ABSTRACT

The twentieth century was an age of extremes. Advances in medicine, science, public services, education, labor and safety laws, and women’s and minority rights improved the lot of millions. The twentieth century can be said to have begun with World War I. Transformed by the great nineteenth-century historical processes of secularization, acculturation, politicization, migration, and urbanization, Jewish society was further shaken to the core by World War I and its aftermath. For many young German Jews, the process of reclaiming their Jewish identities had already begun to occur with their encounter with Eastern European Jews on the eastern front. The Zionist movement believed it would be the great beneficiary of the developments as it was moving to the center stage in British-Jewish communal politics. Despite economic realities, interwar political and economic conditions across Europe made all Jews objects of envy and hatred by nationalist political groups.