This created new possibilities and new difficulties for Jews. Smaller, ethni-
cally more homogeneous states replaced the multinational Habsburg,
Ottoman, and Russian Empires. Many thousands of Jews in central and east-
ern Europe and the Middle East found themselves living in a different
country. Poland, which was reunited in 1918 after 123 years, had a popula-
tion of 3 million Jews who prior to the war had lived in the Russian,
Austro-Hungarian, and German Empires. The 900,000 Jews who lived in the
Kingdom of Hungary in 1914 found themselves living in six newly created
states by 1920: Austria, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Poland, Romania, and
truncated Hungary.
The situation of Jews in these new states depended on a combination of
political and economic factors, principally whether the new state regarded itself
as a beneficiary or a victim of national self-determination. Jews generally fared
better in the former, at least until the end of the 1920s. Some Iraqi nationalists,
for example, including King Faisal, lauded the creation of an independent Iraqi
state out of the dismembered Ottoman Empire, and reached out to Iraqi Jews
and other non-Muslims “because we all belong to one stock, the stock of our
noble ancestor Shem; we all belong to that noble race, and there is no distinc-
tion between Muslim, Christian, and Jew.” In some cases, nationalists were
willing to forget the prewar Jewish loyalties to a rival national cause. Czech
nationalists, for example regarded their Jewish neighbors as Czechs, although
prior to 1914 most had been culturally oriented toward German culture. Jews
fared less favorably in states that felt victimized by the post-war settlement,
notably German and Hungary, where anti-Semitism reached new heights.
The war also marked the end of the age of progress, and thus fed a growing
disillusionment with science, technology, reason, and bourgeois lifestyles and
values. This critique had begun to simmer even before the war among urban
intellectual elites in a cultural movement called fin de si`ecle. Centered in Paris
and Vienna, this movement provided a forum for criticism of a variety of
widely accepted cultural norms and scientific conventions. Such criticisms
included Freud’s challenge to the notion that the human mind was knowable
and a reflection of divine or natural beneficence, Albert Einstein’s upending
of the pillars of Newtonian physics with relativity theory, Arnold
Schoenberg’s dissent from the rule of musical tonality, Arthur Schnitzler’s
insertion of interior dialogue in a modern novel, and Franz Kafka’s sweeping
critique of everything modern.
Kafka’s angst, in particular, exemplified the general angst and discontent
of the immediate prewar years. His critique of the age paralleled a critique of
the pervading Jewish identity of the age. He rejected and was highly critical
of his father’s liberal, progressive Jewish identity, which, according to Kafka,
had been watered down by his entrance into mainstream society. “As a young
man, I could not understand how, with the insignificant scrap of Judaism you
yourself possessed, you could reproach me for not making an effort to cling to
a similar insignificant scrap.”
204 From renewal to devastation, 1914–45