On the Margins: Essays on the History of Jews in Estonia

Anton Weiss-Wendt

Published by Central European University Press 2017

On the Margins

Essays on the History of Jews in Estonia

Anton Weiss-Wendt

https://doi.org/10.1515/9789633861660

Overview
Contents

About this book

Estonia is perhaps the only country in Europe that lacks a comprehensive history of its Jewish minority. Spanning over 150 years of Estonian Jewish history, On the Margins is a truly unique book. Rebuilding a life beyond so-called Pale of Jewish Settlement in the Russian Empire, the Jewish cultural autonomy in interwar Estonia, and the trauma of Soviet occupation of 1940–41 are among the issues addressed in the book but most profoundly, the book wrestles with the subject of the Holocaust and its legacy in Estonia.

Specifically, it examines the quasi-legal system of murder instituted in Nazi-occupied Estonia, confiscation of Jewish property, and Jewish forced labor camps and develops an analysis of the causes of collaboration during the Holocaust. The book also explores the dynamics of war crimes trials in the Soviet Union since the 1960s and so-called denaturalization trials in the United States in the 1980s. The haunting memory of Soviet and Nazi rule, the book concludes, prevents a larger segment of today’s Estonian population from facing up to the Holocaust and the universal message that it carries.E

Author / Editor information

Weiss-Wendt Anton :

Anton Weiss-Wendt is Head of Research at the Center for the Study of the Holocaust and Religious Minorities in Oslo, Norway.

Reviews

Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern:
“In the context of Jewish history, Estonia long had an image of a haven for anybody who thought differently. The book by Weiss-Wendt challenges this conventional stereotype. It tells a sad story of a tiny and exotic ethnic group, the Jews, who Estonians bestowed minority rights on in the interwar period, helped to exterminate during the Holocaust, marginalized in the post-war period, and vilified in the post-1991 Estonia. The author of the book made an effort to reclaim the memory of the Estonian Jews from the realm of the exotic. This book reads like a warning: it suggests that a people who marginalize a minority and the memory of that minority might themselves be easily marginalized as exotic and insignificant.”

Doyle E. Stevick:
“Anton Weiss-Wendt provides us with a fascinating and important examination of the Holocaust in Estonia and, crucially, Jewish life before the war. Two decades of research inform this original contribution to Estonian and Jewish history. His judicious and meticulous documentation provide needed perspective to a heated and contentious topic. Yet the work is anything but dry—Weiss-Wendt writes as fluidly and compellingly about the broader geopolitics of the region as he does the individual lives affected by the tragic history of the region. The exceptional depth achieved in this volume provides a model for scholarship . . . and will be of broad interest to researchers of both Jewish and Holocaust history generally.”

Michael Berkowitz:
“In the vast spectrum of books concerned with modern Jewish history, On the Margins is highly distinctive and unusually compelling. While focusing on a supposedly ‘marginal’ entity, Anton Weiss-Wendt demonstrates that we have the potential to learn a great deal about European Jewish history, comprehensively, through an illumination of Estonia’s Jews—which fit few of the perceived conventions of Jewish life. It is on the one hand deeply tragic—an interpretation of a country that the Nazis boasted had cleansed itself of its Jews. But on the other hand, Jews in Estonia, while small in number, seemed to embody ‘normalcy’ before and after the Holocaust—with the lack of attention remarkable in itself. We are indeed fortunate that a talented scholar with courage and integrity has a produced a work that is both deeply personal and a critical part of the whole of Jewish and human history.”

"What distinguishes this volume from other more traditional histories is the interconnectedness of the author and his personal context with his historical subject. Weiss-Wendt interweaves his own career trajectory and historical and social questions into the contemporary world of Estonia, the historiographical debates about the Final Solution in eastern Europe, and the roll of antisemitism in the history of Estonia and its collaboration with the German occupiers during the war. The result is a unique and compelling collection of essays that sometimes do not hold together, yet which if taken as a whole and read in the spirit for which they are intended, offer real insight and meaning into much neglected areas of Estonian, German, Soviet, and Jewish histories."

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Table of Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
List of Tables Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
Acknowledgments Publicly Available Download PDF	xi
Preface Antony Polonsky Publicly Available Download PDF	xiii
Studying Estonian Jewish History: A Professional and Personal Journey Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
CHAPTER 1 New in Town: Jews in Narva, 1874–1917 Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	31
CHAPTER 2 Thanks to the Germans! Jewish Cultural Autonomy in Interwar Estonia Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	69
CHAPTER 3 The Soviet Occupation of Estonia in 1940–41 and the Jews Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	95
CHAPTER 4 Accidentally Jewish: Helmut Weiss and the (Il)logic of Political Violence in Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	115
CHAPTER 5 Ordinary People Facing Holocaust: The Estonian Security Police Investigation Files, 1941–42 Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	143
CHAPTER 6 The End Complete: The Destruction of Jews in Provincial Cities Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	165
CHAPTER 7 The Business of Survival: Baltic Oil Ltd. and Jewish Forced Labor Camps in Estonia Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	197
CHAPTER 8 Estonian Perpetrators of the Holocaust in the Annals of the Cold War: The Prosecution of War Criminals in the Soviet Union, 1943–1987 Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	221
CHAPTER 9 Why the Holocaust Does Not Matter to Estonians Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	243
Appendix: Primary Sources on Estonian Jewish History until 1941 Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	277
Selected Bibliography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	283
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	293

Language: English
Publisher: Central European University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 332
Keywords: 19-20th century; Ethnic relations; History; Holocaust; Nazism; Political violence; Soviet Union

eBook

Published: April 30, 2017
ISBN: 9789633861660