Jews as real people.(Book review)

Yiddish Civilisation: The Rise and Fall of a Forgotten Nation, by Paul Kriwaczek; Phoenix, 2006, $26.95.

OVER CENTURIES "the Jews" have been portrayed as dodgy and difficult, if not sinister; as a "marvellous people" of extraordinary gifts; as perpetual victims of cruel societies; or in hypersensitive awe as "members of the Jewish community".

It is more refreshing than it should be, therefore, to find them portrayed in this affectionate, sensible and pleasantly readable history of European Jewry as real people--sometimes oppressed, sometimes doing a little oppressing of their own, not without faults, foibles and communal suffering but mostly thriving and enjoying life.

The author says he is trying to get away from "lachrymose" presentations, and perhaps the publication suggests at last an easing away from the horrible shadow of the Holocaust, but as well from the modern cult of history as mainly about victims. It is also quite a good potted history of Europe.

Paul Kriwaczek's emphasis is on the Yiddish-speaking people of Eastern Europe, covering a period of about a thousand years from the first Jews moving into Eastern Europe until their society began to fragment and break up around the beginning of the last century and then was demolished during 1941-42 on Hitler's mad Holocaust whim.

Jews moved over centuries principally into what became the great Poland-Lithuania kingdom, which at its peak stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea, covering much of the present-day Ukraine and Baltic states.

They came from Spain, Rome and Germany in the west, from the Greek-ruled Byzantine empire and Middle East to the south-east. They grew into the world's largest Jewish community, nearly half the population of many towns and cities, up to 10 per cent of many overall populations and numbering about 10 million by the peak around 1900; a distinctive, influential, but somewhat suspect society within societies.