A Pragmatic Alliance

Jewish-Lithuanian political cooperation at the beginning of the 20th century
ISBN: 
978-615-5053-17-7
cloth
$79.00 / €69.00 / £63.00
Kindle edition is available through Amazon
Publication date: 
2011
280 pages

Discusses the political cooperation between Jews and Lithuanians in the Tsarist Empire from the last decades of the 19th century until the early 1920s. These years saw the transformation of both Jewish and Lithuanian political life. Within the Jewish community, the previously dominant integrationists were now challenged both by those who believed that the Jews were not a religious but an ethnic or proto-nationalist group and those who believed that only with the abolition of capitalism and the establishment of a socialist state would Jewish integration be possible. Among the Lithuanians, the emergence of a modern national identity became increasingly prevalent.

Each essay is based on original research, which generalizes not only the published sources, but also a vast, though little known or completely new, archival material held in the archives of Lithuania, Israel, Russia, USA, and Ukraine.

Introduction

Articles

Chapter 1: Jews and the Lithuanian National Movement

Chapter 2: Collaboration of Lithuanians and Jews during the Elections to the First and the Second Dumas

Chapter 3: Lithuanians in the Jewish Politics of the Late Imperial Period

Chapter 4: Lithuania? - But Which? The Changing Political Attitude of the Jewish Political Elite in East Central Europe towards Emerging Lithuania (1915–1919)

Chapter 5: The Zionist Priorities in the Struggle for Lite (1916–1918)

Chapter 6: Jewish-Lithuanian relationships during elections to the Constitutive Assembly of Lithuania

Chapter 7 :Between Poland and Lithuania: Jews and the Vilnius Question, 1918–1925

Document publications

1 The Lithuanian-Jewish Political Dialogue in Petrograd in 1917

2 Jewish Politicians and Lithuanian Taryba in 1918

3 The Lithuanian Zionist Conference, Vilnius, December 5–8, 1918

"Dieser Sammelband bietet nicht nur eine wertvolle Ergänzung unserer Kenntinisse über die komplexen interkonfessionellen und -etnischen Beziehungen in Ostmitteleuropa, sondern lierfert auch Einblicke in politische und kulturelle Adaptionsprozesse vor allem der jüdischen Bevölkerung an der Schnittstelle von Imperium und Nationalstaat. Gerade die jüdische Koexistenz mit den Liatauern steht einerseits im Schatten des Holocaust, doch hat sich anderersetits auch die Bezeichnung des heutigen litauischen Hauptstadt Vilnius als einstiges 'Jerusalem des Ostens' eingeprägt. Die Geschichte der bedingten politischen Zusammenarbeit beider Bevölkerungsgruppen in den ersten Jahrzenten des 20. Jahrhunderts, die bislang kaum je als eigenständiges Forschungproblem zur Kenntnis genommen wurde, bezeichnen die beiden Herausgeber ders vorliegendes Sammelbands als eine 'pragmatische Allianz', war sie doch eher von antipolnischen Überzeugungen des Protagonisten geprägt denn von einer... more
"This is a most valuable addition to our understanding of the complex inter-ethnic relations in northeastern Europe in the last years of the nineteenth and early years of the twentieth century. It also provides a clear background to the subsequent creation of the extensive system of Jewish communal autonomy in independent Lithuania which lasted until 1925."
"This short but very well developed book summarizes the relationship between Jews and Lithuanians and the progress of Jewish-Lithuanian political life and cooperation. The hitherto unknown secondary and especially primary sources used in the book really make it well worth reading for anyone interested in either Lithuanian or Jewish life from the late nineteenth century to the early 1920s."