What is "Europe"?
So far, Martin Halliday is the only one who told me that he had read my book review in the Listener. He took me to task when I met him, for saying that from the sixteenth and the eighteenth century there were virtually no Jews in Europe. Most had been either murdered or driven out. Clearly, Martin is right. I should have said 'in Western and Central Europe". A geographer would tell you that Europe reaches as far as the Urals in Russia. It includes Poland, Belarus, Lithuanian, and all the countries of Eastern Europe. Yet when we talk about European civilization we really mean the civilization of Western and Central Europe. The line that divides the European heartland from Eastern Europe runs down along the borders of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire. It includes Lviv, Krakow, Czernowitz, old Austro-Hungarian cities, but go further east and you are in the Slav world of onion dome churches, and a different view of European civilization. So Martin is right, but perhaps I am not entirely wrong.
This division is reflected in the Jewish world too. The Jews of Western and Central Europe hardly felt any commonality with the Ost-Juden. The Ost-Juden, the Polishers looked different, wore different clothes, had manners that appeared uncouth to those who modelled themselves on the middle class or the gentry of their country. These Jews were an embarrassment to the Jews of Germany, France, and indeed, Hungary. For the Ost-Juden, the Polishers, the emancipated Jews of Western and Central Europe hardly seemed Jewish. What defined you as a Jews? Surely it is the way you lived, davened three times a day, fasted on fast days, ate only food that was kosher, felt at home in the synagogue, the shul, the shtiebel. In Imre Kerttesz's film and book, Fatelessness, the orthodox Jewish prisoners in the concentration camp, Buchenwald, thought of the others who came from emancipated backgrounds as goyim, not worthy of their help.
But even within the confines of the orthodox Jewish world, Samson Raphael Hirsch, one of the greatest rabbinical authorities of his age, was perceived as a Yakke, a German, writing obscure, difficult, ever so Germanic texts, even if this was founded on unimpeachable Jewish sources. Not for him the colourful comforting Hassidic tales. Grappling with being Jewish was a serious challenging intellectual pursuit.
Nice to see you blogging regularly :)
ReplyDeleteI wonder if Hungarians perceive Europe differently from people outside Europe. Many people divide Europe in to "West" (France, Spain, Italy) and "East" (former Soviet-bloc countries).
In this divide, Central-Europe (Hungary and Austria) are considered part of the East, even if culturally Hungarians identify themselves with the "Progressive" West not the "Backward" East.
From a Jewish perspective, I think the dividing line would be use of Yiddish - which would put Budapest in the West, but areas closer to Romania (such as Transylvania) in the East.
Yiddish is certainly identified with the East, looking down on Yiddish as a bastard language is a Western European phenomenon, It kind of false intellectual snobbery, the belief that everything German or French is superior to anything Jewish. But you touched on the point that although people understand what they mean by Europe, even in Hungary, the lands west of the Danube were seen as part of the West, (Gyonk where the Groszs came from), east of the Danube more part of the East, (Cegled, where the Czegledis came from), with notable pockets of strongholds of Western culture, The German and Hungarians speakers of Transylvania are Westren, the Romanians are Eastern. Debrecen and Szeged on the east of the Danube are important university cities and centres of western culture. But the antisemitc, comparatively uncultured (and I am not going to define this term here) supporters of Horthy came from Szeged, while the more cultured, educated, aristocratic, and less rabidly antisemitc supporters came from Vienna.
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