From: heb_roots_chr@mail.geocities.com
Sent: Wednesday, November 19, 1997 12:45 AM
To: Hebraic Heritage Newsgroup
Subject: Diaspora: The Jews in Eastern Europe
From: JUICE Administration <juice@virtual.co.il>
To: diaspora@virtual.co.il
Subject: JUICE Diaspora 9
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World Zionist Organization
Student and Academics Department
Jewish University in CyberspacE
juice@wzo.org.il birnbaum@wzo.org.il
http://www.wzo.org.il
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Course: Actors on the World's Stage: Jewish Life in the Diaspora
Lecture: 8/12
Lecturer: Rabbi Zvi Berger
Shalom "Diaspora" students! Last week we focused in on developments in 19th
Century Western and Central Europe, particularly in Germany. The primary
reason I wished to pay close attention to this community was because of its
important legacy for Jewish life in the Diaspora today. But we need to
remember that as important as this Diaspora was, it was a small community
numerically, when compared with the Jews of Eastern Europe. It is this
community that we shall examine today.
I remind you that in Lectures 5 and 6 we traced the history of the
Ashkenazic Jewish community in the Middle Ages. We saw Ashkenazic Jewry
move eastward, and we saw how the cataclysmic blows of the Cossack Revolt
and the conversion of the false Messiah, Shabbetai Zvi, ultimately led to
the spiritual revival of the Hasidic movement in the 18th Century. We also
saw that the community was deeply divided between the Hasidim and their
opponents, the Mitnagdim. But as serious as the conflict was, it was
focused almost exclusively on internal issues. The impact of the modern
world, which was so profoundly affecting Jewish life in Western Europe in
the late 18th and early 19th Century, was barely felt in Eastern Europe,
where both general and Jewish society were still living a basically medieval
way of life. Still, there were certain "winds of change", and today's story
begins with an important political development, namely, the partitions of
Poland, (which took place in 1772, 1792, and 1795). The Polish empire was
carved up between Prussia, Austria, and Russia, with Lithuania and the
Ukraine going to Russia. These were areas with very large Jewish
populations. The result of this was that the Russian Empire, in which
virtually no Jews had lived before the partitions, now found itself forced
to formulate a policy concerning the status and treatment of a large,
foreign minority living within her midst.
So let's start our story by tracing a number of stages in Russian policies
toward the Jews. The first major development took place during the reign of
the Tzarina Catherine the Great. In 1794, Catherine decreed that Jewish
settlement was to be limited to the region known as the Pale of Settlement.
This area included Lithuania and the Ukraine, and basically the idea was to
confine Jewish settlement to the areas that had been recently acquired from
the Polish partitions. This policy was to cause great economic distress in
the century ahead, because while the Jewish community grew dramatically, it
was severely limited in its mobility. Even within the Pale, Jews were
excluded from many towns and crown-lands. The goals of the policy were
clear; to protect Russians from economic competition with Jews, and to keep
the great majority of Russian territory free from Jews. The next major
direction of Tzarist policy toward the Jews could be summed up in one word;
"Russification".
The goal of turning the Jews into Russians was actively pursued by Tzar
Alexander I (1801-1825) and Nicholas I (1825-1855). The accession of
Alexander I to the throne in 1801 filled many Jews with hope, since he was
known as a man who had been influenced by enlightened liberal political
principles. Alexander I may well have had good intentions in regard to the
Jews, but the effects of his policies were largely negative. He tried to
encourage Jewish integration (i.e. "Russification") by offering economic
privileges to those Jews who were willing to take up agriculture. These Jews
would be allowed to live in two districts outside the Pale, and live on
crown lands or buy unoccupied lands. They would even receive five years of
tax exemptions. Yet by the end of his reign in 1825 less than 2,300 Jews
had exercised this option. The educated, literate Jewish population simply
couldn't conceive of adopting a new and precarious occupation, which also
required living alongside the predominantly illiterate and boorish Russian
peasantry. Alexander I also opened up all Russian schools to Jews, in the
hopes that Jews would become Russified by becoming exposed to general
culture. But few Russian Jews were interested in such schools, which were
heavily influenced by the teachings of Russian Orthodox Christianity.
Alexander I's successor, Nicholas I, pursued a much more aggressive and
reactionary policy toward the Jews. Nicholas was a brutal autocrat, who
took "Russification" to a much higher degree. His main focus was through
army service. In theory, all able bodied Russians were subject to military
conscription for a period of 25 years! Obviously, not everyone was actually
required to serve, and corruption and favoritism were rampant. Nicholas
applied the law with particular ferocity toward the Jews, and even added a
separate provision whereby Jewish children were taken at age 12, so as to
place them for 6 years in preparatory canton schools. After 31 years, it
was assumed that these Jewish recruits, having no kosher food and being
continually exposed to Orthodox Christian practices, would lose their Jewish
identity and convert to Christianity! Try to imagine the agony of Jewish
parents who had their sons snatched away from their arms, knowing that they
would probably never see them again! What made things even worse was that
the Russian authorities required the Jewish communities themselves to supply
the required number of recruits. Community officials were forced to hire
recruiters, known as khappers, who would swoop into communities without
warning and take away young Jewish boys. Many parents deliberately
mutilated their child's body in order to disqualify him from conscription!
By the 1840's, however, even Nicholas understood that Russification could
also be achieved through less brutal means. He too, began to consider the
possibilities of an extensive education program. The Russian Minister of
Public Education, Uvarov, proposed that a new Jewish educational system be
set up under Tzarist auspices, in which the language of instruction would be
Russian, and Russian literature and secular studies would be emphasized. An
enlightened German Jew, Dr. Max Lilienthal, was appointed to head the
program. Lilienthal was a rabbi as well as a doctor of philosophy, and he
took the position only after considerable trepidation. He wondered why the
government showed such a strong interest in enlightening the Jews, when the
vast majority of Russians were still illiterate and totally unaware of the
glories of secular Western culture. Nonetheless, Lilienthal accepted the
position, and made valiant attempts to convince Jews to send their children
to the Crown schools. Most Jews, however, remained unconvinced of the
goodness of the intentions of the notoriously anti-Semitic tzar, and even
those who did send their children to these schools usually hired a private
melamed (teacher) to teach their children traditional Jewish subjects. It
was tempting, however, since those who attended the Russian Jewish schools
received an exemption from the dreaded military conscription! Eventually,
however, rumors began concerning a memorandum sent by Uvarov to the tzar, in
which he assured him that as soon as the program became widely accepted, the
instruction in Jewish subjects would be gradually reduced, and ultimately be
replaced by lessons in greek Orthodox Christianity! Lilienthal himself
resigned in disgust from his position in December 1844, and emigrated to
America. The experiment in a more humane and gradual Russification had
ended in colossal failure.
In this hostile environment, it should come as no surprise that the vast
majority of Jews displayed little desire for contact with the non-Jewish
world. Clearly the source of life and spiritual sustenance for the simple
Jews who lived in the shtetls, the Jewish villages of Russia, was the life
of Torah, as expressed in the day to day life of the community. It was a
community characterized by a profound and ever-present depth of piety and
religious feeling. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, in his beautiful tribute
to East European Jewry, "The Earth is the Lord's", describes these Jews in
the following excerpt:
"They put no trust in the secular world. They believed that the existence
of the world was not contingent on museums and libraries, but on houses of
worship and study. To them, the house of study was not important because
the world needed it, but, on the contrary, the world was important because
houses of study existed in it. To them, life without the Torah and without
piety was chaos, and a man who lived without these was looked upon with a
sense of fear...harassed and oppressed, they carried deep within their
hearts a contempt for the 'world', with its power and pomp, with its
bustling and boasting...They knew that the Jews were in exile, that the
world was unredeemed. Their life was oriented to the spiritual, and they
could therefore ignore its external aspects. Outwardly a Jew might have
been a pauper, but inwardly he felt like a prince, a kin to the king of
kings..."
Nonetheless, from the early 19th Century on there was a movement for reform
of Jewish life in Russia. The Haskalah was a movement for Jewish
Enlightenment. The maskilim believed that Jewish life required significant
educational and cultural reform, and that Jews needed to become versed in
the general European cultural heritage of literature, the arts, philosophy,
etc. The maskilim wished for Jews to become exposed to the cultural
treasures of European literature, (especially German literature), in order
that they would also be able to create a modern Hebrew literature of their
own. Interestingly, they showed little interest in Russian literature and
culture, which appeared to them to be backward and filled with medieval
ignorance and superstition. Similarly, these maskilim had no interest in
adapting Jewish religious life to the norms of religious observance and
practice prevalent in the Orthodox Christianity of Russia, which was
associated in their minds not only with brutal anti-Semitism, but also with
reactionism, cultural backwardness and superstition. As a result, though
many of the maskilim left the traditional world of Halakhic observance and
became secular free-thinkers, most expressed little interest in religious
reform per se.
The impetus towards Haskalah received a powerful boost during the relatively
enlightened reign of Alexander II, (1855-1881). Alexander was a liberal in
his thinking, who sincerely desired to bring Russia into the modern world.
He placed restrictions on the power of the Christian clergy, and early in
his reign he liberated 40,000,000 Russian serfs from their medieval
shackles. Russian Jewry benefited greatly from the liberal atmosphere of
the early years of Alexander's reign. The hated military conscription of
juveniles was abolished, and while conscription continued to exist, an equal
standard and age limit was imposed for Jew and Christian alike. Schools and
universities were opened up to Jewish students, and more Jews were granted
permission to live outside the Pale of Settlement. Unfortunately, many
powerful classes in Russian society were deeply opposed to his reforming
aspirations, and Alexander himself ultimately despaired of liberalism. But
by this time revolutionary movements had developed on the Russian scene who
called for radical overhaul of the political system and Russian society. In
1881 a group of these revolutionaries assassinated the tzar. Among the
group of revolutionary conspirators was one Jewish woman, and this fact was
exploited by anti-Semitic elements within and outside the government as
proof of an "international Jewish conspiracy" against Russia! In the spring
and summer of 1881, large anti-Jewish riots, known as pogroms sprung out in
many locations throughout the Ukraine and southern Russia. While these
appeared to be "spontaneous" popular outbreaks, in fact many of them were
organized by the tzarist government itself. Alexander III was a reactionary
nationalist through and through, who was heavily influenced by his "right
hand man", Konstantine Pobedonostsev, the Procurator of the Holy Synod (the
chief lay official of the Orthodox Church in Russia), and a notorious
anti-Semite. The government eventually stopped the pogroms, but it severely
damaged the Jewish community with the promulgation of the May Laws of 1882,
which effectively forbade Jews from moving outside of the communities that
they had previously lived in. With one flick of the pen, any hope of
liberation from the already overcrowded cities was extinguished. Jews were
also forbidden from holding mortgages and leases on land, and the economic
conditions in the Pale were to worsen dramatically. The pogroms continued,
and conditions continued to decline with the ascension to power of Tzar
Nicholas II in 1895. The culmination of the horror took place on April 6,
1903, with the infamous Kishinev pogrom. Early in 1903 some Russian
peasants had discovered the mutilated body of a young Russian boy. The
boy's uncle had in fact confessed to the crime, but this did not prevent a
local anti-Semitic journal, the Bessarabetz, from accusing the Jewish
community of the medieval charge of ritual murder. Instigators organized by
the Minister of Interior von Plehve, began fomenting the countryside and
encouraging a bloody reprisal against the Jews. The result was the Kishinev
pogrom, an attack of extreme brutality and savagery. 45 Jews were killed
and 86 were wounded, and gross mutilation of the dead and wounded was
graphically described by Russian eyewitnesses.
It was clear that Jews could not remain indifferent to their worsening
situation. A number of responses emerged within the Jewish community. From
1882 to 1930, about four million Jews chose to leave Russia for more
hospitable environments, in particular to the United States, where almost
three million were to settle. Other countries which became havens for
Russian Jewry were England, Canada, Argentina, South Africa, and Australia.
Other Jews placed their hope in a revolution which would obliterate
anti-Semitism in the context of a total societal upheaval. Some young Jews
became active members of the various political revolutionary movements.
(Jews were quite well represented among the Bolsheviks who ultimately
overthrew the tzarist regime and established the Soviet Union, Leon Trotsky
being a prominent example.) And finally, a small number of Russian Jews
began to espouse a new solution to the Jewish problem, one which had given
up on reform or change in Russia, but also refused to exchange one galut
country for another. This was the beginnings of Zionism. Leon Pinsker was
a maskil who had been a strong advocate of reform of Jewish life in Russia.
The pogroms shattered his faith in this possibility, and he underwent a
severe crisis, which ultimately led him from his belief in Jewish
emancipation, to a new belief in Auto-Emancipation, which was the name of an
influential pamphlet which Pinsker published. In this pamphlet, he spoke of
Judeophobia as an endemic sickness which could not be cured in Europe. The
only solution would be for Jews to return to their ancestral homeland. The
Zionist message of Jewish nationalism of Leon Pinsker was quite similar to
that which would be expressed by Theodor Herzl a decade later.
The Zionist movement had many different ideological streams within it,
including Political Zionists such as Pinsker and later Herzl, Cultural
Zionists such as the writer and publicist Ahad Ha'am, Religious Zionists
(like Rabbi Abraham Isaac Hacohen Kook), and Labor or Socialist Zionists,
such as Ber Borochov and A.D. Gordon. All of these ideological currents
were developed primarily by Eastern European Jews.
Russian Jewry, then, has had a major effect both on the 20th Century
Diaspora, as well as on the State of Israel. Of course, millions of Russian
Jews remained in Russia in the time of the Russian Revolution. Many of
these Jews left the Jewish world as a result of the Communist anti-religious
policies, which almost totally extinguished Jewish educational and religious
life in the Soviet Union. Many other Soviet Jews were killed by the Nazis
in the Holocaust in the wake of the invasion of Russia. Still, as a result
of the movement to free Soviet Jewry, as well as the liberalization and
ultimate dismantling of the Soviet Union, hundreds of thousands of Russian
Jews have left Russia in the past few decades and are building new lives in
Israel and in various Diaspora countries. Within Russia and other newly
independent Eastern European countries such as the Ukraine, I'm happy to
report that there is a revival of interest concerning Jewish history and
tradition among many young Russian Jews today.
Next week we're going to switch gears and deal with a very different world.
We'll learn about the ancient Diasporas of Yemen and Ethiopia.
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