CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2011
| Author | Janusauskas, Tadas |
|---|---|
| Title | Becoming Lithuanian: Jewish Acculturation in the Interwar Period |
| Summary | One of the least acculturated Jewries in Europe, Lithuanian Jewry, stepped into neighboring majority's independent state as the largest minority and the most culturally distant one. The new state was nationalizing, thus the Jews, along with other minorities had to learn the state language – Lithuanian. Although it stays unclear how well the Jews learned the majority's vernacular and how often used it, there are indicators that by the end of the 1930s most of them were literate in the majority's language. This slight shift of identity of Lithuanian Jewry, which is heavily under-researched, was also promoted by some groups of the society, mostly by the Jews. The Union of Jewish Soldiers (active 1933-1940) was the most prominent advocator in this field. Their Lithuanian-language weekly “Apzvalga” (en. “Review”; published 1935-1940) became the main public medium in the context of mutual Lithuanian-Jewish recognition. However, as it is shown, even the Union did not internalize Lithuanian language, and thus, using mostly archival sources and the weekly, this thesis argues that even in the most extreme cases of shifting identity of the interwar Jewish community of Lithuania, there was no assimilation, and only to some extent the Jewry was acculturated. |
| Supervisor | Miller, Michael Laurence |
| Department | Nationalism Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2011/janusauskas_tadas.pdf |
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