11. Continuing the Story in Europe: The Jewish Underground
There is a fairly straight line from the self-defence groups of this period
to the militant undergrounds of the Eastern European ghettoes of the 1940’s.
By the time of the rise of European fascism, in its various inter-war forms,
the Zionist, Jewish socialists - and many Jewish Communists, too - had internalised
the idea of the fighting Jew. They might have differed in their interpretation
of this concept, and their ideas of the desirable human society might indeed
vary from group to group, but they were at a similar stage of development
in terms of self-defence.
Nevertheless, these three groups remained the principal and exceptional
recipients of the idea of the fighting Jew (“muscle Jews”, as
Max Nordau referred to them in a famous article of 1903), and it was therefore
predictable that they would lead the fighting underground groups in the ghettos,
or the partisan groups in the surrounding forests, possibly up to 30,000 people
in all. Many of the Jewish groups outside the ghettoes experienced isolation
from the general resistance movements and some were even given up to the Nazis.
http://motlc.wiesenthal.com/text/x28/xm2844.html
http://www.yad-vashem.org.il/about_yad/magazine/
magazine_new/jewish_resistance.html
http://www.jewishpartisans.org/partisanslb.html
[A similar phenomenon occurred among the French Jewish youth movements, especially
the Eclaireurs Israelites de France (Jewish Scouts). Numbers for Jewish groups
in Soviet Russia remain unknown See: http://www.interviewsfromtheunderground.com/
]
On the one hand, these were Jews who understood that the experience of the
Jew forced him and her – all too often – away from the beloved
books that, in one way or other, had remained the central heritage of Jewish
culture, a literary culture par excellence.
Yet many of them were intellectuals, who in other circumstances would have
spent their lives far away from any expressions of violence.
It was essentially their shared understanding of the Jewish situation, together
with their internalisation of the impossibility of living out a normal life,
that led them into the ranks of the underground groups.
Finally, they were committed to their ideas, to working together in organised
groups, and had an informal leadership structure, all of which enabled them
to make their own decisions and undertake concerted action against their shared
enemy.
http://www.yad-vashem.org.il/about_holocaust/documents/part3/doc209.html
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