, the primary German Jewish defense agency, the Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens, reported, among other acts of violence following the July 1932 federal election that had made the Nazis the largest Reichstag party, an assassination attempt upon its representative in Königsberg, a bomb planted at a synagogue in Kiel, a handgrenade attack upon a Jewish shop in a small town in Upper Silesia, and a bloody beating of a Jewish merchant in Neidenburg, East Prussia.Footnote ⁵ From distant Cairo, lawyer Jacques Maleh depicted Germany as a place where “disorder continues to reign …, crimes are being committed at gunpoint and by throwing bombs, and … the Jews, pursued by the ferocious hatred of the Hitlerites, are the first victims.”Footnote ⁶ Although many took comfort in noting that the Nazis had failed to win either the German presidency or a parliamentary majority and that, after yet another federal parliamentary election in November 1932 in which their vote share declined sharply, their ascension to power no longer appeared quite so inevitable as it had in mid-year, the insecurity besetting German Jewry, and the concern of Jews the world over, was palpable.

From his Berlin vantage point, Wischnitzer could surely sense that insecurity up close. Still, he did not rank German Jews’ precarious prospects among world Jewry’s most pressing problems. Nor, it appears, did most of the leaders of some dozen Jewish organizations – including the Hilfsverein, the Alliance israélite, the American Jewish Committee, the American Jewish Congress, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), the Board of Deputies of British Jews, and the Paris-based Comité des Délégations Juives – that purported to guard the welfare of Jews across the globe. Only Leo Motzkin, executive secretary of the Comité des Délégations Juives, assigned equal urgency to German Jewry and to “numerous other Jewish communities.”Footnote ⁷ Other leaders agreed with Wischnitzer. During the previous decade they had become accustomed to dividing the Jewish world between what sociologist Arthur Ruppin called “countries of a higher … [and] a lower culture.”Footnote ⁸ The Jewish communities of western and central Europe, along with those of the USA and the British overseas dominions, comprised the former zone; the Jews of eastern Europe (including the Asiatic parts of Russia), the Middle East, and North Africa made up the latter.Footnote ⁹ In the minds of the organizational leadership, the division paralleled the distribution of economic and political resources in the Jewish world. The countries of “higher culture” were the ones where the capitalist economy seemed most fully developed and the liberal political order most firmly entrenched; hence their Jewish residents, whose share of Jewry overall had grown from less than a quarter (about 2.5 million out of 10.6 million) in 1900 to nearly half (about 8 million of 17 million) in 1933, thanks mainly to mass westward migration from eastern Europe,Footnote ¹⁰ could be reasonably confident regarding their long-term safety and prosperity. By contrast, Jews in the countries of “lower culture” were routinely described as living “on the edge of the abyss,” threatened with imminent “ruin and degeneration,” and dependent entirely upon the charity of their co-religionists elsewhere for their very survival.Footnote ¹¹

From the perspective of the early 1930s, empirical evidence seemed strongly to justify such perceptions. Surveying the situation of European Jewry at the end of May 1932, the journalist Alfred Berl, editor of Paix et droit, called attention to numerus clausus legislation in Hungary, “scandalous violence” against Jews in Romania, Polish state economic policies aimed at “ousting the Jewish element from its historic social function,” and the even greater success of the Soviet communist regime in the same direction through “the abolition of private business and the progressive substitution of large industry for artisan handicrafts.” These actions, he argued, proved that Western efforts at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference to impose civic equality for Jews upon the newly created or expanded national states that had arisen in eastern Europe on the ruins of the Romanov and Habsburg empires had failed to induce “nations still … imbued with religious intolerance and national exclusivism” to “forget centuries of fanaticism and join the countries of … high culture in a single bound.”Footnote ¹² More concretely, a 1933 attempt by economist Abram Menes to calculate wealth distribution among Jews in various countries found that the per capita income of Jews in the USA was 2.5 times greater than the average for Jews worldwide and 8.75 times greater than for Jews in Poland. German Jews were on average 6 times better off economically than Jews in Poland and 1.75 times more prosperous than the average for Jews in all countries across the globe.Footnote ¹³

Such data suggested to Western Jewish organizations with international concerns that, for all their disquiet over the impending explosion in Germany, Jews in eastern Europe would continue to demand the bulk of their attention in the long run (the 900,000 Jews of Asia and North Africa excluding Palestine, who made up less than 6 percent of world Jewry, figured only minimally in the organizations’ strategic planning). The problems in eastern Europe, Jewish policymakers thought, were endemic to the region, a product of its intrinsic benightedness, whereas in Germany Jews’ difficulties stemmed from a temporarily aberrant and ultimately futile effort to ignore “the continuous ascent of an enlarged humanity” in which that country had participated over the previous two centuries. Germany may try to “force [its Jews] back … to the medieval ghetto and to place it outside the community, outside culture, outside humanity,” opined Berl, but, in reality “the time has passed when peoples can live in enclosed silos, separated from and heedless of others.”Footnote ¹⁴ To be sure, many Jews in positions similar to Berl’s took a less sanguine view of civilizational progress, and the Nazis’ growing electoral strength in Germany underscored their lack of confidence in the values of enlightened Europe as a Jewish strategic asset.Footnote ¹⁵ But their doubts do not appear to have altered the overall assessment in the face of the Nazi rise that the slightly more than half a million Jews of Germany did not confront imminent extinction, as nine million Jews farther east did. Thus, for example, the Hebrew-language press in Palestine gave precedence in its coverage of diaspora affairs to the largest and seemingly most endangered communities – those in Poland, Romania, and the USSR. The Jews of Germany figured, if at all, as misguided believers in “assimilation” whose strategy the Nazi rise had disproved, not as Jews facing acute danger.

This picture of the Jewish world suggested three primary directions for strategic planning. The first, which Wischnitzer stressed in his January 1933 survey, involved moving as many Jews as possible from the zone of “lower” culture into the zone of “higher” culture. Migration in this direction had been a primary feature of Jewish life during the decades before the First World War, resulting in a massive demographic shift. Whereas during the 1890s fully three-quarters of the world’s Jews had lived east of an imaginary line running from Danzig south to Budapest, now more than half lived west of the same line, with one-fifth concentrated in five metropolitan areas – New York, London, Paris, Vienna, and Buenos Aires.Footnote ¹⁶ The USA had been the destination of the large majority of migrants until 1924, when restrictive legislation had cut the yearly inflow by more than three-quarters, to an annual average of 11,000 during the subsequent 6 years. Between half and two-thirds of the decline during those years had been made up by increased movement into Latin American countries, British overseas dominions, and Egypt.Footnote ¹⁷ However, beginning in 1930, under the impact of worldwide economic depression, those countries had raised barriers to would-be entrants lacking personal fortunes or immediate employment prospects – qualities few east European Jewish candidates for migration, mostly impoverished small businessmen with relatively large families, possessed.Footnote ¹⁸ These developments left Palestine as the main potential receiving country. In 1925, it had taken in nearly 37,000 Jews, more than half of all Jews who resettled anywhere during that year. Numbers had fallen over the next six years, but by spring 1932, unlike in most places in the world, the local economy was expanding, making employment prospects plentiful.Footnote ¹⁹ With Great Britain obligated by its mandate from the League of Nations to facilitate Jewish immigration, Jewish planners were increasingly discussing Palestine as a place where a large proportion of endangered Jews might be securely reestablished.Footnote ²⁰

A second strategy looked to the international diplomatic arena as a counterweight to the systemic obstacles facing Jews in the zone of “lower culture.” All of the zone’s east European states, and some in Asia as well, were bound by an international regime of protection of minorities inaugurated at the 1919 Peace Conference and supervised by the League of Nations. Throughout the 1920s, many Jewish organizations with a global focus had relied upon that regime to prevent individual states from engaging in or encouraging practices that subjected their Jewish residents to economic discrimination or physical harm. By the end of the decade, most of the organizations’ leaders were dissatisfied with the results of that reliance.Footnote ²¹ But in 1931, the American Jewish Congress and the Comité des Délegations Juives revived the idea, first broached in 1921, of creating a global Jewish parliament, which, proponents hoped, would permit the entire Jewish people to address the international community through a single popularly chosen representation.Footnote ²² The organizers expected that such a representative body would facilitate effective Jewish use of international protection mechanisms.Footnote ²³ To that end, in August 1932, ninety-four delegates representing Jewish communal bodies in seventeen (mostly east European) countries convened for a World Jewish Conference, where Leo Motzkin demanded that “if [the Jews of the world] did not understand the need to organize themselves as a fully fledged nation during normal times, let us at least do so now …, in the face of a cruel war of destruction without parallel anywhere.”Footnote ²⁴ After four days of meetings, the delegates authorized a World Jewish Congress to convene no later than summer 1934.Footnote ²⁵

The third strategy involved alleviating the immediate economic distress of the world’s largest concentrations of impoverished Jews. Since the First World War, the JDC had taken the lead in this regard, distributing some $24 million to support poor relief, job training, credit societies, health care, orphanages, schools, and cultural and religious institutions in Jewish communities throughout Europe (excluding the USSR), of which nearly 80 percent had been directed toward six east European countries.Footnote ²⁶ In 1931 and 1932, JDC leaders noted only “increased misery and destitution” in that region,Footnote ²⁷ inducing the organization to spend down endowments and exhaust fundraising surpluses from previous years.Footnote ²⁸ On a similar note, early iterations of plans for the World Jewish Congress stressed the primacy of economic concerns not only for philanthropic, but also for political organizations, noting that government policies on such issues as the right to work, access to credit from state banks, regulation of workshops, distribution of the tax burden, and Sunday rest were major determinants of the economic situation of Jews in each country. The plans saw the future Congress devoting significant attention to cajoling east European governments into adopting policies more favorable to Jewish interests.Footnote ²⁹

Finding the proper balance among the three strategic directions was a matter of intense controversy in the Jewish world during the years of the Nazi rise. Both emphasis on Palestine as a primary migration destination and the pretensions of some promoters of the World Jewish Congress to represent Jewry as a nation among nations were ideologically anathema to numerous organizations that opposed the Zionist program for a Jewish national home.Footnote ³⁰ Organizations and leaders in some countries worried that too great a stress on emigration would play into the hands of hostile elements seeking to drive Jews out en masse, while others thought its financial cost too great in relation to likely returns, given the millions of people to be transported and resettled, a paucity of suitable destinations, and high birthrates among the target populations, which compounded excess demand.Footnote ³¹ Economic assistance commanded the broadest agreement, but with depressed economies in the West reducing relief organizations’ income to a fraction of what it had been only five years before, competition between countries and types of aid grew noticeably.Footnote ³² Those developments had moved Wischnitzer to stress that economic assistance alone would not end the “distress and privation” of the world’s neediest Jewish communities.Footnote ³³

Nevertheless, all who debated priorities in the early 1930s appear to have shared an underlying sense that their primary task was to manage a set of chronic problems endemic in countries of “lower culture.” Acute dangers in countries of “higher culture” evidently worried them less. They did not anticipate the ways in which the Nazi takeover in Germany the day following Wischnitzer’s speech would undermine not only the position of German Jewry but the entire set of strategies the internationally-focused Jewish organizations had developed for preserving the physical and material security of Jews worldwide.

In the event, Jews everywhere were shocked both by the Nazis’ ability to dismantle the Weimar Republic and by the assaults upon Jews that accompanied the process. “In one week the Germans have moved backward a hundred years,” wrote Polish Jewish journalist Natan Szwalbe on 5 March 1933, “testify[ing] to the absurdity of assumptions” that the German people would not permit such a retreat.Footnote ³⁴ Alfred Berl appears to have retreated from that assumption already in April, when he wrote, recasting his words of the previous May, that the new regime had “put the Jewish population outside the community, outside the law, [and by doing so] does not hesitate to put itself outside humanity.”Footnote ³⁵ Berl now saw German Jews facing a “war of extermination.”Footnote ³⁶ Stephen S. Wise, president of the American Jewish Congress, also spoke about an imminent “economic extermination” of German Jewry at the hands of an implacable government.Footnote ³⁷ Suddenly German Jews appeared throughout the Jewish world to be confronting a more alarming prognosis than any of their fellow Jews farther east.Footnote ³⁸ More ominously, “higher culture” itself now seemed a broken reed, together with the liberal order it had supported. “Jews who only yesterday thought themselves full citizens with equal rights have today been humiliated and degraded to the level of homeless dogs,” wrote Jakub Wygodzki, former minister of Jewish affairs in Lithuania and member of the Polish parliament, in the wake of the Nazi takeover. Hence, he reasoned, “Jews [in every country] who today think themselves fully equal citizens are liable tomorrow … to slide into the same abyss of suffering and despair as German Jews.” In their attack upon the Jews of their country, he warned, the Nazis had assaulted the foundations of Jewish security everywhere: “The fate of our unfortunate brothers in Germany is accordingly not their problem alone; it is of concern to all of us.”Footnote ³⁹ In short, the danger there now appeared not only acute but deadly, and, if not addressed forcefully and at once, it was liable to exacerbate the chronic peril facing Jews to the east.

A proximate result of this perception was a radical reordering of Jewish organizational priorities. The JDC, for one, decided to redirect the lion’s share of its distributions to Germany. Between 1920 and 1933, JDC allocations to Poland had exceeded disbursements in Germany by a factor of 13, or 2.5 times more per capita.Footnote ⁴⁰ By contrast, in 1934 German Jews received six times more dollars from the organization than did Polish Jews, forty-two times more per capita.Footnote ⁴¹ Hitherto German Jewry had been a modest net donor of philanthropic funds; now it was the Jewish world’s largest recipient. In 1936, German Jewry’s central organization, the Reichsvertretung der deutschen Juden, depended upon contributions of some 2.4 million RM (approximately $1 million) from Jewish organizations abroad for supporting education, social welfare, and emigration. The amount constituted nearly 60 percent of its total budget. Berlin-based organizations such as the Hilfsverein and ORT, whose attention had been concentrated on east European Jews, now devoted their efforts to vocational training and emigration assistance for Jews in Germany.Footnote ⁴²

Jewish organizations also moved German Jews to the head of the emigration queue. Advocates spoke of Jews departing Germany as “refugees,” in contrast to east European Jews, who continued to be dubbed “emigrants.” In early spring 1933, the JDC, the Alliance, the Board of Deputies of British Jews, and the Jewish Colonization Association began to pool resources for refugee assistance.Footnote ⁴³ The refugee designation helped bring the plight of German Jews to the attention of the League of Nations, thanks largely to a group of New York Jews and non-Jews mobilized by the American Jewish Congress and the American Jewish Committee, who began in mid 1933 to press the League to create a new High Commission for Refugees coming from Germany.Footnote ⁴⁴ At the same time, the Jewish Agency for Palestine worked with the British mandatory authorities to increase the number and the proportion of immigration certificates for German Jews.Footnote ⁴⁵ These moves helped push the number of Jewish emigrants from Germany to more than double the number from Poland in 1933. Although the numerical gap narrowed during the following three years, the rate of Jewish migration from Germany between 1933 and 1936 exceeded the rate from Poland ten-fold.Footnote ⁴⁶

Jewish political efforts in the international arena, too, came to focus entirely on restraining the actions of the Nazi government. Germany was not governed by a minorities protection treaty, but a 1922 German–Polish treaty regarding Upper Silesia guaranteed legal equality for all residents of the Prussian-ruled province, potentially barring it from enforcing anti-Jewish legislation there. In May 1933, the Comité des Délégations petitioned the League of Nations to declare the Nazi laws null and void, if only in the small territory in question. The petition and the subsequent debate in the League Council generated much condemnation of Germany’s policies and actions toward Jews, leading the German government to restore legal equality in the province.Footnote ⁴⁷

The intense focus on German Jewry arguably helped a significant part of that community gain temporary respite from persecution. In the rest of the Jewish world, by contrast, it helped turn the distress of much larger communities from chronic to acute, while leaving them with dwindling possibilities for improving their situation. Poverty, already a defining feature of the region from which Jewish philanthropic assistance was being diverted, only grew. By 1937, 38 percent of Jews in Białystok and 40 percent in Łódź depended entirely upon local communal assistance for their support, even as the means for assistance dwindled.Footnote ⁴⁸ Following a visit to Poland in 1936 on behalf of the JDC, writer Scholem Asch reported that “every second person was undernourished, skeletons of skin and bones, crippled, candidates for the grave.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Polish Jews trying to escape impending starvation through emigration found themselves competing, usually unsuccessfully, with German Jews both for Jewish and for international attention. Whereas the Jewish population of Germany fell by some 20 percent between 1933 and 1936, in Poland emigration failed to offset the natural increase, and the Jewish population continued to rise.Footnote ⁵⁰ Between 1933 and 1938 France took in Jewish refugees from Germany at between twice and eight times that of Jewish emigrants from Poland.Footnote ⁵¹ After 1937 the absolute number of Jews entering Palestine from German-controlled areas increasingly exceeded entrants from Poland.Footnote ⁵² Emigration possibilities to that country had become even scarcer beginning in 1936, as Britain, facing violent protests from Palestinian non-Jews alarmed that the country’s Jewish population had doubled since the Nazi accession, severely curtailed Jewish entry. The place that in 1935 had taken in 80 percent of Poland’s 30,700 Jewish emigrants saw the number fall to fewer than 9,000 emigrants two years later.Footnote ⁵³ In 1939, only 1,444 Jews from Poland entered Palestine, under 10 percent of all Jews who migrated there in that year.Footnote ⁵⁴

Focusing attention upon Germany also appears to have complicated the situation of Jews elsewhere. A month after the Upper Silesia decision by the League of Nations, Germany withdrew from the League, leaving the international body with no lever for influencing it. Emboldened by the Nazi move, Poland unilaterally renounced its obligations under its minorities treaty the following year. In 1937 the German–Polish treaty on Upper Silesia expired, and the province’s Jews lost whatever advantage over their fellows in the rest of Germany they had temporarily enjoyed. By that time, the strategy of seeking international protection for Jewish interests seemed defunct even to its most ardent erstwhile advocates. When a World Jewish Congress finally convened in 1936, one of the new organization’s architects, Nahum Goldmann, admitted that international guarantees remained “only on paper.” He termed the belief in their efficacy “prehistoric.”Footnote ⁵⁵

Initially much of east European Jewry had been prepared to give the German situation priority. In 1933 Polish Jewish leaders actively supported a worldwide boycott of German goods, to the point where for months Warsaw’s two leading Yiddish-language dailies ran a banner headline calling upon readers not to buy German products. The leaders did so even though many Jewish merchants did business with Germany. Evidently, they expected that economic pressure would quickly bring the Nazi regime to its knees, allowing Jewish resources to flow once again in their direction.Footnote ⁵⁶ When their expectation was frustrated, so were they. “It is clear to us,” complained Polish Jewish labor leader Anshel Reiss in 1938, “that what is going on among the Jewish public outside Poland is a great danger for the Jews of Poland,” who have been forgotten altogether in the false belief that German Jews faced greater danger.Footnote ⁵⁷ Reiss believed dictatorship was imminent in Poland, more dangerous for the Jews even than the Nazi regime, “because here we are dealing with a population that does not possess the cultural discipline to be found there.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Already in 1936, Poland’s prime minister had licensed an “economic struggle” against Polish Jewry with a mind to pushing a million or more Jews out of the country in short order. During the same year, an organized boycott movement in Poland began to use physical force to keep Christians away from Jewish shops.Footnote ⁵⁹ Between 1935 and 1937, Jews in dozens of cities and smaller towns throughout the country fell victim to violent attack by bloodthirsty crowds.Footnote ⁶⁰ Many Jewish observers in the country interpreted these phenomena as a reflection of growing Nazi influence within Poland itself.Footnote ⁶¹ What is certain is that key figures within the Polish government looked to Germany’s treatment of Jews as a model for achieving their own policy objectives. In December 1938, one month after Kristallnacht, a British Foreign Office official reported a warning from Poland’s Ambassador in London that if the international community did not “tackle … Poland’s Jewish problem” by facilitating mass emigration, “the Polish Government would inevitably be forced to adopt the same kind of policy as the German Government, and indeed to draw closer to that Government in its general policy.”Footnote ⁶²

By that time Romania, Hungary, and Italy had already done so, restricting Jews’ civil rights and curtailing their presence in key economic and cultural sectors in accordance with Nazi models. That Italy had taken such a course confounded many Jewish observers who had hitherto believed that that country’s “higher culture” immunized it against the propensity of east European fascist regimes to strip Jews of their legal equality.Footnote ⁶³ The “amazement and consternation” they expressed was compounded by the inroads hostility toward Jews appeared to have made in other western lands. In mid 1939 the American Jewish Committee warned that during the past year “the activities of Jew-baiting groups and persons not only increased … but were brought out into the open more than ever before.”Footnote ⁶⁴ It attributed the phenomenon largely to insidious Nazi influence in the USA. Such anxieties had actually been brewing among American Jews and those in Europe for several years, moving Jewish organizations to turn their attention increasingly to their own domestic situation.Footnote ⁶⁵ In short, between 1933 and 1939, the bodies looking out for the welfare of world Jewry found their resources spread ever more thinly across a wider area, as a result of the interlocking, cascading effects of the Nazi takeover.

In September 1933, Polish Jewish leader Ozjasz Thon ventured that world Jewry possessed the resources necessary for defeating the Nazi threat: “We [Jews] number 16 million,” he wrote, “and we are not without … weapons.” To his mind, one of the greatest weapons was the Jewish people’s ability to move material assets across a network of international connections that were “well sewn together.” In the coming struggle against Nazism, he warned, Jewish “losses may be many and painful, but our solid core is able to withstand all blows.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Six years later the Nazi onslaught had left the network in tatters, well before the regime conceived of mass murder on a continent-wide scale. Two days following Germany’s invasion of Poland, Cyrus Adler, a key figure in the American Jewish Committee and JDC, threw up his hands in desperation: “Our business is to protect Jews and Jewish rights wherever they are assaulted, and in time of war nobody has ever been able to do this.”Footnote ⁶⁷