Amos Bitzan
"Eastern European Jewry under Occupation, 1915-1918: Practice and Experience"
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Abstract
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My doctoral dissertation, “Eastern European Jewry under Occupation, 1915-1918: Practice and Experience” examines the impact of the German and Austrian occupations on eastern European Jewish cultures and societies, and attempts to provide a new understanding of these administrative regimes through the practices and experiences of the region’s Jewish populations. The goal of my research is to understand both the states doing the occupying and the societies contesting, exploiting, or ignoring the former’s newly-elaborated mechanisms of control. To this end, I am trying to recover the imaginative and social worlds of ordinary people – men, women, and children, rabbis, workers, and soldiers – and their refractions in the discursive and governmental practices of the state.
My focus is on how the Jewish populations of this region lived and perceived the German and Austro-Hungarian occupations with all their attendant effects on the societies, economies, and cultures of the region. Of particular interest, beside interactions between the Jewish minority of the area and these states, are the ways in which the occupation transformed relationships between the Jews and other local ethnic groups, as well as relations among Jews themselves. In this study, my approach will be to integrate an analysis of state practices – the plans of policy-makers, military operations of generals, and directives of civilian administrators – with an examination of ordinary people’s practices and experiences of occupation – the requisitioning of supplies, appearance of new business opportunities, forced labor inductions, religious eschatologies, relief missions, rumor-mongering, and physical violence that framed the lives of this area’s Jewish populations during the war.
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