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C O N T E N T S

I N T R O D U C T I O N . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .7

I A S H KENAZIM & SEPHARDIM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .1 7

II THE YIDDISH LANGUAGE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .2 7

III THE FORMATION OF POLISH JEWRY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .3 5

1 / Legends, Landscapes & Memories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .3 7

2 / Land and People . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .3 9

3 / The Jews Find a Home . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .4 0

4 / The Shettl . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .4 7

IV TRADITIONAL JEWISH SOCIETY IN POLISH COMMONWEALT H . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .5 7

V THE DECLINE OF THE POLISH STAT E . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .7 3

VI U N D E R N E W R U L E R S . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .7 7

V I I M I G R ATION AND URBANIZAT I O N . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .9 5

VIIII THE REVOLT AGAINST TRADITIONAL SOCIETY: HASIDISM AND THE HASKALA . . . . .1 0 1

1 / Hasidism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .1 0 3

2 / The Haskala . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .1 1 6

IX TRANSCENDING THE HASKALA: A CULTURAL REVIVA L . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .1 2 9

X T O WARD A NEW JEWISH POLITICS: ZIONISM AND SOCIALISM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .1 4 5

1 / Zionism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .1 4 9

2 / The Bund . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .1 5 5

3 / Polish-Jewish Relations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .1 6 0

XI UNDER NEW FLAGS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .1 6 9

XII I N T E RWAR POLAND . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .1 7 5

E P I L O G U E . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .1 8 9

I N T R O D U C T I O N

I N T R O D U C T I O N

It was the autumn of 1943, and the Germans were about to liquidate

the Vilna ghetto. For close to five centuries, Vilna had been a center of

Jewish culture in Eastern Europe, and Vilna Jews had proudly called

their city the “Jerusalem of Lithuania.” It was in Vilna that the gre a t

18th century Talmud scholar Reb Eliyahu - the Vilna Goen - had daz-

zled the entire Jewish world with his commentaries and scholarship.

Not far from the small synagogue where Vilna Goen prayed, an enter-

prising Jewish widow founded the famous Romm Press, which sup-

plied the entire Jewish world with beautiful editions of the Talmud. For

generations, middle class Jewish fathers of young brides would give

their sons-in-law a dowry that included the bound volumes of the

“ Vilna Shas” — the popular name for the Romm Talmud.

Jews came from all over the world to marvel at the beautiful city syn-

agogue, which impressed even Napoleon. They loved to tell the story

of how a rival sect, the Karaites, had tried to steal the synagogue fro m

the Jews. When the Jews had finished building the synagogue in the

early 17 century, the Karaites appeared and said: yo, we’re the re a l

Jews, not you. So the synagogue belongs to us! Since the Jews told

them to get lost, both sides had to go to the Polish Governor to get a

final decision on the ownership of the synagogue. As they came into

his house the Karaites took off their shoes and left them in the fro n t

hall. The Jew arrived and also took off his shoes. But instead of leav-

ing them in the front hall, he hung them around his neck and went in.

And the Karaites asked: what are you coming in with your shoes for?

And the Jew answered: you know, when Moses went up to Mount

Sinai to get the Torah from God, he left his shoes at the foot of the

mountain: and some Karaite came and stole his shoes. So I’m scare d :

If I leave my shoes in the front hall, the Karaites will filch them! The

Karaites had a good laugh. “You idiot, what are you talking about?,”

they said. “When Moses was on Mount Sinai, there were no Karaites

yet!.” At this point the smart Vilna Jew turned to the Pole and said,

“ You see, if that’s so, then how can the Karaites say that they are the

true Jews?” And the Jews got to keep the old synagogue.

7I N T R O D U C T I O N

But Vilna was not just a religious center. Near the great synagogues

w e re major Jewish libraries where both religious and secular Jews

would spend entire days reading Talmud-or studying the new Torah of

Karl Marx. Vilna was the birthplace of the Jewish Labor Bund , an

a n t i religious socialist party. It was in Vilna that in 1902 a young Jewish

s h o e m a k e r, Hershel Lekert, had shot and wounded a Russian gover-

nor who had ord e red the flogging of Jewish workers. As he faced the

gallows, he refused to pray with a rabbi, but died bravely as a pro u d

J e w. The Bund had acquired its first martyr.

Zionism also captured the hearts of many Vilna Jews. On a bitterly cold

night in 1903 tens of thousands mobbed the railroad station at 2a.m.

to catch a glimpse of Theodore Herzl, the great Zionist leader, who was

on his way to plead with the Russian government to help the Jews.

During and after the First World Wa r, Vilna became the capital of a new

imaginary worldwide nation —-Yiddish land. Its new Yiddish schools

w e re the best in the world and Jews from Argentina, the US and South

Africa sent their hard earned contributions to help build the new tem-

ple of Yiddish culture: the YIVO, the Yiddish Scientific Institute, which

opened in 1925. Like their brothers and sisters elsewhere in Eastern

E u rope, Vilna Jews liked to argue. But they argued in Yiddish and they

all agreed on one thing: whatever their diff e rences, they were pro u d

Jews nevertheless.

When the Vilna Goen died in 1797 the Jews of Vilna buried him next

to the ashes of the Ger Tsedek (the righteous convert). In the 1740’s

a Polish nobleman, Count Valentin Potocki, committed a capital

o ffence: he converted to Judaism. The Polish authorities off e red him

a chance to save his life, but he refused to betray his new faith and

died at the stake. Like many other Jewish martyrs who pre f e r re d

death to the betrayal of their faith, he died for kiddush ha-shem- f o r

sanctification of God’s name. According to Vilna Jewish legend, a

Jew disguised as a Christian ran to the stake and smuggled away

some ashes and a finger which the Vilna Jews buried in the cemetery.

On the spot an oak tree grew whose branches reminded the Jews of

o u t s t retched arms raised to heaven. When Vilna Jews were in tro u b l e ,

they would go to that oak tree that sheltered the tombs of the Vi l n a

Goen and the Ger Tsedek, and they would pray.

THE DISTINCTIVE LIFE OF EAST EUROPEAN JEWRY8

Over the years as periodic anti-Semitic riots rocked other cities and

small towns in Eastern Europe, Vilna stayed calm. Vilna Jewry had a

ready explanation: the souls of the Vilna Goen and the Ger Ts e d e k

p rotected this special city. Vilna Jews even had a favorite song about

their beloved “yerushalayim d’Lite”. Its refrain was “Vilna shtot fun

gayst un tmimes” (Vilna, city of spirit and quiet learn i n g ) ” .

On a hot day in July 1941, shortly after the Nazis occupied the city, the

Germans ord e red the city’s Jewish elite to form a Judenrat, a Jewish

council. Dr. Gershuni, one of the pillars of Jewish Vilna, opened the

meeting. “We had thought up to now,” he sighed, “that the merit of the

Vilna Goen and the Ger Tsedek would protect us. But now we must

follow the German orders and form this Judenrat. No one has a moral

right to refuse to serve.” A few weeks later the Germans executed the

e n t i re Judenrat. By the time they established a ghetto in late 1941,

70% of Vilna Jewry had already been shot in the nearby pits of Ponary.

N o w, in September 1943, the last surviving Jews of Vilna were about

to go to their death. A few Jewish fighters were preparing to escape

and join the partisans in the surrounding forests. A few months later,

in a frigid partisan camp deep in the Narocz woods, a young poet

named Av rom Sutzkever, wrote a symbolic poem that described how

the fighters —- just before they left the ghetto —- melted the lead

plates of the Romm Press, the plates of the Talmud, to make bullets.

At some timeless native lair/we unlocked the seal once more/ shrouded inshadow/ by the glow of a lamp/like Temple ancients dipping oil/ into can-delabrums of festal gold/ so, pouring line after lettered line/ did we./ let-ter by melting letter the lead/ liquefied bullets, gleamed with thoughts/ averse from Babylon, a verse from Poland/ seething, flowing into onemold./ Now must Jewish grit, long concealed in words/ detonate theworld in a shot!

The images of Sutzkever’s poem bring together Jerusalem, Babylonia

and Vilna, three important milestones of Jewish history. The Land of

Israel had shaped the Jewish people and the Babylonian Talmud guar-

anteed that they would survive when the Romans destroyed the tem-

ple. The new authority of rabbis and scholars filled the vacuum

caused by the collapse of political sovere i g n t y. In Babylonia, in Egypt,

in Yemen, in Spain and in France the Bible and the Talmud ensure d

Jewish cohesion, even in the face of linguistic and cultural diversity.

I N T R O D U C T I O N 9

Now the Jewish partisans of Vilna were turning a new page in Jewish

h i s t o r y, and the final page of their own. Mostly the products of Zionist

youth movements or the Bundist and Communist underg round, few

of them had ever studied Talmud. But now, as the young poet poeti-

cally transformed talmudic letters into bullets, he also fashioned a

striking image of the place of Vilna in Jewish history. Vilna had

b rought together the old and the new. Vilna had nourished a vibrant

m o d e rn Jewish culture by building on Jewish tradition, not destro y-

ing it. The Jewish fighters of Vilna, Sutzkever believed, were still the

descendants of the priests of the Great temple and the rabbis who

had compiled the Talmud in the sunny plazas of Babylonian towns.

Vilna might go under, but its spirit would survive elsewhere. No, the

poem did not re c o rd a literal event. What counted was the power of

poetry to capture and immortalize the soul of a city, and its people.

S u t z k e v e r ’s poem marked the very last days of the East European era

of Jewish history. Today Jewish life is centered in Israel and in the

United States. Six hundred years ago the center was Spain. But for

close to 500 years — between 1500 and the Holocaust — the lands

of the former Polish Commonwealth were the home of the world’s

l a rgest Jewish community, East European Jewry.

B e f o re the partitions of the late eighteenth century wiped it off the

map, Poland was the largest country in Europe, and much bigger than

it is today. West to east it stretched from the present Polish-German

b o rder to the Dnieper river, about 250 miles west of Moscow. It con-

t rolled important territories on the Baltic Sea and extended south

almost as far as the Black Sea. It was in this huge area that Polish

Jewry — East European Jewry— took shape and developed its dis-

tinctive, Ashkenazi Jewish culture.

The story of East European Jewry went through several phases. The

first stretched from the beginnings to Jewish settlement in Poland until

the collapse of the Polish Commonwealth in the late 18th century.

During this time East European Jewry became a distinct subgroup of

the Jewish people, with its own language, institutions and folkways.

During the second period-1795 to 1918, Polish Jewry came under the

rule of Russia, Austria and Prussia. According to one estimate, Russia

THE DISTINCTIVE LIFE OF EAST EUROPEAN JEWRY1 0

inherited some 800,000 Polish Jews, Austria took over Galicia with

some 260,000 while Prussia absorbed 160,000. (David Biale, “A

J o u rney Between two Worlds, p. 801). Over time history took these

Jews in diff e rent directions. During the course of the 19th century

most of the Jews under Prussian rule migrated westward into Berlin

and other major German cities. By the middle of the 19th century they

had all abandoned Yiddish for German and eagerly seized the eco-

nomic opportunities of German industrialization to start a re m a r k a b l e

climb into the middle class. Under Hapsburg rule the process of

acculturation was slower. In Galicia — the most important concentra-

tion of Yiddish speaking Jews in the Hapsburg empire — accultura-

tion and cultural change coexisted with large, Yiddish speaking

Orthodox communities . By the latter part of the 19th century political

liberalization and educational opportunities had set in motion a far

ranging transformation of Galician Jewry, even though their overall

economic situation remained grim. The majority of Polish Jews who

wound up under Russian rule faced a legal system that treated them

as second class citizens. Until the very end of the Tsarist empire in

1917, most Russian Jews faced tough residence restrictions that

s e v e rely hampered their economic opportunities.

During the third period, which began after World War I, East Euro p e a n

Jews lived in many diff e rent centers including the United States, a

re b o rn Poland, the Soviet Union and the Baltic countries. Thanks to

heavy Jewish emigration from Eastern Europe, American Jewry had

become, by 1918, the largest Jewish community in the world, with 4

million Jews. But despite important diff e rences of geography and ide-

o l o g y, the East European Jews still constituted, in many important

respects, a single family, and the major pillar of the Jewish people.

One Jewish scholar, Abraham Menes, declared that it was in Poland

that the Jews became a people-rather than a collection of far flung

communities who lived in diff e rent countries, spoke diff e rent lan-

guages and who just happened to practice the same religion. This is

an exaggeration. Their unique religion had made the Jews a people

long before they settled in Poland. Nevertheless Menes did have a

point, even if one does not agree with his Ashkenazi-centric view of

Jewish history. It was in Poland that the Jews experienced an

u n p recedented population boom. In 1650 the one and a half million

I N T R O D U C T I O N 1 1

Jews in the world were about equally divided between Sephardim and

Ashkenazim. By the eve of the Holocaust, however, world Jewry was

m o re than 90% Ashkenazi. While the Sephardi population grew very

s l o w l y, the Jewish population in Poland-virtually all Ashkenazim-

began to skyrocket. In 1500 there were 30,000 Jews in Poland. By

1575 there were 150,000 and by 1795, more than a million. By 1900

7 million Jews lived in Eastern Euro p e - l a rgely in the territories of the

former Polish Commonwealth. With a natural rate of increase of

100,000 a year, even the emigration of more than three million Jews

f rom Eastern Europe to other countries between 1880 and 1939 did

not reduce the Jewish population there. Eastern Europe became not

only the cultural dynamo but also the demographic reservoir of the

e n t i re Jewish people. To d a y, most Jews in the US, Canada and Latin

America are descendents of emigrants from Eastern Euro p e .

Scholars still are not exactly sure about the reasons for this startling

i n c rease in the Ashkenazi population. Many point to a lower rate of

infant mortality among Jews or to the Jewish custom of early mar-

riage. But most agree that a major factor was the opportunity that the

political system of the old Polish Republic off e red the Jews to settle

and to pro s p e r.

It was in Poland that the Jews developed a unique folk culture based

on the Yiddish language. Poland saw the rise of a new kind of Jewish

settlement, the shtetl, that created new patterns of community and

s e n s i b i l i t y. Nowhere else in the Diaspora was Jewish society marked

by such occupational diversity, by such intellectual and ideological fer-

ment and by such a sense of national distinctiveness. In the words of

the great Polish-Jewish historian Meyer Balaban,

Jews had their own objectives and aspirations, their institutions, courts,synagogues, schools, councils, their own taxation and means of implemen-tation, their own Weltanschauung, their streets and towns, their ritualsand ceremonies, their special rights recognized by the Polish government,their attire, their customs and behavior patterns, their guilds and associa-tions, and their language used at home and in community life. 1

When the Jews came to Poland, they brought with them the

Ashkenazi Jewish culture that had developed in Germany and France

and in Northern Italy. But sheer numbers, new economic opportuni-

ties, and unprecedented social and occupational diversity all com-


bined to make Polish Jewry diff e rent from the German or Fre n c h

Jews. Never in Jewish history did more Jews speak a Jewish lan-

g u a g e - Yiddish. Never in the history of the Jewish Diaspora did more

Jews live in settlements that had a Jewish majority-and for a longer

period of time.

Indeed it is impossible to understand the Jewish people today without

looking at the legacy of Polish Jewry. It was the driving religious ener-

gy of East European Jewry that produced the Hasidic movement and

the great yeshivas that have nourished orthodoxy to this day. But

Jewish religious tradition could not prevent the rise of the H a s k a l a, the

Jewish enlightenment. It was the Haskala that paved the way for a

M o d e rn Hebrew and Yiddish secular culture and that created new

options for Jews who sought alternatives to the strictures of Jewish

tradition and a new balance between their individual identities and

their collective Jewish heritage. The epic confrontation between re l i-

gion and secularism that divided East European Jewry galvanized the

e n t i re nation. This intellectual ferment produced new religious elites

and dedicated revolutionaries, great rabbis and young people who

carried the red flag in May Day demonstrations. It was East Euro p e a n

Jewry that furnished the shock troops of modern Zionism, the idealis-

tic pioneers that settled the Land of Israel. The State of Israel of today

is inconceivable without the Zionist dream that was nurtured in

E a s t e rn Europe. But that same Jewish culture also produced anti-

Zionists such as the left-wing Bund that saw salvation in a democrat-

ic, socialist Europe. Meanwhile hundreds of thousands of Jews re a d

new books, went to new schools and tried in diff e rent and diverse

ways to bring together Jewish and non-Jewish cultures.

The culture of east European Jewry, there f o re, was not monolithic. But

it was creative and intense, and absolutely suffused with a deep

sense of Jewish peoplehood .

Why did Poland develop such a large Jewish community? Why did

Polish Jewry quickly assume the religious and cultural leadership of

the Jewish people? What was special and distinctive about Polish

Jewry? These are some of the questions that this introductory essay

will try to answer.


The second essay will also examine some important issues of

i n t e rethnic relations and mutual tolerance. Between the 16th century,

when Jewish life in Poland began to flourish, and the Holocaust, which

wiped out East European Jewry, relations between Jews and non-

Jews saw periods of stability and times of acute crisis. The Holocaust

itself was planned and executed by the Nazis, but sadly they had the

support of some elements of the local populations. Yet the story of

Polish Jewry began because Jews felt welcome in the vast open

spaces of Eastern Europe. There, over the course of hundreds of

years they went through good times and bad with their Polish,

Ukrainian, Belorussian and Lithuanian neighbors. Yes, there were

p o g roms and even massacres. But there was also an enormous web

of personal and neighborly contacts that brought together Jews and

gentiles, face-to-face relationships whose memories are now over-

shadowed by the catastrophe of World War II. Historians know well

that the very nature of the sources they use can sometimes skew our

p e rceptions. “Man bites dog” is a headline; “dog bites man” bare l y

rates attention. The extraordinary event —- such as a pogrom —- will

attract the attention of journals and newspapers. As the Polish schol-

ar Professor Jerzy Tomaszewski has pointed out, the long stretches of

quiet routine, where Jews and their neighbors live peacefully together,

do not get the same play.

T h e re have been other cases in recent history where seemingly nor-

mal neighborly relations have suddenly given way to interethnic vio-

lence. Examples that come readily to mind include the Chinese in

Indonesia, the Indians in Uganda or the wave of murder in the former

Yugoslavia. Can the story of the East European Jews teach us some-

thing about why this happens? Is there any correlation between eth-

nic hatred and what is broadly called “modernization,” the growth of

l i t e r a c y, urbanization, and national awareness?

For centuries Jewish national consciousness had been inextricably

linked to the Jewish religion. As the hold of religion began to weak-

en in the second half of the nineteenth century, many Jewish intellec-

tuals began to redefine Jewishness in secular terms. The rise of a sec-

ular Jewish nationalism paralleled the rise of nationalism elsewhere in

E a s t e rn Europe, and confronted Jews with new challenges just as

they were beginning to rethink their national identity. How would a


Jewish nation — without a distinct territorial base — find its place

among Ukrainian, Polish and Lithuanian neighbors who were also

developing a modern national identity? Would these new nation-

alisms accept the presence of a Jewish nation in their midst? By the

t u rn of the twentieth century, there f o re, the Jews of Eastern Euro p e

faced a serious dilemma. Thanks to the specific political and social

conditions of the old Polish Republic, they had developed a distinct

folk culture with a large degree of national consciousness. But the

very processes of modernization that were beginning to transform

east European Jewry were also transforming their neighbors, thus

u n d e rcutting the foundations of the Jews political and economic status.

As communications improved and literacy increased in the late 19th

c e n t u r y, as the various peoples of the area developed national aspira-

tions, anger against the Jews began to increase. A growing native

middle class saw the Jews as unwelcome competitors. Peasants

began to build cooperatives that cut out the Jewish middleman and

that undermined the shtetl, the Jewish market town. Nationalists saw

Jews as a foreign element who sided with the enemies of the host

nation. (For example, both Ukrainian and Polish nationalists accused

Jews of siding with the Russians. But that did not keep Russian

nationalists from accusing Jews of being enemies of Russia). Political

transformations, including a popular press and democratic elections,

often led to worsening relations between Jews and non-Jews. This

raises a disturbing but important question. We rightly esteem democ-

racy and national self-determination. But how do we deal with the evi-

dence that at least in its beginning stages, democracy might lead to

less rather than to more interethnic tolerance?

As we ponder the implications of anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe for

a wider understanding of interethnic relations, it is worthwhile to

remember the changing legal status of the Jewish minority in the

region. Until 1795, when Poland finally disappeared from the map, the

Jews were a separate legal caste, a corporation with its own gover-

nance structure, laws and taxes. From 1795 until 1917 the Jews under

Russian rule-who constituted the majority of the East European Jews,

lost their formal legal status as a distinct caste. Nevertheless they still

s u ff e red from serious legal discrimination based on religion. However

it was easy for a Jew to escape these burdens. All he or she had to do


was convert. After 1917-1918, the legal position of the Eastern

E u ropean Jews changed for the better, on paper. In Poland and the

Baltic States, they were equal citizens of newly established re p u b l i c s ,

their rights firmly anchored in constitutions and in League of Nations,

t reaties on the treatment of national minorities. The Soviet Union also

abolished the legal discrimination of the Tsarist regime. In fact, how-

e v e r, this new era of legal equality left many Jews in a worse position

than before. In the new nation states, Jews were now a re s e n t e d

m i n o r i t y, to be pushed and hounded out of the national economy. In

the USSR Jews enjoyed enormous educational opportunities, as long

as they were pre p a red to exchange their religious tradition and the

H e b rew language for a secularized Yiddish culture. It came as no sur-

prise that more and more upwardly mobile Soviet Jews turned their

backs on Yiddish and embraced the undeniable attractions of Russian

c u l t u re.

The tragedy of the Holocaust showed that these years of formal legal

equality in the interwar period did little to solve the “Jewish pro b l e m . ”

One important reason why the Soviet and other Communist re g i m e s

s u p p ressed memorialization and study of the Holocaust was their

reluctance to admit how few non-Jews had helped their Jewish neigh-

bors. Official propaganda trumpeted that Communism had ended

i n t e r-ethnic hatred, but this was a lie.

The story of the Jews in Eastern Europe, there f o re, also raises wider

questions about ethnic minorities and tolerance. Legal guarantees in

and of themselves fall far short of protecting minority rights, especial-

ly when the majority resents the minority and is trying to build a new

nation state based on ethnic hegemony.


I ASHKENAZIM A N DS E P H A R D I M

The rise of Jewish Poland was part of a series of transformations that

changed the course of Jewish history. In the late middle ages,

E u ropean Jews had been divided into two major groups. The

S e p h a rdim lived mainly in Spain and were in close contact with

Moslem North Africa. The Sephardim created a marvelous literature

in Hebre w, Arabic and Ladino. Their culture reflected the re l a t i v e l y

high level of integration that they had achieved with their non-Jewish

neighbors, especially in the Moslem parts of Spain. Sephardi Jewish

c u l t u re produced many exceptional scientists, poets and philoso-

phers. Shmuel Hanagid (993-1056), and Judah Halevi (1070-1141),

w e re both important secular poets and major religious writers.

H a l e v i ’s Kuzari remains one of the key classics of Jewish re l i g i o u s

thought. Moses Ben Maimon (Maimonides, or the Rambam-1135-

1204), one of the greatest Jewish philosophers who ever lived, wro t e

many seminal works that tried to reconcile Jewish religious practice

with philosophical rationalism. Around 1280 Moses de Leon com-

posed the Zohar, a foundation of the Kabala, the system of Jewish

mysticism. These were just a few examples of the extraordinary cre-

ativity of Sephardi Jewry.

The other major group of European Jewry was the Ashkenazim who

w e re centered in the Rhone Valley in France and later, after the expul-

sion of the Jews from France in the 14th century, in the Rhineland

region of western Germany and in Bohemia. While both Sephard i m

and Ashkenazim strictly observed the basic precepts of the Jewish

religion, important diff e rences nonetheless developed between the

two groups. Between the 11th and the 14th centuries Ashkenazi

J e w r y, under the impact of leading rabbis, forged a distinct re l i g i o u s

and cultural tradition. The 10th century Rabbi Gershom earned the

title Me’or Ha’golah (The Light to the Diaspora) for his important

d e c rees that banned polygamy (some scholars dispute this) and the

d i v o rcing of a woman against her will. His rulings helped lay the

g roundwork for a distinct Ashkenazi tradition. Another key figure in

the cultural development of Ashkenazi Jewry was Rashi, Rabbi

Solomon ben Isaac, who lived in Troyes, Worms and Mainz between

1040 and 1105. Rashi’s commentaries on the Bible and on the

Talmud have shaped Jewish education and learning to this day. Some

of Rashi’s grandsons — especially the re v e red Rabbenu Tam —

became leading Tosafists, commentators on the Talmud that re c o rd-

I. ASHKENAZIM & SEPHARDIM 1 9

ed the lively discussions that were taking place in the Talmudic acad-

emies in northern France.

A major milestone in the development of a specific Ashkenazi re l i g i o u s

c u l t u re was appearance of a pietist movement in Germany called the

Hasidei Ashkenaz, (The Righteous of Ashkenaz). The leading work

associated with this movement, the Sefer Hasidim, composed by

Rabbi Judah ha-Hassid around 1200, had a major impact on the for-

mation of Ashkenazi religious culture. Rabbi Judah laid down a strict

code of religious and moral behavior and challenged the individual to

o v e rcome psychological barriers to greater piety. Even after the move-

ment disappeared, its stress on personal piety and on the importance

of inner struggle to achieve a higher level of moral conduct and re l i-

gious awareness, left an important mark on the cultural traditions of

Ashkenazi Jewry.

A brief summary of the major diff e rences between the Ashkenazim

and the Sephardim does not do justice to a complex and important

p roblem. Diff e rences should not obscure more important points that

the two groups had in common. Both Ashkenazim and Sephard i m

saw themselves as belonging to a Jewish people united by a common

religion and by shared historical memory. In reaction to Christian and

Moslem attacks on Judaism, both groups responded with heightened

pride in Jewish tradition and with a staunch defense of Jewish texts.

While the medieval Catholic Church had little tolerance of any com-

peting faith, it treated the Jews with particular scorn and contempt.

Jews were not like any other non-Christians. They were at the “hid-

den center” of Christianity. The church taught that the Jews had first

rejected Christ and then killed him. There f o re, if Jewish survival had

any point, it was only to show that Jewish stubbornness and tre a c h-

ery came at a price. Ghettos and the yellow star would mark the Jews

as a pariah people, homeless wanderers who had killed God.

Moslems were less hostile, since Jews had not played the same spe-

cial role in the formation of their religion. But they too treated Jews as

“dhimmi,” as resident foreigners of inferior status.

The Jews, both Ashkenazim and Sephardim, responded to these

attacks with a staunch belief in the superiority of the Jewish re l i g i o n


and with an obstinate determination to defy persecution and con-

tempt. It was not easy, after all, to be a Jew. In those days, harried

Jews had an easy way out: conversion to Christianity or Islam. But

relatively few Jews took that route. Many pre f e r red death to conver-

sion and this martyrdom—kiddush hashem—left a deep imprint on

the Ashkenazi Jewish culture of the middle Ages. Of course, as the

g reat Jewish historian Salo Baron reminds us, Jewish history during

this period was more than just death and tears. For long periods of

time, the Jews’ relations with their non-Jewish neighbors were re l a-

tively “normal.” But the fear of catastrophic rupture always lurked in

the background.

In this pre modern period an all embracing religious culture bound the

e n t i re Jewish people. All Jews, Ashkenazim and Sephardim, prayed

in Hebre w, observed the Jewish dietary laws, kept the Sabbath, fol-

lowed the same Jewish calendar, studied the same Talmud and cele-

brated the same holidays. Jews were sure that they were an “am seg-

ulah,” a people chosen by God. They never forgot their special place

in history and their special tie to Eretz Yisrael, the Land of Israel.

In the 16th century, this sense of a common national identity re c e i v e d

added re i n f o rcement from the Shulkhan Arukh (The Set Ta b l e ) ,

Joseph Caro ’s convenient compilation of Jewish law that put all the

d o ’s and don’ts of the Jewish religion into one easily accessible text.

It was first published in Venice in 1565 and in 1570 an edition

a p p e a red in Krakow, Poland with additions by the great rabbinic

leader of Polish Jewry, Moses Isserles (the Rema). The Rema called

his gloss on Caro the Mapa, or the tablecloth and modified the

Shulkhan Arukh to reflect the diff e rent customs and needs of the

Ashkenazi Jews. The beginning of the age of printing facilitated the

wide circulation of these convenient codes among both Sephardi and

Ashkenazi Jews and strengthened the common identity of the Jewish

people. The 16th century also saw the wide dissemination of a print-

ed edition of the Talmud, whose lay-out and pagination would have a

major impact on Talmud study. The fact that the spread of printing in

the 16th century coincided with the consolidation and the develop-

ment of Polish Jewry was to be of paramount importance in estab-

lishing Poland as a cultural center of the Jewish nation.


Despite a common Jewish identity, however, important cultural diff e r-

ences did begin to develop between the two groups. Ashkenazim and

S e p h a rdim pronounced Hebrew diff e re n t l y. Over time variations in

l i t u rgy became more pronounced, especially in the religious poems

(Piyyutim) that each group included in the service. Passover customs

also diff e red. Sephardim ate legumes and rice on Passover,

Ashkenazim did not.

Another key diff e rence was in language. In Spain the Sephard i m

mostly spoke Judaeo-Arabic and Judaeo-Spanish, a language that

would later be called Ladino. In Northern France the Ashkenazi Jews

spoke Judaeo-French, or what Rashi, in his commentaries called

Loez. When the center of the Ashkenazi Jews moved east into the

Rhineland region of Germany, Loez merged with German dialects to

become Old Yiddish. Neither Ladino nor Yiddish can be seen simply

as Jewish variations of Spanish or German. They were distinct lan-

guages whose syntactical diff e rences reflected the vast gap between

Jewish and non-Jewish culture. Each language also had major

H e b rew elements, especially on matters that dealt with religion and

m o r a l i t y.

Also important were unmistakable diff e rences in sensibility and cus-

tom. While the Sephardi Jews suff e red from persecutions in Spain, by

and large they enjoyed a much better and much more open re l a t i o n-

ship with their non-Jewish neighbors, especially in Moslem Spain.

One can generalize that Sephardi Jewish culture was much more

open to non-Jewish influences and somewhat more tolerant on mat-

ters of religious observance. Its educational system readily included

secular subjects such as mathematics and science.

By contrast Ashkenazi Jewish culture — as evidenced by the exam-

ple of the Hasidei Ashkenaz — tended to be more stringent in matters

of religious observance, more focused on personal piety, more con-

c e rned with the problems that confronted the individual who sought a

higher level of religious and ethical purity. The developing Ashkenazi

Jewish culture was also more inward-looking; it was less interested in

secular knowledge or in intellectual interaction with the non-Jewish

world. Perhaps this reflected the severe persecutions that Ashkenazi

Jews had suff e red during the mob violence of the first crusades and


during the hysteria of the Black Death, when they were accused of

poisoning wells and spreading the plague. These are only generaliza-

tions of course, and there were Jews — such as the Ashkenazi com-

munity of Italy — that did not quite fit this model. Ashkenazi Jews

went to universities, especially to medical faculties and many re c e i v e d

a secular education. But by and large these generalizations hold true.

P rofessor Max We i n reich, the leading historian of the Yiddish lan-

guage, has argued that one of the most distinct principles of

Ashkenazi Jewish culture was “Vertical Legitimization,” which re f l e c t-

ed this focus on Jewish sources and Jewish values. The great schol-

ars of the past came alive to shape the Jewish present. In the yeshiv-

as, the talmudic academies of Ashkenazi Jewry, in the course of a sin-

gle lesson, students would move from the great rabbis of the 11th

century (Rashi) to the 12th (Rabenu Tam) to the 16th century (The

Maharal of Prague, the Rema of Krakow) to the 18th (The Vilna Gaon,

Reb Eliyahu, the Sage of Vilna). Diff e rences in time were submerg e d

by the consciousness of a common tradition. To be sure, the sages of

the past did not serve as convenient foils to stop any talk of change.

R a t h e r, Ashkenazi rabbis brought these previous texts into an ongo-

ing “conversation” that helped adapt Jewish religious law to chang-

ing times.

The culture of Ashkenazi Jewry was suffused with the ideal of “ler-

nen,” the constant study of Jewish texts. “Lernen” was never- e n d i n g .

It was also an end in itself (lishma in Hebrew) not a means to an end.

In the words of Abraham Joshua Heschel2:

A blazing passion permeated all intellectual activities. It is an untold, per-haps incommunicable story of how heart and mind could merge into one.Immersed in complicated legal discussions, they could at the same time feelthe anguish of the Divine Presence that abides in exile. In endeavoring tounravel some perplexity raised by a seventeenth commentary on a com-mentary on the Talmud, they were able in the same breath to throb withsympathy for Israel and for all afflicted people. Study was a technique forsublimating feeling into thought , for transposing dreams into syllogisms,for expressing grief in difficult theoretical formulations, and joy by findinga solution to a difficult passage in Maimonides. Tension of the soul foundan outlet in contriving clever, almost insolvable riddles. In inventing newlogical devices to explain the word of God, they thrilled with yearning after


the Holy. To contrive an answer to gnawing doubts was the highest joy.Indeed there was a whole world of subdued gaiety and sober frolic in theplayful subtleties of their pilpul (dialectic).

Their conscious aim, of course, was not to indulge in self-expre s s i o n - t h e yw e re far from being intent upon exploiting the Torah-but humbly to par-take of spiritual beauty. Carried away by the mellow, melting chant ofTa l m u d - reading, one’s mind soared high in the pure realm of thought ,away from this world of facts and worries, away from the boundaries ofthe here and now, to a region where the Divine Presence listens to whatJews create in the study of His Wo rd .

The literary critic Irving Howe aptly observed that Heschel’s descrip-

tion of study in East European Jewish culture was “somewhat ideal-

ized yet not irre l e v a n t . ”3

By the 19th century many writers, intellectuals and political leaders

had begun to attack the study of religious texts as a waste of time.

Abraham Joshua Heschel himself, the scion of a great hasidic family,

experienced first hand this gathering revolt against the hegemony of

the religious culture. But he wrote these words in January 1945, when

Jews all over the world were beginning to learn the true dimensions of

the Holocaust. His grief gave Heschel the tragic hindsight that could

separate the essential from the ephemeral in this Jewish world that

the Nazis had just destroyed. Many Jews had indeed abandoned the

study of the Talmud for the study of Karl Marx. But was it so far-

fetched to see the link between the two? When former yeshiva stu-

dents fought in the Red Army for world revolution, had they totally for-

gotten those visions of the messiah that had helped them endure hun-

gry days and sleepless nights on cold synagogue benches?

The master of lernen, the ideal Jew in Ashkenazi culture, was the

t a l m e d - k h o k h e m, the true scholar. But no talmed-khokhem felt that he

was entirely self-sufficient when it came to knowledge of Jewish texts

or of Jewish law. Each chose yet other scholars as role models and as

advisors. Problems of everyday life, religious dilemmas and conun-

drums, were resolved not so much by rote application of pre c e d e n t

but rather by a creative process of constant consultation which syn-

thesized previous principles with new interpretations. This resulted in

a dynamic interplay of past and present and left the door open for


constructive change within the framework of an overarching Jewish

tradition. It was 16th and 17th century Poland, however, with its

Jewish courts and with its Jewish autonomous institutions, that pro-

vided the most powerful stimulus to the synthesis of creative rabbinic

thought and the problems of everyday life.

During the 15th and 16th centuries expulsions and migrations shift-

ed the center of gravity of Jewish life. The expulsion from Spain in

1492 forced many Spanish Jews (Sephardim) to move into the lands

of the Ottoman Empire where they settled in Saloniki, Istanbul,

Sofia, Sarajevo and other cities. (Right up until World War II Ladino-

speaking Jews made up close to half of Saloniki’s population).

Meanwhile Ashkenazi Jews left the German speaking lands and

Bohemia for the vast Polish kingdom, where royal charters pro m i s e d

tolerance and economic opportunity. There they probably found

s m a l l e r, Slavic-speaking Jewish communities that had already wan-

d e red in from the East. For a long time there were some Jewish his-

torians — such as Isaac Schiper — who argued that the millions of

East European Jews were really descended from the Khazars, a

people along the Caspian Sea who had converted to Judaism in the

eighth century. But most experts agree it was Ashkenazi Jewish

immigrants from the West who predominated. After all, didn’t

Yiddish become the language of Polish Jewry?


II THE YIDDISHL A N G U A G E

This eastward movement of Sephardi and Ashkenazi Jews in the 16th

century would have important cultural implications for the Jewish peo-

ple. In Spain and in the German lands the Jews had spoken lan-

guages — Jewish-German and Jewish-Spanish — that their Christian

neighbors could understand, more or less. But in the new lands of the

Ottoman Empire and Poland, language heightened the Jewish sense

of cultural distinctiveness. The Judeo-Spanish of the 16th century

t u rned into Ladino, and would flourish in communities where the non

Jews spoke Greek, Serbo-Croat, Bulgarian Turkish and Arabic.

Meanwhile in the vast open spaces of Slavic Europe, the Judaeo-

German dialects the Jews brought with them would lose their ongo-

ing contact with the German language. In the new Slavic enviro n-

ments their language would turn into Eastern Yiddish, mame loshn,

(the “mother tongue”). Yiddish would become the bedrock of a dis-

tinct folk culture and national identity. The distance between Yi d d i s h

and German quickly increased. Yiddish developed diff e rent tenses, a

d i ff e rent word ord e r, diff e rent syntax. It absorbed many new Slavic

w o rds, especially to describe trees, plants and animals. Hebrew had

always been an essential element, while the culture of Talmud study

added an important layer of Aramaic. All the while, many important

w o rds survived from Loez, the Old Romance spoken by the Ashkenazi

Jews in the Rhone valley of France.

Let us look at the following sentence. “Shabes nokhn cholnt iz geku-

men der zeyde farhern dem bar-mitsve ingl,” Saturday afternoon, after

we ate the traditional stew, grandfather came to examine the bar- m i t z-

vah boy (in the texts that he had studied that week). Shabes,

S a t u rd a y, stems from Hebre w. Even if Yiddish was based primarily on

a German word bank, Hebre w, not German, furnished most of the

w o rds that were connected with the crucial universe of religion and

custom. Cholnt, the Saturday stew, derived from Old French, Loez.

Zeyde, grandfather, was of Slavic origin. Bar-Mitsve- yingl was a com-

bination of Hebre w, Aramaic and German. Iz gekumen (came) and

f a r h e rn (examine) are of German origin.

Quite often Yiddish words of German origin acquired totally new

meanings. One example was the common Yiddish expression esn teg

(eating days). The words are of German origin but make no sense in

II. THE YIDDISH LANGUAGE 2 9

the German language, where they would connote dropping days into

o n e ’s mouth and eating them. In Yiddish, however, they re f e r red to the

important system which gave yeshiva students “financial aid.” Each

day of the week, another Jewish family would volunteer to feed stu-

dents who came from out of town.

Whether a Jew spoke Yiddish or Ladino, a crucial principle was

lehavdil, which means “to distinguish.” (David Roskies, The shtetl

book; We i n reich, Derekh Ha-shas.) One said a yom tov, un lehavdil, a

khoge (a Jewish holiday, and to divide, a Christian holiday). Yom To v

came from Hebre w, Khoge, derived from Aramaic. A ro v, un lehavdil,

a galekh (a rabbi, and, to divide, a priest).

The language served as a powerful reminder of the psychological

divide between the Jewish and the non-Jewish world, between

“them” and “us.” Sometimes the language and its rhymes and

p roverbs served as a defense mechanism, where a vulnerable people

could counter the danger of the outside world with verbal aggre s s i o n .

One childre n ’s song, quoted by David Roskies, illustrates this mixture

of vulnerability and defiance

Kishkes kokhn/in der vokhn!/ Mir a broyt, dir a toyt!/ Mir a vogn/dikhbagrobn!/ Mir a shlitn/dikh bashitn (Kishka cooks in our pots. For me ab re a d - You drop dead! For me a wagon, For you a hearse!/Pant andrave/Dig your grave!)4

To be sure, there were many points of contacts between Jews and

gentiles. Jews and gentiles knew each other, played together and

often formed friendships. But all the while Jews re g a rded themselves

as belonging to a diff e rent spiritual world, and their language certain-

ly re i n f o rced this feeling.

Diminutives, prefixes and suffixes interacted with the diverse linguistic

re s o u rces of Yiddish to create incredible opportunities for emotional

e x p ression, for iro n y, for humor, and for cursing and anger. A common

curse was “a nomen nokh dir,” may someone name a child after you.

Since Jews did not name children after living persons, the intent was

c l e a r. Curses could also be more complex. “May you inherit a million

zlotys, and spend every penny on doctors” resembled the cheery

g reeting “You look like a million dollars-in small change!”


Endearments were often expressed through suffixes. Zun, the word

for son, became zunele if one wanted to express special endearment.

Sons were zin. But if, instead of zin, one used the plurals ‘bonim’ or

‘zindlekh,’ then there was a certain pejorative undertone. Chaye was

a common girl’s name. Chayele expressed love and tendern e s s ;

Chayinke even more so. But add a Slavic suffix and our beloved

Chayele becomes Chayuta, a particular daughter who gives her par-

ents sleepless nights and who deprives them of nakhes. What Jewish

p a rents wanted from their children was nakhes and takhles, or the

happiness gained from knowing they were settled, had children and

had a real source of income. Nakhes (happiness) and takhles (the bot-

tom line) were Hebrew words that acquired new meanings in the

Yiddish folk culture of Eastern Europe.

The fact that many words had parallel Hebrew and Germanic forms

c reated further opportunities for linguistic flexibility. The word for book

was ‘bukh,’ the same as German. But a bukh was a secular book,

while the Hebrew ‘sefer’ was always used for a holy or religious book.

But Hebrew did not always impart an aura of holiness or solemnity. A

horse was a ‘ferd,’ of Germanic origin. To use ‘sus,’ the Hebrew word ,

implied either that one was a horse thief or that the horse had some

shortcoming which the seller hid from the buyer. A woman was a

‘ f ro y.’ The Hebrew ‘nekeve’ was also used in Yiddish but it had lewd

undertones. The double role of Hebrew as the guardian of the sacre d

and as an expression of the vulgar and the profane, also reflected the

fact that in the evolution of Yiddish, many Jews used Hebrew terms

because gentiles — policemen for instance — would have a hard e r

time understanding them.

Yiddish matured into a rich register of the evolving culture of

Ashkenazi Jewry in Eastern Europe, a language that reflected the indi-

visible bonds of culture and religion in the shaping of a national iden-

t i t y. Over time, folk songs and proverbs gave the East European Jews

an important sense that they were not just a religion but also a distinct

people. In We s t e rn and Central Europe, the aftermath of the

Enlightenment and the French revolution made many Jews want to

become Germans or Frenchmen of the Mosaic persuasion. In Eastern

E u rope relatively few Jews would ever call themselves “Poles of the

Mosaic persuasion.” Even fewer — hardly any, in fact — ever spoke


about being “Russians of the Mosaic persuasion.” They were Jews,

p u re and simple. One reason of course was numbers. Another was

politics. There were fewer opportunities for assimilation. But one

should never forget the powerful resonance of the Yiddish folk culture.

Each day in countless ways the Yiddish language re i n f o rced the

seamless links between folk culture and the Jewish religion. In

Yiddish one could say that the time between two events was short. Or

one could say that it was like the interval between the Fast of Esther

and Purim, which was short indeed. One could say that a husband

was tall and a wife was tiny. Or one could say that the pair re s e m b l e d

a lulav (long stalks that one carried on the Jewish holiday of Sukkot)

and an Esrog (a citrus that Jews held together with the Lulav). Jews

ate carrots on the New Year because the Yiddish word for carro t s ,

m e rn, was the same as the word to multiply and on the New Year one

also wished for more children and more pro s p e r i t y. One could say

that a person had an ulterior motive. Or one could say that a person

“talks Hagada and means dumplings”: i.e., someone pretends to care

about the religious aspects of the Passover meal but actually craves

the food. The rhythm of Yiddish speech, the constant back and forth,

the endless questioning, resembled the give-and-take of Ta l m u d

study in the yeshiva (Talmudic academy) or in the synagogue. One

common Yiddish story had a gentile ask a Jew on a train why Jews

also answered a question with another question. “Why not?,” the Jew

replied.

Virtually all Jews in Eastern Europe spoke Yiddish, but until the late

19th century it was a language that was both loved and despised. It

was loved as mame loshn, the mother tongue, but scholars and seri-

ous writers re g a rded it as an inferior language. They pre f e r red to write

their letters and books in Hebrew or even in Polish.

On the other hand a large popular literature in Yiddish had long won

an avid following among ordinary Jews, and especially among Jewish

women. The 16th century Bove Bukh, adapted from a medieval

romance by Elia Levita, enjoyed enormous popularity. The title gave

rise to a popular Yiddish expression for a tall tale: a “bobe mayse.”

Another popular Yiddish work was the Maase bukh, a collection of

tales from Jewish and non-Jewish folklore and from the Ta l m u d .


Generations of Jewish women lovingly studied the Ts e n e u rene, an

adapted translation of the Five Books of Moses that included edifying

midrashic commentary. The first edition appeared in 1618. The just-

ly famous memoirs of Gluckel of Hameln, written in Yiddish in the 18th

c e n t u r y, are still re q u i red reading not only for Jewish historians but also

for anyone with a serious interest in women’s history. In the 19th cen-

tury writer like Isaak Meir Dik write many “best sellers” in Yiddish. But

the Jewish elites had little interest in a literature that they re g a rded as

domain of women and uneducated tailors.

It was only in the late 19th century that the role of Yiddish began to

change-with important implications for East European Jewish culture .

New writers appeared like Mendele Mokher Sforim,5 S h o l o m

A l e i k h e m ,6 and Yitshak Leibush Peretz, who created a literature that

demanded the attention and respect of the elites. This was no easy

task, especially since even Mendele and Peretz began their literary

c a reer in Yiddish by apologizing for the fact that they were writing in

the despised “jargon” rather than in Hebrew or Russian.

But by the turn of the century, the status of Yiddish rapidly began to

i m p rove. By 1908 a language conference in Czernowitz actually pro-

claimed Yiddish as a national language of the Jewish people. There

w e re many reasons for the growing stature of Yiddish. The first was

the stunning growth of a serious Yiddish literature. Alongside Sholom

Aleikhem and Peretz appeared new writers and poets that developed

the artistic possibilities of symbolism and expressionism and that

served as a major link between East European Jewry and non-Jewish

E u ropean culture.

A second reason was the rise of a strong Jewish labor movement and

especially the major Jewish socialist party, the Bund, (founded in Vi l n a

in 1897). The Bund came to support Yiddish not only because it was

the language of the masses but also because it undercut the Zionist

claim for the primacy of Hebre w. As will be seen the Jewish Left in

both Europe and the United States became the major bulwark of the

i n f r a s t r u c t u re of Yiddish culture-schools, theaters and book publish-

ing. More than one Yiddish writer expressed discomfort with this

reliance on political movements that pre f e r red their art and literature to

be “engaged” and “pro g ressive.” But without the Left, Yiddish cul-

t u re would have had a much harder time establishing itself.


T h i rd, a large Yiddish daily press in urban centers such as Wa r s a w

gave new opportunities to Yiddish writers and journalists. New daily

newspapers like Haint and the Moment in Warsaw transformed the

cultural landscape with a heady mix of news stories, serialized thrillers,

and serious political and cultural essays.

A fourth reason was the steady growth of the Yiddish theater in

E u rope and in the United States. The plays of Abraham Goldfaden in

the late 19th century were so popular that several of their musical

numbers became instant “folksongs.” Actors and playwrights like

Jacob Gordin, Boris To m a s h e f s k y, Molly Picon and Jacob Adler

helped create a powerful rapport between the Jewish masses and a

theater that rapidly grew in stature and in popularity. New theaters

that arose during and after the First World Wa r, such as the Vilna Tr u p e

and Wa r s a w ’s VIKT staged serious European plays in Yiddish transla-

tion and gave Jews new cultural options.

A fifth factor in the growing importance of Yiddish was the heavy

Jewish emigration to the United States. On the Lower East Side of

New York, and in the Yiddish theaters of Second Avenue a major new

Yiddish cultural center arose. Economic conditions were relatively bet-

ter and the Yiddish press and theater did not have to fear political

re p ression. They created a culture that found an audience not just

among the immigrants but also back home in Eastern Europe. The

biggest problem that Yiddish culture faced in the United States was its

inability to gain the loyalty of the second generation of American-born

Jews. But especially during the interwar period, American based

Yiddish actors and writers regularly toured Eastern Europe and

s t rengthened Yiddish culture there.

The Jews in Eastern Europe developed a polylingualism that would

persist until the very end. Yiddish was the language of everyday life

while Hebrew was the language of prayer and Hebrew-Aramaic the

language of Talmud study. In addition Jews used Ukrainian,

Belarussian or Polish to talk to the peasants. Many songs, especially

Hasidic songs, combined Yiddish, Hebrew and Ukrainian at the same

time. Between the two world wars in Poland, more and more Jews

would speak Polish as a first language. But they continued to re g a rd

themselves as Jews and the Polish language Jewish press took a live-

ly interest in Yiddish and Hebrew theater and literature.


III THE F O R M ATION OF POLISH J E W R Y

1/ LEGENDS, LANDSCAPES & MEMORIESA c c o rding to one legend, when the first Jews wandered into

Poland they saw pages of the Talmud emblazoned on the tre e

trunks-a sign that God had chosen this country for them. Ye t

another popular story found its way into Sholom Asch’s widely

read novel, Kiddush Hashem: 7

“The place is absolutely intended for Jews. When the gentiles had gre a t l yo p p ressed the exiled Jews and the Divine Presence saw that there was nolimit and no end to the oppression and that the handful of Jews might,God forbid go under, the Presence came before the Lord of the Universe tolay the grievance before Him and said to Him, as follows: “How long isthis going to last? When you sent the dove out of the ark at the time ofthe flood, You gave it an olive branch so that it might have a support forits feet on the water, and yet it was unable to bear the water of the floodand returned to the ark; whereas my children You have sent out of the arkinto a flood, and have provided nothing for a support where they may re s ttheir feet in their exile.” Thereupon God took a piece of Eretz Yisroel (TheLand of Israel) which he had hidden away in the heavens at the time whenthe Temple was destroyed and set it down upon the earth and said: “Be myresting place for My children in their exile. That is why it is called Poland(Polin) from the Hebrew poh lin which means “Here shalt thou lodge” inthe exile. That is why Satan has no power over us here, and the Torah iss p read over the whole country. There are synagogues and schools andyeshivas, God be thanked.

“And what will happen in the great future when the Messiah will come?What are we going to do with the synagogues and with the settlementswhich we have built up in Poland?’ asked Mendel.....

How can you ask? In the great future, when the Messiah will come, Godwill certainly transport Poland with all its settlements, synagogues andYeshivas to the Land of Israel. How else could it be?”

Polish Jews also re m e m b e red the legend about Casimir the Great, the

14th century king, who fell in love with Esterke, the daughter of a poor

Jewish tailor.8 They would meet in the castle overlooking the beautiful

town of Kazimierz Dolny and the sweeping vistas of the Vistula river.

Esterke bore the king children and got him to promise the Jews that

Poland would be their refuge. In her devotion to her nation, she

resembled her namesake in the Book of Esther, who took advantage

III. THE FORMATION OF POLISH JEWRY 3 7

of her closeness to the Persian king to save her people from the das-

t a rdly schemes of Haman, the anti-Semite who wanted to destroy the

Jews. In the Polish legend, it was thanks to Esterke that Casimir the

G reat promised the Jews that Poland would be a secure home. Over

time the Esterke legend took on a life of its own. Jews liked it because

it reminded them of their long ties to the Polish land. Polish anti-

Semites saw in it an ominous harbinger of the Polish-Jewish re l a t i o n-

ship: a wily cunning Jewess, Esterke, ensnared a trusting good-heart-

ed Pole (Casimir the Great) and tricked him into offering up Poland for

settlement and exploitation.

T h e re were many more legends. Taken together, they were important

pillars of a Jewish collective memory that said: “ Poland is special. We

a re at home here and we have been here for a very long time. We have

roots here. We’ve been in exile for many centuries, but Poland is not

really exile (galut); somehow it is diff e rent.” As early as the 16th cen-

t u r y, the Rema (Rabbi Moses Isserles), one of the great leaders of

Polish Jewry, wrote to a student that it was better for a Jew to be poor

in Poland than to be rich and live somewhere else.

Over the course of hundreds of years the Jews of Poland developed

a special sense of belonging. Until the 19th century, few Jews spoke

Polish but they still saw themselves as part and parcel of the Polish

Commonwealth and supported it against external threats. Many

works of modern Yiddish literature, such as Shie Perle’s O r d i n a ry

Jews (Yidn fun a gants yor), and Joseph Opatoshu’s In Polish Wo o d s

(In Poylishe Ve l d e r ), sang the praises of the Polish landscape, of its

rivers, fields and forests. The Yiddish poet Aryeh Shemri left Poland

to settle in Israel before World War II. But in a poem about Poland, he

admitted that he missed the land of his youth:

“Bay Vaysl Bug un Nare v, a shakharis in di roses, a minkhe un a mayre vin klingen fun di koses (On the banks of the Vistula, the Bug and theN a re v, you can feel the Jewish morning prayer when you look at the dew,and you can hear the afternoon prayers, as the scythes cut the grain.)”

After World War II the Yiddish writer Sh.L. Shneiderman wrote memoirs

of his native town, Kazimierz Dolny (in Yiddish the Jews called it Kuzmir):

this was the same town where Esterke would meet the king. His book

had a simple but evocative title: “When the Vistula Spoke Yi d d i s h ”


2 / LAND AND PEOPLE

The landscapes of Poland were dominated by the rivers-the main

transportation arteries. In the south, as one neared the Carpathians,

the countryside became hilly, and then mountainous. The mountain

regions included many wild , remote and beautiful regions such as

Podolia, that would in time became the cradle of the hasidic move-

ment. But in the center and in the north, the land was flat, the rivers

flowed slowly and were quite navigable. The most important river of

all was the Wisla, the Vistula that flowed from the Carpathian moun-

tains in the south, past Krakow, past Wa r s a w, and emptied into the

Baltic Sea at Gdansk, Danzig. Other key rivers, such as the Bug and

the San flowed into the Vistula. The Vistula thus became the “Route

66” of the Polish Commonwealth, its economic backbone. Further

north other rivers-the mighty Dvina and the Nieman also flowed into

the Baltic Sea.

T h e re were enormous forests, especially in the northeast, in today’s

Belarus. Today a few remnants of Euro p e ’s last virgin forest, the

Bialowieza, can still be found in northeastern Poland. Euro p e ’s

biggest marshes and swamps took up tens of thousands of square

miles around Pinsk and Chernobyl. In the southeast, today’s western

Ukraine, were huge stretches of arable land; the farther east one went,

the smaller the forests became and the more these lands re s e m b l e d

the American prairies. These were wide open spaces, under- p o p u l a t-

ed and fertile. Under the sponsorship of the Polish nobility, Jews

would pour into this frontier region in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Many diff e rent peoples lived in Poland. Most of the population was

peasants who spoke Polish, Lithuanian, and various Slavic dialects

that would turn into modern Belorussian and Ukrainian. The Polish

and the Lithuanian peasants were Catholic while most of the Ukrainian

and Belarussian peasants who lived east of the Bug River practiced

E a s t e rn Orthodoxy. Virtually all were the serfs of the Polish nobility. In

the time of the Polish Commonwealth, it is doubtful that these peas-

ant populations saw themselves as Poles or Lithuanians or

Ukrainians. This consciousness of nationhood did not really develop

until the late 19th and the 20th century. Religion was another matter.

Orthodox peasants were especially angry at their Polish Catholic over-

l o rds, and at the Jews who served as their agents.


The cities were initially populated largely by Germans invited in by the

Polish kings to develop the economy. They were allowed to rule their

own towns under the Magdeburg Law prevalent in the German speak-

ing parts of Europe. Over time these Germans became Polonized.

They remained an important factor in the cities of western and central

Poland. But the Polish cities failed to gain real political power. Has

they done so, the history of the Jews in Poland might have turned out

quite diff e re n t l y, and they might have suff e red the same expulsions

that they encountered elsewhere in Europe. In central and western

E u rope the urban centers — and especially the urban guilds —were

hotbeds of opposition to the Jews and they would become so in

Poland as well. Not only were the Polish cities politically weak, how-

e v e r. Many did not even have a Polish majority. Over the course of

time, many Polish cities became predominantly Jewish, and this tre n d

was not reversed until the twentieth century.

Real power in Poland lay not in the cities but in the hands of the

szlachta, the nobility. The szlachta itself was quite diverse and ranged

f rom the magnates, who controlled huge estates to the impoverished

holota, landless noblemen who possessed nothing more than a sword

and a coat of arms. But more than any other class it was the szlach-

ta that determined the character of the Polish Commonwealth. The

szlachta monopolized political power and steadily imposed Polish

rule on non-Catholic “Ukrainian” and “Belorussian” peasants. The

szlachta played a major role in the development of a vibrant Polish cul-

t u re that — over time— attracted many non-Polish nobles in the east.

Especially after the Union of Lublin in 1569, which brought together

Poland and the enormous grand Duchy of Lithuania, the Polish

Commonwealth became a vast multi-national state.

3 / THE JEWS FIND A HOME

In the 14th and 15th centuries the situation of Jews in the German

speaking lands of Europe began to worsen. The Crusades and the

calamity of the Black Death caused a sharp increase in popular anti-

Semitism. Anti Jewish riots and expulsions made the large, underd e-

veloped neighbor to the east seem more and more attractive to many


Jews. Small numbers of Jews had already begun to settle in Poland

in the 13th and 14th centuries, and Polish Kings had issued charters

that guaranteed the Jews refuge and safety. One of the most impor-

tant of these charters — and a model for others — was the charter

issued by Casimir the Great, the legendary lover of Esterke.

T h e re were two major reasons why the Jewish presence in Poland

g re w, despite the opposition of city guilds and the Catholic churc h .

The first was that most of the Polish kings in the 16th and 17th cen-

turies saw the Jews as an economic asset and were ready to pro t e c t

them. To be sure they often caved into guild and church demands and

made many important towns off-limits to Jews. But this did not

change their basic conviction that the Jews paid a lot of taxes, helped

the economy and were an asset to the country. Besides, from a polit-

ical point of view, the Jews were safe: as outsiders and as re l i g i o u s

pariahs, there was simply no chance that they would have political

aspirations or ambitions that would prove harmful to the established

authorities.

The second reason was even more decisive: the growing power of the

Polish nobility. All over Europe, nobles played a key role in political

and social life but in no other country would they come to enjoy as

much political power as in Poland. In the early 16th century the Polish

King Zygmunt the First had promised the nobles that he would con-

sult their parliament-the Sejm-on all important matters. When the last

Jagiellonian King, Zygmunt II died in 1572 the nobles met to elect his

successor and from that year on, Polish Kings were elected by the

n o b i l i t y. The Polish Commonwealth had turned into a Republic, a

Republic of the nobles.

The nobles had a hard time agreeing among themselves, and this

made it difficult to push much-needed reforms through the parliament.

Any noble could veto a bill. Far from decrying this creeping paralysis,

h o w e v e r, many nobles welcomed it as a guarantee of Polish democ-

r a c y. One popular slogan was Polska nierzadem stoi: Poland exists

thanks to her internal anarc h y. One historian noted that Poland had

become a paradise for the nobility and a hell for the peasantry-whom

the nobles had turned into serfs to be exploited through forced labor

and oppressive taxation.


In time this noble power would become a liability, especially in the 18th

c e n t u r y. Just as Poland’s neighbors-Austria, Prussia and Russia

began to find more efficient ways to collect taxes, build armies and

e x e rcise ruthless political power. Poland became increasingly para-

lyzed by political deadlock. Poland, to put it mildly, did not occupy an

ideal location. To the east was Moscow whose power, under the lead-

ership of the ruthless Tsars Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Gre a t ,

steadily gre w. From the middle of the 16th century on, Russian pre s-

s u re against Poland’s eastern borders rarely let up.

The border between Russia and Poland also marked the eastern lim-

its of Jewish settlement. The Tsars, who re g a rded the Jews as Christ

killers and economic vampires, barred them from settling in Russia.

In his wars against the Poles the 16th century Tsar Ivan the Te r r i b l e

perpetrated terrible atrocities on the Jews in the towns he capture d .

In Polotsk he drowned most of them in the Dvina River. No, the Jews

did not come to Russia. Russia came to the Jews when she took over

most of Poland in the late 18th century. True to her principles Russia

established the Pale of Settlement in the former Polish territories and

kept most Russian Jews from settling in interior Russia. The Pale

would remain in force until the Russian revolution in 1917.

To the west were the Germans, or more pre c i s e l y, a Prussia that made

up in military efficiency what she lacked in re s o u rces and people.

Prussia also had ruthless leaders who built up her power- e s p e c i a l l y

F rederick the Great in the 18th century. To the south Poland faced the

H a p s b u rg Empire and the Turks. Both were still strong enough to

cause Poland trouble. Russia, Austria and Prussia increased their

i n t e r f e rence in Polish internal affairs and began to covet the vast lands

of their hapless neighbor. By the late 18th century this disparity

between the growing power of these surrounding states and Poland’s

weakness would seal the doom of the Polish Commonwealth.

But in the 16th century these problems lay far in the future. Poland

and the Polish nobility were enjoying their golden age-and the nobles

needed the Jews to help them extract the maximum amount of cash

f rom their vast estates. These estates became even bigger after 1569,

when Poland united with the huge Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The

Grand Duchy stretched from the Baltic Sea almost as far as the Black


Sea. It included territories that today make up Lithuania, Latvia, east-

e rn Poland, most of Belarus and most of the Ukraine. These territories

w e re now joined to the old Polish Crown lands that included today’s

Poland and parts of Germany. By the 16th century Poland was the

biggest country in Europe. But it was economically underd e v e l o p e d .

T h e re were many large regions in the Grand Duchy that had not re c o v-

e red from the ravages of the Mongol invasion of the 13th century.

They were potentially wealthy but very under populated. This was

especially true of the vast plains of the western Ukraine.

In the 1500’s and the 1600’s, Europe turned into a major market for

Polish products. The navies and merchant shipping that moved goods

between the Old World and the New needed huge amounts of lumber

that the Polish forests could provide. The rapid growth of cities in

We s t e rn Europe opened up rich markets for Polish wheat. Euro p e a n s

also began to buy furs, honey and amber. Not only could Poland pro-

vide all these goods, but she benefited from a wonderful accident of

mother nature-her river system. As we have seen, except for the

e x t reme south, Poland was a flat country with many slow-moving,

navigable rivers that facilitated the transport of goods. Even more

important, most of the major rivers ultimately flowed into the country’s

major artery, the Vistula. Gdansk (Danzig), the huge Baltic port at the

mouth of the Vistula, became a vast clearing house where Euro p e a n

and Jewish agents exchanged Polish lumber, wheat and furs for the

luxury goods and industrial commodities that the Polish nobility

demanded.

The stage was set for a symbiotic relationship between the Polish

nobility and the Jews. The Polish nobles needed skilled agents who

could help them manage their lands and provide them with cash. This

was not a job that they could easily do themselves: their social code

f rowned on trade and commerce. But the Jews would fit the bill per-

f e c t l y. Unlike Polish or German merchants and artisans, the Jews

posed no potential political risks. They would happily settle for peace

and security and made no demands that might undercut the privileges

of the nobility.

The nobles invited the Jews to settle on their lands and instituted the

a renda system. The arenda system formed the economic basis for the


t a k e - o ff in Jewish settlement in Eastern Europe. To offer a simple

description of a complex system, arenda meant that Jews would re n t

concessions from the Polish nobleman and take the gamble that their

income from the lease would exceed the payments that they had to

make to the Polish landlord. For example, a Jew might purchase the

right to cut and ship lumber for a given number of years. He would

assemble gangs of peasants, usually supervised by other Jews, who

would spend the harsh winter months in remote forests, cut down

t rees and shove them on sleighs towards the banks of frozen rivers.

Come spring, the Jews would tie the lumber together in big rafts and

float them from one river to another (the splav) until they reached the

major arteries that flowed into the Baltic: the Vistula and the Dvina. Ye t

other arendas covered the harvesting of wheat, the building of ro a d s ,

the collection of tolls or the shipment of furs. The Jewish arendar or

leaseholder would then sell subleases to other Jews who might in turn

contract business to yet another party. In that way, each arenda could

have a multiplier effect and attract many Jews to what had been a

remote wilderness.

What made Jewish agents even more useful to the Polish nobles was

their wide range of personal contacts. Jews in Poland knew their core-

ligionists from Amsterdam, Saloniki or Hamburg. At the great trade

fairs in Leipzig and Jaroslaw they would not only do business but also

find mates for their children or a suitable yeshiva (religious academy)

for their sons. These contacts made it possible for Jews to exchange

l a rge amounts of money without having to carry cash. They accepted

each other’s personal checks and made the deals that benefited both

the Jewish arendar and the Polish nobleman.

One important arenda was the right to make and sell vodka. Jews

would buy these rights from the landlord, run the taverns and share

the profits. Ta v e rns were the social centers of rural society, the place

w h e re the peasants would come to drink in the evenings and on

Sunday afternoons after church. Much of the time relations between

the peasants and the Jewish tavern keepers were good. But there

w e re many potential sources of conflict. Economic logic dictated a

skewed alliance between the Polish nobles and the Jewish tavern-

keepers. The livelihood of the Jew depended on the power of the

Polish lord, and it came as no surprise that all too often the peasants


saw the Jew as the hated agent of the Polish landlord. This was espe-

cially true in the southeast, in today’s Ukraine, where the Orthodox

peasants developed a special hatred of the Catholic Polish nobles and

the Jews who personified their oppression. The Polish landlords often

told the Jews to report on what they saw and heard in the tavern. If a

peasant ran up a large bill and did not want to pay, both the Jew and

the landlord had a common interest in making him do so. The Polish

l a n d l o rds often re q u i red peasants to spend a certain minimum at the

t a v e rn. Those who tried to make their own liquor in backyard stills suf-

f e red severe punishments.

The Jewish tavernkeepers — along with many other Jewish are n d a r s

— found themselves caught in the middle. If they did not earn enough

to pay their leasing fees to the Polish landlord, they themselves would

not only lose their livelihood but might be flogged. There were even

isolated cases where family members were kidnapped in order to

p re s s u re Jews to pay up. The Jews’ position depended on the power

of the Polish nobility-and they knew it. But in order to live, they had to

engage in activities that sparked the resentment of the peasantry.

The interaction between the Jews and the Polish nobility was compli-

cated. Polish nobles established close personal contacts with “their”

Jews, whom they valued and needed. But their social code defined

the Jews as an inferior caste. ( In some ways this peculiar mixture of

personal intimacy and caste distance resembled certain features of

the Old South, where white Southerners often felt genuine affection for

particular slaves . Like the southern plantocracy, the Polish nobility

lived by a demanding code of honor that valued personal courage,

blood sports and integrity-and that rigorously excluded outsiders and

social inferiors). There are many Jewish stories of drunken nobles

who would summon their “little Jews”(Zydki) to entertain their guests

with Jewish dances (ma-yofus) and songs. Once again, one sees a

certain parallel to Stepin Fetchett or to the stereotypes of happy,

dancing “Negroes” that were so ingrained in the American South.

Of course one should not push this analogy too far. Jews were not

slaves, they were in a better legal position and they were white. In

e m e rgencies they could count on the help of other Jews, even in dis-

tant cities like Amsterdam and Istanbul. They preserved their stro n g


family structure and had much more freedom than the peasants

whom the Polish nobles had turned into serfs. In this early period there

w e re hardly any Jews who envied the Polish nobility or who felt any

tinge of inferiority. In his important memoirs of Jewish life in 18th cen-

tury Poland, Solomon Maimon re c o rds how he happened to meet

Princess Radziwill, a daughter of one of the wealthiest and most pow-

erful noblemen in Poland. The Princess was a member of a hunting

party that had stopped to rest at his father’s house. Maimon was then

a small boy. He hid behind the stove and marveled at the beauty of

the princess and at the splendor of the noblemen and the ladies-in-

waiting.

My father came in just as I was beside myself with joy, and had broken intothe words, “Oh, how beautiful!” In order to calm me, and at the sametime to confirm me in the principles of our faith, he whispered into mye a r, “Little fool, in the future life, the princess will kindle the stove for us.

But the stark diff e rences in the social and cultural codes of the Polish

nobility and the Jews set the stage for later stereotypes that would

help define Polish-Jewish relations. It would be a relationship defined

by a unique interplay of closeness and distance, respect and alien-

ation, affection and, all too often, contempt.

In keeping with the growing political power of the nobility the Sejm in

1537 passed an important law that gave the nobles legal power over

all Jews living on their lands. This law would have important conse-

quences, both positive and negative. Over time Polish Jews would, by

and large, be divided into two categories: those who were living under

the legal jurisdiction of the nobility (“The Lord ’s Jews,” to use Moshe

R o s s m a n ’s term) and those who were not.

On the positive side, this law gave Jews an important counterweight

to the anti-Jewish policies of the church and the Christian townsmen.

The latter fought Jewish commerce and settlements in the cities and

enjoyed the encouragement of the Catholic church. The anti-

Semitism of the church became even more of a factor during the

c o u n t e r reformation and the rise of the Jesuit order in Poland. This

g rowing anti-Semitism had many consequences. Many cities

received charters that banned Jewish settlement. Jews began to suf-

fer from monstrous accusations that they desecrated the host or that


they used Christian blood to bake Passover Matzos. Many Jews were

t o r t u red and executed as a result of these charges. Students fro m

Jesuit religious academies led frequent anti-Jewish riots, which

caused Jews to buy them off with a yearly bribe called the kazubalec.

In light of this threatening anti-Semitism, the nobility could aff o rd the

Jews some protection. They founded towns on their own lands

(shtetlekh or miasteczka) where Jews were protected from the pre d a-

tions of the Christian guilds and the church. In cities where Jewish set-

tlement was banned, Jews could get around these restrictions by liv-

ing on noble properties that enjoyed extraterritorial status (jurydyki).

But this protection did come at a price. Jews had little defense against

the cruel and arbitrary behavior of noblemen. And in the 18th century,

as we shall see, nobles began to interfere more and more in intern a l

Jewish institutions.

4 / THE SHTETL

This symbiotic relationship between the Polish nobility and the Jews

led to the development of the shtetl, the Jewish small town. In

American terms, the shtetl started as a “company town,” a communi-

ty built on the private property of the Polish nobleman. The szlachta

quickly learned that if they wanted to attract Jews to the re m o t e

f o rests and plains, they had to give them a chance to build new com-

munities that had the critical mass to sustain the institutions of re l i-

gious life. Jewish prayer re q u i red a minimum of ten men. Before Jews

could have marital relations, Jewish women had to make a monthly

visit to a mikva, a ritual bath. Jews needed cemeteries to bury their

dead and schools to educate their children. In these big open spaces

the Jews built their communities on the lands of the Polish nobility.

To be sure not all Polish Jews lived in shtetlekh (the Yiddish plural of

shtetl). Technically speaking many of the royal towns in central and

w e s t e rn Poland—towns that did not belong to the nobility—w e re not

shtetlekh. On the other hand, surrounding each shtetl were many

yishuvnikes, rural Jews, who lived in isolated homesteads or in peas-


ant villages and who came to the shtetl for major religious holidays.

(By the 18th century perhaps one third of all Polish Jews fell into this

category). It was in eastern Poland-the lands east of the Bug River-

that the shtetlekh enjoyed their most rapid development, especially in

the 17th and 18th centuries.

The shtetl was unlike any other Jewish community in the Diaspora. It

was unique. Since the destruction of the Second Temple and the loss

of national sovere i g n t y, there had been key Jewish centers in Iraq,

Persia, Spain and Germany. But in none of these centers had there

been anything like the shtetl. In Spain and Germany Jews had lived in

particular neighborhoods or on Jewish streets. A shtetl, however, was

m o re than just a neighborhood or street. It was an entire town with a

l a rge Jewish majority and with a relatively large hinterland of villages

and farmlands. Many shtetlekh were 90% Jewish and some would

even remain so until the beginning of the Second World Wa r.

No two shtetlekh were exactly alike but they did share common char-

acteristics. They were market towns that served the immediate re g i o n ,

w h e re Jews and the surrounding peasantry came together once a

week to trade. The market square stood in the center of each shtetl

and usually the Polish nobleman would build a big, ornate Catholic

c h u rch on one side of the square, just to remind everyone who was

the boss. The market square was also the center of Jewish settlement.

Gentiles usually lived on the edges of the shtetl. The shtetl served also

as the anchor, the home base for the Jews who would fan out into the

countryside to tend to their arendas or to work for their core l i g i o n i s t s

who did. There were also many Jewish craftsmen—tailors and car-

penters and shoemakers—who would spend the week going fro m

peasant village to village until their re t u rn home for the Sabbath.

In Germany France and Spain, language did not divide Jews from their

neighbors. In the shtetlekh of Poland, the enormous cultural and re l i-

gious gap between the Jews and the surrounding peasantry was

deepened by a stark linguistic divide. In Eastern Europe, more than

a n y w h e re else, Jews had little interest in assimilating with their pre-

dominantly peasant neighbors. To be sure, a tight web of personal

relationships bound the shtetl Jews to non-Jews: the prince who re n t-

ed out the arenda; the peasant supplier who would show up each


week on the market day; villages that eagerly awaited the visits of the

cobbler or the tailor-and above all the customers who determined

whether the market day would feed the family for the coming week.

But it was the shtetl, more than any other kind of Jewish settlement,

that nourished a keen sense of diff e rence between “us” and “them.”

The spread of shtetlekh in the spaces of Eastern Europe reflected a

unique feature of east European Jewry: its striking occupational and

economic diversity. In most of the Jewish Diaspora, Jews had been

concentrated in rather narrow economic roles: money-lending, trading

in livestock, or whatever else a particular prince or king allowed them

to do. In Poland, on the other hand, Jews did practically everything.

They were farmers and tailors, teamsters and milkmen, beekeepers

and merchants, water carriers and penniless teachers. The interplay

of this striking economic diversity and common religious values gave

shtetl society a unique vitality.

The shtetl was a community with real social diff e rences. It was a “face-

to-face” community where everybody knew everybody else and

w h e re public opinion perpetuated personal foibles and eccentricities

with piquant and sometimes brutal nicknames. One woman re m e m-

b e red the nicknames from her girlhood shtetl in the 1930’s :

Many in our town had nicknames that were derived either from their occu-pation, physical appearance or deformities such as Chaim the re d h e a d ,Moishe the icon, Faivel cold sore, Eli big belly, Avrum the hernia, MeishlPick the stuttere r, Berl the Copperbeard, Henoch the tin collar (his gar-ment shone like metal for it had not been cleaned since he put it on twen-ty years earlier). There was Libitchke the maiden. Although she had beenmarried and had children the townsfolk could not forget that Libitchkehad married late in life. We had in our shtetl Crutch the tailor who lost aleg and walked with one crutch; Yankl the hunchback, Yosl the latrine,because he had a disagreeable body odor and so on and so on. (Throughlaughter and tears. Personal memoirs by Luba Bat: Internet).

The shtetl — especially before the 19th century — was both a re a l

and an imagined community, an actual place and a model of Jewish

space and time floating somewhere between Jerusalem and Polish

f o rests and the Ukrainian plains. Jews lived in Szarkowszczyzna or in

Kozienice, but they prayed to re t u rn to Jerusalem and studied a


Talmud that had originated in Babylonia. They were “here” and “there ”

at the same time.

The rhythms of shtetl life reflected the interplay of the sacred and

the profane, of the Sabbath and the week, of the marketplace and

the synagogue. On the market day peasants were start streaming

into the shtetl early in the morning. Hundreds of wagons would

arrive and the Jews would surround them and buy the products

that the peasants had to sell. With money in their pockets the

peasants then went into the Jewish shops. The market day was

a noisy cacophony of shouting, bargaining and hustling. Often

after the sale of a horse or a cow, peasants and Jews would do

a version of a high five and share a drink. Sometimes fights would

break out, and everyone would run for cover. Especially on a hot

summer day, the presence of hundreds of horses standing around

would lend the shtetl an unforgettable odor. But the market day

was the lifeblood of the shtetl. It was no accident that in the

countless charters of rights that the Jews had received from the

Polish nobles and kings, one of the most important was the prom-

ise that no market day would be held on the Sabbath or on a

Jewish holiday.

If the market day was noise and bustle, the Sabbath was the holy

time, when the Jews dropped all work and turned to God. The

exhausted carpenters and tailors who had spent the previous week

walking around the countryside, sleeping in barns, and doing odd

jobs for the peasants now re t u rned home. Women shopped for the

Sabbath meal, the best meal of the week. Jews went to the bath-

house, changed into their best clothes and pre p a red to forg e t — i f

only for one special day—the cares and worries of the past week.

In the late afternoon, men and boys would go to the synagogue and

sing beautiful religious poems that compared the Sabbath to a

bride. A Jew, they believed, received a neshome yeseire, an extra

soul, with the coming of the Sabbath. Meanwhile at home their

wives lit the Sabbath candles and laid a white tablecloth on the

family table. From Friday evening until after sunset on Saturd a y,

Jews did not work, no cooking, lit no lights. On bitterly cold winter

days, a gentile, or Shabbes goy, would come into Jewish homes

and keep the fire going in the stove.


On Saturday almost all Jews went to synagogue. Men and women sat

s e p a r a t e l y. The position of women in the religious life of the shtetl was

quite distinct from that of the men. They had to sit separately. They

w e re not counted as part of the minyan, the quorum of ten that was

necessary for Jewish communal prayer, nor could they be called up to

the Torah. But although Jewish custom had ordained that a Jewish

w o m a n ’s major duties lay in the home, Jewish women fashioned their

own religious culture. In the women’s section, women and girls would

read from a special book, the Ts e n e u rene, that contained Yi d d i s h

translations of prayers, biblical stories and commentaries chosen for

their moral uplift and emotional power. There would also be a

zogerke, a woman who would translate the Hebrew prayers for the

women who were sitting around her in the synagogue. She would do

so with such pathos that the women would cry. (Jewish women also

had their own prayers, called Tkhines, that heightened their re l i g i o u s

a w a reness and even gave them a sense of empowerment.9 T h e s e

w e re said at home rather than in the synagogue and were often

framed in the first person singular rather than in the usual first person

plural of the liturg y ) .

After the service Jews would re t u rn to their homes to eat cholent, the

special Sabbath stew that would still be warm from the embers lit the

p revious day. The Sabbath afternoon was the only genuine leisure

time that the shtetl Jew had. On short winter days, there was just

enough time to grab a short nap and then re t u rn to the synagogue for

the shalosh seudes, the third meal that preceded the end of the

Sabbath. In summer, there would be long walks.

Especially after World War I, the shtetl Sabbath began to reflect the

major changes coming in from the outside world. Synagogue atten-

dance began to slip. A visiting Yiddish writer from a big city would lec-

t u re to large audience at the fire m a n ’s hall. Young people from Zionist

or Bundist youth movements would go on hikes or perform amateur

t h e a t e r, much to the dismay of their religious parents who saw this as

a desecration of the holy day. The youth movements also played a

major role in changing relationships between young men and young

women, relationships that had been so closely regulated in traditional

Jewish society. Parents often tried to stop their daughters from join-

ing youth organizations, but few succeeded. A hapless father in a


shtetl near Vilna, told that his daughter was going on picnics in the

woods on Saturday afternoon and even carrying baskets of food (for-

bidden on the Sabbath) replied: “Male vos zey trogn in vald iz nor a

halbe tsore. Di gantse tsore vet zayn ven zey veln onhoybn trogn fun

vald.” (‘I’m more worried about what she’ll be carrying out of the for-

est than what she carries into it.’ The Yiddish word ‘trogn’ meant both

to carry and to be pre g n a n t ) .

The social diff e rences that divided shtetl Jews were felt every-

w h e re, from the synagogue to the market place. The synagogue

was a holy place, but it also reflected the social pecking ord e r. At

the top of the social scale were the sheyne yidn, the fine Jews,

who were economically well-to-do and who ran the shtetl’s institu-

tions and controlled its politics. In the synagogue they usually sat

along the eastern wall. They determined who would receive hon-

ors during the service and who would receive a prestigious aliya, a

call to a reading of that week’s portion of the Torah. Just below the

sheyne yidn were the balebatim, the “middle class” whose store s

and businesses did not make them rich but aff o rded them a cer-

tain measure of respect from the community. Further down the

social scale came the skilled artisans, such as watchmakers and

exceptionally skilled tailors. Near the bottom were ordinary tailors

and shoemakers, followed by water carriers and teamsters.

But social diff e rences in the shtetl, painful as they were, were mitigat-

ed and softened by many important safety valves. Rich or poor, Jews

w e re linked by a common religion and by a common fate. High social

status rested on money or learning, not on the legal rank of nobility or

the possession of land. There f o re social barriers were not as insur-

mountable in Jewish as they were in gentile society. If a Jews had a

genuine grievance he could force the entire shtetl to hear it by delay-

ing the reading of the Torah on Saturday morning.

F u r t h e r m o re despised tailors and shoemakers had many other

ways of compensating for their lowly status. They could start their

own synagogues, for instance. Many documents that date back to

the 17th century re c o rd how poor Jewish artisans began khevre s

(associations) where they prayed together and banded together to

p rotect their economic status. These khevres kept chro n i c l e s


(pinkesim) that often began with a Talmudic passage such as

“ G reater is man’s pleasure from his labor than from worshipping the

L o rd”(berakhot 8), (Roskies, Shtetl book, p. 184). The tailor’s pinkes

of Loytsk proclaimed, in 1721 that:

No one, not even a self-employed tailor can work late into the night. Onthe eve of the Sabbath and holidays, all work must be laid aside at 2PM.If, however, someone was forced to work overtime-because of a weddingor because the local porets (Polish prince) badly needed the garment-thensomeone must pay two groschen to charity for each hour of overtime andmust also pay his own workers extra. (s.b 185)

In these khevres where poor Jews prayed together, many rules

e n s u red that each member felt equal and valued. In other syna-

gogues aliyes (calls to the torah) were sold; here aliyes were appor-

tioned by alphabetical ord e r. The only exceptions were special family

occasions.

Anyone seeking the origins of the impressive Jewish labor movement

of the modern period had to look to these early khevres and syna-

gogues that reflected the deep belief of ordinary Jews in yoysher (jus-

tices) and in the right of each individual to be treated with dignity. The

road from religion to revolution, or from the synagogue to the Bund

was often less complicated that many would believe.

After World War I the lowly artisans stepped up their political struggle

by starting new organizations. One popular organization was the

handverker fareyn, (the artisans union) which became a powerful polit-

ical player in many shtetlekh. These artisans unions had a central

headquarters and even a common song which began: handverker fun

ale fakhn/ glaykht di rukns oys/ derloybt nisht mer fun aykh tsu lakhn/

geyt shtolts mutik un faroys (Artisans of all trades, Stand tall, don’t let

them laugh at you, go proudly forward ) .

Each shtetl had its own peculiarities and any generalizations should be

a p p roached with caution. The shtetl existed in the real world and it

too was subject to the great historical shifts that rocked East

E u ropean Jewry: the economic decline of the Polish nobility after the

abortive revolts against Russian rule in 1831 and 1863; the impact of

r a i l roads and big cities on the rural economy; the growth of peasant


cooperatives that eliminated the Jewish middleman; the blows of wars

and revolution; the rapid growth of major Jewish urban centers; the

rise of new ideologies and youth movements that changed the face of

the shtetl, especially during the period between the first and the sec-

ond world wars. The Jewish shtetl underwent enormous changes,

changes determined by time and by region, and the basic trend was

economic decline after the middle of the nineteenth century. After

1918, the new Soviet state destroyed what remained of the econom-

ic base of the shtetl. In interwar Poland and Lithuania the shtetl sur-

vived but fought a losing battle to retain its economic relevance.

The new youth movements and artisans unions in interwar Poland and

in the Baltic states served as a powerful reminder that under the

impact of war and political change in the 20th century, the shtetl had

to rethink its value system. Traditionally the shtetl had looked down

on workers and artisans. But as the shtetl suff e red severe economic

decline, it became harder to maintain the status of a “sheyner yid” and

to lavish generous dowries so that daughters could find a learned and

cultivated husband. The youth movements, both Zionist and social-

ist, now emphasized the dignity and importance of physical labor. So

did the new artisans unions.

By the 1930’s in interwar Poland, the city, not the shtetl had become

the base of Jewish life, the center of the newspapers, political parties,

theaters and writers clubs that had transformed the Jewish world.

One in four Polish Jews lived in the five largest cities and fewer than

half of Polish Jews lived in settlements that might be called a shtetl.

Yet the shtetl, that unique Jewish town born in the old days of the

Polish Commonwealth, still kept its hold on the Jewish imagination. In

many ways, the shtetl was, for the East European Jew, home. Much

of Yiddish literature was set in the shtetl. Various Yiddish writers used

the shtetl as the symbol of collective Jewish existence and its intern a l

struggles became a story of the modern Jewish experience writ larg e .

Mendele Mokher Seforim created fictional shtetlekh called Glupsk

(stupidtown) and Kaptsansk (beggarville). As one can easily guess

Mendele had a love-hate relationship with the shtetl. Especially in his

younger days Mendele subjected the shtetl and its customs to savage

criticism for its backwardness and superstition, but later on he was


m o re willing to concede its importance as a source of tradition and

national cohesion. Sholom Aleikhem created a fictional shtetl called

Kasrilevke, with its “little Jews”(kleyne menshelekh”) who were beset

by poverty and persecution and whose only weapons were their faith,

their ingrained optimism in the triumph of good and a Yiddish lan-

guage full of irony and humor. By the turn of the century, when

Sholom Aleikhem was writing these stories, the ominous threat of the

outside world—pogroms, wars, anti-Semitism—loomed larger and

behind his hilarious stories lay an ominous dichotomy between the

fragile, powerless shtetl and historical forces that threatened to

d e s t roy it.

A new generation of Yiddish writers after the Russian revolution of

1905 rejected the shtetl as a symbol of Jewish unity and tradition.

Instead they portrayed a shtetl that had become an arena of social

conflict and demoralization. In Ojzer Wa r s z a w s k i ’s S m u g g l e r s, Wo r l d

War I deals the shtetl a death blow by subverting its moral universe

f rom within. Only smuggling provided economic security and to live,

one had to turn into a criminal.

In his masterpiece novella A Shtetl, I.M. We i s s e n b e rg describes a

shtetl beset by social divisions and class conflict. The synagogue, no

longer the symbol of Jewish unity, becomes the scene of brawls and

vicious arguments between the balebatim and the rebellious workers.

But in the end, We i s s e n b e rg asks, what does internal conflict in the

shtetl matter when the entire Jewish community is so powerless and

defenseless against the anti-Semitism of the outside world?

He started back to town heavy hearted, but once back in the shtetl he felteven worse. Looking around the marketplace at the peaceful little houseswith their windows half open he sensed something that he had neversensed before: there, beyond the shtetl, lay such a vast multitude, and hereeverything was so small, so puny, held together by just a dab of spit....Ito c c u r red to him that if the thousands out there just decided to have a bitof fun-just a simple bit of peasant fun-if each of them took from the hous-es of the Jews no more than a couple of rotting floor boards apiece and car-ried them off under his arm, nothing would remain of the shtetl but anempty plot of land.10


By the late 1930’s however, as the threat of Hitler loomed larg e r, some

Jewish intellectuals and writers began to take yet another look at the

shtetl. Threatened and beleaguered though it was, it still exemplified

the deep roots that the Jews had put down in Eastern Europe. With

their backs to the war the Jews had fight harder than before and the

shtetl now symbolized a threatened fortress than the Jews had to pro-

tect. In a powerful song written just after a pogrom in the shtetl of

Przytyk in 1935 the popular Yiddish songwriter Mordkhe Gebirtig

w a rned the Jews that “Es Brent, oy unzer orem shtetl brent.” Our

shtetl is burning, terrible winds were fanning the flames and Jews

w e re just standing around and watching the fire. Fight back, Gebirtig

w a rned his fellow Polish Jews, don’t be passive. Put out the fire !

S AVE YOUR SHTETL!

Vulnerable as it was, the shtetl for many Jews continued to symbolize

the distinct Jewish peoplehood that had evolved over the course of

centuries. It continued to determine the contours of Jewish collective

memory and its spaces, streets and wooden buildings re m a i n e d

etched in the collective imagination. So much so that many years

l a t e r, Fiddler on the Roof took Broadway by storm. American Jews

instinctively felt that what they saw on the stage could tell them where

they came from.


IV TRADITIONALJEWISH SOCIETY IN THE POLISH C O M M O N W E A LT H

As the Jews sunk down economic roots and as Jewish numbers

i n c reased, during the 16th and 17th centuries, the Polish Kings as well

as the Polish nobility took steps to define their legal status. The char-

ters granted by the Polish kings had promised the Jews freedom of

religion and the right to use, within certain limits, their own courts.

During the course of the 16th century, a mutually beneficial re l a t i o n-

ship developed. The Polish Kings and nobles found it convenient to

have central Jewish bodies collect taxes from the Jewish community.

For their part, Jewish elites welcomed the chance to enforce com-

munal discipline on the basis of Jewish law.

The basic unit of Jewish self-government was the kehilla, or commu-

nity board. A kehilla would include the Jews in a particular town or

shtetl as well as surrounding villages. Over time, as nearby shtetlekh

g rew and developed, the Jews there would grow restive and would

try to start their own kehilla, where they would have more direct con-

t rol over how their taxes were spent. The number of kehillas steadi-

ly gre w, even though established communities often resisted the

e fforts of the newer ones to gain independence.

The kehilla enforced communal discipline and standards. It had wide-

ranging powers. For example, according to the custom of hezkat-

h a y i s h u v, a kehilla could limit Jewish immigration from other are a s .

Even a Jew from a nearby shtetl or town needed the permission of the

kehilla before he moved in with his family. The laws of hazaka pro-

tected local Jewish citizens from cutthroat competition: one could not

move in and compete with an existing business or arenda unless the

kehilla gave permission and received a hefty fee. Over time, however,

it became increasingly clear that these kehilla powers did not suit the

i n t e rests of the Polish nobles, who saw these kehilla rules as an

assault on their own economic interests.

The kehilla enforced rules about conduct in the synagogue, about

what women could wear in public, about public gambling, etc. It col-

lected taxes and used them to fund essential communal institutions.

For example, the kehilla maintained a Talmud Torah to give poor boys

an elementary Jewish education.

5 9I V. TRADITIONAL JEWISH SOCIETY IN THE POLISH COMMONWEALT H

The kehilla was no democracy. It was run by an oligarchy of wealthier

Jews and those who had achieved some distinction in learning. This

elite controlled elections and chose a board that met the major

responsibilities of the community. Each month a diff e rent member of

the board became the parnas ha-khodesh, the executive officer of the

c o m m u n i t y. The kehille also decided on who would be rabbi. Once

appointed, the rabbi would decide on questions of religious law, the

dietary laws, and help settle communal disputes. He would also be

expected to preach to the entire town, especially on the Sabbath

between the New Year and the Day of Atonement as well as on the

Sabbath before Passover.

Money was one way to achieve power and prestige in the Jewish

c o m m u n i t y. But the power of money in the Jewish community was

relative. Jews did not have the legal status of nobles and they did not

have the same legal protections for their wealth. As a rule they could

not own large estates, nor, given the political risks of pre m o d e rn soci-

e t y, did they want to. Given the uncertainties of the times—ro b b e r i e s ,

storms, fire—wealth could easily vanish. As one Yiddish proverb stat-

ed, yidishe ashires iz vi shney in Merts (Jewish wealth is like snow in

M a rch). Wealth was important-but so was education.

Under the guidance of the kehilles, Polish Jewry had developed a sys-

tem of universal education: all boys would go to a kheder, where they

l e a rned the rudiments of the Hebrew alphabet, how to recite the

prayers and, as they got older, some Bible and an introduction to the

easier texts of the Talmud. These kheders—which formed the basis

of the educational system of east European Jewry right up to the 20th

c e n t u r y — w e re far from perfect. They were often located in the cro w d-

ed and filthy quarters of the melamed, the teacher. Paradoxically the

status of the melamed was quite low, although Jews valued educa-

tion. The melamed would often vent his frustration and anger at the

c h i l d ren. Boys who made mistakes or who misbehaved would often

receive slaps and curses. By the 19th century the reform of the khed-

er ranked high on the agenda of maskilim, pro g ressive thinkers who

wanted to reform Jewish life. Nonetheless, the kheder did achieve its

basic goal: it taught children how to read Hebrew and it socialized

them into the value system of the community.


One of the most popular Yiddish songs described an idealized khede r :

Oyfn pripetchik brent a fayerl/ un in shtub iz heys/ un der rebbe lerntkleyne kinderlekh/dem alef beys.... (A fire burns in the fireplace and itshot in the room. The teacher teaches the children the Hebrew alphabet.)

But many Jews had less than happy memories. In the memoirs of the

Zionist leader Shmarya Levin, the kheder was a veritable hell: over-

c rowded, violent and run by a hapless melamed who had no idea how

to teach. Levin also recalled what had happened to his Uncle Meyer,

who was married off young but still went to kheder.

During kheder hours the news was suddenly brought to him that his wifehad borne him his first child. But the messenger of the happy tidings foundthe new father, his nether garments down, lying across the bench, re c e i v-ing the (beating) of his teacher. He was asked to dress himself at once andhurry home to his wife. But Ziskind, the teacher, coolly replied, “There ’stime. Wait, I’m not finished with him yet!”

Girls also received an education of sorts. They were taught the

H e b rew alphabet and basic arithmetic. In some places very young

girls would go to kheder with boys. In other towns, someone would

establish a basic kheder for girls. Wealthier families would hire a home

t u t o r. In the modern period, many well-off religious Jews began to

send their daughters to gentile schools and give them the secular edu-

cation that they denied their sons. Most Jewish women in Eastern

E u rope were literate and in what little spare time they had, they

enjoyed a freedom to engage in reading for pleasure that was denied

men by a Jewish tradition that looked askance at time not spent in

either work or study. By the middle of the 19th century they pro v i d e d

the key source of readership for popular Yiddish books. The novels of

the Yiddish writer Isaac Meyer Dik sold 100,000 copies in the middle

of the nineteenth century and most of these readers were pro b a b l y

women. (Shaul Stampfer).

Most boys who finished kheder around the age of 13 ended their for-

mal schooling and went to work. But a lucky elite continued on to the

yeshiva or a Talmudic academy. In traditional Jewish society, yeshiva

l e a rning provided an alternate route to status and political power. By

the late 16th century Poland’s yeshivas had acquired such a high re p-

utation that they attracted students from Italy, Germany and Holland.

I V. TRADITIONAL JEWISH SOCIETY IN THE POLISH COMMONWEALT H 6 1

Mastering the Talmud was extremely difficult. It took many years of

serious study in a yeshiva before a student could study Talmud on his

own: the students who broke off their education at 13 would find it

impossible to reach the level of those who went to the yeshivas. Thus

the ability to decipher the Talmud became an important line of demar-

cation between the elite and the masses.

The Talmud, which was divided into diff e rent tractates according to

subject matter, consisted of the Mishna and the Gemara. The Mishna

was relatively easy. Composed in straightforward Hebrew it was the

basic code of Jewish oral law and reflected early rabbinical discus-

sions of the written laws of the Old Testament. It was compiled in the

second century by the eminent scholar Judah HaNasi.

Far more difficult was the Gemara, the commentary on the Mishna

which re c o rded the debates in the Babylonian academies that took

place between 400 and 700. The Gemara was written in a mixture of

H e b rew and Aramaic. Much of the Gemara was extremely compli-

cated and demanded intense concentration and an ability to follow

very intricate arguments.

By 1523 printing of the Talmud had begun and the text assumed a

s t a n d a rdized layout. The center of a page would consist of ‘mishna’

and ‘gemara.’ Surrounding the mishna and gemara would be com-

mentaries by Rashi and other important rabbis. Talmud study evolved

its own customs. One studied the Talmud with a swaying motion and

with a particular chant. In the yeshivas one spent most of one’s time

studying passages of Talmud with a companion. Intense discussions

of a particular passage would involve constant dialogue, questions,

inflexions and phrases that made their way into the everyday Yi d d i s h

of ordinary Jews. The yeshivas would also feature formal lectures by

the leader, the rosh yeshiva. Poland’s yeshivas in the 16 and 17th cen-

turies developed a specific approach to Talmud study that later

became quite controversial. It was called pilpul and re q u i red the stu-

dent to suggest contradictions in the text, offer finely honed distinc-

tions (hilukim) and then demonstrate his intellectual prowess by

resolving all the problems. Opponents condemned this method for its

emphasis on an arid scholasticism that allowed students to show off

their prowess but also fostere rd egotism at the expense of basic re l i-


gious values. Proponents argued that it sharpened the mind. It cer-

tainly widened the gap between the elite-who could follow this

method-and the masses, who could not. Thus one of the basic social

boundaries was between those who received an elite education and

those who made do with the kheder.

Those who excelled at the study of the Talmud were accorded special

respect and received special titles from the rabbis of the kehilles. The

first degree was ‘khaver,’ that a student received after a certain period

of study in a yeshiva and the taking of an oral exam. An even higher

d e g ree was ‘moreinu,’ which entitled someone to compete for the

position of rabbi.

Mastery of the Talmud was a way of gaining status even if one lacked

m o n e y. While the ideal was ‘torah lishma,’ study for its own sake, all

too often, excellence in the Talmud could be parlayed into social sta-

tus and an advantageous marriage. In Poland, the parents of a bride

who married a Talmud scholar would undertake to support the young

couple for a certain period of time. This was called ‘kest.’ The pur-

pose of kest was to enable the young man to continue his studies. The

bride would help with the business or earn money in some other way.

But the priority was to enable the man to study the Talmud.

Indeed it was the upper classes of East European Jewish society that

w e re most likely to push their children into marriage at a very early

age-with often devastating emotional consequences. Solomon

Maimon left important memoirs of his life in Poland and Germany in

the 18th century. His family was not particularly wealthy, but as a

young boy he had gained a reputation as a prodigy in the Talmud. As

a result his family received several marriage offers and he found him-

self, at the age of eleven, engaged to two girls at the same time!

Matters got ugly. When Maimon’s mother died, one of the angry

p rospective in-laws got an order from the kehilla forbidding burial until

M a i m o n ’s father gave them satisfaction. Like many other learn e d

boys, Maimon found his childhood cut short at an early age.1 1 A f t e r

marriage he had to leave his parents home and live with in laws. At

14 he became a father.


Domestic life was hardly peaceful:

Once I came home from the yeshiva ravenously hungry. As my mother inlaw and wife were occupied with the business of the tavern, I went myselfw h e re the milk was kept, and finding a dish of curds and cream, I fellupon it and began to eat. My mother-in-law came in as I was thus occu-pied, and shrieked in rage, “You are not going to devour the milk with thec ream!” The more cream the better, thought I, and went on eating, with-out allowing myself to be disturbed by her screams. She was going tow rest the dish forcibly from my hands, beat me with her fists, and let mefeel all her ill-will. Exasperated by such treatment, I thrust her from me,seized the dish and smashed it on her head. That was a sight! The curd sran down all over her!

Maimon then left his home and deserted his young wife and son to

wander through Poland and Prussia in search of an education. He

arrived in one town after months on the road. Filthy and unkempt, he

t u rned up at the home of the local rabbi. When the rabbi discovere d

his prowess in the Talmud, he seated him at the family table, much to

the dismay of his daughter, who did not enjoy the odor that emanat-

ed from Maimon’s ragged clothes. No matter. The unkempt stranger

was a Talmud scholar! As Maimon recalled:

The study of the Talmud is the chief object of higher education among ourpeople. Riches...(are esteemed)..but no merit is superior to that of a goodTalmudist. He has first claim upon all offices and positions of honor in thec o m m u n i t y. If he enters an assembly, whatever his age of rank, everyonerises before him out of respect, and the most honorable place is assigned tohim. He is director of ordinary men’s conscience, their lawgiver and theirjudge. One who does not show such a scholar proper respect is...damnedto all eternity. The common man dare not enter upon the most trivialundertaking, if, in the judgment of the scholar, it is not according to law. . . Awealthy merchant, leaseholder or professional man with a marriageabled a u g h t e r, does everything in his power to acquire a good Talmudist as son-i n - l a w. In other respects the scholar may be deformed, diseased and igno-rant: he will still have the advantage over his rivals.

If the Talmud was one pillar of traditional Jewish society, another

was the extensive network of associations and clubs called

‘ k h e v res.’ Usually, though not always supervised by the kehilla, the

k h e v res retained their key role in Jewish life right until the Second

World Wa r. In any Jewish community one of the most important


k h e v res was the khevre kadisha, that pre p a red the dead for burial.

This khevre was quite powerful. It allocated burial plots in the ceme-

tery; payment for a prestigious spot became a major source of

income for the kehilla. The khevre kadisha could also enforce com-

munal norms. If someone had neglected his duties to the commu-

n i t y, or if a rich person had been stingy in his contributions to chari-

t y, then the khevre could force his heirs to compensate through the

payment of a hefty burial fee. Election to the khevre was a gre a t

honor; in many shtetlekh the yearly banquet of the khevre kadisha

was the major social event of the year.

T h e re were other khevres that performed essential functions and bol-

s t e red the communal solidarity that was so bound up with the

demands and strictures of the Jewish religion. The practice of

Judaism was impossible without community. If a Jew lacked the

money to provide his family with a minimal Sabbath meal, the com-

munity had a moral obligation to help. The same obligation compelled

special efforts to ensure that poor Jews could meet the special dietary

obligations of Passover. Jewish law commanded parents to teach

their children. If parents could not aff o rd to send their son to school,

then that became the community’s re s p o n s i b i l i t y. All communities,

t h e re f o re, maintained a Talmud Tora (communal religious school) that

educated poor boys up to the age of 13 or 14. If the boy showed gre a t

p romise as a scholar, the kehilla might then send him to a yeshiva. If

not, then the kehilla would make him an apprentice and entrust a local

artisan to teach him a trade.

The commandment of “Be fruitful and multiply” strongly encouraged

marriage: single people had little status in the Jewish community. If

p a rents were too poor to provide a dowry, or in the case of orphans,

then the community had to step in. The ‘hakhnoses kala’ collected

dowries for poor girls and found them husbands. Judaism was

s t rongly suspicious of sexual license and the upper classes, as we

have seen, traditionally encouraged early marriage. (By the 19th cen-

t u r y, however, this custom began to die out). On the other hand

kehilles made sure that the poor did not marry too early, lest the com-

munity be inundated with welfare cases. Some communities set a

quota on the number of the poor who could marry in a given year.

After a certain age, however, the kehilla did indeed encourage mar-

riage and took steps to help the poor set up a household.


K h e v res such as lekhem evyonim helped the poor and ensured that

they would have money to observe the Sabbath in relative comfort

and dignity. The Bikur Kholim bought medicines, arranged rudimenta-

ry help care, and tended the gravely ill. Every community had khevre s

— such as the khevre shas — that studied holy texts and that catere d

to the diff e rent levels of ability and learning in the Jewish community

The Gmiles Khesed society helped the needy with interest free loans.

The khevre hakhnoses orkhim would welcome strangers and give

them lodging.

Artisans who had little Jewish learning might meet to study the week-

ly bible portion or the Eyn Ya a k o v, a collection of stories and legends

f rom the Talmud that were easily understood and that did not re q u i re

r i g o rous training. Other khevres might meet each day to chant psalms,

or come together in the middle of the night to mourn the destruction

of the temple. Jews with more training might form a khevre to study

the mishna, the code of law that was formulated by Judah HaNasi in

the 2nd century and that was written in clear and relatively easy

H e b re w.

The khevres were the basis of communal social life. Traditional Jewish

society frowned on social activities, parties or banquets that were not

connected to an ostensible religious purpose. So each khevre would

often have a traditional banquet that was often linked to the week

when a particular portion of the bible was read. In one Jewish town

the water carriers would meet on Saturday afternoons to study

Talmudic legends (Eyn Yaakov). Their yearly banquet took place dur-

ing the week when the bible portion of Emor was read. This was

because Emor resembled Emer, the Yiddish word for “water pail.”

This pun might have seemed forced. But it reflected the determina-

tion to anchor life in religious tradition.

Each khevre often had a given week when it received particular re c o g-

nition from the community as a whole:

On the Sabbath of “Lekh Lekho” when the passage “And you shall cir-cumcise the flesh of your foreskin is read (Genesis17:11), the circumcisersw e re called up. The story of Abraham inviting the three angels belongedto the Welcoming the Visitors Society. The portion of Mishpotim concern-ing money-lending was reserved for the Free Loan association. The khevre


that supplied Jewish soldiers with kosher meat was called up on theSabbath which included the passage that described the ..(dietary laws).Likewise the passage “The Lord removed you from an illness” wasreserved for the Association of Visiting the Sick. (Shtetl Book, p. 187).

While religious tradition dictated a strict code of public and private

b e h a v i o r, there were opportunities to have fun. One such holiday was

Purim, that usually fell in February and March and that commemorat-

ed the deliverance of the Jews in Persia. Purim took place in a carn i-

val atmosphere, with drinking and singing. Adults and children would

d ress up in costumes and wandering troupes of amateur actors would

go from house to house. Like other carnivals the merriment and the

relaxation of rules also served as a subtle reminder that the rules, in

fact, remained very much in force.

Standing over all the kehilles in the Polish Commonwealth was a

unique national institution, the Council of the Four lands Vaad Arba

Aratsot). Instituted around 1580, this was a super-kehille that super-

vised the kehilles at the district and at the local level. It was elected

by delegates from provincial kehilles all over Poland. For a short time

the Lithuanian kehilles joined the Vaad and made it the Council of the

Five Lands. For the most part, however the Lithuanian Jews had their

own Vaad. In most periods the Vaad would meet twice a year,

although it some periods it would be less fre q u e n t l y.

Such a national body suited the Polish kings just fine, since it made it

easier to collect taxes from the Jews. The Vaad and the Polish tre a s-

ury would periodically negotiate a head tax that Polish Jewry as a

whole would have to pay. The Vaad would then distribute the burd e n

among the various localities.

Jewish historians have argued about the real character of the Va a d .

The great pioneer of the modern study of East European Jewish his-

t o r y, Simon Dubnow, stressed the positive role of the Vaad as the pin-

nacle of Jewish autonomy in the Diaspora and as a powerful symbol

of national identity. Other historians, however, especially leftists like

Raphael Mahler, did not share Dubnow’s enthusiasm. For them the

Vaad allowed the Jewish elites to exploit the masses through unfair

taxation and the enactment of laws that benefited the wealthy at the

expense of the poor. But even Mahler recognized that the Vaad had


some important achievements to its credit, especially during times of

crisis such as the massacres and wars of 1648-1656 when it helped

Jewish refugees and raised money to help stricken communities.

While the Vaad was far from an ideal institution, it played a major ro l e

in giving the East European Jews a sense of peoplehood. As one

c h ronicler wrote, the Vaad “ was a small solace and a little honor too,

p roving that the Almighty God in his great pity and great loving-kind-

ness had not deserted us.” This chro n i c l e r, Ber of Berkenheim, added

that the partitions of Poland were God’s punishment for the Sejm’s

decision to abolish the Vaad in 1764.

The Council of the Four Lands (Vaad) was composed of both lay lead-

ers and rabbis. One of its major functions was to defend Jewish inter-

ests and be ready to ward off any planned legislation in the Polish

Sejm that might be harmful to the Jews. To that end it employed a

shtadlan, a full time re p resentative of the Vaad who spoke good Polish

and who had extensive contacts with the nobility and government off i-

cials. The Vaad was often quite forceful and assertive in pro t e c t i n g

Polish Jews from unfair accusations that they used Christian blood for

ritual purposes. The Vaad also collected money to ransom Jewish

captives and to help poor Jews in the land of Israel. It regulated Jewish

education and set minimal standards for the melamdim, the teachers

in the Jewish elementary schools (chedorim).

One of the Va a d ’s most important tasks was to interpret, modify and

adapt the legal code of Polish Jewry. Since this legal code was larg e-

ly based on Jewish and not on Polish law, this re q u i red a great deal of

rabbinic expertise in Talmudic law and subsequent commentaries.

Rabbis were not just religious leaders; their legal rulings had far- re a c h-

ing economic and social consequences.

In Poland, the Talmud was not just a text to be studied. Because of

the special political organization of Polish Jewry, the Vaad used the

Talmud as a tool to adapt Jewish law to changing economic and

social circumstances. For example the Bible had forbidden Jews to

c h a rge interest. But one of Poland’s leading rabbis, Rabbi Menakehm

Mendel of Krakow, devised a re s o u rceful solution that did not formal-


ly violate traditional Jewish law but nonetheless took account of eco-

nomic re a l i t y. In 1603 the Vaad accepted this reasoning and appro v e d

the concept of the ‘heter isqua.’ The heter isqua allowed lending at

i n t e rest by setting up a formal business partnership between the cre d-

itor and the borro w e r. What was really interest was formally re g a rd e d

as a business expense. One might argue that the heter isqua was a

t r a n s p a rent attempt to circumvent Jewish law. But in fact, it was an

important example of the “vertical legitimization” that characterized

Ashkenazi Jewry. The Vaad and the rabbinical elite took the lead in

finding a balance between tradition and changing circ u m s t a n c e s ,

between religious discipline and the decisive economic self-interest of

the Jews in Poland.

The Vaad took the lead in other important economic matters. It came

up with a kind of Jewish bank check called the memre, a document

which a Jew signed and which could be cashed by a second and

even a third party. This gave Jews a tremendous commercial advan-

tage at a time when the roads were infested with bandits and carry-

ing cash was dangerous. The Vaad also enacted important legisla-

tion that regulated bankruptcies. This legislation was in keeping with

a cardinal principle of the Vaad: collective Jewish re s p o n s i b i l i t y.

Whatever a Jew did as an individual was the responsibility of the

e n t i re community. If a Jew cheated gentiles, or used bankruptcy to

avoid paying debts, that might reflect badly on the entire communi-

ty-and re q u i red the attention of the Vaad. By the same token, in an

e ffort to avoid excuses for anti Jewish feeling, the Vaad re p e a t e d l y

passed laws that forbade Jewish women from wearing too much

jewelry on major holidays.

Jews defied the kehilla and the Vaad at their own peril. The kehilla had

all kinds of sanctions to enforce discipline. It could levy fines or it could

o rder a recalcitrant Jew to be locked up in the ‘kune’ (the pillory). Often

the kune was located just outside the synagogue and the congre g a n t s

would spit on the malefactor as they passed by on their way to prayer.

Once in the 18th century Vilna, Abba of Hlusk visited the great sage

Reb Eliyahu, the Vilna Goen. In the course of the their conversation

Abba said things about Rashi, a major commentator on the Ta l m u d ,

that aroused the ire of his illustrious host.


I returned to my lodging. But scarcely had I crossed the threshold whentwo evil messengers who were waiting for me summoned me to appearb e f o re the heads of the kehilla and their law-court. I went and foundmyself facing seven gre y b e a rds adorned with praying shawls and phylac-teries. The one rose and from his seat said: “Art thou the one who scoffedand blasphemed against...our master Rashi of blessed memory?” I re p l i e d :“I neither scoffed nor slandered.” The he said to me: And what did thousay at the Goen’s” to which I replied : “I stated that the sages in questiondeviated in their explanations from the immediate sense (of the text).” Theold man thereupon made a sign with his hand, and the two henchmen ofthe evil one seized and led me out of the courtyard. Then I heard from thelips of the same old man the decision of the court, that on account ofdefaming the sages of olden times I was condemned to forty strokes, whichthe two myrmidons administered to me on the spot. But their rage was byno means assuaged by this, for then I was led to the threshold of the syna-gogue and my neck was enclosed within the iron rings attached to the wall,so as to expose me to the people, with a piece of paper on my head bearingthe words: “This man has been punished for scoffing at the words of ourholy teachers.” Everyone who came for that afternoon service stopped andcalled to me: “Traitor to Israel!” But even more: they spat nearly into myface , so that the spittle really flowed in streams. Thou knowest well thatVilna is not Berlin , and that the people there go to prayers in crowds.After the evening service was over, I was conducted outside the city andobliged to depart. (I. Cohen Vilna, 1943, pp224-225)

But the greatest sanction the kehilla could levy was the most dre a d e d

punishment of all: herem (excommunication). As the rabbi blew the

shofar and as the synagogue was illuminated by the dim light of black

candles, the decree was read out to the congregation. The guilty party

could not pray with other Jews. Jews could not visit him, do business

with him or allow their children to marry his. He was expelled from the

community and word of the herem was sent all over the Jewish world.

Today such a penalty would carry little weight. In those days, howev-

e r, herem was a catastrophe. There was a world of diff e re n c e

between the legal status of 17th century Polish Jews and American

Jews today. The latter are equal citizens of the United States. Their

Judaism is a voluntary act, and their synagogues are voluntary asso-

ciations of like-minded adults who choose to support and maintain

the institution.


But before the 19th century, certainly before the French and the

American revolutions, this concept of citizenship and legal equality was

practically unknown. One’s status and rights derived from the gro u p

into which one was born. Noblemen, members of guilds, peasants and

Jews, were all defined by the laws, customs and status of their gro u p .

By the same token, this pre modern society had little understanding of

“individual rights,” much less “individual autonomy.” Autonomy was

something granted by a political superior to a group or a corporation.

Towns, or guilds or universities — or Jewish communities — would

receive charters from a king that told them what they could and could

not do and how much they had to pay for the privilege.

And the individual? Today it is taken for granted that individuals have

a right to plan their own life and make their own choices. To d a y ’s col-

lege seniors weigh the pros and cons of graduate school, a long trip,

or a job in New York or San Francisco. In the 17th and 18th centuries,

in a time of scarcity and uncertainly, such luxuries did not exist. People

c o n f ronted too many dangers and the future was too uncertain.

Famine was a constant threat and would remain so in Europe well into

the middle of the nineteenth century. (The Irish Hunger occurred in

1846). Disease spared neither rich nor poor. The great German

philosopher Hegel and military thinker von Clausewitz both perished

in the savage cholera epidemic of 1831. Fire was a constant thre a t

and insurance was hard to come by. In a town of wooded houses,

one could never escape the fear that one’s house and possessions

w e re at the mercy of any drunk who turned over a lighted lantern. Wa r

was yet another calamity. In some areas of Germany, half the popu-

lation died during the Thirty Years Wa r. During the Khmelnitsky mas-

s a c res of 1648-1649 in southeastern Poland, entire Jewish towns

w e re slaughtered.

In a world of such uncertainty and danger, the individual needed the

g roup for whatever security and protection it could provide. One of the

worst disasters was to be expelled from the group, to find oneself

homeless and alone. In this context it was no wonder that here m

(excommunication) was such a dreaded penalty. Collective discipline

was the hallmark of European society and the Jews were no exception.


By modern standards the treatment that the Vilna kehilla meted out to

Abba of Hlusk was shocking. Compared to the norm elsewhere in

E u rope, Abba got off lightly. In Paris in 1762, during the heyday of the

F rench Enlightenment, the son of a Protestant, Jean Calas, was found

dead. Rumors flew that Calas had murd e red his son to prevent his

conversion to Catholicism. Calas was subject to brutal torture. Hot

lead was poured down his throat, his limbs were broken on the rack

and then he was strangled. This took place in one of the leading cities

of Europe just a generation before the French revolution.

The powers of the kehilles and the Vaad, there f o re, weighed heavily on

many Jews: the poor, rebels, those who crossed the entrenched oli-

g a rc h y. On the other hand this communal discipline did much to pre-

serve Jewish ethnic cohesion. As we shall see, when the Poles abol-

ished the Vaad in 1764, and when the Russians, Austrians and

Prussians abolished what was left of the kehilles in the 19th century,

Jews faced a new challenge. Without a kehilla to enforce internal dis-

cipline, what would hold Jews together?


V THE DECLINE OF THE POLISH S TAT E

As mentioned above, the Polish state was beset from all sides by

potential enemies. The very internal democracy that so pleased the

szlachta made it more difficult for Poland to respond to growing mili-

tary thre a t s .

These threats suddenly assumed crisis proportions in the middle of

the 17th century. The first crisis occurred in 1648 when Bogdan

Khmelnitsky led a massive attack of Cossacks and Ukrainian peas-

ants against Polish rule in the southeastern territories of the Republic.

The volatile mix of economic exploitation and religious diff e rence had

s t retched the relationship between the Polish landlords and the

Ukrainian peasants to the breaking point, and these same peasants

would have no mercy on the Jews, whom they saw as exploiters and

as Polish agents.

The Poles were unpre p a red for Khmelnitsky’s attack and one by one

key cities fell to his forces. When Khmelnitsky took a town, he would

m u rder the entire Jewish and Polish populations, most often after

cruel tortures. In some towns Jews and Poles fought side by side

against the common enemy. In others Poles surre n d e red to the

Cossacks and betrayed the Jews in the hope of receiving merc y

themselves. The massacres of 1648-49 were the first major trauma

s u ff e red by Polish Jewry. They devastated the Jewish communities

of the southeast. While previous claims of 100,000 Jewish victims

may have been too high, there is no doubt that scores of thousands

w e re killed.

No sooner than the Poles had finally defeated Khmelnitsky than

Swedes invaded Poland from the north. In 1654 and 1655 heavy

fighting devastated wide regions of the country and Jews suff e re d

f rom both Polish and Swedish troops. To make matters worse, Russia

invaded Poland from the East and inflicted heavy losses on the Jews

in the northeastern regions of the Republic.

These multiple disasters, which Poles called the Potop (the Flood) did

not deal a death-blow to the Republic. The Poles re c o v e red and

under King Jan Sobieski, they even sent a powerful army to re s c u e

Vienna from the Turks in 1683. But they were a harbinger of things to

come. Unless Poland could modernize her political system and con-

V. THE DECLINE OF THE POLISH STAT E 7 5

vince the szlachta to make some sacrifices for the common good, the

looming dangers from her neighbors would only increase.

The unrest of the mid 17th century had important long-term effects on

Polish Jewry. In many respects Polish Jewry showed surprising

resiliency from the calamities of the Khmelnitsky massacres and the

Swedish invasion. The population losses were rapidly made good

and the towns in the southeast were resettled. Many areas of the

country continued to enjoy economic stability.

But the crisis touched off political changes that would seriously aff e c t

the Polish Jews. One result of the wars was a sharp increase in pop-

ular religiosity among the urban Catholic population, who linked

P o l a n d ’s salvation to the intervention of the Vi rgin Mary. To d a y

Catholic Poland’s most important shrine is the Black Madonna of

Czestochowa, that commemorates the supposed intervention of the

Holy Mother in lifting the Swedish siege in 1655. The ultimate victo-

ries over the Orthodox Ukrainians and the Lutheran Swedes height-

ened the sense that there was a special, mystical link between Poland

and the Church and sharpened the suspicion of Jews as enemies and

potential traitors. The aftermath of the Potop saw a sharp increase in

accusations of desecration of the Host and blood libel.

The Polish government also increased the taxes that it demanded

f rom the Jewish population. Pre s s u re increased on the Vaad and the

kehilles to provide more money. Kehilles now began to borrow more

money from Polish nobles and from monasteries to meet their finan-

cial obligations. As the indebtedness of the kehilles gre w, so did their

dependence on the Polish nobility. To an ever greater extent, the

Jewish communal bodies began to lose their autonomy and inde-

pendence. Polish nobles began to interfere in the inner affairs of the

Jewish community. They used their influence to appoint rabbis and

pliant deputies. They also subverted kehilla powers that adversely

a ffected their own economic interests. As outside interference gre w,

a crisis of confidence arose within the Jewish community. The pre s-

tige of the rabbinate fell. In order to meet their growing financial obli-

gations kehilles raised taxes, and the poorer sections of the Jewish

community resented what they saw as the unfair exploitation of the

poor by the rich. In 1764 the Polish Sejm voted to abolish the Va a d

and take over the direct collection of the head tax from the kehilles.

The first partition of Poland was only eight years away.


VI UNDER NEW R U L E R S

Between 1772 and 1795 Russia Austria and Prussia carried out thre e

partitions of Poland; Poland disappeared from the map of Europe until

her re e m e rgence in 1918. During this fateful period, many Poles re a l-

ized the urgent need for reforms. But none of Poland’s neighbors had

much interest in giving Poland the chance to reform. The more likely it

seemed that the Poles would finally get their house in ord e r, the more

insistent her neighbors were in completing her destruction. In this they

had the collaboration of many key members of the Polish nobility, who

f e a red what internal reforms would do to their own power.

When Poland collapsed, she had the largest Jewish population in the

world, just over a million. The states that took over—Russia, Prussia

and Austria—were quite unpre p a red to deal with a Jewish population

of such magnitude. None had many Jews until they acquired these

Polish territories. Russia had kept Jews out. Prussia had ruthlessly

limited her Jewish population by enforcing a distinction between “use-

ful” Jews and others. Only a few “useful” Jews were allowed perma-

nent residence; the rest had to leave. Austria had a larger Jewish pop-

ulation, especially in Bohemia and Moravia but it too looked on Jews

with suspicion.

Complicating the new situation of the Polish Jews was the changing

political context climate produced by the Enlightenment. The fall of

the Polish Commonwealth seemed to offer eloquent proof that states

based on corporate privileges and autonomy could not survive. The

f u t u re belonged to states that could raise armies, mobilize re s o u rc e s

and channel the energies of the population to produce national power.

Centralized power would do away with the confusing system of cor-

porate privileges and separate laws based on caste and birth. In

Poland, the Jews had been a separate legal corporation. Now what

would their status be? The Enlightenment called for a modern and

e fficient state with uniform laws. Logic dictated that Jews would now

have to be treated just like anybody else. But political reality was

somewhat more complicated. Few Europeans wanted to give Jews

equal rights or improve their legal status. Jews were widely seen as

c rooked and dishonest. Many leading paragons of the Enlightenment

despised them. Vo l t a i re had little use for Jews, Kant and Hegel

believed that Judaism was an obsolete, fossilized religion that should

d i s a p p e a r. But it was also awkward to leave restrictions on Jews in

place. That risked undercutting the Enlightenment goal of a state

based on uniform and rational laws.

7 9VI. UNDER NEW RULERS

This tension between reason and emotion became quite appare n t

during the French Revolution. The Declaration of the Rights of Man,

issued by the National Assembly in August 1789, rejected diff e r-

ences between human beings based on birth or religion. But when

the National Assembly actually debated how to change the status of

F rench Jews, matters were not so simple. Many of the delegates did

not like Jews, especially the Ashkenazi Jews who lived mainly in

Alsace and who were seen as dishonest money lenders who exploit-

ed the peasantry. Proponents of emancipation agreed that Jews

w e re obnoxious but emphasized that equal rights would civilize

them in time. To be sure the Jews would have to pay a stiff price for

their equal status. They would have to give up their distinctive iden-

tity and become Frenchmen. As one delegate put it during the

debates on the matter, “to the Jews as individuals, everything. To the

Jews as a nation, nothing.” The Assembly compromised. The dele-

gates were quicker to bestow citizenship on the Sephardi Jews, who

w e re fewer in number and who supposedly more educated and

closer to European standards of morality. The Ashkenazi Jews of

Alsace had to wait a bit longer. Indeed, Napoleon later put them on

p robation. They would finally receive legal equality only after a ten

year probation period.

The states that took over the Polish Jews feared the Fre n c h

Revolution, but they were all ready to undertake major reforms, espe-

cially after Napoleon crushed their armies. Prussia and Austria moved

slowly towards legal emancipation of the Jews, a process that was

l a rgely completed by the middle of the 19th century. Russia, howev-

e r, pursued a much more confused policy.

In the space of just a few years, Russia went from having no Jews to

becoming the center of the largest Jewish population in the world.

Her rulers were totally unpre p a red for this new challenge. As we have

a l ready mentioned, Russia had feared the Jews for two major re a s o n s .

The first was religious. As head of the Russian Orthodox church, the

Tsar had to protect the religious foundations of his country, and the

Jews were arch-enemies.

The second reason was the Tsarist belief that the Jews posed a spe-

cial danger to the peasantry. The Russian peasant, they believed, was


a simple and vulnerable soul. Let the Jew loose in the Russian villages

and in no time all the peasants would fall prey to Jewish swindlers and

t a v e rnkeepers. The legal and social position of the Jews in the Polish

lands that Russia took over bolstered these Russian fears and anti-

Jewish prejudices. In Russia there had been nothing like the are n d a

system. There had been no shtetl. The Polish economic system,

based as it was on a close economic interrelationship between the

n o b i l i t y, the peasants and the Jews, struck the new Russian rulers as

being bizarre and dangerous. The Russian legal system had concep-

tualized a countryside of serfs and noblemen. There was no room for

Jews, especially for Jews who sold liquor to the peasants and took

their money.

But the Tsars were on the horns of a dilemma. On the one hand they

wanted to preserve the autocratic system and the legal code that

divided all subjects into diff e rent estates. On the other hand they

understood that Russia could remain an international power and a mil-

itary player only if she modernized. That meant that she had to build

schools, develop universities and open careers to talented individuals.

Could a modernizing society aff o rd to turn millions of its citizens into

p a r i a h s ?

From the very beginning, therefore, Russia’s Jewish policy was

marked by confusion and ambivalence and stamped by the innate

tension between the deep rooted anti-Semitism of Tsarist ideolo-

gy and the pragmatic demands of a modern state. At times,

Russia’s leaders tried to integrate the Jews into Russian society.

At other times they tried to isolate them. Quite often, they tried to

do both at the same time.

Catherine the Great established the Pale of Settlement in the late 18th

c e n t u r y. The Pale, which would remain in force until 1917, was the sin-

gle most important piece of Russian legislation that affected the Jews.

The Pale essentially confined the Jewish population to the pro v i n c e s

that had been part of Poland with certain additions in the southern

Ukraine. (Technically speaking, Congress Poland was not a part of the

Pale). By 1914 just under 95% of Russian Jewry would still be living

in the Pale, and a significant proportion of Russian Jews lived in towns

with a Jewish majority. Thus Russian law promoted the very aims that

VI. UNDER NEW RULERS 8 1

many Tsarist officials deplored. The Pale acted as a powerful deter-

rent to Jewish assimilation and acculturation, and ensured that the

m o d e rnization of Russian Jewry would not undercut Jewish national

consciousness. Galician Jews who lived under Hapsburg rule — such

as Sigmund Fre u d ’s parents —could easily move to Vienna and thro w

over Yiddish for German. In Russia the Freuds would have had a much

h a rder time.

Tsar Nicholas I who ruled from 1825-1855, epitomized many of the

fears and prejudices that marked Russian Jewish policy. As a young

man, he had taken a trip through the former Polish lands and he had

come to see Jews as a dangerous threat to Russian peasants. But

what should he do with the huge Jewish population that he inherited

f rom the Poles? Nicholas settled on a policy of forced modern i z a t i o n

that would break down the Jews’ determination to maintain their

national and religious identity. In 1844 he abolished what was left of

the Jewish communal autonomy inherited from Polish rule.

Another idea that Nicholas implemented was to use the savage disci-

pline of the army to turn the Jews into useful citizens and perhaps

even to force them to convert and become Russians. In 1827 he

issued the infamous Cantonists decree that ord e red the Jewish com-

munities to provide quotas of Jewish boys—aged 12 to 18—for the

Russian army. Young boys would be sent to special camps (cantons)

w h e re they would learn how to be good soldiers. If the Jewish com-

munities did not follow orders, then the leaders would bear personal

re s p o n s i b i l i t y. The government exempted the sons of the wealthy and

those who were studying in yeshivas. It was the poor that had to go.

The communities organized teams of catchers (khapers in Yiddish) to

kidnap poor children and hold them in jail until the recruiting serg e a n t s

would come to take them away. Khapers roamed the Pale and seized

poor children and even travelers who were far from home and had

nobody to protect them.

This was a savage decree that tore the Jewish community apart and

sparked deep resentments. Generations later Yiddish folk songs still

p reserved the bitterness and the anger of parents who felt betrayed

by their community’s leaders. Parents ran away with their children but

often they were hunted down.


One folk song lamented:1 2

Kleyne oyfelekh rayst men fun kheyder/ men tut zey on yevonishe kley-der/ undzere parneysim, undzere rabonim/ helfn nokh optsugebn zey fary e v o n i m

Little children are torn from their lessons/ and pressed into coats that havesoldiers buttons./ Our rabbis, are bigshots are in cahoots/ teaching our kidsto be re c r u i t s

Unlucky parents who lost their children knew that they would never

see them again. Military service in the Russian army was for 25 years!

To make matters worse, the term of service only began at the age of

eighteen. If a twelve year old entered the special camps for boys (the

cantons) then he served an extra six years before his term began.

Over 50,000 Jewish boys were torn away from their homes, their cul-

t u re and their language and sent as far away as central and eastern

Siberia. They marched there on foot and many died on the way. In his

memoirs, the great Russian revolutionary leader Alexander Herzen

re m e m b e red coming across a group of young Jewish boys who were

being marched east in a cold wind. The sergeant had taken them over

about 100 miles Herzen met them and complained that the “kids were

d ropping like flies.”

This was one of the most frightening things that I saw in my life. Suchunlucky children! The twelve year olds were somehow hanging on, butthe younger ones, the eight year olds and the ten year olds-no pen will beable to describe this....Pale, tired, tortured they stood in their soldiers uni-forms with upturned collars and looked with imploring glances at therough soldiers who were arranging them in the ranks...

When the boys arrived at the military camps, they encountered

savage pressure to convert to orthodoxy. Many were beaten,

deprived of sleep, or subjected to hunger and thirst. Most boys

broke down eventually, but many did not. Jews were not the only

victims of this system, which Nicholas believed was helpful and

constructive. The sons of Polish noblemen who had been defeat-

ed in the Polish rebellion of 1831 were also herded into the army.

But the experience traumatized the Jewish community and alien-

ated them even further from their new masters.


Nicholas also tried to transform Russian Jewry through education. His

Minister of education recruited a German rabbi, Max Lilienthal, to set

up pro g ressive schools in Russia that would teach Jewish childre n

Russian. Hopefully they would also wean the Jews away from the

harmful Talmud that had turned the Jews into swindlers and cheats.

The government also set up two rabbinical seminaries in Vilna and

Zhitomir to train a new generation of “enlightened” rabbis who would

m o d e rnize the community. Few Jews were attracted to the scheme

and Lilienthal soon quit in disgust and emigrated to the United States.

The seminaries failed in their original purpose, but they still were to

have an important impact on Russian Jewry. They would became the

first incubators of the Russian speaking Jewish intelligentsia that

would become so important by the middle of the 19th century.

Nicholas believed that military coercion and strong, autocratic gov-

e rnment could solve Russia’s problems and protect her from re v o l u-

tion. This was the Tsar who sent troops into Hungary to crush a re v o-

lution in 1849. He had the young writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky endure

a staged encounter with a firing squad before a last-second re p r i e v e

commuted his sentence to ten years of hard labor in Siberia. His

crime? He belonged to a circle that read forbidden books.

But behind the façade of brute force and a huge military, Russia’s

economy stagnated. In the 1970’s, during another period of stagna-

tion masked by huge military parades, Russians would tell a joke

about the death of the Soviet leader Leonid Ilich Bre z h n e v. Bre z h n e v

dies, goes to hell and meets Nicholas I. Well, Nicholas asks, are we

still oppressing the Jews? Yes, Nikolai Pavlovich, they are as miser-

able as ever! Are we still putting intellectuals in mental hospitals?

A b s o l u t e l y, Nikolai Pavlovich! Are our troops still in Poland? Da! And

tell me, Leonid Ilich, is the vodka still 47%? No, Nikolai Pavlovich, it is

now 50%! At that point Tsar Nicholas hit Brezhnev in the face. Yo u

SOB! For a crummy three percent, did it pay to make a revolution?

During the last year of his reign, Russia fought and lost the Crimean

War against France and Britain. This humiliating defeat, in her own

b a c k y a rd, was a traumatic reminder that brute force and savage

re p ression did not make a nation strong. Like Mikhail Gorbachev

m o re than 100 years later, Nicholas successor, Alexander II, had to


think about “pere s t ro i k a ” reform that would address the root causes of

the nation’s weakness without endangering the autocratic system.

A l e x a n d e r, who reigned from 1855 to 1881, ushered in the era of the

“ G reat Reforms.” He emancipated the serfs, established trial by jury

for the non-peasant population, created important institutions of local

s e l f - g o v e rnment in the cities and the countryside and allowed the uni-

versities a greater degree of autonomy.

And what about the Jews? Like many enlighteners Alexander was

t o rn between a strong personal animus against Jews and the re a l i z a-

tion that persecution undercut wider attempts at social rationalization

and reform. Alexander did more than any other Russian Tsar to liber-

alize the status of Russian Jewry. He ended the cantonist decrees and

t h e reby earned the fervent gratitude of Russia’s three million Jews.

He encouraged Jews to receive a Russian education by allowing

Jewish graduates of Russian universities to leave the Pale and live in

the Russian interior. He also unlocked the gates of Russia proper for

wealthy Jews and skilled artisans. But when some of his advisors

u rged him to abolish the Pale completely, he balked. No, he said, the

time was not right. Someday perhaps, but not now.

Nevertheless Alexander’s reforms had far- reaching consequences for

Russian Jewry. For the first time many Russian Jews began to enter

Russian high schools and universities. As a percentage of the total

Russian-Jewish population, the number was miniscule-much less

than one percent. In absolute numbers, however, the growing Jewish

student population of the 1860’s and 1870’s laid the foundation for

some important changes: the rise of a Russian-speaking Jewish intel-

ligentsia, of lawyers and physicians and entre p reneurs; the establish-

ment, for the first time, of an important Jewish community in the cap-

ital city of Saint Petersburg; the beginning of an important Russian-

Jewish press-in the Russian language. Until this point, it was diff i c u l t

to speak of a “Russian Jewry.” The huge Jewish population that

Russia had inherited had really been a continuation of Polish Jewry.

And the vast majority — even after the reforms of Alexander II — con-

tinued to live in the Pale, speak Yiddish and live their lives accord i n g

to Orthodox Jewish law. But Alexander’s reforms set something new

in motion: the seeds of a new community that was committed to

bringing together Jewish and Russian culture.


In the 1860’s and 1870’s, optimism ran high in certain Jewish circ l e s .

As we shall see the reign of Alexander II was the high point of the

Russian Haskala, of an “enlightenment” that confidently predicted the

eventual integration of the Jews into Russian society. The gre a t

H e b rew poet, Yehuda Leib Gordon let his hopes soar in a famous

poem called “Awake My People.” In this poem Gordon expressed his

certainty that Russia and the Russian people were waiting to re c e i v e

the Jews with open arms. All the Jews had to do was re c i p ro c a t e :

l e a rn the Russian language, serve in the Russian army, learn a useful

trade and trust in their new fatherland.

But this optimism turned out to be pre m a t u re. While the 1850’s and

1 8 6 0 ’s saw the virtual completion of legal emancipation of the Jews in

Prussia and the Hapsburg Empire, in Russia the process re m a i n e d

unfinished. While Alexander was more liberal in his Jewish policy than

any other Ts a r, his instincts kept pulling him back. The upsurge of the

Russian revolutionary movement in the 1870’s also made him more

cautious. One example of his growing ambivalence was his insistence

that when cities elected new municipal councils, no more than one

t h i rd of the delegates could be Jews.

If Alexander had stayed alive, then perhaps the fate of Russian Jewry

might have been diff e rent. Perhaps he would have overcome his pre j-

udices and reverted to his policy of pro g ressive reform. But on Marc h

1, 1881 a group of dedicated terrorists from the revolutionary org a n i-

zation “The People’s Will”(Narodnaya Volya) assassinated Alexander

II, just as he was about to sign a document that would have liberalized

R u s s i a ’s government. Russia — and Russian Jewry — were now

about to enter a new era. Immediately after the assassination of

Alexander II, rumors spread like wildfire through the southern Ukraine

that Jews were responsible. As a result during 1881 and 1882 a wave

of anti-Jewish riots, pogroms, swept through the south. Many Jews

w e re wounded and there was widespread property damage. As we

shall see, these pogroms would have fateful consequences, and 1881

would become a symbolic turning point in modern Jewish history.

A l e x a n d e r ’s son, Alexander III, was determined to undo the liberal

course set by his father. He had long believed that his father had re c k-

lessly endangered the very foundation of the Russian empire by his


reforms. As a symbol of what he intended to achieve, Alexander

o rd e red the building of a church, the Church of the Spilt Blood (Spas

Na Krovi), on the very spot where his father had been murd e red. The

C h u rch was built in the traditional Muscovite arc h i t e c t u re of the 17th

century with onion domes and cupolas and stood in jarring contrast

to the Imperial Saint Petersburg style: stately neo-classical stre e t s

built by Italian architects.

The stark confrontation in Saint Petersburg between the traditional

Russian church and the surrounding neighborhood was meant to

send a message. The new Tsar was determined to cancel his father’s

reforms. The new Tsar also reflected an ongoing tension between

legacy of Moscow and Saint Petersburg, between a nativist tradition

based on religion and a modern politics that saw the Tsar as the head

of modern empire rather than as a religious ruler. The Muscovite tra-

dition divided Russian society into traditional estates, where the

h e reditary nobility served the tsar and staffed the army and the civil

service. The Imperial tradition put more stress on the civil service and

allowed non-nobles to advance because of talent rather than birth.

The Muscovite tradition saw the nation as the personal property of the

Tsar who ensured the Russian orthodox character of the realm and

kept non-Russians from positions of power. The Imperial tradition

understood that in a multinational empire, non-Russians had to feel

that there was some opportunity for them. This tension between the

Muscovite and the Imperial traditions had important implications for

Russian Jews. The Muscovite tradition had despised them as dan-

g e rous outsiders and had sought to exclude them from Russia alto-

g e t h e r. The Imperial tradition was more ambivalent. While it denied

Jews full emancipation, it had grudgingly accepted the idea that

Russian education might make them into useful citizens that might

facilitate the economic development of the Empire.

Alexander III wanted to be consistent and firm; in fact his policies were

a jumble of contradictions. Thanks to Otto von Bismarck, there was

a powerful new neighbor on Russia’s western fro n t i e r, and Alexander

knew that he could not aff o rd the luxury of too much nostalgia for

onion domes and church choirs. Under his finance minister, Serg e i

Witte, Russia built railroads and new factories. It expanded its army

and even signed an alliance with a state that Alexander despised,


Republican France. The Ts a r ’s heart pushed one way, but his brain

told him that Russia had to modernize. When it came to Jews, how-

e v e r, the Tsar could try to follow his heart. Unlike the old Muscovite

Tsars, he could not expel the Jews. But he could treat them like dan-

g e rous and harmful enemies.

Russian Jewry quickly felt the impact of the new regime. Contrary to

what some historians had said, neither Alexander nor the Russian

g o v e rnment had organized the pogroms of 1881-82. But the anti-

Jewish riots had convinced Alexander that his instincts had been right.

The Jews were indeed bloodsuckers and parasites, and the peasants

f e a red and hated them. He would protect his native Russian people

f rom Jewish exploitation.

In May 1882, Alexander proclaimed the so-called May Laws. Now it

was not enough to confine most Russian Jews to the Pale. With the

May Laws, even much of the Pale was now off-limits! Jews in the Pale

could only live in legally recognized cities or towns: villages or rural

a reas were off limits. After all, Jews exploited the peasants and ruined

them with liquor and usury. The fate of hundreds of thousands of

Jews hinged on the legal diff e rence between a “town” and a “village.”

Often enormous bribes were necessary to persuade Russian off i c i a l s

to rule the right way. The May Laws were a major blow to the eco-

nomic status of Russian Jewry and forced many families into the

o v e rc rowded towns and cities. Brutal expulsions followed of many

Jews who had settled outside the Pale. In the dead of winter in 1891

the Russian police rounded up thousands of Moscow Jews and

shoved them into unheated trains for a trip back to the Pale.

But bigger shocks were to come. In 1886 Alexander III reversed a fun-

damental element of Russian Jewish policy by establishing strict quo-

tas on Jewish enrollments in high schools and higher educational

institutions. The quotas were set at 10% of overall enrollment in the

Pale, 3% in Moscow and Saint Petersburg and 5% in the rest of the

c o u n t r y. The effects of these quotas were even worse than the num-

bers indicated. In many towns of the Pale, the Jewish population

exceeded 80%, and there were very few Christians who could or

would send their children to high school, much less to a university. In

a bittersweet story by the great Yiddish writer Sholom Aleikhem, des-


perate Jewish parents bribed non-Jews to send their children to high

school so Jews could study as well. Needless to say, the Jewish par-

ents paid the tuition fees, not only for their children but for the non-

Jews as well.

No single Russian decree, with the exception of the law that estab-

lished the Pale, had a greater psychological impact on Russian Jewry

than this decision to limit Jewish access to education. Until this time,

Jews took some comfort from the fact that the State off e red them a

ray of hope, a way out. Even the hated Nicholas I had encouraged

Jews to get an education. High schools and universities opened

doors that would lead out of the Pale, to a career as a physician or an

a t t o rn e y. These doors now closed.

Russian Jewry responded to this perceived betrayal in a number of

ways. The reign of Alexander III marked the beginning of the mass

Jewish emigration from Eastern Europe to the United States and other

countries. Until the 1880’s most American Jews traced their origins to

Central Europe: Germany, Bohemia and Moravia. Beginning in the

1 8 8 0 ’s more and more Jewish immigrants began to arrive in the

United States from Eastern Europe. This migration turned into a flood

after the Russian Revolution of 1905 with its accompanying wave of

anti-Jewish riots. In 1906 alone, about 3000 Jews arrived in the US

each week! All in all, between 1881 and 1924, when the US closed its

doors, close to two million Jews would come to America from Eastern

E u rope.

As we shall see, the new assault on Russian Jewry also sparked a

psychological earthquake. Many Russian Jewish intellectuals who

had trusted Russia now felt betrayed and turned to a new political

activism. Some looked to Zionism, others to revolutionary socialism.

By the middle of the 1890’s a new vicious circle began to poison re l a-

tions between Jews and the Russian government. Young Jews,

e m b i t t e red and angry, began to stream into the Russian re v o l u t i o n a r y

movement. By 1900, Jews made up one third of all political arre s t e e s ,

although they constituted about 5% of the population. In turn, the

Tsar and many of his ministers became more convinced than ever that

the Jews were a dangerous enemy of the state and re p ressed them

even more .


When Alexander III died in 1894, some Jewish leaders hoped that his

son Nicholas II would revert to the liberalism of his grandfather. But

Nicholas had no intention of doing so. Egged on by his wife, the

E m p ress Alexandra, a German princess who converted to Russian

O r t h o d o x y, Nicholas was determined to protect Russia from the

Jewish menace. Nicholas was totally unpre p a red, psychologically

and intellectually, for the daunting tasks that he had to face. Just

when the Tsar faced these growing challenges at home, he stumbled

into a losing war with Japan in 1904. As Russian defeats mounted, the

country exploded in revolution. Many Russians wanted to turn Russia

into a democratic and a socialist republic. Many others feared change

and instinctively blamed Jews for the nation’s troubles.

For Russian Jewry a terrible consequence of this mounting social

u n rest was the re t u rn of pogroms that were more destructive than

e v e r. In 1903, just before the war but during a period of labor and

peasant unrest, a pogrom broke out in the Moldavian city of Kishinev

that claimed 43 lives. Mobs rampaged through the streets and loot-

ed Jewish pro p e r t y. Unlike the pogroms of 1881-82 this time the vio-

lence included sexual assaults on Jewish women and the horrible

mutilation of many victims. By the standards of Hitler and Stalin, the

Kishinev pogrom was hardly worth mentioning. But in 1903 the civi-

lized world reacted with outrage. There were more pogroms in 1904

and they reached a peak in October 1905. During the crisis of the

Revolution, when a general strike forced the government to the bre a k-

ing point and engulfed the country in a wave of violence and fear, hun-

d reds of pogroms broke out at the same time.

In just one week in mid-October 1905, 1500 Jewish lives were lost,

500 in Odessa alone. Rioters broke into Jewish homes and went fro m

room to room looking for victims. ( In Kiev a young, terrified Jewish

girl hid in a closet as thugs ransacked her family’s apartment. Her

name was Golda Meir, a future Prime Minister of Israel). In many

places Jews fought back and there were pitched battles between the

Jews and the enraged mob. Sometimes, though, local Russian mili-

tary units, many just back from the Far East, pitched in to help the riot-

ers. When they did, the Jews had little chance.


What caused these pogroms? For a long time most Jews believed

that the answer was simple: they were organized by the govern-

ment. In a peculiar way Jewish intellectuals took comfort from the

legend of state sponsorship, since that implied that a change in the

political system would also mean safety for the Jews. Today histor-

ical re s e a rch has established that while many pogroms were

encouraged by local authorities, they broke out in large part because

of a fateful convergence of popular anti-Semitism; widespread fear

caused by political crisis; economic disruption; and the anxieties of

local elites. Some pogroms were organized by military units. This is

what happened in Bialystok in 1906 and during much of the Russian

Civil War in 1918-1921.

T h e re was an ominous tendency for pogroms to escalate. In 1881-

1882 there was widespread property damage but little loss of life. In

1903 43 Jews died in Kishinev. In 1904-06 over 2000 Jews would die.

In the pogroms that accompanied the Russian civil war in 1918-1921

about 60,000 Jews died.

As political pre s s u res mounted on the Russian empire, Jews were

m o re and more likely to be caught in the political cro s s f i re between

m o n a rchists and revolutionaries in 1905, between the Russian and

the Austro-German armies in World War I, and between the Red

armies and their White Russian, Ukrainian and Polish enemies

between 1918 and 1921. Jews now came to symbolize the hated

“Other”: they could be killed because they were re v o l u t i o n a r i e s ,

because they were Communists, because they killed Christ,

because they were bourgeois exploiters, or simply because they had

p roperty that was worth stealing.

The defeat of the revolution of 1905 gave the Tsarist government a

new lease on life. While the wave of pogroms ebbed after 1906,

Russian Jewry got little relief on the political front. On the one hand

many important ministers in the Russian government understood that

Russia was paying a heavy price for its anti-Semitism and advocated

a gradual loosening of restrictions on Jews. But the Tsar thought oth-

erwise. He re g retted the concessions that he had made at the height

of the Revolution: elections to a parliament (Duma) and an easing of


restrictions on the press. Russia was far from being a democracy,

but it was no longer the autocratic state that it had been before 1905.

Pushed by his wife, the Tsar dreamed of reversing these concessions

and restoring a government that rested on the conservative nobility.

Blaming the Jews for much of the revolutionary turmoil, he consis-

tently vetoed all proposals to ease educational and residence re s t r i c-

tions on them. The Ts a r ’s real attitude toward the Jews surfaced in

1913 when a poor Jewish barber, Mendel Beilis, was arrested in Kiev

on a trumped up charge that he had kidnapped a Russian child and

had used his blood for ritual purposes. This revival of the old blood

libel shocked the world and embarrassed even many Russian con-

servatives. But Nicholas supported the trial. Even after a Russian jury

acquitted Beilis, the Tsar clung to his belief that Jews engaged in rit-

ual murd e r.

In its fight against the Jews the government had many allies. Many

Russian conservatives—especially influential newspaper editors like

Mikhail Katkov and Suvorin—sounded the alarm against a Jewish

assault on the Russian peasantry. As Jews began to enter the

Russian legal profession, many Russian lawyers feared and re s e n t e d

Jewish competition. Large numbers of Russian landowners joined the

g o v e rnment in linking the Jews to the revolutionary movement. Some

important Russian writers, like Anton Chekhov, betrayed in private

c o r respondence a distinct ambivalence towards Jews.

Jews also had their defenders within Russian society. Writers such as

Lev Tolstoy and Maxim Gorky condemned anti-Semitism as did the

major liberal party, the Kadets. The revolutionary movement also

attacked the persecution of the Jews. Nevertheless, many Russian

Jews questioned just how reliable these allies were. Some believed

that the too many liberals and revolutionaries did not give the fight for

Jewish rights the priority that it deserved. Many Jews played a pro m i-

nent role in the Kadet party and on the revolutionary left. But with

some important exceptions most of these Jews were quite assimilat-

ed and had few ties with the Jewish masses.

In short from the time that Russia acquired its Jews until the

Revolution of 1917, the “Jewish Question” never ceased to be a pro b-

lem for the Tsarist government, for Russian educated society and last


but not least, for the Jews themselves. Their institutions and culture

shaped by the particular circumstances of the Polish Commonwealth,

R u s s i a ’s Jews posed a challenge for a government that was torn by

conflicting priorities and by inconsistent principles. For Tsars and their

supporters who clung to the idyllic vision of a traditional society where

nobles and peasants rallied around the throne, the Jews symbolized

the disquieting threat of the outsider. Not only did they practice a re l i-

gion that defied Christianity. They were also seen as the agents of

m o d e rn i t y, of a ruthless capitalist system that threatened the very fab-

ric of the Russian social ord e r. The more political realities forc e d

Russia to modernize, the more the Tsars resented the Jews as the

very embodiment of a value system foreign to Russian culture.

The difficulties that the Jews encountered in the Russian empire stood

in glaring contrast to the pro g ress that they were making under

H a p s b u rg rule. During the partitions of Poland, Austria had inherited a

l a rge number of Jews when it took over the province of Galicia. At

first, these Polish Jews found Hapsburg rule tyrannical and re p re s s i v e ,

quite diff e rent from the conditions that they had known under the

Poles. The Emperor Joseph II, known for his Edict of Toleration issued

in 1781, was determined to force the Jews to become useful subjects,

whether they liked it or not. Unlike the Poles he would not allow the

Jews to remain a semi-autonomous estate within the state. He want-

ed to force them to get a European education, learn German and dro p

their medieval customs. After the revolutions of 1848, the political

position of Hapsburg Jewry rapidly improved, and the Jews achieved

full legal emancipation by the 1860’s. Unlike Russia, they encountere d

no educational restrictions. Galicia, the province with the larg e s t

Jewish population, suff e red from economic difficulties, but the Jews

felt that unlike their brothers across the bord e r, they at least enjoyed

full legal equality. Jews were mayors, judges, and civil servants. They

repaid Franz Jozef, the Hapsburg Empero r, with a loyalty and gratitude

and even gave him a Yiddish name, Froym Yosl.

But this devotion to the Hapsburg monarchy carried a price. The Jews

w e re the only non-territorial nationality in this multinational empire .

Many other nationalities hated the Hapsburgs and dreamed of estab-

lishing independent nation states. Naturally they saw the Jews as col-

laborators with a hated regime and as a serious obstacle to their own


national aspirations. Czechs, Hungarians, Poles and others looked on

the Jews with suspicion. But matters did not stop there. German

speaking Austria also became a hotbed of anti-Semitism, as many

Austrians began to accuse the dynasty of selling them out to the hated

Slavs and Jews. Once again, Jews were conspicuous for their sup-

port of a hated regime, and the heavy migration of Yiddish speaking

Jews from Galicia to Vienna inflamed hatreds further. It was this pre -

w a r, racist climate of German speaking Austria that nurtured Adolph

H i t l e r. Another Viennese Jew, Theodore Herzl, rejected the optimism

that most Jews still harbored and warned them that they would get

caught in the cro s s f i re of escalating national and social conflicts in

E u rope. The Jews’ best hope, Herzl argued was to create a Jewish

State in Palestine. In 1897 Herzl would call the First Zionist Congre s s

in Basel Switzerland.


VII MIGRAT I O NAND U R B A N I Z AT I O N

Escalating anti-Semitism in late 19th century Eastern Europe coincid-

ing with far reaching changes within the Jewish community. Many of

these changes reflected the impact of large scale migrations and of

rapid urbanization. Millions of Jews left Eastern Europe. Many other

left their shtetlekh for big cities like Wa r s a w, Lodz and Odessa. In

1825 Lodz had literally no more than a few thousand Jews. By 1914

the Jewish population approached 150,000*. Wa r s a w ’s Jewish pop-

ulation jumped from 40,000 in 1862 to 350,000 by the eve of Wo r l d

War I. Odessa became a major Jewish metropolis in the space of a

few decades. Cities like these lacked the collective memories and his-

torical traditions that marked older Jewish centers such as Vilna. But

their very newness gave them a raw energy and a vitality that encour-

aged the creation of a new Jewish urban culture and new kinds of

o rganizations and institutions.

What caused these large scale Jewish migrations? One major factor

was demographic growth. The skyrocketing Jewish population began

to outgrow the ability of the shtetl to provide an adequate social safe-

ty net for the poor. The shtetl itself found itself affected by major out-

side shocks. One pillar of the traditional shtetl economy, the Polish

n o b i l i t y, began to collapse after the abortive Polish insurrection of

1863. Especially in Belarussia and Lithuania, the Russian govern m e n t

began savage reprisals against the Polish nobles that had supported

the revolt. Another factor that affected many shtetlekh was the gro w t h

of railroads which began to undercut the shtetl’s role as a local eco-

nomic center. In the early twentieth century yet a new threat began to

loom over the shtetl: the rise of peasant cooperatives, often linked to

Ukrainian, Lithuanian and Polish national movements. These cooper-

atives also undercut the economic foundation of the shtetl as a link

between the peasantry and the wider economy.

The Jewish population in the Russian empire was expanding at a

rapid rate. In 1800 the empire had one million Jews; by 1900 that

number had grown to 5.5 million. If a poor shtetl family had five sons

and four daughters, what would they be able to? Traditionally the sons

of a poor shtetl Jew might enter the father’s trade or find an appre n-

ticeship with another craftsman. Daughters could work as servants in

the homes of the “nice Jews”, the sheyne Yidn, or find some piece-

work from a local contractor that they could do at home and help sup-

9 7VII. MIGRATION AND URBANIZAT I O N

plement the family income. When the time came for them to find a

husband, the community would help if their parents could not aff o rd a

d o w r y. Women from the better social strata would help poorer girls

find husbands and provide them with the basics for starting a house-

hold. This was the purpose of such societies as the hakhnoses kale.

But a shtetl could handle only so many people. At a certain point

demographic pre s s u re began to overwhelm the fragile safety net that

the shtetl had set up over the course of centuries.

But in the latter part of the nineteenth century new economic oppor-

tunities began to open up in the cities. Thanks in large part to Jewish

investment and entre p reneurship, new niches opened up in the

Russian economy for Jewish capital and for Jewish workers. Jews

took a major role in the development of many important industries.

Lodz became a major textile center that exported cloth and cheap

clothing to the Russian interior and even as far as Asia. Thanks to its

strategic location on key railway lines Warsaw became an important

center of light manufacturing and clothing. Bialystok and Gro d n o

became the site of important tobacco factories; Odessa burg e o n e d

into an important port city.

In the big cities, the face to face community and the safety nets of the

shtetl gave way to a totally new experience. Huge slums sprouted in

the Balut section of Lodz and in north Wa r s a w. In the famous Wa r s a w

c o u r t y a rds, the heyf, as many Jews lived in one multistory building as

in a large shtetl. In 1947 the noted Yiddish actor Abraham Te i t e l b a u m

published his memoirs of growing up in Warsaw: the book was enti-

tled Varshever Heyf, Warsaw Courtyards and traced his life through a

series of diff e rent courtyards. Each one was a world unto itself—with

tenements, workshops, synagogues and khedarim. In time of tro u b l e ,

the hoyf, with its massive gates imparted a sense of security. For a

small child there was the endless wonder of wandering around the

dozens of small workshops in each courtyard, or gaping at the wan-

dering magicians and acrobats, not to mention the fortune tellers who

trained white mice to pull out kvitlekh, Wa r s a w ’s answer to the

Chinese fortune cookie. From early in the morning peddlers and

craftsmen knife sharpeners, carpenters would yell for business. On

Shabbes there was a traditional society: gut shabes yideleh who

come in and collect food for the poor. But the Varshever heyf were not

only gut shabbes yidelekh.


The hustle and bustle of Warsaw was captured by the great Yi d d i s h

writer I.B. Singer in the introduction to his panoramic novel, The Family

M u s k a t :

The carriage turned into Grzybow Place and abruptly everything changed.The street was a bedlam of sound and activity. Street peddlers called outtheir wares in ear piercing chants-potato cakes, hot chick peas, Hungarianplums. Although the evening was warm the merchants wore outer coatswith huge leather money poaches hanging from the belts. Wine, wine,wine, shrieked a red faced red headed peddler displaying a basket ofspoiled grapes, Nab em grab em. Nuzzle em. Guzzle em. Buy em. Van vanvan koyfst loyfst, khaptz. In the middle of the street truckmen guided over-loaded wagons. The horses are making sparks on the cobblestones. Aporter wearing a hat with a brass badge carried an enormous basket of coalstrapped to his shoulders with a thick rope...A dwarf with an oversize headw a n d e red bout with a bundle of leather whips fanning the straps back andforth demonstrating how to whip stubborn children. Reb Meshulem:glanced out of his carriage: The Land of Israel, eh? Muskat’s new wife, aGalician widow, who had never been to Warsaw before gaped in disbelief.What a foreign country.

In these big new city slums the underworld and the pimps were a con-

stant problem. Te i t e l b a u m ’s mother was forced to close down her

restaurant rather than see it taken over by Jewish gangsters. In 1905,

at the height of the revolution, Jewish workers used opportunity

a ff o rded by temporary anarchy to attack the brothels and thus clean

up their neighborhoods.

But as the Jewish world faced the pre s s u res of rapid modern i z a t i o n

the cities would nurture the new movements that would transform

Jewish life in the 20th century. In Warsaw emigration from Central

Poland and from Lithuania would bring together Jews from diff e re n t

b a c k g rounds and force a new urban society that would change the

shape of East European Jewry.

VII. MIGRATION AND URBANIZAT I O N 9 9

THE REVOLTAGAINST T R A D I T I O N A LS O C I E T Y:HASIDISM AND THEH A S K A L A

VIII

Even before the collapse of the Polish Commonwealth, two powerful

movements began to undermine the foundations of traditional Jewish

s o c i e t y. One, Hasidism was a movement of religious revival. The other,

the Haskala, wanted a Jewish Enlightenment that would pave the way

for the integration of the Jews into European society. In many ways

Hasidism and the Haskala were polar opposites. One looked inward

and tried to redefine the Jewish religious experience with joyous

p r a y e r, enchanting melodies and the leadership of charismatic re b b e s ,

who would guide their flock and help them come closer to mystic

communion with God. The other looked outward, towards a Euro p e a n

c u l t u re that was supposed to welcome Jews who cast off their dis-

tinctive dress, abandoned their Yiddish speech and educated their

c h i l d ren to become cultured Europeans.

But despite the glaring diff e rences between the two movements,

they had one important point in common. They both served to

undermine the traditional Jewish society that had taken root in the

Polish Commonwealth by challenging its authority structure and

basic values.

1 / HASIDISM

When we think of the history of east European Jewry, we usually

associate the word “revolution” with secular movements, while the

religious world often conjures up images of rigid conservatism and

s t u b b o rn adherence to tradition. But in fact the rise of Hasidism in the

18th century was a revolution that took place within the world of re l i-

gious Jewry. Within a few years after its birth in the wild mountain

country of the Carpathians, it spread like wildfire through most of

E a s t e rn Europe. Hasidism challenged traditional Jewish society in

almost every important respect. In place of the communal authority of

the rabbi, it championed the charismatic authority of a new re l i g i o u s

l e a d e r, the tsadik or rebbe. Hasidism also questioned a major pillar

of the established value system: the primacy of Talmud study. Without

a pure heart and religious devotion, the Hasidim charged, Ta l m u d

study meant little. Hasidism preached a message that was happy and

optimistic. Any Jew—poor or rich—could come closer to God. God

VIII. THE REVOLT AGAINST TRADITIONAL SOCIETY: HASIDISM AND THE HASKALA 1 0 3

was everywhere, and that in itself was enough reason for a Jew to be

h a p p y. Joy, not sadness, could turn a prayer into a bridge between

the Jewish soul and the heavens. To walk along that bridge one need-

ed faith, a song-and the help of a rebbe.

Hasidism unleashed the latent power and driving spirit of the Jewish

religion. From its very beginnings it was a force that drew its energ y

not only from the vital traditions of Jewish mysticism but also from the

very landscapes and folkways of Eastern Europe. Hasidim re s p e c t e d

the folk wisdom of both simple Jews and simple peasants. Over time

Hasidic folklore absorbed peasant songs and peasant pro v e r b s .

Many Hasidic songs were “macaronic,” a mixture of Hebre w, Yi d d i s h

and either Polish, Ukrainian or Belarussian. Hasidic culture valued

story-telling: stories about the wonderful deeds of the rebbes, about

how ordinary Jews overcame their troubles and found happiness,

even about how gentiles sought out rebbes and came away dazzled

and impressed.

Deeply rooted in the traditions of Jewish mysticism, the Hasidic

movement arose at a time of crisis in Jewish life. The bitter wounds

inflicted by the Khmelnitsky massacres and the Swedish invasions

had not yet healed. Yet another source of pain and grief for Jews was

the traumatic episode of the false messiah, Sabbatai Tsvi. Sabbatai

Tsvi was a Jew from Smyrna with a talented “publicity agent,” Nathan

of Gaza. Nathan put out the word that Sabbatai was the messiah who

would lead the Jews to Palestine. In 1665 this mania spread like wild-

f i re through many Jewish communities, and many Jews, convinced

that they were about to go to Palestine, sold their homes. Hopes ran

high until they learned a short time later that the Turkish Sultan had

given the “messiah” a choice between conversion to Islam and exe-

cution-and Sabbatai chose Islam. The humiliation left deep scars.

To compound the problems of Polish Jewry, the kehilles and the

Vaad faced growing financial difficulties. Debts to Polish nobles and

even to the Catholic church mounted. Poorer Jews resented the

g rowing tax burden imposed on them by their own leadership. To

make matters worse the prestige of the rabbinate steadily declined,

especially since Polish nobles began to interfere more frequently in

the appointment of rabbis.

THE DISTINCTIVE LIFE OF EAST EUROPEAN JEWRY1 0 4

The legendary founder of the hasidic movement is the Baal Shem To v,

or the B E S H T, (1700-1760). The real name of the B E S H T was Reb

Israel, who was born in a remote area of the Carpathian mountains.

He wrote nothing himself; what we know about him are the stories and

legends collected by his followers after his death (Pirke ha B E S H T) .

Lately scholars such as Professor Moshe Rosman of Israel have found

important material about the B E S H T in the Polish archives that chal-

lenge previous opinions about his poverty and “outsider” status.

While many particulars of the B E S H T’s life are still shrouded in mys-

t e r y, one thing is clear: he was one of the most important figures in

m o d e rn Jewish history. He changed the face of East European Jewry.

Reb Israel was orphaned at an early age and spent many years in

lowly occupations. After he married, his wife tended a tavern while

Reb Israel roamed the mountains, sang and studied. In time he began

to acquire a reputation as a Baal Shem, a combination healer and psy-

chiatrist who could cure physical and mental ailments with herbs,

amulets or even a good talk. Both Jews and non-Jews went to see

Reb Israel, and stories about him began to spread.

A typical and well-known story concerned an incident that occurre d

on Yom Kippur. A Jew from an outlying village came to the shtetl with

his son to pray. The boy listened in awe as all the other Jews prayed,

but he himself could not read Hebrew and could not follow the

prayers. But then he had an idea. He pulled out a shepherd ’s flute fro m

his pocket and began to play the flute and whistle. All the other Jews

w e re horrified and demanded that the father throw his son out of the

synagogue. But the Baal Shem Tov smiled. “Until now,” he said, “ I

believed that our prayers were not reaching God. But this young boy’s

playing was so beautiful and so sincere that it brought all of our

prayers right to God.”

What mattered was not just prayer. Even more important was the

heart of the worshipper. As Joseph Telushkin and other scholars have

pointed out, the BESHT particularly valued a statement in the Ta l m u d

that said “God desires the heart”(Sanhedrin 106b). One could be a

master of Talmud, but without sincerity and a pure heart, what did all

that learning matter?


A round 1745 the BESHT settled in Miedzybozh in eastern Poland and

began to attract many followers, who would come to listen to his sto-

ries and parables. He would tell them about his famous mystical

visions and captivate his listeners with beautiful tales full of optimism

and hope that anyone could find God. The world was a good place,

a c c o rding to the BESHT, and Jews should be happy. As it was written

in Isaiah, “The whole world is full of his glory.” If that was so, then what

was wrong with experiencing the pleasures of life?

One of the BESHT’s many followers was Dov Ber of Mezritch. Dov

Ber had spent many years in a deep depression, which lifted when he

finally journeyed to see the BESHT. The BESHT explained to him that

one did not serve the Lord with sadness and deprivation but with glad-

ness and with joy in life. Dov Ber stayed in Miedzybozh, and when the

BESHT died in 1760, Dov Ber became the “organizer” of the Hasidic

movement. Although the BESHT had a son, it was Dov Ber who took

over the mantle of leadership and gave it structure. He gathered many

disciples, who would journey long distances to celebrate the Sabbath

and holidays with him. Dov Ber’s disciples formed the so-called “third

generation,” and they fanned out to almost all corners of Eastern

E u rope to found many new Hasidic dynasties. Some, like Habad, have

continued to this day.

The two central ideas of Hasidism were “dvekus” and the role of the

“tsaddik.” Dvekus, communion with God, was what every Jew could

find. But how? To achieve dvekus, early Hasidism advocated far

reaching reappraisals of the Jewish value system. While traditional

Jewish society esteemed Talmud study, early Hasidism stressed the

importance of prayer. Prayer had to be performed with intense devo-

tion (kavanna). And if one were not in the mood? Then there was

nothing wrong with dancing and singing, especially of wordless tunes

( n i g g u n i m ). Even handstands and somersaults served a purpose!

With other Hasidim one would chant the niggunim, over and over

again, dance together in a human chain, and slowly feel one’s soul

moving higher and higher.

To achieve dvekus, it was helpful to find a tsaddik (holy man) who

could serve both as a spiritual and as a practical mentor. The new fig-

u re of the tsaddik was one of the major innovations of Hasidism and


d i rectly challenged the existing authority structure of traditional Jewish

s o c i e t y. The tsaddik, or rebbe, was totally diff e rent from the rabbi, who

played such an important role in traditional Jewish life. The tsaddik

derived his power not from appointment or political pull but fro m

charisma and innate religious power. The tsaddik was tough enough

to look evil in the eye and descend to the dangerous regions of the

netherworld to redeem sparks of holiness trapped in the husks of

worldly frustration and imperfection. But he was also capable of

miraculous feats of spiritual ascent. Hasidim would exchange stories

about the wonders that only their own rebbe could bring about. Later

on opponents of the Hasidim would compose biting songs that lam-

pooned the faith Hasidism had in their rebbe. In one song a Hasid

hears an amazing story of a steamship that can cross the ocean in six

days. That’s nothing, the Hasid answers. All our rebbe has to do is

s p read out his handkerchief, and he can cross the entire ocean!

Within a few decades after the death of the Baal Shem To v, Hasidism

had become a real movement. By 1780 an important book, To l d o s

Yakov Yosef, written by Jacob Joseph of Pollone, laid out the Hasidic

doctrine. The Jewish people was in crisis, Rabbi Jacob Joseph

w a rned, and the people needed the help of the Tsaddikim. The new

movement also sparked fierce opposition. Opponents— misnagdim,

as they were called in Hebrew—hurled many charges at the Hasidim.

The liquor and dancing and even handstands and summersaults that

marked Hasidic prayer undercut communal discipline and the author-

ity of the kehilla. In their fanatic loyalty to rebbes and in their craving

for instant religious gratification, the Hasidism angered many rabbis

who still re m e m b e red the Sabbatai Tsvi mania. But except for

Lithuania, Hasidism continued to spread.

Many Jewish historians have sought to define the exact causes of

Hasidic revolution and to pinpoint its significance for Jewish history.

One of the greatest 19th century historians, the German Jewish schol-

ar Heinrich Graetz, treated Hasidism with contempt. In his view it was

a confusing mish-mash of incoherent superstition. Graetz, however,

did not have a high opinion of the intellectual stature of East Euro p e a n

J e w r y. What else, Graetz implied, could one expect from backward

Jews who spoke a deformed language-Yiddish. Marxists saw

Hasidism as a revolt of the poor against the rich, but recent scholar-

ship, such as the pioneering work of Moshe Rosman, does not bear


this out. Other historians, such as Simon Dubnow, distinguished

between a creative early period of the movement and a later period,

when too many rebbes presided over lavish courts where an unend-

ing stream of followers would shower them with money in exchange

for blessings and other hocus-pocus. Dubnow saw the early, “posi-

tive” period of Hasidism as a struggle for individual liberation from the

o p p ressive discipline of the kehilles and their ossified religious stric-

t u res. But here too modern scholarship questions this thesis: some

kehilles were quick to leap on the hasidic bandwagon. Gerschom

Scholem, the great scholar of Jewish mysticism, stressed hasidism’s

role in neutralizing the dangerous energy latent in the Jewish hope for

a messiah. The Sabbatai Tsvi debacle served as a chilling re m i n d e r

that false messiahs could cause terrible injury to the entire nation.

What Hassidism did, Scholem argued, was to channel this energy in

a less harmful direction. Instead of following false messiahs to

Palestine, Hasidim now traveled to their rebbes in nearby towns and

thus focused their energies into less dangerous pursuits.

In time dozens of diff e rent rebbes preached the hasidic message and

the movement adopted quite diverse approaches to Judaism. While

some rebbes continued to downplay the importance of Talmud study,

others, such as the rebbes of Lubavich and Ger, re s t o red the primacy

of Talmud scholarship for their followers. Some rebbes acquired a par-

ticular reputation as special souls who loved the Jewish people. One

such rebbe was Levi Yitshok of Berd i c h e v, who never hesitated to take

on God himself and ask him why he let the Jewish people suffer:

“Reb Levi Yitshok reproached God by saying that He did not obey thelaws that He himself had drafted. ‘Woe, woe,’, Reb Levi Yitzchak sighed,‘if a simple average Jew drops his tefillin (phylacteries), he quickly bendsdown and kisses them. He is terribly distressed and fasts. And You, Masterof the Universe, for eighteen hundred years Your own tefillin, wherein itis written that you love your people Israel, have been lying around in thedirtiest mud, shamed and mocked. How can you do this?” 1 3

Others, like Menakhem Mendel of Kotzk, would chase his followers

away and demand that they wrestle with their own problems. Some

rebbes, like the Chortkover were known for their lavish courts, main-

tained in high style by wealthy followers. Yet other rebbes lived in

p o v e r t y.


Hasidism transformed the life of East European Jewry in many ways.

Now a Jew had two families: his natural family and his hasidic fam-

i l y. “Forn” — travelling to the rebbe— now became an integral part

of the hasid’s life. One tried to visit the rebbe for major Jewish holi-

days and if one could, even for an ordinary Sabbath. One also went

to see the rebbe for advice and blessing on any important family

matter: a business decision or the marriage of a child. Quite often

wealthy Jews would make the rebbe a silent business partner, just

to bring good luck.

On the way to their rebbe, whether in a train, a wagon or by foot,

Hasidim would sing and tell stories. When they finally arrived, they

might stay for days. Hordes of Hasidim would gather together, strain

to hear the re b b e ’s words of wisdom or grab some scraps of food

f rom his table. The table, or “tish” became another focal point of

Hasidic life, the symbolic point of contact between the rebbe and his

followers. Imagine the town of Ger on the eve of the Jewish New Ye a r

in 1938. 80,000 Gerer Hasidim piled into the shtetl to hear the Gere r

Rebbe blow the shofar (the ram’s horn). And this was only a small frac-

tion of the Gerer Hasidim who lived in Poland. When Hasidim did not

leave town to be with their rebbe, they would pray in their own little

synagogue (shtibl), where they would sing their own tunes and dance

their special dances (rikudim). Today El Al, Israel’s national airline,

charters many flights to carry thousands of Bratslaver Hasidism to the

Ukrainian town of Uman, where they pray at the grave of their 18th

century rebbe, Reb Nakhman of Bratslav.

Hasidism had an enormous impact on the religious, social and cul-

tural history of East European Jewry. It off e red a meaningful and

intense religious experience to the entire spectrum of the Jewish com-

m u n i t y, from the very rich to the very poor. It was not true that

Hasidism was simply a folksy revivalism that peddled a cheerful mes-

sage of song and love. There was a great deal of complex and cre-

ative theology in Hasidism, and many rebbes built on the traditions of

Jewish mysticism to write intricate and subtle religious works. But the

new creed could reach out to all segments of the people. It created a

warm community and a sense that the individual Jew was not alone.

It provided a powerful underc u r rent of optimism: any Jew could

achieve dvekus. With a little help, he could get closer to God.

Hasidism was indeed a religion that off e red happiness.


T h e re is no question, though, that it often had a negative effect on

family life. The movement made little effort to include women, and

wives were not happy to see their husbands leave them on the eve of

important holidays. At the beginning of I.J Singer’s great novel, the

B rothers Ashkenazi, the family patriarch is about to leave his wife to

consult with his rebbe. Unfortunately, his wife was about to give birth!

Solomon Maimon recalled a visit to Dov Ber of Mezritch. One of the

Hasidim came late because his wife had just given birth to a girl.

Everyone began to make a lot of noise and congratulated their friend. Butwhen Dov Ber found out that the new child was a girl, he nature d l yremarked that “he ought to be whipped.” The poor fellow protested. Hecould not comprehend why he should be made to suffer for this wife hav-ing brought a girl into the world. But this was of no avail: he was seized,thrown down on the floor and whipped unmercifully. All except the vic-tim fell into a hilarious mood over the affair, upon which (Dov Ber) calledthem to prayer in the following words, “Now bre t h ren, serve the Lordwith gladness!”

But the hasidic movement had many positive consequences that

went far beyond religion. One key area where Hasidism made a

major impact was in the development of Yiddish culture. Hasidim

cherished the genre of storytelling and they loved the language of

the simple people: Yiddish. The key role of singing in the Hasidic

s u b - c u l t u re indirectly encouraged the popularity of Yiddish music.

The important Yiddish writer Y.L. Peretz used Hasidic themes as a

major element of his work.

Hasidism certainly contributed to the growing cultural diff e re n c e s

between Lithuanian Jews, who were mostly untouched by Hasidism,

and Jews in Poland, Galicia and the Ukraine who were more aff e c t e d

by the new movement.14 In more modern times, humorous re f e re n c e s

to the rivalry between “Litvaks”(Lithuanian Jews) and Galitsianers (all

the rest) have become a staple of the Yiddish comedy circuit. Polish

Jews liked to joke that they saw a policemen take away two Jews and

a Litvak. They would call Litvaks ‘tseylem kep’ (people with crucifixes

on their foreheads), a re f e rence to the alleged religious laxity of the

Lithuanian Jews. “You don’t have to kiss me in the forehead,” Litvaks

would cheerfully, and lewdly, re p l y. These diff e rences stemmed in part

f rom the diff e rent dialects of Yiddish these Jews spoke. But more


important was the impact or the absence of the Hasidic imprint on the

local Jewish culture. These diff e rences affected dress, values and in

an indirect fashion, intellectual receptiveness to modern influences

and secular learning.

It is only a tiny bit of a exaggeration to say that one man stood at the

Lithuanian border and barred the gates to the surging hasidic move-

ment, Reb Eliyahu, the Vilna Goen (Genius). In the great symbolic

c o n f rontation between the two great giants of 18th century — the

Baal Shem Tov and the Vilna Goen — it was the Vilna Goen who

determined as much as any single person the cultural future of

Lithuanian Jewry.

Both the Baal Shem Tov and the Goen confronted a deep crisis of

18th century Polish Jewry: a crisis of authority, a crisis of morale, a

g rowing sense that the religious and social elite had failed the test.

Hasidism met the crisis by offering a new kind of religious experience

and a new kind of authority, charismatic authority. The Goen also

o ff e red an alternative to the traditional value system-but in quite a dif-

f e rent way. Instead of offering the tsaddik as a charismatic re p l a c e-

ment for failing communal authority, the Vilna Goen off e red the charis-

ma of disinterested study. In other words the Goen countered the

“personal charisma” of Hasidism with the “impersonal charisma” of

duty and study (Nadler, Mishkinsky). Unlike the early Hasidim who

attacked the excessive role of Talmud study in Jewish society, the

Vilna Goen redefined its context and significance. In the process he

recast the way students studied the Talmud. The search for plain tex-

tual meaning and understanding was far more important than pilpul,

the arid mental gymnastics that had more to do with the ego of the

scholar than with the service of God. Talmud once again should be

an end in itself, not a means to an end. To understand the Talmud bet-

t e r, the Vilna Goen even encouraged the study of mathematics and

a s t ro n o m y. Study yes, adoration of a tsaddik, no! The Vilna Goen

fought Hasidism tooth and nail. When Shneur Zalmen of Lyadi, the

founder of the Chabad dynasty tried to see him, the Goen refused.

When the Vilna Goen dug in his heels and declared war on the

Hasidim, the rest of Lithuanian Jewry listened. His prestige was enor-

mous. Born in 1720, the Goen supposedly memorized several trac-


tates of the Talmud by the time he was six. It was widely believed that

he slept no more than two hours a night. He refused all offers of pub-

lic office and contented himself with a tiny stipend from the kehilla.

When a kehilla employee began to embezzle part of his stipend, rather

than shame him publicly the Goen kept quiet and sold his furn i t u re to

survive. There was story that as he walked through the streets, chil-

d ren followed him chanting der Vilner Goen, der Vilner Goen. And he

t u rned around and replied to one of the children: ‘vil nor vest oykh

zayn a goen’( if you only want to badly enough, you can become a

goen as well. ) ‘Vil nor’ for the Vilna Jews equalled Vilna: That story

became the story of their city: Vil nor: will power, diligence, stick to it

tiveness. Rely on yourself. Let the Polish Jews, the Hasidim, dance,

sing and rum after their miracle re b b e s !

After his death the Goen’s sons wrote an admiring biography where

they told a story about Reb Eliyahu’s favorite son, Shlomo Zalmen,

became very sick at the age of six. Nevertheless the Goen continued

to take long walks to think about the Talmud.

T h e re (in this secluded study spot) the springs of nature were dammed

up to the point that he forgot his house and his children for more than

a month. Once he went to the bath house and since, as it is known,

it is forbidden to meditate on the Torah there, he began to think about

personal matters and in this way he re m e m b e red that he had been

away from home for more than a month. And he also re m e m b e red his

beloved son who was lying on his sick bed. (At once) his compassion

was aroused and he ord e red his carriage pre p a red to take him home

so that he could seek after his son’s welfare .1 5

This incident, retold by his sons, was meant to show the Goen in a

good light! He was so engrossed in study that he even forgot about

his own childre n !

As if the sheer force of his personality was not enough, the Vilna Goen

shaped the future of Lithuanian Jewry through one of his disciples,

Reb Khaim Vo l o z h i n e r. To combat Hasidism and the beginning thre a t

of the Jewish Enlightenment, Khayim went to the small town of

Volozhin to found, in 1802, one of the most important and crucial insti-

tutions in east European Jewish history: the Volozhin Yeshiva. This


yeshiva became a prototype for the famous Lithuanian yeshivas of the

19th and 20th centuries: Slobodka, Telz, Mir, Novaredok and Lida.

These yeshivas formed the Lithuanian Jewish elite. As we have seen,

yeshivas had existed since the beginning of Polish Jewry, but Vo l o z h i n

was a new kind of institution. Yeshivas had traditionally been com-

munal institutions. The Volozhin yeshiva founded by Reb Khaim was

an independent institution that raised its own money, had its own

leadership and housed students in its own dormitories. The ro s h

yeshiva, the rabbi who headed the yeshiva, served as a combination

development dire c t o r, admissions off i c e r, professor and moral tutor.

Working under the rosh yeshiva’s supervision were many teachers

(mashgikhim) who helped maintain academic standards and just as

important, supervised the students’ moral development. The new

Lithuanian yeshivas in Volozhin, Slobodka, Mir and other towns

became the incubators of a new Jewish intellectual aristocracy,

O r t h o d o x y ’s answer to the challenge of modernity and the Jewish

enlightenment.

If Hasidism had the tsadik stretching out a helping hand to his flock,

Lithuanian yidishkayt (Jewishness) stressed the doctrine of individual

responsibility and accountability. Hasidism was optimistic that a Jew

could attain dvekus. The Lithuanian misnagdic tradition, as Allan

Nadler points out, was skeptical. Dvekus and religious exaltation

might not be attainable anytime soon. But in the meantime a Jew had

to pray, study Torah, examine his character and do his best. For

Khaim Vo l o z h i n e r, the concept of individual responsibility for his own

development was so central that once he even complained about the

Friday night hymn ‘Sholom Aleikhem,’ where Jews welcomed angels

into the Sabbath home. “Why should we ask angels to bless us? Why

a re we asking angels to help us? Don’t we have our own strength?”

Another Lithuanian Rabbi, Israel Salanter transformed this concept of

individual responsibility into a powerful movement that made

Lithuanian Jewishness even more distinctive. Salanter was an

e x t r a o rdinary man and there were many stories about his good deeds.

Once, on his way to Kol Nidre, the solemn service that began the Day

of Atonement, Salanter heard a crying baby. The mother had left the

infant asleep and had gone to the synagogue. Rather than go to the

synagogue, Salanter stayed with the child.


Salanter brought together the search for religious meaning and the

m o d e rn concept of behavior modification. How can we be really pure

if we are the prisoners of quite natural desires for material and sensu-

al gratification? The individual had to train himself to overcome the

yetser hora (evil impulse) in the same way that an animal trainer trained

an animal. The key was constant study augmented by repetition and

e x e rcises that tamed ones ego and taught humility. One always had

to root out negiah, the indulgent self-interest that poisoned even the

p u rest religious actions. Salanter stimulated a new movement, Musar

(morals) that spread through many of the Lithuanian yeshivas. In the

musar yeshivas, the teachers always pushed students to ask each

other what their real motives were. We re they studying Torah for its

own sake? Or were they doing it to impress their friends? Students

w e re told to always consider the consequences of their actions. If a

Jew went to the synagogue to pray early, but woke the maid and told

her to have breakfast ready when he re t u rned, then the command-

ment was worth little. In musar there was an unending dialectic. One

could never sit back and relax. One always had to question one’s own

motives. According to one Musar text, “The Maskilim (enlighteners)

say ‘know the world.’ The Hasidim say ‘know God.’ The scholars say

‘know the Torah.’ The musar movement says, ‘know yourself’.”

H a s i d i s m ’s failure to penetrate Lithuania (with the partial exception of

Khabad) helped determine that re g i o n ’s future as a crucible of a mod-

e rn Jewish culture that could blend religious and secular values. For

w h e re Hasidism took hold the charismatic rebbes and their followers

built miniworlds that shut out secular education and modern culture .

The great hasidic courts also acted as an effective barrier between the

Jewish intelligentsia and the Jewish masses. A Polish speaking

Jewish doctor felt that he had little in common with ordinary Jews who

ran around in hasidic garb and told hysterical stories about the mira-

cles that their rebbe performed. In Lithuania, however, the gap

between the intelligentsia and the masses was not as great. It was

easier for even a religious Jew to make his own decisions about how

to blend traditional and modern culture. It was Lithuania that became

the center of the Haskala, the Jewish Enlightenment.

In central Poland Jewish intellectuals in the 19th century were more

tempted by assimilation into a dominant gentile-Polish-culture than


they were in Lithuania. In Jewish Lithuania most of the gentile popula-

tion consisted not of Poles but of Lithuanians and Belorussians.

During the 19th century the Jewish intelligentsia in Lithuania dre w

closer to Russian culture, but there were hardly any native Russians

living there. In short while central Poland and Galicia off e red an assim-

ilationist option-to Polish culture-Lithuania did not. So instead of try-

ing to become Russians of the Mosaic persuasion Jewish intellectu-

als became pioneers of the Haskala and later of Jewish political move-

ments such as Zionism and Bundism. Modern Jewish politics was

i n t roduced into central Poland by the Litvaks. Thus the secularization

and modernization of Polish as opposed to Lithuanian Jewry was dis-

c o rdant and traumatic. The modern world came in the form of a thre a t ,

an either/or: either Jewishness or secularism.

Although fierce battles raged between the Hasidim and the mis-

nagdim (the orthodox opponents of Hasidism), by the middle of the

19th century, both sides realized that they faced a common enemy in

the Haskala. A kind of unofficial cease fire took hold and certain dif-

f e rences began to moderate. Certain important Hasidic sects, espe-

cially Ger and Habad, paid as much attention to torah study as any

Lithuanian yeshiva. Important diff e rences of temperament and re l i-

gious doctrine did remain, but these paled in the face of gro w i n g

t h reats, first from the Haskala and later from the revolutionary Left and

f rom secular Zionism.

To defend Jewish tradition, religious Jews in Eastern Europe became

“ O r t h o d o x . ”1 6 When virtually all Jews lived a traditional life, there was

no concept of “Orthodoxy.” Everyone was simply a Jew. Orthodoxy

a rose as a direct response to the challenges of modernity and the

Haskala.

By the beginning of the twentieth century key religious leaders such

as the powerful Rebbe of Ger began to understand that they could

use the tools of modernity — especially the press — to defend Jewish

tradition. The Gerer rebbe set up new Orthodox newspapers and

helped organize a new political party, the Agudas Yi s roel. The Agudas

Yi s roel brought together Lithuanian Misnagdim and Hasidim against

the common enemies — Zionist, Bundists and Jewish secularists. It

had its own press and ran candidates in national and local elections.


The religious community also began to revise its long standing disin-

t e rest in the Jewish education of women. For decades middle class

Hasidic families had sent their sons to religious schools and had

allowed their daughters to go to non-Jewish secular schools. Many

of these girls were predictably unhappy when their families then tore

them away from their new friends and married them off to a re l i g i o u s

man with little secular learning. In 1918, with the approval of the Gere r

rebbe, Sarah Schenire r, opened the first Beys Yakov school for girls.

These schools developed widely all over Eastern Europe in the inter-

war period and gave girls a solid secular and religious education. At

about the same time one the great giants of Lithuanian Orthodoxy,

Rabbi Yisrael Meyer Cohen (The Khofets Khayim) also came out in

support of formal education for girls. (Baskin 276).

Only uncritical outsiders saw the religious community as hidebound

and unchanging. Those who knew better could see that Jewish ortho-

doxy possessed great reserves of flexibility and cre a t i v i t y. It had to

change with the times-and did.

2 / THE HASKALA

If Hasidism undermined the basis of traditional Jewish society with its

doctrines of the Tsaddik and religious revival, the Haskala had an

equally revolutionary effect with its call for a fundamental re e v a l u a t i o n

of Jewish relations with gentile society.

It is not easy to define exactly what the Haskala was. There were re l i-

gious maskilim (followers of the Haskala) and secular maskilim, mask-

ilim who never left a library and maskilim who were politically active.

B roadly speaking the Haskala wanted to open Jewish life up to re a-

son, to European culture and to positive currents in Jewish history and

c u l t u re that had been suppressed by traditional Jewish society. While

the maskilim wanted the modernization of Jewish life, they stre n u o u s-

ly opposed total assimilation. As Shmuel Feiner has pointed out, the

Haskala was a transitional movement between the traditional society

that eroded in the 19th century and a modern Jewish world marked

by activist ideologies and assertive nationalism. The Maskilim were


sharp and ascerbic critics of Jewish society. They had a harder time

finding convincing answers and solutions.

Hasidism had wanted to replace the leadership of the rabbi with the

charismatic authority of the Tsaddik. The Maskilim also wanted to

sweep away rabbinic authority but they aimed to replace it with a new

kind of leader— the Jewish intellectual. Hasidism undermined the

authority of the traditional kehilla by establishing a rival sub-commu-

nity that prayed separately and that recognized another leader. The

Maskilim wanted to replace the traditional kehilla with something that

was even more diff e rent: a Jewish life based on a loose network of

synagogues, schools and voluntary organizations. One of the major

goals of the Haskala was to abolish the legal status of Jews as a sep-

arate people, who obeyed diff e rent laws and who lived under the dis-

cipline of the kehilla. Legally the Jewish people as such would cease

to exist-Jews would now be Germans or Russian subjects of the

Mosaic persuasion. The new ideal was to be, as the poet Yehuda Leib

G o rdon put it, a “man on the street and a Jew at home.” Jewishness

would become a purely private aff a i r.

B e f o re the Haskala, Jews had lived their entire lives within the sphere

of Jewish religious tradition and discipline. Leisure activity and amuse-

ments took place within the framework of a religious sanction.

K h e v res held banquets when they completed the study of a particular

volume or during the week of a Torah portion that was connected to

their activities. Amateur theater and playacting took place as part of

the celebration of the Purim holiday. As Jacob Katz has pointed out,

what the Haskala introduced was the concept of “neutral time” and

“neutral space.” Social activity and the enjoyment of leisure were now

seen as perfectly legitimate human activities. By the same token,

Jews could now feel free to go to the theater, read secular literature

and even cultivate purely social relationships with gentiles. The new

sense of “neutral” space and “neutral time” radically transformed

E u ropean Jewry. The Haskala looked both outward and inward. At

the same time that it tried to engage Jews with the non-Jewish world,

it also attempted to carve out new space for individual expression and

independence. There f o re autobiographies are as important a sourc e

for understanding the Haskala as newspapers or programmatic man-

ifestos. Young Jews began to identify with the characters of the new


H e b rew novels or started to look for answers in the rich world of

Russian literature.

New literature in Hebrew and Yiddish also began to displace tradi-

tional texts as models for young people who were seeking altern a t i v e s

to the well worn path of early marriage, yeshiva study and synagogue.

In the yeshivas of Volozhin and Slobodka students would insert the

forbidden Hebrew novels of Abraham Mapu or Hebrew translations of

E u ropean literature into the outsized folios of the Vilna Talmud. As they

swayed over their Talmud and pretended to study, they actually re a d

about the glories of ancient Palestine, the wonders of 19th century

Paris or the shocking doctrines of Charles Darwin. Often re l i g i o u s

teachers would search the students’ rooms and find the forbidden

books. Expulsion from the yeshiva often followed, and many students

would now find themselves between two worlds. No longer a part of

the traditional Jewish world, they still did not know exactly where they

w e re headed and what they wanted. Quite often after years of wan-

dering and questioning, they discovered that the Haskala posed more

questions than it provided answers.

Seen purely from a political or ideological perspective, the Haskala

lapsed in the late 19th century. But if the Haskala is seen as the begin-

ning of a monumental effort to define the relationship between Jewish

tradition and Jews as individuals, then its impact affects Jewish life

even to the present day.

T h e re were crucial diff e rences between the Haskala in Central Euro p e

and the Haskala in Eastern Europe. In German speaking Europe and

in much of the Hapsburg Empire the Haskala led to a considerable

d e g ree of acculturation and even assimilation to gentile society. The

Haskala encouraged the rise of an important new Jewish scholarship

— the Wissenschaft des Judentums — that took a new look at Jewish

tradition and Jewish history. It also helped create Reform Judaism,

which began in Germany and later flourished in the United States. By

the beginning of the 20th century, most German Jews saw themselves

as “Germans of the Mosaic persuasion.”

In Eastern Europe both acculturation and assimilation certainly took

place. But by and large the Haskala in Eastern Europe developed in a


m o re distinctly Jewish key that in the West, and Yiddish and Hebre w

played a more prominent role.

At the base of the Haskala was the expectation of a quid pro quo. In

re t u rn for far- reaching reforms of Jewish life, European states would

grant the Jews legal emancipation. While the Haskala played a critical

role in the German speaking lands, in the Hapsburg Empire and in the

Russian Empire, it had much less significance in the United States,

France or in Great Britain. In these latter countries, the Jews had

a l ready achieved emancipation and did not have to “learn how to

behave” in order to achieve equality.

In Austria and Prussia the Jews eventually received their quid pro quo:

legal emancipation was practically complete by the 1860’s. In Russia,

h o w e v e r, full emancipation never came. The resulting disappointment

would send the Russian Haskala in new directions-such as political

activism, Jewish nationalism and revolutionary socialism.

The first and most important symbol of the European Haskala was an

e x t r a o rdinary individual, Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786). The son of

a poor Torah scribe in Dessau Prussia, Mendelssohn received solid

Talmudic training, but he also taught himself German, classical lan-

guages and philosophy. Mendelssohn moved to Berlin, where his flu-

ency in several languages and his imposing intellect won him the

respect of Gotthold Lessing, Johann Fichte and Immanuel Kant.

Indeed in 1767 he beat out Kant for a philosophy prize off e red by the

Prussian academy! For many members of the German cultural elite,

Mendelssohn was the first Jew that they had met socially. What made

Mendelssohn so significant was not just what he wrote but who he

was. In an age where Jews were re g a rded as unsavory strangers and

pariahs, Mendelssohn proved that a Jew could follow Jewish law and

still be “civilized.” Despite a physical deformity, Mendelssohn

i m p ressed everyone he met with his gentle character and his natural

d i g n i t y. He was one of the very first Jews to successfully bridge the

enormous gulf that separated the Jewish world and the world of cul-

tivated Germans. He insisted that Jews were also Germans. But at

the same time he staunchly defended the Jews from anti-Semitic

attacks and lived an observant, orthodox life.


Mendelssohn lived in an age of Enlightenment, where many philoso-

phers attacked revealed religion and questioned the divine origin of

the Bible. Mendelssohn tried to show that there was no essential con-

tradiction between Judaism and the Enlightenment. Judaism, he

a rgued, was far more suited than Christianity, to coexist with rational

p h i l o s o p h y. The Jewish faith believed that God wanted all people to

be happy and that He respected all human beings. No Jewish doc-

trines, Mendelssohn emphasized, defied reason, logic or natural law.

In its essentials, Mendelssohn argued, Judaism was not unique.

What made Judaism diff e rent was simply the special obligation

imposed on Jews to observe the specific commandments of their

religion. These commandments did not make Jews any better, sim-

ply diff e rent. They reminded Jews that their ancestors had stood at

Mount Sinai and had promised to obey the Torah. But Jews,

Mendelssohn argued, should follow these commandments out of

conscience, not because of fear of communal discipline. The time

had come, he believed, to dismantle the kehilla and abolish all legal

distinctions between Jews and non-Jews.

Mendelssohn believed that one could be a cultured German and an

Orthodox Jew at the same time. But other Jews wondered why they

should follow the commandments at all. If the most important princi-

ples of the Jewish religion were also found in other faiths or in ration-

al philosophy, then why were the Jewish dietary laws or Sabbath

observance so important? If Jews were to seek out the company of

cultivated Germans, then why should they refuse to eat at their

homes? Whatever explanations sufficed for Mendelssohn were not

necessarily acceptable to others. In fact four of Mendelssohn’s six

c h i l d ren eventually became Christians.

One of Mendelssohn’s major legacies to the Haskala was conviction

that proper education could allow Jews to become Germans (or other

E u ropean) and still remain loyal to their own faith. In 1783 he com-

pleted one of his most important projects, the translation of the Bible

into German with a Hebrew commentary, the Biur. This project, he

hoped, would not only encourage Jews to speak German instead of

Yiddish. It would also get them to learn proper Hebre w. Together with

his disciple, Naftali Herz Wessely Mendelssohn founded a Hebre w


j o u rnal, Ha-Measef, and began to propagate the basic principles of

the Haskala.

Mendelssohn helped inspire the Haskala in Eastern Europe, but there

the movement took a diff e rent course. The enormous numbers of

Jews in the Russian Empire, not to mention state sponsored anti-

Semitism, ruled out assimilation or even large scale acculturation.

Nonetheless the Haskala in Eastern Europe also had an enormous

impact. It produced major reforms in Jewish education, a new Yi d d i s h

and Hebrew literature and a new periodical press in Russian, Polish,

H e b rew and Yiddish. The Haskala’s insistence on taking a new look at

Jewish society also encouraged new interest in Jewish history.

If the Hasidim were optimistic that a Jew could achieve a meaningful

contact with God, the Maskilim (the followers of the Haskala) were

s u re that the Jews would enjoy a new relationship with their non-

Jewish neighbors. They were convinced that anti-Semitism was an

unfortunate survival of darker times. Thanks to a new age of pro g re s s ,

it would eventually disappear. But Jews would have to do their part.

They would have to forget Yiddish and learn the language of the land.

They would have to start dressing like civilized Europeans and thro w

away their semi-Asiatic caftans and fur hats. They would have to take

an honest look at themselves. We re they giving gentiles a legitimate

reason to dislike them?

Another important agenda of the East European Haskala was an end

to the custom of early marriage and a redefinition of gender roles in

Jewish life. Many maskilim in Russia had grown up in traditional fam-

ilies that had married them off at an early age.1 7 They re m e m b e red a

stunted childhood and the dreary years spent with obnoxious in-laws

and with young wives brides whom they married as total strangers

and whom they grew to hate. Although maskilim called for a diff e re n t

a p p roach to marriage and gender relations, it would be a mistake to

see them as feminists. Many wanted women to stay in the home and

become the pillar of domestic life that they believed distinguished the

m o re pro g ressive societies of the West. It followed that the ideal man

would have to leave his cloistered bench in the synagogue study hall

and learn the skills to make a real living. As the Maskilim attacked tra-

ditional Jewish society, they also lambasted what they saw as the


unfortunate propensity of Jewish women to yell at customers all day

in the marketplace and then re t u rn to nag her husband at home.

Maskilim also took dead aim at the traditional Jewish education sys-

tem. Jews had to change their schools. The kheider, they charg e d ,

p roduced stunted, abused children whose education was chaotic and

sterile. Even worse was the yeshiva and the ideal of the Ta l m e d

Khokhem. This obsession with the Talmud had distorted both Jewish

c u l t u re and the Jewish character. It distracted Jews from the beauty

of the Bible and kept them from really learning the language of their

b i r t h r i g h t - H e b re w.

Maskilim all agreed that language was far more than just a means of

communicating. Proper use of language helped shape character

and ensure an appreciation of beauty and morality. How, then, could

any Jews continued to speak their deformed jargon? All Jews

should learn the language of the land, Russian or Polish or German.

But they should also learn Hebrew-the language of the Jews’ former

spiritual nobility.

Maskilim wanted the new Jewish educational system to combine re l i-

gious with secular learning. Jewish studies would now include healthy

doses of Hebrew grammar and Bible. Jewish children would also

l e a rn productive skills and arts and crafts. It was time for Jews to

re t u rn to real physical labor and end their traditional roles as hucksters

and middlemen.

Maskilim shed few tears for the old Polish Commonwealth and wel-

comed the new absolutist rulers who were determined to eradicate

Jewish communal autonomy and force the Jews to become more

“useful.” When Joseph II of Austria issued an 1781 edict that pro m-

ised to transform the lives of recently annexed Galician Jews, the early

maskilim supported him. The Hapsburg Emperor wanted to open new

State schools for Jews where they would learn German as well as

useful vocations. Implicit was the promise of eventual emancipation,

as long as the Jews became “useful.”

In Russia too, maskilim saw the state as an indispensable ally against

their main enemy, the rabbis. Break the hold of the rabbis and the

kehilles on the Jewish masses, and the way would be open to sweep-


ing changes. It was not surprising, there f o re, that Maskilim like Isaac

Ber Levinson were even ready to cooperate with the most hated Ts a r

of all, Nicholas I. For all his faults, they told themselves, Nicholas was

still ready to build new Jewish schools and new rabbinical seminar-

ies that would produce new leadership for Russian Jewry.

At a time when Russian Jewry hated Nicholas for his ruthless deter-

mination to force young Jewish boys into the army, Russian maskilim

j o u rneyed across the Pale of Settlement and tried to convince the

Jewish masses to send their children to the new government schools.

They pinned high hopes on Rabbi Max Lillienthal, whom the Russian

g o v e rnment had recruited from Riga to run the new Jewish schools.

Despite many warnings, Lilienthal at first assumed that the Russian

g o v e rnment was acting in good faith and that its goal was reform and

enlightenment, not conversion. But in a short time, a disillusioned

Lilienthal left Russia in order to accept a pulpit in Cincinnati. He had

e n c o u n t e red first hand the distrust and contempt of Jewish pare n t s

who accused him of collaboration with the enemy. In time he also

began to doubt the sincerity of the govern m e n t ’s intentions.

Although the overwhelming majority of Russian Jews rejected the

Maskilim and the new schools, just enough students enrolled to make

a long-term diff e rence. By the 1870’s the graduates of these schools

would form the nucleus of the new Russian speaking Jewish intelli-

gentsia and the shock troops of the Russian Haskala.

The reign of Alexander II was the high tide of the Russian Haskala. As

the Russian state encouraged Jews to seek education and re w a rd e d

the cultured and the wealthy with an exit ticket out of the Pale, many

Russian Jews responded with hope and a new-found patriotism. For

the first time Saint Petersburg became an important Jewish center.

B a ron Horatio Ginzburg, a wealthy Jew who emerged as the leader of

the Saint Petersburg community, encouraged the founding of a new

o rganization: the Society to Spread Enlightenment among Jews. This

society would establish branches in many cities and would serve as

an effective advocate for educational reform.

In 1863 a Hebrew poet Yehuda Leib Gordon wrote a poem, “Aw a k e

my People,” that conveyed all of the optimism and hope of the


Russian Haskala. Russia was the new fatherland; the Russian people

w e re eager to embrace the Jews as equal citizens; Russia needed the

Jews talents. It was up to the Jews to respond. They had to learn

Russian and become productive citizens. Gordon ended his poem

with words that would become the catchphrase of the Haskala: “Be a

Man in the Street and a Jew at Home.” Jewishness would re t reat into

the private sphere. It would no longer have any public or legal status.

In public, the Jew would be a citizen like anyone else.

“ Awake my People” reflected the fervent belief that full emancipation

was just around the corn e r. It was up to the Jews to break down the

walls that they themselves had erected as protection from gentile

s o c i e t y. Now that European rulers were reaching out to them,

Maskilim argued, Jews had to reject the rabbis who wanted to per-

petuate their isolation.

But Gord o n ’s optimism was also tinged with ambivalence. Was he

really kidding himself, he asked. Supposed he actually got what he

wished for. Once Russian Jewish youth used their new educational

opportunities to leave the Pale, would they really be interested in

reading his Hebrew poetry? Eight years after “Awake My People,”

a new poem “For Whom do I Toil,” expressed these nagging doubts

(JMW 386):

My enlightened brothers have acquired worldly wisdom,And are but loosely bound to the language (ie Hebrew) of their peopleThey scorn the aged mother holding her spindle“Abandon that language whose hour has passed;Abandon its literature, so tasteless, so bland;Leave it and let each one use the language of the land”And our sons? The generation to follow us?From their youth on they will be strangers to us.—My heart bleeds for them-They make progress, year by year they forge ahead:Who knows where they will reach, how far they will go?Perhaps to that place when they shall never re t u r n . . . .

Their high hopes of a new golden age of Russian Jewry crashed in

1881, when revolutionaries assassinated Alexander II. The wave of

p o g roms that swept through the south of Russia were a bitter disillu-


sionment to maskilim who had believed that anti-Semitism was a ves-

tige of the past, not a danger for the future. The pogroms shocked the

maskilim for yet another reason. They had been convinced that if the

Russian Jew acted as “a man in the street” and saved his Jewishness

for the privacy of home, then he would be safe from anti-Semitic vio-

lence. Gentiles hated Jews who held aloof, who refused to learn the

language of the land, who boycotted secular schools. The bitter truth

t u rned out to be much diff e rent. The mobs attacked all Jews: those in

traditional dress and those in European clothing, those who spoke

Russian and those who spoke Yiddish. And as we have seen, the

p o g roms augured in a new era of official anti-Semitism. The quid-pro -

quo of the Haskala-Emancipation in exchange for Jewish enlighten-

ment, did not happen.

Many Jewish historians have called 1881 the symbolic turning point of

m o d e rn Jewish history. After 1881 the trickle of East European Jewish

emigration to the United States and We s t e rn Europe steadily

i n c reased and turned into a mass exodus after 1905. (Yet the high

birth rate precluded any absolute decrease of the Jewish population).

The pogroms of that year also shook the intellectual and political foun-

dations of the Haskala. Many important Maskilim now began to

rethink their fundamental relationship between Jews and gentiles.

B e f o re, they had believed that changes in Jewish behavior could elim-

inate anti-Semitism. Now many maskilim began to realize that anti-

Semitism was far more pervasive and deep-seated than they had

thought. One Maskil, Moshe Leyb Lilienblum, wrote in the aftermath

of the pogroms that:

The opponents of nationalism see us as uncompromising nationalists, witha nationalist God and a nationalist Torah; the nationalists see us as cos-mopolitans, whose homeland is wherever we happen to be well off.Religious gentiles say that we are devoid of any faith, and the fre e t h i n k e r samong them say that we are orthodox and believe in all kinds of nonsense;the liberals say we are conservative and the conservatives call us liberal.Some bureaucrats and writers see us as the root of anarchy, insurre c t i o nand revolt, and the anarchists say we are capitalists, the bearers of the bib-lical civilization which is, in their view, based on slavery and parasitism.Officialdom accuses us of circumventing the laws of the land-that is, thelaws directed specifically against us. ....Musicians like Richard Wa g n e rcharge us with destroying the beauty and purity of music. Even our merits


a re turned into shortcomings: “Few Jews are murd e rers,” they say,“because the Jews are cowards.” This, however, does not prevent themfrom accusing us of murdering Christian children.

Other maskilim were beginning to ask themselves whether modern-

ization, urbanization and democracy were really working in the Jews’

f a v o r. The rise of class conflict and national tensions could well leave

Jews squarely in the middle of a dangerous cro s s f i re. Socialists would

see Jews as bosses. Capitalists would identify the Jews with their

leftist foes. Meanwhile oppressed nationalities like Ukrainians and

Poles would condemn the Jews as allies of the hatred Russians-while

the Russian state continued to see Jews as a disloyal fifth column.

If Jews could not secure their place in Europe by changing their

b e h a v i o r, then what was the answer? In 1882 a Jewish doctor fro m

Odessa, Leon Pinsker, published one of the most important pam-

phlets in modern Jewish history: A u t o e m a n c i p a t i o n. Until 1881,

Pinsker had embodied and personified all the hopes of the Russian

Haskala. He had a superb Russian education with a medical degre e

f rom Moscow University. He had shown exemplary courage on the

battlefields of the Crimean war and had received a decoration from the

Tsar himself. Totally acculturated, Pinsker had little reason to question

the optimism of the Haskala, until he witnessed the pogrom of 1881

in Odessa.

Enraged and disillusioned, Pinsker now argued that the great goal of

the Russian Haskala-emancipation, was a chimera. It was also

demeaning for the Jews to hope for “Emancipation,” a favor that

Jews would gratefully accept as a re w a rd for good behavior. Enough

p a s s i v i t y, Pinsker argued. The Jews had to take their fate into their

own hands, and emancipate themselves. The first step was to under-

stand the root cause of anti-Semitism: their lack of a homeland. Non-

Jews hated Jews not for how they prayed or for how they dressed but

because they were a people without a land of their own. Strangers

e v e r y w h e re, they were at home nowhere. Pinsker compared Jews to

ghosts who elicited feelings of uncanny fear and dismay. “The

nations,” Pinsker pointed out, “never have to deal with a Jewish

nation, but always with mere Jews.”


To make matters worse Jews themselves had little idea that some-

thing was wrong. They misunderstood their real situation and they

failed to appreciate that there was little they could do to improve their

lot until they changed their psychology:

In seeking to fuse with other peoples they deliberately renounced, to a cer-tain extent, their own nationality. Nowhere, however, did they succeed inobtaining recognition from their neighbors as native-born citizens of equalrank. The strongest factor, however, operating to prevent the Jews fromstriving after an independent national existence is the fact that they do notfeel the need for such an existence. Not only do they feel no need for it, butthey go so far as to deny the reasonableness of such a need. In a sick manthe absence of desire for food and drink is a very serious symptom. It is notalways possible to cure him of this ominous loss of appetite. And even ifhis appetite can be re s t o red, it is still a question whether he will be able todigest food, even though he desires it. The Jews are in the unhappy condi-tion of such a patient.

At first Pinsker flirted with the possibility that Jews could settle for any

suitable territory. But within a few years he realized that nothing could

displace the special emotional attraction of the ancient homeland,

Palestine. Pinsker joined Russia’s major Zionist organization, the

Hovevei Tsiyon (The Lovers of Zion). A new politics was emerg i n g .

The Haskala was giving way to a new surge of Jewish activism.


T R A N S C E N D I N GTHE HASKALA: A CULT U R A LR E V I VA L

I X

This reevaluation of the Haskala also extended to Jewish culture. Even

b e f o re the blow up of 1881 many maskilim had been having second

thoughts. They knew what they had left and what they rejected. But

w h e re were they going? A new figure appeared in Jewish literature ,

the Tolush. The Tolush (Hebrew for uprooted) remained suspended

between worlds, unable to find a place, either socially or intellectually.

They had gone too far to re t u rn to the Jewish world of the synagogue

and the cheder. But when they tried to grab a foothold in the gentile

world, they encountered brutal rejection.

Many of the maskilim lived lonely and embittered lives. Many Jewish

intellectuals who had embraced the Haskala as the answer to their

personal problems soon learned that it promised more than it could

give. In his widely read autobiography Hatot Neurim (The Sins of

Youth), Moses Leib Lilienblum admitted that he had reached a

moment of crisis. Orthodoxy had repelled him, but the Haskala had

left him stranded.

Now what am I? My heart is cold and dried like wood. It is all the sameto me whether it is the Sabbath or Yom Kippur, Passover, the Fast of Estheror a weekday. The poetry, too, has been torn out of my heart. My heart isfrozen with hoarfrost. ...That was the end of the intoxication and of theillusions I had which stemmed from the chaotic Haskala, to which I hadbeen so susceptible only because of the bad education I re c e i v e d .

(Dawidowicz, The Jewish Tradition, p. 126)

One way out was to rethink the Haskala’s definition of the Jewish

p roblem, and its attitude toward the Jewish masses. The Haskala

had assumed a benign gentile world that would welcome Jews who

had re p a i red their faults. The problem, according to the Haskala, lay

with fanatic rabbis and the backward, uneducated masses. The

Maskil had to break down the barriers and lead the Jewish people

out into the light.

But after 1890 new Jewish writers appeared who questioned these

assumptions. Like the Maskilim, they too believed that Jewish

Orthodoxy could no longer work. It was too fanatical, too anti-intel-

lectual and too opposed to reason and common sense. In the long

run, orthodoxy would not be able to hold on to Jewish youth. Like the

Maskilim, they also rejected assimilation as a way out. They wanted to

IX. TRANSCENDING THE HASKALA: A CULTURAL REVIVA L 1 3 1

remain Jews. If Orthodoxy was doomed, and assimilation unaccept-

able, then what was left?

The answer was a new Jewish culture that would take the place of re l i-

gion as the linchpin of Jewish identity. The Haskala had paved the

way-with its biting critique of traditional Jewish society. But it had

failed to create vital cultural alternatives, largely because of its one-

dimensional appraisal of the Jewish masses. The Haskala had posit-

ed a one way relationship between the Jewish intellectual and the

Jewish masses. The enlightened intellectual would teach the benight-

ed masses. By the turn of the century, however, new voices were

appearing who urged the Jewish intelligentsia to appreciate the vitali-

ty and the creativity of the Jewish people. It was time to approach the

masses not as a teacher but as a partner. The Haskala had blindly

worshipped European culture and had failed to see the tre a s u res that

lurked in the everyday life of shtetl Jews.

Writers like S. Ansky (Solomon Rappoport), Yitzhak Leibush Pere t z ,

and the historian Simon Dubnow began to urge educated Jews to get

to know the people, (the folk). Study folklore, they said, study and col-

lect folk wisdom, jokes, proverbs. Understand the rich tre a s u res of

Hasidism and Yiddish folk songs. Collect documents and sources on

Jewish history. Sholem Aleikhem created rich new characters that

transformed the Jewish collective imagination. The symbiosis of the

Jewish intelligentsia and the Jewish masses produced a new spurt of

c reative vitality and a new determination to z a m l, to collect sources for

writers, historians and ethnographers. Jewish writers, folklorists and

historians began to seek a new national identity based on the genuine

values of the Jewish people. This culture would use the creative ener-

gies and spiritual values of traditional Judaism to create a new

Jewishness that would bring together the best of Jewish tradition and

E u ropean humanism.

Today most people have not heard of the Yiddish writer Yi t z h a k

Leibush Peretz (1856-1916). But among East European Jewish intel-

lectuals in the generation before the Holocaust, his influence was

enormous. In the words of one Yiddish poet (Yankev Glatshteyn),

P e retz “created the Jewish twentieth century.” (Wisse, Peretz). Born

in 1856 in the picturesque town of Zamosc in southeast Poland,


P e retz had believed in the Haskala and in a harmonious future link-

ing Jews and Poles. He became a lawyer and also wrote in Hebre w

and Polish. But he soon encountered personal frustrations that also

reflected the failed hopes of the Haskala. Because of a gro u n d l e s s

denunciation, the Russian authorities barred him from practicing

l a w. At the same time, the Polish-Jewish rapprochement that had

seemed so promising in the 1860’s began to give way to gro w i n g

mutual estrangement. In 1888, as he contemplated the nasty turn

that his life had taken, he decided to send a Yiddish poem to Sholem

Aleichem new journal, the Yidishe Folksbibliotek. Sholem Aleikhem

had founded this journal to put Yiddish “on the map.” He would

publish first rate literature and force the Jewish intelligentsia and

middle classes to treat the language with respect. Peretz sent a

poem called “Monish.”

To say that Peretz was ambivalent about his debut as a Yiddish writer

would be an understatement. He began a first draft of the poem with

an apology for the poverty of the Yiddish language:

Mayn lid volt andersh gor geklingen/ ikh zol far goyim goyish zingen/ nornisht far yidn, nisht zhargon./ keyn rekhtn klang, keyn rekhtn ton/ keyneyntsik vort nit un keyn stil/ hob ikh far “libe,” far “gefil”.. My song wouldhave sounded completely different/ Had I sung it for gentiles and in theirtongue/ Not for Jews, not in Yiddish/ No proper sound, no proper tone/Not one single word and no style/ have I for love, for feeling...

(Dan Miron, A Traveler Disguised, p. 61)

Monish symbolized what Peretz saw as the crisis of the Jewish peo-

ple. Monish was a perfect Jewish boy: handsome, smart and a genius

in the Torah. But Satan decided to catch him by tempting him with a

beautiful blond, German woman. Did Monish resist? Did he refuse to

even talk to her? Not at all! To please her, he threw over everything that

was holy, and even uttered the forbidden four letter name of God. The

message was clear: if Monish could surre n d e r, then what about the

o rdinary Jew? The traditional faith could no longer hold the Jewish

people together.

During the next few years Peretz climbed down from his high perc h

and got to know ordinary Jews better. A study tour of small shtetlekh

in eastern Poland brought him face to face with the impoverished,


b a c k w a rd small town Jews. But he was surprised to discover that

for all their faults, they possessed a vitality and a down to earth com-

mon sense that forced him to treat them with respect. His attitude to

Yiddish changed and as he wrote more in that language, he slowly

began to formulate a new mission for himself in particular and for

Jewish writers in general. Literature and theater, especially in

Yiddish, would serve as a bridge between the Jewish past and the

Jewish present. Peretz could never become a Hasid who traded mir-

acle stories about his rebbe and who jumped up to fight for scraps

f rom the re b b e ’s table. But as a writer, he could take the positive

Jewish values exemplified by Hasidism and use them to create a liv-

ing literature that could inspire modern Jews. Literature and theater

could also bring the Jew into the world of European culture-not as a

b e g g a r, but as an equal. The modern Jew would embrace the best

of European culture. But because he had a culture of his own, he

would do so without abandoning his own people. But the role of the

new culture did not stop there. The real antidote to anti-Semitism

was not emigration from Europe. To fight anti-Semitism the Jews

had to command the respect of their neighbors and to create a cul-

t u re that would be both national and cosmopolitan. To do so they

had to respect themselves. They had to be proud of their Yi d d i s h

language and they had to fight for their rights as Jews. In turn their

neighbors would come to appreciate Jewish culture and accept the

rights of the Jews themselves.

Like Peretz, S. Ansky (Solomon Rappoport) also came to Yi d d i s h

l i t e r a t u re by a roundabout route. Born in Vitebsk, he started writ-

ing in Yiddish and spent some time as a tutor in small Jewish

towns. There he lived through the typical saga of the young

maskil. The religious Jews suspected, corre c t l y, that he was

s e c retly showing their children the forbidden books of the

Haskala and ran him out of town. Frustrated and disappointed in

Jewish society, Rappoport joined the Russian re v o l u t i o n a r y

movement and went to live among ordinary Russian workers and

peasants. He became a Russian writer, and for a brief moment,

even contemplated conversion to Russian Orthodoxy. He did not

and remained suspended, in his own words, “between two

w o r l d s . ”


In the stormy years just before and during the Revolution of 1905,

Ansky slowly re t u rned to his Jewish roots. One major factor was the

impact that Pere t z ’s writing made on him. As David Roskies has

pointed out, “for the first time he discovered a modern European sen-

sibility expressing itself in Yi d d i s h . ”1 8 Once again Ansky started to

write in Yi d d i s h .

One of Ansky’s major contributions to the cultural revival of East

E u ropean Jewry was his appreciation of the importance of Jewish

f o l k l o re. Like Peretz, Ansky called on the Jewish intelligentsia to

a p p reciate the enormous reservoir of spiritual energy that lay

untapped and unnoticed in the hundreds of shtetlekh of the Pale.

Ansky put the study of Jewish folklore at the center of his cultural

agenda. Through the study of Jewish folklore, the Jewish intelligentsia

could appreciate what was special about the Jewish people. It was a

people that lived by spirit, not by power. The folksongs, the customs,

the jokes and the everyday language of the Jewish masses re f l e c t e d

a deep seated moral sense, a fundamental humanism that the intelli-

gentsia had to value and respect. In 1912 Ansky organized an amaz-

ing folklore expedition that combed the Pale for sources. In the space

of two years it collected “2000 photographs, 1,800 folktales and leg-

ends, 1500 folk songs and mysteries (biblical Purim plays), 500 cylin-

ders of Jewish folk music, 1000 melodies to songs and niggunim with-

out words, countless proverbs and folk beliefs, 100 historical docu-

ments, 500 manuscripts and 700 objects acquired for the sum of six

thousand rubles.” 1 9 This tre a s u re trove of material was not only meant

to re c o rd Jewish life. It also could give Yiddish writers valuable sourc e

material to produce a new culture that could realize Pere t z ’s vision of

a sensibility that was both Jewish and European. A new modern i s t

c u l t u re could use Jewish themes and produce works that would not

embarrass the most demanding literary critic. This is exactly what

Ansky himself achieved in his great play, the Dybbuk.

If Ansky was looking for one fictional character to confirm his faith in

the Jewish masses, he would have found it in Sholem Aleikhem Te v y e

the Dairyman (Tevye Der Milkhiger). In Tevye der milkhiker, published

in many installments between 1894 and 1914, Sholem Aleikhem cre-

ated a character that personified the escalating tensions between tra-

dition and modernity at the turn of the century. As Ruth Wisse


observes, “Sholem Aleikhem realized that he had discovered in Te v y e

the Jew through whom he could tell the story of his time, and he

b rought him back again and again over the next twenty years at criti-

cal moments in his own and the nation’s life.” 2 0 The stories are in

monologue form, with Tevye addressing the narrator, Sholem

Aleikhem, who never speaks.

Tevye presents the dilemmas faced by Jews of the period in a per-

sonal, convincing and poignant way. Many of the tragedies and con-

flicts that Tevye confronts are not only ideological and national, but are

intensely personal, embedded in family life and religious tradition. It is

in the stories of Tevye and his daughters that Sholem Aleikhem is able

to write about critical issues through humor, satire, irony and pathos.

The stakes get higher and higher as the first three daughters follow

their personal paths and push Tevye further and further in his con-

f rontation with modern i t y. Through his daughters Tevye confronts key

p roblems of Jewish life: the role of women, class conflict, the impact

of politics and revolution on traditional Jewish society, and re l a t i o n s

between Jews and gentiles and the challenges of liberal humanism.

Te v y e ’s daughters are smart, tough and self-assured. And they con-

f ront Tevye with one nasty surprise after another. One marries a tailor.

Another marries a revolutionary and follows him to Siberian exile.

Tevye, caught between his daughters and his wife, meets each chal-

lenge with resigned good humor.

Then C h a v a (1906) breaks her father’s heart when she converts to

Christianity to marry a gentile. After Chava disappears into the “pro-

tection” of the Russian church to pre p a re for her conversion, Te v y e

c o n f ronts the powerful Christian priest of the town. He is painfully

reminded of his weakness as a Jew in a gentile world. “Tevye under-

stands — even if his daughter pretends not to — the essential weak-

ness of the Jew in Christian society, and he is furious with Chava for

exposing his impotence.”2 1 Chava defies Tevye and challenges him to

explain why Jews and gentiles should stay apart. Tevye desperately

s e a rches for an appropriate Talmudic response, but only retorts that

“we Jews have an old custom that when a hen begins to crow like a

ro o s t e r, off to the slaughterer she goes. That’s why we say in the morn-

ing prayer, hanoseyn lasekhvi binoh - not only did God give us brains,

He gave some of us more than others.” 2 2 In the face of Chava’s pas-


sionate humanist argument, Tevye cannot give her one reason why

Jews should remain a separate people.

Even so, Chava underscores that Tevye, re p resenting Jewish tradition,

has his limits. Jewish survival demands fixed boundaries, no matter

how painful they are. For him, the extreme boundary is intermarriage.

C h a v a ’s conversion to Christianity, her embrace of the “other world,”

is too much for Tevye to bear. He renounces his beloved daughter and

f o rces his family to mourn the loss of this child, as if she were dead.

Tevye tells his family, “Let us sit s h i v e as God commanded, for the

L o rd gives, and the Lord takes away. ”2 3 At the end of the story, Te v y e

cannot bear to even speak to her as he accidentally meets her in the

woods. When the Broadway version of Tevye appeared as Fiddler on

the Roof, the ending changed to suit the tastes of an American audi-

ence. Now Chava and her Russian husband come to say goodbye to

Tevye and the family as they all disperse from their homeland. The

Russian son-in-law admonishes Tevye having refused to speak to the

couple: “Some are driven away by edicts; others by silence.” This is

his plea for acceptance and tolerance from his father in law. Tevye will

not speak directly to them, but as they part, he mutters “and God be

with you” thus invoking a blessing on his intermarried daughter and

her husband. He is tacitly making her intermarriage almost acceptable

by his blessing. This ending is a far cry from the painful price Tevye is

p re p a red to pay — sitting s h i v a for his daughter — that ends the orig-

inal tragic tale of Chava. Sholem Aleikhem’s ambivalence about the

end of the story is evidenced in subsequent rewrites that allow Chava

to come back to Tevye after her marriage crumbles and she re a l i z e s

her mistake. But in the climate of the civil rights movement when

F i d d l e r was first performed, “the American version was the first to

champion mixed marriage and the liberal ideal of an undiff e re n t i a t e d

h u m a n k i n d . ”2 4 Tevye, the man rooted in Jewish tradition in a time of

enormous social upheaval and disintegration is like his beloved

H a l a c h a - He continues to bend and adapt to meet the challenges of

his ever-changing world, up to a point.

Tevye is aware that the religious conflicts that result from the enlight-

enment are causing his world to unravel. He is proud, albeit ambiva-

lent, that his daughters are enlightened thinkers. Sholem Aleikhem is

not giving us an ideological blueprint to resolve these conflicts and


dilemmas. Each story confronts a new set of problems. The author is

f o rcing his reader to enter Te v y e ’s inner thoughts, to listen to the dif-

f e rent registers within him as a parent and as a Jew responding to the

challenges of the time. These registers reflect diff e rent sources of

Jewish identity and diff e rent layers of Jewish tradition. Tevye is con-

stantly quoting or misquoting the Talmud, Midrash, Bible and other

s a c red texts of Jewish prayer. Under his veneer of simplicity and igno-

rance, Tevye is reflecting the profound and complicated re l a t i o n s h i p

that the masses have with the Jewish tradition and its texts. The

H e b rew canon is both far and near at the same time. Sholem

Aleikhem expects his readers to be sophisticated enough to catch the

humor and satire of Te v y e ’s misquotes of Jewish texts. The reader is

expected to have knowledge of these texts, to understand the

nuanced allusions to Jewish history, literature, and religion. Thro u g h

his complex appropriation of Jewish tradition and its mediation

t h rough Yiddish, Sholem Aleikhem is developing a profound state-

ment about the Jewish condition and modern i t y.2 5 (Ruth Wisse, Ken

Frieden). Tevye bends but he never breaks. He is not afraid to arg u e

with God and even make some jokes at his —and his own —

expense. One of Te v y e ’s most effective weapons is the very language

he speaks. Yiddish, with its dueling registers of the holy and the pro-

fane, enables Tevye to emerge with his dignity intact. In the face of the

escalating crisis that faced Russian Jewry, Sholem Aleikhem could

o ffer no easy political solution. But he could remind his fellow Jews

that after all, Tevye was one of them.

While Sholem Aleikhem confronted the problems of modern i t y

t h rough a brilliant fictional character, his close friend Simon Dubnow

(1860-1941) advanced a bold plan to use the study of Jewish history

to harmonize the conflict between “The Old and the New Judaism.”

Dubnow came from an observant family in the town of Mstislav. His

g r a n d f a t h e r, Bentsion, was so observant that he refused to fight a fire

in his own house because of the Sabbath. After the usual stint in var-

ious kheders, Simon rebelled and found a local maskil who lent him

forbidden books. He then went on to read John Stuart Mill, To l s t o y

and the sociology of Herbert Spencer and Auguste Comte. One day

he had painful meeting with his grandfather to tell him that he would

not be going with him to pray on Yom Kippur. Having fled the syna-

gogue, he now tried to escape the shtetl. That was not so easy. Like


many other Jewish boys he ran into the barriers of Russian anti-

Semitism. He never managed to get accepted to a university and

when he went to Saint Petersburg, he lived in constant fear of police

d e p o r t a t i o n .

By his mid 20’s Dubnow found himself looking at a dead end. He had

rejected the world of Jewish tradition but where could he go? What

could he believe in? Then one day he had an epiphany. History could

replace religion. History could become the religion of the secular Jew.

If he could not follow the laws of the Torah, he could still remain true

to his people by studying their past. Furthermore, just like Peretz and

A n s k y, he came to see that there was really no contradiction between

the “Jewish” and the “universal.” The study of Jewish history could

harmonize his Jewishness and his allegiance to universal, pro g re s s i v e

values.

But how does a people without a state and without a territorial base

study history? East European Jews had no archives or universities.

Valuable Jewish documents and chronicles lay scattered about in pri-

vate homes, attics and cellars. This, Dubnow, warned was not only a

scandal but it posed a national danger. When future historians wro t e

about Jews, what sources would they use? Would they be the docu-

ments left by anti-Semitic bureaucrats or sources written by Jews

themselves?

In 1891 Dubnow issued a call to Russian Jews to collect documents

that future Jewish historians could use. No people could aff o rd to

i g n o re its own history-or to leave its writing to others. This appeal had

an enormous impact. The call to zaml, to collect, touched a chord. In

Saint Petersburg Russian speaking Jewish lawyers and doctors, alien-

ated from the synagogue but looking for alternative expressions of

Jewishness, responded to Dubnow’s call with alacrity. In 1908, along

with Dubnow and Ansky, they founded a Historical- Ethnographic

society in Saint Petersburg to collect and publish documents on

Jewish history. An important historical journal, Evreiskaia Starina,

began to appear in the Russian language. Meanwhile Dubnow began

to publish on a wide range of topics. He wrote not only on history but

also on literature and on current aff a i r s .


D u b n o w ’s impact on Russian Jewry was felt in many ways. Until

Dubnow the most prominent Jewish historians had been German-

Jewish scholars like Heinrich Graetz who tended to denigrate the con-

tribution of East European Jewry and who held Yiddish in total con-

tempt. (In fact Graetz refused to authorize a Yiddish translation of his

History of the Jews). As a young literary critic, on the other hand,

Dubnow had also been one of the first Russian Jewish intellectuals to

recognize the national and aesthetic importance of Yiddish literature .

He was also the first major Jewish historian to put the history of the

East European Jews at the center of his re s e a rch agenda. Unlike

Graetz, for example, he saw Hasidism as a vital and creative nation-

al movement rather than as a source of backwardness and supersti-

tion. He diff e red from Graetz in yet another important way. Where a s

Graetz saw Jewish history primarily in terms of religion and literature ,

Dubnow tried to focus on the Jewish people. Books and ideas did

not move the history of the Jews; they reflected the national energ y

of the people itself. In interwar Poland a younger generation of

Jewish historians, many of them Marxists, built on Dubnow’s

a p p roach and studied Jewish history from the “ground up.” They

w rote about forgotten groups like women, workers, young people

etc. This social history became a primary focus of the YIVO histori-

ans of the 1920’s and 1930’s.

In the last decade of the 19th century it was Dubnow who had re c o g-

nized the importance of Jewish history for the cultural modern i z a t i o n

of East European Jewry. Far from being an academic exercise, the

study of history had direct cultural and political implications for the

Jews of Eastern Europe. Why, Dubnow asked, did the Jews manage

to hold on to their national identity after they had lost their political sov-

e reignty and their territory? The answer, he believed, lay in the cre-

ativity and adaptability of the Jewish people, in their ability to cut loose

f rom the bonds of territory and to become a spiritual nation. Like

Ansky he was convinced that spirit, not power provided the key to

understanding the Jews. They carried their homeland — their spirit —

with them as they settled in successive centers: Babylon, Spain and

then Poland. The Bible and the Talmud were not the word of God, but

they had kept the Jews together. For centuries they had been the

b e d rock of the portable homeland. But now, at the end of the 19th

century the time had come to find a new synthesis of Jewishness and


E u ropean liberalism. Orthodox, Zionism and revolutionary socialism

had all failed to offer plausible solutions for the Jewish pro b l e m .

Orthodoxy was too rigid. Zionism negated the fact that for two thou-

sand years, the Jews had lived as a Diaspora people and would con-

tinue to do so. Revolutionary socialism tried to fit the complex history

of the Jews into the procrustean bed of class struggle.

Dubnow urged that Jews use the study of history to bring together the

old and the new. Like Peretz and Ansky, Dubnow envisioned a new

secular Jewishness that would take in the best of Jewish tradition.

Armed with this culture, the Jews would find their place in the liberal

democratic Russia that would replace the doomed Autocracy. What

Dubnow foresaw was a new Europe based on diff e rent nationalities —

including Jews—enjoying national-cultural autonomy.

P e retz, Ansky and Dubnow, personified a profound cultural shift that

both transcended and complemented the Haskala. The new literature

in Hebrew and Yiddish and the growing interest in folklore and history

b roadened and developed the search for new alternatives to the col-

lective discipline of Jewish tradition. These new alternatives included

a new interest in the individual and in the life and culture of the peo-

ple. The Haskala’s program was unrealistic. Nonetheless the maskilim

paved the way for new cultural creativity that took shape in East

E u rope at the beginning of the twentieth century.

What Peretz, Ansky and Dubnow had begun reached a new level in

interwar Poland with the founding of the YIVO, the Yiddish Scientific

Institute in Vilna in 1925.

In 1938, one year before the outbreak of the WW II, a young woman

f rom new York City went to Vilna to enter the YIVO’s graduate pro-

gram. The YIVO’s building on 18 Wiwulska Street, with the park like

g rounds, the well lit reading rooms, the maps with lights showing

w h e re YIVO zamlers (collectors) lived, the library, the theater arc h i v e

-all made an enormous impression on Dawidowicz. The Yi d d i s h

institutions she had been used to in New York were a jumble of

messy cluttered rooms somewhere on the third or fourth floor of old

buildings. The YIVO was saying something new: Yiddish deserved to

travel first class, Yiddish had arrived, the time for inferiority complex-

es was over.


The idea of the YIVO had been in the air for a long time, as Jewish

historians, linguists and writers called for a serious scholarly institu-

tion in Yiddish. Finally in 1925, the same year that the Hebre w

University began in Jerusalem, the YIVO was founded in Vilna. There

w e re times when there was too little money to buy postage stamps.

Yet YIVO scholars traveled to Yiddish speaking communities in

A rgentina, the US and South Africa and slowly raised funds to put up

the building, to publish a monthly scholarly journal and finally to start

a graduate program.

The YIVO had two main goals: to promote scholarly re s e a rch in the

Yiddish language and to use the insights of interdisciplinary scholar-

ship in Yiddish to bolster the morale and cultural vitality of a belea-

g u e red people. If ordinary Jews knew more about themselves and

their language, the YIVO argued, they would have more self-re s p e c t

and more determination to fight for their rights.

The YIVO scholars were mostly secular, leftist Jews who had been

trained in European universities. Among them were noted historians

(Simon Dubnow, Emanuel Ringelblum), sociolinguists (Max

We i n reich), statisticians (Liebman Hirsh), and philologists (Noyekh

Prilutzki, Zelig Kalmanovich). They wanted to replace traditional re l i-

gion with a secular Jewish identity that would derive its vitality and cre-

ativity from a newfound respect for, and knowledge of Jewish folklore ,

history mass culture and the Yiddish language. The YIVO supporters

a rgued that Jewish scholarship had focused too long on what the rab-

bis wrote and on what the rich did. It had ignored the Jewish mass-

es and had favored Hebrew over the popular language, Yi d d i s h .

Social history, folklore and the history of Jewish women had been

especially neglected. The YIVO tried to correct this by breaking down

disciplinary boundaries to capture to totality of the Jewish experience

in Eastern Europe. The YIVO consciously tried to bridge the bound-

aries between history, sociology, linguistics, psychology and anthro-

p o l o g y. Each of its four sections—H i s t o r y, Philology/Literature ,

Economics/Statistics and Psychology/Education—published a

re s e a rch journal that stressed interdisciplinary methodologies.

YIVO scholars worked under enormous handicaps. Its scholars had to

assemble many source materials from scratch. How does one study

the history and folklore of a dispersed people with no land of its own,


with no central authority or library to preserve re c o rds? In order to col-

lect raw material for re s e a rch the YIVO realized the hopes and dre a m

of Peretz, Ansky and Dubnow. It organized armies of “zamlers” (ama-

teur collectors) who tracked down community re c o rds, collected folk

songs, and conducted surveys of the local population based on YIVO

q u e s t i o n n a i res. In time, a healthy tension developed between those

who wanted to emphasize academic scholarship and those who

called for more stress on “relevance:” outreach activities, adult edu-

cation and popularization. The YIVO’s political backers, leftist parties

like the Bund and the Poalei Tsiyon, strongly argued for the latter. At

the YIVO world congress in August 1935, there were some heated

a rguments between “leftists” and “academics”. But the YIVO contin-

ued its work.

During the Second World War the Associate Director of the YIVO,

Zelig Kalmanovich, gave popular lectures on Peretz in the Vilna ghet-

to. The choir of the ghetto school recited Pere t z ’s poetry of hope and

humanism: fun tre rn taykhn, fun taykhn yamim, fun yamim a mabul, o

meyn nisht az di velt iz a kretchme b’leys din d’leys dayan. (Our tears

t u rn into rivers, rivers into seas, seas into the Flood, don’t think the

world is like a tavern, without a judge and without laws). At the end

of 1941 the Germans dragged the aged Simon Dubnow to his execu-

tion. “Jews,” he called out, “Write this down! (Yidn, farshraybt!)

Perhaps the best known YIVO project — for that’s what it really was

— was the enormous Ringelblum archive in the Warsaw Ghetto. In

1946 and in 1950 searchers pulled out from under the rubble of the

Warsaw ghetto ten tin boxes and two milkcans that contained thou-

sands of documents on the history of the Jews under the German

occupation. Under the code name of the Oneg Shabes Arc h i v e ,

Ringelblum and his staff of dozens of co- workers collected every-

thing: candy wrappers and diaries, artistic sketches and childre n s ’

school notebooks. The Oneg Shabes commissioned study pro j e c t s

on women and young people, the underg round press and trolley tick-

ets. Nothing was too small. Peretz, Ansky and Dubnow had called on

the Jewish people to zaml, and they did this until the very end. Of the

e n t i re Oneg Shabes staff only two survived. Ringelblum along with his

wife and son were shot in March 1944.


T O WARD ANEW JEWISHP O L I T I C S :ZIONISM ANDSOCIALISM

X

In 1903, after a vicious pogrom in Kishinev killed 43 Jews, the Hebre w

poet Chaim Nachman Bialik wrote a poem that would re v e r b e r a t e

t h rough Jewish Eastern Europe. Entitled the City of Slaughter, it was a

poem that could not have been more diff e rent from Gord o n ’s gre a t

paean to the Haskala, “Awake My People.” Barely 40 years separat-

ed one poem from the other, 40 years that witnessed an intellectual

and cultural earthquake. In Bialik’s poem Gord o n ’s friendly, pro g re s-

sive Russians had turned into beasts. Russia was no longer a Gard e n

of Eden that beckoned its Jews to learn a trade and learn the lan-

guage of the land. It was a country of savages that raped Jewish

women. And the Jewish men? They watched and did nothing. And

when it was all over, those who were kohanim (descendents of the

priestly caste) simply asked their rabbis if Jewish religious law allowed

them to have marital relations with their wives.

How did their menfolk bear it, how did they bear this yoke? /they crawledforth from their holes, they fled to the house of the Lord/ they offere dthanks to him, the sweet benedictory word. The kohanim sallied forth tothe rabbi’s house they flitted” Tell me, O Rabbi, tell. Is my own wife per-mitted? /The matter ends and nothing more. And all is as it was before . . . .

Come now and I will bring thee to their lairs/ The privies, jakes and pig-pens where the heirs of Hasmoneans lay, with trembling knees, concealedand cowering-the sons of the Maccabees! The seed of saints, the scions ofthe lions! Who crammed by scores in all the sanctuaries of their shame, Sosanctified my name! It was the flight of mice they fled, The scurrying ofroaches was their flight; They died like dogs and they were dead!

This poem was a bitter attack on the Jewish tradition of kiddush-

hashem, of suffering and dying to sanctify the name of God. The Jews

should not have run to their rabbis. What they should have done, Bialik

s c reamed, was to fight back.

B i a l i k ’s poem hit Russian Jewry like a bombshell. All through the Pale

of Settlement Jewish youth began to form self-defense units. When

the next wave of pogroms swept through the Pale in 1904-1905, the

rioters encountered young Jews with axes and pistols ready to fight.

B i a l i k ’s poem also accelerated a process of political activism that had

begun to intensify in the 1890’s. As faith in the Haskala and in the

X. TOWARD A NEW JEWISH POLITICS: ZIONISM AND SOCIALISM 1 4 7

good intentions of the Russian state plummeted, two major political

ideologies appeared to fight for the allegiance of East Euro p e a n

Jewry: Zionism and revolutionary socialism. Just as Pinsker had

w a rned, Jews now became convinced that they had to take their fate

into their own hands. They had to make their own history and stop let-

ting others decide how they would live. But just what was it that the

Jewish people needed? Should they stay in Russia, emigrate to the

United States, or re t u rn to rebuild a Jewish State in Palestine? There

w e re many other questions. Could Jews construct a secular

Jewishness, or should they continue to define themselves by re l i g i o n ?

If they did begin to see themselves as a secular nationality, what would

be their language? Yiddish or Hebrew? Which national movement —

if any — should they support? Should they bet on the Russians

against the Ukrainians or the Poles? We re they better off in multina-

tional empires or should they join their Czech and Polish neighbors

and fight for new independent nation states? If so would they claim

the separate status of a national minority? Or would they pro c l a i m

themselves to be Poles or Czechs of the Mosaic persuasion?

No matter what answers they found to these troublesome questions,

t h e re was yet another shadow that dogged the Jews as they sought

salvation in a new politics. Did they really have any options at all?

Whether they sought salvation in Zionism, in revolutionary socialism or

even in emigration overseas, they ultimately had to confront the terri-

ble question of their powerlessness. Great Britain might give the Jews

a chance to build a national home in Palestine, and then scrap its

p romise and pre p a re to turn the country to the Arabs. Jewish social-

ists might hope for better times come the revolution, but did the non-

Jewish left really need them or want them? The same Yiddish writer

who received a prize from Stalin might find himself in a death cell the

next day. Desperate Jews might flee to New York, but did American

Jews have the political clout to keep the doors to the United States

open?

Indeed by 1939 any honest observer might have concluded that the

g reat leap into modern Jewish politics that had begun with such high

hopes just 60 years before had now failed. Early that year, not many

weeks after the Night of the Broken Glass in Germany, Great Britain

issued a White Paper that would limit Jewish immigration into


Palestine and turn it into an Arab State. The major opponent of the

Zionists in Poland, the Jewish Socialist Bund had fought the Zionists

and had urged Jews to stay in Poland and battle for socialism, for

democracy and for their Yiddish culture. These millions of Jews in

Poland were now about to fall into Hitler’s clutches. Jewish commu-

nists trumpeted the wonderful promise of the Soviet Union, even as

Stalin was preparing to liquidate Yiddish culture and sign his pact with

H i t l e r. Jews who had preached assimilation and accommodation now

found themselves banging on bolted doors, confronted by a world

that simply did not want them, no matter how they had put their

Jewish past behind them. The United States had already closed its

doors to mass Jewish emigration in 1924.

So even as new political movements changed the psychology of east

E u ropean Jewry, they relied as much on faith and desperation as on a

s h rewd calculation of the real odds. Had Jews taken a sober look at

their real lack of power, they might well have succumbed to despair.

What these new political movements gave the Jews of Eastern

E u rope was something they badly needed, the priceless gifts of ener-

gy and hope.

1 / ZIONISM

In 1897 in Basel Switzerland, Theodore Herzl convened the first

Zionist Congress and established Zionism as a major political move-

ment. The yearning for a re t u rn to the ancient homeland had been in

the Jewish heart for two thousand years, and Theodore Herzl was not

the first Jew in the nineteenth century who tried to turn this primal

bond into a modern political movement. Left wing radicals (Moses

Hess), rabbis (Tsvi Hirsch Kalishcher), and disillusioned intellectuals

(Leon Pinsker), had supported Zionism before anyone had ever heard

of Herzl. A brilliant Hebrew essayist, Asher Ginzburg, better known

under his pen name of Ahad Ha’am, had already begun to preach a

Jewish national revival based on a Hebrew cultural renaissance in

Palestine. Just as Peretz saw Yiddish as a cultural bridge that would

give the modern Jew a creative alternative to both rigid orthodoxy and

shameful assimilation, Ahad Ha’am saw a living Hebrew speaking cul-


t u re in Palestine as a way to renew the Jewish people and charge the

Diaspora with new energ y.

Long before Herzl convened the first Zionist Congress in 1897, there-

f o re, Zionism had already demonstrated its latent appeal. What made

it so strong was its cultural and political flexibility. Rooted as it was in

the fundamental bond between the ancient homeland and the Jewish

people, Zionism could still adapt to all the diff e rent variations of Jewish

i d e n t i t y. Although the vast majority of Orthodox leaders opposed

Zionism as a blasphemous movement that presumptuously tried to

“rush the end” and take on work that really belonged to the messiah,

t h e re were still religious Zionists who argued that before God acted,

he needed to see proof that the Jews could help themselves.

Although most Jewish leftists would argue that social revolution in

E u rope, not flight to Palestine, would solve the Jewish problem, there

w e re still socialist Zionists who pushed the vision of a socialist

Palestine based on collective pro p e r t y, egalitarian ideals and bro t h e r-

hood between Jews and Arabs. Zionism also meshed easily with

moderate, democratic liberalism that saw a Jewish state as an exten-

sion of a liberal Europe based on the rule of law, private property and

p ro g ressive values. (This was the kind of Zionism that fit best with the

ideals of Theodore Herzl). In time the Zionist movement would pro-

duce many diff e rent branches: the religious Zionism of the Mizrakhi

movement, the spiritual Zionism of Ahad Ha’am, the Labor Zionism of

David Ben Gurion, the liberal Zionism of Chaim Weizmann.

These trends existed quite apart from important Zionist youth move-

ments that would have a major impact on Jewish young people in

interwar eastern Europe. In eastern Europe the “adult” Zionist org a n-

izations straddled the divide between the Diaspora and Palestine and

fought for both a Jewish National Home and for Jewish civil and

national rights in Europe. The new youth movements — Hashomer

H a t s a i r, Dro r, Gordonia and others — were quite diff e rent. They forg e d

an intense and separate youth culture based on kibbutzim in Poland

and in Palestine, seminars, outings and discussions. The youth move-

ments focused on transforming the inner lives of their members as a

p reparation for emigration to Palestine. Many were in open re v o l t

against the traditional, middle class values of their parents. During

World War II, these Zionist youth movements, along with the youth


movements of their arch-rival Bund, would form the backbone of the

Jewish resistance in the ghettos and forests.

But without Theodore Herzl’s special charisma and drive, it is hard to

see how all of this potential that later blossomed in Zionist parties and

youth movements could ever have been transformed into the move-

ment that eventually won a Jewish state. Theodore Herzl was an

unlikely candidate to build the Zionist movement. Born in Budapest in

1860, he was raised in a middle class Jewish milieu that was just

beginning to enjoy the new liberalism of the Hapsburg empire. Herzl

had only a mediocre Jewish education and he knew little about the

east European Jews and their problems. Local anti-Semitism in

Vienna was another matter, and it worried him. But Herzl’s charm

opened many doors and by the early 1890’s he had earned a solid

reputation as an amusing playwright and as an engaging journalist. In

1894, when the Dreyfus Affair erupted in France, Herzl was in Paris as

the correspondent of a prestigious Viennese newspaper. The viru-

lence of the anti-Semitic mob that he saw on the streets of Paris, bare-

ly 100 years after the French Revolution, shocked Herzl into the re a l-

ization that anti-Semitism was far more deep-seated than he re a l i z e d .

Like Pinsker, Herzl began to understand that little that the Jews did in

E u rope would help them gain acceptance. What the Jews needed

was a Jewish state in Palestine. That would remove the sting fro m

anti-Semitism, since Jews would now be a “normal” people. So even

Jews who did not go to Palestine would benefit, as would all

E u ropeans who valued order and stability.

Ever the optimist, Herzl did not see acquiring Palestine as a big pro b-

lem. Palestine belonged to the Turks, but surely rich Jews could per-

suade the Sultan to turn Palestine over to the Jews in exchange for a

buy back of Tu r k e y ’s onerous foreign debt. Of course, Herzl assumed,

the major European powers would also support the scheme since

they had everything to gain, and little to lose, from a Jewish state in

Palestine. After all anti-Semitism was a dangerous threat to public

o rder and even leaders who did not care for Jews had good reason to

fear pogroms and blood libels. Herzl expected settled, middle class

Jews to support the state, even if they did not go there themselves.

As for the Arabs, they had no reason, Herzl believed, to oppose the

re t u rn of long-lost cousins who would bring employment and pro s-


perity and who would treat them with respect. In an age of

Imperialism, where Europeans did not hesitate to annex other lands in

o rder to spread the benefits of a superior civilization and culture, Herzl

was very much a product of his time.

At first Herzl turned to rich Jews, confident that they would put up the

money to make his scheme work. After they re b u ffed him, Herzl made

a fateful decision. He turned Zionism into a mass movement. Fro m

that point on, he spared nothing, not his private life, not his finances

and not his journalistic care e r. Little counted except his incre d i b l e

determination to lead the Jewish people to self-respect, dignity and a

state of their own. Herzl worked like a man possessed. He org a n i z e d

the First Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897 and traveled everywhere

and anywhere to meet leaders and hucksters who might help him with

the Turks.

Herzl, a gifted choreographer and playwright, grasped that a gre a t

leader had to be an impresario and a showman. At the first Zionist

C o n g ress in 1897 as Herzl elegantly strode down the aisle of the Basel

Casino, cheering delegates leapt to their feet and shouted “Yehi Ha-

melekh” (Long live the King!). In a stirring speech, Herzl told the excit-

ed hall that if the Jews only wanted a state badly enough, they would

have it within 50 years. 50 years later, the United Nations passed its

historic resolution that partitioned Palestine.

The six years between the First Zionist Congress and Herzl’s early

death in 1904 at the age of 44 were a time of high hopes and bitter

disappointment. The Turks did not give Herzl Palestine and after the

Kishinev pogrom, Herzl recommended that the Zionist movement

accept what seemed to be a British offer to turn over much of Uganda

to the Jews. What the movement had to do now, Herzl argued, was

to save Jews. Uganda was not what Jews had hoped for, but it could

become a temporary refuge — a Nachtasyl he called it —until better

possibilities opened up. After all, the Jews were in danger and who

knew how long the United States and other havens of refuge would

keep their doors open?

Russian Zionists, led by Ahad Ha’am, yelled that Herzl had betrayed

the cause and forced Herzl to backtrack on the Uganda scheme. The


split between Herzl and Ahad Ha’am reflected deeper problems in the

basic character of Zionism. For Herzl Zionism was a political move-

ment, whose purpose was to gain a sovereign Jewish state. Jewish

settlements and schools were well and good but unless they re s t e d

on political guarantees, they were ultimately too fragile and exposed

to have long lasting results. Ahad Ha’am, who compared Herzl to

Sabbatai Tsvi, the false messiah of the 17th century, railed against

political Zionism and questioned Herzl’s leadership.

Zionism was about reviving Jewish culture and Jewish cre a t i v i t y, Ahad

Ha’am warned, not about political statehood. The Jews once had a

state, lost it, and showed that they could maintain their identity

t h rough spirit rather than power. Did Herzl want a Jewish state or a

state of people who just happened to be Jews? How could Herzl lead

his people if he knew no Hebrew and had so little grounding in Jewish

c u l t u re? Political statehood, Ahad Ha’am emphasized, was also dan-

g e rous. Could Palestine really absorb millions of desperate Jews?

Would the Great Powers really leave a Jewish state alone when it

stood on such strategically valuable property? Ahad Ha’am was also

the first Zionist thinker to remind Jews that Herzl was too optimistic

about the Arabs. It was unlikely, Ahad Ha’am warned, that the Arabs

would welcome Zionism.

Herzl did not die a happy man. In many ways he saw himself as a fail-

u re. But whatever his shortcomings Herzl transformed Zionism and

t u rned it from a sentiment into a focused political movement. Herzl

left a mighty legacy: an organization that could harness the massive

e n e rgy of hundreds and thousands of potential supporters and pursue

the goal of a Jewish state. Ironically one might argue that Herzl “won

by losing.” Had he gotten what he wanted in 1897, had the Sultan

handed over Palestine in re t u rn for a big check, then it is entirely pos-

sible that Zionism would have failed. In the 50 years between 1897

and 1947, Jews were forced to work on many diff e rent fronts. They

revived the Hebrew language, built the Technion and the Hebre w

U n i v e r s i t y, founded the city of Tel Aviv and established collective set-

tlements in remote areas of Palestine. Foiled in their hope of rapid

political victory, the Zionists were forced to create something that

p roved to have more staying power: a medinah ba’derekh (a state in

the making).


As soon as it became possible, David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first prime

m i n i s t e r, flew Herzl’s remains for reburial on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem

in 1949. Ben Gurion understood the enormous debt that the entire

Zionist movement owed to this extraordinary man.

After Herzl’s death, a new Zionist leader appeared who bro u g h t

together the political Zionism of Herzl with the cultural Zionism of

Ahad Ha’am. Herzl understood the importance of power but slighted

the cultural agendas of Jewish renewal. Ahad Ha’am stressed the cru-

cial task of a Hebrew revival but was overly pessimistic about Zionist

chances to create a state and absorb immigrants. Weizmann com-

bined both.

Chaim Weizmann was a remarkable man, a brilliant chemist who was

b o rn in the marsh country near Pinsk and who ended up as a wel-

come guest in the highest circles of the British elite. Even as he left the

Pale for a German education and a career in Great Britain, We i z m a n n

never forgot who he was, a Yiddish speaking Jew from eastern Euro p e

who loved his own people and who saw their only hope in a Jewish

state. He was one of those rare individuals who could live two lives

and two careers at the same time: as a Zionist leader and as a famed

s c i e n t i s t

We i z m a n n ’s great moment came in World War I. He discovered a

chemical process that facilitated Britain’s production of munitions.

Now that he had the attention of Britain’s leaders, he pushed the

Zionist cause. Jews and the British, he argued, had common inter-

ests. A Jewish presence in Palestine could protect the north flank of

the Suez Canal. Yes, today France and Russia were British allies but

who knew what tomorrow would bring? Why not bet on the Jews,

who shared British values and who would remain faithful and trust-

worthy guardians of British interests. Besides a British expression of

support for the Zionist cause would surely impress American Jews

and impel them to help the Allies.

In November 1917 Zionism gained its most important victory yet, as

G reat Britain issued the Balfour Declaration. The Balfour Declaration

did not promise a Jewish state, just that “His Majesty’s Govern m e n t

viewed with favor the establishment of a Jewish national home in


Palestine.” No sooner had the British issued the Balfour declaration

than they began to backtrack. Weizmann correctly understood that

the Balfour Declaration was only the beginning of a very long ro a d .

Nonetheless the Balfour Declaration proved to be one of the most sig-

nificant events in modern Jewish history. For the first time in the mod-

e rn period, a European power, seconded by the League of Nations,

recognized the Jews as a nation with a certain standing in intern a t i o n a l

l a w. This was a significant reversal of the Haskala, that had sought to

redefine Jews as an essentially voluntary community without political,

legal and national standing. The Balfour Declaration was incorporat-

ed into the mandate over Palestine that the League of Nations award-

ed Britain in 1920. It provided the legal framework within which the

Jews built a creative and diverse community, the Yi s h u v, in interwar

Palestine.

2 / THE BUND

In 1897, the same year that Herzl convened the first Zionist Congre s s ,

a group of Jewish radicals organized the Jewish Bund in Vilna. The

two gatherings were quite diff e rent. Herzl had rented the elegant Basel

Casino, had re q u i red the delegates to wear morning coats and top

hats, and dominated the gathering with his charisma and polished

speeches.

What happened in Vilna was very diff e rent: there was no casino, no

nice coats and ties, no cheers. A dozen or so tough Jewish re v o l u-

tionaries — whose names today are largely forgotten — slipped in to

a dilapidated wooden house that had no furn i t u re except for two

chairs, a single bed and a picture of Karl Marx on the wall. As they sat

on the floor and argued for days and days, they all knew that the

Tsarist secret police had put a price on their heads and many would

end up in Siberian exile. Today every literate Jew has heard of Herzl,

Chaim Weizmann and David Ben Gurion while the names of Arkady

K remer and John Mill are largely forgotten.

These men and women knew that the Jewish workers in the Russian

E m p i re were angry and ready to fight. They suff e red multiple oppre s-

sions: as workers, as Jews and, for many, as women. They lived in the

raw slums of Wa r s a w, Lodz and Vilna where they slaved in clothing


and textile factories and worked 16 hours a day. The govern m e n t

despised them because they were Jews while the Jewish middle

class looked down on them because they were uneducated and poor.

As they struggled to find some shred of human dignity, they constantly

had to straddle the very thin line that separated the Jewish urban poor

f rom the underworld that ran brothels and protection rackets in these

n e w, tough city ghettos.

That week in Vilna, these Jewish revolutionaries argued about one

basic question. Should the Jewish workers have their own party or

should they simply join the Russian and the Polish socialist move-

ments? The non-Jewish left adamantly rejected the idea that Jewish

workers should form their own organization. Lenin had followed Marx:

Jews were not a nation, Yiddish was not a language and come the

revolution, the Jews would happily assimilate. The Jewish re v o l u t i o n-

aries who founded the Bund were not sure exactly where they were

going. Few of them spoke fluent Yiddish and all of them were militant

leftists who despised the Jewish religion and Jewish nationalism. But

something bothered them. It was quite simply a fact that there were

millions of Jews in eastern Europe, that they spoke Yiddish and that

they were a people. Why should the revolution promise liberation to

Poles and Russians and demand that the Jews simply fade away?

No, they too needed their own party to fight for their rights and to

speak to them in their own language. In those early years, the

founders of the Bund professed not to care if the Jews voluntarily

assimilated or forgot Yiddish. That was the business of the Jewish

workers. But no one should TELL them that they had less right to their

c u l t u re than did their non-Jewish brothers.

In Minsk, in Vilna, in Warsaw and in Lodz the Bund quickly began to

gain popularity. It organized unions, led strikes and gave Jewish work-

ers, both men and women, a new determination to fight for a better

life. The workers did not only fight against employers. They also

attacked the pimps and the brothels that symbolized the degradation

of the Jewish poor. In the grim Jewish slums, tensions rapidly esca-

lated between the Bundists and the Jewish underworld, who re s e n t-

ed this bothersome new competitor for power in the street.

In a fateful coincidence the rise of the Bund took place at the same

time as the rise of a modern Yiddish literature. The Bund and the


Yiddish writers had very diff e rent agendas, but they shared a common

i n t e rest in spreading the new culture. The Bund began to issue cheap

editions of new Yiddish books and encouraged workers to discuss

them. If the Jewish worker respected his language, he would have

m o re respect for himself. By the same token, when Y.L. Peretz and

others began to fight for a more serious Yiddish theater, he found a

willing ally in the Bund. The Bund, as well as the labor Zionists, would

s p a re no effort to fight for Yiddish schools and for Yiddish literature ,

f rom its early years right up to the Holocaust.

In 1902 the Bund gained its first martyr. That year on May Day, the

Russian authorities arrested a number of Jewish and Polish workers

who had demonstrated against the government. The Russian gover-

nor ord e red the Jewish workers flogged in jail. An enraged Jewish

s h o e m a k e r, Hershke Lekert, tried to assassinate the Russian gover-

n o r. He was arrested, sentenced to death and hanged. On the gal-

lows he bravely faced the executioner and refused the services of a

rabbi. Soon Jewish workers on both sides of the ocean were singing

the ballad of Hershke Lekert:

Oy brider iz zolt mir nisht fargesn: Dem shtrik vos men hot farvorfn oyfmayn halz: A tsavoe brider vel ikh iberlozn: az nekome zolt ir nemen faraltz (Brothers, don’t forget me and the rope that they put around my neck.I’ll leave a testament, and you will take re v e n g e )

It did not take long before the Bund found itself in a nasty battle with

Vladimir Lenin, the founder of modern Bolshevism. Lenin despised

the Bund for two reasons. First he scorned what he called its Jewish

nationalism and second, the Bund threatened his plan to org a n i z e

Russian Marxists in a tightly disciplined, centralized party. The Bund

wanted a loose, decentralized party - organized along national lines -

w h e re workers would make their own decisions and not take ord e r s

f rom a Leninist central committee. It also insisted that the Russian

Left recognize the Jews’ right to organizational and cultural autono-

m y. At a raucous free for all that took place in 1903 during the

Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Party, Lenin suc-

ceeded in isolating the Bund. Even Lenin’s Marxist opponents could

not stomach the Bund’s insistence that the Jews were a separate

nationality who deserved a separate organization within the party. “A

Bundist,” Georgyi Plekhanov sneered, “was a Zionist who was afraid

of sea sickness.”


Isolated from the rest of the Russian Social Democratic Party, the

Bund found itself all alone during the Russian Revolution of 1905.

Many have called these years 1903-1906 the first great heroic period

of the Bund, as the party fought Cossacks and pogromists on the

s t reets of Wa r s a w, Lodz and many smaller towns. Hundreds fell on

the barricades and even middle class Jews who disliked the Bund

gained a grudging respect for its courage and its determination to

defend Jewish honor. But isolation came at a great price. The Bund

faced a basic dilemma. Within the camp of the left, it aroused suspi-

cion as a Jewish nationalist party. But other Jewish parties saw it as a

d a n g e rous group that put class interests ahead of national interests.

F rom its very beginnings as a party, there f o re, the Bund found itself

occupying the uncertain and shifting space between two poles: leftist

i n t e rnationalism and Jewish nationalism. The left off e red powerful

non-Jewish allies and an end to the isolation of the Jewish workers.

What, after all, could the Jewish workers ever hope to accomplish on

their own? But both the Russian and the Polish Left demanded a

price that the Bund could not pay: assimilation. The Bund would have

to surrender its bedrock insistence that Jews deserved national-cul-

tural autonomy.

This insistence on national-cultural autonomy would become one of

the major demands of the Bund. In Eastern Europe, the Bund pointed

out, nationalities did not live in neatly delineated groups. All over east-

e rn Europe various nationalities lived together. While the Jews were a

major extraterritorial nationality, they were not the only one. To make

national rights dependent on territory would be a recipe for disaster

and bloodshed. Only a general readiness to allow all nationalities to

maintain their own schools and cultural institutions wherever they lived

could guarantee harmonious coexistence in a future socialist Euro p e .

Years later events in the former Yugoslavia underscored just how seri-

ous the Bund’s concerns were.

If the Bund looked to the right, it faced the Zionists and the Orthodox.

Many times, when Jews found themselves in trouble the Bund would

face pre s s u re to embrace “klal yisroel” or form a united national fro n t

with other Jewish parties. But this course also carried unacceptable

dangers. The Bund saw collaboration with other Jewish parties as the


d a n g e rous beginning of a slippery slope that threatened a loss of ide-

ological integrity and coherence. Only by remaining a class oriented

Marxist party could the Bund find its niche and press its claim to be

the only Jewish party that had at least some chance of finding non-

Jewish allies.

In time the Bund developed a very complex relationship to Jewish

nationalism. To borrow some traditional Jewish expressions, the Bund

distinguished between the “written Torah” and the “oral To r a h , ”

between what it preached and what it practiced. The Bund pre a c h e d

its scorn of Jewish nationalism and its adamant refusal to work with

other Jewish parties. But in reality the Bund emerged as a powerful

defender of Jewish dignity and Jewish rights. In theory it was a work-

ing class party, concerned only about class issues. In practice, it

stood up to defend many other Jews. In the 1930’s as anti-Semitism

escalated in Poland, tough Bundists organized fighting groups that

took on the thugs who attacked caftaned Hasidism in city parks and

middle class Jewish university students in lecture halls.

A fitting epitaph for the Bund would certainly be the suicide note of

Szmul Zygielboym, who killed himself in London in 1943 as a pro t e s t

against the unwillingness of the outside world to stop the murder of

Polish Jewry. Zygielboym had been one of the leaders of the Polish

Bund between the wars and had been active in the unions, in the cul-

t u re clubs and in the summer camps that the Bund had established

for poor Jewish children. Before he killed himself he wrote that:

“I can no longer remain silent. I can not live when the remnant of theJewish people in Poland, whom I re p resent, is being steadily annihilated.My comrades in the Warsaw ghetto fell with weapons in their hands, inthe last heroic struggle. I was not fortunate enough to die as they did andtogether with them. But I belong to them and to their mass graves. By mydeath I wish to express my vigorous protest against the apathy with whichthe world re g a rds and resigns itself to the slaughter of the Jewish people.”

Between its founding in 1897 and the Holocaust, the Bund faced

many crises. One of the worst came after the Bolshevik revolution in

1917, when Lenin re b u ffed the Bundist pleas to spare the party and

let the Jewish workers keep their separate identity. He gave them only

one choice: join the Communist party with no conditions. In the Soviet


Union, the Bund disappeared and many of its former leaders perished

in Stalin’s execution cellars in the 1930’s.

What was left of the Bund flourished in interwar Poland. Many mem-

bers left the Bund for the Communist party but those who re m a i n e d

w e re forced to define what separated them from Communism. The

Bund became a major advocate of democratic socialism and a pow-

erful support for Jewish unions, sport clubs and Yiddish schools.

The Bund also played a major role in the advancement of Jewish

women. In no other modern Jewish political movement did women

have as important a place as in the Bund, whose major leaders includ-

ed Esther Frumkina, Anna Heller, Sofie Novogrodzka and Patty

K re m e r. A popular Bundist song was Arbeter Froyen (Working Wo m e n )

You working women/ suffering women/ women who languish at homeand in mills/ O why don’t you help us in building the temple/ of fre e d o mand joy that will end the world’s ills/

The impact of the Bund extended far beyond Poland. Former

Bundists helped form the Jewish labor movement in the United States

and organized the Wo r k m e n ’s Circle. Needle unions like the

Amalgamated Clothing Workers and the ILGWU reflected the influ-

ence of their Bundist founders. Aside from fighting for bre a d - a n d - b u t-

ter issues, these unions built coops and struggled to give the workers

cultural and educational opportunities.

3 / POLISH-JEWISH RELAT I O N S

The steady deterioration of Polish-Jewish relations towards the end of

the nineteenth century, both in the Russian Empire and to a lesser

d e g ree in the Hapsburg Empire, was a particularly worrisome signal

for the future of East European Jewry. Many Jews still clung to the

hope that anti-Semitism was a vestige of the past, a holdover from an

era of religious enmities and feudal jealousies. Economic pro g re s s

and modernization would sweep away ancient hatreds and bring war-

ring peoples together. We have seen how many important Jewish

thinkers began to rethink this Haskala optimism after the pogroms of


1881. The escalating wave of anti-Semitism in Poland seemed to

confirm their fears.

Tensions also escalated with Czechs, Slovaks, Ukrainians and

Lithuanians whose own nationalist movements tended to see Jews as

economic competitors and as allies of rival cultures. For example

Czechs resented Jews because they spoke German, Slovaks

because they spoke Hungarian and Lithuanians and Ukrainians

because Jews spoke Russian or Polish. Predominantly peasant peo-

ples like Ukrainians and Lithuanians made new agricultural coops a

c o rnerstone for their national revival and this put them on a collision

course with the shtetl economy and the Jewish middlemen in the

countryside. But the escalating conflict with the Poles had the most

ominous implications. The downturn in Polish-Jewish relations had its

roots in simultaneous transformations that were changing both Polish

and Jewish societies. In many important respects, by the late 19th

century each people was moving away from the other.

For much of the 19th century, Polish-Jewish relations had been

i m p roving. Poland’s great poet, Adam Mickiewicz, had seen Poles

and Jews as allies and a Jewish character, Jankiel, had played a

p rominent and positive role in his important epic poem, Pan Ta d e u s z ,

P o l a n d ’s national classic. Many Polish intellectuals who had fled

Poland after the defeated revolt against Russia in 1830-31, pro m i s e d

the Jews that an independent, democratic Poland would bring them

equal rights and brotherhood with the Poles. In turn many Jews ded-

icated themselves to the Polish cause and re g a rded themselves as

“Poles of the Mosaic persuasion.” The high tide of Polish-Jewish

understanding came during the 1850’s and 1860’s. Jews fought side

by side with the Poles in the 1863 uprising against Russia, and fer-

vently believed in the stirring Polish slogan “For your liberty and for

ours.” A free Poland would also be a country of fraternity and civic

h a r m o n y.

The defeat of the 1863 rising against Russia caused many Poles to

rethink their national strategy. Two rebellions had now failed. How

long could a people beat its head against a wall? Some Poles called

for a strategy of “organic work:” instead of armed rebellion, the Polish

people should rebuild their nation from the ground up. Not arms but


schools, cooperatives, sports clubs and banks would guarantee the

n a t i o n ’s future. Many Polish intellectuals also learned another lesson

f rom the failed rebellions against Russia: the Polish nation had to

include more than just the nobility. There had to be some way to con-

vince the peasants and the workers that they were Polish too. New

thinkers appeared who called on their country to build a new society

that would transcend the dysfunctional legacy of the old

Commonwealth. Poland had lost its independence, they said,

because it had been a society fractured along national and econom-

ic lines. But how could the Poles become an “organic” nation if they

lacked a middle class? How could one build a new Polish people if

most of the cities and small towns were indeed populated by Jews?

Many Poles now took a new look at the people who lived in their midst

and who constituted at least half of her urban population. The turn to

anti-Semitism was not immediate. Many Polish advocates of “org a n-

ic work” were ready to accept the Jews as Poles, provided that the

Jews assimilated, gave up Yiddish, dressed like Poles and defended

Polish national interests against hostile third parties such as the

Russians or the Ukrainians in Hapsburg Galicia.

As time went on, however, a few Polish nationalists believed that even

assimilation did not go far enough. New leaders like Roman Dmowski

founded an important new movement called National Democracy, the

so-called Endecja. Poland, argued Dmowski, was a Catholic country.

A non-Catholic could not be a Pole. Jews were a foreign element.

Once upon a time, Poland’s economic weakness had impelled the

szlachta and the kings to invite them in. But those times were long

gone. It was time to tell the Jews, by means of economic boycotts and

political struggle, that they were now unwanted guests. By the eve

of World War I, National Democracy was the single strongest political

movement in Russian and Prussian Poland.

As many Poles began to shift from tolerance to anti-Semitism, many

Jews also began to rethink their own identity. For much of the second

half of the nineteenth century Polish Jewish politics had been domi-

nated by a Warsaw Jewish elite — familes like the Natansons,

Dicksteins and Wa w e l b e rgs — who saw themselves as Poles of the

Mosaic persuasion. They were generous with their time and money


and contributed liberally to both Jewish and Polish institutions. These

families built not only Jewish hospitals and schools but also liberally

endowed Polish art museums and schools. Thanks to Jewish money,

Poles had an encyclopedia and access to aff o rdable editions of their

own classics.

One of the great symbols of their aspirations for Polish-Jewish under-

standing was the dedication of the Tlomackie Synagogue in Wa r s a w

in 1878. This enormous, beautiful structure was built with contribu-

tions from the leading Warsaw Jewish families. At the opening of the

building, Rabbi Isaac Cylkow defiantly faced the Russian govern o r

and delivered his sermon in Polish, an act that was forbidden by law.

The Tlomackie synangoue, its founders hoped would accomplish

many things. Its splendor would show the Poles that Judaism could

be dignified and patriotic, a noble religion that could develop in total

harmony with Polish patriotism. The synagogue would also attract the

c h i l d ren of the Hasidic masses that were streaming into Wa r s a w. It

would educate them and convince them to abandon the Asiatic cus-

toms of their fathers and adopt a more European life style. The gov-

e rning board would select rabbis who would stand out not only for

their Jewish learning but also for their mastery of Polish culture .

Perhaps, the Warsaw Jewish elite fervently hoped, the synagogue

might also persuade their own children to stay Jewish.

But the Jewish doctors and bankers who built the Tlomackie syna-

gogue soon realized that their hopes for Polish-Jewish rappro c h e-

ment were misplaced. Indeed they found themselves in an ever more

lonely position as not only Poles but also Jews began to question the

possibility of becoming a “Pole of the Mosaic persuasion.” The

Hasidim did not flock to the synagogue and even worse, many of the

c h i l d ren of the Warsaw Jewish elite left Judaism altogether and con-

verted to Catholicism. Polish society, they discovered, was losing its

former tolerance and now demanded a baptismal certificate as an

entry ticket into the national community.

The synagogue itself changed over time and reflected the gro w i n g

nationalism of even the wealthy and acculturated strata of Polish

J e w r y. The rabbis who succeed Rabbi Cylkow were eminent schol-

ars who gave their sermons in Polish. But they also supported


Zionism and proudly insisted that they were Jews, not Poles of the

Mosaic persuasion.

In 1943, the SS General Jurgen Stroop decided to end the battle of

the Warsaw ghetto with a grand gesture. He ord e red German sappers

to blow up the Tlomackie Synagogue. In his report he described how

happy he was:

“A beautiful official seal to the end of the action was provided by the blow-ing up of the Great Synangogue on Tlomackie Street. Preparations tookten days.... The synagogue was solidly built. As a result in order to blowit up in one explosion we had to undertake time- consuming sapper andelectrical work. But what a beautiful sight. From an artistic or theatricalpoint of view it was a fantastic spectacle....In the light of the burning build-ing stood tired and bedraggled my brave officers and men. I prolonged themoment of expectation. Finally I called out Heil Hitler and pushed thebutton. A fiery explosion rose towards the clouds. An ear-piercing crash.Enchanting fairy tale colors...

(Quoted by Wlayslaw Bartoszewski and Antony Polonsky in the Jews of Wa r s a w )

The growing estrangement between Poles and Jews was not entire-

ly one-sided. As we have seen after 1880 a new Jewish nationalism

and assertiveness began to transform Jewish life as well. This hap-

pened not only in the Russian Pale but also in the Polish provinces that

w e re under Russian rule but were not a legal part of the Pale.

In response to intensified official anti-Semitism during the reign of

Alexander III, many Jews began to immigrate to Poland from the

Lithuanian and Ukrainian sections of the Pale. The legal position of

the Jews in Poland was somewhat easier and economic conditions

w e re also better. These new immigrants, whom the Polish Jews called

Litvaks, knew little Polish and had little reason to identify with the

Polish cause. On the other hand, it was largely due to these Litvaks

that modern Jewish secular ideologies, such as Zionism and

Bundism, came into Poland. However diff e rent they were, one point

that Zionists and Bundists had in common was the belief that Jews

w e re a separate nationality who had a right to their own autonomy and

their own language. This growing Jewish nationalism was bolstere d

by the appearance of important Yiddish writers like Y.L. Peretz, who


t u rned Warsaw into a center of the new Yiddish literature. Pere t z

waged a tireless campaign to instill pride in the Yiddish language and

to raise the artistic standards of the Yiddish theater. Aspiring young

Yiddish writers from the provinces flocked to Pere t z ’s apartment on

Ceglana Street for approval and for encouragement. In the new

Yiddish daily press that began to appear in Wa r s a w, Peretz and oth-

ers began to attack the old Jewish leadership that allegedly gro v e l e d

to the Poles and that was too cowardly to affirm a separate Jewish

i d e n t i t y.

I ronically the surging tide of modern Jewish nationalism in Wa r s a w

p roduced an unlikely alliance of the assimilationist elite with Hasidic

leaders. Elegantly attired Polish-speaking doctors and lawyers sat

side by side on the community board with wealthy Yi d d i s h - s p e a k i n g

Hasidic businessmen in silk caftans. What brought these gro u p s

together was a common hatred of this emerging Jewish nationalism.

The assimilationists warned their fellow Jews that this new Jewish

nationalism would bring nothing but disaster, since the Poles would

now rightly suspect that the Jews had separate agendas and would

become “a state within a state.” The Hasidim scorned the very idea

of secular Jewishness. Jews were a religion, and their leaders were

rebbes, not Yiddish writers, socialists and Zionists. But in Warsaw and

e l s e w h e re, the assimilationists and the rebbes were slowly losing their

battle against these new forces.

By the first decade of the twentieth century, Warsaw had become a

flashpoint of Polish-Jewish tensions. Not only were the Jews chang-

ing politically but they were also becoming more numerous. By 1910,

t h e re were 340,000 Jews in Warsaw or about 43% of the population.

The 1912 elections to the Russian Duma produced a crisis that helped

poison Polish-Jewish relations for years to come. After the Russian

Revolution of 1905, Russian subjects could vote for deputies to the

Duma (or parliament). The voting system was far from democratic and

it was extremely complicated, but the election campaigns were hard

fought-and often ignited interethnic tensions. Here was a clear exam-

ple of how democratic reforms — however imperfect — could wors-

en rather than improve relations between diff e rent peoples.


The complex electoral law actually ensured that Wa r s a w ’s Jews could

elect the city’s delegate to the Duma. The entire Polish elite, from lib-

erals to nationalists, demanded that Jews respect Polish pre e m i n e n c e

in Warsaw and acquiesce in whomever the Poles chose. It was outra-

geous, they fumed, that Jews, not Poles, would decide who re p re-

sented Poland’s most important city. The Jewish assimilationist elite

begged other Jewish voters to give in to the Polish demands. The

Poles warned that if Jews elected their own delegate, they would

re g a rd this as a Jewish betrayal of Polish national interest. But a ter-

rible problem quickly developed. The leading Polish candidate was an

unabashed anti-Semite. No matter, said the Jewish leadership, grit

your teeth, stay home, but let the Poles make their choice without

Jewish interference. Peretz was having none of it and wrote impas-

sioned articles in the Yiddish press that implored Jews to show some

pride and reject the popular Polish candidate. Most Jews understood

that they had better not elect a Jew to re p resent Wa r s a w. But in a

show of defiance and national pride, they elected a Polish socialist,

Jagiello. This enraged mainstream Polish society.

As a result of this election, the National Democrats called for an eco-

nomic boycott of all Jewish shops. They saw Jewish conduct as a

declaration of war against their Polish neighbors. In their eyes, the

Jews had proved beyond all doubt that they were a foreign element in

Poland, an alien race ensconced in the very heart of the nation. The

boycott remained in effect until the beginning of the First World Wa r.

World War I brought new disasters for east European Jewry. From the

time the fighting broke out in 1914 until the Russian revolution of 1917,

most of the fighting took place in the regions that had the heaviest

Jewish population. In 1914 the Russian army launched an off e n s i v e

against Austria that took much of Galicia. The hundreds of thousands

of Jews who fell under Russian military rule suff e red from brutal tre a t-

ment at the hands of the Russian army, who accused them, with re a-

son, of harboring pro-Austrian sympathies. As the Germans and the

Austrians pushed the Russians back in 1915, Russian commanders

blamed their defeats on Jews and ord e red the expulsion of over

600,000 Jews from their homes.


Because of the greater horrors of the Holocaust, the terrible suff e r i n g

of World War I has been largely forgotten. But at the time, it had a far-

reaching impact on Jewish life. News of the calamities in Poland and

Galicia galvanized American Jewry to bury political and cultural ani-

mosities and set up a united body to send help-the Joint Distribution

Committee. The Joint would emerge as one of the most important

Jewish organizations in the interwar period. Not only did it provide a

crucial margin of help to the economically beleaguered Jews of east-

e rn Europe but it also signaled the growing weight of American Jewry

as a factor in world Jewish politics.

The crisis of World War I also hastened the modernization and trans-

formation of East European Jewry. As food supplies collapsed Jews

in the war zones became more dependent on public soup kitchens

and on organized relief. Hundreds of thousands of refugees needed

housing and their children needed education. These new soup

kitchens quickly became the catalysts for new Jewish schools that

taught Zionism or Yiddishist socialism. New political parties used the

relief effort to establish themselves and spread their ideology. The col-

lapse of Russian rule brought terrible suffering but the new power vac-

uum also removed many of the restrictions that had hampered the fre e

development of Jewish political and cultural life. Under German and

Austrian occupation new Yiddish theaters emerged. In Vilna a new

drama company, the Vilne Trupe, would have a major impact on

interwar Yiddish culture. Even more important, in major cities activists

established entirely new Jewish school systems in Yiddish and

H e b re w, with creative curricula, innovative textbooks and a dedication

to the principle of Jewish secular nationalism.


UNDER NEW F L A G S

X I

World War One unleashed momentous political changes that deeply

a ffected the Jews of eastern Europe. At least on paper these changes

w e re for the better. Zionists —thanks to the Balfour Declaration —

had the promise of a foothold in Palestine. The new nation states in

e a s t e rn Europe — Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Czechoslovakia,

Yugoslavia — all adopted constitutions that recognized the Jews as

equal citizens and Poland signed a special Minorities Tre a t y. Needless

to say, the new Soviet State established by the Bolsheviks abolished

the Pale, scrapped all the old laws that discriminated against Jews

and threw open the doors of Soviet universities to Jewish youth.

But in fact the situation of east European Jewry was much worse

than it appeared to be. The great Jewish communities of the

H a p s b u rg and the Russian empires were now divided by new nation-

al borders. Furthermore whatever economic problems the Jews

faced before 1914 paled before the dislocations of the interwar peri-

od. Neither the world economy nor the regional economy re a l l y

re c o v e red from the war. Polish Jewry suff e red particular strain as

Jewish businessmen not only lost their traditional Russian markets

but also faced new state sponsored anti-Semitism from the new

Polish state. Whatever the new nation states promised the Jews, the

reality proved to be quite diff e rent.

Anti-Semites never had to look hard to find reasons to hate Jews. But

now they had a powerful new weapon-the specter of the Jewish-

Communist conspiracy. The presence of many Jews in the top ranks

of the Bolshevik leadership was a windfall for Jew baiters. From Nazis

in Germany to Henry Ford in Detroit, Jew haters spread the word that

Communism was a Jewish plot. This heightened anti-Semitism cer-

tainly played a role in the passage of the 1924 law that slammed

A m e r i c a ’s doors shut.

In fact Russian Jews at first showed little interest in Bolshevism. In the

November 1917 elections to the Russian Constituent Assembly, the

Bolsheviks got only two percent of the Jewish vote and garn e red most

of their support from Russian soldiers and workers. But these facts

counted for little. Anti-Semites now had a new weapon. During the

1918-1921 Russian Civil Wa r, the anti-Soviet forc es —i n c l u d i n g

Ukrainians, Poles, and White Russians—used pogroms to siphon

popular support away from the Bolsheviks.

XI. UNDER NEW FLAGS 1 7 1

The Russian Civil War saw the bloodiest anti-Jewish pogroms since

the Khmelnitsky massacres of the 17th century. Between 1918 and

1921 about 60,000 Jews were killed, mainly in the Ukraine. These

m u rders would prove to be an ominous prelude to the Holocaust.

Jews and Communism had become interchangeable: to kill one, one

had to destroy the other. The Yiddish poet Peretz Markish described

the horror of the Ukrainian poems in his stark poem, the Kupe (the

heap). For Markish, there was no consolation, no recompense for the

mass murd e r. The heap of Jewish corpses had nothing to do with kid-

dush Hashem. It only remained for the Yiddish poet to convey the

calamity in unsparing, expressionistic language:

D o n ’t! Heavenly tallow, do not lick my pasted beards, / Brown streams ofg rease run from my mouths,/ Oh, brown leaven of blood and sawdust,/D o n ’t. Do not touch the puke on the black thigh of the earth (Tr a n s l a t i o nin David Roskies, Against the Apolcalypse, p. 99).

As the death toll gre w, many Jews now turned to the Red Army as the

only force that was ready to protect them. Lenin, as we have seen,

had little interest in Jewish culture and was convinced that the Jews

would eventually assimilate. But he knew that anti-Semitism thre a t-

ened the Soviet regime and took tough measures against pogro m s .

When the Civil War ended in 1921 the Soviet system began to offer its

two million Jewish citizens a mixed package of terrible hardships and

tempting opportunities. The new regime destroyed what was left of

the economic basis of the old shtetl. Egged on by Jewish commu-

nists, the Soviets shut down traditional Jewish religious schools,

closed synagogues and banned Hebrew culture as a “bourg e o i s -

nationalist” perversion.

And the opportunities? First and foremost the new system off e re d

Jews chances for education and social mobility that were unheard of

in tsarist Russia. The Five Year Plans and the drive for bre a k n e c k

industrialization created a great demand for scientists, managers and

engineers. Jews became army officers, physicians and the dire c t o r s

of huge factories.

But the new system off e red far more to Jews as individuals than it did

to Jews as a nation. The regime could not completely ignore Jewish

c u l t u re. Whatever their long term views about the national future of the


Jews, Lenin and his government were pragmatic enough to see that

in the short run, the Soviet Jews were a distinct nationality. Most of

them spoke Yiddish as their first language and lived in the former Pale

of Settlement. To influence the Jewish masses, the Soviets org a n i z e d

the Evsektsiia, the Jewish section of the Communist party. These

Jewish Communists-many of them former Bundists, tried to convince

o rdinary Jews to embrace a new Yiddish culture with schools, news-

papers and theaters all supported by the Soviet state. The Moscow

State Yiddish Theater, under the direction of the famous actor

Solomon Mikhoels, became one of the best theaters in the entire

Soviet Union. Many Yiddish writers — Peretz Markish, David

B e rgelson, David Hofstein — left Poland, the United States and even

Palestine to settle in the Soviet Union and build this new Yiddish civi-

lization. High level Jewish academic institutes in Kiev and Minsk

began to publish important scholarship in Yiddish. Hopes rose even

higher when in 1928 the Soviet government proclaimed the beginning

of a new Jewish Autonomous Region in Birobidzhan, a remote area in

Siberia near the Chinese bord e r. The Soviets had already begun

Jewish collective farms in the Ukraine and the Crimea. Now there was

the promise of an eventual Jewish Soviet Republic!

What many outsiders mistook for a Soviet Jewish renaissance actual-

ly rested on very weak foundations. Whatever the merits of the new

Soviet Yiddish culture, it could not dissuade Soviet Jews from switch-

ing to Russian as their first language. As more and more Jews left the

Pale for the booming cities of Russia pro p e r, the use of Yiddish began

to decline. Secular Yiddish culture had little staying power and when

Jewish mothers wanted their children to study in Moscow’s medical

institutes, the last thing they cared about was sending them to Yi d d i s h

schools. Had the Soviet regime allowed the Jews a genuine Jewish

c u l t u re, it is possible that the pace of acculturation might have been

s l o w e r. But Yiddish poems that praised Stalin were a pale substitute

for the Psalms. Over time Stalin also began to attack Jewish culture .

His latent anti-Semitism did not become obvious until after the sec-

ond World Wa r, when he murd e red many Yiddish writers and closed

down what was left of Soviet Yiddish culture. But by the 1930’s the

writing was already on the wall. After a promising beginning the

Jewish Autonomous Region in Birobidzhan suff e red from a savage

p u rge that destroyed most of its political and cultural leadership.

XI. UNDER NEW FLAGS 1 7 3

During the 1920’s and 1930’s a new Jewish identity took shape that

rested on professional accomplishment and, iro n i c a l l y, on a thoro u g h

familiarity with Russian culture and literature. No matter how much

they assimilated, Soviet Jews remained diff e rent from their non-

Jewish countrymen. Most Russians who flocked to the big cities in

the 1920’s and 30’s were of peasant origin and they carried the traces

of their village culture with them. The Jews had a very diff e rent back-

g round and it showed, even after they had forgotten the Yiddish that

they heard from their grandparents. Through the entire period of

Soviet rule, the Jews remained the most highly educated nationality

on a proportional basis. Decimated by the Holocaust, Soviet Jewry

n u m b e red less than one percent of the entire population after Wo r l d

War II. But it was only in 1955 that the Jews lost their rank as the

nationality with the second largest absolute number of university grad-

uates! Many Jews felt genuinely grateful to the regime and believed

in its promises. Mass disillusionment would only come years later,

after the terrible anti-Semitism of the late Stalin years and the vicious

campaigns against Israel.


I N T E R WA RPOLAND

X I I

In his 1932 introduction to a newly published, handsomely bound his-

tory of Polish Jewry, Zydzi w Polsce Odrodzonej, Senator Ojciasz

Thon stressed that although Polish Jewry found itself in an economi-

cally desperate situation, it still had to recognize its special re s p o n s i-

bilities as the cultural leader of world Jewry. American Jewry was rich-

e r, Thon implied, Soviet Jewry had more prospects for education and

social mobility, but only Polish Jewry possessed the national pride and

the cultural re s o u rces to guide the Jewish people. And Thon was

absolutely right. The story of interwar Polish Jewry was a story of cul-

tural vitality and political intensity rarely matched in Jewish history.

By the eve of the Second World Wa r, there were about 3.5 million Jews

in Poland, about ten percent of the population. The Jews were only

one of four major minorities that made up about 40% of the popula-

tion of the interwar Polish republic. There was also a large Ukrainian

population in the southeast, a Belorussian minority in the northeast

and a million Germans in Poland’s western provinces. The Jews were

the only non-territorial minority and the only one that did not question

the political integrity of the Polish state. Nonetheless, as we shall see,

Polish Jewish relations, already strained before the first World Wa r,

continued to deteriorate.

Unlike the Poles, who still largely lived in the countryside, the Jews

w e re a predominantly urban and small town people. Half of Polish

Jewry still lived in small shtetls, but one in four lived in the big cities of

Wa r s a w, Lodz, Krakow and Wilno. Many smaller cities were 60 to 80%

Jewish. Warsaw and Lodz were about 30% Jewish, and these figure s

would have been higher were it not for the incorporation of larg e l y

gentile suburbs. Most of Polish Jewry were petty traders, artisans and

workers in small factories. Yiddish remained the predominant lan-

guage but between the wars an ever larger number of Polish Jews

began to use Polish as a first language.

We all know now how the story of Polish Jewry ended. Of the thre e

and a half million Polish Jews about 10% survived the Nazi

Holocaust. The vast majority of survivors stayed alive because they

managed to flee to the Soviet Union or were arrested by the Soviets

during their occupation of Eastern Poland between 1939 and 1941.

Another way of looking at these figures is that the Nazis managed to

XII. INTERWAR POLAND 1 7 7

kill about 96% of the Jews who actually found themselves under the

German occupation.

This memory of this horrible tragedy has made it even more difficult to

understand and assess the modern history of the Jews in Poland. It is

all too easy to accept the facile assumption that the Polish Jews in the

late 1930’s knew they were trapped and were standing, to quote fro m

one book title, “On the Edge of Destruction.” To “backshadow” in this

fashion to overlook the determination of millions of Polish Jews to

get on with their lives, to overcome enormous obstacles to persevere

and to wait for better times.

For a long time the shadow of the Holocaust has also affected the

ability of Poles and Jews, both scholars and laypeople, to talk to each

other about their common experience in the land that both peoples

s h a red. Many Jews naturally harbored bitter feelings toward Poles

and thus tended to blur the distinctions between Polish and Nazi anti-

Semitism, between the problems that Jews had in pre-war Poland

and the catastrophe that engulfed them during the war. Many sur-

vivors re m e m b e red the indiff e rence of the Polish population, the

blackmailers who preyed on Jews that tried to survive on false papers

and the informers who handed their victims over to the Gestapo. If

that were not enough, the end of the war brought a new kind of hor-

ro r. In 1945 and 1946 hundreds of survivors were murd e red in Poland.

Some were killed because certain Poles had taken their homes and

p roperty during the war and did not want to give it back. Others died

because the anti-Communist underg round saw them as natural sup-

porters of the new Communist regime and shot them on lonely ro a d s

or on rural trains. The worst single atrocity occurred in Kielce on July

4, 1946. Enraged by a false rumor that Jewish survivors had tried to

kidnap a Christian child, a mob that included police and soldiers

attacked a house full of Jews and killed 42 survivors. It was the

Kielce pogrom that stampeded most Jewish survivors to leave Poland

f o re v e r. In the summer and fall of 1946 ten and thousands of Jews-

mostly re t u rnees from the Soviet Union-crossed the border into

Czechoslovakia.

Only in the 1980’s did a new dialogue begin between Polish and

Jewish scholars. Conferences in Israel, Britain and the United States


reached across barriers of mistrust and mutual suspicion to take a

new look at the experience that Poles and Jews shared for 800 years.

Two basic issues stood out: the Holocaust and the Polish-Jewish re l a-

tions before World War II.

At one of these conferences an important Israeli scholar, Pro f e s s o r

Ezra Mendelsohn, called for Jews to take a new look at their history

with the Poles. Without condoning injustice or crimes, Mendelsohn

appealed for a more nuanced view based on a better understanding

of the actual historical context. As Jews now knew from their expe-

rience in the State of Israel, there was a natural tension between the

principle of democracy and the principle of the ethnic nation state.

No one will pretend that the Israeli government spent the same

money on Israeli Arab education and towns than it spent on Jewish

schools and Jewish towns. Israel was founded as a Jewish state,

re s o u rces were limited and Jewish survival came first. Israeli Arabs

could vote and they enjoyed civil liberities. But no one could arg u e

that they were truly equal. Mendelsohn asked Jews to re m e m b e r

that for a re b o rn Polish nation state with very limited re s o u rces, the

Jewish domination of much of the retail economy and the major

Jewish presence in the cities was seen as a problem. Of course the

comparison between interwar Poland and the State of Israel does

not hold up completely. One might argue that unlike Israeli Arabs,

Polish Jews posed no security risk to the state and were totally loyal.

T h e re f o re Polish anti-Semitism was self defeating and the Poles

missed a great opportunity to strengthen their state and their econ-

o m y. But if we look at the sorry history of contemporary Europe, the

b reakup of Yugoslavia, the divorce between the Czechs and the

Slovaks etc., it remains a fact that ethnic harmony in that region is

the exception and not the rule.

What, then, really happened to Polish Jewry before the war? As we

have seen Polish-Jewish relations had been tense in the years that

p receded the rebirth of the Polish state in 1918. During Poland’s bat-

tles against Bolsheviks, Lithuanians and Ukrainians between 1918

and 1921, her new army had started some nasty pogroms, especial-

ly in Vilna and Lwow. On the other hand, many Jewish leaders saw

some grounds for cautious optimism. There was no proof that the

Polish government condoned the anti-Jewish violence committed by


the military. Jewish leaders also took some comfort from the fact that

Poland had signed a Minorities Treaty and her new constitution pro m-

ised the Jews equal citizenship and basic civil liberties.

But this cautious optimism soon gave way to the bitter realization that

votes alone could not protect Polish Jewry. Most Polish political par-

ties were hostile or ambivalent towards the large Jewish population

and the Jews simply did not have enough political clout to pro t e c t

themselves from discriminatory legislation. Like Israeli Arabs they

could vote and their deputies could complain in parliament. But ulti-

mately whatever Jewish deputies did in parliamentary commissions

counted for little. They made many eloquent speeches, the other del-

egates listened politely and then proceeded to pass laws that tight-

ened the screws on the Jewish population.

Much of this legislation was economic. The Poles nationalized key

branches of the economy — such as the manufacture and sale of

tobacco products — and then discharged all Jewish workers. The

l a rge state controlled sector of Polish industry gave few if any con-

tracts to Jewish firms. Municipal enterprises, the post office and pub-

lic transport fired their Jewish workers.

Perhaps matters would have been diff e rent had the Polish economy

been in better condition. But the re b o rn Polish state was an economic

cripple. Poland was cobbled back together from territories that had

belonged to three diff e rent empires. Roads and railroads mostly ran

in opposite directions and towards Moscow or Berlin or Vienna. Seven

years of non-stop war had ravaged Polish territory with blown bridges,

b u rned towns and shattered railroads. To make matters worse, Polish

industry now lost her former markets. The great textile centers of Lodz

and Bialystok had produced for the internal Russian market. This was

now cut off. The prices of Poland’s main exports —food, flax and

c o al—remained depressed on world markets. The peasantry sunk

into misery and had less and less purchasing power. Stung by the run-

away inflation of the early 1920’s Poland from that time on pursued a

tight money policy to keep the zloty strong vis a vis the dollar. This pol-

icy devastated the Jewish retail sector because the govern m e n t

raised taxes on commerce to achieve balanced budgets.


Indeed it was a painful irony that democracy threatened the Jews

m o re than semi-dictatorship. In 1926 Jozef Pilsudski pulled off a

coup d etat and ruled Poland as a strongman until his death in 1935.

During this period, Polish Jewry actually felt more secure. Pilsudski

did not love Jews and his re c o rd was far from perfect. But as a

native of the eastern borderlands Pilsudski had a better under-

standing of the multiethnic character of the Polish state. He accept-

ed the fact that the Jews had been in Poland a long time and were

an integral part of the country. It would be safe to say that the vast

majority of interwar Polish Jewry re g a rded him as a friend and were

devastated when he died in 1935.

The single most powerful party in interwar Poland were the National

Democrats, founded by Pilsudski’s major rival Roman Dmowski. If

Pilsudski was a federalist who wanted a multinational state, Dmowski

fought for a homogenous Polish nation state and the Jews were his

a rch enemy. The National democrats pressed for economic boycott

to drive the Jews out of the Polish economy.

After Pilsudski died in 1935 his successors, afraid of being outflanked

by the National Democrats, started to increase the pre s s u re on the

Jews. The boycott campaign intensified and many pogroms bro k e

out. The government condemned physicial violence against the Jews

but condoned an economic boycott-as long as it was peaceful. The

Catholic Church also let it be known that physical violence was unac-

ceptable but Poles had the right to boycott Jewish stores. The gov-

e rnment instituted a numerus clausus in the universities. As right wing

student violence intensified, many Polish universities instituted “ghet-

to benches” to segregate Jewish students. The Jews pre f e r red to

stand and pitched battles broke out in the lecture halls. Many Polish

anti-Semities pointed out that the world was re w a rding Hitler for his

persecution of the Jews. Half of Germany’s Jews had left the Reich

and other nations still treated Germany like an honored member of the

world community. Why couldn’t Poland do the same?

What could the Jews do to defend themselves? Politically they could

choose from four major options: Orthodoxy, Zionism, Bundism and

Communism. The main Orthodox party was the anti-Zionist Agudas

Yi s roel. (Its smaller rival, the Mizrakhi was religious and pro - Z i o n i s t ) .


The Aguda, led by a coalition of Hasidic rebbes and Lithuanian ortho-

dox rabbis, tried to protect Jewish interests through a strategy of

accommodation. It proclaimed its absolute loyalty to the Polish state

and its bitter opposition to Communism and Socialism. For a while

this strategy worked, especially under Pilsudski, as the govern m e n t

channeled money to the Aguda and helped it win elections to Jewish

community councils. But after Pilsudski died, the Aguda faced a rude

shock. The new government sponsored a bill to ban the kosher

slaughter of meat. This campaign exposed the hypocrisy of Polish

anti-Semitism. Many Poles said they fought Jews because they

allegedly supported Communism and were godless secularists. Now

it was hardly the case that communists consumed kosher meat. The

real aim was to take one more step towards the economic destruction

of Polish Jewry by driving Jewish butchers out of business. At any rate

the bill exposed the failure of the Aguda’s strategy of loyalty and

accommodation. The party had many achievements to its cre d i t -

especially in education. Its new Beys Yakov schools for girls showed

that it could indeed change with the times. But politically it had

achieved little.

Polish Zionism was another option and between the wars it came in

many diff e rent varieties: religious, secular, left wing, right wing and

youth movements. Since Polish Zionism fought for Jewish rights in

both Palestine and Poland, it was ultimately dependent on two gov-

e rnments that the Jews did not control: Great Britain and Poland. This

was the Zionist dilemma. It preached Jewish self-reliance and inde-

pendence but it had only limited control over its own fate. Arab riot-

ing and British restrictions on Jewish immigration exposed the basic

weakness of the Zionist movement in the late 1930’s. Nor were Polish

Zionists any more successful in protecting Jewish rights in Poland.

One Zionist leader, Yitzhak Grunbaum, chose a strategy of combata-

tive confrontation. Pound the table. Remind the Poles of their own

constitution . Wave the Minorities treaty for the world to see. To max-

imize Jewish leverage in the Polish parliament, Grunbaum made a

short-lived alliance with other minorities in 1922. This alliance, the

Minorities Bloc, even elected a Polish President-who was pro m p t l y

assassinated by a right wing nationalist outraged that Jews could

elect the nation’s head of state. The Minorities Bloc quickly faded and


Grunbaum left Poland for Palestine. To be sure Polish Zionism was a

powerful force. It set up a strong network of Hebrew schools and

enjoyed major support in the 1920’s. Zionist youth movements

attracted some of the finest and most idealistic Jewish youth. But ulti-

mately it achieved more in raising Jewish morale than in pro t e c t i n g

Jewish rights, either in Poland or in Palestine.

A third option was communism, and many young Polish Jews joined

the outlawed Polish Communist Party. After all, just across the bord e r

was a country where Jews, it seemed, could study anywhere and

become anybody. Many young people crossed the Soviet border ille-

g a l l y, and promptly disappeared into the labor camps of the Gulag. By

the mid 1930’s news of mass arrests and the purge trials began to

have a sobering effect. It was no secret that Stalin was closing Yi d d i s h

schools and had liquidated the leadership of the Jewish Autonomous

region in Birobidzhan. In 1938 Jewish Communists absorbed yet

another blow. Stalin dissolved the entire Polish communist party-on

g rounds that it was infested with Trotskyites (read Jews).

And that left the Bund. As other alternatives failed, on the eve of the

Wa r, the Bund emerged as the single largest Polish Jewish party. In

Wa r s a w. Lodz and Wilno the Bund got as many votes in the 1938

local elections as all the other Jewish parties put together. In Wa r s a w

the Bund elected 18 of of 20 Jewish members of the city council.

These sweeping Bundist victories did not mean that Polish Jews had

suddenly become Marxists. As one reporter put it, “The Jews voted

for the Bund on their way to Minkha (afternoon prayers).” Instead by a

p rocess of elimination the Bund, on the eve of the Holocaust, seemed

like the only meaningful alternative open to Polish Jewry.

The Bund said that there was nowhere to run. Jews could not trust in

God, they could not escape to Palestine and they could not hope to

take favors from Stalin’s bloodstained hands. The only thing left to do

was to stay in Poland and fight. Poland was home and the Jews had

as much right to it as the Poles. Fight the anti-Semites, fight the boy-

cott, and wait for the Polish Left to convince the Polish people that

anti-Semitism was a dead end. By the late 1930’s the Bund had

joined forces with the Polish Socialist Party. The beleaguered Jewish

population noticed that the Bund was the only Jewish party with a


major Polish ally. While Zionists warned about the danger from Hitler,

the Bund pointed out that if Hitler conquered Europe, then he would

s u rely capture Palestine as well. The fight against Hitler began in Spain

and on the streets of Wa r s a w. The Bund organized massive pro t e s t

strikes against pogroms and it formed combat squads to protect Jews

f rom anti-Semitic hooligans. The Jewish masses took notice. By vot-

ing for the Bund they could show their defiance.

The tough times that Polish Jews faced only redoubled their deter-

mination to protect their dignity and develop their own culture. The

Polish Jews developed schools in Yiddish and Hebre w, and dozens

of daily newspapers appeared in Yiddish and Polish. Wa r s a w ’s

Tlomackie 13 was a literary club that included hundreds of writers

and journalists. In Wilno in 1925 Jewish scholars founded the

YIVO, the Yiddish Scientific Institute that was dedicated to re s e a rc h

in the Yiddish language. Each town boasted its own network of

sports clubs, libraries and youth clubs. Polish Jewry was in the mid-

dle of profound and rapid cultural change. The use of Polish was

s p reading and in central Poland and Galicia, most Jewish childre n

w e re actually studying in Polish language state schools. But with

few exceptions acculturation did not mean assimilation. Most

Polish Jews were proudly Jewish.

Jewish writers and the Yiddish theater helped keep spirits up. One

Yiddish poet (Moshe Shimel) wrote, after a pogrom, that “zoln zey

shtrashen mit mesers, zoln zey shlogn un roybn, mir’ln farikhtn di

tishn, mir veln araynshteln shoybn, eyn mol un tzvei mol un dray mol,

biz in dem letztn mol, dem gegartn, mir hobn geduld, mir kenen

vartn”(they can threaten us with knives, beat us, rob us. We’ll repair the

tables, put in new glass, once and twice and a third time until the last

time. We have patience, we can wait”).

Jews also knew how to keep laughing. Two of the most popular

Jewish cabaret stars were Dzigan and Shumacher. In the summer of

1939, just before the outbreak of the war, they put on a skit entitled

“The Last Jew in Poland.” In the skit the dream of the Polish anti-

Semites has come true, and all the Jews have left Poland: but then the

Poles look around and see that things are n ’t so great. Life is boring,

the economy is ruined, and there are no cabarets. The Polish students

a re depressed and glum. There is nobody to beat up in the stre e t s :


But they find one Jew, a little man who was late getting out.

G o v e rnment delegations come to him and beg him not to leave. The

students organize a campaign to keep this last Jew from emigrating.

They stage a banquet and play Yiddish songs. The Jew sets a condi-

tion: he wants gefilte fish and cholent (a Jewish stew). The Polish radio

appeals for somebody who can cook it. To make the Jew even hap-

pier the Poles give him a medal. In the last scene he fastens the medal

to his posterior, turns his back to the audience and takes a big bow as

the curtain falls! The next day, Dzigan was summoned to the police.

No, for many Jews life went on. A few years ago the Polish Jewish

writer Jozef Hen published his memoir of his boyhood in interwar

Wa r s a w. Hen’s parents were comfortable but not wealthy. His father

was a successful plumbing contractor, and had immigrated to

Warsaw from Radzymin. He read Yiddish papers, could hardly re a d

Polish, but the children spoke Polish among themselves. Hen was 16

when the war broke out; and until that time he recalls a fairly happy

uneventful life ice skating in a nearby rink, bicycling, summers on the

Otwock line (the Warsaw equivalent of the Catskills), a lot of soccer,

and many trips to the movies. Like many other boys of his class, his

p a rents sent him to private Jewish schools where Polish was the lan-

guage of instruction and where both Jewish and Polish subjects were

taught. Hen may have been better off than most but his account is a

useful corrective to those who imagine the psychological state of

Polish Jewry in the darkest terms.

Under severe economic pre s s u re the Jews of Poland fought back.

With help from American Jewry they organized coops and credit soci-

eties to enable beleaguered Jewish shopkeepers to hang on. They

set up retraining programs for young people. After a pogrom, Jewish

relief agencies, led by the Joint Distribution Committee, arrived to help

the community get back on their feet. In October 1938 Polish Jewry

showed the world just how tough it was. That month Hitler expelled

15,000 Polish Jews from Germany. For some time the Polish bord e r

g u a rds would not let them enter Poland and they lived for months in

squalid refugee camps. In great need themselves, Polish Jewry nev-

ertheless organized a national campaign to help the refugees and

resettle them.


It was this dogged fight to fight and to persevere that carried over into

the first period of the Nazi occupation. For a very long time the Jews

had no idea that the Nazis intended to exterminate them. Since the

Nazis themselves did not decide on the Final Solution until sometime

in late 1941, the Jews could hardly have suspected what would hap-

pen to them. In the meantime they went about the grim business of

survival. In the inhuman conditions of the ghettos, they fought disease,

smuggled food, fed refugees and starving children, set up schools and

theaters and hoped for the best.

It is totally wrong to equate Jewish resistance only with armed re s i s t-

ance, to imply that the heroic young people who fought in the Wa r s a w

ghetto were somehow “better” than the millions who went to their

deaths in the gas chambers without an armed struggle. Not to leave

an aged parent on the brink of death, to caress a child in his or her final

moments, to stay together with loved ones until the very end — no

one who was not there should call these the acts of people who went

“like sheep to the slaughter.”

In the meantime the Jews could hope. They fell back on their tradi-

tional optimism. Peretz had preached that a moral order ruled the

world. Sholem Aleikhem’s “little Jews” in Kasrilevke ran around con-

vinced that in the end there would be “yoysher”(Justice). In the Vi l n a

ghetto, there was standing room only to hear a lecture series on Pere t z

and on Lag B’omer 1942 the choir of the ghetto school declaimed his

poem that proclaimed a stubborn conviction in the eventual triumph

of justice: Fun tre rn taykhn, fun taykhn yamim, fun yamim a mabul, o

meyn nisht az di velt iz a kretchme, b’leys din b’leys dayen: Fro m

tears, rivers, from rivers oceans, from oceans a flood, o do not think

that the world is a tavern, without laws and without a judge. One year

later in September 1943 most of these children would die in the gas

chambers of Sobibor. But in the meantime, they wrote poems and

o rganized mock trials of Bar Kokhba and Hero d - f i g u res in Jewish his-

tory who had chosen either collaboration with the enemy or hopeless

resistance. These were remarkable kids, the last gasp of Jewish Vilna.

T h e re was a popular Jewish folksong, “Lomir zikh iberbetn”(Let’s

make up), Jews changed the words to “Mir veln zey iberlebn”(We ’ l l

outlive them). In the Krakow ghetto the best loved Jewish song-writer


in pre-war Poland, Mordecai Gebirtig wrote a song whose re f r a i n

repeated: “Traybt unz fun di dires. Shayt unz op di berd. Yidn zol zayn

f reilekh. Mir hobn zey in dre rd ! ” ( You can throw us out of our homes

and cut off our beards. Jews be happy. They can go to hell!).

In the middle of the 1930’s after a pogrom in the small town of Przytyk,

Gebirtig had written an entirely diff e rent song, Es Brent. The shtetl

was in flames, raging winds were fanning the flames.

S ’ b rent, briderlekh, s’brent!/ Oy es ken kholile kumen der moment/ unzershtot mit unz tsuzamen/ zol oyf ash avek in flamen/ blaybn zol vi nokh ashlakht/ nor puste shvartse vent

The moment is near when our town will do up in fire and all of us willturn into ashes...

Many have mistakenly believed that Gebirtig wrote this song during

the Holocaust. No, no one would have believed that such a song

could turn into the literal truth. No, the flames and ashes, the visions

of burning Jews were only literary devices to goad the Polish Jews on

and encourage them to fight hard e r. And this is what they did, until the

very end.


E P I L O G U E

Today after 70 years of wars, exterminations and ethnic cleansings

E a s t e rn Europe presents a relatively neat picture of homogenous eth-

nic nation states. Poland, for example, is 99% Polish! It is easy to for-

get how recent this ethnic homogeneity really is or how it came about.

For centuries Eastern Europe was defined by the stunning diversity of

her ethnic mix. In the 17th century 60% of Poland’s inhabitants were

not Polish. In 1939, of Poland’s 34 million citizens, only 22 million were

ethnically Polish. The rest included Ukrainians, Belorussians,

Germans, and 3.5 million Jews. The Baltic States of Lithuania and

Latvia also had large minority populations, as did Czechoslovakia,

Hungary and Romania.

To d a y, however, one can wander through Eastern Europe and see lit-

tle evidence, or consciousness of the multiethnic past. Under

Communism, history books and city guidebooks re w rote history.

Tourists could visit Lviv, (Lvov in Russian, Lwow in Polish, Lemberg in

German, Lemberik in Galician Yiddish) and read that it had always

been a purely Ukrainian city; schoolchildren studied textbooks that

i g n o red the Poles and the Jews that had made up most of Lviv’s s

population before 1939. Most urban histories published in Poland

after World War II contained next to nothing on the Jews, although

b e f o re the war they had comprised, depending on the re g i o n ,

between 30% and 80% of the urban population. So it is no surprise

that few Poles today — or Ukrainians or Lithuanians — know very

much about the hidden landscapes submerged by many layers of

tragedy and amnesia. To be fair, some attempts are being made to

c o r rect the situation. Groups like the Borderlands Foundation in

Poland sponsor seminars and workshops about the rich multi-ethnic

past. But even well-meaning teachers in Poland, the Ukraine or

Belarus are hard put to reverse past policy and teach their students

about their own history.

Few Poles would know that their town might well have had a Yi d d i s h

name, or that the Jewish geography of Poland was quite diff e re n t

f rom how Poles read their land. For Poles, Kock and Gora Kalwaleria

w e re small towns in Central Poland with little to distinguish them. But

any Polish Jew knew that Kock was the home of the famous and enig-

matic Kocker Rebbe, the Hasidic Sage of Kock whom the great re l i-

gious thinker Abraham Joshua Heschel compared to Sore n

E P I L O G U E 1 9 1

K i e r k e g a a rd, one of the most important theologians of the 19th cen-

t u r y. A Yiddish song reminded Jews that “In Kotsk geyt men nisht. In

Kotsk muz men oyle regel zayn.” (You don’t just go to Kock. You make

a pilgrimage to Kock). Gora Kalwaleria was the Jewish Ger, the seat

of the biggest Hasidic dynasty in Poland before World War II. In 1938,

the last year before the Wa r, 80,000 followers streamed into Ger to

hear the Gerer Rebbe Avram Alter, blow the shofar (ram’s horn.) on

Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Ye a r. Poles in the town called the

G e rer Rebbe the “Jewish Pope.”

The hamlets of Mir (now in Belarus) and Radyn had little meaning to

non-Jews. But even a totally anti-religious Polish Jew would have

h e a rd about the great Mir yeshiva, the religious academy whose grad-

uates helped ensure the staying power of Orthodox Jewry in the 20th

c e n t u r y. And the entire Jewish world immediately associated Radyn

with the Khofets Khayim (Rabbi Yi s roel Meir Ha-Cohen), a giant who

combined exact Talmudic scholarship with the highest ethical stan-

d a rds.

The East European landscape included many cities where diff e re n t

collective memories and diff e rent national stories intersected:

Wa r s a w, Lvov, Czernowitz, Lublin, Prague. One of the best examples

was Vilna. The spectacular kaleidoscope of competing memories, of

swirling imagined cities in the prism of lakes, pine forests and time that

was Lithuania. Imagined cities (in the plural): The Jews , as we have

seen, called Vilna Yerushalayim D’Lite, the Jerusalem of Lithuania.

But Poles and Lithuanians also saw Vilna as their own. The Poles

called it Wilno and the Lithuanians called it Vilnius. Some Belorussian

intellectuals also claimed the city: after all, they argued, Old

Belarussian was the lingua franca of the early modern Lithuanian

D u c h y. Few Americans can imagine a Boston that was also

Bostonius, Bostonsky, Bostonowicz ,Bostonov and, Ye r u s h a l y i m

D’Massachusetts! But in the vast lands that stretched from the Oder

River to the Dnieper and from the Black Sea to the Baltic, this diversi-

ty was the rule, not the exception.

For the Lithuanians Vilnius was their historical capital and today is the

capital of new-independent Lithuania. All Lithuanians have learn e d


the legend of how Prince Gedymynas, the 14th century Lithuanian

h e ro, founded Vilnius. He went hunting, fell asleep, and in a dre a m

replete with howling wolves and blaring trumpets, saw a sign to build

his capital. He built his castle on the “castle hill,” one of the most

beautiful sites in Vilna, which the Jews would call the shlosbarg. It was

and is a great place to walk, and you can see the entire city nestled

u n d e rneath you. As you descend the shlosbarg you reach the main

s t reet of Vilnius, which today is called, no surprise here, Gedymynas

Avenue. Under the Poles, who seized the city from the Lithuanians in

1922, the same street was called Mickiewicz Avenue. And before that

the Russians, who ruled Vilna from 1795 to 1915, named it

G e o rgievsky Pro s p e k t .

One of Gedymynas’ descendants, the King Jagiello married the Polish

Princess Jadwiga in the 15th century and adopted Christianity. In

1569 the two states, Poland and Lithuania, joined in a formal union

that lasted until the Russian takeover in 1793. During the course of the

15th and 16th centuries Vilnius gradually elided into the Polish Wilno

and became an italianate jewel of churches, monasteries, convents,

Jesuit schools and the famous icon of the Ostra Brama, where gener-

ations of Poles would kneel in the street and pray to the Blessed

Vi rgin. It was in Wilno that the Poles built their important university,

which they named after Stepan Batory, the king who led a crusade

against Russian Tsar Ivan the Terrible in the 16th century. And over

time the Lithuanian nobility adopted not just the Polish Roman

Catholic faith but also Polish culture. Their descendants include Adam

Mickiewicz, Poland’s great bard, Jozef Pilsudski, the father of modern

Poland, and Czeslaw Milosz, the Nobel- prize winning poet.

Milosz wrote a wonderful memoir of Wilno ( or Vilnius or Ye r u s h a l a y i m

d’Lite) called Native Realm where he reminded us that neat definitions

never fit Lithuania, or most of Eastern Europe for that matter. For

w e s t e rners who like nations to be conveniently packaged and easily

understood, a careful reading of Milosz is absolutely essential. As

Poland and Lithuania fought over control of Vilnius after World War I,

some of his relatives cast their lot with the Lithuanians, others with the

Poles. But at heart, they felt that they were both.

E P I L O G U E 1 9 3

How else can an outsider understand why Poland’s national epic,

Adam Mickiewicz’s Pan Ta d e u s z, begins with the following words: “O

Lithuania, my fatherland.” Mickiewicz had written this great epic just

after Russia, Austria and Prussia had gobbled up what was left of

Poland in the late eighteenth century. What had been the larg e s t

country in Europe had just disappeared-only to resurface in 1918.

Like many Jewish odes to Vilna, Pan Tadeusz is about the pathos of

loss: Poland-Lithuania was gone, and who knew when it would come

back again? “O Lithuania my country, thou art like good health: I never

knew till now how precious you were, till I lost you. Now how see how

beautiful you are because I miss you so much.” So wrote Mickiewicz

and one can compare these words to Rabbi Abraham Joshua

H e s h e l ’s essay on Jewish Vilna: “Mit vos ken ikh dir farglaykhn vilne,

heylike yidishe kehille? Yeder yid a blat gemore, a kapitl tehilim. A lid

fun betokhn un tzar, a shtiler geshre y, a tzniesdig gezang. Un mir hobn

nisht gevust, vi gut es iz unz geven.” (With What shall I compare thee

Vilna, holy Jewish community. Every Jew a page of the Talmud, a

chapter of the Psalms, a song of faith and sorro w, a silent cry, a hum-

ble chant. And we knew now how good we had it).

The Poles lost Vilna to the Russians in 1795 and then got it back again,

f rom the Lithuanians, in 1922. In 1939 they lost Vilna again. When the

Soviet Union broke up in 1991, Vilna — now Vilnius — once again

became the capital of an independent Lithuania. Two great poets,

both natives of Vilna, have immortalized this splendid city in the verse.

Czeslaw Milosz, a Nobel Laureate who lives in Berkeley, writes in

Polish. Av rom Sutzkever, a Holocaust survivor, lives in Tel Aviv and

writes in Yiddish. Milosz has compared Wilno to Atlantis, the leg-

endary lost continent under the ocean. And as Ruth Weisse has point-

ed out, there is a fascinating similarity between these two poets.

Av rom Sutzkever compares Jewish Vilna, the Yerushalayim D’Lita that

was so brutally destroyed, to a Green Aquarium. Through the glass

and the green water, you can see people, the Jewish Vilna that was.

You want to come closer, you want to touch the glass, you want to

bring back what was. But break the glass and it all falls apart.

Yerushalayim d’Lite can only live in memory.

Last year I eulogized a native of Vilna, Dina Abramowicz who for many

years served as the librarian of the YIVO, the Yiddish Scientific Institute


in New York. I said then that Dina believed in remembering Vilna, not

just to render homage to the dead but also to help the living. Indeed

the example of Vilna has a lot to teach us, Jews and non Jews. Dina’s

native language was Russian, she grew to love the Polish literature

that she studied at the Batory University-and she dedicated her life to

Yiddish culture. The Vilna that used to be —or maybe never really was

— will never come back: That Vilna, simultaneously and mysteriously

the Lithuanian dream capitol, the Polish Elyceum of Mickiewicz and

Slowacki, the Jewish Yerushalyim D’Lita, was more than just a city. It

stood as a challenge, to all those who like to think in black and white,

who prefer neat homogenous nation states to multiethnic tapestries,

who’d rather hear one clear song than a discordant chorus of churc h

bells and Talmudic chants. Vilna was a city of the borderlands, in

Polish the kre s y, a city of “nationalities” in a Europe increasingly dom-

inated by nation states and nationalism. Like Sarajevo, a city that

resembled it in so many ways, its ethnic diversity ended in violence

and bloodshed.

E P I L O G U E 1 9 5

E N D N O T E S

1 Quoted in B. Weinryb, The Jews of Poland (Philadelphia, 1973), p. 169

2 Abraham Joshua Heschel , The Earth is the Lord’s

3 Irving Howe, A Tre a s u ry of Yiddish Stories

4 Quoted in David Roskies, Against the Apocalypse, pp 168-169

5 Mendele Mokher Sforim(1836-1917) was the pen-name of Shalom Jacob Abramowitz. Thepen name means Mendele the Book Seller.

6 Sholom Aleichem(1859-1916) was the pen name of Sholom Rabinowitz. Sholom Aleikhemwas a common greeting that meant “Peace be unto you.”

7 Quoted in Polin, Volume 1

8 On the Esterke legend see Chone Shmeruk, The Esterka Story in Yiddish and PolishL i t e r a t u re: A Case Study in the Mutual Relations of Two Cultural Traditions (Jerusalem, 1985)

9 On these tkhines see Chava We i s s l e r, “Prayers in Yiddish and the Religious World ofAshkenazi Jewish Women” in Judith Baskin ed. Jewish Women in Historical Perspective

10 Quoted in David Roskies, Against the Apocalypse, p. 114

11 Scholars still know all too little about childhood in traditional Jewish society. One of themost popular guides to morals in early modern Poland, Yitshak ben Eli Kim’s Lev Tov pub-lished in 1620 emphasized that “each father and mother must love his children with all hissoul and all his might. But they must not reveal their love in the presence of (the childre n )because then the children would not fear them and would not obey them. Every man mustteach his children to fear him.” Quoted in Gershon Hundert, “The Jewish Family in EarlyM o d e rn Poland-Lithuania” in Steven M. Cohen and Paula E. Hyman eds. The JewishFamily: Myths and Reality(New York and London,1986), p. 20

12 Quoted in David Roskies, Against the Apocalypse, p. 59

13 Heschel Klepfisz, C u l t u re of Compassion, pp. 65-66

14 Of course Lithuania had some Hasidim: Chabad and Karolin were two examples. Butstrictly speaking they were more popular in White Russia than in Lithuania pro p e r.

15 Quoted in David Biale, “A Journey Between Two Worlds: East European Jewish Culturef rom the Partitions of Poland to the Holocaust” in David Biale ed. C u l t u res of the Jews: ANew History (New York: 2002), p. 807

16 M o re on this point in Biale, “A Journey between Two Wo r l d s ”

17 On this point see David Biale, “The Jewish Family in the Eastern European JewishEnlightenment” in Cohen and Hyman ed. The Jewish Family

18 David Roskies ed. S. Ansky, The Dybbuk and other Writings (New York: 1992), p. xviii

19 Ibid xxiii

20 Ruth Wisse, The Modern Jewish Canon, (New York, 2000) page 35

21 Ruth Wisse, The Modern Jewish Canon, (New York, 2000) page 54

22 The Modern Jewish Canon, page 52

23 Classic Yiddish fiction, page 176

24 T h e M o d e rn J e w i s h C a n o n, page 63

25 This discussion owes much to the writings of Ruth Wisse, David Roskies and Ken Frieden

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