The Jews of Eastern Europe, 1772-1881 (Jewish Culture and Contexts) - Bartal, Israel: 9780812219074 (original) (raw)

From the Publisher

Israel Bartal is Avraham Harman Chair in Jewish History at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Among his books are The Records of the Council of the Four Lands, Volume 1: 1580-1792, Exile in the Homeland, and Poles and Jews: A Failed Brotherhood (with Magdalena Opalski).

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Introduction

The following chapters relate the history of East European Jewry from the time of the Polish partitions at the end of the eighteenth century to the pogroms that broke out in the southern regions of the Russian empire in the early 1880s. In the summer of 1772, the three neighbors of the Polish state tore off large chunks of her territory, embarking on a process that, within a little less than two decades, led to Poland's demise as an independent political entity. The first partition of Poland was also the beginning of the triple encounter of the Jews of the Polish Commonwealth with the Austrian bureaucracy (in Galicia), the Russian officialdom (in White Russia) and the Prussian administration (in western Prussia). This encounter between a populous Jewish community, with an age-old cultural tradition, and the apparatus of the centralized state was, for the Polish Jew, the commencement of the modern era. And since the Jews residing in the Polish-Lithuanian kingdom formed an absolute majority of European Jewry The first partition of Poland can actually be viewed as the commencement of the modern era in Jewish history as a whole. Moreover, from then on, a mass immigration movement began that greatly increased the number of Polish Jews in other parts of Europe.

From 1772, a complex and multifaceted process of integration and acculturation started in the regions severed from the Polish state. The Polish-Lithuanian Jew became a "Russian Jew," a "German Jew," or an "Austrian Jew." This was not a rapid process. Most of the Jews in the areas annexed from Poland to the neighboring states continued to maintain their old way of life for decades after they were no longer subjects of the Polish king. They regarded themselves as "Polish Jews," and that is how they were seen by German, Austrian and Russian writers and bureaucrats. As far back as the 1860s, the Yiddish writer Isaac Yoel Linetzky called the protagonist of his anti-Hasidic satire "Dos Poylishe Yingl" (The Polish Lad), although he depicted him as a Jew living in Ukraine, deep inside the territory of the Russian empire. Jewish socialists who published a Yiddish newspaper in London intended for the masses of poor immigrants from the Russian empire, called it (in 1884!) Der Poylisher Yidl (The Polish Kike). According to one of the editors, they chose this name because they wanted to voice the immigrants' protest against the disdainful attitude adopted towards them by the English Jews, who were panic-stricken by the idea that "the Poles are coming!" In those very same years, the German historian, Heinrich von Treitschke, in a polemic with the Jewish historian, Heinrich Graetz, expressed his fear that the German Reich would be inundated by masses of Polish Jewish immigrants. In Treitschke's view, the fact that these immigrants clung to their national identity was antithetical to the equal political rights they had recently been granted. Moreover, it constituted a real threat to the German character of his country. More than one hundred years, then, after the first Polish partition, the Jews of Eastern Europe were still seen by many as a community that had preserved its "Polishness." And deep into the modern era, they maintained what Gershon Hundert recently described as a positive sense of Jewish "identity."

However, what began as the invasions by Poland's enemies in the last decades of the eighteenth century nonetheless changed the political base of the traditional society's life. Although the masses of Jews underwent only partial integration, some segments of the population were considerably influenced by it. The processes of acculturation did not cause the old Jewish culture to disappear, but they did augment it with cultural traits previously unknown to the Jews of the Polish-Lithuanian kingdom. The changes that affected East European Jewry in the nineteenth century also gave rise to a new type of antagonism between them and the various ethnic groups in the empires. The old religious conflict, between Catholics and Jews as well as between the Eastern Orthodox and the Jews, took the form of a radical anti-Semitism, in which the influence of national Romanticism merged with messianic revolutionism In March 1881, 111 years after the Russian army entered the towns of White Russia, Tsar Alexander II was mortally wounded by assassins belonging to the revolutionary movement. Six weeks after the Tsar's murder, the southern provinces of the Russian empire were swept by waves of pogroms against the Jews, unparalleled in their duration and geographical spread. In their wake, many Jews, during the pogroms or in the years soon after, began to abandon the option of integration and acculturation in favor of more radical solutions to the problems of their economic, social and spiritual existence. "The Russian Jew," like his brethren on the Austrian side of the border, began to exchange the incomplete imperial identity, which had taken shape after the Polish partitions, for alternative identities, either by emigrating to new lands or by seeking new Jewish identities unprecedented in the history of East European Jewry.

The boundaries of historical periods are clearly determined by subjective considerations. On the basis of their ideologies, political interests, a certain geographical link or ethnic identity, people are liable to draw totally disparate time lines. The sociologist Eviatar Zerubavel states that:

There are many alternative ways to cut up the past, none of which are more natural and hence more valid then others. Any system of periodization is thus inevitably social, since our ability to envision the historical watersheds separating one conventional "period" from another is basically a product of being socialized in specific traditions of carving up the past. In other words, we need to be mnemonically socialized to regard certain historical events as significant "turning points."

Indeed, why should we decide that the partitions of Poland constitute an historical turning point in the history of East European Jewry? After all, one of the major claims I put forward in this book is that many of the social, economic and cultural traits that were hallmarks of the link between the Polish feudal system and the Jews continued to exist for many years after 1772. Life in the towns of Galicia or White Russia did not change much until the second half of the nineteenth century. In 1850 very few Jews in the Russian Pale of Settlement or in Austrian Galicia felt at home in the cultures of the state. This was the time when the Hasidic movement, a consummate product of the traditional culture, was crossing the borders of empires and winning the hearts of Jews throughout Eastern Europe. Similarly, one can ask whether the year 1881 marks a turning point in the history of East European Jewry. Zionist historiography, on the one hand, and the historical research written under the influence of Jewish radicalism, on the other, chose the year of the pogroms as the time when a new era opened in Jewish history. In 1969, the national-radical historian, Shmuel Ettinger (1919-1988) wrote:

There has been no more dramatic period in Jewish history than the years between 1881 and 1948—a relatively short span of time when measured against the annals of a nation. During those years the Jewish people underwent enormous changes and agonizing tribulations. Yet, at the same time, manifested an extraordinary vitality. [ . . . ] In contrast to the lengthy tradition developed during the Middle Ages to divert the resentment of alien rule and the sufferings of the Diaspora into the inner world of the spirit and abstain from political activism [ . . . ] mighty forces now awoke in the people. These forces, operating at a social and political level, transformed a scattered, divided, and mortally wounded people from a passive entity into an active and independent political and social force.

Ettinger was a Jewish-Russian intellectual, who, in his political and cultural life, moved from a Hasidic ultraorthodox home in Ukraine to Marxism-Leninism in Palestine under the British mandate, and then became an ardent Socialist Zionist in the State of Israel. As for many intellectuals from Eastern Europe, for him too, the image of the Jewish past became a dynamic product of a changing world-view. In his transition from Communism to nationalism, Ettinger altered the role of 1881 in his historical thinking. In an earlier version of his lectures on modern Jewish history (from which his previously cited work was adapted), 1848—the year of the "spring of the nations"—was a watershed in modern Jewish history. Jonathan Frankel also describes what took place in the year of the pogroms as a radical and unprecedented shift. In his monumental work on the roots of modern Jewish politics, describing events in the wake of the pogroms, he states that "a revolution in modern Jewish politics took place in Russia during the years 1881-1882." In recent years, there has been a tendency in research on the history of East European Jewry to place less emphasis on the influence of the pogroms on the processes of modernization the Jewish people underwent in the modern era. Unquestionably, the decline of the political movements, which, in previous generations, had shaped the collective memory of the past of United States and Israeli Jewry, contributed to a new way of looking at the role of 1881 in Jewish history. That year was linked in the Jewish collective memory with the emergence of the Hibbat Zion movement, as well as with the search for the roots of the mass immigration to the United States. Modern nationalism and the mass immigration were two modes of reaction to the pogroms that distanced the Jews from the old country. They blackened the memory of the past and radicalized trends that until then had not been unequivocal in the complex historical reality. Even after the 1881-1882 pogroms, certain sectors in Jewish society still tended to seek integration into the imperial cultures. Jewish-Russian culture, works by Jewish authors in the Polish language and aspirations for social and political integration continued to exist alongside trends of separatism and abandonment. At times, these conflicting trends were even intermixed, because Jewish nationalism in Eastern Europe was strongly influenced by the cultures into which many Jews aspired to integrate.

In his groundbreaking research, Benjamin Nathans adopted a Tocquevillian reenvisioning that "seeks not to deny the profound upheaval that occurred in Russian Jewry (just as Tocqueville never denied that a revolution occurred in France in 1789) but rather to reveal the subtle forms of change as well as continuities that bridge the moment of crisis."

In this book, I tend to concur with some of these reservations about the view that the events of 1881 caused a revolutionary "leap" from a premodern phase in the history of East European Jewry to a totally new phase. Thus, for example, I stress the fact that some Jewish intellectuals in the Russian empire were already becoming disillusioned with the policy of the imperial government towards Jews quite a few years before the pogroms, and this suggests that there was not a sudden shift in the attitude of the members of the Haskalah movement towards the Russian government. Moreover, in this book, I assert that the disintegration of the feudal system, which preceded the pogroms of the eighties, was a decisive factor in the profound upheaval that Jewish society underwent. The pogroms in the Pale of Settlement were, in a certain sense, a byproduct of political, economic and social processes rather than a major cause of these processes.

Nevertheless, I believe the 1881 pogroms can be viewed as a significant milestone in the history of East European Jewry. The Jews' tendency to isolate themselves from the milieu in which they had lived for centuries was then significantly intensified and took on massive proportions. Anti-Semitism became an official policy in the Russian empire and Jewish nationalism moved from its cultural phase to the phase of political organization. Although the massive immigration from Eastern Europe to the West began back in the seventies because of the famine that struck the northern provinces of the Pale of Settlement, it became associated with the new anti-Semitism. From then on, it was also linked to the emergence of a nationalist movement that sought to direct the huge stream of immigrants into different ideological channels.

The period 1772-1881 constitutes a vastly significant chapter in the history of the largest Jewish collective in the world in modern times. During those years, a society, immense in its demographic dimensions, spread over a large geographical area on the eastern fringes of Europe, underwent processes of change that uprooted and shattered centuries-old social and cultural structures and practices, exposing the Jews to the transformative power of modernity. In the one hundred years described in the following chapters, historical circumstances arose that engendered the development of large Jewish movements, which later determined the nature of contemporary Jewish society, left their imprint on contemporary Jewish collectives, and also played a decisive role in shaping Israeli society. From 1772-1881, the founders of the Haskalah movement in Lithuania and Ukraine made their appearance; the first buds of secular Hebrew literature emerged; the first modern works in Yiddish, the spoken language of the Jewish masses, were written; Jewish literature in Polish and Russian was created; and the Jewish press in various languages flourished. Also, during that period, the founders of the Jewish national movement; the early leaders of East European Orthodoxy, and the pioneers of the Jewish labor movement, were galvanized into action. All of these movements bore the hallmark of Eastern Europe: a blend of an ethnic Jewish identity, deeply rooted in a large, widespread community, with a profound consciousness of modernity. Even the opponents of modernity, including the rabbis of Lithuania at the end of the nineteenth century, were greatly influenced by it. They understood all too well that the kahal with its rabbis and laymen leaders, had ceased to exist, and they adjusted to modern politics and to concepts such as public opinion, equal rights, and nationalism. The radical revolutionaries and the early nationalists, on the other hand, while they cherished the vision of revolution and change, still felt part of that large community of Jews rooted in their culture. They rediscovered this community, felt connected to it and wanted to preserve some parts of its culture. The history of the two large Jewish centers in the world—Israel and the United States—is not linked only due to the simple demographic fact that several million Jews in the Middle East and in North America are the offspring of East European immigrants. In my view, it is impossible to understand political and social processes and to delve deeply into cultural phenomena in the State of Israel without a profound knowledge of what took place in Eastern Europe in the decades prior to the period of the First Aliya. We usually seek historical explanations for what was created in the Land of Israel in the last 120 years in the Middle East...

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