In 1919, the new Lithuanian state did something no European government had yet done. It recognized its Jews as a national community entitled to run important parts of their collective life, not merely as individual citizens or members of a religion. Jewish schools received public money. Elected communal bodies could tax their members and keep civil records. Yiddish could be used before state institutions. A minister for Jewish affairs sat in the cabinet.

This was not decorative tolerance. It was a serious attempt at national autonomy. In his 2005 Brandeis dissertation, later published as Murder Without Hatred, Anton Weiss-Wendt compressed both the achievement and its weakness into a single sentence: Lithuania was the first country in Europe to introduce national extraterritorial autonomy for its Jewish minority in 1919, but the arrangement rested on precedent rather than a secure legal foundation and was dismantled five years later (dissertation p. 46).

Lithuania deserves the credit. It should also be asked why the experiment was so easy to end.

The commitment was first made abroad. On August 5, 1919, Lithuania’s delegation to the Paris Peace Conference sent the Comité des Délégations Juives a letter promising legal equality, free use of Jewish languages, control of religious, educational and social institutions, and a fair share of public funds. The document became known as the Paris Declaration. Lithuania later restated its minority obligations when it entered the League of Nations.

The new state had already created a Ministry for Jewish Affairs. In January 1920, the Temporary Law on the Rights of Jewish Communities gave the kehiles authority over religion, charity, social assistance and education. They could collect taxes from their members and maintain civil records. The Paris Declaration and the Temporary Law were the legal foundation of the autonomy, as historian Raimundas Valkauskas has shown. The weakness was not the absence of law. It was that the........

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