It was once the conventional wisdom that the "Great War" of l9l4-l8 spelled finis to an incomparable era of European progress and self-confidence. We have long since learned better. Europe's "proud tower" was built on reactionary empires and desiccated caste traditions. By contrast, it was the postwar era that promised a seemingly more authentic social climate of humanism, of national self-determination, of majority democracy, of minority rights.

Did students of European affairs have to await Adolf Hitler to discern which way that social climate actually was developing? Following the Armistice of November l9l8, was there not a reliable weathervane already at hand? There was, and perhaps always had been. It was the Jews, traditionally the most distrusted and disfranchised of Europe's minorities. If the Continent were opened to the full spectrum of their talents--economic, intellectual, political--assuredly, it would be open to Everyman's.

In his volume, SUFFERANCE IS THE BADGE (Knopf, l940), the historian A. L. Sachar addressed the unique role of this protean minority in the turmoil and reconstruction of the l920s and l930s. More than six decades later, I can still recall how, as a youngster, I witnessed my father's poignant struggle to discern pattern--and hope--in the synergy of Europeans and Jews during a period he and his generation optimistically entitled the "new era."

In recent years, with an infinitude of scholarly data available to us, we are in a rather better position than those pioneering contemporary historians of the l930s to evaluate the dream of a "new" and more humane postwar Europe.

--Howard M. Sachar