In the second half of the 19th century, Southeastern Europe was home to a vast and heterogeneous constellation of Jewish communities, mainly Sephardic to the south (Bulgaria, Greece) and Ashkenazi to the north (Hungary, Romanian Moldavia), with a broad mixed area in-between (Croatia, Serbia, Romanian Wallachia). They were subject to a variety of post-Imperial governments (from the neo-constituted principality of Bulgaria to the Hungarian kingdom re-established as an autonomous entity in 1867), which shared a powerful nationalist and modernising drive. The relations between Jews and the nation-states’ governments led to a series of issues relating to the enjoyment of civil rights, public and private education, and political participation, which found varying solutions, sometimes satisfactory for the Jews, but often undermined by the political instability of the region. In this book, the position of the Jews is also approached from the point of view of contemporary western Judaism, perhaps more sensitive to the sufferings of “our poor brothers in the East”; a western Judaism, emancipated, integrated, intellectually advanced, liberal, and able to intervene in situations under observation through diplomatic networks, its international philanthropic agencies and its political representatives. For readers interested in modern history, this book offers a detailed survey of the Jewish question in the various states of Southeastern Europe before the Shoah.

In the nineteenth century, the largest Jewish community the modern world had known lived in hundreds of towns and shtetls in the territory between the Prussian border of Poland and the Ukrainian coast of the Black Sea. The period had started with the partition of Poland and the absorption of its territories into the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires; it would end with the first large-scale outbreaks of anti-Semitic violence and the imposition in Russia of strong anti-Semitic legislation. In the years between, a traditional society accustomed to an autonomous way of life would be transformed into one much more open to its surrounding cultures, yet much more confident of its own nationalist identity. In The Jews of Eastern Europe, Israel Bartal traces this transformation and finds in it the roots of Jewish modernity.

This anthology brings together eight chapters which examine the life of Jews in Southeast Europe through political, social and cultural lenses. Even though the Holocaust put an end to many communities in the region, this book chronicles how some Holocaust survivors nevertheless tried to restore their previous lives. Focusing on the once flourishing and colorful Jewish communities throughout the Balkans – many of which were organized according to the Ottoman millet system – this book provides a diverse range of insights into Jewish life and Jewish-Gentile relations in what became Greece, Yugoslavia, Romania and Bulgaria after World War II. Further, the contributors conceptualize the issues in focus from a historical perspective. In these diachronic case studies, virtually the whole 20th century is covered, with a special focus paid to the shifting identities, the changing communities and the memory of the Holocaust, thereby providing a very useful parallel to today’s post-war and divided societies. Drawing on relevant contemporary approaches in historical research, this book complements the field with topics that, until now in Jewish studies and beyond, remained on the edge of the general research focus. This book was originally published as a special issue of Southeast European and Black Sea Studies.

Gazetteer providing information about more than 23,500 towns in Central and Eastern Europe where Jews lived before the Holocaust.

The Great Jewish Cities of Central and Eastern Europe: A Travel Guide and Resource Book to Prague, Warsaw, Cracow, and Budapest is the most comprehensive guidebook covering all aspects of Jewish history and contemporary life in Prague, Warsaw, Cracow, and Budapest. This remarkable book includes detailed histories of the Jews in these cities, walking tours of Jewish districts past and present, intensive descriptions of Jewish sites, fascinating accounts of local Jewish legend and lore, and practical information for Jewish travelers to the region.

This is a history of the Sephardi diaspora in the Balkans. The two principal axes of the study are the formation and features of the Judeo-Spanish culture area in South-eastern Europe and around the Aegean littoral, and the disintegration of this community in the modern period. The great majority of the Jews expelled from Spain in 1492 eventually went to the Ottoman Empire. With their command of Western trades and skills, they represented a new economic force in the Levant. In the Ottoman Balkans, the Jews came to reconstitute the bases of their existence in the semi-autonomous spheres allowed to them by their new rulers. This segment of the Jewish diaspora came to form a certain unity, based on a commonality of the Judeo-Spanish language, culture, and communal life. The changing geopolitics of the Balkans and the growth of European influence in the nineteenth century inaugurated a period of Westernization. European influence manifested itself in the realm of education, especially in the French education dispensed in the schools of the Alliance Israelite Universelle with its headquarters in Paris. Other European cultures and languages came to the scene through similar means. Cultural movements such as the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah) also exerted a distinct influence, thus building bridges between the Ashkenazi and Sephardi worlds. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries also saw the emergence of nationalist movements in the area. New exclusivist nation-states emerged. The Sephardi diaspora fragmented with changing frontiers following wars and the rise of new rulers. The local Jewish communities had to integrate and to insert themselves into new structures and regimes under the Greeks, Bulgarians, Yugoslavs, and Turks, which destroyed the autonomy of the communities. The traditional way of life disintegrated. Zionism emerged as an important movement. Waves of emigration as well as the Holocaust put an end to Sephardi life in the Balkans. Except for a few remnants, a community that had flourished in the area for over 400 years disappeared in the middle of the twentieth century.