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Riga was part of the province of Livland, which was outside the Pale of Jewish Settlement. With a number of individual exceptions, Jews were not permitted to live there. Livland, originally named Livonia by the conquering German knights, was called Vidzeme after Latvian independence. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, a few Jews were granted the right to settle in Riga, and in 1842 the Jewish community was officially recognized. Gradually, more Jewish families moved there to share in the business opportunities offered by this burgeoning commercial center. The initiative and entrepreneurial spirit of the Jewish merchants and businessmen contributed significantly to the rapid growth and development of the local economy. The Jewish population of Latvia expanded rapidly in the late nineteenth century. Just before the start of World War I, the number of Jews in the region peaked at about 185,000. The expulsion of the Jews from Courland in 1915 and the evacuation and flight into Russia during the war sharply reduced the number of Jews living in the area. In 1920 about 80,000 Jews were living in the newly independent Latvia. With the return of refugees from Russia, the number increased to 95,000 by 1925 and remained at that level during the 1930s. Jews constituted about 5 percent of the population of Latvia at that time.4 About half of Latvia’s Jews lived in Riga. The city had only 25,000 Jewish inhabitants in 1920, but by 1939 that number had risen to 45,000— about 12 percent of the city’s total population. Riga was an important center of trade between Russia and Western Europe. It was a cosmopolitan city that drew inspiration from the latest developments and ideas in Western Europe, particularly Germany. The city was also the heart of the country’s Jewish cultural and political life. Jewish entrepreneurs contributed significantly to the vitality and growth of the economy in Latvia during the period between the two world wars. ! The Jewish Community of Riga  18 GROWING UP JEWISH IN PREWAR LATVIA More than a quarter of Latvia’s commercial enterprises employing ten or more people were owned by Jews. Jews dominated professional occupations , particularly as doctors, dentists, and lawyers. They were the intelligentsia : a well-educated, cultured, multilingual urban people. They read Jewish newspapers published in Yiddish and Russian. They went to Jewish theater. They read Jewish books—fiction, poetry, and philosophy—and produced a wide variety of Jewish artists. Oscar Handlin, in his introduction to Simon Dubnov’s History of the Jews, described a view of Judaism shared by the majority of these intellectuals and professionals: Although Dubnov was a free thinker, he could not entirely detach himself from the Orthodox world of his forebears. He retained a high regard for the culture of the East European Jews, even though he felt he had grown beyond its religious origins. The need for reconciling his modern thinking with the inherited values of the group were basic to his distinctive form of nationalism. Dubnov expected that cultural nationalism would replace Orthodox religion as the cement that held the Jewish communities together. . . . He insisted that national identity was essentially cultural rather than political. The Jews were therefore a nation like any other, capable of leading an autonomous cultural life wherever they happened to be in the Diaspora.5 In the years immediately following World War I, organizations representing the entire Jewish political spectrum were active in Latvia: Marxists, communists, and socialists; Zionists and Revisionists. Endless discussions, disputes, squabbles, and fierce infighting among the different political factions were conspicuous in the Jewish scene in Riga. Zionism exerted a strong influence, and all the diverse Zionist movements were active there. Many Latvian Jews emigrated to Palestine. As elsewhere, communism had great appeal for Jewish youth. To some in the younger generation, Marxism’s vision of a classless society and the elimination of ethnic conflicts offered an alternative to Zionism and a beguiling solution to the “Jewish problem” in Eastern Europe. Marxist ideology was less popular with those old enough to remember the excesses committed during the Bolshevik Revolution, particularly the activities of the Yevsektsia (the Jewish section of the Communist Party). Soviet propaganda to the contrary, most of Riga’s Jews recognized Stalin as a ruthless tyrant. The Latvian Jewish community was also divided along linguistic lines. The vast majority of Latvian Jews spoke Yiddish, but there were sizable German- and Russian-speaking enclaves. The Yiddish-speaking group included both the Orthodox and the...

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