The Eastern European Era in Jewish History
We Jews, the first nation in the world that began not only to mark but also to appraise and to judge the generations, evaluate eras on the basis of different criteria, namely, how much refinement is there in the life of a people, how much spiritual substance in its workaday existence, i.e., how much metaphysics in its material aspect? To us culture…
“The Eastern European Era in Jewish History” was not originally published as an article, but began as a lecture delivered by Heschel in Yiddish at the 19th Annual Conference of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York. The original text was then printed in the journal YIVO-bleter. In 1950, Heschel expanded and refashioned and published it in his celebrated English volume, The Earth Is the Lord’s: The Inner World of the Jew in Eastern Europe. Delivered on January 7, 1945, just months before the end of World War II, Heschel’s work was regarded as his eulogy for European Jewry. Later, some historians and sociologists argued that he had painted an idealized portrait of the shtetl and East European cities. Critics felt that he had also downplayed ideological conflicts of the interwar era—battles between Hasidism, secular Jews, Zionists, and Bundists.
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