Jewish Minorities between Nation-Building and Emigration in late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century East Central Europe

Introduction

The term “Jewish mass migration” with reference to migration flows of Eastern European Jews to Western Europe or North America has been often employed in research. This resulted in the mixing up of processes relating to migrants from both Eastern European territories (mostly from the Russian Pale of Settlement and the Kingdom of Poland)¹ as well as from parts of the Habsburg Empire (mostly Galicia and Bukovina)² and the German Reich.³ Although often and for obvious reasons overlapping, the labeling of such a phenomenon as “Jewish” is not accurate. First of all, there has never been a homogeneous “Eastern European Jewry”—as the essays of this special issue show. Secondly, it was not only Jews who left their regions of origin, but also hundreds of thousands of other non-Jewish Eastern Europeans. Frequently, they used the same trains and ships. Thirdly, Jews’ migrations often followed recurrent patterns: from the Russian Empire to the Kingdom of Poland or the German Empire, from the Kingdom of Poland to the German Empire or directly to North America, and from the German and the Habsburg Empires to the New World.⁴

Leaving East-Central Europe was not only a physical but also a mental process. In their memory, Jews and other migrants continually constructed and deformed the past, especially with regard to present needs and future expectations. In these processes, political interventions and strategies on memory played an important role. Memory politics is the organization of collective memory by political institutions or agents, in our case rabbis or other spiritual leaders such as hachams and others. It is structured hierarchically and institutionally, and it aims to update selected memories through representations, rituals and stagings, each of which turns the present into a platform for transformation of the past and the future.⁵

Yet, Jews in Central and Eastern Europe reacted very differently to top-down guidelines, often by ignoring them completely. Migrants took their Heimat or ojczyzna to the New World and lived it there. Nostalgic memories mixed with individual unpleasant recalling of pogroms, distress and poverty.⁶ Nevertheless, efforts to offset Antisemitism⁷ and the widespread feeling of cultural detachment from mainstream society did not necessarily result in the physical departure of the persons involved. On the contrary, many sought refuge in literature, the arts in general, or even in the intellectual shaping of national paradigms within their regions of origin. Experiences of “spiritual” or “linguistic exile” took place regardless of migration.

Against this background, this special issue aims at outlining forms of reaction to Nation-Building processes among Jewish minorities in East-Central Europe, particularly in the context of Antisemitism and emigration—either to other countries or within the country of origin. For this purpose the volume presents selected case studies dealing with both patterns of Jewish emigration from the German, Russian and the Habsburg Empire, and adjustment to dominant national narratives. Specific forms of Jewish Nationalism (Zionism) are not examined here and shall receive only marginal attention.

During the second half of the long nineteenth century, nationalism, liberalism and secularization became entrenched in a whole generation of Jewish citizens across Europe. Clearly, the Congress of Vienna led mostly—despite the formal recognition of equal rights and freedom for all citizens in Western and Central Europe—to an intensification of the repression of minorities, including Jews, who were systematically excluded from the cultural and political formation of the “nation,” or excluded from high positions in the state administration or in the army. This applied of course particularly to the Russian Empire, the Polish lands, as well as the rural areas of the Habsburg Monarchy or the Prussian easternmost border regions. Although emancipation progressed after the revolts of 1848, the rise of nationalism often made Jews enemies of the state. Furthermore, failed or belated emancipation, especially in the Russian Empire, encouraged emigration.

In the late nineteenth century, violent pogroms in the Russian Empire forced tens of thousands of Jews to move to Central and Western Europe. Many of them took a further step and continued their migration to North America. Failed or—as in the case of Tsarist Russia—non-existent assimilation policies, and the lack of understanding of cultural and religious diversity was often the reason why hundreds of thousands of Polish, Russian, as well as German/German speaking Jews had no choice but leaving their home regions and head to the New World.⁸

An interesting laboratory of Jewish emigration was the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Many of the cities of this pre-modern multi-ethnic empire were inhabited by Jews, Poles, Ukrainians (in Galicia), Lithuanians (in the Vilnius region) or Germans (in its western parts). After the partition of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the late eighteenth century, Jews from that region came to live in the German, Russian or the Habsburg Empire. They were exposed to different policies of emancipation, discrimination and acculturation. While Jews in Lemberg and Warsaw acculturated to Polish “civilization,” their fellow believers in Posen became Germans. Unlike in Warsaw and Lemberg, the number of Jews living in Posen declined steadily between 1848 and 1918. Many of them moved to Berlin and other German cities, 0thers decided to go to the New World.⁹

Reasons for migration among East European Jewry were varied. The commonest was financial hardship. In addition to the Jewish population Poles, Ukrainians, Russians, and Germans also left Eastern Europe because they hoped for better social opportunities in other parts of Europe or in North America. Jews, however, emigrated also because of Antisemitism and violence. The pogroms in the Pale of Settlement and other parts of the Russian Empire were a clear indicator of Antisemitism and anti-Jewish prejudice. Thousands of Jews lost their lives and others decided to leave before it was too late. After the pogroms of 1881-1882, about 100,000 Litvaks escaped to the Kingdom of Poland. Some of them moved further to the German Empire and from there to North America.

Many emigrants remained in contact with their families. They supported their families financially and sent them letters—which constitute a very good source to study emigration as a cultural process. Moving from a village or a shtetl to a place such as Berlin, Paris or New York changed their lives. Usually they left a religious and rural environment, and landed in a secular and modern society. Most frequently, the migrants were young, mobile and enterprising persons who had relatively little to lose, had escaped from violence and persecution, and were ready to take risks.

Many of those who left the Polish, Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Belorussian lands were Jewish, but by far not all. Between around 1820 and 1880, about 60,000 Jews left the Russian Pale of Settlement and headed to the USA. Between 1881 and 1890, some 265,000 more went to North America, mostly from the Kingdom of Poland as well as the “Polish lands” that belonged to the Russian Empire and the Habsburg Monarchy. Some 236,000 Jews left the Austrian partition in the period between 1881 and 1910, headed primarily to the USA. In the same period a relatively small number of Jews emigrated from the Prussian partition, mostly from Posen/Poznań province. By 1914 more than 2 million Jews had arrived in the USA, which accounted for nearly 6% of the total European emigration to that country. They constituted about 14-15% of the total Jewish population on the old continent at that time.¹⁰

Emigrants from East-Central Europe had very different experiences and multiple reasons that pressed them to leave their homes. Whereas in many cases such a reason was the increase of Antisemitism or the danger of being physically harmed, others decided to leave because they did not feel they belonged anymore to the nation they were living in or hoped to continue their lives in a less hostile environment and more liberal societies. The emigration processes were also not monolithic—diverse groups of actors were involved in them. Besides the emigrants, the local officials, the shipping companies, smugglers played an important role in that respect. Yet, as mentioned above, many did not leave, and rather tried to keep afloat among potential conflicts, material difficulties and cultural detachment by developing suitable national identities in their regions of origin.

In this light, the articles of this special issue intend to deliver a nuanced view on this topic by presenting selected studies of Jewish minorities, focusing on both their political and cultural understanding as well as their shaping of national belonging. The editors, Francesco Di Palma (University of Vienna) and Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe (Freie Universität Berlin), invited five experts in the field of Jewish studies, Antisemitism, and emigration to contribute with essays on relevant aspects of the subject.

These included the following issues:

• What role—if any—did religion play? Did religious dignitaries mediate between the private (individual and familial) and the public (political) sphere?
• To what extent did Jewish minorities engage in the establishment, consolidation and/or modification/transformation of the national state/national environment they lived in?
• How did emigration and/or the Antisemitism they experienced change their lives?
• How did Jewish minorities appraise and process the experience of emigration and/or Antisemitism in visual arts and/or literature?
• How, if at all, did emigration and/or Antisemitism (re-)shape their cultural and linguistic paradigms?

The first two chapters are dedicated to the Russian Empire. In her article “Unexpected Allies: Russian Officials’ Support of Jewish Emigration at the Time of Its Legal Ban, 1881-1914” Anastasiia Strakhova concentrates on Russian officials’ agency during the period of Jew’s emigration from the Tsarist Empire. Although the government officially banned emigration between 1881 and 1914 two million Jews left the Russian empire and settled in the United States, Argentina, and Palestine. Analyzing official documents and police reports from the the imperial provinces of Podolia, Volhynia, and Novorossiia, Strakhova explains the strategies the empire resorted to in order to force Jews to leave. She is able to prove that the Russian government supported Jewish emigration in implicit or explicit ways and was willing to tolerate Jewish resettlement to the extent that it could regulate the process.

Things were different in the case of Karaites. Dovilė Troskovaitė, in her chapter “Jews, Russians, Karaites: the birth of Karaite nationalism in the Russian Empire in the beginning of the 20th century,” examines the rise and consolidation of Karaism in Tsarist Russia from the first half of the nineteenth century through the beginning of the twentieth. She argues that the creation of a specific national culture was on the one hand a consequence of the authorities’ hostile policy towards Jews, which eventually favored Karaites’ departure from their historical community; on the other hand, and despite the late spread of Haskalah within Karaites as compared to the surrounding larger Rabbanite community, Troskovaitė claims that the former did share Maskilic ideals, partly because in most cases Karaites already displayed distinctive signs of acculturation and secularization—all predisposing elements for the formation of a new feeling of national belonging.

Dana Mihăilescu deals with emigration from Romania, by concentrating on the very telling examples of two men. Both were Jewish American writers who described their life stories. The first is the semi-obscure author and journalist M. E. Ravage, and the other a much more celebrated leftist writer, Michael Gold. Both authors were of Romanian parentage but they represented two different generations of authorship. M. E. Ravage emigrated from Romania to the U.S. in 1900, at the age of 16, whereas Michael Gold was born in the U.S. in 1893. By comparing these writers representing different generations of immigrants, Mihăilescu investigates the shift in perspective on the relation between Jewish ethnicity and Romanian as well as American nationalism.

The following two chapters are dedicated to the Habsburg Empire. Susanne Korbel discusses the emigration of artists and musicians from the Empire to the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. As Korbel shows, during the fin de siècle, migration and mobility for social, economic, political and/or professional reasons determined the patterns of everyday life for many. Examining Jewish artists and musicians, she explains the peculiarities of this specific form of migration. While concentrating on specific men, women but also children, and using findings from interviews of Jewish migrants in newspaper articles and their correspondence, Korbel presents specific forms of experience of Jewish artists and musicians from the Habsburg Empire in the United States.

Maya Shabbat deals with the German expression Heimweh (longing for the homeland) and shows how it triggered a whole set of emotions related to the creation of a national sense of belonging in the region Lemberg/Lwów. Focusing on the particular environment of the city, where after 1867 the considerable Jewish minority was visibly divided over whether to tend towards a pro-German or a pro-Polish cultural affiliation, the chapter describes the traumatic experience of such a clash, which eventually resulted in an imagined experience of “spiritual” and/or “linguistic exile” within the Jewish community.

Francesco Di Palma discusses in the last chapter of this issue the “strange case” of the Jewish community of the German-Polish city of Posen/Poznań. Until the end of the nineteenth century Jews accounted here for between 15 and 20 percent of the overall population, a much greater number than in any other German region. “Ostjuden” formed a considerable share of the minority, an almost unique feature within the German Reich. Such a setting forced the new authorities (Posen was incorporated into Prussia in the late eighteenth century) to introduce targeted integrationist strategies. Di Palma's article shows how Jews in the area got caught in a clash of nationalisms, as they sought to keep afloat amid rapid changes, and to strike a balance between two conflicting cultures, the one of the new German rulers, eager to “germanize” them, and the traditional Polish culture. One of the main results of these strategies was mass migration. For fear of losing financial independence as well as their cultural and religious autonomy, at least 20,000 Jews left the region for good at/by the end of the nineteenth century.

Of course, the chapters collected here cannot fully encompass the complexity of the phenomenon under discussion—national sense of belonging vis-à-vis emigration—as a cultural and political-ideological turning point in the history of East-Central European Jewry. We do hope that our issue will give new insights and serve as a platform for future research on the topic, which will have to focus on entanglements and transfers of ideas (both on the sub-central and on the international level) between emigrated and non-emigrated Jews, the role of agency (e.g. by influential spiritual leaders, political actors and media in general), as well as on specifities related to gender.

[1] The Kingdom of Poland belonged to the Russian Empire but enjoyed different political regulations and a different political situation than the rest of the empire. Especially until 1905 many more Jews emigrated from this colony of the Russian Empire and Lithuania, than the rest of the Empire. On this topic and in general on Jewish minorities in this region see among others: Lloyd P. Gartner, “The Great Jewish Migration. Its East European Background,” Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für deutsche Geschichte, 27 (1998): 107-133; Dov Levin, The Litvaks: A Short History of the Jews in Lithuania (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2000); Shlomo Lambroza, “Jewish Responses to Pogroms in Late Imperial Russia,” in Living with Antisemitism: Modern Jewish Responses, ed. Jehuda Reinharz (Hanover: Brandeis University Press, 1987), 253-274; John Klier, Russia Gathers her Jews: The Origins of the “Jewish Question” in Russia, 1772-1825 (Illinois: Northern Illinois University Press, 1986); John Klier, Imperial Russia’s Jewish question, 1855-1881 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Michael Stanislawski, Tsar Nicholas I and the Jews: The Transformation of Jewish Society in Russia 1825-1855 (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1983); Alexei Miller, The Romanov Empire and Nationalism, (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2008); Simon Dubnow, History of the Jews in Russia and Poland: From the Earliest Times until the Present Day, vol. 2 (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1918); Louis Greenberg, The Jews in Russia, vol. 2 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1951); Eugene Avrutin, Jews and the Imperial State: Identification Politics in Tsarist Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010); Antony Polonsky, The Jews in Poland and Russia (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2010-2012), 114. Theodore R. Weeks, From Assimilation to Antisemitism: The “Jewish Question” in Poland 1850–1914 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2006).

[2] Jews’ migratory flows from the Russian Pale of Settlement have long attracted a considerable interest in research, whereas the Habsburg Empire has been rather neglected. Yet, over the last years there has been a revival of scientific work on the topic, focusing i.a. on trans-cultural issues. Among others: Leslie Page Moch, Moving Europeans: Migration in Western Europe since 1650, 2^nd ed. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2003); Marsha Rozenblit, “A Note on Galician Jewish Migration to Vienna,” Austrian History Yearbook 19 (1983): 143-52; Israel Bartal and Antony Polonsky, “The Jews of Galicia under the Habsburgs,” Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry 12 (1999): 3-24; Stanislaw Grodziski, “The Jewish Question in Galicia: The Reforms of Maria Theresa and Joseph II, 1772-1790,” Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry 12 (1999): 61-72; Israel Bartal, The Jews of Eastern Europe, 1772-1881 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006); Rachel Manekin, “The Galician Roots of Polish Jewish Historiography,” in Conflicting Histories and Coexistence: New Perspectives on the Jewish-Polish Encounter, ed. Daniel Baltman (Jerusalem: Magnes, 2014), 319-331; Rachel Manekin, The Jews of Galicia and the Austrian Constitution: The beginning of Modern Jewish Politics (Jerusalem: Shazar Center, 2015); Robert A. Kann, The Multinational Empire: Nationalism and National Reform in the Habsburg Monarchy 1848-1918, vol. 1 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964); John-Paul Himka, “Dimensions of a Triangle: Polish-Ukrainian-Jewish Relations in Austrian Galicia,” Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry 12 (1999): 25-48; Robert S.Wistrich, Laboratory for World Destruction: Germans and Jews in Central Europe (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007).

[3] Among others: Werner Bergmann and Rainer Erb, Die Nachseite der Judenemanzipation. Der Widerstand gegen die Integration der Juden in Deutschland 1780–1860 (Berlin: Metropol, 1989); Arnold Paucker, Deutsche Juden im Kampf um Recht und Freiheit. Studien zu Abwehr, Selbstbehauptung und Widerstand der deutschen Juden seit dem Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts (Teetz: Hentrich und Hentrich, 2003); Werner Mosse and Arnold Paucker, eds., Juden im wilhelminischen Deutschland 1890-1914: Ein Sammelband (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1976); Albert A. Bruer, Geschichte der Juden in Preußen (1750-1820) (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1991); Michael Brenner, Wicki Caron and Uri Kaufmann, eds., Jewish Emancipation Reconsidered: The French and the German Models (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003); Ulrich Wyrwa, Juden in der Toskana und in Preußen im Vergleich. Aufklärung und Emanzipation in Florenz, Livorno, Berlin und Königsberg (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003).

[4] Oh this see, among others, Tobias Brinkmann, “Points of Passage: Reexamining Jewish Migration from Eastern Europe after 1880,” in Points of Passage: Jewish Transmigrants from Eastern Europe in Scandinavia, Germany, and Britain 1880–1914, ed. Tobias Brinkmann (New York: Berghahn, 2013).

[5] Burckhard Dücker, “Ritual,” in Gedächtnis und Erinnerung. Ein interdisziplinäres Lexikon, eds. Nicolas Pethes and Jens Ruchatz (Reinbek: Rowoht, 2001), 502-503; Helmut König, “Das Politische des Gedächtnisses,” in Gedächtnis und Erinnerung. Ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch, eds. Christian Gudehus, Ariane Eichenberga, and Harald Welzer (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2010), 115-125; Astrid Erll, Kollektives Gedächtnis und Erinnerungskulturen. Eine Einführung (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2005); Aleida Assmann, Der lange Schatten der Vergangenheit. Erinnerungskultur und Geschichtspolitik (Bonn: C.H. Beck, 2007).

[6] Recent theoretical reflections on cultures of remembrance have assumed that they require flexible spaces that can lead to social action, draw mental maps and establish their own boundaries. Following on from this, the concept of “trans-cultural memory” might be the most suitable to describe efforts to shape realities against the background of experienced hostility (Antisemitism), detachment from one’s own traditions and eagerness to mold new ways of being, as it offers the advantage of accurately capturing the complexity of the phenomenon discussed here. It is based on theoretical considerations on trans-culturality and connected history and examines memories as a process of movement across temporal and spatial boundaries. On this, see Astrid Erll, “Travelling Memory,” Parallax 17 (2011): 4-18; 11; Gabriele Rosenthal and Arthur Bogner, eds., Ethnicity, Belonging and Biography: Ethnographical and Biographical Perspectives (Münster: LIT, 2009); Alon Confino, “Collective Memory and Cultural History: Problems of Method,” American Historical Review 102 (1997): 1386-1403.

[7] On this topic there is, as is well known, a flood of publications. For the sake of brevity we will merely point out the following crucial work: Ulrich Wyrwa et al., eds., Einspruch und Abwehr: Die Reaktion des europäischen Judentums auf die Entstehung des Antisemitismus (1879-1914) (Frankfurt am Main: Campus 2010).

[8] On Antisemitism in the USA, see among others: Carey McWilliams, A Mask for Privilege: Antisemitism in America (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1999); on Antisemitism and modernity, see among others: Marcel Stoetzler, ed., Antisemitism and the Constitution of Sociology (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014); Leonard Dinnerstein, Antisemitism in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).

[9] Jerzy Topolski and Lech Trzeciakowski, eds., Dzieje Poznania 1793-1918 (Poznań: PWN, 1994); Antony Polonsky, The Jews in Poland and Russia, 1881-1914 (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2010).

[10] On the conditions under which Jews lived in Tsarist Russia, the Habsburg Empire, Prussia as well as after their emigration to the New World, there is a virtually unmeasurable wealth of valuable literature. See among others: Theodore R. Weeks, “Poles, Jews, and Russians, 1863-1914: The Death of the Ideal of Assimilation in the Kingdom of Poland,” Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry 12 (1999): 242-256; Salo W. Baron, The Russian Jews under Tsars and Soviets (New York: Macmillan 1976); Stephen Birmingham, “The Rest of Us”: The Rise of America’s Eastern European Jews (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1984); Robert N. Rosen, The Jewish Confederates (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2000); Louis Greenberg, The Jews in Russia, vol. 2 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1951); Eugene Avrutin, Jews and the Imperial State: Identification Politics in Tsarist Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010); Pamela Nadell, “From Shtetl to Border: East European Jewish Emigrants and the Agents System, 1868-1914,” in Studies in the American Jewish Experience, eds. Jacob R. Marcus andAbraham J. Peck, vol. 2 (Lanham; New York: University Press of America, 1985); Nancy L. Green, Jewish Workers in the Modern Diaspora (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Klaus Hödl, Vom Shtetl an die Lower East Side. Galizische Juden in New York (Vienna: Böhlau, 1991); Gerald Sorin, A Time for Building: The Third Migration 1880-1920 (Baltimor: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992); Hasia Diner, A Time for Gathering: The Second Migration 1820-1880 (Baltimore:Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992);Jacob Kabakoff, “The View from the Old World: East European Jewish Perspective” in The Americanization of the Jews, eds. Robert M. Seltzer and Norman J. Cohen (New York: New York University Press, 1995), 41-59; Tobias Brinkmann, Migration und Transnationalität (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2012); Id., Von der Gemeinde zur “Community”: Jüdische Einwanderer in Chicago 1840-1900 (Osnabrück: Univ.-Verl. Rasch, 2002); Ulla Kriebernegg, “Nach Amerika nämlich!” Jüdische Migrationen in die Amerikas im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2012); Claus-Dieter Khron, ed., Jüdische Emigration zwischen Assimilation und Verfolgung, Akkulturation und jüdischer Identität (Munich: edition text + kritik, 2001); Arthur Hertzberg, Shalom, Amerika! Die Geschichte der Juden in der Neuen Welt (Frankfurt am Main.: Jüdischer Verlag im Suhrkamp Verlag, 1992); Naomi W. Cohen, Encounter with Emancipation: The German Jews in the United States 1830-1914 (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1984); Naomi W. Cohen, Jews in Christian America: The Pursuit of Religious Equality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Mark Wischnitzer, To Dwell in Safety: The Story of Jewish Migration since 1800 (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1948); Frederic C. Jaher, The Jews and the Nation: Revolution, Emancipation, State formation and the liberal Paradigm in America and France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002); Avraham Barkai, Branching Out: German-Jewish Immigration to the United States 1820-1914 (New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers, 1994); Pierre Birnbaum and Ira Katzelson, eds., Paths of Emancipation: Jews, States and Citizenship (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).

Francesco Di Palma is Associate Professor at the University of Vienna. A former Teaching Fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and at the Free University of Berlin, he has published widely on European socialism and communism, fascism and antifascism, and cultural and Jewish history. Selected publications: Trouble for Moscow? Der Eurokommunismus und die Beziehungen der Sozialistischen Einheitspartei Deutschlands (SED) mit den kommunistischen Parteien Frankreichs (PCF) und Italiens (PCI) 1968-1990 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2022); “Israel als westliche Bastion im Nahen Osten? Überlegungen zur Orient-Okzident-Debatte bei den israelischen ʽNew Historians’,” eds. Barbara Haider-Wilson and Maximilian Graf, Orient und Okzident Begegnungen und Wahrnehmungen aus fünf Jahrhunderten (Vienna: Neue Welt Verlag, 2016), 751-769; “Jews and the SPD. The Influence of Jewish Intelligence on German Exile Social-Democracy (1933-1945),” Zeitgeschichte 1 (2014): 4-19.

Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe is a research associate at the Freie Universität Berlin. He studied at the Viadrina European University and holds a PhD in history from the University of Hamburg. He published books, volumes, special issues and numerous articles about the Holocaust in East Central Europe, transnational fascism in Western and Eastern Europe, the history of multiethnic cities, and various aspects of European and global history. He was a fellow of the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung, the Zentrum für Holocaust-Studien, the Yad Vashem International Institute for Holocaust Research, the Polish Institute of Advanced Studies, and the Honorary Research Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung at the Polish Center for Holocaust Research.