Introduction

Summary

IN HIS INFLUENTIAL WORK Vanishing Diaspora, published in 1996, Bernard Wasserstein forcefully argued that European Jewish life ended in the catastrophe of the Second World War. The ravages of the Holocaust and massive emigration in the post-war period, he contended, resulted in the disappearance of the Jews of Europe as a population group, as a cultural entity, and as a significant force in European society and the Jewish world. ‘Soon nothing will be left’, Wasserstein mournfully commented, ‘save a disembodied memory’. The noted Israeli historian David Vital had expressed similar sentiments six years earlier in The Future of the Jews. Generally unconcerned with post-war events in Europe, Vital was nevertheless quick to note that its Jewish population's present institutions, cultural life, and future were matters of central concern to only a tiny minority of the members of its tired communities. Without a doubt, the author concluded, the decline of European Jewry after the war ‘is one of the great, sad chapters in the history of the Jewish people’.

Most general studies of modern European Jewish history do not engage in prophetic speculations or generalized musings. Nevertheless, they mirror the negative and dismissive views of Wasserstein and Vital by giving short shrift to European Jewish history after the Second World War. To the extent that their authors deal with the period, they tend to centre their narratives on the plight of central and east European displaced persons (DPs) in occupied Germany. In limiting their discussion to individuals who, by definition, were uprooted from and unlikely to return to their homelands and who generally wished to make a radical break with their European past, such studies ignore the history of those Jews who chose to remain on the Continent and to reconstruct their lives.

A similar myopia characterizes discussions of Jewry in general works on post-war Europe. In a haunting reflection of the tendency of many countries after 1945 to avoid dealing with the painful events and legacy of the Holocaust, studies of contemporary Europe say little about the fate of Jewish survivors in the post-war period. The French historian Michel Crouzet, for example, devoted only a short paragraph to Jewry in his massive study of European revival after the Second World War.