Acta Historica Universitatis Klaipedensis

Historians believe that between 2,000 and 4,000 Jewish soldiers took part in the struggle for Lithuanian independence in 1919–1923, of whom at least 500 joined the Lithuanian army as volunteers. Although recent research casts doubt on these figures, it is clear that only a small number of Lithuanian Jews joined the fledgling Lithuanian army. One explanation for this could be the deliberate intentions of the leadership of the Lithuanian armed forces to avoid active Jewish involvement, since Jews were not trusted. Despite the atmosphere of mistrust, some Lithuanian Jews chose to join the Lithuanian army. The article tries to establish what motives led to their decision. The discussion may help find answers to the often-raised and still relevant questions about Jewish-Lithuanian political relations during the period of the creation of the modern Lithuanian state.

The article analyses issues related to the participation of national minorities in the Estonian War of Independence of 1918–1920. Due to the low numbers of national minorities, they were not treated as a serious problem in the Republic of Estonia during the war, but the question of their involvement was important in the principle of the strategy of active defence. This article is based on a doctoral thesis that was defended at Tallinn University in June 2018. The involvement of national minorities in the national units of the Estonian national army in the Estonian War of Independence is investigated from a cultural studies approach. The article aims to show the attitude of national minorities towards the Estonian state and the army, and to evaluate their role in the struggle by the Estonian army in the War of Independence.

This article offers a comparative analysis of how the First World War affected emerging Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian nationalisms. There has been a clear tendency to treat the three states declared by these national movements in 1918 as a single ‘Baltic’ grouping created as a result of common factors and processes. Yet, such a characterisation downplays differences which arise due to the position of the region at the very frontline of the war in the East, which brought a variety of jurisdictions and political contexts. A further tendency has been to retrospectively portray the nationstate framework ultimately created in all three cases as the realisation of the long-cherished goal of the pre-1918 national movements. Such an understanding of national self-determination, however, only emerged much later, and federalist thinking continued to shape both external and internal conceptions of sovereignty during and immediately after the war. How statehood was conceived, moreover, had a lot to do with which side of the line a region was located during the conflict, with key points of difference being discernible between the Estonian and Lithuanian cases in particular.

In the course of the First World War, ‘the nationalities question’ exploded in Eastern Europe. By the fall of 1918, the Eastern Europe of the three empires had collapsed, and national states were rising. During the war, the nationalities question as perceived in Switzerland, a neutral country, had developed from an initial concern about the loyalty of the minorities in the borderlands of the three East European empires into a battle royal for recognition as individual states. The article focuses on the activities of the German ambassador in Bern who was the most active force in the development, and he gave special support for the nationalities on Russia’s western border. Poland’s future quickly became the major issue but this threatened Germany’s own ambitions in Eastern Europe. The Lithuanians and the Ukrainians particularly opposed Polish dreams of establishing a large state. The Germans, however, considered the future of Ukraine to lie mostly in the hands of the Austrian Empire, and therefore Lithuania appeared to be the more promising force to limit any new Polish state.

The article is devoted to the new ethnographic and social research results on the Karaitic religion’s minority in Lithuania and Poland. After the last partition of Poland in 1795 main part of Karaites lived in Russia and was given some privileges by the tsars too. When Poles regained their independence and created new Polish Republic Karaites declared full loyalty towards it. During II World War Karaites were not ex-terminated by the Nazis like Jews although they easily could be taken for Jews because in Karaitic liturgy Hebrew language is still present. Today in Lithuania there are two main Karaitic centres: in Trakai and Vilnius with two churches still open. While visiting Trakai it is worth to see Karaitic wooden houses with three windows situated next to a road being a sign of presence of Karaitic community composed of 154 persons.