A History of Zionism (12 page)

In the Kishinev riots of April 1903, forty-five Jews were killed and many more wounded. Similar attacks followed in Gomel and Zhitomir. The outbreak reached its climax in October 1905 when in the course of twelve days 810 Jews were killed in riots all over western and southern Russia. The number of victims was small in comparison with the catastrophe that befell the Jewish people in Europe forty years later, but the particular brutality of the attacks, the inactivity of the central government, and the positive incitement by many of its local representatives aroused a storm of protest in western Europe and the United States. This was in many respects a more civilised age than our own. Unashamed cynicism on the part of governments and individuals in the face of acts of barbarism had not yet become an accepted fashion. Some populist groups had played a certain part in stirring up anti-Jewish sentiments during the early phase of these attacks, on the mistaken assumption that riots against ‘Jewish parasites’ would eventually turn into a revolutionary movement directed against the government, the landowners and capitalists. The main instigators, especially during the later period, were the ‘Black Hundred’ and other movements of the extreme Right, which preached a mixture of extreme nationalism and religious obscurantism.

The tsarist government was rightly accused of aiding and abetting the pogromists in the hope of diverting popular dissatisfaction. But anti-semitism was not manufactured by the administration or forced upon an unwilling or indifferent population. It had deep roots among at least part of the population, and not much encouragement on the part of the authorities was needed to kindle the flame of race hatred. This mood was not restricted to one specific section of the people. It was found among the peasants and the aristocracy, the middle classes and even the intelligentsia, some of whose members firmly believed that the Jews were an alien body which could not and should not be assimilated. Some of the accusations against them, such as wholesale exploitation, were ludicrous; in their overwhelming majority they were penniless; the Jews of Mogilev, who constituted 94 per cent of the town’s population, could not have made a living by exploiting the remaining 6 per cent in that city. They were also accused of harbouring subversive sentiments, and it was certainly true that there was little love lost among them for a government that cruelly oppressed them. While the number who took an active part in the revolutionary movement in the 1880s and 1890s was small, more and more young Jews joined in the following years the one movement which held out the promise of a better future in Russia.

As already mentioned, the government had no clear and consistent policy. From time to time half-hearted measures were contemplated to further cultural assimilation, promote agricultural employment, open the gates of the pale of settlement, and allow the Jews to disperse over the vast territories of the empire. But few of these projects ever got beyond the planning stage, and those which did were tackled without much conviction. What other possible solutions existed? With all their oriental ferocity, the rulers of Russia were neither cruel nor systematic enough to contemplate the physical extermination of the Jews. They did not expect much from encouraging or enforcing mass baptism. There were simply too many of them. Emigration was the last resort; and in despair the Jews began to flee the country of their birth in thousands. Mass emigration, mainly to America, and to a much lesser extent to Britain, South Africa, and western Europe, followed the May Laws and the pogroms of 1882. It is estimated that between that year and 1914 about two and a half million Jews left eastern Europe, including Austria, Poland and Rumania. During the fifteen years before the outbreak of the First World War, 1.3 million Jews emigrated from Russia. The wave reached its peak in 1903-6, the years of the worst pogroms, when four hundred thousand Jews left Russia for the United States.

Thus a new, major chapter opened in the long history of Jewish migration. This is not the place for a detailed analysis of the mass exodus, nor for an account of the hardships and privations they had to endure. But it was not a tale of unmitigated woe. Their sufferings hardened them. The fight for survival brought out some of the qualities which explain their success in the country of their adoption. The challenges facing them generated an enormous fund of resilience, inventiveness and intelligence. Those who stayed behind drew closer together. A western observer, Harold Frederic, visiting Russia in the 1880s noted the ‘remarkable solidarity, at once so pathetic and prejudicial’, which marked the Russian Jews:

Once you cross the Russian frontier, you can tell the Jews at railway stations or on the street almost as easily as in America you can distinguish the Negroes. This is more a matter of dress - of hair and beard and cap and caftan - than of physiognomy. But even more still is it a matter of demeanour. They seem never for an instant to lose the consciousness that they are a race apart. It is in their walk, in their sidelong glance, in the carriage of their sloping shoulders, in the curious gesture with the uplifted palm. Nicholas [the First] … solidified [the Jews] into a dense, hardbaked and endlessly resistant mass.
*

Frederic expressed astonishment that any religion and any rudimentary notion whatever of honesty survived in these terrible conditions.

The great bulk remained simple and devout people, clinging doggedly to their despised faith, helping one another where they could, keeping up virtues of temperance and family affection which their Russian taskmasters hardly knew by name.
†

With all this, life in the ghetto was dismal, even if its inhabitants were not always aware of the full extent of their degradation. True, from Mendele Mocher Sfarim (
In those days
) onwards, there has been a tendency to grow sentimental about the ghetto, to describe it in a rosy, almost idyllic way. Life in the pale had its bright sides and not a few of those who grew up in the ghettoes of eastern Europe later on stressed the vitality, the warmth, the solidarity, the we-are-the-people aspect which was so sadly absent among later generations. But the darker aspects of life in the pale were of course far more striking and provided much bitter comment among contemporaries. A.A. Gordon wrote about the ‘parasitism of fundamentally useless people’, Frischmann about the disgust generally evoked by Jewish life. Berdichevsky said that the Jews in the pale were ‘not a nation, not a people, not human’, and Joseph Chaim Brenner, the most radical critic of all, used such epithets as ‘gypsies and filthy dogs’. The anomalies of Jewish life were bound to find expression in the search for radical solutions to the general misery, the
Judennot
which was not just political and economic, but increasingly also psychological in character.

Intellectual Life

The mood of east European Jewry was reflected in changing religious fashions and intellectual currents. Hassidism had developed partly under the impact of the Khmelnitsky massacres in 1648, and had a strong hold in the Ukraine, Podolia, and eastern Galicia. It was not a philosophical movement but anti-rationalist, based on religious emotion and with strong elements of Messianism. For the Hassidim, God was not an abstract concept; they saw his presence in every particle of the world, inherent in all creatures, animals and plants; the relationship between man and God was immediate. In this and other respects Hassidism resembled other mystical movements and the pantheism of previous centuries. It tried to combine mutually exclusive elements; its leaders argued that divine providence was omnipotent and omnipresent, that the Creator was present in every act of man, that divinity (
shechina
) manifested itself in all human activity, even in sin. If so, what was left of the traditional Jewish idea of the freedom of the individual and, incidentally, of the concept of sin? Such philosophical contradictions did not trouble the leaders and followers of Hassidism. It was a folk religion, with a tremendous appeal for the common people precisely because it stressed qualities of real piety in contrast to the rabbinical tradition with its emphasis on external performance, on the observance of all the commandments and taboos of the Torah. Hassidism preached not asceticism but the enjoyment of life, considering such enjoyment a form of worship. It took a poor view of the leading rabbis and their arid style of learning and scholarship, stressing instead contemplative understanding of religion. The Hassidic prayer was not a mechanical duty but an act of direct communion with God. The right kind of prayer could cure the sick, make the poor rich, avert all kinds of evil. All depended on the intensity of prayer; the ecstasy of the Hassidim at the time of prayer, their wild bodily contortions and their dances were the most dramatic characteristics of the movement.

By the middle of the nineteenth century the original impetus of Hassidism had largely petered out. Instead a cult of
Zadikim
had spread, the cult of saint-leaders; they were the real mediators between God and the world, inscribing amulets, providing special prayers (in Yiddish) and incantations for their followers. On a lower level the
Magidim
, the itinerant preachers and miracle men, became very popular. Hassidism had given birth to a great religious revival, but there were many who had watched its manifestations with serious misgivings because of its ‘cult of the personality’, its unbridled emotionalism, and other features utterly opposed to Jewish tradition. A thirty-year war between Hassidism and its opponents split east European Jewry right down the middle; the two camps physically attacked and outlawed each other, and even denounced the other side to the Russian authorities, asking for their intervention against the hated enemy.

Hassidism appealed to the masses; it was unlikely to satisfy the more sophisticated elements who were witnesses to the great material and intellectual changes in the world around them. Such men were likely to find their place in the
Haskala
, the movement of enlightenment, which from the early years of the nineteenth century tried to combine some elements of Jewish tradition with modern secular thought. In Germany and western Europe the Haskala led towards cultural and political assimilation; in eastern Europe, with its millions of Jews, it was bound after similar beginnings to take a different course. The early centres of the east European Haskala were Odessa and to a lesser extent Vilna. Some of the leaders of this school regarded it as their main task to bring about a revival of Hebrew literature - in contrast to the Yiddish vernacular. Others felt that a purely literary movement would fail to make any substantial impact on Jewish life, and consequently emphasised the need to guide the Jewish masses towards a more normal and productive life. Their activities were followed with suspicion and active opposition not only by the orthodox rabbis but by the great majority of simple Jews, distrustful of western education, western attire, and the western way of life in general. The life of the early small-town
Maskil
, described in countless contemporary autobiographies and novels, was not enviable; divided by an abyss from the mass of fellow Jews, his call for reform all too often fell on stony ground. Socially isolated, deeply hurt by the open hostility facing them, some of the early Maskilim despaired of their people who, they thought, were bound to remain forever ignorant and backward. Others, more optimistically inclined, collaborated with the Russian authorities who during the 1850s and 1860s favoured the reform movement. The appeal of Russian culture was considerable, and there seemed to be a real prospect that cultural assimilation would bring about a radical change in the entire position of the Jews.

Thus the new age of reason finally reached the ghettoes of eastern Europe. A new world was arising as the forces of darkness were receding; the moral and intellectual regeneration of the Jewish people seemed only a question of time. ‘Awake! Israel and Judah arise! Shake off the dust, open wide thine eyes’, Abram Ber Gottlober wrote; and Yehuda Leib Gordon: ‘Arise my people, ’tis time for waking! lo, the night is o’er, the day is breaking!’
*
This was the keynote of the period. The poetry was not beyond reproach but the message was clear. The spread of secular education was no longer to be stopped. When Rabbi Israel Salanter learned that his son had gone to Berlin to study medicine, he removed his shoes and sat down on the floor of his house to observe the traditional seven days of mourning for the death of a beloved relative. Such uncompromising attitudes towards the winds of change sweeping the ghettoes became rarer during the 1860s and 1870s. ‘Let there be light’ was the motto chosen in 1860 for the first Jewish newspaper in the Russian language. The general trend was towards Russification; even those who wrote in Hebrew were not at all certain whether the language and the culture had a future: Who knows, Gordon asked in a famous poem, whether I am not the last of the writers of Zion - and you the last readers? Our children, the same poet lamented on another occasion, have become strangers to our nation. The conflict between fathers and sons, described in Turgenev’s famous novel, had its parallel in the Jewish quarters. The Jewish Bazarovs, too, ‘believed in nothing’, to quote one of Turgenev’s Russian heroes. They took to radical ideas like thirsty men to water; populism and early Socialist ideas found enthusiastic followers in this generation of young Jews, among them quite a few such as Eliezer Ben Yehuda, Yehuda Leib Levin, and Yehiel Chlenov, who were later to become Zionist leaders.

The pogroms of the early 1880s and the anti-Jewish policy of Alexander III were a shattering blow to the hopes of these men and women for a gradual integration into Russian society. More young Jews joined revolutionary groups, others turned to the new movement calling for a national revival of the Jewish people. The beginning of this movement dates back several decades, more precisely to some early writers of the Haskala, who were the leading advocates of the national revival. Abraham Mapu and Yehuda Leib Gordon were contemporaries of Tolstoy and Dostoievsky (which is not to say that their contribution to world literature was of equal significance). They were above all mentors and educators and only incidentally writers; this much they had in common with the Russian radical writers of the period such as Nekrasov (who was much admired by Y.Y. Gordon), Pisarev, and Chernyshevsky (who strongly influenced Lilienblum). They regarded their poems, their essays and their novels as the most suitable vehicle for their message. Their writings are of considerable interest, reflecting various social and cultural facets of Jewish life at the time. Even the most ambitious novels, such as Smolenskin’s
Hatoeh bedarke hehayim
(
The Wanderer on the Path of Life
) are weak judged by purely literary criteria. Shrill, verbose, lacking psychological refinement, oblivious of nature, these Jewish
Bildungs-romane
all describe the difficulties faced by small-town Maskilim. The young heretics are usually expelled from their parental home (or the
Yeshiva
); they make their way to Odessa or some other centre of the Haskala. They are invariably poor but honest - in glaring contrast to the leaders of the community. Their material problems are often solved by sudden legacies from rich uncles in America. The villains (such as Rabbi Zadok in Mapu’s
Ayit Zavua
, or Menasse in Smolenskin’s novel) are criminals or at best boors and imposters who, posing as pious people, somehow manage to dominate their communities and use their influence to oppress the weak and poor Maskilim. At their best these novels describe the great Hassidic rabbis holding court, the exploits of the itinerant miracle men, the forerunners of both Barnum and modern revivalism. Jewish society as it emerges from these novels is engrossed in unending internal strife, engulfed in obscurantism and prejudice, stubbornly resisting any reform. True, there are redeeming features, such as the traditional respect for learning; but the traditional subjects are criticised for their total irrelevance to the modern world. The Yeshiva student thus ceases to be the glamour boy of Jewish life. He is not even any longer the ideal husband. More than once the Haskala novel deals with the conflict arising from the unwillingness of an educated Jewish girl to marry the Yeshiva student picked for her by her parents.