This volume offers a fascinating look at the complex relationship between Jews and Europe during the past two hundred years, and how the European Jewish and non-Jewish intelligentsia interpreted the modern Jewish experience, primarily in Germany, Russia, and Central and Eastern Europe. Beginning with premodern European attitudes toward Jews, Reinharz and Shavit move quickly to “the glorious nineteenth century,” a period in which Jewish dreams of true assimilation came up against modern antisemitism. Later chapters explore the fin-de-siècle “crisis of modernity”; the myth of the modern European Jew; expectations and fears in the interwar period; differences between European nations in their attitude toward Jews; the views of Zionists and early settlers of Palestine and Israel toward the Europe left behind; and views of contemporary Israeli intellectuals toward Europe, including its new Muslim population—the latest incarnation of the Jewish Question in Europe.

In European and Holocaust historiography, it is generally believed that neither the Zionist movement nor the Yishuv were mindful of the plight of European Jews in the face of the Nazi threat during the 1930s. Drawing on a wide variety of memoirs, letters, and institutional reports by people from all walks of life, this volume sheds new light on a troubled period in Jewish history. Jehuda Reinharz and Yaacov Shavit trace Jewish responses to developments in Eastern and Central Europe, as well as reactions to British policy on the question of a Jewish homeland, to show that Zionists in the Yishuv worked tirelessly on the international stage on behalf of their coreligionists in Europe. Nevertheless, their efforts were all too often shattered by the realities of their powerlessness and lack of resources. Piercing to the heart of conversations about how or whether to save Jews in an increasingly hostile Europe, this volume provides a nuanced assessment of what could and could not be achieved in the years just prior to World War II and Holocaust.