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particularly in matters of immigration.
    No less blatant than their powerlessness was the inability of most European Jews to assess the seriousness of the threats that they faced. During the first five years of Hitler’s regime, barely one-third of German Jewry emigrated, even with the persecution and the indignities that descended on it month after month, year after year, starting in January 1933. The massive violence unleashed by the Nazis during the pogrom of November 9 and 10, 1938 (the so-called Night of Broken Glass, or Kristallnacht), became the very late moment of real awakening and led to desperate attempts to flee. Tens of thousands of Jews still managed to leave; for many, however, obtaining a visa or scraping together the necessary financial means for departure had become impossible. Hardly any Jews left Austria before the Anschluss in March 1938; nor did the Jews of Bohemia and Moravia before the German occupation in March 1939. Again, notwithstanding all starkly visible warning signals, notwithstanding Hitler’s furious anti-Jewish threats and the steep increase of local hostility, the trickle of Jewish emigration from East Central Europe did not grow significantly, nor did almost any Jews leave Western Europe, before the German onslaught.
    This apparent passivity in the face of mounting danger seems hard to understand in retrospect, although, as mentioned, the growing difficulties faced by Jewish emigrants explain it in part; a deeper reason may have come into play during the immediate prewar period and also in the weeks and months that followed. In the East, and mainly in the West (apart from Germany), most Jews entirely misjudged the degree of support they could expect from surrounding society and from national or local authorities in the face of a common enemy. In Warsaw in September 1939, let us recall, Kaplan and Czerniaków were proud participants in the common struggle.
    In the West the misperception was more extreme, as we shall see. Moreover, mainly in Western Europe, the Jews believed in the validity of abstract principles and universal values, “in a world inhabited by civilized Cartesian phantoms”; 17 in other words they believed in the rule of law, even in the rule of German law. Law offered a stable framework for facing ordeals and planning everyday life and long-term survival, in other words—the future. Thus the Jews were unaware that “the Jew” was outside the domain of natural and contractual ties and obligations, a situation that the German Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt defined in her wartime essay “The Jew as Pariah” by borrowing a sentence from Franz Kafka’s The Castle : “You are not of the castle, you are not of the village, you are nothing.” 18
    Zionism, although growing in strength in the wake of German and European anti-Semitism, still remained a comparatively minor factor on the Jewish scene on the eve of the war. In May 1939, after the failure of the St. James Conference among the British, the Arabs, and the Zionists, London published a white paper that limited Jewish immigration to Palestine to 75,000 immigrants over the next five years and practically put an end to Zionist efforts to buy land in Eretz Israel. Zionist policy had never seemed so far from achieving its goals since the Balfour Declaration.
    On August 16, 1939, the Twenty-first Zionist Congress convened in Geneva but was cut short by the impending outbreak of war. In his concluding address to the assembled delegates, on August 22, Chaim Weizmann, the president of the World Zionist Organization, spoke simply, in Yiddish: “There is darkness all around us, and we cannot see through the clouds. It is with a heavy heart that I take my leave…. If, as I hope, we are spared in life and our work continues, who knows—perhaps a new light will shine upon us from the thick black gloom…. We shall meet again. We shall meet again in common labor for our land and people…. There are some things that cannot