Mapping Jewish Loyalties in Interwar Slovakia

Rebekah Klein-Pejšová

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780253015624
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Jewish Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

"Well researched... A major contribution to our understanding of the dilemmas and challenges faced by Czechoslovak Jewry in the interwar period." —Michael Miller, Central European University In the aftermath of World War I, the largely Hungarian-speaking Jews in Slovakia faced the challenge of reorienting their political loyalties from defeated Hungary to newly established Czechoslovakia. Rebekah Klein-Pejšová examines the challenges Slovak Jews faced as government officials, demographers, and police investigators continuously tested their loyalty. Focusing on "Jewish nationality" as a category of national identity, Klein-Pejšová shows how Jews recast themselves as loyal citizens of Czechoslovakia. Mapping Jewish Loyalties in Interwar Slovakia traces how the interwar state saw and understood minority loyalty and underscores how loyalty preceded identity in the redrawn map of east central Europe. "This book makes a crucial contribution to the question of minority loyalties in Central Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. It points to a dramatic divergence of the constructions of loyalties between the majority and minority populations." — Slovakia "After WW I, former Hungarian territory became part of the newly established state of Czechoslovakia. Jews who had lived under Hungarian rule faced the problem of status and identity in a new state... The overall picture the author presents is skillfully balanced by effective individualized treatments of individuals and events... Recommended." — Choice "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." — Slavic Review

1 From Hungary to Czechoslovakia

Jewish Transition to the Consolidating Czechoslovak State

Local residents in the northwestern town of Považská Bystrica, a short distance from Slovakia’s provisional capital in Žilina, forced their way into David Büchler’s general store.¹ By the time they dispersed, every item in the store was destroyed. All the furniture, the cash register, and display cases lay ruined. The building itself sustained heavy damage. They also broke into his home and made off with bedding, linens, rugs, furnishings, and other belongings. Büchler’s store and residence were attacked on November 5, 1918, during the “November Pillages” that accompanied Slovakia’s chaotic integration into the newly established Czechoslovak state after the First World War. Hardly a Jewish community in Slovakia was spared.²

Eighty years later the youngest member of the Turzikov family, then nine-year-old Pal’ko, still remembered the crash of shattering glass outside as two neighborhood men appeared in their kitchen looking for the innkeeper Arnold Eisler’s wife, hidden in the adjoining room. “Nobody’s here! Go away!” shouted his grandmother. “Why did you come? We are poor, we don’t have men [chlapov].” She shamed them into leaving.³ Emboldened young men roamed from town to town looking for Jewish shops and inns to “visit.”⁴ Soldiers celebrated their joy at returning alive from the front by looting Jewish stores—there were no others around, a local history reminds us—and hunting for alcohol. They accused the Jews of bribing their way out of military service in order to remain working as “clever shopkeepers,” getting rich on the war economy while Slovaks bled on the battlefield and starved at home.⁵

The Jewish People’s Union (JPU) took David Büchler’s case to the Czechoslovak administration in Bratislava to request state compensation for his losses.⁶ Emil Waldstein, president of the JPU, signed the petition. The damages to Büchler’s shop came to a steep 300,000 crowns (US$8,880 in 1920). Büchler was unable to either repair the damages or restock his store for five months after the attack. In spite of this the taxes the new state required on his 1918 profits were twice what he had paid in 1917.⁷ The JPU found the tax demand unreasonable and tainted by anti-Jewish bias. The local police chief confirmed the details of the Büchler case on the blank reverse side of a printed Hungarian-language police report form of the kind used in old Hungary. Looting had been so prevalent in November 1918 that it was impossible to pursue the matter on behalf of just one individual, the chief wrote. The National Assembly in Prague had granted amnesty to everyone guilty of plunder during the Prevrat, or change of regimes, for this reason. The Slovak people’s bias “against everything Jewish” was well known, he added. “David Büchler was robbed like all of the Jews during the Prevrat, and so this [grievance] is completely without foundation as a complaint of official discrimination,” wrote the county administrator (župan) in his assessment of the case.⁸ “He cannot be trusted to sell sugar and flour, etc.; furthermore there were even complaints that he abused the authorities’ trust during the old regime.” The county administrator dismissed the case.⁹

While Czechoslovakia would soon prove to be the most hospitable environment for the Jews of its interwar east central European neighbors, entry into the new state was bitter. Anti-Jewish violence erupted with the regime change across Czechoslovakia. In Prague civilians and demobilizing soldiers together rioted in the streets in early December 1918, attacking Jews and Jewish property.¹⁰ Yet anti-Jewish excesses were especially prevalent in Slovakia because of higher levels of antisemitism there and the widespread desire for revenge against all those who were seen as representatives and proxies of the hated Hungarian regime.

For Jews in Slovakia, reorientation into Czechoslovakia began abruptly with self-defense activity and economic adaptation to the radically transformed geopolitical environment. Immediate Jewish concerns were local. How should they defend themselves against the widespread postwar violence and compensate for damages? How would they best look after their interests, well-being, and communities in a region redefined as the Slovak national space? How would they protect their newly granted rights as Czechoslovak citizens? What would their relationship to the state as a whole be like? The answers to these questions developed from their Jewish religious affiliations and the political leanings those affiliations influenced, their experiences in Hungary and with the surrounding Slovak population, and their expectations of the Czechoslovak administration in Slovakia and in Prague. The first step in their long and often arduous process of reorientation involved creating strategies for postwar protection of their economic, political, and social interests. That process also included the development of Jewish national political practices as well as institution building and territorial reorganization.

At the same time Czechoslovakia was still a nation-state in formation. Successful Czechoslovak state building required incorporating the territory and peoples of Slovakia. This was to be accomplished not by gradually building popular consensus, but through military engagement and diplomatic maneuvering.¹¹ Drawing the borders in this way would have significant implications for Czechoslovakia’s domestic and international nationalities problems. Prague needed the Slovaks, a “state forming nation,”¹² or there would be no independent Czechoslovakia. Without the Slovaks, the Czechs could not form a majority and legitimately create a viable state. The Slovaks likewise needed the Czechs to help them leave Hungary, to help them establish a functioning civil and governmental infrastructure in Slovakia, and to create an educational system for producing Slovak national elites who were ready to take control of that developing infrastructure. The help the Slovaks desired was temporary.¹³

The central Prague government also needed the Jews. Good relations with the Jewish population would help secure the reputation of the new state in the eyes of the international community and supportive international Jewish organizations. Prague sought to positively distinguish the new Czechoslovak state from the old monarchy. Implementing Jewish national rights and securing Jewish well-being tested the state’s burgeoning democracy; these rights were themselves part of the state-building process. The wartime plight of Eastern European Jewish refugees had drawn international attention to the need for minority protections. In the aftermath of the war, the new question was how Jewish individual and communal rights would be protected in the new east central European state system.¹⁴ Czechoslovakia was considered the linchpin of that system. The country would attempt to use its handling of the postwar Jewish refugee issue to balance out the damaging anti-Jewish violence of the change of regimes.

The Czechoslovak administration’s postwar Jewish refugee management highlights the state’s turn from wartime concerns such as public health, scarce resource allocation, and chaos control to state-building concerns like state security and consolidation, currying favor with the international community, population legibility, and fixing the population within the state’s borders. State building is a chaotic process. This chapter examines social relations in Slovakia in the immediate aftermath of the war against the backdrop of Slovakia’s incorporation into Czechoslovakia. Prague’s aim was to bind Slovak and Jewish loyalty to the state while mitigating German and Hungarian resistance to it. To do so, it needed to show both groups that times had changed and that their situation would improve in Czechoslovakia. It was a task beset with complications.

Prevrat

“We have learned to our sad surprise that anti-Jewish riots are occurring even in the new Czechoslovak state,” Chaim Weizmann said in a telegram to the first prime minister of Czechoslovakia, Karel Kramář, on December 1, 1918.¹⁵ Weizmann was then president of the World Zionist Organization (WZO), based in Copenhagen, Denmark. Anti-Jewish activity was characteristic of the period immediately after the war across east central Europe, especially in Ukraine, Poland, and Hungary. In contrast to events elsewhere, however, the anti-Jewish activity in Czechoslovakia mainly consisted of looting and attacks on property rather than brutality resulting in scores of fatalities.¹⁶ The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (AJDC) estimated the material loss caused by the anti-Jewish outbreaks in Slovakia in November 1918, the worst period of the violence, to be 150 million Czechoslovak crowns (nearly US$4.5 million in 1920).¹⁷ In Bohemia and Moravia it “was not safe for a Jew to be seen in the streets,” the AJDC reported. Mobs beat and robbed Jews who had been driven out of cafes and restaurants.¹⁸

The violence ran counter to President Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk’s reputation as a moderate Western-oriented nationalist who opposed antisemitism and supported Jewish national rights. Masaryk had put his university career on the line in 1900 when he took a stand against antisemitism by denouncing the blood libel charges against the Jew Leopold Hilsner and by refusing to alter his position.¹⁹ In exile in England and the United States for most of the war, Masaryk had gained considerable support for the Czechoslovak national state-building project from important figures in the Jewish community, including Bohemian Jews. He later acknowledged Western Jewry’s decisive backing of his national work during the war. The Zionist Organization of America congratulated him in September 1918 after President Woodrow Wilson assured him in conversation that the “Czechoslovak nation” would enjoy independence after the war. Masaryk then sent a telegram to the Bohemian Zionist leader Max Brod, with whom he had met at the beginning of the war, guaranteeing that the new Czechoslovak state would respect Jewish rights.²⁰ The seriousness of the postwar disturbances in Czechoslovakia threatened to upend the important support of international Jewish organizations for the new state.

The WZO office followed developments surrounding the Prevrat in Czechoslovakia carefully, concerned about reports of widespread anti-Jewish disturbances and rhetoric. Although Bohemia and Moravia saw their share of looting and rioting,²¹ Slovakia experienced the greatest concentration of serious anti-Jewish activity. The “revolutionary mood” there found more emphatic expression in the chaotic atmosphere produced by the postwar conflict with Hungary. The Hungarian Red Army, under the leadership of Béla Kun during the short-lived Hungarian communist regime, invaded the Slovak territory held by the Czechoslovak regime in spring 1919 in an attempt to reclaim it. The Czechoslovak government called on the aid of the Entente powers to help them, which in the end successfully secured Slovakia.²² In this atmosphere locals demolished Jewish homes, looted Jewish shops and inns, and stole grain and other food supplies, believing the Jews to have worked as Magyar spies and agitators during the Kunled invasion.²³

Two stages to the anti-Jewish disturbances in the aftermath of the war may be distinguished. In the first, soldiers robbed stores and inns as they returned from the front; in the second ideological phase, they joined local Slovaks in seeking revenge against the former Hungarian regime. Soldiers stole in order to feed themselves as they made their way back home on foot after long years in battle or in captivity. They robbed inns and pubs to celebrate their freedom. Once home the soldiers learned how the local population had suffered during the war. They then joined in a brutal campaign of revenge against Hungarian state power and its representatives, often expressed in violence against the Jewish population. “Drunken soldiers vented their rage against people who had remained at home, and their businesses,” Yeshayahu Jelínek writes, “because part of those businesses and inns were in Jewish hands, and [because] in Upper Hungary political and social outbursts regularly rained down on Jewish backs, now too the hunger, frustration, and embitterment [of the war] very quickly merged with judeophobia.”²⁴ Armed Slovak soldiers joined in spontaneous uprisings, lashing out against state administrators, notaries, and policemen. They attacked the shopkeepers, innkeepers, and the propertied, all of whom they saw as representatives of the hated war and repressive Hungarian state system.²⁵ The majority of shopkeepers and innkeepers in many regions of Slovakia were Jewish, while Magyars formed a considerable percentage of the above-mentioned state administrators, notaries, and policemen.²⁶ When Czechoslovak troops were deployed to defend the Jews, they, too, occasionally took part in the anti-Jewish excesses.²⁷ In response the Jews in former Upper Hungary armed themselves for the first time in 1918. Like other demobilizing soldiers, they had also returned home carrying their weapons. They formed self-defense units to patrol the Jewish quarters of town and other areas where Jews lived and worked. Demobilizing Jewish soldiers and freed Jewish prisoners of war formed self-defense units wherever possible.²⁸

Weizmann’s December telegram to Kramář reminded the prime minister that the protection of the Jewish population, “the Jewish nationality group,” in Czechoslovakia was essential for continued international Jewish support of the state. “[We are] putting our trust in the message sent by your leader Masaryk to the Zionist Organization of America and in the principles of the freedom of the nations on which the Czechoslovak Republic has been founded,” Weizmann wrote. “We and the entire Jewish people are convinced that the government of the State of Czechoslovakia will do everything in its power to ensure the safety of the Jewish nationality group in Czechoslovakia and to assure for it those rights which were requested in the memorandum addressed by the Jewish National Council in Prague to the Národní výbor [National Committee].”²⁹

Weizmann again expressed his dismay to Kramář in July 1919, concerned with the significant rise in anti-Jewish activity and press agitation during the summer. Slovaks and Jews were compared to fire and water in a leading Slovak paper, Slovensko, which deemed them unable to exist together. One of the two must yield, the paper insisted. The “Czecho-Slovaks” would remain and the Jews would depart. The theme of Jewish departure from the territory of Slovakia appeared frequently in the Slovak press. Another widely circulating paper called for a general boycott of the Jews in trade and industry. Weizmann reminded the minister plenipotentiary of the Republic of Czechoslovakia in London, Dr. Ferdinand Veverka, of the great sympathy shown by worldwide Jewish opinion for Czechoslovakia. He urged the Czechoslovak government to take a strong stand against the current anti-Semitic agitation.³⁰

From London, Veverka sent Weizmann’s request for an explanation of the violence on to the minister plenipotentiary of Slovakia, Vavro Šrobár. Veverka wrote Weizmann that Šrobár was best qualified to discuss the matter because of his insights into Slovak public opinion based on his forty years’ experience as a countryside physician. In his reply Šrobár highlighted the recip...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Place-Names and List of Place-Name Equivalents
• Introduction: Seek the “Right Path”: The Jews of Slovakia in Remapped Post–World War I East Central Europe
• 1. From Hungary to Czechoslovakia: Jewish Transition to the Consolidating Czechoslovak State
• 2. Nationality Is an Internal Conviction: Jewish Nationality and Czechoslovak State Building
• 3. Contested Loyalty: Proving Slovak Jewish Loyalty to Czechoslovakia
• 4. Between the Nationalities: Statist Slovak Jews, Separatist Slovaks, and the Revisionist Threat
• 5. Conclusion: Mapping Jewish Loyalties
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index