Expressions of Litvak Pro-Lithuanian Political Orientation c. 1906 - c. 1921

Abstract

This article attempts to analyse the political orientation of the Litvaks in their homeland during a period of crisis in the first two decades of the twentieth century. It treats the Litvaks as an autonomous ethnic community with its own national/ethnic interests, political aims and vision for the future. The political self-determination of the Litvaks and the settling of relations with newly emerged subjects, the new national states, were influenced by outside factors and circumstances. The Jews were the only minority to have a determining influence on the country’s fate without having any territorial pretensions of their own. Their experience during the First World War and the country’s new geopolitical situation transformed Litvak attitudes to nationalist Poland and Soviet Russia and turned them into supporters of the re-established state of Lithuania. Living in one state together with the small Lithuanian nation protected in theory at least the local Jews’ position, guaranteed them cultural autonomy and equal political rights and thus was safer for the Litvaks and suited the interests they sought to defend. To solve the issue of the rise of a “power vacuum” in the east the Litvaks saw in the Lithuanian Republic an optimal guarantor of stability for the local community that would defend them from extreme nationalism and radicalism.