Book Reviews

 

Forgotten Crimes − The Holocaust and People with Disabilities. By Suzanne E. Evans. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee Press, 2004, 201 pp.

 

Evans’ book is an elaborate and intelligent work based on several, more or less canonical, secondary sources. Its declared aim is to enlighten the wider public about the Nazi annihilation project against people with disabilities conducted between the years 1939 and 1945. However, it raises some fundamental questions.

Beginning with the title of the book, Evans calls for remembering a forgotten event. Nazi extermination of the disabled is far from exhaustively researched; still one might wonder whether the use of the term ‘forgotten’ is accurate. It may be safely assumed that the general public is less aware of the Nazi regime’s annihilation of the disabled than that of the Jews. Since most people have only a scanty knowledge of the Jewish Shoah, one might deduce that they are even less familiar with the extermination of the physically and mentally disabled.

Yet, one might question whether reference to the disabled as a ‘forgotten’ group of victims will prove in the long run to be an injurious strategy. In fact, one might cast doubt on the book’s fundamental objective: to create a minority identity category of people with disabilities. This entails the construction of an identity with its own history, culminating in a formative catastrophe, after a long tradition of persecutions and discrimination.

The issue is not simple, since it deals both with historical facts and with strategies of identity construction, collective memory and public consciousness, which need to be assessed in relation to political pragmatism and wider political patterns that were typical of the era.

Evans claims that by 1945 no fewer than 750,000 people with disabilities were annihilated by the Nazi regime and its collaborators (p. 18). This number is surprising at first glance. However, it incorporates not only victims processed into the system of annihilation under the label, ‘a life unworthy of living’, but also those marked for extinction primarily because of their identity (Jewish, Roma, political, a-social, sexual) and then branded at some point as being physically unfit for whatever reason (such as in the notorious Nazi selections), and exterminated. There is no doubt whatsoever that the facilities of exploitation and destruction that the Nazis developed for the handling of undesired populations − such as camps and ghettoes − were geared to a higher mortality among the physically and mentally weak.

However, can one ‘enlist’ all those victims into the sum of the disabled who were annihilated? And by doing so, were they subtracted from the identity group in which they were primarily processed into the system? These are questions of little if any value for the historian. The issue is entirely political, belonging more precisely (though mistakenly) to the field of victimhood politics − or to what the French philosopher Jean Michel Chaumont labeled ‘the competition of victims [la concurrence des victims]’.

The very division of the Nazi genocide during World War II into discrete programs of genocide according to the identity of the community that faced annihilation has long been common both in research and in the public consciousness; this is exemplified in the separate treatment given to the genocides of the Roma and of the Jews. From this perspective, Evans’ book seeks to do no more than add another category to the Nazi genocide − that of people with disabilities.

The rationale for the book lies in a growing inclination on the part of the disabled to conceptualize themselves in terms of a minority identity faced with systematic discrimination, like blacks, Jews or homosexuals. The role of a well-established historical narrative in the construction of a distinct and stable identity community is obvious. The contribution of a historical narrative that has as its climax a catastrophe revealing the well-concealed, though denied, desire of society to exclude and even destroy people with disabilities, is also evident. This is exactly what Evans book seeks to transmit.

We must differentiate between a practical and focused discussion of the political advantages of a minority identity community approach for the disabled, one that American and Western history of the last 50 years has proven effective, and a historical discussion of the way in which we should organize the past.

It should be noted that relating the Nazi annihilation of people with disabilities as a story in its own right, makes a real contribution to the universal history of World War II. Its main role lies in clearing existing history of misconceptions, such as the interpretation of the T4 project (mass murder of the handicapped and mentally ill) as the exposition of the Shoah. Including the extermination of the disabled in the narrative of the Shoah by using a teleological interpretation, with this annihilation perceived as foreshadowing the Shoah, is just as problematic as the dissection of the Nazi genocide project into well-separated discrete stories.

On the other hand, in order to be able to responsibly criticize identity community oriented attempts, such as that which Evans presents, we must make a real effort to describe what the Nazis did from the most universalistic viewpoint possible, and create the language and conceptual framework that will succeed in interweaving the various Nazi motives and criteria for the annihilation of each identity community into a single cause and criterion.

 

Yehonatan Alsheh

                                                                                                                                           Doctoral Student

                                                                                                                                           Dept. of History

                                                                                                                                           Tel Aviv University

 

Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz. An Essay in Historical Interpretation. By Jan Tomasz Gross. Princeton/Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006, 303 pp.

 

In 2000, Jan Tomasz Gross, currently a professor at Princeton University, published a study entitled Neighbors (Sąsiedzi). This book, which describes in graphic detail the massacre of Jewish inhabitants of Jedwabne by their Polish neighbors, aroused a heated public debate and engendered a spate of historical research. Now Gross has turned to a subject no less controversial yet still somewhat neglected: antisemitic sentiments which prevailed in Poland after the Holocaust.

Gross begins by presenting Poland’s situation at the end of the war, including the understandable sense of betrayal felt by many Poles when Russian demands were accepted on behalf of their country. Five years of brutal German occupation had left their mark on the Polish psyche, and this scarred country found it difficult to welcome back its wretched Jewish citizens who had survived the Holocaust in the East in camps or in hiding, most of them sole survivors of entire families.

Gross portrays clearly the unpleasant, brutal face of antisemitism in postwar Poland and stresses that even under the Communist regime – which at least declared equality for all – hatred of Jews continued at various levels of society. Jews returning to their homes were attacked verbally and physically not only by their former neighbors but by the local and state authorities as well. In fact, this was a Europe-wide phenomenon: Jewish survivors were met with contempt, distrust and even hostility in the Netherlands, Italy, Hungary and many other countries. Yet, the existence of antisemitism in the land of Auschwitz had unique expressions, features and significance. As in his previous book, Gross describes the chronicle of violence toward Jews which characterized many segments of Polish society. His portrayal of the masses’ abhorrence of Jews is horrifying reading.

Gross sees a major motivation for violence against Jews in postwar Poland as stemming from the Polish takeover of Jewish property during the war, which, he said, transformed the Poles in some respects into ‘accessories’ to Nazi crimes. If one could blame a person from whom one benefited as a result of his disaster, one would not be taking advantage of an innocent victim. Thus, the very tragedy of the Jews, which enriched Poles, made Jewish suffering almost acceptable and hence justified Polish gain. Moreover, the war created in Poland a new ‘normative’ system, which determined who was ‘entitled’ to earn most from the murder of the Jews. Gross emphasizes the central role of economic advancement in mobilizing the people, as Aly Götz did in reference to German society in his study: Hitlers Volksstaat. Raub, Rassenkrieg und nationaler Sozialismus (2005).

Gross also reveals other factors which contributed to the violence in Poland, among them, Christian antisemitism and blood libels. The ‘pogrom that wasn’t’ in Rzeszów, in August 1945, violent events in Kraków, and the 1946 Kielce pogrom occurred in the wake of rumors about Jews killing Christian children.

The core of Gross’ book is a detailed description of the Kielce pogrom, which claimed the lives of dozens of Jews. Walenty Błaszczyk, father of Henryk Błaszczyk, the eight-year-old boy who disappeared for two days while visiting former neighbors, informed the police that the boy had escaped Jews who had kidnapped him. On the morning of 4 July, the boy identified the Jewish Committee building on 7 Planty Street as the place in whose cellar he had been held, and identified Kalman Singer as the man who had seduced him to enter the house. Singer was arrested and beaten by the police while Dr. Seweryn Kahane, head of the Jewish Committee, tried to convince them of their mistake, pointing out that the building had no cellar. A crowd had gathered in front of the building where about 40 Jews lived, shouting that Christian children were being held and killed there by the Jews. Soldiers who were called searched the house and demanded that the Jews hand over all weapons they had for self-defense. After the first shot was fired – it is unclear by whom: a policeman, a soldier or one of the Jews – deadly violence broke out. Gross describes the scene graphically: the barbarity of the mob, the baseness of the police and the helplessness of the Jews. It should be emphasized that, unlike at Jedwabne, the Kielce pogrom was perpetrated both by the mob and by state and social agents such as the police, the army and workers from a nearby factory. Some Jews were gunned down – Dr. Kahane was shot in the back while he was trying to call the authorities for help – but most of the victims, among them many women and children, were beaten to death with stones, planks and metal bars.

The violence against Jews in Kielce did not stop at 7 Planty Street, and soon people began looking around for more Jews. Trains at the main railway station were searched for Jews; the 42 victims identified as such, were thrown from the trains and killed. Only when troops arrived from Warsaw did the mob scatter and the pogrom end.

The Kielce pogrom had a great impact on the remnants of Polish Jewry as well as on what was to become ‘Communist Poland’. In the months to follow, tens of thousands of Polish Jews left Poland, many of them using the Zionist Bricha (escape to Palestine) organization. True, antisemitism and the Kielce pogrom were the main spurs for the flight, but several other factors should also be named, including the psychological difficulty of survivors to continue their lives in the place where their loved ones had been brutally murdered and the desire of many to avoid living under a Communist regime.

This brings us to one of the most important contributions of Fear: the response of various segments of Polish society to the pogrom and the weight given, incorrectly, to the image of Żydokomuna (Jewish communism). Gross traces the reaction of the Polish intellectual elite, the representatives of the Catholic Church and the Polish Communist rulers to the pogrom, and the use they made of it in their efforts to shape postwar Poland. Moreover, Gross’ examination of official and unofficial attitudes of the Communist regime toward Jews in Poland, the price many Jews paid as a result of this system, as well as the involvement of Jews in Communist secret service agencies, discredits the well-known claim that Jews played a major role in the implementation of communism on Poland, an allegation used to justify the hatred and violence against them.

The book eloquently describes how antisemitism in postwar Poland spread throughout the entire society, infiltrating even the formal state apparatus, and became a political and social tool used by various and even opposing groups. Fear demonstrates that hatred toward Jews was a norm and perhaps a unifying factor. The use of race hatred – especially hatred of Jews – that people, governments and ideological movements are willing to make in order to enlist the masses has particular relevance today. If Gross’ book succeeds in arousing a public and academic debate about antisemitism as an effective tool for mobilization after Auschwitz, its importance and endurance are assured.

                                                      

Havi Ben-Sasson

Hebrew Univ. of Jerusalem

 

Troubling the Waters: Black-Jewish Relations in the American Century. By Cheryl Greenberg. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006, 368 pp.

 

Numerous studies examining the relationship between Jews and African Americans have been published during the past two decades. Most describe and analyze the nature of those relationships in the past and the reasons for the apparent disintegration in recent years of what has been termed the black-Jewish alliance.(1) Cheryl Greenberg has now written the most comprehensive and best-researched assessment to date of black-Jewish relations in the United States during the twentieth century. It would not be amiss to say that her book is superior to anything that has previously appeared on the subject.

In six elegantly written chapters, she explores whether there ever was in fact a black-Jewish alliance, and if there was a so-called golden age of black-Jewish relations, what happened to it. She shows that what existed was less an alliance than a tumultuous political relationship. Nonetheless, the close association between the two groups energized the civil rights movement, shaped the agenda of liberalism, and had a profound effect on the course of American politics in general.

Focusing her study on national black and Jewish civil rights agencies, especially the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the American Jewish Committee, she explains that “to determine the nature and extent of a black and Jewish civil rights collaboration, one must concentrate on relations between the political organs of the two communities” (p. 7). Although she recognizes that the NAACP does not speak for all blacks or the American Jewish Committee for all Jews, she felt that these organizations serve as better guides for identifying the broader community’s convictions than do individuals. Further, by the second half of the century, when the civil rights movement had gained momentum, national liberal organizations, such as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), had become highly successful in promoting a politics of coalition between blacks and Jews.

Utilizing a variety of organizational records, archival collections, Jewish, black and general journals and newspapers, as well as a wealth of secondary and literary sources, Greenberg moderates the idealized version of mutuality between the black and Jewish communities. She convincingly demonstrates that blacks and Jews had different but overlapping goals and interests that came together at a particular historical moment. Leaders in both communities recognized this intersecting of interests and seized the opportunity for cooperation. This resulted in their working together in ways that allowed them to achieve their objectives more effectively.

Nonetheless, fundamental differences of approach and priorities of the two groups remained. These continued to be manifested in low-level tensions and occasional sharp disagreements, such as those involving the growing movement for mass action strategies within the civil rights community. Jews had overcome discrimination and achieved success while generally adhering to the law. The notion of breaking laws through civil disobedience made them uncomfortable. Although Jewish groups eventually supported the tactics of the Montgomery bus boycott and civil disobedience, they viewed them with unease and refused direct participation. The divergent visions of the two groups eventually led to a weakening of the alliance, especially in the decades after the 1960s.

Although each group encountered discrimination, the experiences of most Jews diverged from those of most African Americans. Antisemitism in the United States has almost always been less vicious and violent than racism against African Americans. Moreover, antisemitism declined more rapidly in the second half of the twentieth century than did racist attitudes toward blacks. Jews might have been restricted from colleges, country clubs and exclusive neighborhoods, but they did not have to contend with segregationist laws and rampant mob violence. Furthermore, almost all Jews were white people; they could pass. Since social and economic opportunities were frequently based on the color of one’s skin rather than on ethnicity or religion, Jews did not have to contend with the economic barriers that black Americans did. By the 1940s and 1950s the Jews’ color and job skills had facilitated their mobility into entrepreneurial and white-collar positions. During those same years, most African Americans remained trapped at the bottom of any occupational field they were permitted to enter. Greenberg insightfully describes the role that the Jews’ ‘whiteness’ and the class differences between Jews and African Americans have played in the communities’ perceptions of each another.

Greenberg also deals with changes that affected ordinary Jewish and African Americans. She describes the process that took place during the 1930s and 1940s of upwardly mobile Jews in the North moving out of their old ethnic enclaves – she uses the term ‘ghettos’, which I think is misleading – and being replaced by African Americans, while the former kept their jobs, stores and other real-estate investments there. The rise in Jewish income also allowed Jewish housewives to hire African Americans as domestics. Thus, at the same time that Jewish and black civil rights organizations began to reach out to one another, Jews had also become landlords, rental agents, social workers, teachers, employers, and shopkeepers in black communities. For the masses of blacks and Jews, relations on the everyday level took place in interchanges generally dominated by the Jews. By the early 1940s, the economic and class tensions thus generated threatened to derail the black-Jewish coalition.

Greenberg explores these issues as well as the impact that Jewish racism and black antisemitism had on the perceptions and actions of both groups. She shows how the period of cooperation that produced remarkable progress in civil rights was also wracked by tensions that constrained collaboration and foreshadowed the later collapse of mutual purpose between the two groups.

She concludes her fine study by describing and analyzing major issues – such as the sit-ins, the black power movement, and the Ocean Hill-Brownsville conflict of the 1960s, the affirmative action cases of the 1970s, the black stance on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the mob attacks against Hasidic Jews in Crown Heights, and the anti-Jewish rhetoric of Louis Farrakhan in the 1990s – that strained relations between blacks and Jews. Despite these and other very real difficulties between the two groups, Greenberg proffers the hope that black-Jewish cooperation is not dead. However, that is for future leaders of both groups to pursue. In the meantime, Cheryl Greenberg’s engaging book should remain the seminal work on black-Jewish relations for some time to come.

 

Robert Rockaway

Tel Aviv University

 

 1.    Recent examples include, Murray Friedman, What Went Wrong? The Creation and Collapse of the Black Jewish Alliance (NY, 1995); Jack Salzman and Cornel West (eds.), Struggles in the Promised Land: Toward A History of Black-Jewish Relations in the United States (Oxford University Press, 1997); V.P. Franklin, Nancy L. Grant, Harold M. Kletnick, and Genna Rae McNeil (eds.), African Americans and Jews in the Twentieth Century: Studies in Convergence and Conflict (University of Missouri Press, 1998); and Maurienne Adams and John Bracey (eds.), Relations Between Blacks and Jews in the United States (University of Massachusetts Press, 1999).

 

The Politics of Hate – Anti-Semitism, History, and the Holocaust in Modern Europe. By John Weiss. Chicago: Ivan Dee, 2003, 245 pp.

 

No student of antisemitism can fail to be amazed by the extraordinary resilience of this age-old malaise. For generations, antisemitism has flourished throughout Europe (and beyond), even in countries with a negligible Jewish population, under varying social systems, and with vastly different cultures. Of late, new historical research has indicated that in countries which have widely been recognized for their ‘tolerance’, and even for attempts to rescue Jews during the Holocaust, things were rarely quite as positive as they had been portrayed. Hence, a comparative political study of this phenomenon is a welcome development.

John Weiss, an emeritus professor at Lehman College and the Graduate Center of the City University in New York, explains what lay behind his decision to undertake this task:

To fully grasp the dangerous potential of racism we must also know the relationship between the fantasies of the antisemites and the long-term historical development of various nations, relationships that gave or denied racists the power to harm their Jewish communities.

Weiss continues:

It is important to witness and remember, but it is essential to explain… Without more knowledge of its long-term historical causes, the Holocaust may well end as an inexplicable enigma, a searing and bitter memory of horror kept alive chiefly within the Jewish community. As such, the Holocaust will offer little help to those who hope to learn from its causes possible ways to avoid future, if lesser, mass murders with different killers and victims.

Weiss provides a variety of explanations. In his opening remarks he draws attention to five core sources of antisemitism that eventually led to the Shoah: Christian theological antipathy toward Jews, hostility rooted in economic competition, fear of Jewish liberal and progressive movements, racial hostility, and hatred borne out of nationalism. His audience is the general public, not scholars who are obviously familiar with much of the information presented here. The book is written in a fluent and engaging style and the author endeavors to provide numerous examples to substantiate his contentions.

Of course, there are inherent dangers in any attempt to reach an ‘explanation’ of a phenomenon as complex as the Shoah, and some would even question whether the exercise should be undertaken at all. In Goethe’s play Torquato Taso, the great German writer wrote: “Was wir verstehen, das koennen wir nicht tadeln” (What we understand, we cannot condemn). Tolstoy is credited with coining the proverb: “Tout comprendre c’est tout pardoner” (To understand fully is to excuse entirely). One suspects that there is a limit to just how much we can really comprehend without eventually ‘contextualizing’ the crime, and in so doing legitimize it. Such Holocaust deflectionism is flourishing in many parts of Europe, though happily it shows at least some signs of abating.

Sadly, although the memory of horror is being kept alive, one sees little evidence that humanity has learned anything from its causes, let alone “possible ways to avoid future, if lesser mass murders with different killers and victims,” and Weiss is perhaps being overly optimistic in his statement that “the Holocaust was unique, but its historical origins tell us much that can help us in the battle against present and future horrors by other perpetrators with different victims.” He himself mentions many outrages, including acts of genocide perpetrated in many parts of the world.

Weiss focuses on four countries: Germany, Austria, France, and Poland, to highlight the evolution of antisemitism Toward the end of the book, which presents a thoroughly gloomy litany of antisemitic actions, Weiss discusses what he tellingly calls “the Italian exception.”

The seemingly arbitrary selection of countries was motivated by Weiss’ search for answers to the following questions:

·         Why did Germany initiate the Holocaust?

·         Why did Austrians supply so many of the killers?

·         Why was it that a million French fascists could not gain sufficient power to help destroy the Jews until the German conquest put the Vichy government in power?

·         Why did fascist Italy not cooperate in the massacre of Jews until Mussolini had lost the war?

·         Why was antisemitism far stronger in Eastern − as illustrated by Poland − than Western Europe?

The focus on these countries alone is somewhat surprising; certainly, the absence of Russia, Romania and Hungary, in particular, leaves the reader with the impression that there were major omissions.

Moreover, Weiss’ expertise is clearly German-speaking Europe and his chapters on Germany and Austria are masterfully written and solidly argued. Weiss, the author of Ideology of Death: Why the Holocaust Happened in Germany, reminds us how very deeply rooted antisemitism is in German culture (Kant called the Jews “a nation of swindlers”; Hegel, “a moral dunghill”; Fichte wanted them removed from the country). He points out that the elites in Germany voluntarily played a disproportionate role in the annihilation of Jews (one-third of the officer corps of the Einsatzgruppen held university degrees at a time when less than 10 percent of that age group had studied at institutions of higher learning). His text is far more readable (and therefore effective and convincing) than Goldhagen’s ponderous Willing Executioners, which provoked such a powerful debate in German society.

To his credit, Weiss dissects the history of Austria going back to the Hapsburg period and the Austrians’ culpability for the Shoah (as distinct from that of the Germans). He notes that William L. Shirer, a contemporaneous eyewitness, described the “orgy of sadism” conducted by Austrians against Jews as worse than anything he had seen in Berlin; that one in ten Austrian joined the Nazi party as compared to one in fifteen Germans; that Austrians, 8.5 percent of the population of Greater Germany, accounted for 15 percent of the membership of the SS and 70 percent of Eichmann’s staff.

However, Weiss is on weaker ground when dealing with countries with which he is less familiar. In the two chapters on Poland, and the specificity of antisemitism in that country, Weiss demonstrates a shallow knowledge of Polish-Jewish history and often repeats platitudinous stereotypes (presumably based on secondary sources). At other times his information is simply erroneous (“Many Polish Jews were peasants”). The history of antisemitism in Poland is more nuanced than Weiss acknowledges and resists a simplistic approach. This is exemplified in Weiss’s assertion that “along with Ukraine and Romania, Poland became more antisemitic than any Western nation including Germany and Austria.”

At the end of his treatment of Poland, Weiss writes: “We can never know, but it seems likely that without the alliance with the West and the murderous policies of the Nazis toward the Poles, a majority of Poles would have been willing participants and not simply indifferent bystanders during the Holocaust.” That one sentence is especially unsettling because it reflects none of the fine distinctions involved in Polish-Jewish relations. Moreover, Weiss’ failure to refer to the murderers (Germans, as well as Austrians) by name rather than anonymous ‘Nazis’, perpetuates a lamentable but prevalent inaccuracy. In the testimonies of survivors collected immediately after the war, there are almost no references to Nazis – only Germans. Whatever its imperfections and with certain clarifications, however, this book could be put to effective use by university lecturers. It is a definite contribution to the popular literature on the subject.

 

Laurence Weinbaum

Research Director

Research Institute of the

World Jewish Congress

 

The Ransom of the Jews: The Story of the Extraordinary Secret Bargain between Romania and Israel. By Radu Ioanid. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2005, 254 pp.

 

The gist of this fine study, which could, in fact, be a work of fiction on the intrigues of the Cold War, was expressed by the author, Radu Ioanid, a director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, in an interview to the Romanian daily Adevarul, in October 2006. “Romania’s Communist leaders succeeded in realizing the ‘golden dream’ of antisemites – not only did they get rid of most of Romania’s Jews,” he said, “but they profited massively from this elimination.” A look at some of the responses to this interview on the web demonstrates that antisemites can never be truly satisfied: some claimed that the Jews were demanding the return of the ransom money paid for them by the Jewish world, while others complained that the deal was not complete, and that Romania was still stuck with too many ‘kikes’.

The Communist regimes of Eastern Europe did not usually engage in human traffic; however, after 1965 the regime of Nicolae Ceausescu continued a practice begun by his almost forgotten predecessor Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, a drab, old-style Stalinist who, although he disliked and feared Stalin, admired his techniques and after taking up the nationalist cause, gave the custom of trafficking in humans new meaning and content.

For years the Romanian Communist regime sold ethnic Germans to West Germany (there were no candidates seeking to emigrate to the former German Democratic Republic) and Jews to Israel. The book focuses on the sale of some 250,000 Jews, especially during the Ceausescu period, for about $3000 per head, a price which varied according to the fluctuations of the world market and to the state of the Romanian economy − which often meant the Ceausescu clan’s personal bank accounts. The price was often also a function of the person’s worth in the eyes of both sides: rumors circulating among Israeli families at the time told, for example, of the low prices offered by Israel for Jewish writers specializing in Socialist realist novels depicting Romanian achievements.

The Romanians could, of course, provide a ‘moral-economic’ cover for their cynical deals; after all, the Jewish world was returning the investment made by the state in their education and professions to Romania − without acknowledging the significant Jewish contribution to Romanian science, culture and economy. The author reveals the story with the aid of recently opened, or partially available archives, as well as personal interviews. In many respects it surpasses Cold War fiction in its revelations of an intricate web of ties between the intelligence services on both sides, and descriptions of some very colorful personages. On the Israeli side was the towering, almost legendary figure of Shaike Dan, whose missions ranged from parachuting into Romania in 1944 in order to save Jews from the Nazis and their Romanian allies, to carrying Samsonite briefcases filled with thousands of dollars in cash, which he handed over to small-time Romanian agents.

Students of international relations will be delighted by this book. Instead of concepts such as ‘bilateral ties’ and ‘high level diplomatic talks”, they will learn that relations between the two states were conducted mainly in the shadows and focused on human traffic. The deals for selling the Jews were very advantageous to the Romanian leadership. Israel provided a wide range of economic benefits in international markets by selling Romanian products under various covers in order to disguise their country of origin. Israel also gradually expanded military ties with Romania, supplying them with Soviet arms captured from the Arabs in the 1967 War, and thus access to Soviet military technology. Romania was the only country in the Communist bloc that did not break off relations with Israel in 1967, and Ceausescu was instrumental in mediating between Israel and the Arabs/Palestinians, including in Sadat’s visit to Jerusalem in 1977. Solving the Arab-Israeli conflict corresponded with Ceausescu’s megalomaniac plan of becoming a world renowned peacemaker, while keeping a safe distance from Moscow. Israel’s contribution to Romania’s foreign policy was also valuable. In the best tradition of antisemites, Ceausescu believed − and Romanian Chief Rabbi Moses Rosen and dozens of other Jewish figures did their best not to disappoint him − that the road to Capitol Hill in Washington ran through the hills of Jerusalem. Albeit perhaps unwillingly, Israel did, in fact, become a major part of the Romanian regime’s life support system.

The author utilized a number of sources, some based on personal interviews with experts, or people involved in Romanian-Israeli relations. One of those frequently quoted is Shlomo-Leibovic Lais, known for his activities as a writer and historian of Romanian-Jewish affairs. The reader has the sense that there are several key persons, probably on both sides (almost no Romanians were interviewed), and undoubtedly on the Israeli side, who possess more intimate details of the deals and their effect on Romanian-Israeli-international relations than they can reveal for the time being.

The book also discusses the overall context in which the entire process of selling Jews to Israel took place. Some aspects are left partially open for further research. Thus, several questions might be raised. To what extent was the nature of Romanian-Israeli ties, and for that matter, world Jewry, shaped by the secret agreements on the sale of Jews, with their far-reaching political-economic repercussions? Of course, in official talks the subterranean channels of communications and deals never figured, and some, if not most of the diplomats and public figures involved on both sides were unaware of the exact nature and magnitude of the transactions (despite the rumors among Israeli families). Must we rewrite the complex story of Romanian–Israeli relations from the perspective of trafficking in Jews? Are we dealing with ‘parallel histories’? The work Romanian–Israeli Relations at the End of the Ceausescu Regime (2002), by Yosef Govrin, a former Israeli ambassador to Romania, contains a wealth of information on Romanian Jewry and Ceausescu’s policies, and is utilized by Radu Ioanid as a source; however, there is not a word in it on the topic of Ioanid’s book. Perhaps we should treat the tale as a ‘two-volume’ series on Romanian-Israeli ties, which tackles the issues at the heart of these relations from different perspectives?

Last, but not least, were Ceausescu and his cronies antisemites? To what extent did the secret deals push the Romanians into clamping down on antisemitism that they themselves fomented? Or, did Israel and the Jewish world discreetly prefer to turn a blind eye to antisemitism in order not to jeopardize the secret relationship. The author does not provide clear answers to these questions; however, according to other available evidence, Ceausescu loathed being surrounded by too many Jews.

One point, however, clearly emerges from the book: Romanian leaders believed that Jews could be traded for money, and that it was always possible to find Jews as willing partners to do such business, especially when it meant bringing them to their ancient homeland.

 

Raphael Vago                           

Dept. of General History

                                                                                                                                           Tel Aviv University