Jewish Experiences during the Great Depression (1929-1934): An Introduction
After the First World War, the global economic crisis that broke out in 1929 must be considered the second “great seminal catastrophe” of the 20th century.1 The first catastrophe had led to the collapse of the old, largely dynastically ruled Europe and, in some countries, to revolutions. At the same time, the empires of the Habsburgs, Romanovs and Ottomans collapsed, not without triggering new wars after the Great War.2 From the remnants of these empires, new states were built, a process which was complicated by further conflicts, particularly regarding the treatment of minorities.
And yet the end of the war also triggered a surge of democratization in large parts of Europe.3 As the rights of minorities played a decisive role in the reorganization of Europe, these processes also benefited the Jewish populations of Europe, who were also actively involved in the democratic upheavals. However, the political upheavals in Europe also gave rise to counter-revolutionary movements and attempted coups, many of which were decidedly directed against the Jewish minority and were accompanied by an escalation of antisemitism on a previously unimaginable scale. Furthermore, during the brutal Russian Civil War, the Jewish populations were afflicted by an unprecedented level of antisemitism and violence.4 The end of the Civil War in Russia subsequently gave rise to a new Bolshevik power, which in turn increased the intensity of antisemitic forces in other countries. This not only led to a new quality of physical violence against Jews on the part of counter-revolutionary movements, but also to an intensification of fundamentalist antisemitism. During this phase, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, compiled in pre-war Russia, were distributed internationally through numerous translations. At the same time, victory of the Bolsheviks in the Russian Civil War led to the development of the new stereotype of “Jewish Bolshevism.”5
However, both the counter-revolutionary movements and the antisemitic acts of violence could be contained. The early post-war crises were overcome. The social situation of Jews in Europe improved, as did their legal situation, not least due to a new minority-protection regime. Jews were able to participate more and more in public life and political culture. In many cases, the last occupational barriers and legal restrictions were also lifted. In some countries, they were even able to elect their own members of parliament to represent specifically Jewish interests. This development reinforced the renaissance of Jewish culture in Europe which, according to Martin Buber, had already begun at the turn of the century.6
With the global Great Depression and the ensuing social upheavals and political and moral disruptions, the cautious beginnings of democratization, including the new openness towards the Jewish minorities, which still varied from country to country, collapsed.
The rapid rise in unemployment had profound socio-psychological consequences. The Great Depression led to despair, dejection, and fear of the future in almost all European countries. Social inequalities and political conflicts increased. The economic crisis became a political crisis. In many cases, politicians responded helplessly, sometimes exacerbating the problems through their actions. In many parts of Europe, there was a loss of trust in the political class and the establishment. Authoritarian political styles found widespread favor. Distrust of fellow human beings and suspiciousness of any ways of life that could be regarded as deviant emerged. In addition to this, political violence broke out once more, accompanied by street terror, which in turn fueled fears of civil war and revolution in parts of bourgeois society. The immediate consequence was a renewed rise in antisemitic movements in Europe.
The extensive literature on the Great Depression has mostly focused on the industrialized countries, too often neglecting the fact that the Great Depression had existential consequences for the agricultural states, especially in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, whose economies largely depended on agricultural exports and were thus shattered by the global collapse of agricultural prices.7
In Germany (and elsewhere in Europe), the massive collapse in prices on the New York Stock Exchange on 24 October 1929 hardly affected the broader public mood.8 In the spring of 1930, however, perceptions changed, especially as the global dimensions of the depression became increasingly apparent. At the same time, the political conflicts in Europe intensified, leading to the rise of the hitherto small splinter party NSDAP in Germany. Its success in turn led the old ruling class in Germany to accept this party into the government. The National Socialists soon seized all state power and smashed the republic. Armed with the power of the state, they gradually set about realizing their antisemitic delusions. The Great Depression alone paved the way for them.
In contrast to the Jewish experiences during the First World War, which has been the subject of numerous studies since the commemorative year 2014 at the latest,9 the lives of Jews during the Great Depression have hardly ever been the object of scholarly inquiries. Although the rise of anti-democratic, authoritarian and often antisemitic movements in Europe as a direct consequence of the Great Depression has been widely analyzed in Jewish studies, there has been little research into the experiences of the Jewish population in Europe during the Great Depression and its consequences. As is evident not least in memoirs and testimonies, the memories of this were completely overshadowed by the Shoah.10
An exception is the comprehensive study on the experience of New York Jews during the Great Depression by Beth S. Wenger.11 Especially after the collapse of the Bank of the United States in December 1930, where a large number of New York Jews had kept their savings accounts, confidence in the future was shattered.12 Among young Jews in particular, optimistic expectations evaporated, and they began to look to their future with concern. Within families, however, Wenger shows that women in particular helped to overcome the crisis by adapting their household management. Young unemployed Jews, in turn, went to school for longer, thus paving the way for later upward mobility and success. The adoption of the language of the New Deal in turn promoted future cooperation with the Democratic Party.13
References to the Great Depression in Jewish Encyclopedias and Handbooks
How little attention Jewish historiography has given to the impact of the Great Depression on the everyday lives of Jews in Europe is evident in the relevant handbooks and encyclopedias. The Encyclopaedia Judaica chapters on the two great nations of the West, France and Great Britain (or England), do not address the issue at all. 14 Neither does the chapter on Austria mention the economic situation of Austrian Jewry in the interwar period. The keywords Bulgaria and Yugoslavia, to name two further examples, merely indicate the population figures in the 1930s, but neither the economic activity of the Jews nor the economic slumps.15
The country chapters in the Handbook on the History of the Jews in Europe also refer to this aspect in brief phrases at best.16 Esther Benbassa, for instance, only mentions in passing the “economic difficulties caused by the Great Depression of 1929” in France.17 If country chapters do mention the Great Depression, they tend to refer to the fact that it led to a rise in antisemitism. Renate G. Fuchs-Mansfeld writes about the devastating effects of the economic crisis in the Netherlands, but only mentions it to refer to the government’s attempts to “stem the flow of German-Jewish refugees” after 1933.18 According to Wilfried Jilge, Jewish-Latvian relations “were not free of tensions during the Great Depression.”19 As Ezra Mendelsohn shows in his fundamental study on the Jewish minorities in Central Europe in the interwar period, the economic decline of Eastern European Jewry in the interwar period resulted in an intensification of antisemitism.20
The Encyclopaedia of Jewish History and Culture also occasionally refers to the consequences of the Great Depression for the Jews.21 In France, according to Pierre Birnbaum, the Great Depression increased support for the Popular Front led by the Jewish socialist Leon Blum.22 As Marcos Silber emphasizes in the keyword “Profession,” the depression affected Jewish entrepreneurs and workers as well as Jews in the liberal professions in the same way as the corresponding professional groups from the non-Jewish population.23 In Vilnius, the Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institute, established in 1925 as an interdisciplinary research institute on the past and present of the Jews of Eastern Europe, ran into financial difficulties as a result of the global economic crisis, as Samuel D. Kassow shows.24 According to Peter Jelavich, the economic collapse led to a politicization of Viennese cabaret.25In the United States of America, too, the Great Depression had devastating consequences for the Jewish population. The Encyclopaedia of Jewish History and Culture refers occasionally to these experiences. For instance, the political and social uncertainties caused by the crisis led to the politicization of musical productions in the USA, which had previously been rather apolitical. As Theresa Eisele shows, George Gershwin’s socially critical musical Strike Up the Band, for example, achieved great success on Broadway three years later after initial failures in 1927. 26 Conversely, according to Nina Warnke, the crisis contributed to the decline of Yiddish theatre in America.27 The designer Lucian Bernhard, professor of advertising at the Museum of Decorative Arts in Berlin, who emigrated to the USA in 1932 and had previously already spent substantial time in the USA as a successful advertising designer for American companies, initiated the founding of a company for industrial design in New York in 1928, which, according to Ori Z. Soltes, ceased its activities the following year due to the global economic crisis.28 Not only in America, but also in Australia, Jewish communities suffered from the Great Depression, as Kay Dreyfus and Jon Stratton have stressed in the case of Melbourne.29
In order to conclude the section on references to the Great Depression in Jewish historiography, the following section will summarize remarks on Germany, as well as on Poland and Romania, especially as these two latter countries in particular, which will be discussed further below, have remained a blank space in this “Focus” of Quest 26.
In the case of Germany, the rise of the NSDAP is widely described in general accounts of the history of the Jews in the wake of the Great Depression, but the consequences of the economic collapse for the everyday lives of Jews before 1933 are rarely analyzed. The keyword “Germany” does appear in the Encyclopaedia Judaica, but it refers to the economic crisis resulting from the hyperinflation of 1923.30 In the four-volume Deutsch-jüdische Geschichte in der Neuzeit, published on behalf of the Leo Baeck Institute, Avraham Barkai devotes a section to the topic in his chapter on demography and economic development in the Weimar Republic.31 In the Encyclopaedia of Jewish History and Culture, Michael Brenner points out in the section on the Academy of Jewish Sciences, founded in Berlin in 1919, that its decline began with the Great Depression.32 In the entry on Jewish historiography, he adds that the joint study of a Jewish global history in several volumes, planned by the Academy and Ismar Elbogen, also failed due to the depression.33 The Deutsch-Israelitischer Gemeindebund, founded during the period of national unification, whose task was also to help organize the relief work of the Jewish communities, lost most of its assets during the Great Depression and had to cease its activities after 1930, according to Andreas Reinke.34 According to Johannes Wachten, the free school founded by the Jewish community in Frankfurt am Main in 1804, the Philanthropin, also had to lay off some teachers due to the strained community finances caused by the global economic crisis, until the kindergarten was closed in 1930 and the women’s school in 1932.35 In their contribution on the diary of Anne Frank, Raphael Gross and Laura Robertson stress that the Frankfurt headquarters of her father’s bank fell into crisis during the Great Depression.36
For Poland, the corresponding entry in the Encyclopaedia Judaica refers rather vaguely to the “economic collapse of Polish Jewry” after the First World War, but not to the Great Depression.37 Jerzy Tomaszewski, on the other hand, stresses that it was Poznań, Poland’s most economically developed region, that was most severely affected by the crisis. Jewish peddlers emigrated. Growing poverty increased the demand for cheap goods of poor quality. As a result, the large trading companies made heavy losses.38 The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, on the other hand, states in the keyword “Warsaw” that, on the one hand, the city’s economic problems in the new Polish state were exacerbated by the economic crisis, but that Warsaw was nevertheless able to maintain its leading position as the most important center of Yiddish book printing.39 Łódź also experienced the interwar period as an era of worsening economic difficulties, which was linked to the consequences of the Great Depression.40 According to Gertrud Pickhan’s entry in the Encyclopaedia of Jewish History and Culture about the General Jewish Workers’ Union, Bund, founded in 1897, the pauperization and proletarianization of the Jewish population in Poland, resulting from the Great Depression, directly benefited the Bund, making it the strongest political force among Polish Jews in the 1930s. This was reflected not only in the increase in membership numbers, but also in the election results for city councils and municipal councils.41 As Katrin Steffen stresses in her entry on the Polish parliament, the Sejm, the cause of the catastrophic situation of Polish Jews due to the Great Depression lay in the credit, financial and economic policies of the Polish government.42 In the Handbuch zur Geschichte der Juden in Europa, Heiko Haumann also wrote of the “proletarianization” of Polish Jews in the 1930s, but above all he notes a renewed flare-up of antisemitism due to the global depression.43 In his account of the situation of the Jews of East Central Europe in the interwar period for Poland, Ezra Mendelsohn notes that the triumph of nationalism in the interwar period was exacerbated by the Great Depression and dashed any hope of Polish Jewry for an improvement of their already miserable economic situation.44 The global economic crisis hit Poland with full force in 1929 and intensified the effects of economic antisemitism.45 Even though the entire Polish population became impoverished in the 1930s, it became apparent that not only Polish Jewish youth had “no future” in the country, but that the entire Jewish community was in danger.46 The most striking aspect of the economic crisis was the decline in the number of Jewish-owned businesses. Ezra Mendelsohn quotes a contemporary study by the Jewish economist Menakhem Linder, who analyzed the situation of Jewish-owned businesses in eleven towns in the Białystok region between 1932 and 1937. According to his findings, there were 663 Jewish-owned shops in these towns in 1932, which accounted for 92.0 per cent of the total number of shops. In 1937, there were only 563 shops, which corresponded to 64.5 per cent.47
For Romania, the Encyclopaedia Judaica does provide a picture of the occupational composition of the Jewish population, and the article also mentions the importance of Jewish banks for the Romanian economy, but the consequences of the economic crisis for the country are not explained.48 Raphael Vago merely points out in passing that the economic crisis primarily affected the Jewish minority in those parts of the country where their share of the population was high. Overall, however, the situation of Jews and non-Jews was similar.49 In his contribution to the Handbook on the History of Jews in Europe, Avram Andrei Baleanu emphasizes the increased antisemitic agitation in the wake of the crisis, which he interprets as a “diversionary manoeuvre” in the face of “rising unemployment.”50 According to Hildrun Glass, the number of members of Jewish credit co-operatives, which had been rebuilt in Romania after the end of the First World War with the help of loans from the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, had risen sharply in the 1920s. As a result of the Great Depression, however, this number fell by a third.51 According to Ezra Mendelsohn, the Jewish population of Romania—as in other Eastern European countries—was primarily engaged in trade. But within the new Romania, the socio-economic situation of Romanian Jews differed considerably in the various parts of the country. In Bessarabia and Bukovina, the predominantly impoverished Jewish population played a strong role in trade, crafts and the liberal professions. In Moldavia, they were active in trade and industry, while in Wallachia, where the Jewish population was much smaller, there was a significant Jewish bourgeoisie, especially in Bucharest, and several wealthy Jewish banking families resided there.52 In an article on Bucharest Jewry, Felicia Waldman points out that the global economic crisis in Romania reached its peak in 1931, when one of Romania’s most important banks, the Marmorosch Blank Bank owned by the Jewish banker Aristide Blank, had to file for bankruptcy.53
Overall, it can be said that the Jewish experience of the Great Depression remains rather unexplored in Jewish historiography.
Contemporary Coverage in the German-Jewish Press
Contemporary Jewish observers, on the other hand, had a very keen sense of the effects of the economic crisis on everyday Jewish life and life in the Jewish communities. The German-Jewish press reported on this time and again. At the same time, the commentaries showcase the diversity and contradictory nature of Jewish assessments of the crisis, even if they were united in emphasizing the effects.
In December 1930, the organ of liberal Judaism, the Central-Vereins-Zeitung, reported on a lecture at a conference of Jewish youth organizations in Nuremberg on the question: “What is to become of our youth?” The starting point of the lecture was the Great Depression, which, according to the report, “was having a particularly catastrophic effect on young German Jews.”54 Just one month later, the paper printed a longer, two-page article by journalist and Berliner Tageblatt employee Günther Stein55 on unemployment and the fate of the Jews.56 According to Stein, it was crucial to recognize the economic causes of unemployment and the structure of “Jewry, which is also affected by it, from an economic perspective.” Judaism had a share in the extent of the “overt or covert misery that was several times greater” as that of the German middle class as a whole. According to Stein, Jews were living “in a period of the crisis of capitalism,” which, after the “first great eruption” of the world war, has been exacerbated by a “new agglomeration of foreign policy and socio-political storm clouds.” “What does all this mean for the fate of the Jews?” Stein asked in conclusion: “Sad things, very sad things. Not only will they have to bear the great difficulties of the future together with the other parts of the German people, but their share of hardship and worry will obviously be much greater than the numerical weight of the Jewish group in the German national community.” The Jewish Society for the Promotion of Sciences (Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaft des Judentums) was also affected by the crisis in the 1930s.57 In January 1931, the community newspaper of the Jewish religious community in Leipzig reported on a meeting of the “Interest Group of the Jewish Unemployed” on the topic of “The global economic crisis and its impact on Judaism.” According to the article, “the daily increase in unemployment” had caused “ever greater panic among Jewish employees.”58 In the magazine Der Morgen. Monatsschrift der Juden in Deutschland, Leopold Merzbach, managing director of a Frankfurt banking house and expert witness in banking and financial matters in court, examined the issue from a macroeconomic perspective: “The economic situation must currently give the unbiased observer the impression of grotesque confusion.”59 The Vienna-based liberal journal Die Wahrheit. Unabhängige Zeitschrift für jüdische Interessen, quoted in May 1931 from an appeal by the “Central Commission for Social Welfare of the Jewish Community of Vienna,” which provided a “gripping picture of the immense economic hardship among Viennese Jews.”60 “Harrowing dramas of the most profound human suffering,” the appeal states, “play out daily in the rooms of the Vienna Jewish welfare center.” It concludes with an appeal for donations, because who “will want to stand idly by and watch in cold blood as Jewish livelihoods perish hopelessly and helplessly as a result of the catastrophic economic situation, and who can pass by the plight of our youth with indifference?”
In 1931, the economist and journalist Alfred Marcus published a sociological study on the economic crisis of German Jewry, in the foreword to which he stressed that a “strong trend towards the proletarianization of German Jewry” had become noticeable.61 However, while Marcus did not specifically address the consequences of 24 October 1929, Hubert Pollack, who had studied economics and philosophy at Berlin University and had been head of the Office for Statistics of Berlin’s Jewish community since 1930, emphasized in an article in the journal of the Cartel of Jewish Student Societies, Der jüdische Student: “We are in the midst of an economic crisis of German Jewry of a magnitude and with a catastrophic force that would have been inconceivable 20 years ago.”62
The Jewish-Zionist labor movement also followed the consequences of the Great Depression with particular attention. As the organ of the Zionist National Committee for Austria, Die Stimme, Jüdische Zeitung, reported, Berl Locker, born in Galicia and a member of the executive of the Zionist-socialist organization Poale Zion and the World Zionist Organization, gave a speech on the world economic crisis at the Vienna Congress of the Workers’ International, in which he spoke of the “process of declassification” that Jewry had undergone after the war. According to Locker, Jewish workers were therefore closely following the “phenomena of the world economic crisis.” They were therefore following the “efforts of the international proletariat to counter this world economic crisis with the means of class struggle with even greater hopes.”63 In the same month, the co-editor of Die Stimme, Leo Goldhammer, wrote at the beginning of a series of articles on the Jewish economic crisis that “the economic catastrophes occur earlier among the Jews and that the same causes trigger much stronger setbacks among them.”64 In November 1931, the Russian-born socialist journalist Israel Hellenberg, who lived in Austria, also wrote an article Die Stimme about the collapse of the Austrian Creditanstalt in May 1931. The world was “plunged into an unprecedented global economic crisis [...] which ultimately also dragged the banks down into its maelstrom.” According to Hellenberg, the first to suffer were Jewish bank employees.65
The journal of the Jewish social democratic workers’ organization Poale Zion, Der Jüdische Arbeiter (The Jewish Worker), struck an anti-capitalist note. On the fifth anniversary of the founding of the Austrian group, it stated that the global economic crisis had “worsened the situation of Jews throughout the capitalist world tremendously.” It “starkly demonstrates the inability of the bourgeoisie to regulate production.” The Jewish workers’ youth had to deal with economic issues because “capitalism is plunging the whole world into chaos.”66 In March 1932, Mendel Singer, who came from Brody, had been active in Poale Zion since 1907 and was elected to the board of the Jewish Community of Vienna in 1928, gave a speech on the Jewish community in the economic crisis, in which he explained that “the impoverishment and proletarianization” of Jewish youth was progressing inexorably. They were “in a much more desperate situation than their non-Jewish class brothers.”67
In March 1933, the editors of the Frankfurter Israelitisches Gemeindeblatt felt that the economic situation of the Jews was so threatening that they asked five authors of different political orientations to contribute articles on this topic.68 Kurt Wongtschowski, head of the German-Jewish hiking society Kameraden, which was committed to a “connection between Germanness and Judaism,”69 deplored both the “proletarianization of the middle class, to which the majority of German Jews belong” and the “urbanisation of German Jews.” Alex Benjamin, head of a Jewish labour register, pleaded for more attention to be paid to the issue of career choice and for Jewish careers advice to be improved. Edgar Gerson referred to Karl Marx and cited the Economic Card Index of the Jewish Community in Berlin (Wirtschaftskarthotek der Jüdischen Gemeinde in Berlin), which listed around 40,000 people in need of help, as evidence of the pauperisation of the Jewish population. For Gerson, however, “a return to bourgeois positions is no longer an option.” He called on the German Jews to spiritually draw closer to the proletariat and their struggle.
In June 1933, the General Secretary of the Association for Liberal Judaism in Germany and editor-in-chief of the Jüdisch-liberale Zeitung, George Goetz, saw the cause of the misery of Jews in Germany solely in the economic collapse. Fatalistically, he himself warned against emigration at this moment. The word emigration was circulating in Jewish newspapers, but, according to Goetz, this “magic word is a deception.”70 For the hardship, “from the effects of which the German people are suffering more than any other, has a very specific name: it is called the world economic crisis, with the stress on the first syllable.” To anyone who believed that “the new German Jewish problem could be solved by migration,” Goetz replied: “To put it in a nutshell: it cannot be done.” As late as November 1933, Herbert Kahn, who also wrote for the magazine Jüdische Wohlfahrtspflege und Sozialpolitik, saw a solution to the problems in his article for the Jüdisch-liberale Zeitung. One “root cause of the economic crisis [...] is the general illness of commercial enterprises, of individual companies. This can be cured.”71
The Zionist press followed the development of the global economic crisis and its consequences with particular attention. In July 1930, the Austrian-born supporter of Revisionist Zionism, who had lived mainly in Palestine since 1922, stated in a “Report from Palestine,” published in Die Stimme, that “the neighbouring countries of Palestine” had not been spared from the global economic crisis. But, he continued, “in Palestine one hardly feels anything of it.”72 As early as January of the following year, however, the same Zionist newspaper had to report: “The world economic crisis is also beginning to have a noticeable effect in Palestine.”73 A little later, the organ of the socialist Zionists also reported that the global economic crisis was “leading to economic stagnation and unemployment, too, albeit low” in Palestine.74 In September, however, Keren Hayesod, the founding fund for collecting donations and promoting immigration to Palestine, placed an advert in the Stimme: “The world economic crisis is threatening our work of reconstruction in Palestine” and called on all Zionists to make an “emergency donation.”75
The German-Jewish press was not only concerned with the situation in Germany, but also frequently reported on the situation in other European and American countries. In February 1931, the news of B’nai B’rith wrote about the plight of Jewish workers in the Antwerp diamond industry;76 in the same month, Die Wahrheit reported on a lecture on the Great Depression at a meeting of the Union of Democratic Jews in the small Polish town of Bielsko-Biała77, in which the speaker referred to the economic situation in Poland and the catastrophic situation of the Jewish population.78 Also in February 1931, the economist Gerhard Schacher opened a two-part detailed analysis in the magazine Der Morgen on the economic situation of the Jewish minorities in Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey, in which he described the economic development in south-eastern Europe in detail, but did not go into the consequences of the depression any further.79 Instead, in May 1931, Die Wahrheit printed the annual report of the Anglo-Jewish Association on the situation of Jews in Eastern and Central Europe, which emphasised the particular impact of the Great Depression on the Jews in these countries.80 In Poland in particular, it stated, “the unfavourable economic situation [...] has had catastrophic consequences.” And according to an interview the newspaper conducted with Hungarian Prime Minister Bethlen, the economic crisis had hit the Jews “harder than any other part of the population, as Jews are mainly active in trade, which suffers most in times of economic depression.”81 According to the Dresden Jewish community newspaper, the Association for the Promotion of Crafts, Industry and Agriculture among the Jews (Verband zur Förderung von Handwerk, Industrie und Landwirtschaft unter den Juden) held an event in November 1931 on the Jewish question in the context of the global economic crisis, at which the speaker Aron Singalowsky, Berlin board member of the association82, emphasised “that the process of loss of the Jewish middle class masses of Eastern Europe, which must be prevented, is a problem affecting the entire cultural world.”83 However, the German-Jewish press was not only interested in Eastern Europe, but also in America, as an article in the Jüdisch-liberale Zeitung in April 1933 shows. The global economic crisis had also left its mark on Argentina, “a country that is rich in itself.” Unemployment was also increasing there “to an alarming extent.”84 Finally, in 1935, the Orthodox Israelit published an article about Vilnius and Kaunas, which stated: “The economic situation of Lithuanian Jews has become quite critical in recent years under the impact of the global economic crisis.”85 In November 1936, Eva Reichmann-Jungmann described the desolate situation of Poland and Polish Jewry in Morgen. “Horrific mass misery” had gripped Poland and Polish Jewry, and because the “Jews are a minority, they are the first to be dragged down in the maelstrom of economic decline.”86
Simon Dubnow, who as the author of a world history of the Jewish people (completed in 1929) was very familiar with the lives of European Jews87, also closely followed the effects of the economic collapse in his diaries: “Economic crisis everywhere in Europe, terrible unemployment,”88 he noted in January 1930, and in February 1932 he added that the Great Depression had gripped the whole world.89
Even if the two contemporary sociological studies on the economic situation of the Jewish population in Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s mentioned in the newspapers did not address the Jewish experience and the socio-psychological effects of the Great Depression on German Jewry, the press coverage shows how accurately these were perceived in their time.90 After the Shoah, however, the memory of the Great Depression tended to be forgotten, and historically-minded Jewish studies did not take up this topic either.
The Conception of this “Focus”
If we acknowledge that the impact of the depression on European Jewry is underexplored, this is even more true in the case of the Jewish experiences of the depression in East Central Europe, where around 46% of the world’s Jewish population lived at the time.91 This is despite the fact that the impact of the Great Depression on the fragile sovereign states of this region was particularly harsh if compared to other parts of Europe.92 Apart from Czechoslovakia, all remaining democracies in the region were replaced by authoritarian regimes. Minority policies were increasingly reshaped through pressures from the extreme right. In Poland, the government’s right-ward turn led to tacit political support for economic boycotts of Jews.93 International influence on East Central Europe, epitomized by the League of Nations’ efforts of financial reconstruction, gave way to an aggressive Nazi policy of exerting economic hegemony over the region.94 In international historical scholarship, the Great Depression of Europe’s peripheries is gradually shifting back into focus.95 Hence, this special issue will focus on the experiences and perceptions of the Jewish population of East Central Europe during the Great Depression, which are represented here by two successor states of the Habsburg Empire (Czechoslovakia and Hungary) and two of the Russian Empire (Lithuania and Latvia). These four contributions provide fundamentally new insights into how Jews experienced the Great Depression in a region that had undergone—and was still undergoing—a profound geo-political, political, social, and economic transformation, as the Great War had reshaped statehood itself, but also the relationship between states and societies and between the national groups contained within these states.
In their article “The Great Depression and its Effect on Hungarian Jews,” Ágnes Katalin Kelemen and Péter Buchmüller put the focus on Jewish university students and lawyers. Through these case studies, they discern both direct and indirect consequences of the Great Depression on Hungary’s Jewry and reconstruct how far the Great Depression catalysed political antisemitism to enable the rise of far-right extremist politicians. Daniel Bartáková studies “Jewish News and Reflections on the Great Depression in Czechoslovakia” and argues that the crisis aggravated disparities between the industrialised Czech lands and rural Slovakia and Subcarpathian Rus, with significant implications for the Jewish minority more broadly. Through a close reading of the Zionist periodical Židovské Zprávy (Jewish News), Bartáková identifies how Jews made sense of both domestic and international events—e.g. in the case of Palestine—during the depression. In his contribution on “Jews and the Great Depression in Lithuania,” Klaus Richter zooms in on the impact of the depression on the relationship of Jews with both the Lithuanian majority population and with the Lithuanian state. His article argues that the depression reshaped the lives of Lithuanian Jews, dramatically transforming the predominantly Jewish towns economically, socially, and culturally. At the same time, the rise of the Nazis in Germany made Lithuanian Jews more dependent than ever on the existence of an independent Lithuania. Finally, Paula Opperman argues that Jews were disproportionately affected by the depression because of their strong representation in those economic sectors that were particularly hard hit. This was aggravated by increasingly exclusionary politics after the authoritarian coup of 1934. In her contribution, “The World Economic Crisis: Jewish Experiences and Responses in Latvia,” she also argues that Latvian Jews, who, for historical reasons, were a highly heterogenous group, responded to the depression with a sense of unity.
How little attention the depression has received in historical research to date is reflected in the editors’ difficulties to find authors for contributions to this issue, as well as in the cancellation of two essays that had already been promised shortly before the editorial deadline. These were intended to address to Poland and Romania, the two largest countries of East Central Europe, without which the Jewish history of the region remains incomplete. This leaves a serious gap. For this reason, the editors stress that this issue is merely a starting point and hope that it will inspire further research into other parts of the region and of Europe more broadly.
Concluding Remarks
A study on the situation of the Jewish minorities in Eastern Europe, commissioned by the World Jewish Congress and published shortly before the beginning of the Second World War, stated that “it is common knowledge that Jewish homes have suffered far more from the crisis than non-Jewish ones.” In Poland, the depression in the countryside had pushed peasants into predominantly Jewish towns, exacerbating unemployment and ethnic tensions. In Bulgaria, government responses to the depression had resulted in the bankruptcy of Jewish shopkeepers. Jews in the Free City of Danzig, whose economic livelihood depended on international trade, felt they were “caught between Germany and Poland, abandoned by the League of Nations, as helpless victims of the prevailing politics in their homeland and neighboring countries.” Across several states in the region, the proliferation of clearing trade, especially with Nazi Germany, led to the exclusion of Jews from the commercial sector.96
In their precise observations of the social hardship that the economic crisis inflicted on the Jewish population, the German-Jewish media did notice the extent to which antisemitism had been exacerbated by the economic collapse. In the aforementioned report on the meeting of the interest group of Jewish unemployed people in January 1931, the Leipziger Gemeindeblatt wrote that the Jewish employees “were unable to resist the antisemitic economic boycott.”97 Leopold Plaschkes, chairman of the Association of Radical Zionists, said in 1931 that “Jewish hardship [...] is part of the general hardship, but for us Jews it is considerably exacerbated by political and economic Antisemitism [...].”98 The magazine of the Jewish workers’ organisation Poale Zion, Der Jüdische Arbeiter, emphasised that the economic crisis was compounded by “the recent rise in Antisemitism, which threatens the physical existence of Jewry in most capitalist countries in Central and Eastern Europe.”99 At the opening of the Hechaluz movement’s youth centre in Vienna, the chairman described “the catastrophic situation of Jewry” during the global economic crisis and the “new flare-up of Antisemitism” as a result.100 According to Kurt Wongtschowski, the special situation of the Jews was exacerbated by “the Antisemitism that has become extraordinarily strong today.”101 The Anglo-Jewish Association’s annual report on the year 1930, which described the impact of the global economic crisis on Jews in all countries, already stated for Germany “that the tremendous success of the National Socialists in the Reichstag elections in September 1930 had caused great concern among German Jews.”102
While in the United States, the American Jewry, as Beth S. Wenger has shown, created a new self-confidence through creativity and innovation and the adoption of the language of the New Deal. In Germany, in contrast, the National Socialists came to power and brought death and destruction to European Jewry, which was to eclipse all the experiences that Jews in Europe had to make in the course of the Great Depression.103
1 Despite the inflationary use of this phrase, coined by George F. Kennan, The Decline of Bismarck’s European Order. Franco-Russian Relations, 1875-1890 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 3, the term remains indispensable for understanding the twentieth century. On the centrality of this formulation, Wolfgang Mommsen, Die Urkatastrophe Deutschlands. Der Erste Weltkrieg 1914-1918 (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2002); Aribert Reimann, “Der Erste Weltkrieg. Urkatastrophe oder Katalysator?” Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte 54 (2004): 29-30 and 30-38.
2 Klaus Richter, Fragmentation in East Central Europe. Poland and the Baltics, 1915-1929 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020); Stephan Lehnstaedt, Der vergessene Sieg. Der Polnisch-Sowjetische Krieg 1919-1921 und die Entstehung des modernen Osteuropa (München: C.H.Beck, 2019); Steffen Kailitz, ed., Nach dem “Großen Krieg.” Vom Triumph zum Desaster der Demokratie 1918/19 bis 1939 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2017).
3 Tim B. Müller, Nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg. Lebensversuche moderner Demokratien (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2014); Tim B. Müller and Adam Tooze, Normalität und Fragilität. Demokratie nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2015).
4 On antisemitic violence during the Russian Civil War: Elissa Bemporad and Thomas Chopard, eds., “The Pogroms of the Russian Civil War at 100: New Trends, New Sources,” QUEST. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History. Journal of Fondazione CDEC 15 (2019), https://www.quest-cdecjournal.it/?issue=15, accessed August 13, 2024.
5 Forthcoming: Ulrich Wyrwa, “Antisemitism in Interwar Europe,” in Cambridge History of the Holocaust, vol. I Contexts - Origins, Comparisons, Entanglements, eds. Mark Roseman and Dan Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025).
6 Martin Buber, “Jüdische Renaissance,” Ost und West. Illustrierte Monatsschrift für das gesamte Judentum 1 (Januar 1901), 7-10.
7 From the extensive literature on the Great Depression, see i.a. the following: Roger Middelton, “The Great Depression in Europe,” in The Oxford Handbook of European History 1914-1945, ed. Nicholas Doumanis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 179-206; Christoph Kreutzmüller, Michael Wildt, and Moshe Zimmermann, eds., National Economies. Volks-Wirtschaft, Racism and Economy in Europe between the Wars (1918-1939/45) (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015); Jan-Otmar Hesse, Roman Köster, and Werner Plumpe, Die Große Depression. Die Weltwirtschaftskrise 1929-1939 (Frankfurt/M.-New York: Campus, 2014); Randall E. Parker, ed., The Seminal Works of the Great Depression, 3 vol. (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Pub. 2011); Charles P. Kindleberger, The World in Depression, 1929–1939 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973); Patricia Clavin, The Great Depression in Europe, 1929–1939 (New York, N.Y: St. Martin’s Press, 2000).
8 Kristoffer Klammer, Wirtschaftskrisen. Effekt und Faktor politischer Kommunikation. Deutschland, 1929–1976 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2019), 80.
9 Gerald Lamprecht, Eleonore Lappin-Eppel, and Ulrich Wyrwa, eds., Jewish Soldiers in the Collective Memory of Central Europe. The Remembrance of World War I from a Jewish Perspective (Wien-Köln-Weimar: Böhlau Verlag, 2019); Tim Grady, A Deadly Legacy. German Jews and the Great War (New Haven-London: Yale University Press, 2017); Petra Ernst, Jeffrey Grossman, and Ulrich Wyrwa, eds., The Great War. Reflections, Experiences and Memories of German and Habsburg Jews (1914-1918), QUEST. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History 9 (2016), https://www.quest-cdecjournal.it/?issue=09, accessed August 13, 2024.
10 Monika Richarz, ed., Jüdisches Leben in Deutschland. Selbstzeugnisse zur Sozialgeschichte, 1918-1945 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1982).
11 Beth S. Wenger, New York Jews and the Great Depression. Uncertain promise (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996).
12 Ibid., 10-14.
13 Ibid., 33-53 and 103-135.
14 Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd edition. [EJ], 22 vol. (Detroit: Thomson Gale, 2007); EJ, vol. 7, 159; EJ, vol. 6, 417.
15 EJ, vol. 4, 271; EJ, vol. 21, 412.
16 Elke Vera Kotowski, Julius H. Schoeps, and Hiltrud Wallenborn, eds., Handbuch zur Geschichte der Juden in Europa, Bd. 1, Länder und Regionen (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2001).
17 Esther Benbassa, “Frankreich,” in Handbuch zur Geschichte der Juden in Europa, 387-418; 408.
18 Renate G. Fuchs-Mansfeld, “Die Niederlande,” in Handbuch zur Geschichte der Juden in Europa, 419-439; 436.
19 Norbert Franz and Wilfried Jilge, “Rußland, Ukraine, Weißrußland, Baltikum (Lettland, Estland),” in Handbuch zur Geschichte der Juden in Europa, 167-227; 222.
20 Ezra Mendelsohn, The Jews of East Central Europe between the Wars (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1983), 255.
21 Dan Diner, ed., Enzyklopädie jüdischer Geschichte und Kultur [EJGK], 8 vol. (Stuttgart-Weimar: J.B.Metzler, 2011-2014).
22 EJGK, vol. 6, 304.
23 EJGK, vol. 5, 30.
24 EJGK, vol. 6, 482.
25 EJGK, vol. 3, 283.
26 EJGK, vol. 5, 213.
27 EJGK, vol. 5, 411.
28 EJGK, vol. 5, 288.
29 EJGK, vol. 4, 127.
30 EJ, vol. 7, 530.
31 Avraham Barkai, “Bevölkerungsrückgang und die wirtschaftliche Stagnation,” in Deutsch-jüdische Geschichte in der Neuzeit, Bd. IV. Aufbruch und Zerstörung 1918-1945, eds. Avraham Barkai and Paul Mendes-Flohr (München: C.H.Beck 1997), 44-47.
32 EJGK, vol. 1, 22.
33 EJGK, vol. 3, 66.
34 EJGK, vol. 2, 109.
35 EJGK, vol. 4, 531.
36 EJGK, vol. 6, 7.
37 EJ, vol. 16, 304.
38 Jerzy Tomaszewski, “The Role of Jews in Polish Commerce, 1918-1939,” in The Jews of Poland Between Two World Wars, eds. Yisrael Gutman et. al. (Hanover-London: University Press of New England, 1989), 141-157; 150-151.
39 Antony Polonsky, “Warsaw,”in YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, ed. Gershon David Hundert, vol. 2 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 1993-2004; 1997 and 2000.
40 Robert Moses Shapiro, “Lódź,” in YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, ed. Gershon David Hundert, vol. 1 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 1081-1086; 1083.
41 EJGK, vol. 1, 469.
42 EJGK, vol. 5, 419.
43 Heiko Haumann, “Polen und Litauen,” in Handbuch zur Geschichte der Juden in Europa, 228-274; 269.
44 E. Mendelsohn, The Jews of East Central Europe, 43.
45 Ibid., 69.
46 Ibid., 74.
47 Ibid.
48 EJ, vol. 17, 384.
49 Raphael Vago, “Romanian Jewry During the Unterwar Period,” in The Tragedy of Romanian Jewry, ed. Randolph L. Braham (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 29-56; 39.
50 Avram Andrei Baleanu, “Rumänien,” in Handbuch zur Geschichte der Juden in Europa, 277-286; 282.
51 Hildrun Glass, Zerbrochene Nachbarschaft. Das deutsch-jüdische Verhältnis in Rumänien 1918-1938 (München: Oldenbourg, 1996), 106-107.
52 E. Mendelsohn, The Jews of East Central Europe, 179.
53 Felicia Waldman, “Jewish Mobility and Settlement in Bucharest,” in Economy and Society in Central and Eastern Europe. Territory, Population, Consumption, eds. Daniel Dumitran and Valer Moga (Wien: Lit, 2013), 109-122; 118. Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Daily News Bulletin 243, October 23, 1931, 5-6.
54 Central-Verein-Zeitung. Blätter für Deutschtum und Judentum 50, December 12, 1930.
55 Günther Stein, 1932 correspondent in Moscow, emigrated in 1933 to Great Britain.
56 Günther Stein, “Wege aus der Krise? Die Arbeitslosigkeit und das Schicksal der Juden,” Central-Verein-Zeitung. Blätter für Deutschtum 2, January 9, 1931.
57 Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums 75, no. 2 (1931), 156-160.
58 Gemeindeblatt der Israelitischen Religionsgemeinde zu Leipzig 3, January 16, 1931.
59 Leopold Merzbach, “Betrachtungen zur Wirtschaftslage,” Der Morgen. Monatsschrift der Juden in Deutschland 1 (April 1931), 97-101.
60 “Wirtschaftsnot,” Die Wahrheit. Unabhängige Zeitschrift für jüdische Interessen 22, May 29, 1931, 2.
61 Alfred Marcus, Die wirtschaftliche Krise des deutschen Juden. Eine soziologische Untersuchung (Berlin: Stikle, 1931).
62 Hubert Pollack, “Jüdische Wirtschaftsnot. Zugleich eine Besprechung des Buches Alfred Markus [sic] ‘Die wirtschaftliche Krise des Deutschen Juden’,” Der jüdische Student. Zeitschrift des Kartells Jüdischer Verbindungen 8-9 (August 1931), 263-267.
63 Die Stimme. Jüdische Zeitung 187, August 6, 1931.
64 “Die Wirtschaftsnot der österreichischen Juden,” Die Stimme. Jüdische Zeitung 197, August 15, 1931, 2.
65 Israel Hellenberg, “Glanz und Elend der jüdischen Bankbeamten. Zum Problem: Juden und Credit-Anstalt,” Die Stimme. Jüdische Zeitung 202, November 19, 1931.
66 “5. Jahre Jüd. soz. Arbeiterjugend. Was sind unsere wichtigsten gegenwärtigen Aufgaben?,” Der Jüdische Arbeiter. Organ der jüdischen sozialdemokratischen Arbeiterorganisation Poale Zion 19, December 18, 1931, 3.
67 Mendel Singer, “Die jüdische Gemeinde in der Wirtschaftskrise,” Der Jüdische Arbeiter 5, March 4, 1932, 1.
68 “Das wirtschaftliche Schicksal des deutschen Judentums. Unsere Lage — unsere Aufgaben,” Jugend und Gemeinde. Beilage zum Frankfurter Israelitischen Gemeindeblatt 7 (March 1933), 176-179.
69 Jüdisches Jahrbuch (Berlin: Scherbel), vol. 8 (1933), 101.
70 Gtz. [George Goetz], “Emigranten,” Jüdisch-liberale Zeitung 6, Juni 15, 1933.
71 Herbert Kahn, “Betriebsumstellung,” Jüdisch-liberale Zeitung 24, November 10, 1933.
72 Wolgang Weisl, “Der Alltag in Palästina,” Die Stimme. Jüdische Zeitung 134, July 10, 1930.
73 Die Stimme. Jüdische Zeitung 161, January 29, 1931.
74 Der Jüdische Arbeiter. Organ der sozialdemokratischen Poale Zion Österreichs 9, May 26, 1931.
75 Die Stimme. Jüdische Zeitung 194, September 24, 1931, 3.
76 “Kurze Übersicht,” Der Orden Bne Briss. Mitteilungen d. Großloge für Deutschland 2 (February 1931), 35.
77 1910 hatte der Ort einen jüdischen Bevölkerungsanteil von 16,3 %: Ludwig Patryn, Die Ergebnisse der Volkszählung vom 31. Dezember 1910 in Schlesien, ed. Landesstatistisches Amt des schlesischen Landesausschusses (Troppau: Schlesischer Landesausschuss, 1912), 8-9.
78 Die Wahrheit 8, February 20, 1931, 9.
79 Gerhard Schacher, “Die wirtschaftliche Lage der jüdischen Minderheiten in Südosteuropa,” Der Morgen. Monatsschrift der Juden in Deutschland 6 (1930-1931), no. 6 (February 1931), 579-590; 7 (1931-1932), no. 1 (April 1931), 102-109. Bereits 1930 hatte Schacher eine wirtschaftswissenschaftliche Studie über diesen Raum veröffentlicht: Gerhard Schacher, Der Balkan und seine wirtschaftlichen Kräfte, (Stuttgart: Enke, 1930).
80 Die Wahrheit. Unabhängige Zeitschrift für jüdische Interessen 18, May 1, 1931.
81 “Die Juden in Ungarn. Ein Interview mit dem Ministerpräsidenten Graf Bethlen,” Die Wahrheit. Unabhängige Zeitschrift für jüdische Interessen 18, May 1, 1931.
82 On Aron Singalowsky see: Jüdisches Adressbuch für Gross-Berlin, Ausgabe 1929/1930 (Berlin: Goedega, 1931), 313 and 416. Singalowsky had published a study on the economic conditions of the Eastern European Jews in 1928 already: Aron Singalowsky, Aufbau und Umbau. Zum Problem des jüdischen Wirtschaftslebens in Osteuropa (Berlin: Philo, 1928).
83 Gemeindeblatt der Israelitischen Religionsgemeinde Dresden 7, no. 11 (November 1931), 8-9.
84 Jüdisch-liberale Zeitung 1, April 1, 1933.
85 Der Israelit 35, August 29, 1935, 5-6.
86 Eva Reichmann-Jungmann, “Eine Million zuviel,” Der Morgen. Monatsschrift der Juden in Deutschland 12 (1936/1937), no. 8 (November 1936), 337-343.
87 Viktor E. Kelner, Simon Dubnow. Eine Biographie (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2010).
88 Simon Dubnow, Buch des Lebens. Erinnerungen und Gedanken. Materialien zur Geschichte meiner Zeit, ed. Verena Dohrn, trans. Barbara Conrad, vol. 1, (1860-1903), vol. 2 (1903-1922), vol. 3, (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005), 145.
89 S. Dubnow, Buch des Lebens, 156.
90 Alfred Marcus, Die wirtschaftliche Krise des deutschen Juden. Eine soziologische Untersuchung (Berlin, 1931); Jakob Lestschinsky, Das wirtschaftliche Schicksal des deutschen Judentums (Berlin: Stikle, 1932).
91 American Jewish Year Book, vol. 32 (1930-1931), 225.
92 Iván T. Berend, Decades of Crisis: Central and Eastern Europe before World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 253; Hans Raupach, “The Impact of the Great Depression on Eastern Europe,” Journal of Contemporary History 4, no. 4 (1969): 75-86.
93 William W. Hagen, “Before the ‘Final Solution’: Toward a Comparative Analysis of Political Anti-Semitism in Interwar Germany and Poland,” The Journal of Modern History 68, no. 2 (1996): 351-381.
94 Patricia Clavin, Securing the World Economy: The Reinvention of the League of Nations, 1920–1946 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Nathan Marcus, Austrian Reconstruction and the Collapse of Global Finance, 1921–1931 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018); Klaus Richter, “The Catastrophe of the Present and That of the Future: Expectations for European States from the Great War to the Great Depression,” Contemporary European History (2023), doi:10.1017/S096077732200100X: 1–19.
95 See, for instance, the project The Liminality of Failing Democracy: East Central Europe during the Interwar Slump, funded by the Gerda-Henkel Foundation, and one of its key outputs: Klaus Richter, Jasmin Nithammer, and Anca Mandru, eds., The Great Depression in Eastern Europe (Vienna: Central European University Press, in print); Jerzy Łazor, The Political Economy of Interwar Foreign Investment: Economic Nationalism and French Capital in Poland, 1918-1939 (London: Routledge, 2024); Catherine P. Brégianni, The Great Depression and Greece: Monetary and Economic Perspectives in a Transnational Context (Athens: Alfeios Editions, 2023); Gérard Béaur, Francesco Chiapparino, eds., Agriculture and the Great Depression: The Rural Crisis of the 1930s in Europe and the Americas (London: Routledge, 2023).
96 Congrès Juif Mondial. Département Économique, La Situation Économique des Minorités Juives, vol. 1 (Paris, 1938), 22, 39, 58, 69 and 82.
97 Gemeindeblatt der Israelitischen Religionsgemeinde zu Leipzig 3, January 16, 1931.
98 “Die Wirtschaftsnot der österreichischen Juden,” Die Stimme. Jüdische Zeitung 197, August 15, 1931, 2.
99 Der Jüdische Arbeiter. Organ der jüdischen sozialdemokratischen Arbeiterorganisation Poale Zion 19, December 18, 1931, 3.
100 Die Stimme. Jüdische Zeitung 208, December 31, 1931, 9.
101 Jugend und Gemeinde. Beilage zum Frankfurter Israelitischen Gemeindeblatt 7 (March 1933), 176-179.
102 Die Wahrheit. Unabhängige Zeitschrift für jüdische Interessen 18, May 1, 1931.
103 Wenger, New York Jews and the Great Depression, 206.
Klaus Richter is a professor in Central and Eastern European History at the University of Birmingham. His research focuses on nationalism and the social and economic history of Poland and the Baltics. Among his publications are a book on antisemitism in Lithuania during the late Russian Empire: Antisemitismus in Litauen: Christen, Juden und die “Emanzipation” der Bauern, 1889-1914 (Berlin: Metropol, 2013) and Fragmentation in East Central Europe: Poland and the Baltics, 1915-1929 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).
Ulrich Wyrwa retired Professor of History at the University of Potsdam and Fellow at the Centre for Research on Antisemitism at the Technical University of Berlin. His field of work was originally in the area of historical consumer research and shifted to Jewish history and the history of antisemitism in 19th and 20th century Europe, with a particular focus on Italy and Germany. Publications (until 2021) under: https://www.uni-potsdam.de/de/hi-wyrwa/schriftenverzeichnis.
