Robert Wistrich: Interviewed about anti-Semitism
C: Your family has a very interesting background in Poland, would you mind telling us about it?
W: My parents were both born in Imperial Austria, my mother in Krakow and my father in southern Poland, and I myself spoke Polish until the age of 10. My mother came from a Modern Orthodox family, studied horticulture at university, and moved in artistic circles. My father was a doctor. In September 1939 they took a vacation and, because of a sense of foreboding that they had, they went eastward. Well, this turned out to be an eight-year vacation in hell! They entered territory held by the Red Army in the western Ukraine and, by 1942, they had reached Khazakstan, where I was born a few years later…. After the Polish-Soviet repatriation agreement, they returned to Krakow in 1947 but soon found out that they were living in a Jewish graveyard. They acquired Costan Rican passports (on the black market) and in 1948, we reached Paris and eventually London, where we settled and I was brought up.
C: How did growing up in Britain influence your view of Jewish issues and antisemitism?
My first experience of antisemitism was in Britain. In the 1950s, this was a normal part of the landscape. Jews were “bloody foreigners,” but I wasn’t rattled by it. All the teachers at my grammar school were influenced by anti-Jewish prejudices. So, in order to achieve, you had to outperform. I earned my first two degrees at Cambridge, where jokey upper class humor against Jews was part of the scene. My fellow undergraduates knew almost nothing about the history of the Jewish people. At Cambridge I met George Steiner, who lambasted the insularity there. His wife, who was an American, became my supervisor.
In 1966-68 I studied at Stanford, then returned to Europe where I participated in the Paris student revolt, and then in 1969-70 I came to Israel for 16 months. Here I became the literary editor of New Outlook, which was founded by Martin Buber. I had a lot of contact at that time with people associated with MAPAM, which was the main component of the Marxist Zionist left. I was very critical of the euphoria and hubris at that time in Israel right after the Six-Day War.
C: And what did you do next?
I went back to the University of London for a doctorate in 1971, and chose to work on Socialism and the Jewish Question in Central Europe. I began to deal with documentation from Germany and Austria. I had studied with George Mosse, who influenced me at that time, and recommended that I examine the holdings of the Wiener Library in London for sources on the Third Reich. In 1974, I became the director of research and editor of the library’s journal for the next seven years! There I was in a German-speaking environment and in fact, I had spoken German from the age of seventeen or eighteen, having learned it from my grandmother. For her, and her generation, the German language represented high culture, the culture of Germany and Austria, the Viennese culture that they were attracted to.
C: You have done scholarly historical work on the situation of Jews in Vienna. What does that have to tell us about the history of antisemitism and the development of modern Jewish history? Wasn’t Vienna during the late nineteenth century and up to the 1930s a real laboratory for the effort at assimilation?
W: Yes, it was a fascinating laboratory for assimilation, but also for world destruction, in the 1930s. That, by the way, is the title of my most recent book, which examines the fateful dialectic of assimilation in Central Europe. The more intensely Jews sought to become integrated into that culture, the more extreme the antisemitic response, which ultimately assumed genocidal forms. But I’ve always had a special interest in late Habsburg Vienna, which was a cosmopolitan, polyglot environment, a multinational setting in which German was the lingua franca. I have been fascinated by that. It was a European Union in miniature, it was an empire which had to perform a difficult balancing act, and which unraveled due to the ethnic nationalisms which were constantly in conflict with one another. Within that unique framework, Jews were highly influential in science, culture and the economy (less so in politics)....
Read entire article at Barry Rubin & Judith Roumani at the website of Covenant: The Global Jewish Magazine
W: My parents were both born in Imperial Austria, my mother in Krakow and my father in southern Poland, and I myself spoke Polish until the age of 10. My mother came from a Modern Orthodox family, studied horticulture at university, and moved in artistic circles. My father was a doctor. In September 1939 they took a vacation and, because of a sense of foreboding that they had, they went eastward. Well, this turned out to be an eight-year vacation in hell! They entered territory held by the Red Army in the western Ukraine and, by 1942, they had reached Khazakstan, where I was born a few years later…. After the Polish-Soviet repatriation agreement, they returned to Krakow in 1947 but soon found out that they were living in a Jewish graveyard. They acquired Costan Rican passports (on the black market) and in 1948, we reached Paris and eventually London, where we settled and I was brought up.
C: How did growing up in Britain influence your view of Jewish issues and antisemitism?
My first experience of antisemitism was in Britain. In the 1950s, this was a normal part of the landscape. Jews were “bloody foreigners,” but I wasn’t rattled by it. All the teachers at my grammar school were influenced by anti-Jewish prejudices. So, in order to achieve, you had to outperform. I earned my first two degrees at Cambridge, where jokey upper class humor against Jews was part of the scene. My fellow undergraduates knew almost nothing about the history of the Jewish people. At Cambridge I met George Steiner, who lambasted the insularity there. His wife, who was an American, became my supervisor.
In 1966-68 I studied at Stanford, then returned to Europe where I participated in the Paris student revolt, and then in 1969-70 I came to Israel for 16 months. Here I became the literary editor of New Outlook, which was founded by Martin Buber. I had a lot of contact at that time with people associated with MAPAM, which was the main component of the Marxist Zionist left. I was very critical of the euphoria and hubris at that time in Israel right after the Six-Day War.
C: And what did you do next?
I went back to the University of London for a doctorate in 1971, and chose to work on Socialism and the Jewish Question in Central Europe. I began to deal with documentation from Germany and Austria. I had studied with George Mosse, who influenced me at that time, and recommended that I examine the holdings of the Wiener Library in London for sources on the Third Reich. In 1974, I became the director of research and editor of the library’s journal for the next seven years! There I was in a German-speaking environment and in fact, I had spoken German from the age of seventeen or eighteen, having learned it from my grandmother. For her, and her generation, the German language represented high culture, the culture of Germany and Austria, the Viennese culture that they were attracted to.
C: You have done scholarly historical work on the situation of Jews in Vienna. What does that have to tell us about the history of antisemitism and the development of modern Jewish history? Wasn’t Vienna during the late nineteenth century and up to the 1930s a real laboratory for the effort at assimilation?
W: Yes, it was a fascinating laboratory for assimilation, but also for world destruction, in the 1930s. That, by the way, is the title of my most recent book, which examines the fateful dialectic of assimilation in Central Europe. The more intensely Jews sought to become integrated into that culture, the more extreme the antisemitic response, which ultimately assumed genocidal forms. But I’ve always had a special interest in late Habsburg Vienna, which was a cosmopolitan, polyglot environment, a multinational setting in which German was the lingua franca. I have been fascinated by that. It was a European Union in miniature, it was an empire which had to perform a difficult balancing act, and which unraveled due to the ethnic nationalisms which were constantly in conflict with one another. Within that unique framework, Jews were highly influential in science, culture and the economy (less so in politics)....