ABSTRACT
The exiled Czech writer Milan Kundera recently observed that central Europe in the years before Hitler owed more to the Jewish genius than perhaps any other part of the world. The Jews were the ‘intellectual cement’, the cosmopolitan and integrative element which added a quintessentially European colour, tone, and vitality to great cities like Berlin, Vienna, Prague, and Budapest. The Polish example illustrates an important sociological difference between central and eastern European Jewries which greatly influenced the role which they respectively played in the general culture of the time. The ‘intellectual pre-eminence’ of the Jews in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which attained its peak in pre-Hitler central Europe, has occasioned much speculation as to its motivations and causes. Zionists had of course been consistently hostile to the intense Jewish assimilation to German culture which they saw as an undignified self-surrender and wasting of precious Jewish national assets.
