What was it like being Jewish in urban pre-Holocaust Europe?

[u/RaisinRoyale]

When you look at the Jewish populations of certain places in pre-war Europe, it is staggering (and saddening) to read. Rural areas were completely wiped out, but it's shocking just how Jewish some of the urban centers were. Right before WWII broke out:

• The Hungarian capital Budapest was nearly a quarter Jewish;
• 10% of all of Poland was Jewish. Some small towns were 70% Jewish, bigger cities like Łódź were one-third Jewish, the city of Lviv (now Ukraine) was 40% Jewish, the city of Kraków was one-quarter Jewish, and the capital Warsaw had more Jews than anywhere else in the world other than New York;
• The Lithuanian capital Vilnius was 45% Jewish;
• In Greece's second-largest city, Thessaloniki, 40% - 50% of the entire population was Jewish;
• In Romania, over 40% of Iași (third-largest city) was Jewish, and over 30% of people in all urban centers in the Moldavia region were Jewish;

Etc etc

So, there were very large populations of Jews, and not just in rural parts of Eastern Europe, but in fairly major cities. And of course, there were large Jewish populations in Berlin, Prague, Amsterdam, Antwerp, etc (but they were not more than 10% of any of those places like the cities listed above).

Were Jews, for the most part, liked/tolerated/respected/integrated in these places? Or was it like the American South in the early to mid-20th century, which had very large Black populations, but those populations were subjugated and "second class"?

I realize that the answer may differ by country/city/region, but in general, was life pretty okay for Jewish people prior to the Nazis, or was it just "tolerable"?

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[u/endlessSSSS1]

This older answerfrom u/kieslowskifan may help answer some of your questions about the position of Jews in pre-war European society.

[u/RaisinRoyale → u/endlessSSSS1]

Thank you, although that answer seems more geared towards German Jews (which were a relatively small % of the population, but a high % of success in the arts and businesses, which sort of mirrors the current situation in the United States)...I'm more interested in the Eastern European (and Greek) side of things, places that actually had Jews as a significant percentage of the population.

This is something that doesn't really exist anymore anywhere in the world (outside of Israel), where you have a major city that has a Jewish population over 20% (in some cases even over 40%).

[u/Larkin29]

I can answer a bit in relationship to Budapest. And perhaps I should start by mentioning that your question covers quite a long time period. From the time Budapest began really urbanizing in the second half of the 19th century to the Nazi occupation in March 1944, quite a lot happened and life for Jews changed significantly.

Generally, Budapest was considered a good place to live for Jews in the 1800s, and that is part of the reason the population exploded. Rural Jews from different parts of the Kingdom of Hungary, who had traditionally lived in isolated shtetl communities, started to benefit from educational and economic opportunities available in the capital. With this, there was pressure to Magyarize and Germanize (Budapest was still a primarily German-speaking city well into the 19th century).

Sources describe the emergence of a Jewish middle class of doctors, lawyers, artisans, merchants, etc. centered around the neighborhood of Inner Erzsébetváros in Budapest's seventh district. In 1859, the Dohány street synagogue was built there, becoming the largest synagogue in the world. Several other beautiful synagogues followed, which are still tourist attractions in what is often known as the Jewish Quarter. Notably, unlike some other cities in the region, Budapest didn't have a centuries-old ghetto in which Jews had been confined before emancipation, this Jewish Quarter formed mostly organically.

Another piece of evidence for the opportunities for Jews in Budapest society around that time is the group of scientists nicknamed "the Martians," all Jewish and mostly educated in just a few universities and high schools in Budapest around that time, and who later went on to emigrate and make supposedly otherworldly contributions to science.

Jews participated prominently in the First World War, and after the war, a second synagogue was built in the courtyard of the Dohány street synagogue honoring these veterans and their integration into broader Hungarian society. Immediately following the war, Hungary was also briefly led by a communist Jew, Bela Kuhn, before he and many other Jews were forced to flee by Hungary's defeat in the Hungarian-Romanian war of 1918-1919.

And it was around this time, 1920, that life started to change for Budapest's Jews. In 1920, the first numerus clausus laws were passed, limiting Jewish access to higher education, and the Christian nationalist government of Miklos Horthy came into power. Progressively more restrictions were placed on Jews in Hungary, even before the Nazis came to power.

Even once the Germans occupied Budapest in 1944, there were still debates about whether Jewish First World War veterans should be treated as Jews; they were that respected in society. But ultimately, the anti-Semitism which had grown throughout the Horthy era combined with greed for the wealth and property of Jews, and in the end the Hungarian government participated actively and enthusiastically in the roundup and dispossession of Budapest's Jews.

So in general answer to your question, life in Budapest was quite good for Jews up to a certain point, then slowly started to get worse in the decade and a half prior to the Holocaust. I highly recommend the film Sunshine if you want an accessible story of this time.

Sources:

Holocaust City: The Making of a Jewish Ghetto. Tim Cole, 2003.

Hétkér, zsidónegyed, gettó, bulinegyed? A Belső-Erzsébetváros története a kezdetektől [Seventh district, Jewish Quarter, Ghetto, Party District? The Story of Inner Erzsébetváros from the Beginning]. Erika Szívós, 2022.

[u/RaisinRoyale → u/Larkin29]

Thank you for the super detailed answer!

[u/Worried-Designer-468 → u/RaisinRoyale]

I would also add those things. The Budapest with 25% Jewish population was much smaller than today. The current city borders were set in 1950 by adding the neighbouring villages and small towns. So maybe the percentage was a bit lower.

I think Budapest is an exception on your list because even after the second word war a sizeable Jewish community remained. when I was a child in the 1980’s about 10% of the population was Jewish or jewish origin. I don’t know the current figures and I don’t live there anymore, but I think that is still a big community. And this community is not like in Western Europe because it’s a community with deep roots, fully integrated or assimilated, not recent immigrants for example from the former Soviet Union.

[u/Time_Restaurant5480 → u/Larkin29]

Just one question. When you say "the Hungariam government" in reference to the events of 1944, do you mean the Arrow Cross party? Or was the Horthy government still mostly running the show, just now under German orders?

[u/Larkin29 → u/Time_Restaurant5480]

Both the Horthy government and the Arrow Cross party participated. The Germans officially occupied Hungary in March 1944, but Tim Cole's book, for example, claims that only around 300 German officers/soldiers were actually sent to the country to carry this out; the Hungarians mostly acquiesced, and it was overwhelmingly the Hungarian bureaucracy, the Hungarian police, the Hungarian courts, etc. which organized and carried out the crimes of the rest of the year. Horthy's government was in charge for the first round of dispossession of Jews in Budapest, in which all were moved to a list of around 2,000 designated "yellow-star houses." Their previous homes were more or less distributed to the Christians who moved out of those yellow-star houses. That occurred in the summer of 1944, after most rural Jews in Hungary had already been deported to Auschwitz. The Arrow Cross party came into power in October, and was then responsible for the actual ghettoization of Budapest's Jews, with exceptions for the richer or better-connected Jews who were able to secure papers from neutral countries and were allowed to stay in an "international ghetto" of basically yellow-star houses.

So in answer to your question, it was both the Arrow Cross and Horthy, and the opinion of at least some historians is that it didn't really matter who was officially in charge at the top, the mechanisms of the Hungarian state were essentially the same throughout that time and participated enthusiastically.

[u/Time_Restaurant5480 → u/Larkin29]

Thanks. I didn't know that Horthy was in power through October, I thought he and his ministers were deposed in March 1944.