Liekis, who is a professor at Kaunas Vytautas Magnus University, has recently co-authored (together with Antony Polonsky and ChaeRan Freeze of Brandeis University) a volume of Polin, a reputable academic publication on Jewish history. The 500-page volume “Jews in the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania since 1772” took four years to put together and it focuses on Jewish communities after the first partition of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
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| Jews in the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania since 1772 |
“We attempted to answer the question of how we look at the minority, which was nearly exterminated during World War Two, in modern times. How we look at the issues relating to Jewish heritage, Jewish symbols, Jewish presence in the history of Lithuania,” Liekis comments.
The independent Lithuanian Republic, founded in 1918 on ethnic conception of nationhood, was not open to national minorities, including the Jews. It was not until 4 years later that Jews became fully-recognized citizens, after the constitution established the equality of national minorities. Even then, however, their social integration was slow.
According to data from 1923, there were 154 thousands Jews in Lithuania (excluding Vilnius region). Over ninety percent of the Jewish community was annihilated in the Holocaust.
According to Liekis, many in the world still see Lithuania as the country where Jews were killed by Lithuanians themselves. Solid academic studies contribute to dispelling such simplistic generalizations.
– The new volume of Polin is dedicated to Jews who lived in the territory of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. How did the idea for it come about?
– Polin has been published in Oxford since 1987. It is a respected journal of some tradition, already comprising of 25 volumes. The 500-page publication that came out this year is dedicated to the history of the Jewish community in territories of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania. It is a book of a broader scope, encompassing historical, sociological, and political topics. There are plans to publish a volume on Ukraine next year.
The idea to dedicate one volume to Lithuania emerged in 2006 and work started in 2008. We attempted to put the subject in a broader Lithuanian-Polish context, concentrating only on the last two hundred years. Defining the old Lithuania is a much more complex issue than one might think. So in order to foreground the particularity of Lithuania, we took the period between 1772, the first partition of the Polish -Lithuanian Commonwealth, and now. We tried to include papers by the best authors working on this subject.
– How did you come into contact with other co-editors of this volume? One of them, Mr Polonsky, traces his roots to Lithuania.
– Antony Polonksy supervised my dissertation when I was doing a PhD in Brandeis University. He is now professor there.
His family roots are Lithuanian, even though he himself was born in South Africa. His parents left Lithuania in the late 19th century. Some of his grandparents came from Marijampolė, others from Panevėžys. He does not speak Lithuanian, but after all, language is not indispensable to an identity. True, comparing what it meant to be Lithuanian in the 19th century and now, there's a huge difference.
Oxford-educated Polonsky lectured at London School of Economics for a long time, until 1992, and then left for Brandeis University.
The list of authors in our volume is very international, so it would be difficult to accuse it of national bias. The third co-editor is Korean ChaeRan Freeze, also a professor at Brandeis, and papers were submitted by Estonians, Lithuanians, Americans, Israelis.
It is often assumed that only Jews themselves can be interested in Jewish studies. That is not true. It is an accepted academic specialization in the West and, for several decades now, in Eastern and Central Europe. Jewish studies are an established area of enquiry and it is only natural that it engages people coming from different backgrounds.
– What topics does this volume of Polin tackle in particular?
– The strength of this study is that we tried to put the issues we concentrate on into a wider historical context. How this dimension of civilization mapped itself on the cultural-historical plane. We traced developments affecting the Jewish minority, its interaction with the outer world, etc.
Back then, all ethnic groups, even those that now are in the majority, were minorities. For example, Lithuanian-speaking peasants were a minority in the Grand Duchy as well, much like the Jews. The latter, however, lived throughout the territory and their language was spoken everywhere. One could be understood in Yiddish in every town of the Grand Duchy, unlike contemporary dialects of Lithuanian.
When we were presenting the book in London, someone joked that if you wanted to be a true Lithuanian of the entire Grand Duchy, you had to be a Litvak, i.e., Lithuanian Jew.
We address a rather broad field of enquiry: the present-day Jewish community in Lithuania; Jews and resistance to Nazis in World War Two; anti-Semitism in the Republic of Lithuania; economic relations (what niches in the economy were dominated by different national minorities), the concept of the Eastern European Jewry; religious conversion; various Jewish religious movements; the Lithuanian anti-Semitism, traditional ethnic culture; houses of prayer; political philosophies (e.g., socialist Zionism) and political movements (like the Bund in Vilnius), World War Two and the Holocaust; the place of Jewish national symbols in Vilnius.
– How did the role and the situation of the Jewish community change after 1772?
– Our starting point is a feudal society, where being a Jew primarily meant belonging to a social class, an ethnic-religious group. A society that does not have universal rights – only particular rights – does not recognize the concept of citizenship. Citizenship only applies to the elites – the nobility are citizens, they are the ones who embody sovereignty.
We look at transformations in the lands of what was the Grand Duchy throughout the 19th century, finishing with the emergence of the interwar republic. This is the formation of a modern state. What problems a minority faces when it does not become a majority, while another minority – the Lithuanians – does. How the majority looks at this minority and vice versa, how the Jewish genocide was carried out in Lithuania.
We attempted to answer the question of how we look at the minority, which was nearly exterminated during World War Two, in modern times. How we look at the issues relating to Jewish heritage, Jewish symbols, Jewish presence in the history of Lithuania. The state of research into these issues in Lithuania and abroad also receives due attention in the volume.
– What was a statistical Jew like, say, in the 18th century? Was he anything like the prevailing stereotype – wealthy, cunning, and influential?
– 18-century Jews were townsfolk and free people, unlike the majority of the serf population. About 85-90 percent of people in the Grand Duchy were not free.
Stratification in terms of wealth within the Jewish community was huge. Some Jews were economically active, they were merchants or craftsmen. Some were poor and supported by the community.
In terms of structure, the Jewish community was no different from other estates in medieval Europe. It was closed, autonomous, not unlike the nobility or goldsmith guilds and other town groups, some of whom even had a different religion from the rest. Communal forces and internal coercion were used in order to maintain the apparent unity. A member of the community could not exist outside its limits.
In the case of Jews, this medieval structure persisted until the first half of the 19th century, since Tsarist Russia was very slow to modernize. Legal discrimination of Jews was completely eliminated only during World War One.
Community structure, its social and economic role was evolving very slowly in the interwar republic, too. Between the wars, policies of the Lithuanian state, affected as they were by slow economic growth and delayed development, were conserving the situation instead of encouraging integration and acculturation.
Why would Jews here be regarded as an ethnic-religious minority, which could never become part of the Lithuanian nation, while in 19-20-century Hungary they were accepted into nationhood? For the majority of Lithuanians such analogies only add to the confusion in their stereotypical perceptions.
– What factors conditioned this backwardness of the 20-century Lithuanian society? Is it still perceptible today?
– Yes, it persists. In slow processes of social integration, appalling quality of our democracy, relapses of authoritarianism, low social mobility, hierarchisation of interpersonal relations, disrespect for minority rights, identity politics resembling pre-modern social standards.
The issue of minorities, particularly Jews, was raised in the beginning of the 20th century when people began to think what kind of a state and society they were building. Who are its citizens? They failed to come up with a model of integrating minorities. The Jews were left overboard. They led their separate lives and integration was painfully slow.
Not because they did not want to integrate – there was nothing to integrate into. The Lithuanian middle class they could have integrated into was non-existent, while the folklorized mass culture of the new Lithuanians, still reeking of recent serfdom, did not appeal to the Jews who were mostly townspeople.
– We can still feel relics of banal everyday anti-Semitism, when Jews are mocked in nursery rhymes and sayings. When did that start?
– It is mostly Lithuanian authors who address this issue in the book. Speaking of interwar Lithuania, the fierce modern anti-Semitism which is affiliated with racism was effectively non-existent. In the early 20th century, much like in the 18th, the dominant form in Lithuania was Christian anti-Judaism. That is to say that Judaism as religion was regarded to be inferior and the existence of Jews as a group was taken as proof for their inadequateness and victory of Christianity.
On the other hand, Jews were accused of conspiracy against the Roman Catholic Church. There were many superstitions, conspiracy theories, etc. One conspiracy theory that still prevails today is the assumed link between Jews and capitalism, liberalism, modernization. This is something that still has currency today, since our society is not open enough – and closeness always inspire mushrooming of various conspiracy theories.
– The Holocaust is still the most dramatic topic when it comes to Jews and Lithuania. Lithuanians fume when they are called the nation of Jew slayers. How does the book tackle the Holocaust?
– There are several essays dealing with the subject in the volume and illustrating key problems relating to genocide, resistance, anti-Semitism, or collaboration with Nazis.
We know only too well that some international readers equate all Lithuanians with the crimes of the Holocaust perpetrated here during World War Two. They stereotype Lithuanians – of today and of back then – perceiving them to be a uniform mass of people. This kind of representation often has a mirror-image here, a kind of anti-Semitism that puts blame on all Jews.
In order to fight negative preconceptions, we need a sane, depoliticized academic discussion which alone can dispel stereotypes, mutual accusations, and double-genocide theories.
