Jews and Germans in Eastern Europe New Perspectives on Modern Jewish History
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Jews and Germans in Eastern Europe New Perspectives on Modern Jewish History Edited by Cornelia Wilhelm Volume 8 Jews and Germans in Eastern Europe Shared and Comparative Histories Edited by Tobias Grill An electronic version of this book is freely available, thanks to the support of libra- ries working with Knowledge Unlatched. KU is a collaborative initiative designed to make high quality books Open Access. More information about the initiative can be found at www.knowledgeunlatched.org ISBN 978-3-11-048937-8 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-049248-4 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-048977-4 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial NoDerivatives 4.0 License. For details go to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Grill, Tobias. Title: Jews and Germans in Eastern Europe : shared and comparative histories / edited by/herausgegeben von Tobias Grill. Description: [Berlin] : De Gruyter, [2018] | Series: New perspectives on modern Jewish history ; Band/Volume 8 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018019752 (print) | LCCN 2018019939 (ebook) | ISBN 9783110492484 (electronic Portable Document Format (pdf)) | ISBN 9783110489378 (hardback) | ISBN 9783110489774 (e-book epub) | ISBN 9783110492484 (e-book pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Jews--Europe, Eastern--History. | Germans--Europe, Eastern--History. | Yiddish language--Europe, Eastern--History. | Europe, Eastern--Ethnic relations. | BISAC: HISTORY / Jewish. | HISTORY / Europe / Eastern. Classification: LCC DS135.E82 (ebook) | LCC DS135.E82 J495 2018 (print) | DDC 947/.000431--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018019752 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston The book is published with open access at www.degruyter.com. Typesetting: Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com Contents Preface VII Shaul Stampfer Settling down in Eastern Europe 1 Jürgen Heyde Images and Narratives: Germans and Jews in the “Annales seu Cronicae incliti Regni Poloniae” of Jan Długosz 21 Zuzanna Krzemien Solomon Dubno, His Eastern European Scholarship, and the German Haskalah 46 Rachel Manekin From Johann Pezzl to Joseph Perl: Galician Haskalah and the Austrian Enlightenment 61 Marie Schumacher-Brunhes The Figure of the Daytsh in Yiddish Literature 72 Steffen Krogh Dos iz eyne vahre geshikhte … On the Germanization of Eastern Yiddish in the Nineteenth Century 88 Martina Niedhammer Codified Traditions? YIVO’s filologishe sektsye in Vilna and Its Relationship to German Academia 115 Tobias Grill “Pioneers of Germanness in the East”? Jewish-German, German, and Slavic Perceptions of East European Jewry during the First World War 125 Philipp Nielsen In the Defense of Germandom in the East: Jews and the Verein für das Deutschtum im Ausland, 1914 to 1935 160 VI Contents Marija Vulesica An Ambivalent Relationship: The Yugoslav Zionists and Their Perception of “Germanness,” Germany, and the German Jews at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century 177 Mariana Hausleitner Transformations in the Relationship between Jews and Germans in the Bukovina 1910–1940 199 Hannah Maischein The Historicity of the Witness: The Polish Relationship to Jews and Germans in the Polish Memory Discourse of the Holocaust 215 Kamil Kijek Aliens in the Lands of the Piasts: The Polonization of Lower Silesia and Its Jewish Community in the Years 1945–1950 234 References 257 Index 293 Preface In the last 25 years historiography has shifted its focus increasingly away from long-standing “methodological nationalism” and toward more transnational approaches and perspectives. These take an interest in relational aspects of history, moving beyond a hitherto prevalent concern for the history of the (European) nation state. However different such transnational approaches may: […] all share the conviction that historical and social processes cannot be apprehended and understood exclusively within customary, delineated spaces or containers, might they be states, nations, empires or regions. Consequently, all of these tools or perspectives stress the importance of the interaction and circulation of ideas, peoples, institutions or technologies across state or national boundaries and thus the entanglement and mutual influence of states, societies or cultures.1 Thus, transnational perspectives focus on the multi-directionality of cultural relationships and reflect the rejection of the previously prevailing method of historical comparison which investigates similarities and differences, conver- gences and divergences between independent units.2 Yet, we should be aware that it fundamentally limits scholarly insight to completely discard any compar- ative approach within transnational history. Rather, it “is the task of the future to better combine comparative and entanglement history,”3 as Jürgen Kocka and Heinz-Gerhard Haupt have stressed. One such transnational approach in historiography is the concept of shared or entangled history, which is closely related to the emergence of the New Imperial History.4 This approach concentrates first and foremost on interactions, depend- encies, and interdependencies between specific national, regional, ethnic, social, political or religious entities, but also on parallels, similarities and differ- ences. An entangled history approach particularly encompasses issues of cultural 1 Bernhard Struck, Kate Ferris and Jacques Revel, “Introduction: Space and Scale in Transna- tional History,” The International History Review 33 no. 4 (2011): 573–574; see also Akira Iriye (ed.), The Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History: From the Mid-19th Century to the Present Day (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), xviii. The Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History claims that transnational history deals with the “links and flows,” the “people, ideas, products, processes and patterns that operate over, across, through, beyond, above, under, or in-between polities and societies.” 2 On the method of comparison see Jürgen Kocka and Heinz-Gerhard Haupt, “Comparison and Beyond: Traditions, Scope, and Perspectives of Comparative History,” in Comparative and Trans- national History: Central European Perspectives and New Approaches, Heinz-Gerhard Haupt and Jürgen Kocka (eds.) (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009), 1–30. 3 Ibid., 21. 4 See Margrit Pernau, Transnationale Geschichte (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2011), 56. Open Access. © 2018 Tobias Grill, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110492484-201 VIII Preface borrowing, transfer or appropriation, such as when one group adopts or imitates certain ideas and cultural practices of another group, and adapts them according to their own specific needs.5 Insofar, to overcome former research interests in uni- directional “influences” of one culture on another, a general concern for cultural hybridity has gained much currency among scholars of culture, history, anthro- pology etc. However, it needs to be emphasized that processes of exchange and interaction between certain entities are regarded as highly ambivalent. According to Sebastian Conrad and Shalini Randeria, who devised the approach of entan- gled history, an increasing circulation of goods, people and ideas generates not only commonalities, but also demarcations and the desire for particularism, and the reification of dichotomic structures, which still dominate perceptions of history.6 Thus, entanglement is not only characterized by parallels, similarities, exchange, or appropriation, but also by differences, exclusion, and even perse- cution. Hence, historical acts of violence can also be interpreted as an entangled or shared history of perpetrators and victims. In general, the perspective of an entangled history should not neglect, as Klaus Kiran Patel warns, “the suppres- sion and subsiding, the diversion and destruction, the forgetting and fading of transnational relations.”7 One of these destructed and largely forgotten transnational, transcultural, or entangled relations is the history of Jews and Germans in Eastern Europe. For many centuries, both “groups”8 played a very significant role in Eastern Europe, a region which for a long time was dominated by the poly-ethnic and multi-con- fessional empires of Russia, the Habsburgs, the Ottomans and Prussia-Germany.9 According to Andreas Kappeler, who subdivides Eastern Europe into East Central, Eastern and South Eastern Europe, one of the three historical characteristics of 5 See Jürgen Kocka and Heinz-Gerhard Haupt, “Comparison and Beyond,” 19–20. 6 Sebastian Conrad and Shalini Randeria, “Einleitung: Geteilte Geschichte – Europa in einer postkolonialen Welt,” in Jenseits des Eurozentrismus. Postkoloniale Perspektiven in den Geschichts- und Kulturwissenschaften, Sebastian Conrad and Shalini Randeria (eds.) (Frankfurt/ Main-New York: Campus Verlag 2002), 17. 7 Klaus Kiran Patel, “Transnational History,” Europäische Geschichte Online (EGO) (Mainz: In- stitute of European History (IEG), 2010) http://www.ieg-ego.eu/patelk-2010-en, 14. 8 The use of the term groups in quotation marks confronts the tendency, observed by Rog- ers Brubaker, “to treat