Professor David J Smith, Baltic Research Unit, University of Glasgow, Scotland, UK.
Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen,
It is an honor to join you in marking the centenary of Jewish cultural autonomy in Estonia, one of the most notable landmarks in the history of minority governance in modern Europe.
In these brief remarks, I will firstly discuss what made Estonia’s 1925 Law on Cultural Self-Government for National Minorities so distinctive in the European context of the day and I will reflect on the important role that Jewish minority activism played in bringing this law into being.
Secondly, I’ll consider how the positive international reception given to Estonia’s cultural autonomy model made it a focus for wider European-level debates that remain highly significant today.
I don’t need to go into the details of Estonia’s 1925 autonomy law, as I know you will be discussing it extensively during the conference. The main thing to say is that by devolving cultural responsibilities elected public-legal bodies elected by minorities themselves, this law went far beyond the more limited European minority protection model established under the League of Nations during the 1920s.
While the League model paid lip service to preserving linguistic and educational diversity, it focused mainly on non-discrimination and respect of individual civil rights. Furthermore, there was no solid international legal basis for its enforcement.
As a state that was established outside the framework of the post-1919 European peace settlements, Estonia followed its own distinctive approach to addressing the minority question, rooted in the multiple political and intellectual currents that had shaped its society over the preceding decades and, in some cases, centuries.
Estonia’s approach was not entirely unique, as a similar model had been followed by the Ukrainian People’s Republic in 1918 and by Lithuania (for its Jewish minority) in the early 1920s. In these cases, though, autonomy was a short-lived experiment. Estonia was alone in establishing a durable institutional framework for minority self-government which, in the Jewish case, persisted right up until to the Soviet occupation of 1940.
Self-government was established on the basis of non-territorial or personal autonomy, whereby minorities were understood as communities of persons formed through free affiliation by individuals, regardless of where they lived within the state. This approach was consistent with the democratic idealism of the early Republic of Estonia, and it was particularly well-suited to the Jews, as a numerically small and territorially dispersed minority community.
Existing historiography often portrays the Baltic Germans as the main driving force behind the adoption of cultural autonomy. Anton Weiss-Wendt, for instance, has suggested that Estonia’s Jews were merely ‘unintended beneficiaries’ of the 1925 Law.
More recent work by Timo Aava, however, demonstrates that it was in fact Jewish activists who did most to propagate this model across the western regions of Russia before 1918, and that this activism was carried over into the early years of Estonia’s independence.
A pivotal moment was the May 1919 Congress of Jewish Communities in Tallinn, where the future president of the Jewish CSG, Hirsh Eisenstadt, was able to unite delegates behind the goal of non-territorial autonomy.
In his speech to the congress, Eisenstadt made three points that remain central to present-day European norms on minority rights:
In making this case, Eisenstadt referenced the Austrian social democrat Karl Renner, often hailed as the “founding father” of NTA. Yet, equally significant in his thinking were the ideas of Simon Dubnow and a range of other Jewish activists within pre-revolutionary and revolutionary Russia.
The resolution of the Jewish Congress was transmitted to Estonia’s Constituent Assembly, sitting at that time, which famously enshrined the right to minority cultural autonomy in Estonia’s founding constitution of 1920. While Estonia’s Jewish community was too small to gain representation in the first Riigikogu, the records show that its leaders consulted closely with Baltic German deputies in preparing the initial draft of autonomy legislation during 1921.
The Jewish community was thus fully embedded in a political project that emerged from the bottom-up, but which could not have been realized without supportfrom a significant portion of the new ruling Estonian elite.
Cultural autonomy thus rested on a cross-ethnic sentiment of civic unity, which was reflected not just in legislation, but – more importantly – also in actual practical implementation over the years that followed. From 1926, the Jewish Cultural Council and Self-Government were able to assume responsibility for education, cultural institutions and communal affairs and oversee what Anna Verschik has called a “Jewish national awakening”. One indicator of this was the fact that, by the mid-1930s, the proportion of Jewish pupils in Estonia studying in Jewish schools had risen from around one third during the early 1920s to over one half.
What is also striking about the Jewish Cultural Self-Government is its internal pluralism. There were frequent political disputes within the Council, reports of which found their way into the Jewish press in my home country of Scotland. Ultimately, however, autonomy provided a framework within which Hebrew and Yiddish institutions and Zionist and non-Zionist political currents were able to coexist.
The successful practice of Jewish and German cultural autonomy in Estonia attracted widespread attention and admiration across Europe during the late 1920s.
Among other things, the Estonian example directly inspired the work of the Congress of European Nationalities - a transnational minority activist movement established in 1925, which lobbied the League of Nations to promote non-territorial autonomy as a generalized approach to addressing minority issues in Europe.
The Congress of European Nationalities was founded by a Baltic German activist from Estonia, Ewald Ammende, who served as its General Secretary until his death in 1936. It has to be said that the Estonian Jewish community participated directly in the Congress only once, with Cultural Self-Government Deputy President Abram Gurewitsch attending the third meeting in 1927.
More generally, however, Jewish representatives constituted the second largest grouping within the Congress during 1925-1932, with internationally prominent figures such as Leo Motzkin and Max Laserson playing an important role in its work. Indeed, until the 1930s, when Nazi influence began to take hold among the German minorities within the Congress, it was very much a German–Jewish joint endeavour, just as the promotion of cultural autonomy had been in Estonia earlier in the 1920s.
If you look at the British press from the interwar period, you will find very many positive accounts of Estonia’s cultural autonomy law. These extended as far as a local paper in Scotland, the Dundee Courier, which reported on cultural autonomy as part of an article in February 1928 dedicated to the 10th anniversary of Estonia’s independence. Here, it observed that “this Estonian step has been highly appreciated by the League of Nations and other circles interested in minority questions,” further claiming that the law was already being regarded as “an ideal for eventual corresponding laws in other countries.”
This claim in the Dundee Courier needs some qualification, because, in 1931, the League of Nations in fact rejected the Congress of European Nationalities’ appeal (presented by Ewald Ammende) to make the Estonian model the basis for a Europe-wide approach to minority issues. It did this despite the obvious fact that the existing League minority protection system was failing to work effectively.
In its response, the League was, however, correct to point out that cultural autonomy in itself could not be regarded as a panacea for addressing minority issues. Nor could it be understood as a “one-size-fits-all” approach applicable to all minority groups. For instance, it pointed out that in the Estonian case, Swedes and Russians did not adopt the NTA law, mainly because their size and compact settlement enabled them to benefit from other territorially based arrangements the allowed for education in and local use of their minority languages.[1]
The successful practice of cultural autonomy in inter-war Estonia also owed much to specific contextual factors such as the small size and demographic profile of the population; institutional legacies carried over from the time of the Baltic provinces; and the strong democratic idealism of the early 1920s.
The later authoritarian turn of 1934 weakened these enabling conditions, but it did not eradicate them entirely. Ultimately, the cultural autonomy experiment ended not because of political factors internal to Estonia, but because of an external geopolitical shift – namely, the August 1939 Pact between neighbouring totalitarian powers that paved the way for the Soviet and Nazi occupations of Estonia and the horrors that ensued during the 1940s.
Already in November 1940, Scottish paper The Jewish Echo lamented the closure of Jewish national institutions following the Soviet occupation of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, stating that “the Jews in the Baltic States … formed a great Jewish centre, full of life and activity. The last island of Jewish culture and creativeness in Eastern Europe”.
One hundred years on from its establishment, Estonia’s Jewish cultural self-government remains highly significant as one of the rare historical examples of a fully functioning system of non-territorial autonomy. The revived scholarship on this topic since the end of the Cold War has focused primarily on the experience of Estonia’s German minority. However, as I have tried to stress in my remarks today, it is essential to highlight the important role played by Jewish minority representatives in setting up this system – a system that helped Estonia navigate the path from a world of authoritarian empires to one of democratic yet pluralistic nation-states.
Today, there are varying opinions on whether non-territorial autonomy remains a suitable model for the contemporary world. Nevertheless, if we examine Estonia’s experience during the 1920s and the wider international discussions surrounding it, they still they have much to tell us about a question that remains central to current European politics and societies – how to accommodate cultural diversity within a single political framework.
Once again, I thank you for the opportunity to participate today and I congratulate you on this significant anniversary!
[1] Here I refer to the system of administrative decentralisation whereby a minority language could be used alongside Estonian in municipalities where the relevant minority made up more than 50% of the local population; in the case of education, minority-language schools or classes could be established where the minority was more than 20% of the local population.
