For all of the diversity of the Jewish communities living in the multi-religious and multi-linguistic lands of eastern Europe from the Baltic to the Adriatic and Black Seas, Jews faced a remarkably similar dilemma in integrating into the modernizing political, economic, and legal systems of the Austrian, Russian, and Prussian/German Empires, as well as Romania and Serbia. The dilemma is based on the reality that Jews lived in environments where the religious and linguistic rivalries between the groups among whom they lived were closely linked to the economics and class of transitioning estate-based economies. In essence, the choices Jews made (even when they weren’t choices at all) were often viewed by their neighbors in zero-sum terms: the Jews seek their prosperity at the cost of their neighbors; they adopt the language of our rivals rather than our own; their ties are to their coreligionists elsewhere rather than to us. As Rebekah Klein-Pejšová ably demonstrates in Mapping Jewish Loyalties in Interwar Slovakia, the Hungarian-, German-, and Yiddish-speaking Jews of Slovakia might well provide an archetype for this dynamic.
Before the creation of interwar Czechoslovakia, the Jews who lived among Slovaks did so in the northwestern part of the Kingdom of Hungary. Thus, in the 19th century they were pressed between the cultural and linguistic draw of Vienna and Budapest; German and Hungarian. After the creation of the dual-monarchy in 1867, the Hungarian government sought to enable the non-Magyar population to Magyarize, and as Hungarian Jews moved into middle class professional fields, many (but not all) also reoriented politically, culturally, and linguistically from German to Hungarian. The Hungarians, on the other hand, who ruled a territory in the dual-monarchy barely half Hungarian, resisted any kind of Ruthenian, Slovak, or “Pan-Slavic” nationalism. About 135,000 Jews found themselves no longer in northern Hungary after WWI, but rather in the Slovak region of a new state called Czechoslovakia. Klein-Pejšová’s book tells the story of how these people became “Slovak Jews,” a term that came to reflect a political, geographical, and for a portion of the population linguistic, reality, but not a cultural or national one.
The Jewish experience with the new Czechoslovakia began inauspiciously. Jews were the targets of violence and looting during November and December 1918, but the state came to recognize the national minority rights of Jews. This began with the first census in 1919, which recognized Jewish nationality as a self-defined category (rather than religious or linguistic) according to “internal conviction” for the entirely practical purpose of lowering the number of Germans and Hungarians who would appear in the census if determined linguistically. In contrast to the comparatively tolerant and secular interwar Czech society, where Jews and Czechs in the cities saw their interests aligned, Jews saw little appeal in acculturating into Slovak society and the Slovak public viewed Jews as foreign. While suspected of being pro-Hungarian by Slovaks, the fact that Jews in interwar Czechoslovakia had civil equality and national recognition compared to the Jews in increasingly antisemitic Hungary, who did not, made it far easier for the formerly northern Hungarian Jews to reorient their political loyalty to Czechoslavakia.
Like previous scholars of nationalism (in particular Benedict Anderson and Francine Hirsch), Klein-Pejšová demonstrates how the Czechoslovak state used both the census and map as tools in its attempt to consolidate nationalities and centralize the state’s view of the alignment between nationality and language. Even so, when Jews had the opportunity to identify as nationally Jewish and build a separate Jewish politics they did so, and Klein-Pejšová provides examples of Jews who actively resisted attempts to equate nationality and language and thereby eliminate the separate national status of the Jews. Yet for Jews, first as Hungarian Jews, then as Slovak Jews, there was no way out of the middle, especially as interethnic tensions rose in the 1930s. As Klein-Pejšová concludes, “Hungarians and Germans understood the state’s decision to count Jewish nationality without regard to language as an attack on their own language-based minority rights within the state. & Slovaks saw Jewish nationality as a defense against aligning with the Slovak nation” (145). After the Nazis’ ascension to power in Germany, Slovak Jews saw their physical security assured only by maintaining the borders of Czechoslovakia, but their loyalty to the Czechoslovak state put the Jews in direct conflict with the growing Slovak autonomist movement. In sum, Klein-Pejšová has contributed a succinct and sophisticated profile of an understudied community, one that can help us understand the impossible dynamic faced by all Jews who lived among multiple nationalities with competing national claims.
