Jewish Masculinity in the Holocaust

Jewish Masculinity in the Holocaust Anna-Madeleine Halkes Carey Student No. 100643952 Royal Holloway, University of London PhD Thesis Declaration of Authorship I, Anna-Madeleine Halkes Carey, hereby declare that this thesis and the work presented in it are entirely my own. Where I have consulted the work of others, this is always clearly stated. Signed: Date: 2 Abstract This thesis considers the prevailing historical representation of Jewish masculinity in Holland, Belgium, France and Poland during the Holocaust and asks to what extent it is an accurate reflection of the source material available. Having concluded that such scholarship as exists on the subject is inherently flawed, my thesis will attempt to consider exactly how it might more accurately be represented. Beginning with a broad understanding of theories of masculinity and discussions of Jewish gender my thesis will lay out a clear approach both to the study of masculinity and to the questions and key features of Jewish masculinity in the interwar period in Europe. Treating the period largely chronologically, this thesis will then go on to its substantive research, looking at the sources, contemporary and modern, written both by survivors and those who died during the Holocaust, to attempt to determine the impact of persecution upon several elements of male gender identity, specifically, conformity to normative identities, the impact of gendered environments and , finally, more individual elements of masculinities. Ultimately, this thesis will argue that whilst Jewish masculinities were severely damaged in the initial phases of persecution, particularly due to an environment which was gendered feminine and the near impossibility of practising normative gender identities, the period of enclosure, and particularly ghettoisation, which followed was one in which many men were, within reason, able to reassert clear masculine identities. Finally, my thesis will conclude by considering the role of fatherhood and father-son relationships in the Holocaust and what this can tell us about generations within masculinity and the impact of fatherhood on the masculine identity of the individual. 3 Table of Contents Title Page p.1 Declaration of Authorship p.2 Abstract p.3 Table of Contents p.4 Acknowledgement p.5 Introduction p.6 Methodology p.14 Chapter 1 – Masculinity in Theory p.37 Chapter 2 – Jewish Masculinity in Practice on the Eve of the Holocaust p.53 Jewish Masculinity in the Holocaust p.74 Chapter 3 – Jewish Masculinity in Crisis: the beginnings of Holocaust persecution and the deconstruction of male gender identities p.76 Chapter 4 – The Reassertion of Jewish Masculinity: ghettoisation, enclosure and the destruction of European Jewry p.118 Chapter 5 – Fatherhood: filial respect and parenting as a sustaining force in gender identity p.168 Conclusion p.203 Bibliography p.207 4 Acknowledgements First, I am indebted to my supervisor Dan Stone, who has taught and supervised me for over 9 years. For all of his suggestions, the ones that I listened to and the ones that I, perhaps ill-advisedly, ignored, for his extremely speedy reading of numerous drafts of varying quality, for his honest feedback and for his support through the travails of pregnancy, sleep deprivation which seemed to rid me of the capacity to remember names, part-time study and footnoting, I am truly grateful. To many others who taught me history throughout my lengthy tenure as a student, perhaps most importantly, Jinty Nelson, Stephen Lovell, Ian Wood and John Seabrook, I also owe a debt of gratitude. Secondly, I am extremely grateful to Royal Holloway, particularly the Holocaust Research Centre which found my proposal interesting enough to fund, the Friendly Hand Society, which funded a research trip to Paris, and Laura Clayton, a friend and colleague who helped me get through it all, unpaid maternity and my fourth year particularly, still in the black. Also sources of funding, my gratitude goes particularly to the Rothschild Foundation and the Vilnius Yiddish Institute, who not only jointly supported me through a month of sun, potato pancakes and diphthongs in Lithuania learning Yiddish, but, most importantly, enabled me to spend time with the incredible, humbling, Yiddish community of Vilna and their music. Many libraries and archives also made my thesis possible, and I am equally grateful to the staff of the Wiener Library, the British Library, Le Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine in Paris, The Imperial War Museum and the Shoah Foundation. To my friends and family I owe a great deal more than I can repay, but I hope this acknowledgement can be a start. In no particular order: Alex Fairfax who has heard me talk more about my thesis than anyone ought to have to and his family who offered me their wonderful hospitality in a time of need, Julie Stoll who showed me that I had grown up, friends who have heard me talk about the thesis endlessly, and those who have helped me not to (big Nancy that is you), the wonderful mothers who have assisted me, through the medium of tea, food, quiz nights and laughter, in finding the will to combine studying the Holocaust with parenthood and lastly my family and in-laws, too many to mention by name but more important that I can ever say. And so to the final few. Matthew, my theoretical support when my brain baulked. My incredible father, not only the inspiration of this thesis as a man and parent, but my tireless proofreader, to whom I owe so much. My Nancy, who makes me smile everywhere, forever. And very finally Simon. Thanks are nowhere near enough to match the ceaseless support, belief, encouragement, comfort and love which he has offered and without which I could never have completed this thesis, but I humbly offer them, nonetheless. 5 Introduction In spite of burgeoning academic interest in the history of modern masculinity, a small but detailed understanding of Jewish masculinity, and an established body of work relating to gender in the Holocaust, the question of Jewish masculinity during the Holocaust is one that has barely been considered by historians. No systematic attempt has been made to analyse the impact of humiliation, ghettoisation and genocide on the gender identities of the Jewish men who experienced them, and whilst some conclusions have nevertheless been drawn, little attention has been paid to the detail of such a question including the role of men in the home and in public, the significance of fatherho od and parenting, and the multiple and diverse masculinities practised by Jewish men in this period. It is this gap in the scholarship that my thesis will begin to fill, considering the impact of persecution on the masculinities of Jewish men in Poland, France, Belgium and Holland during the Holocaust: a carefully chosen range which is both broad enough to allow me to draw useful conclusions concerning gender identities and limited enough in scope to form a manageable research project. The starting point for this thesis must necessarily be the small body of work which, whilst not considering in detail the gender identities of men in this period, nonetheless draws clear conclusions concerning the negative gender implications of loss of work, problems of supporting one's family, and the consequent slide into depression. However, not only are these conclusions extremely perfunctory and reliant on limited research, but, perhaps more significantly, they have been drawn in the service of another master. Written predominantly by historians whose primary interest lies in understanding the impact of the Holocaust on Jewish female gender identity, much of what we know about Jewish masculinity is no more than a corollary of important and successful attempts to show the significant role that Jewish women played in enabling families and communities to endure and survive the Holocaust. And whilst titles do sometimes suggest a more balanced approach to the study of gender in the Holocaust, in most cases for ‘gender’ it would be fair to read ‘women’. This is particularly clear in the case of Judith Baumel’s work Double Jeopardy: Gender and the Holocaust which, in spite of this ungendered title, notes in the introduction: “Gender and the Holocaust complements the existing 6 literature by presenting a volume of historical essays illuminating the factors which shaped the lives of Jewish women during and after the Holocaust.” 1 Whilst I quibble over neither the importance of women’s actions during the Holocaust, nor the negative results of unemployment and persecution on Jewish men,2 the relative neglect of male gender history in the Holocaust has had several consequences. First, it has led to the marginalisation of the male experience, for example when Heinemann references women particularly as being “doubly damned,” since they were attacked both as Jews and as women, she appears to ignore the significant ways in which men were equally “doubly damned.”3 This lack of consideration of Jewish men must necessarily lead the historian to question her other conclusions about men and their behaviour, including her attribution to Jewish men of a greater tendency to diminish and exert power over the weak when she writes, “[w]hat has been described as a universal adoption by inmates of Nazi values of domination of the weak is apparently much less true for women than for men in memoirs.”4 Not dissimilarly Tec, who has much to say about the male experience of the Holocaust, writes that, “Jewish mothers had often to experience the unimaginable pain of watching their children starve to death.”5 That she seems to consider this pain specific to women is problematic not only because it directly contradicts the work of Raul Hilberg, who suggests that in general men took the deaths of children and family harder than women, but because it does not seem to be based on any particular research.6 1 Judith Tydor Baumel, Double Jeopardy: Gender and the Holocaust (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 1998), p.x.

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