"Forget Versailles": From Rights to Privileges in the Illiberal Lithuanian State

• In Event: Negotiating Jewish Rights Between International Ideals and National Constraints, 1848-1968

Abstract

In July of 1927, seven months after coming to power with a military coup d’état, and three months after disbanding the parliament, Lithuanian president Antanas Smetona announced that Jews should not “rely on papers with reminders that Jewish legal guarantees are in Paris.” The Paris Declaration of 1919, as a result of the diplomatic efforts of Lithuanian Jewish activists and Smetona’s own prime minister, Augustinas Voldemaras, stated that Lithuanian Jews would have full political and national rights, rights of citizenship, rights to participate in governmental institutions, a Ministry of Jewish Affairs, proportional representation, rights to use their language in the public sphere, protection from not working on Saturdays, and cultural autonomy, all to be outlined in a future Constitution. Lithuanian Jews had looked to this treaty as, in the words of political activist Jacob Robinson, “the Magna Carta for our rights.” Thus, it was jarring when Smetona asked Jews, in 1927, to abandon belief in the Paris Declaration and align more closely with the Lithuanian national cause as his Nationalist Union party understood it. This paper charts the evolution of Jewish rights discourse in Lithuania from the early 1920s, when the country was upheld as a paragon of Jewish autonomism and minority rights, to the early years of the authoritarian regime. Based on a close reading of a variety of sources in Yiddish, Lithuanian, and other languages, I argue that, as rights eroded under the Smetona’s regime, Jewish political activists such as Robinson sought to mediate between the promises of international law and the demands of an anti-democratic government.

Author

• Michael Casper, University of California, Los Angeles