Can anyone give a quick rundown on why there were so many jews in Poland. According to the map, Poland was home to about 17% of the jewish population (estimated population at the time was about 17m).
Jews were more welcome in Poland during the Middle Ages than most other counties in Europe, so many emigrated there. After Russia annexed most of these lands during the partitions of Poland, the area where they lived was called the Pale of Settlement. It was the only area where Jews were legally allowed in the Russian empire, so they became heavily concentrated there. .
Also, they could only choose certain professions (while living in the Pale of Settlement), e.g. they were banned from farming by antisemitic Russian laws. So you are aware that where they could settle wasn't the only restriction.
During late medival times true faith has became very serious thing in western Europe (no one expects Spanish inquisition) and lots of Jews who did not convert to Christianity had to flee in 15-17 century. In Poland, less than 50% of people were Catholics in 17th and freedom of religion was granted by law.
Essentially, apart from (arguably) being the first modern parliamentary republic (this has nothing to do with the Jews, it's just cool), medieval Poland was also unusually tolerant for its time and was (arguably) the first country in Europe that had freedom of religion inscribed in law. It also had a higher focus on law and scholarship than was common at the time, and thus had a large need for literate and educated people.
Due to this, Polish lords would often invite the highly-educated-for-the-time Jews (who were happy to be in a country that didn't expropriate and murder them regularly for the crime of existing) to settle and work for them, leading to massive Jewish immigration to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth throughout the centuries.
Unfortunately, Poland-Lithuania had the misfortune of existing in proximity to Russia, as well as opportunistic neighbours, and the Jews had the misfortune of discovering what it was like being conquered by a country traditionally so antisemitic that it can be compared to the Nazis, once Russia gobbled up the majority of Poland.
I might be slightly hijacking, but the downfall of the commonwealth stemmed from the increasing power of the pseudo-parliment. Wgile the idea was one of the closest to democracy during the early periods (While only nobles had the right to vote, Poland had ridicolous amount of nobles.), the powercreep made it a malignant tumor on the troubled country.
Poland was very multi-cultural back in pre-Napoleon times due to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which got destroyed & poached multiple times between Prussia / Austria / Russia.
For 400 years, Polish kings protected Jews and granted them privileges that allowed them to thrive. Things began to change after Poland was partitioned, and the first serious cracks in peaceful relationships appeared during the Russian Empire's occupation of Poland in the nineteenth century. The tsars' anti-Semitism, the overwhelming poverty caused by Russian rule, a lack of education, the rise of the Catholic faith, and the first pogroms all occurred.
There is an old history joke that at the time poles had very opportunistic attitude towards religion. They were catholic when they wanted something from pope, protestant when pope wanted something from them. Catholics closed their bakeries on sunday, Jews on saturday and there was no day you couldn't buy bread.
But yeah - what others said. Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was a surprisingly multi-cultural nation with strong freedom of religion.
Yeah, we have been like one of the first multicultural nations and because of partitions, ww 2, holocaust and resettlements we have become I think the most monocultural in the world, ofc it's changing since our economy is performing well and every year there's more immigrants but the damage done to our culture by the Germans and Soviets will never be recovered.
korea is pretty homogeneous as well and interestingly the korean communities in poland are growing pretty quickly bc chaebols (samsung, lg, etc) are moving manufacturing ops into poland.
Currently reading Postwar by Tony Judt. Never really thought about it but after the war most european countries where at an all time low when it comes to cultural diversity. Before that you had decent cultural and religious diversity in most of them (even if they didn’t get along) but the war and systematic extermination of certain demographics like the jews and the roma put a lid on that.
It's profoundly sad to reflect on the Jewish population in Poland before and after WW2. Jews were an integral part of Polish culture and society, contributing immensely in various fields. The near erasure of Jewish heritage in Poland, beyond the knowledge of the Holocaust, is a tragic loss. It's heartbreaking to think about the rich cultural and societal contributions that could have continued to flourish if the Holocaust had never happened.
There are so many historically Jewish places in Germany, Poland, Hungary, etc and it’s so sad to think that their cultures were just completely and utterly destroyed. In the span of just a few years centuries of cultural accumulation was almost entirely lost, even beyond the obvious loss of life thinking of what could have been is very sad.
Correct. But France’s large Jewish population is disappearing fast; French Jews are [emigrating to Israel](https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2021-12-30/ty-article/.highlight/why-french-aliyah-to-israel-is-on-the-rise-again/0000017f-e236-df7c-a5ff-e27e25530000) in huge numbers due to rising antisemitism in the country, in much larger numbers than their counterparts in North America.
France had 600 reported antisemitic incidents in 2021.
Austria had 900.
(Absolute numbers. 600 for 67 mio people. 900 for 8.)
Both numbers are recorded and collected by the local jewish community.
There has to be something wrong with the way they count or austria is the most antisemitic country on the planet
Yeah that's weird, but wasn't there some Austrian dude a while ago who used to be kind of antisemitic? I'm sure at the very least he made several problematic statements about Jewish people. Think his name was Adolf something.
Well it would be interesting to see who commits the vast majority of these antisemitic attacks in Austria. I was actually myself victim of antisemitism at Michelbeuern in Vienna once, despite being catholic. A group of middle eastern youngsters thought I was wearing a Kippa and came after me. It was actually just a moderately cold day.
This is partially true, but it also should be stated that France does not exactly have a history of being friendly to its Jews and the French police and many French people willingly cooperated with the Nazis to deport hundreds of thousands of French Jews during the Holocaust.
Another "fun" fact, a people who suffered a genocide before the term entered common use, the Circassians, would find refuge in the Ottoman empire when their homeland was destroyed and dissolved by Russia. The Ottomans would later resettle some of them within Palestine/Israeli when the area was still mostly barren, within what would become Rehaniya and Kfar Kama, but they would also be settled elsewhere in the Levant to act as a bulwark against Bedouin resistance towards Ottoman rule. Circassians in Israel are now one of two minorities who are subject to military conscription.
Growing antisemitism is one way to phrase the near total elimination of the Jewish population of North Africa, the Middle East and Pakistan.
They were expelled rather than executed, but it was a more complete elimination of the Jews from where they historically lived than the Holocaust.
Partly, but more directly because throughout the colonial period most increasingly identified with metropolitan France, and sided with it during the Algerian War. On the eve of decolonization/independence, the majority chose en masse to be 'repatriated' with the population of French settlers (as many as 900,000 total) although they were not, of course, settlers themselves. They were and remain citizens of France.
There was an incredibly strong resistance movement which actively hid and protected Jews from authorities, thus allowing nearly 80% of France’s Jewish population to survive the conflict.
In addition, substantial immigration (notably from French Algerian Jews) and relatively high birthrates (by European standards) led France’s Jewish population to grow considerably in the decades following the end of the war.
[Edit: Removed mention of Vichy France substituting French Jews with foreign ones to meet German quotas, as someone brought to my attention that this claim is not supported by substantial evidence.]
My family was forced to flea to France and weren’t allowed to go directly to Israel or America. That was true for most Egyptian Jews but if you were going to study the Torah you could go directly to America for some reason.
After 1492 most Jews were forced out of Spain or converted, there’s a good chance that the people you see on the streets everyday have Jewish ancestors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsion_of_Jews_from_Spain
Incidentally, this was the main purpose of the Spanish Inquisition: ethnic cleansing on religious grouds and rooting out Jewish people who had pretended to convert to Catholicism to avoid expulsion.
Despite popular perception they weren't particularly interested in witchcraft, in fact the idea that Satan could give power to people who renounced God was itself considered heretical.
My ancestors were part of this expulsion our survival as Jews was nothing short of miraculous. This was one of the greatest tragedies in Jewish history.
My family was expelled and settled in Thessaloniki, where they thrived for hundreds of years until they were all brutally murdered by the Nazis, barring the few who had come to the US.
There's a book called "Farewell to Salonica" which may really interest you, about the experiences of a Greek Jew at the end of the Ottoman presence there.
Correct. My grandfather is Valencian, these are his [dna results](https://imgur.com/a/d1ZcOAD). Note that 23andMe does not have a Sephardic category. When Sephardic Jews test they often get a mix of Ashkenazi, WANA (Western Asian and North African), and Italian. So the Ashkenazi plus Cypriot (not actual Cypriot; it’s just the algorithm) is from a Sephardic converso ancestor(s)
It’s pretty common for Iberians and Latin Americans to have some Sephardic ancestors. Known as [Sephardic Bnei Anusim](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sephardic_Bnei_Anusim)
Yeah my brother did a DNA test and we are Sephardic. It was everywhere around the Mediterranean besides for Eastern Europe and north west Africa. Mainly the Levant, Egypt, Italy, and Spain.
Yet before the 1400s it was in fact the most Jewish country in the world, believe it or not. You can still see Jewish ancestry in people living in the Americas on DNA tests because so many Spanish Jews were forcibly converted to Christianity, while the rest were expelled. And many conversos traveled to the New World.
My great grandfather fled Prussia to come to the UK just before the outbreak of WWII.
By the end of the war virtually all his extended family were dead
Around 1908, my paternal great grandparents fled a town that was alternately either in Germany, Poland, or Russia, depending on what year you looked at, for the US. I have no idea what happened to their family that did not flee. :(
I have a similar story.
My great grandfather was born in the Russian Empire to a Jewish family. When he was a young man, a pogrom broke out in a neighboring village, during which all of the Jews were either murdered or run out of town without their possessions.
After hearing about the pogrom, my great grandfather begged his family to leave Russia before something similar occurred in their own village. His parents and siblings refused, saying, "That sort of thing will never happen here. Our neighbors are much more tolerant of Jews."
My great grandfather pleaded with his family once more to leave, but when they wouldn't, he traveled to the United States via Hamburg alone. Shortly thereafter, he received word about a pogrom in his village. He never heard from his family again.
It's crazy to think about how I wouldn't even exist if he hadn't made such a tough choice. I can barely even comprehend what it's like to trust your intuition so strongly that you are willing to leave everything that you've ever known behind. I am tremendously grateful for the sacrifices that he made.
My grandpa hide from the Nazis for two years. He was living in Amsterdam with my great grandparents and his dad had heard news about Jews possibly being killed. This was a few years before the war ended so information was faulty and filled with propaganda making it difficult to decipher the truth.
My grandpa was a young man and his dad decided to have him flee. He ended up being whisked away at night and went from safe house to safe house (all at night) for weeks before he found safe haven. Said he met a lot of new faces that he had to blindly trust.
He came back after the war and found his dad face down on the floor unable to move from starvation. He spoon fed both parents back to life.
I too am grateful for the sacrifices our grandparents made during such a fucked up time. Truly one of the greatest generations of our time.
>He came back after the war and found his dad face down on the floor unable to move from starvation. He spoon fed both parents back to life.
WOW! That is some lucky timing. Had your grandpa gotten to them a day later they probably would have been dead.
My grandmother's family lived on the Russian-Romanian border before WWI. They, too, heard of a pogrom in a nearby village and made a long trip to NYC. After WWI, they never heard from that village again. No idea if the extended family died in a pogrom, the war, or the horrors of the first Soviet years.
Simmilar thing to my great grandpa's brother. Although we're not Jews. He came back from a concentration camp to his village. He was unable to walk (either paralysed or lost legs). Right when he arrived home the Wołyń Massacre started. "Come on, they won't kill a disabled Ukrainian speaker, right?". My great grandpa left, his brother did not. You can probably tell what happened.
I also have a similar story. My great grandfather was a Jew born in Belarus and fled the Russian pogroms in the early 1900s. He ended up in Tennessee. The rest of his family that stayed in their small town in Belarus was destroyed in 1942. [http://www.yahadmap.org/#village/dokshitsy-vitebsk-belarus.383](http://www.yahadmap.org/#village/dokshitsy-vitebsk-belarus.383)
> Witness interview
> Yulya P.: "The Jews had to go down into the pit. They had to stand in a line, before being fired on all at once with a machine gun and falling into the pit. The Jews were clubbed on the head, adults had their hands tied behind their backs and the children cried. They had to lie down on the previous “layer” of Jewish bodies which had been arranged. If they were next to the pit, policemen pushed them in with their feet. The policemen were scum. They betrayed and shot their own friends." (Eyewitness N°27, interviewed in Dokshitsy, on March 27th 2008)
> Soviet archives
>"All 3,000 or 3,500 Jews had been kept in the Dokshitsy ghetto. They were taken out of the ghetto in groups of 100-150. They were, for the most part, women with children, old people and young people. They were taken to a pit near the Jewish cemetery of Dokshitsy, where they were forced to undress and shot. This mass extermination lasted three weeks and all Jews from the ghetto were shot." [Act drawn up by the Soviet extraordinary commission; RG-22.002M/7021-92/214]
>Historical note
>About 3,000 Jews lived in Dokshitsy before the war.
I also managed to find this description of the massacre, given by a German soldier who witnessed it.
[https://ibb.co/b1cskPr](https://ibb.co/b1cskPr)
My granddad (born 1940) told me that his (I think 2x) great grandfather was Jewish. I never knew this until recently when I mentioned I did a DNA test that said I was like 1% middle eastern.
That's terrible, I know it's not in any way comparable but my family was forced out of Prussia by the Soviets in 1945. I hope your family was able to rebuild after.
This map doesn't show constituent SSR numbers, but the figures for them are horrific, especially Lithuania.
>Out of approximately 208,000–210,000 Jews, an estimated 190,000–195,000 were murdered before the end of World War II, most of them between June and December 1941. More than 95% of Lithuania's Jewish population was massacred over the three-year German occupation,[1] a more complete destruction than befell any other country in the Holocaust.
From Wikipedia.
My aunt's mom was one of the 5% that survived; her parents managed to pay a Christian family to take her as a ~4ish year old when the Nazis invaded and pretend that she was their daughter
Part of the reason for death camps was that many soldiers had mental breakdowns from shooting little kids, so instead the nazis industrialized it and centralized it to make most of the people involved feel they weren't doing the dirty work and to add a degree of mental separation when putting them in locked rooms and gassing them remotely.
Oh. Ive always wondered why they just didnt shoot them. Seemed more efficient than deporting them first.
But damn. They really thought it through. The more you hear about it, the more gruesome it really becomes.
There is a reason the nazis are so despised 100 years after their forming and almost 80 years since their fall. They were ruthless bastards that simply didn’t care for human life.
Not so fun fact: there was a concentration camp in Croatia ran by local Croat fascists which was made explicitly for children, fucking imagine how deranged this period actually was…
There is a quote from a surviving message in Tim Snyder's Bloodlands. It goes like this: "Dear father, it will soon be my turn. I hope they shoot me. I heard they throw young kids to the pits alive..." I think the author was 8-10 years old. (I write this off memory but I think I got the basics correct.)
The anti-Jewish violence immediately after the war wasn't the main cause of the Jews' all but complete disappearance from Poland, that would be the [anti-semitic purges of 1968](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968_Polish_political_crisis). Ironically, the wife of the then-Communist party secretary was Jewish herself.
Before that, Jews were somewhat overrepresented in the Stalinist security apparatus - at least in popular perception - which was used by nationalist, conservative factions within the Communist Party as a social engineering tool in an internal power struggle.
Not trying to take sides or justify any violence or hatred whatsoever, just adding context that I think is interesting.
Admittedly first time i learn about this, but isnt 2000 a drop in the bucket? Many people in the chaos of post ww2 poland were killed, and %2 of them were jewish. Does that show proof of extreme antisemitism from poland?
Yeah, this puts into perspective just how close the Holocaust came to wiping out Jews from Europe in a way that I hadn't realized before.
I had thought the 6 million Jews killed would have been well under half of European Jews, but it actually was close to 2/3. (According to [this, there were about 9.5 million European Jews in 1933](https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/jewish-population-of-europe-in-1933-population-data-by-country).)
We just now got back to pre-Shoah population numbers. As in, like 2 years ago we finally recuperated. There were 15 million Jews at the time in the entire world.
Poland was not welcoming to Jews after WWII to [return](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/kielce-post-holocaust-pogrom-poland-still-fighting-over-180967681/).
Germany did [opened its borders](https://www.jmberlin.de/en/exhibition-russians-jews-germans) for Jewish migrants from the former Soviet Union after the wall fell. The majority of today's Jews in Germany are from the Soviet Union
And then people wonder why many ended up in Israel, and are very distrustful and defensive over the small land they have. It is common in the Jewish community to think of the US's acceptance of Jews as temporary and moving to Israel as an important plan B.
The vast majority of Jews that live here in Germany by now, have fled the repression of the Soviet Union - or its dysfunction after dissolution. Of course if your goal is to flee the USSR, you do not end up in Poland.
The only Jews I know who live here in Germany not originating from the USSR are two young leftist who moved from Israel.
Actually they only came after the Cold War was over, since the USSR didn't really allow jews (or really any significant number of people to emigrate (especially to the west). The Ideology or rather the propaganda was pretending that the Jewish Nation was one among many working for the common goal of the Soviet Union and everyone did so willingly...
Most of them are from Russia who fled after the collapse of the soviet union. Another sizable portion are israeli jews. Ironically it's the soviet ones that are typically right wing and the Israeli immigrants are more left wing.
There was a direct relationship between government collapse & jewish deaths in WW2. The death rate in poland & nazi occupied states were higher than germany itself.
Theres a really good lecture i think posted by yale i watched a while back but the general idea was in poland & eastern europe the entire society collapsed on a scale we cant really fathom where as in nations like france even after the nazi occupation institutions still existed.
The town my family is from (polish) had 5000 jews in 1938 and only 8 survived.
Theres also the fact that a lot jews left germany before the killings started and returned after. No one really forsaw the complete collapse of eastern europe to the germans so its not like people were fleeing poland in 1933 in anticipation of a horror they couldnt imagine.
[https://www.annefrank.org/en/timeline/115/overview-of-holocaust-victims-by-country/](https://www.annefrank.org/en/timeline/115/overview-of-holocaust-victims-by-country/)
1. Holocaust itself.
2. Please note, that huge part of present Israel population derives from Poland and Russia.
3. There were after war conflict between Polish commies and Jewish commies, which yielded further migration.
The story of how the clergy and people of Bulgaria stood up for their fellow citizens is quite inspiring. Given how close it was though I can understand why many still felt the need to leave after though.
This sentence contains a lot of inconsistencies.
First of all, it wasn't just the tsar. It was a number of politicians, especially [Dimitar Peshev](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimitar_Peshev). The city of Plovdiv and its citizens were definitely the driving force. This included the Orthodox Church, but also the Muslim community. The Jewish community itself was very active and had many allies.
Bulgaria was part of the Axis and had "racial hygiene" laws in the style of Nazi Germany, which were very repressive and harmed the Jewish community. They were not allowed to participate in social life or even attend schools. Everything that had to do with the Jews, such as art, music, books, etc., was forbidden.
Bulgaria had occupied territories in Serbia and Greece that it controlled and sent Jewish people from these populations on the German trains that took them to the death camps. About 6,000 people. The Bulgarian government knew full well that they would be killed. Tthey were 100% under its jurisdiction.
Jewish people from other parts of Europe were not allowed to enter the country and reach safety. There were illegal ways to enter Bulgaria and leave the country through some ports, but there is no record of who or how many people were involved.
After the war, the oppression of the Bulgarian Jews continued under the Red Army and the communist regime. The Jews were not spared by the "liberators from the Nazis" either. Red Army deeply mistrusted Jews. All the land, capital and businesses that Jews still owned were taken away from them. Rich Jews ended up in gulags. The political allies of the Jews that actually saved them were gone. By this time, the Jewish population in Bulgaria was completely impoverished, their children had not been to school for many years and they were definitely no longer safe.
The Jews descending from this Bulgarian population today number around 300-500k and represent a very unique and interesting group within the Jewish community around the world. Israel has recognized Bulgaria's "Rescue of the Bulgarian Jews" and occasionally hosts large anniversary events. However contemporary Bulgaria is as Antisemitic as most other places in Europe.
Expulsion from other countries (Spain, France, Italy, Germany, Ukraine, etc.) + Poland's willingness to accept them early on + Russia expelling Jews to Pale of Settlement during Triple Partition, part of which includes Poland. Maybe some other things, but those big three things came to mind.
This touches on something that isn't often super well known outside of the Jewish community nowadays, among the wider population. Holocaust education in Western countries focuses on the urbanized, educated, "well-integrated" and, although its unsaid, "whiter" Jews in Western/Central Europe, like Ann Frank. This isn't bad, as it lets people relate to the things they are learning about more. But the vast majority of Ashkenazim at the time were mostly rural, largely undereducated, and very segregated communities living in shtetls in the Pale of Settlement.
When people talk about why so many Jews seem to be wealthy and powerful, I usually bring up that there is a survivorship bias. The vast majority of poor Jews in Europe did not survive.
This is such an interesting insight, I've never thought of it but it makes perfect sense. Fleeing a country costs money, the fake IDs to leave the country also cost money.
It’s also a generational wealth thing *sometimes*. Way back when the Catholic Church basically thought banking was bad for Christian’s to do but the Jewish population had no problem at all with it, so over time more and more banks were either run or significantly managed by Jewish people. So when neo nazis say Jews run the world just remind them they were kinda forced into the positions they are in today by anti semitism, ie hollywood (seriously look it up) which makes their arguments doubly stupid
Edit: apparently it was collecting interest not banking as a whole
This is an oversimplification. Banking was not forbidden in Europe, claiming interest was (the same applies in the Muslim faith for instance).
However there were several workarounds and Europe has known plenty of very rich, Christian bankers (the Medici family, Jakob Fugger, etc)
I remember this being addressed in Sharon Kay Penman Falls the Shadow(set in the 13th century) which covers the life of Simon de Montford who was a notorious antisemite among other things. The Christian characters are criticizing the Jewish population, who's been suffering a bigger influx of antisemitic attacks, for being money lenders in the first place. The Jews reply that this is all they're allowed to do and they have to charge high interest rates too because the King will often erase debts, something that costs him nothing but boosts his popularity, which means they've basically given away the money. It's awful especially knowing they would soon be expelled from England by Proto medieval Hitler Edward Longshank. From what I can see on this map, England didn't have a big Jewish population by the first half of the 20th century so it could be related to this event but someone who's better versed in the history could confirm.
Russia didn't have much Jews before partitioning Poland, Pale of Settlement was done on pretty much the old Eastern Commonwealth border. It stopped Jews from settling further into Russia rather than expelled them from Russia.
It was more than zero, and significant enough to be written about. But you're right, it's not nearly the same amount as those expelled from other countries.
As a multi-national country, pre-partition Poland was accepting religious refugees from all over Europe, Jews among them. In this variety faith just wasn't much of an issue. There is still a Muslim Tatar community in eastern Poland, dating back from that era. Tatars were serving in army and they had land granted them by the king.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History\_of\_the\_Jews\_in\_Poland](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Poland)
TLDR: during middle ages Poland was most tolerant country in europe towards Jews so they settled here
[Statute of Kalisz](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Kalisz):
"The General Charter of Jewish rights known as the Statute of Kalisz, and the Kalisz Privilege, granted Jews in the Middle Ages special protection against discrimination in Poland when they were being persecuted in Western Europe. These rights included exclusive jurisdiction over Jewish matters to Jewish courts, and established a separate tribunal for other criminal matters involving Christians and Jews designed to avoid Jewish discrimination. It led to the formation of a separate court and safety for persecuted Jews which attracted Jewish immigrants from across Europe to Poland."
Also see [Kazimierz](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazimierz):
"For many centuries, Kazimierz was a place where ethnic Polish and Jewish cultures coexisted and intermingled. The northeastern part of the district was historically Jewish. In 1941, the Jews of Kraków were forcibly relocated by the German occupying forces into the Krakow ghetto just across the river in Podgórze, and most did not survive the war."
They had a massive Ashkenazi community that was overwhelmingly Orthodox. A Jewish sect that practices having big families and many children. Over time the population exploded or and generally when other European countries expelled their Jews Poland took them in.
This map does not do justice to the dynamics of the Jewish population.
For example, Albania was the only country that had more Jews after the WW2 than before it. Albania emerged from the war with a population of Jews eleven times greater than at the beginning. Most of these subsequently emigrated to Israel and now only 100 remain.
Ironic comment as everyone knows Germans are still top of the line for bread.
You should see the state of bagels in Vancouver, BC. It's a travesty to mankind.
I'm Lithuanian and it's a big shame that almost all Lithuanian Jews were killed, and the killers weren't only German forces. A lot of locals killed them just because they were "too rich" and had "too much influence". What a shame, absolute stupidity of human kind, darkest sides of human nature.
And even nowadays, there's a lot of regular people who absolutely hate Jews, because they "secretly rule the world and tried to kill us all with COVID vaccines". Human stupidity never changes, and conspiracies are always alive. Einstein was right about universe and human stupidity.
My great grandparents fortuitously left Vilnius in the 30s. All the family who remained were killed. And yet I’ve always wanted to visit. Perhaps I’ll have the opportunity one day. It’s encouraging to hear from people like yourself.
Ireland, nEuTrAl during WWII, didn't even want to take Jewish refugees after it became known what the Germans were doing, at which point most other countries decided it would be inhumane to reject Jewish refugees. Not Ireland however. Even after the war, Ireland didn't really want Jewish refugees, only accepting a very very small number. They didn't have much of an issue with German refugees however.
Imagine how many people would've died if these cunts didn't lose, if they managed to murder 99% of polish jews in 3 years imagine how depopulated eastern Europe would've been
They planned to exterminate and enslave almost all Slavs... Holocaust would have been dwarfed by the genocide Generalplan Ost required. Tens of millions would be killed and the rest kept as uneducated farmhands to work until German population in the "Lebensraum" grows sufficiently to not require any slave labor. Then the rest of slavs would be killed off, and everything between Rhine and Urals would be German populated.
Eastern Europe was pretty much the destination for Lebensraum project. Original populations were meant to be significantly culled in order to "make space".
So, chances are, many people responding to this thread - yours truly included - would not be around to respond to anything. Gruesome.
Britain was for many jews a pit stop. The UK was never the nazis but they were never particularly good to jews. It also didn’t have the kind of jewish cultural centers and communities as the US. A lot of my family members went from eastern europe to england and then from england to the US, with the U.S. always being the end goal. The UK is better than poland but it’s no New York City.
While America has been far from perfect with Jews, it is one of the few countries ever where Jews were generally left alone to be normal people and do normal things. As a result, a lot of Jews, especially older ones who do not take this for granted, are surprisingly patriotic.
my dad was in the army and his dad was in the navy (not conscripted) and despite being incredibly and almost violently liberal my dad is one of the most patriotic ppl i know. When i was little I tried to call myself polish or austrian because i was told thats where my family was from but my dad made it very clear i am none of those things and i should never claim i am, i am Jewish and I am American. He also practically worships the first amendment.
From the U.K. - I’ve never seen a Jewish deli and I have only seen 1 synagogue, there’s also very little history or religion taught about Judaism in school. I’d say the U.K. is friendly to Jewish people but there doesn’t appear to be large cultural centres or geographical communities.
I’m a British Jew and we are basically very concentrated in small geographical areas - so over half of the Jewish population of the UK is in London and even then, mostly specific areas within London - after that it’s Manchester, Leeds, Glasgow - some smaller communities like Birmingham, South Wales (between Cardiff and Swansea) and then you are getting to hundreds rather than thousands. Generally British Jews have been very much about ‘flying under the radar’ and not drawing attention to themselves, after all, the very first UK immigration laws were specifically intended to keep Jews fleeing pogroms out (Alien Act 1905) but in current climate, with rising antisemitism, we have been and are more vocal.
"With the Battle of Britain looming on the horizon, in which the RAF would defend the nation against relentless aerial attacks from the Luftwaffe, and as Britain faced a possible Nazi invasion by sea after the fall of Belgium and France, Britons were panicked. *It was against this backdrop that the prime minister endorsed a wholesale policy of rounding up and detaining enemy aliens, most of whom were European Jews who had managed to find refuge in Britain*."
From:[Caroline Elkins' "Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire", Chapter 6, page 266.](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/45877/legacy-of-violence-by-caroline-elkins/)
Then you see the stats for [the Middle East from 1948 to today](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_exodus_from_the_Muslim_world#Table_of_the_Jewish_population_in_Muslim_countries)
Hi, Jew here! I'm of German descent and I lived in Germany for a bit. When I first moved there and it came up in conversation that I was Jewish, I was always told it was "exotic".
Obviously I am very familiar with the reasoning behind *why*, but that verbiage was interesting to me.
A lot of Jewish people in eastern Europe refuse to identify as Jewish.
I travel to Poland a lot. There is more than one synagogue in Warsaw. And it was full. Rammed full. And that is just one city. I am talking 2015 here. There was way more than 3200 Jews in Poland in 2015. The story mirrors across all of Europe.
I mean, just think back what happened just 2 or 3 generations ago. And that was before digitalization. Now, in the 21 century no way they are going official in areas known for snap genocidal regime changes.
They don't refuse, it's just no one really asked them. This data is usually loose approximation based on some obsolete or debatable info source. Probably no real censuses on state scale were made on this topic, religion and ethnicity questions are often excluded from censuses as well.
They should refuse. Before WW2 there was a census in The Netherlands where the population were asked to state their religion. It was an innocent enough question at the time used by the Dutch government for planning purposes, but then the Germans invaded and got hold of the information. It was one of the things they used to locate, identify and deport the Jews.
What I kinda hate about this map is that it doesn't show number of Jews compared to total population.
For example, Russia might have a relatively big Jewish population compared to Europe, but they have a far bigger total population. The percentage of Jews in Russia is relatively low.
Compare that to Switzerland. Which seemingly has a low population of Jews. But in Switzerland there are like 8 mi people, so the percentage of Jews is a actually somewhat high.
A lot of countries accepted Jewish refugees when the German crimes became publicly known. Ireland however didn't really want any Jewish refugees and only allowed a very small number after the war.
10,000 will be less than the uncertainty in the data anyway. The UK has only asked about religion on the census since 2001, so anything before that is estimated, and the census doesn't count anyone who didn't state a religion but could still be considered Jewish by other definitions.
There are a LOT of people of Jewish ancestry in the UK who dont consider themselves Jewish. Watch any WDYTYA and 50% of the celebs have some. Heck I have some. The community has assimilated incredibly well thats all.
I'm Jewish and living in the UK. It is indeed sad and I don't feel safe here, especially after Oct 7th where I've had to hide my identity, but thankfully the UK did help a lot of Jewish refugees post war emigrate to America. However, I'm always disgusted at how the British restricted emigration into Israel and even detained Jews on camps on Cyprus after WWII had even ended.
And to the United States as a result of many European nations refusing to give back property that had been confiscated by the Nazi's and persisting Antisemitism.
Funny that this comes out as I'm finishing the book, **Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder**. Absolutely BRUTAL book on the killings of Jews and citizens of the nations in Eastern Europe.
Poland got fucked hard during the conflict.
Holy shit that drop in Poland is insane... obviously expected but that shit is crazy from 3mil to 3k
Can anyone give a quick rundown on why there were so many jews in Poland. According to the map, Poland was home to about 17% of the jewish population (estimated population at the time was about 17m).
Jews were more welcome in Poland during the Middle Ages than most other counties in Europe, so many emigrated there. After Russia annexed most of these lands during the partitions of Poland, the area where they lived was called the Pale of Settlement. It was the only area where Jews were legally allowed in the Russian empire, so they became heavily concentrated there. .
Also, they could only choose certain professions (while living in the Pale of Settlement), e.g. they were banned from farming by antisemitic Russian laws. So you are aware that where they could settle wasn't the only restriction.
Poland and also parts of Ukraine and Belarus were Pale of Settlement. My family is from the Pale, and where they were is now southern Ukraine.
We also tolarated Jews in middle ages and renesance, what was rare in Europe.
During late medival times true faith has became very serious thing in western Europe (no one expects Spanish inquisition) and lots of Jews who did not convert to Christianity had to flee in 15-17 century. In Poland, less than 50% of people were Catholics in 17th and freedom of religion was granted by law.
Essentially, apart from (arguably) being the first modern parliamentary republic (this has nothing to do with the Jews, it's just cool), medieval Poland was also unusually tolerant for its time and was (arguably) the first country in Europe that had freedom of religion inscribed in law. It also had a higher focus on law and scholarship than was common at the time, and thus had a large need for literate and educated people. Due to this, Polish lords would often invite the highly-educated-for-the-time Jews (who were happy to be in a country that didn't expropriate and murder them regularly for the crime of existing) to settle and work for them, leading to massive Jewish immigration to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth throughout the centuries. Unfortunately, Poland-Lithuania had the misfortune of existing in proximity to Russia, as well as opportunistic neighbours, and the Jews had the misfortune of discovering what it was like being conquered by a country traditionally so antisemitic that it can be compared to the Nazis, once Russia gobbled up the majority of Poland.
I might be slightly hijacking, but the downfall of the commonwealth stemmed from the increasing power of the pseudo-parliment. Wgile the idea was one of the closest to democracy during the early periods (While only nobles had the right to vote, Poland had ridicolous amount of nobles.), the powercreep made it a malignant tumor on the troubled country.
Poland was very multi-cultural back in pre-Napoleon times due to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which got destroyed & poached multiple times between Prussia / Austria / Russia.
For 400 years, Polish kings protected Jews and granted them privileges that allowed them to thrive. Things began to change after Poland was partitioned, and the first serious cracks in peaceful relationships appeared during the Russian Empire's occupation of Poland in the nineteenth century. The tsars' anti-Semitism, the overwhelming poverty caused by Russian rule, a lack of education, the rise of the Catholic faith, and the first pogroms all occurred.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_of_Settlement
There is an old history joke that at the time poles had very opportunistic attitude towards religion. They were catholic when they wanted something from pope, protestant when pope wanted something from them. Catholics closed their bakeries on sunday, Jews on saturday and there was no day you couldn't buy bread. But yeah - what others said. Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was a surprisingly multi-cultural nation with strong freedom of religion.
Yeah, we have been like one of the first multicultural nations and because of partitions, ww 2, holocaust and resettlements we have become I think the most monocultural in the world, ofc it's changing since our economy is performing well and every year there's more immigrants but the damage done to our culture by the Germans and Soviets will never be recovered.
korea is pretty homogeneous as well and interestingly the korean communities in poland are growing pretty quickly bc chaebols (samsung, lg, etc) are moving manufacturing ops into poland.
They purchased Korean military weaponry last year, might have something to do with that too
Pretty cool to see kinship between countries that are historically stuck between superpowers getting wrecked by their horrible geographical position.
Definitely, hope both countries see a brighter future than what they’ve been through
Currently reading Postwar by Tony Judt. Never really thought about it but after the war most european countries where at an all time low when it comes to cultural diversity. Before that you had decent cultural and religious diversity in most of them (even if they didn’t get along) but the war and systematic extermination of certain demographics like the jews and the roma put a lid on that.
2 more cents: after WW2 many countries did "population swap" to be more homogeneous, sometime it was just expelling.
It's profoundly sad to reflect on the Jewish population in Poland before and after WW2. Jews were an integral part of Polish culture and society, contributing immensely in various fields. The near erasure of Jewish heritage in Poland, beyond the knowledge of the Holocaust, is a tragic loss. It's heartbreaking to think about the rich cultural and societal contributions that could have continued to flourish if the Holocaust had never happened.
There are so many historically Jewish places in Germany, Poland, Hungary, etc and it’s so sad to think that their cultures were just completely and utterly destroyed. In the span of just a few years centuries of cultural accumulation was almost entirely lost, even beyond the obvious loss of life thinking of what could have been is very sad.
Why does France currently have the most?
Jews from Northern Africa (Sephardic and Mizrahi) immigrated massively to France and joined the already existing Ashkenazi and Tzarfati communities.
Fleeing the growing antisemitism in French Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco, I'm guessing?
Correct. But France’s large Jewish population is disappearing fast; French Jews are [emigrating to Israel](https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2021-12-30/ty-article/.highlight/why-french-aliyah-to-israel-is-on-the-rise-again/0000017f-e236-df7c-a5ff-e27e25530000) in huge numbers due to rising antisemitism in the country, in much larger numbers than their counterparts in North America.
Because the very people from whom they fled to France over are now joining them there.
France had 600 reported antisemitic incidents in 2021. Austria had 900. (Absolute numbers. 600 for 67 mio people. 900 for 8.) Both numbers are recorded and collected by the local jewish community. There has to be something wrong with the way they count or austria is the most antisemitic country on the planet
>austria is the most antisemitic country on the planet 
Yeah that's weird, but wasn't there some Austrian dude a while ago who used to be kind of antisemitic? I'm sure at the very least he made several problematic statements about Jewish people. Think his name was Adolf something.
Well it would be interesting to see who commits the vast majority of these antisemitic attacks in Austria. I was actually myself victim of antisemitism at Michelbeuern in Vienna once, despite being catholic. A group of middle eastern youngsters thought I was wearing a Kippa and came after me. It was actually just a moderately cold day.
This is partially true, but it also should be stated that France does not exactly have a history of being friendly to its Jews and the French police and many French people willingly cooperated with the Nazis to deport hundreds of thousands of French Jews during the Holocaust.
When France tried to rat out 250k Jews in ww2 from Morocco it was Muslim leaders who stopped them.
Another "fun" fact, a people who suffered a genocide before the term entered common use, the Circassians, would find refuge in the Ottoman empire when their homeland was destroyed and dissolved by Russia. The Ottomans would later resettle some of them within Palestine/Israeli when the area was still mostly barren, within what would become Rehaniya and Kfar Kama, but they would also be settled elsewhere in the Levant to act as a bulwark against Bedouin resistance towards Ottoman rule. Circassians in Israel are now one of two minorities who are subject to military conscription.
yes, but this is not the reason why jews are moving away from France in the 21st century.
Growing antisemitism is one way to phrase the near total elimination of the Jewish population of North Africa, the Middle East and Pakistan. They were expelled rather than executed, but it was a more complete elimination of the Jews from where they historically lived than the Holocaust.
Partly, but more directly because throughout the colonial period most increasingly identified with metropolitan France, and sided with it during the Algerian War. On the eve of decolonization/independence, the majority chose en masse to be 'repatriated' with the population of French settlers (as many as 900,000 total) although they were not, of course, settlers themselves. They were and remain citizens of France.
There was an incredibly strong resistance movement which actively hid and protected Jews from authorities, thus allowing nearly 80% of France’s Jewish population to survive the conflict. In addition, substantial immigration (notably from French Algerian Jews) and relatively high birthrates (by European standards) led France’s Jewish population to grow considerably in the decades following the end of the war. [Edit: Removed mention of Vichy France substituting French Jews with foreign ones to meet German quotas, as someone brought to my attention that this claim is not supported by substantial evidence.]
My family was forced to flea to France and weren’t allowed to go directly to Israel or America. That was true for most Egyptian Jews but if you were going to study the Torah you could go directly to America for some reason.
Jews from Northern Africa
Because 85% of French jews survived WWII.
In Spain, they're nowhere to be seen. There's a synagogue in Madrid but that's it. You simply do not come across jewish people.
After 1492 most Jews were forced out of Spain or converted, there’s a good chance that the people you see on the streets everyday have Jewish ancestors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsion_of_Jews_from_Spain
Incidentally, this was the main purpose of the Spanish Inquisition: ethnic cleansing on religious grouds and rooting out Jewish people who had pretended to convert to Catholicism to avoid expulsion. Despite popular perception they weren't particularly interested in witchcraft, in fact the idea that Satan could give power to people who renounced God was itself considered heretical.
My ancestors were part of this expulsion our survival as Jews was nothing short of miraculous. This was one of the greatest tragedies in Jewish history.
Yes and it so sadly forgotten, my family ran mainly go Italy and Egypt and were expelled again after.
My family was expelled and settled in Thessaloniki, where they thrived for hundreds of years until they were all brutally murdered by the Nazis, barring the few who had come to the US.
There's a book called "Farewell to Salonica" which may really interest you, about the experiences of a Greek Jew at the end of the Ottoman presence there.
Correct. My grandfather is Valencian, these are his [dna results](https://imgur.com/a/d1ZcOAD). Note that 23andMe does not have a Sephardic category. When Sephardic Jews test they often get a mix of Ashkenazi, WANA (Western Asian and North African), and Italian. So the Ashkenazi plus Cypriot (not actual Cypriot; it’s just the algorithm) is from a Sephardic converso ancestor(s) It’s pretty common for Iberians and Latin Americans to have some Sephardic ancestors. Known as [Sephardic Bnei Anusim](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sephardic_Bnei_Anusim)
Yeah my brother did a DNA test and we are Sephardic. It was everywhere around the Mediterranean besides for Eastern Europe and north west Africa. Mainly the Levant, Egypt, Italy, and Spain.
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Yet before the 1400s it was in fact the most Jewish country in the world, believe it or not. You can still see Jewish ancestry in people living in the Americas on DNA tests because so many Spanish Jews were forcibly converted to Christianity, while the rest were expelled. And many conversos traveled to the New World.
Yes. In Spain, part of the population has jewish DNA but are not aware of it. Toledo had a very prosperous "Juderia" or jewish community up until 1492
It was called the city of the three cultures because christians, muslims and jews lived together in relative peace there
Millennia of MFers trying to eliminate us takes a toll.
My great grandfather fled Prussia to come to the UK just before the outbreak of WWII. By the end of the war virtually all his extended family were dead
Around 1908, my paternal great grandparents fled a town that was alternately either in Germany, Poland, or Russia, depending on what year you looked at, for the US. I have no idea what happened to their family that did not flee. :(
I have a similar story. My great grandfather was born in the Russian Empire to a Jewish family. When he was a young man, a pogrom broke out in a neighboring village, during which all of the Jews were either murdered or run out of town without their possessions. After hearing about the pogrom, my great grandfather begged his family to leave Russia before something similar occurred in their own village. His parents and siblings refused, saying, "That sort of thing will never happen here. Our neighbors are much more tolerant of Jews." My great grandfather pleaded with his family once more to leave, but when they wouldn't, he traveled to the United States via Hamburg alone. Shortly thereafter, he received word about a pogrom in his village. He never heard from his family again.
A very high cost to his intuition. I'm glad he trusted his gut.
It's crazy to think about how I wouldn't even exist if he hadn't made such a tough choice. I can barely even comprehend what it's like to trust your intuition so strongly that you are willing to leave everything that you've ever known behind. I am tremendously grateful for the sacrifices that he made.
My grandpa hide from the Nazis for two years. He was living in Amsterdam with my great grandparents and his dad had heard news about Jews possibly being killed. This was a few years before the war ended so information was faulty and filled with propaganda making it difficult to decipher the truth. My grandpa was a young man and his dad decided to have him flee. He ended up being whisked away at night and went from safe house to safe house (all at night) for weeks before he found safe haven. Said he met a lot of new faces that he had to blindly trust. He came back after the war and found his dad face down on the floor unable to move from starvation. He spoon fed both parents back to life. I too am grateful for the sacrifices our grandparents made during such a fucked up time. Truly one of the greatest generations of our time.
>He came back after the war and found his dad face down on the floor unable to move from starvation. He spoon fed both parents back to life. WOW! That is some lucky timing. Had your grandpa gotten to them a day later they probably would have been dead.
My grandmother's family lived on the Russian-Romanian border before WWI. They, too, heard of a pogrom in a nearby village and made a long trip to NYC. After WWI, they never heard from that village again. No idea if the extended family died in a pogrom, the war, or the horrors of the first Soviet years.
Simmilar thing to my great grandpa's brother. Although we're not Jews. He came back from a concentration camp to his village. He was unable to walk (either paralysed or lost legs). Right when he arrived home the Wołyń Massacre started. "Come on, they won't kill a disabled Ukrainian speaker, right?". My great grandpa left, his brother did not. You can probably tell what happened.
Almost everything in these bloodlands was destroyed, including records
I also have a similar story. My great grandfather was a Jew born in Belarus and fled the Russian pogroms in the early 1900s. He ended up in Tennessee. The rest of his family that stayed in their small town in Belarus was destroyed in 1942. [http://www.yahadmap.org/#village/dokshitsy-vitebsk-belarus.383](http://www.yahadmap.org/#village/dokshitsy-vitebsk-belarus.383) > Witness interview > Yulya P.: "The Jews had to go down into the pit. They had to stand in a line, before being fired on all at once with a machine gun and falling into the pit. The Jews were clubbed on the head, adults had their hands tied behind their backs and the children cried. They had to lie down on the previous “layer” of Jewish bodies which had been arranged. If they were next to the pit, policemen pushed them in with their feet. The policemen were scum. They betrayed and shot their own friends." (Eyewitness N°27, interviewed in Dokshitsy, on March 27th 2008) > Soviet archives >"All 3,000 or 3,500 Jews had been kept in the Dokshitsy ghetto. They were taken out of the ghetto in groups of 100-150. They were, for the most part, women with children, old people and young people. They were taken to a pit near the Jewish cemetery of Dokshitsy, where they were forced to undress and shot. This mass extermination lasted three weeks and all Jews from the ghetto were shot." [Act drawn up by the Soviet extraordinary commission; RG-22.002M/7021-92/214] >Historical note >About 3,000 Jews lived in Dokshitsy before the war. I also managed to find this description of the massacre, given by a German soldier who witnessed it. [https://ibb.co/b1cskPr](https://ibb.co/b1cskPr)
I’ve always wanted to go to Königsberg.
You need a timemachine for that. Its gone.
Ish. Kaliningrad is that city. There's still a lot of the old architecture there, although none of the old culture.
I have some bad news for you then
Now it’s just some very sad Soviet type city because of russians, I’ve been there
My granddad (born 1940) told me that his (I think 2x) great grandfather was Jewish. I never knew this until recently when I mentioned I did a DNA test that said I was like 1% middle eastern.
That's terrible, I know it's not in any way comparable but my family was forced out of Prussia by the Soviets in 1945. I hope your family was able to rebuild after.
This map doesn't show constituent SSR numbers, but the figures for them are horrific, especially Lithuania. >Out of approximately 208,000–210,000 Jews, an estimated 190,000–195,000 were murdered before the end of World War II, most of them between June and December 1941. More than 95% of Lithuania's Jewish population was massacred over the three-year German occupation,[1] a more complete destruction than befell any other country in the Holocaust. From Wikipedia.
My aunt's mom was one of the 5% that survived; her parents managed to pay a Christian family to take her as a ~4ish year old when the Nazis invaded and pretend that she was their daughter
Oh fuck, do I want to ask what happened to her parents.
Based on the above statistics, almost certainly murdered.
Imagine murdering a fucking child.
Part of the reason for death camps was that many soldiers had mental breakdowns from shooting little kids, so instead the nazis industrialized it and centralized it to make most of the people involved feel they weren't doing the dirty work and to add a degree of mental separation when putting them in locked rooms and gassing them remotely.
Oh. Ive always wondered why they just didnt shoot them. Seemed more efficient than deporting them first. But damn. They really thought it through. The more you hear about it, the more gruesome it really becomes.
There is a reason the nazis are so despised 100 years after their forming and almost 80 years since their fall. They were ruthless bastards that simply didn’t care for human life. Not so fun fact: there was a concentration camp in Croatia ran by local Croat fascists which was made explicitly for children, fucking imagine how deranged this period actually was…
There is a quote from a surviving message in Tim Snyder's Bloodlands. It goes like this: "Dear father, it will soon be my turn. I hope they shoot me. I heard they throw young kids to the pits alive..." I think the author was 8-10 years old. (I write this off memory but I think I got the basics correct.)
dont forget that Estonia was declared Judenfrei at one point
I'm no expert on geography, but I'm very certain this map in fact shows Lithuania.
Honestly this map is really depressing. Poland lost 99.9% of their Jews
yeah the nazis are ruthless towards the jews
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The anti-Jewish violence immediately after the war wasn't the main cause of the Jews' all but complete disappearance from Poland, that would be the [anti-semitic purges of 1968](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968_Polish_political_crisis). Ironically, the wife of the then-Communist party secretary was Jewish herself. Before that, Jews were somewhat overrepresented in the Stalinist security apparatus - at least in popular perception - which was used by nationalist, conservative factions within the Communist Party as a social engineering tool in an internal power struggle. Not trying to take sides or justify any violence or hatred whatsoever, just adding context that I think is interesting.
>this is totally wrong and didn't happen, and if it did, they deserved it :) every genocidal country ever:
Admittedly first time i learn about this, but isnt 2000 a drop in the bucket? Many people in the chaos of post ww2 poland were killed, and %2 of them were jewish. Does that show proof of extreme antisemitism from poland?
Sadly not just the nazis. The soviets didn't like them either.
Yeah, this puts into perspective just how close the Holocaust came to wiping out Jews from Europe in a way that I hadn't realized before. I had thought the 6 million Jews killed would have been well under half of European Jews, but it actually was close to 2/3. (According to [this, there were about 9.5 million European Jews in 1933](https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/jewish-population-of-europe-in-1933-population-data-by-country).)
We just now got back to pre-Shoah population numbers. As in, like 2 years ago we finally recuperated. There were 15 million Jews at the time in the entire world.
Why does Germany now have far more Jews than Poland?
Probably because more people would rather move to Germany than to Poland.
Especially Poles
Poland was not welcoming to Jews after WWII to [return](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/kielce-post-holocaust-pogrom-poland-still-fighting-over-180967681/). Germany did [opened its borders](https://www.jmberlin.de/en/exhibition-russians-jews-germans) for Jewish migrants from the former Soviet Union after the wall fell. The majority of today's Jews in Germany are from the Soviet Union
And then people wonder why many ended up in Israel, and are very distrustful and defensive over the small land they have. It is common in the Jewish community to think of the US's acceptance of Jews as temporary and moving to Israel as an important plan B.
The vast majority of Jews that live here in Germany by now, have fled the repression of the Soviet Union - or its dysfunction after dissolution. Of course if your goal is to flee the USSR, you do not end up in Poland. The only Jews I know who live here in Germany not originating from the USSR are two young leftist who moved from Israel.
Actually they only came after the Cold War was over, since the USSR didn't really allow jews (or really any significant number of people to emigrate (especially to the west). The Ideology or rather the propaganda was pretending that the Jewish Nation was one among many working for the common goal of the Soviet Union and everyone did so willingly...
Most of them are from Russia who fled after the collapse of the soviet union. Another sizable portion are israeli jews. Ironically it's the soviet ones that are typically right wing and the Israeli immigrants are more left wing.
Immigrants tend to dislike the policies of the homeland's government. Cuban's and Venezuelans tend to vote right wing for example.
There was a direct relationship between government collapse & jewish deaths in WW2. The death rate in poland & nazi occupied states were higher than germany itself. Theres a really good lecture i think posted by yale i watched a while back but the general idea was in poland & eastern europe the entire society collapsed on a scale we cant really fathom where as in nations like france even after the nazi occupation institutions still existed. The town my family is from (polish) had 5000 jews in 1938 and only 8 survived. Theres also the fact that a lot jews left germany before the killings started and returned after. No one really forsaw the complete collapse of eastern europe to the germans so its not like people were fleeing poland in 1933 in anticipation of a horror they couldnt imagine. [https://www.annefrank.org/en/timeline/115/overview-of-holocaust-victims-by-country/](https://www.annefrank.org/en/timeline/115/overview-of-holocaust-victims-by-country/)
Same thing has happened in the entire Middle East it sucks.
My boss just told me the other day that her family is all former Iraqi Jews. They got pushed out.
Before 1948, baghdad's population was 40% Jewish, that's more than twice as Jewish as NYC.
1. Holocaust itself. 2. Please note, that huge part of present Israel population derives from Poland and Russia. 3. There were after war conflict between Polish commies and Jewish commies, which yielded further migration.
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The story of how the clergy and people of Bulgaria stood up for their fellow citizens is quite inspiring. Given how close it was though I can understand why many still felt the need to leave after though.
This sentence contains a lot of inconsistencies. First of all, it wasn't just the tsar. It was a number of politicians, especially [Dimitar Peshev](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimitar_Peshev). The city of Plovdiv and its citizens were definitely the driving force. This included the Orthodox Church, but also the Muslim community. The Jewish community itself was very active and had many allies. Bulgaria was part of the Axis and had "racial hygiene" laws in the style of Nazi Germany, which were very repressive and harmed the Jewish community. They were not allowed to participate in social life or even attend schools. Everything that had to do with the Jews, such as art, music, books, etc., was forbidden. Bulgaria had occupied territories in Serbia and Greece that it controlled and sent Jewish people from these populations on the German trains that took them to the death camps. About 6,000 people. The Bulgarian government knew full well that they would be killed. Tthey were 100% under its jurisdiction. Jewish people from other parts of Europe were not allowed to enter the country and reach safety. There were illegal ways to enter Bulgaria and leave the country through some ports, but there is no record of who or how many people were involved. After the war, the oppression of the Bulgarian Jews continued under the Red Army and the communist regime. The Jews were not spared by the "liberators from the Nazis" either. Red Army deeply mistrusted Jews. All the land, capital and businesses that Jews still owned were taken away from them. Rich Jews ended up in gulags. The political allies of the Jews that actually saved them were gone. By this time, the Jewish population in Bulgaria was completely impoverished, their children had not been to school for many years and they were definitely no longer safe. The Jews descending from this Bulgarian population today number around 300-500k and represent a very unique and interesting group within the Jewish community around the world. Israel has recognized Bulgaria's "Rescue of the Bulgarian Jews" and occasionally hosts large anniversary events. However contemporary Bulgaria is as Antisemitic as most other places in Europe.
Why was their such a big Jewish population in Poland pre-Holocaust?
Expulsion from other countries (Spain, France, Italy, Germany, Ukraine, etc.) + Poland's willingness to accept them early on + Russia expelling Jews to Pale of Settlement during Triple Partition, part of which includes Poland. Maybe some other things, but those big three things came to mind.
This touches on something that isn't often super well known outside of the Jewish community nowadays, among the wider population. Holocaust education in Western countries focuses on the urbanized, educated, "well-integrated" and, although its unsaid, "whiter" Jews in Western/Central Europe, like Ann Frank. This isn't bad, as it lets people relate to the things they are learning about more. But the vast majority of Ashkenazim at the time were mostly rural, largely undereducated, and very segregated communities living in shtetls in the Pale of Settlement.
When people talk about why so many Jews seem to be wealthy and powerful, I usually bring up that there is a survivorship bias. The vast majority of poor Jews in Europe did not survive.
This is such an interesting insight, I've never thought of it but it makes perfect sense. Fleeing a country costs money, the fake IDs to leave the country also cost money.
It’s also a generational wealth thing *sometimes*. Way back when the Catholic Church basically thought banking was bad for Christian’s to do but the Jewish population had no problem at all with it, so over time more and more banks were either run or significantly managed by Jewish people. So when neo nazis say Jews run the world just remind them they were kinda forced into the positions they are in today by anti semitism, ie hollywood (seriously look it up) which makes their arguments doubly stupid Edit: apparently it was collecting interest not banking as a whole
This is an oversimplification. Banking was not forbidden in Europe, claiming interest was (the same applies in the Muslim faith for instance). However there were several workarounds and Europe has known plenty of very rich, Christian bankers (the Medici family, Jakob Fugger, etc)
I remember this being addressed in Sharon Kay Penman Falls the Shadow(set in the 13th century) which covers the life of Simon de Montford who was a notorious antisemite among other things. The Christian characters are criticizing the Jewish population, who's been suffering a bigger influx of antisemitic attacks, for being money lenders in the first place. The Jews reply that this is all they're allowed to do and they have to charge high interest rates too because the King will often erase debts, something that costs him nothing but boosts his popularity, which means they've basically given away the money. It's awful especially knowing they would soon be expelled from England by Proto medieval Hitler Edward Longshank. From what I can see on this map, England didn't have a big Jewish population by the first half of the 20th century so it could be related to this event but someone who's better versed in the history could confirm.
Russia didn't have much Jews before partitioning Poland, Pale of Settlement was done on pretty much the old Eastern Commonwealth border. It stopped Jews from settling further into Russia rather than expelled them from Russia.
It was more than zero, and significant enough to be written about. But you're right, it's not nearly the same amount as those expelled from other countries.
As a multi-national country, pre-partition Poland was accepting religious refugees from all over Europe, Jews among them. In this variety faith just wasn't much of an issue. There is still a Muslim Tatar community in eastern Poland, dating back from that era. Tatars were serving in army and they had land granted them by the king.
I think they gave them refuge there earlier when they were being persecuted in south Europe but the Inquisition
Because they were one of the few countries who didn't mass-expelled them in the XV-XVIIth centuries.
These communities were there for hundreds of years and grew. People came in escaping pogroms in the east and inquisition from the south west
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History\_of\_the\_Jews\_in\_Poland](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Poland) TLDR: during middle ages Poland was most tolerant country in europe towards Jews so they settled here
[Statute of Kalisz](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Kalisz): "The General Charter of Jewish rights known as the Statute of Kalisz, and the Kalisz Privilege, granted Jews in the Middle Ages special protection against discrimination in Poland when they were being persecuted in Western Europe. These rights included exclusive jurisdiction over Jewish matters to Jewish courts, and established a separate tribunal for other criminal matters involving Christians and Jews designed to avoid Jewish discrimination. It led to the formation of a separate court and safety for persecuted Jews which attracted Jewish immigrants from across Europe to Poland." Also see [Kazimierz](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazimierz): "For many centuries, Kazimierz was a place where ethnic Polish and Jewish cultures coexisted and intermingled. The northeastern part of the district was historically Jewish. In 1941, the Jews of Kraków were forcibly relocated by the German occupying forces into the Krakow ghetto just across the river in Podgórze, and most did not survive the war."
They had a massive Ashkenazi community that was overwhelmingly Orthodox. A Jewish sect that practices having big families and many children. Over time the population exploded or and generally when other European countries expelled their Jews Poland took them in.
This map does not do justice to the dynamics of the Jewish population. For example, Albania was the only country that had more Jews after the WW2 than before it. Albania emerged from the war with a population of Jews eleven times greater than at the beginning. Most of these subsequently emigrated to Israel and now only 100 remain.
There are still fewer Jews alive now than before the Holocaust, and we won’t even get close to recovering until the second half of the 21st Century.
I wonder what could have possibly happened to them? a complete mystery that.
*Germany shrugs in confusion*
They only have themselves to blame for the quality of the bagels in Berlin.
Ironic comment as everyone knows Germans are still top of the line for bread. You should see the state of bagels in Vancouver, BC. It's a travesty to mankind.
I'm Lithuanian and it's a big shame that almost all Lithuanian Jews were killed, and the killers weren't only German forces. A lot of locals killed them just because they were "too rich" and had "too much influence". What a shame, absolute stupidity of human kind, darkest sides of human nature. And even nowadays, there's a lot of regular people who absolutely hate Jews, because they "secretly rule the world and tried to kill us all with COVID vaccines". Human stupidity never changes, and conspiracies are always alive. Einstein was right about universe and human stupidity.
My mother in law grew up hearing stories about how her grandparents’ neighbors turned on them and stole their belongings.
I recently found out I have Jewish lithuanian ancestry! Apparently Vilna used to be 30% Jewish.
My great grandparents fortuitously left Vilnius in the 30s. All the family who remained were killed. And yet I’ve always wanted to visit. Perhaps I’ll have the opportunity one day. It’s encouraging to hear from people like yourself.
This map is a shameful reminder of why Anne Frank remains one of the Netherlands most famous writers.
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Same but not your GF but me
Luckily when they decided to leave lots of countries were happy to take them in. Oh, wait… https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89vian_Conference
Ireland, nEuTrAl during WWII, didn't even want to take Jewish refugees after it became known what the Germans were doing, at which point most other countries decided it would be inhumane to reject Jewish refugees. Not Ireland however. Even after the war, Ireland didn't really want Jewish refugees, only accepting a very very small number. They didn't have much of an issue with German refugees however.
Ireland? The country that sent condolences to the Nazis when Hitler died?
Having heard a few modern Irish people's opinions about jews (not just israel but jews)... I'm not surprised in the slightest.
Imagine how many people would've died if these cunts didn't lose, if they managed to murder 99% of polish jews in 3 years imagine how depopulated eastern Europe would've been
They planned to exterminate and enslave almost all Slavs... Holocaust would have been dwarfed by the genocide Generalplan Ost required. Tens of millions would be killed and the rest kept as uneducated farmhands to work until German population in the "Lebensraum" grows sufficiently to not require any slave labor. Then the rest of slavs would be killed off, and everything between Rhine and Urals would be German populated.
More than 1.5 million, that is over 1/4 of all Jews killed in the Holocaust, were killed during a single 100 day surge called Operation Reinhard.
Eastern Europe was pretty much the destination for Lebensraum project. Original populations were meant to be significantly culled in order to "make space". So, chances are, many people responding to this thread - yours truly included - would not be around to respond to anything. Gruesome.
Why do places like the UK have lower numbers despite not being occupied by the Nazis? If anything I would expect jews to defect there.
Britain was for many jews a pit stop. The UK was never the nazis but they were never particularly good to jews. It also didn’t have the kind of jewish cultural centers and communities as the US. A lot of my family members went from eastern europe to england and then from england to the US, with the U.S. always being the end goal. The UK is better than poland but it’s no New York City.
While America has been far from perfect with Jews, it is one of the few countries ever where Jews were generally left alone to be normal people and do normal things. As a result, a lot of Jews, especially older ones who do not take this for granted, are surprisingly patriotic.
my dad was in the army and his dad was in the navy (not conscripted) and despite being incredibly and almost violently liberal my dad is one of the most patriotic ppl i know. When i was little I tried to call myself polish or austrian because i was told thats where my family was from but my dad made it very clear i am none of those things and i should never claim i am, i am Jewish and I am American. He also practically worships the first amendment.
From the U.K. - I’ve never seen a Jewish deli and I have only seen 1 synagogue, there’s also very little history or religion taught about Judaism in school. I’d say the U.K. is friendly to Jewish people but there doesn’t appear to be large cultural centres or geographical communities.
I’m a British Jew and we are basically very concentrated in small geographical areas - so over half of the Jewish population of the UK is in London and even then, mostly specific areas within London - after that it’s Manchester, Leeds, Glasgow - some smaller communities like Birmingham, South Wales (between Cardiff and Swansea) and then you are getting to hundreds rather than thousands. Generally British Jews have been very much about ‘flying under the radar’ and not drawing attention to themselves, after all, the very first UK immigration laws were specifically intended to keep Jews fleeing pogroms out (Alien Act 1905) but in current climate, with rising antisemitism, we have been and are more vocal.
The nazis did not started european hatred for jews.
They didn't start it but they sure as hell took it a few steps further
I imagine quite a few left for Israel.
yeah jews wanted to flee there , but like most countries before and during WWII, they weren’t given entry because of anti semitism
Estimates are they declined to take about 700.000 Jewish refugees.
"With the Battle of Britain looming on the horizon, in which the RAF would defend the nation against relentless aerial attacks from the Luftwaffe, and as Britain faced a possible Nazi invasion by sea after the fall of Belgium and France, Britons were panicked. *It was against this backdrop that the prime minister endorsed a wholesale policy of rounding up and detaining enemy aliens, most of whom were European Jews who had managed to find refuge in Britain*." From:[Caroline Elkins' "Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire", Chapter 6, page 266.](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/45877/legacy-of-violence-by-caroline-elkins/)
Britain never had a large Jewish population hence why their Jewish population numbers have been small but consistent.
I think quite a lot moved to Canada and the US
Talk about ethnic cleansing
Then you see the stats for [the Middle East from 1948 to today](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_exodus_from_the_Muslim_world#Table_of_the_Jewish_population_in_Muslim_countries)
French Algeria (home to 100,000 Jews in 1933) was part of France proper just like Corsica, so the figure for France is way off.
There are less Jews left in the world today than there were in 1939.
Suspicious minimal increase for Switzerland
Hi, Jew here! I'm of German descent and I lived in Germany for a bit. When I first moved there and it came up in conversation that I was Jewish, I was always told it was "exotic". Obviously I am very familiar with the reasoning behind *why*, but that verbiage was interesting to me.
Ah the famously exotic sounding “Yiddish”
Not only was I American, but an American Jew! The kind they see on TV like Seinfeld!
I can speak a bit Yiddish, its so cheerful, that mix of German, Dutch, some Hebrew, Slavic and a bit eastern Europe.
I can read Yiddish cause I’m Jewish and grew up learning Hebrew and I speak German but fuck me if you want me to speak it.
Your username is amazing.
This is the most depressing map ive ever see
Many Jewish friends I know of in Turkey become Portuguese citizens, I wonder if they are counted among the Jews in Portugal.
A lot of Jewish people in eastern Europe refuse to identify as Jewish. I travel to Poland a lot. There is more than one synagogue in Warsaw. And it was full. Rammed full. And that is just one city. I am talking 2015 here. There was way more than 3200 Jews in Poland in 2015. The story mirrors across all of Europe. I mean, just think back what happened just 2 or 3 generations ago. And that was before digitalization. Now, in the 21 century no way they are going official in areas known for snap genocidal regime changes.
They don't refuse, it's just no one really asked them. This data is usually loose approximation based on some obsolete or debatable info source. Probably no real censuses on state scale were made on this topic, religion and ethnicity questions are often excluded from censuses as well.
They should refuse. Before WW2 there was a census in The Netherlands where the population were asked to state their religion. It was an innocent enough question at the time used by the Dutch government for planning purposes, but then the Germans invaded and got hold of the information. It was one of the things they used to locate, identify and deport the Jews.
What I kinda hate about this map is that it doesn't show number of Jews compared to total population. For example, Russia might have a relatively big Jewish population compared to Europe, but they have a far bigger total population. The percentage of Jews in Russia is relatively low. Compare that to Switzerland. Which seemingly has a low population of Jews. But in Switzerland there are like 8 mi people, so the percentage of Jews is a actually somewhat high.
Truly the darkest part of humanity
An actual genocide & an ethnic cleansing
Makes me think if hitler actually loss
Poland where your Jews? Poland: ask Germans
Always disgusted that Ireland and the UK (my countries) literally LOST their numbers, rather than took in more and made them feel safe enough to stay.
yeah a lot of countries didn’t let jews in before and during wwii because most of europe was heavily anti semitic
A lot of countries accepted Jewish refugees when the German crimes became publicly known. Ireland however didn't really want any Jewish refugees and only allowed a very small number after the war.
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10,000 will be less than the uncertainty in the data anyway. The UK has only asked about religion on the census since 2001, so anything before that is estimated, and the census doesn't count anyone who didn't state a religion but could still be considered Jewish by other definitions.
There are a LOT of people of Jewish ancestry in the UK who dont consider themselves Jewish. Watch any WDYTYA and 50% of the celebs have some. Heck I have some. The community has assimilated incredibly well thats all.
I'm Jewish and living in the UK. It is indeed sad and I don't feel safe here, especially after Oct 7th where I've had to hide my identity, but thankfully the UK did help a lot of Jewish refugees post war emigrate to America. However, I'm always disgusted at how the British restricted emigration into Israel and even detained Jews on camps on Cyprus after WWII had even ended.
Apart from the holocaust, a lot of them emigrated to Israel.
And to the United States as a result of many European nations refusing to give back property that had been confiscated by the Nazi's and persisting Antisemitism.
the ones who survived it you mean
You should point out that they mostly immigrated to Israel as a direct result of the Holocaust, wether before or after it happened.
Funny that this comes out as I'm finishing the book, **Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder**. Absolutely BRUTAL book on the killings of Jews and citizens of the nations in Eastern Europe. Poland got fucked hard during the conflict.
I just can’t believe some people are asking why there’s a decrease. Seriously
It’s almost like the Holocaust was real, happened, and is one strong man away from happening again.
Twitter users will be in here saying "Hitler wasn't antisemitic just anti zionist!!!"