Abstract
"The Slovak Jews" or "the Jews in Slovakia"? A seemingly minor difference in wording divides scholarship on interwar and wartime Slovakia. Virtually every Slovak-language book on the Holocaust in Slovakia or on the Jewish community living within the borders of Slovakia-or even on the general history of the country-includes a section in which the authors explain why they chose one term over the other.
The subject is all the more complicated as Slovak, like many other Slavic languages, grammatically distinguishes Jews as an ethnic group (Židia, written with the capital letter "Ž") from Jews as a religious community (židia, written with lower-case "ž"). For example, in his authoritative 1991 work Po stopách tragédie (On the Path of Tragedy)-based on a 1971 dissertation but appearing in press only after the 1989 Velvet Revolution-Ivan Kamenec comes down on the side or "Jews in Slovakia." He argues that the First Czechoslovak Republic (1918-1938) was too short-lived to "influence the overall national profile of Jews in Slovakia, and hence also public opinion."1 Eduard Nižňanský supports this argument, noting that most Jews living in the Czechoslovak Republic or the Slovak State that came into being in March 1939 did not proclaim Slovak nationality, "but claimed to be of Jewish, German, Hungarian or other" ethnicity.2 Conversely, in his monograph on antisemitism in the Slovak national movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Miloslav Szabó opts for the lower-cased version, "taking into account [the Jews'] status as a religious, not an ethnic minority" in the Kingdom of Hungary, of which Slovakia had been a part until the former's dissolution in 1918.3 In other words, before addressing the subjects of their study, scholars must clarify their understanding of who these Jews were.
This necessity points to an even bigger question: How Slovak were the Jews of Slovakia anyway?