THE FIRST WORLD WAR represented a major turning point in the history not only of the Jews, but also of Europe and the wider world. It brought to an end the ‘long nineteenth century’, which had started with the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789, and initiated what has been described as the ‘short twentieth century’, an ‘age of extremes’, which lasted from the outbreak of war in 1914 to the collapse of communism in east central Europe and the USSR in the years 1989–91.

Characteristic of the ‘long nineteenth century’ was the domination of the principles underlying Karl Polanyi's ‘great transformation’: the market economy and constitutionalist and pluralist politics, together with a firm belief in progress. One should not over-romanticize the nineteenth century. There was considerable violence and political repression, not least in the tsarist monarchy, which, on the eve of the First World War, was on the brink of another revolutionary upheaval. In general, however, there was a widespread belief that society was evolving in a positive direction.

The ‘short twentieth century’ was to be very different. It was marked by the devastating impact of the First World War and by the emergence of rival totalitarian systems of the right and left. The ideological conflict between them came to a head during the Second World War, which involved brutality and loss of life on an even larger scale than the First World War. And ideological and geopolitical conflict did not end in 1945, but took a new form in the cold war.

The First World War saw the three powers that had partitioned Poland go to war with each other (see Map 10). German strategy was based on the Schlieffen Plan, an attempt to deal with the problem of fighting a war on two fronts by first defeating France and only then turning on Russia. Thus, the first stage of the war was marked by German advances in the west, which were halted by the first battle of the Marne in early September 1914, and by Russian advances in East Prussia and East Galicia.