A calamity! The trunks of M. Joseph Halévy had failed to arrive in Sana’a, causing their owner such acute distress that he became ill and took to his bed. Escaping from a band of marauders during the journey to al-Hiraz, he had entrusted the baggage to a servant who had assured him he would bring it to Sana’a. But of course the man had disappeared, leaving Halévy without money, clothes, books, cascara, magnesia, parasol or sturdy boots which might resist the snakes and scorpions abounding in the desert hills. He meant to be the first European Jew to penetrate deeply into the interior of Yemen. But all he possessed now, other than the clothes he stood in, were letters from the chief rabbi of Aden introducing him to the ‘sheikhs’ and rabbis of the many towns and villages where Jews, mostly impoverished, had lived for centuries. Some of those Jews traced their origins back to the Himyarite Empire of the fifth century which had converted to Judaism, so that for 150 years, the most powerful state in Arabia had been Jewish.2 Halévy was in Yemen to locate and copy inscriptions from that ancient pre-Islamic culture.
Halévy was still in his state of prostration when Hayyim Hibshush first encountered him in person. Hibshush was a coppersmith but one learned enough to be interested in inscriptions written in a language other than Arabic. In his modest way he too was a collector of mysterious inscriptions. The villagers who lived with these broken fragments guarded them jealously. Though their meaning was obscure, the potters and shepherds knew that removal of the stones would bring evil down on those from whom they had been taken, by whatever means. So Hayyim Hibshush allayed local suspicions by claiming he needed the inscriptions for their magical-alchemical healing properties. The truth, however, was that Hibshush – who looked just like a devout Yemeni Jew, with simanim, the long corkscrew sidelocks – thought of himself in the tradition of Maimonides as a sceptic of superstitions, and an anti-Kabbalist, one of the Generation of Knowledge, later known in Yemen as the ‘Dor Deah’.3
The foreigner Halévy would be an ally. Hibshush would offer himself as his dragoman: guide, interpreter, amanuensis, finder of safe routes to the northern wadi town of Najran which was Halévy’s prime destination. Accordingly he sent the stricken Frenchman a letter enclosing, by way of credentials, a copy of one of his inscriptions. The tactic worked; he was hired. Hibshush now tried to make the best of Halévy’s misfortunes. Was it not the case that the professor was always going to assume the guise of a Jerusalem rabbi wandering the country to collect alms from his co-religionists? Very well then, if he was supposed to be a beggar, now he would look the part.
Joseph Halévy needed little instruction. He was an oriental orientalist born in Ottoman Adrianople, on the ancient Eurasian frontier, north-west of the Bosphorus. As his cleverness flowered he had moved north and west, first to Bucharest, then to Paris where the study of the more obscure languages of the region was well established. In this year of 1869 he was forty-one years old and already something of a master of tongues, dead and alive, in Arabia and the Horn of Africa. Two years earlier the Alliance Israélite Universelle had sent him on an exploratory mission to Abyssinia to the Falasha people around Gondar and Tigray province to see whether their claim to be Jews had any justification. The primary role of the Alliance was to ‘regenerate’ communities of far-flung Jews, especially those in Muslim lands stretching from the Ottoman Empire to the Maghreb territories which had fallen under French control. Regeneration began with an education in the languages and skills needed in the modern world. But the Alliance was also becoming interested in making contact with the remotest communities (and there were Jews in Azerbaijan, Afghanistan and Ethiopia) and returning them to the great global tabernacle of Jewish solidarity. This yearning to gather in the scattered tribes, to understand Jews and Judaism as much more than a European culture, had been going on for centuries, each generation producing its messianic geographers. But now those ancient urges dovetailed with the explorations of ethnographers and linguists, with modern, scientific speculations about the evolution of human cultures and the spreading tree of their languages, and they delivered the new explorers by railway and steamship to their fields of discovery.
Halévy was one of those fieldworkers. He knew Amharic and Ge’ez, the ancient language in which much of the Falasha liturgy and ritual was chanted. He was learned in the pan-continental dispersion of the Jews, preoccupied by the question of whether a common core of beliefs lay beneath dramatically different cultural expressions. He amused the rabbis of Aden and Sana’a by telling them of Falasha incredulity that a white man could also be a Jew, an experience which would be repeated in one of the remoter villages in Yemen. But he misled his hosts by telling them he had ‘come to seek his brethren’; Halévy’s mission in Yemen was not, in the first instance, Judaeoecumenical. It had a much narrower, scholarly goal. The Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres had commissioned him to collect the stone and bronze inscriptions already known to be scattered throughout the country, but which had been reported to survive in fine specimens in the towns and wadis of the north-east. It was there that the Himyarite kingdom had had its strongholds, but the Sabean language (associated in the minds of Jews and Muslims alike with the queen of Saba or Sheba) was many centuries older: pre-Arabic and pre-Hebraic. Hayyim Hibshush would be invaluable, not only because he seemed to know just where to find inscribed stones, often used to support crumbling mud-brick walls, but because his family were descended from the al-Futayhi, one of the four great Jewish Arabian clans tracing their presence in Yemen to centuries before the Islamic conquest.4 For all this pedigree and local knowledge, Halévy might still have regarded Hibshush as a coppersmith with pretensions, but to the communities in and around Sana’a, Hayyim Hibshush was a learned mori, a teacher, not to be trifled with by foreigners even if they were Jewish.
Hibshush was also resourceful. With the scholar prostrate, he offered to begin the quest at the town of Ghaiman, just four hours away from Sana’a. He would copy as many inscriptions as he could find, and then return in the hope that the professor had recovered sufficiently for them both to embark on their expedition in the opposite direction, to the north. In Ghaiman, ‘where every stone cried out “I am two thousand years old”’, the local Jews – silversmiths, dyers, weavers and tanners – were eager to show Hibshush their inscriptions, embedded in the half-ruined town walls, since they believed that ‘evil spirits’ lay within the incomprehensible letters. Once deciphered and brought to light, the characters would be purified of their dark power and ‘an end to Israel’s sufferings’ would follow. Hibshush would be their deliverer. Unbeknown to Halévy, Hibshush’s anti-Kabbalism was responding to a contemporary urgency. In 1865, four years before Halévy’s arrival, a false redeemer calling himself Shukr Kuhayl, whose wonder-working cult had attracted multitudes of ecstatic believers, had been decapitated as an impostor in the main square of Sana’a, his head impaled on one of the town’s gateways.5 But such was the incorrigible desperation of Yemeni Jews for a saviour that when three years later, in 1868, one Judah ben Shalom, probably a potter or cobbler, announced that thanks to the prophet Elijah he was the resurrected and reassembled Messiah, he too won a mass following. Knowing that Yemeni Jews, even those in small villages, were in the habit of memorising chunks of the Bible, the two pseudo-Messiahs quoted passages from the prophets and the Wisdom Books heralding their appearance. There were differences between the two editions of the redeemer, though. Unlike the original model, who had wandered the communities as a mystic preacher living in ascetic poverty, Shukr Kuhayl II (as Judah was now known) recalled the organisational genius of Nathan of Gaza, establishing cells of apostles in many of Yemen’s communities who levied tithes for the support of the Messiah. This provided a princely manner of life. The richest of all the communities, in Aden, was said to have sent him the entirety of its synagogue treasury.6
All this – the establishment of fund-raising circles in Egypt, Bombay and Baghdad; the dissemination of a spurious calendar for the end of time; the orders for mass repentance prior to the Great Redemption – would have dismayed Hayyim Hibshush. He took his cue from his hero Maimonides, who had similarly given himself the role of disabusing the credulous. That campaign against false Messiahs had taken place seven hundred years earlier, but in Yemen time collapsed in on itself and everything that had happened was still happening. Hibshush’s battle plan was to strip the inscriptions of any esoteric mana even as he claimed he could decode their healing qualities.
But he had to be discreet. There was always the possibility that local Muslims on their guard against messianic disturbances among the Jews might suspect that he was part of the problem rather than the solution. It was best not to attract attention. In Ghaiman, disguised as a seller of snuff, Hibshush co-opted his wife in a system of secret signs. She would carry a basket on her head, while in the company of women collecting saltpetre for the making of gunpowder. Lowering the basket would be the signal that an inscription was present, and that the coast was clear for Hibshush to go about his copying. At Zugag he had to be even more furtive, scribbling inscriptions on the back of his hand with a straw and then transcribing them later behind closed doors. He was already feeling himself in a strange land. But that didn’t stop him from taking a quick look inside the local mosque, a folly which would have got him killed had he not persuaded the irate Muslims that he knew the location of ancient buried treasure.
Very much a Sana’a Jew, Hibshush was disconcerted by local customs. At Muhsuna, one of the daughters of his hosts removed her trousers to wash them in the same bowl in which they had all just eaten supper and for that matter in which bread dough was kneaded. In these parts, he remembered, to remark that a man ‘wore the trousers’ was to accuse him of effeminacy.
Back in Sana’a, he was happy to see that Halévy had risen from his divan. But even without the telltale encumbrances of baggage, Hibshush was anxious about the unwelcome attention they might attract. This was a bad time for the Jews in Yemen. The gross humiliations to which they were habitually subjected had grown more brutal, the curses louder, the casual physical assaults now including small children as targets. There were famines, outbreaks of the plague, rumours (well founded) of a coming attack by the Turks, who in fact conquered the Yemen in 1873. Such difficulties, needless to say, were laid at the door of the Jews. Hibshush later wrote that ‘the troubles were so extreme as to become almost intolerable’. Emigration to Palestine, which would gather force in the 1880s, had already begun. To test the foreigner’s resolve, Hibshush told Halévy of another ‘Ashkenazi’ visitor who had been subjected to a rain of stones and, still worse, a dead cat. Bruised and affronted the Ashkenazi had had the temerity to throw the cat back at his tormentors, an offence which could have earned him corporal or even capital punishment had not the imam before whom he was taken found the whole incident amusing. It was a close call but Halévy, as Hibshush would discover, possessed surprising reserves of disciplined courage and seemed unmoved by the prospect of similar indignities. Very well then, but Hibshush insisted that Halévy dress like a Yemeni Jew: a long quftan, the heavy woollen shamlah serving as both shawl and night blanket, and the peculiar kind of quffaya headdress known as the lijjah, a cap ‘stiff as wood’ with the brim striped in black and white. At all costs he must not appear mysterious.
As soon as his identity was revealed in the privacy of a local synagogue and word got around, the local Jews – and there were many, five hundred at al-Madid alone – wanted to meet the Ashkenazi. Hibshush explained to him that it was generally believed that the European had come to find the tribe of Dan, thought to be riding the hill country of the north, the outlier Israelites who would lead him to the rest of the Lost Tribes of Israel. But all that Halévy wanted was to gather as many Sabean inscriptions as he could so that he could lay the foundations for systematic scientific study back in the Paris academies. To that end he was spectacularly successful. By the time the expedition concluded in 1870, he had acquired 685 inscriptions (although as Hibshush later observed, he somehow forgot to give credit to his copyist for all his labours).
Turning their heads from the spray of sand kicked up by the hot winds, swatting away the biting flies, the two men plodded along on their donkeys, riding side-saddle: the only way permitted to Jews. Occasionally the asses were replaced by camels lent, as a special favour, by local Jews. Hibshush hated the camel ride so much that he often took to walking in his bare feet instead, and was surprised that the European seemed not to feel such discomfort. Thickly woven saddle cloths, the crimson dye darkened with dust, hanging over the animals’ flanks did not give enough relief to the sore behind. So Hibshush was grateful when at al-Ghail, even after he had embarrassingly interrupted a Jewish householder while she was washing her hair, the woman was kind enough to massage his aching legs with melted butter, and give him a pot of grease for his hair and face.
Appearing in the villages of the upland Jauf, they were surrounded by boys and young men, whooping as they ran beside the animals. Many wore simanim, more heavily oiled than Hibshush’s own, swinging at their cheeks. Around Sana’a this was less a matter of observing the Torah’s prohibition on ‘shaving the sides of the head’ and more from compliance to the Muslim demand that Jews look distinctive enough to identify them for public degradation. For the same reason Jews were forbidden from wearing any kind of headgear that would cover up those identifying sidelocks. Upcountry to the north of Sana’a, though, relations between the tribes and the Jews were less hostile and the peltings and jeering less relentless. There, country Jews could interpret the biblical commandment as forbidding only the close shaving of the sides of the head, thus allowing the odd scissor-trim of beard and locks. What a boon.
The arrival of the pseudo-beggar, Joseph Halévy, led by Hibshush, eyelids painted with kohl to improve, as everyone believed, the vision, invariably caused a stir in the little synagogues of the wadis. Was he another herald of the Messiah? The 140-year-old man at al-Milh, his beard still dark and his frame massive, certainly believed so and told his little pupils. Or at the very least was he someone who might act as their interlocutor with European co-religionists? For the unification of the Jews of the world, somehow, somewhere, was seen in communities as far apart as India and Galicia as the condition of their redemption. Paradoxically, then, the mission of the emissaries and teachers of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, which was to bring ‘backward’ Jews into the world of modern liberal instruction, was actually flipped by those on the receiving end, to mean the imminence of a mystical communion of all Israelites (sometimes including those elusive Lost Tribes). The Alliance had not yet come to Yemen, but from Palestine, Egypt and especially the Baghdad–Aden–Bombay trading connection, local rabbis had heard of the works of Sir Moses Montefiore and the Rothschilds. So Joseph Halévy could be the messenger who would connect them with the grand Jews and with the great happenings which were apparently taking place far beyond the desert and the sea. It was time Europe knew of their misfortunes, sufferings and ardent hopes. They too looked to Jerusalem even if the direction of their prayers was north-west.
The professor was largely impervious to this tragic fervour and to any kind of role as carrier of the word from Yemen. He just got on with his work while trying not to offend those who might be helpful. Halévy would follow Hibshush to the little whitewashed prayer houses of the weavers, leatherworkers, potters and silversmiths. Even a place scarcely more than a village like Nihm had four synagogues, and it would give offence if he neglected any one of them. In the oasis of Khabb where the Jews wore swords decorated with silver inlay (they were, after all, the silversmiths of Yemen), he was especially solicitous. On Shabbat he sat and ate the breakfast kubaneh bread which had been sitting in its stone pot over smouldering ashes. This was not so bad; at the end of the meal there was always turbid coffee of a richness unimaginable in Paris or even Turkey, and a dish of fresh dates from the palms of the wadi. The cattle got the pounded pits.
Every so often, dressed as he was, Halévy would be asked to give responsa as if he were a real rabbi. In Khabb he was asked to adjudicate a case in which a man claimed a bride whom he said had been betrothed to him when he was four years old. The girl’s family repudiated the betrothal and swords were drawn before the pseudo-rabbi calmed everyone down. In green Najran, where the date palms were so dense that the sun could hardly be seen through their spiny foliage, at the house of his hosts he wondered out loud about a girl whose face, unusually, was veiled. He was told she was awaiting execution for becoming pregnant while unmarried. Dismayed, he asked the girl, whose name was Sai’dah, how this had come about, and she replied that she had been visiting the house of a sick man to help his wife with household chores. During the brief period when her father left her at the house, six young men, known to the family, had come to spend the night and one of them had forced himself on her. She had been too ashamed to cry out and the result of the assault lay stirring in her swelling belly. The sad story prompted Hibshush, not altogether helpfully, to tell the tale of a famed Jewish beauty who had resisted the assault of a sharif by locking him up in a small chamber. Before the tribal lords gathered in judgement, she had made an impassioned speech, declaring that such wicked behaviour had been unknown since the Jews had first come to Yemen. Judgement was given against the malefactor, although the penalty hamstrung his mare rather than the assailant. According to Hibshush, Halévy was moved by Sai’dah’s tragic story but not so moved that, after their party had departed, he bothered to return, much less discover what had become of the doomed girl.
Hibshush was beginning to think that Halévy’s passion for the people of his country was confined to the long dead. He had been misled by Halévy’s profession that he had ‘come to seek his brethren’, for as the journey had progressed his curiosity had waned and his impatience with the importunate grown. There were altogether too many sleeve-tuggers.
Back in Paris Halévy lost no time publishing his findings in the Journal Asiatique and the Bulletin de la Société de Géographie. In a separate essay he described the state of ruined castles and mosques and the lie of the land. In 1879, on the strength of his work in Abyssinia and the Yemen, Halévy was appointed professor of Ethiopic Languages in the École Pratique des Hautes Études, and became librarian of the Société Asiatique. Such feathers in the cap of a Jew from Adrianople.
Hayyim Hibshush did not forget or forgive what he took to be ingratitude compounded by indifference. For himself he would live with the professor’s failure to mention his own part in the recovery of the Sabean inscriptions. It was the betrayal of his fellow Yemeni Jews that he found intolerable when they had opened their doors to the foreigner, given him money, food and hospitality. In 1892 he published an open letter expressing that disappointment. When Halévy had appeared, he had kindled a hope that at last there would be someone who could adequately represent the ordeals of Yemeni Jews to the co-religionists in Europe who, after all, professed to take an interest in their welfare. He was supposed to have been the ambassador of their sorrows, the agent by which their fortunes and misfortunes would become part of the destiny and history of the Jews. And he was also meant to be a guardian against messianic heresies. Judah ben Shalom, ‘Shukr Kuhayl II’, had eventually been unmasked and undone; funds had dried up and he ended his life in poverty and then in prison in 1878, but this was no thanks to the likes of Halévy. The scholar had not even made good on what Hibshush had most hoped for: the sending of teachers to bring the Jews of Yemen into the community of the enlightened while not forsaking their traditions. Shame on him. Had not the Alliance declared that the Jews were one people?
Only up to a point, it seemed. But then how were the Yemeni Jews to know that the man they had believed could be their emissary, protector and champion ‘would undoubtedly forget them in his heart and leave them with their hopes dashed’?
In the last decades of the nineteenth century there was a good deal of holding fellow Jews at arm’s length. In Vienna, Budapest, New York, Paris and London, Jews in high hats and decent tailoring flinched when they saw the beards and kapotes, the shtreimels and sidelocks advancing down the street. Did they belong to the same family, really? The incoming Ostjuden, loud in their Yiddish, bulky in their manners, shouty and finger-jabbing, were sometimes an embarrassment to the waistcoated and crinolined Jews who spoke German, English, French, Magyar, Russian, and read Pushkin and Schiller. In 1864, when the Prussian government summarily expelled Polish Jews from the country, the principal organ of Berlin Jews, the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums, looked the other way and held its tongue. No one wanted to endorse the gross caricatures of the anti-Semites but when they were in Leopoldstadt and Whitechapel the opera-box Jews flinched at the whiff of garlic and herring. The uncouthness of the Ostjuden might reflect badly on the better sort of Jews who had laboured so hard and so long for social respectability and legal emancipation. Now all that was put in jeopardy by the ‘backwardness’ of the newcomers. In a futile attempt to staunch the flow, the Board of Guardians in London (the body established to help relieve the poor) announced it would assist only immigrants who had already lived in Britain for six months. In no circumstances would it provide cash, unless the money was to be used to send the new arrivals back to their place of origin. ‘We beseech every right-thinking person among our brethren in Germany, Russia and Austria,’ the Board said, ‘to place a barrier to the flow of foreigners, to persuade these voyagers not to venture to come to a land they do not know.’
The appeal, coming as it did from the comfortably settled, fell on deaf ears. Jews were on the move. When were they not? But from the 1870s the migrations were epic. Ashkenazi Jews were uprooting themselves by the millions – over 2 million alone from Russia and Poland between 1880 and 1914 and 150,000 from Romania. There was every kind of reason: renewed, vicious nativist assaults; a multiplication (in this modern nineteenth century) of ritual-murder accusations; demographic pressure in the territories of the Pale; sheer grinding destitution for which there seemed no hope of betterment. Where once there had been three, four, five mouths to feed there were now ten, eleven, twelve. Who knew why the infants were surviving, even in shtetls where the water was foul and the coughing bloody, and even though cholera had not entirely abated? Epidemics (diphtheria, scarlatina, tuberculosis) and famine ravaged the Pale yet still the babies came and more of them made it past weaning. Economic dislocation added to the pressure to leave. In Galicia, after the abortive Polish uprising of 1863, aristocratic estates were punitively broken up by the Russian government. Jews who had had a long (if uneasy) mutual relationship with the szlachta gentry and nobility, lending the nobility what was needed to maintain their impossibly ostentatious style of life and receiving in return tax farms, leases and liquor monopolies, now lost those dependable sources of income. At the other end of the social scale, peasants who had been customers for their boots and blouses on market days were moving to factory towns. It was no longer a sure thing to load a cart on Sunday morning and come back to the shtetl on Friday with enough money to put challah on the Shabbat table. There was more taking in of laundry, odd jobs sewing by the women and girls. Food became more meagre: herring, cabbage, a heel of dry bread. A few kept animals but the cows’ milk was watery, the goats bony and the chickens so many bundles of grimy feathers. Why not go, then? What and who was there to stay for: the rebbe who still rolled his eyes to heaven and promised the Messiah would, without fail, show up some day soon; the yeshiva boys bobbing and dipping until visions swam before their closed eyes? Did anyone believe the one maskil in the village with his newspaper, his trimmed goatee, his tarry cigarettes and his quotations from Lermontov, when he droned on that enlightened days were just round the corner?
There would come a morning when it all got too much. Voices were raised; hollow-chested children in their patched hand-me-downs cowered in the corner while their parents bludgeoned each other with shouted recriminations: ‘Dreamer!’ ‘Always with the dreamer! So what do you want? God will provide!’ ‘Look at your children! Skin and bone! It’s you who should provide, not God!’ But factories in Lwów and Cracow and Warsaw and Kiev were turning out cheap clothes, boots and shoes, which meant no one needed old ones mended. Into those factories and sweatshops went the Jews to be cutters, pressers, seamstresses, buttonhole makers, cigar or cigarette rollers; into the miserable, brick-faced, airless backstreets and tenements, twenty of them working in small, stifling workshops, dawn to night, going back to tiny rooms with five others, some sleeping on the floor, babies crying all night.
If Cracow, Vilna or Lwów were too forbidding, Vienna, Berlin, Warsaw, Prague and Budapest seemed to promise a different life; beyond them, Amsterdam and London; and still further away the ‘Goldeneh Medinah’ or ‘Golden Country’ of New York, Cincinnati, Chicago, Boston, where a man came home for the Sabbath and emptied a bill-fold full of dollars. So the carts got under way, cockeyed wheels rolling drunkenly on the rutted roads. Trains rattled past, loaded up with boys in tzitzits whose sidelock payes flew up when they stuck their heads out of the window, ducking to avoid a clip round the ear from Papa, sisters hanging on the bulky woollen skirts of their mothers. Beside them, or piled up at the back of the car, roped together, were pots and pans, mattresses and pillows, boxes stuffed with the Good Sabbath dress, the all-important hats, and other essentials for a Jewish life wherever it would be led: candlesticks; a Havdalah box; a Hanukkah lamp; a single silver kiddush cup, chased or even filigreed Polish-style; a Passover Seder plate.
Way stations, especially Brody, the frontier town between Polish Galicia and Austria–Hungary, were packed to bursting with Jews departing from Ukraine or Bessarabia. The 15,000 native Jews, swamped by migrants, turned difficulty to opportunity by servicing the unending flow of travellers, while their own bourgeoisie, the families who had been brokers and small bankers, moved off elsewhere, to Budapest, Berdichev or Odessa. Carts choked the streets. In the inns of Brody (this was also true of exit ports like Hamburg and Rotterdam), shady characters made empty promises over a glass of plum brandy. In smoky wooden rooms klezmorim played without being asked; a badkhan might try a joke; a Romanian would produce a pack of cards. But things could go hard with the migrants. In 1882 an appeal was launched in London to help out the 23,000 Jews said to be hungry in Brody.
If they didn’t die in Brody, on they went: to Vienna, where the Jewish population rose from 10,000 in 1810 to 175,000 a century later; and to Budapest, called ‘Judapest’ by those who didn’t care for the 150,000 Jews who made up one in three of the population by the 1880s. Cities like Warsaw and Berlin, where the Jewish population went from just 36,000 in 1871 to 144,000 thirty years later, were transformed by this oncoming tide of the poor.
They came from the goose-gaggle life, from Lithuania and east Galicia, from wonder-working Hasidic courts, tumbledown oil-lit cottages, unpaved lanes, sooty taverns, rattletrap day markets; from cheders where the melamed loved his switch as much as the Mishnah and both more than his pupils; from the shir and the schrei, the songs and the shrieks, on they came to the alien universe of the humming metropolis: horse trams and boulevards, gaslight and glass-fronted department stores (many of them, in Berlin anyway, owned by Jews – Tietz and Wertheim), to the parks patrolled by policemen sporting waxed whiskers and polished truncheons, to the alleyways filled with painted whores and ragged flower girls, to the ponds and fountains, theatres and wine cellars, the wheeling waltz and the brassy oompah. Such shocks they had, none more startling than to discover that these were towns where Jewish girls were better educated than Jewish boys, whole rows of them lined up on the benches of the medical schools, paying attention to anatomy spelled out in graphic detail, or bent over books at the public libraries for days on end; girls, for whom it was no longer enough to sew, cook, pray, wait for the shadkhan, the marriage brokers, to bring them a husband and then deliver little Jews into the world to confound the inevitable persecutors. And not just girls: women, wives who had had enough of being extolled as eshet chayil, prized above rubies. Enough with the rubies already! New Jewish women wanted none of such verbal schmeckerei. What they did want was learning – science, art, philosophy, mathematics, all devoured in greedy, ecstatic, liberating gulps of intellectual oxygen. Disconcerted newcomers could see these girls who still, apparently, called themselves Jews, hair pinned up, a wayward curl hanging from their broad-brimmed hats, laughing on the street as they walked arm in arm, sprawled on park benches flirting with overdressed swells, or (God forbid) alone in mirror-walled cafes, rustling the newspapers (also owned by Jewish publishers like Mosse and Ullstein) while they nibbled the kuchen and tried (not too hard) to evade the glances of admirers.
Would the university, the opera house, the cafe and the theatre take them from Judaism forever? Not if the new type of metropolitan synagogue could help it. The synagogue was now far more than simply a house of prayer and study. It was the hub of urban Jewish micro states, a complete governance covering anything and everything a Jewish body and soul could possibly want. For centuries, Jewish self-government had meant rabbinical courts, arbitrating disputes about property, wills, marriages and divorces, licensing and inspecting slaughterers and circumcisers, keeping a watchful eye on funerals and burial grounds. In the Pale, the traditional, autonomous kahal had been abolished by order of the state; and in the rest of Europe, the beneficiaries of emancipation (1861 and 1867 in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, 1871 in Germany), the magnates of modernity, had taken over communal leadership; some of them, nokh – the first Jewish barons and Ritters – had taken over commercial leadership: industrial entrepreneurs like Emil Rathenau (first to see the light, literally, and it was electrical, and had a future); shipowners like Albert Ballin whose Hamburg–Amerika line treated the masses of Jewish emigrants like human beings rather than livestock; bankers naturally, Deutsche, Dresdner and Mendelssohn; and at one stage down the ladder socially, doctors, engineers, newspaper editors and publishers like Leopold Sonnemann of the Frankfurter Zeitung, and a few (the Germans resisted) professors. They did so in a style which would, as they hoped, make them seem a natural extension of the liberalising state, rather than a doubtful enclave within it. They were the ones who emphasised the importance of prayers offered to royal and princely sovereigns during the Sabbath morning service – and who often, at that crucial moment following the Reading of the Law, top-hatted, delivered it ceremoniously as if coming straight from court.
In place of the omniscient rabbi came the Board, meeting weekly in committee rooms at the synagogue: Boards of Deputies (in the British case) keeping a watchful eye on hostility and with authority to make representations to the government when necessary; Boards of Guardians to distribute food to the impoverished. Whether this paternalism was supposed to extend to the incoming masses of eastern Jews, or whether it was ‘local-born first’ was often a source of contention. But once established, such institutions were often driven by the momentum of their own hospitality, even if those who did the giving were inclined to put city space between themselves and the poor. Uptown cleansed its conscience by going downtown with money, time and compassion. So hospitals, homes for the ‘incurable’, and soup kitchens multiplied as did agencies offering start-up help for tailors, carpenters, shoemakers, and money to rent tools and materials. Most important of all were the schools that would equip children, who otherwise would have had only the rote learning of the cheder, for work in the modern, not necessarily Jewish world: trade schools, technical schools, even agricultural schools, schools teaching languages, maths and the natural sciences, literature and history. The transformations those schools wrought were profound. For as long as many could remember, what Jews did was study the Torah and the Talmud, butchered kosher meat, peddled, sold old clothes, tailored, made shoes, lent money; for as long as anyone could remember Jewish women helped around the house and cooked until they had a husband and house of their own. With the new learning they could do anything: journalism, chemistry, poetry, even soldiering. And still, come Friday night, if they wished they could walk to synagogue and welcome in the Sabbath bride.
Nothing spoke more optimistically about the place Jews might have in the metropolis than the new mega-synagogues, monumental in scale, often flamboyantly showy in design, standing conspicuously in the centre of cities, staking a claim to be as much a part of the modern European townscape as museums, opera houses, town halls and cathedrals. For once, Jewish visibility was not imposed as a means of insult and victimisation. It was engineered by the Jews themselves as a sign of cultural self-confidence. When the elders of the Neue Synagogue in Berlin noticed that it was hard to see the enormous golden dome (modelled on the Brighton Pavilion) from the other side of the Oranienburger Strasse, they had the builders set it forward even though it meant that it would crown not the main interior but the vestibule.7 The grandiose Tempio Maggiore in Florence got over this problem by having both a copper dome of a size rivalling Brunelleschi’s on the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore and a half-cupola over the entrance.8 The Jewish bourgeoisie of this brief period of collective elation went dome-happy. Two onion domes evoking Russian or Greek Orthodox churches surmounted slender towers on the front of the unapologetically enormous Dohany Street Synagogue in Budapest, built to accommodate three thousand, and the effect was so satisfying that it was immediately copied in the spectacular Central Synagogue in New York and in the Great Synagogue at Pilsen (Plze
) in Czech Moravia. Though numbering just two thousand in 1880, the community in Pilsen thought nothing of embarking on its own onion-domed towers a full sixty-five feet high, which would have made the building a good way taller than the nearby cathedral of St Bartholomew. It was only when the Jews of Pilsen agreed to lower their towers by twenty feet that the project was allowed to proceed.
Two domes weren’t enough for the Jews of Turin, who doubled the number by placing one at each corner of the building: an astonishing striped hybrid of Venetian-Gothic, Renaissance and Russian Orthodox. The dominant impression, though, was what the nineteenth century liked to call ‘Moorish’, meaning quasi- or not-so-quasi-Islamic. Both the triple horseshoe-arched doorways through which one entered the Great Synagogue in Turin and the Ajimez windows above it, divided by a slender mullion, were unmistakably reminiscent of a mosque. In many of the most colourfully grandiose synagogues built in the 1860s and 70s, including my own, the West London Synagogue on Seymour Place, the Ark is set in a niche canopied by a half-cupola, very much in the style of the mihrab where it encloses the qibla indicating the direction of prayer.
At first sight ‘Moorish Revival’ seems an odd choice of vernacular for communities yearning so much to be part of the European cultures where, at last, they enjoyed equal rights, especially since a favourite complaint of the anti-Semites was that however western their appearance, the Jews were at heart an unassimilable oriental ‘Semitic’ people with no true place among the Christian nations. But at the same time, in Britain and to some extent central Europe, the Jews were being romanticised by philo-Semites for precisely the same reason. Literary personifications of the Jews were invented as a spiritual aristocracy in contrast to the mercenary utilitarianism and especially the empty-headed horse-and-hound vanities of the landed classes. (This was especially ironic since it was exactly at this time that the great Jewish magnates, led by the Rothschilds, were getting an education in estate management, the breeding of thoroughbreds, and the social calendar of hunts and balls.) But in place of the usual caricatures of the pedlar and the petty criminal, the knuckle-cracking miser and the greasy pawnbroker, Jewish Wanderers began to appear in fiction, romantic in their difference, endowed with the peculiar dignity born of the displaced. Disraeli created a whole genre of novels featuring Zion-longing, morally elevated Jews who cast a spell over the blond Gentiles, sometimes in the Holy Land itself.9 Dickens replaced the grotesque crook Fagin of Oliver Twist with the saintly Mirah and her father in Our Mutual Friend. Most memorably, George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda chronicled an odyssey of self-discovery by a figure whose decent instincts and moral severity as much as his un-English complexion identified him as the latest edition of the eternal Jew, sanctified rather than degraded by his wanderings, and with a magnetic needle quivering, always, in the direction of Jerusalem. That figures like Augustus Melmotte in Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now continued to give a Jewish caste to speculative commercial villainy and Shylockian self-destruction only made the alternative ideal – of Jews dwelling in a universe of spiritual grace, their hearts eaten by yearning for Zion – all the more attractive. The Victorians were actually going to the Holy Land as pilgrims, archaeologists and photographers in some numbers, and while many were startled to see the impoverished conditions in which the Jerusalem and Galilean Jews lived, going to the Western Wall of the Second Temple unfailingly moved them. Thoughts of the rebirth of Zion came to Christians at the same time as they did to Jews.
So it was not surprising when architects like Ludwig von Förster, who built the Leopoldstadt Temple and the Dohany Street Synagogue, co-opted their dreams of the First Temple in their design, and the twin towers of the Vienna synagogue were given the names of Jachin and Boaz which, according to Josephus, were the names of the twenty-seven-feet-high bronze columns in the porch of the Solomonic Temple.10 When the cornerstone was laid for the Vienna temple, it included a parcel of soil from the Holy Land. Zion was already being rebuilt (if a little Moorishly) in Vienna, Berlin, Paris and London.11
But, since mishmash was kosher, there was nothing to stop the same synagogues being equally influenced on the interior by the spatial conventions of Christian cathedrals. While the focal axis of churches was down the length of a nave to the altar, often set at the centre of the crossing, the place where the heart of Christian mysteries and rituals were performed, Jewish mystery was concentrated on the Torah: its housing in the Ark and its reading on the bimah. Traditionally, those two sites were physically separated, and the procession of carrying the scrolls moving from Ark to reading desk. But almost all the synagogues designed in the second half of the nineteenth century moved the bimah to a place directly in front of the Ark, so that both were reached by broad flights of steps. The procession carrying the Sefer Torah, both before and after the reading, now wound itself round the aisles and through the entire space of the synagogue, men and boys crowding towards the mantled scrolls to touch them with the fringes of their prayer shawls and then to their lips.
At the end of the Jewish nave, the raised dais became a stage, a spotlit focus of vision. The same thought was given to visibility and acoustics as would have been the case for theatres and opera houses. Two of the architects of the Florence temple were in fact engineers (the third, Marco Treves from an old Venetian Jewish dynasty, was the only Jew). Modern Jews used modern materials, but always to deepen the experience of communal worship, of an ingathering of sensibilities. Iron was used for columns because it was strong enough to be load-bearing while still slender in dimensions, minimising obstruction of vision. The same industrial materials used both below and in the ladies’ galleries opened up their sight lines and it became routine to drop any kind of grille screening them off from view.
Sound was even more important. For the first time in Judaism, two kinds of vocal performance structured the liturgy and the service: that of the preaching rabbi, of whom mastery of rhetoric as well as textual learning was expected, and the melodiously emotive force of the cantor and chorus, leading a great swell of music through the lofty space. Both speech and song now rose upwards from the theatrical bimah, directed as much towards the women in the gallery as the men below, inviting them into the liturgy. Unheard of hitherto, women could now join in the responses during the kedusha of the Amidah prayer; sing along with the joyfully closing ‘Ayn Keiloheinu’. A newcomer from a Galician or Lithuanian shtetl, accustomed to a service that was all chanted prayer with a leading rabbinical speed-gabble, finding himself in these vast, ornately decorated interiors, now exposed to Judaic sacred opera with its highly stylised alternations of speech and song, would have felt himself to be in the presence of an entirely alien religion, with only the Hebrew of the shema and the Amidah and readings from the Torah to remind him this was a Jewish service at all.
But who were all those men in top hats sitting in their panelled box at the front of the congregation as if they were lords of the Jews? Was social grandeur rather than holy learning now supposed to be the criterion for respect? And how could that man, in his peculiar beret-like headgear, call himself a rabbi when his chin was shockingly smooth? In the Leopoldstadt Temple, from 1856, that particular rabbi would have been Adolf Jellinek, originally from Moravia, a yeshiva boy who had had both an intensely religious and, at Leipzig, an ambitiously secular education which included a speciality in oriental languages like Arabic and Persian.12 Jellinek was a one-man bridge between warring camps of the Orthodox and the Reformers; a scholar of midrash and Kabbalah but also a virtuoso of formal rhetoric, deployed to magnetic effect in his sermons, which were so enthralling that a collection of two hundred of the best became one of the great publishing successes of nineteenth-century Jewish Vienna. Jellinek was the complete modern rabbi, refusing to modernise for the sake of it, leery of the more radical reformism of Abraham Geiger, a defender of the Talmud without being enslaved to it. Where he thought tradition was indefensibly archaic or inhumane he would let go of it. The custom of helitzah – which, in order to release a brother-in-law from the obligation of marrying his dead brother’s widow, required her to throw a shoe at the potential new husband – was abandoned. For Jellinek this was not true Judaism at all, which he understood historically rather than as a phenomenon forever adrift in time.
In the tradition of Maimonides, Jellinek also led a public life beyond rabbi and teacher, standing, albeit unsuccessfully, in elections for the Lower Diet of the Austrian Parliament in 1861. He was demonstratively loyal to the fatherland at the same time as he was uncompromisingly Jewish, and thus exactly the kind of Jew the emperor Franz Joseph had in mind when he repeatedly denounced anti-Semites. The respect shown to Jellinek was all the more remarkable since his brother Hermann had been condemned and executed at the age of twenty-five for his part in the Hungarian Revolution of 1848–9. That Adolf could become an eloquent advocate for the abolition of capital punishment for political offences and not suffer any consequences himself says something about his standing with the liberal governments and in particular with the emperor.
But then the Jellineks were a one-family embodiment of what was possible in liberalised Mitteleuropa.13 One of Adolf’s sons became a professor of international law at Heidelberg; another had a chair of philology (a Jewish speciality) at Vienna. But a third, Emil, may have taken his cue for life from his uncle Moritz who had made money from pioneering Vienna trams (still very much in service today). It was apparent early on that Emil Jellinek was not much interested in a scholarly much less a religious life. Constantly in trouble in school, he was then fired from a job working for a railway company (secured through family connections) when he was discovered organising nocturnal locomotive races. Sent to Morocco in some minor diplomatic capacity he discovered that Fez, Tangier and Tétouan were more to his taste, and so was the African-born Sephardi Rachel Goggmann Cenrobert, whom he married. Rachel and Emil decided to give their daughter the pretty name of Mercedes. Four years later Rachel died, and Emil returned to Europe to sell insurance and equities on the Côte d’Azur, his clientele drawn from the very well-to-do who were just discovering the Riviera. He called the house he built with his proceeds the Villa Mercedes. On the Côte d’Azur Emil became intrigued by a motorised four-seat carriage and its inventor Wilhelm Maybach. Emil sought out Gottlieb Daimler, named the development team ‘Mercedes’, changed his own name to E. J. Mercedes, and began to design racing cars with Maybach. By 1909 he was producing six hundred Mercedes cars a year, a future his fretful rabbinical father could not have anticipated.
As he became unstoppably successful Emil Jellinek gave up Judaism. But his family, above all his father, had made their mark on the Jews and the Judaism of Vienna. The other half of the Temple duo was no less imposing than Rabbi Jellinek. The cantor Salomon Sulzer’s collection of synagogue music, the Shir Tzion, published in two volumes in 1840 and 1866, and adopted by cantors from Leipzig to San Francisco, may have done more to shape the whole experience of Ashkenazi worship than any other work in the nineteenth century. It was Sulzer who made certain moments of the service – Ki Mitzyon, Hashiveinu, Aleinu, the kedusha of the Sabbath Amidah – points of high musical drama, punctuated with bursts of choral grandeur, and clearly designated places for the whole congregation to respond. But Sulzer’s music – the refutation of Wagner’s crude dismissal of cantorial singing as so much melismatic wailing – reached beyond its immediate congregation to the larger musical world of Vienna. Schubert had composed a beautiful ‘Tov Lehodot’ for the Seitenstettengasse synagogue but it was Franz Liszt, no friend of the Jews, who after a visit to hear Sulzer sing wrote of ‘an overwhelming spiritual and aesthetic experience … one seemed to see the psalms floating aloft like spirits of fire’.
Coming to hear Sulzer, the great organ and the massed choir of the temple was one reason for Jews who had moved out of Leopoldstadt, as the Ostjuden moved in, to return. The liberal reforms of the empire, the gymnasium and university education of Vienna’s more modern-minded Jews, also made them seek some distance from the pickle barrels and the little tailoring shops. Those who did business with the government – lawyers as well as bankers – moved to the Innere Stadt, the old heart of Vienna now encircled by the Ringstrasse. But Sigmund Freud’s father Jacob – born in Moravia, a textile merchant in Vienna, learned in German culture; mostly a Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur Jew – settled down with his third wife, Sigmund’s mother, in Alsergrund where there had been a Jewish cemetery since the sixteenth century. Incorporating parts of the university, Alsergrund became the home district of the Jewish business and professional classes. By 1880 two-thirds of the gymnasium students were Jewish and you could scarcely walk the streets of an evening and not hear someone practising Beethoven.
Back in Leopoldstadt, traditionally garbed Jews from Galicia and the Pale opened their own little house-synagogues, the shtiblach, as they did in Stepney and Whitechapel, the Bowery and Delancey Street, and in Berlin’s Scheunenviertel district, a tenacious world of custom, Galicia in the big city. There they could say the Amidah as they always had: a quick run of the eighteen blessings just briefly interrupted by a half-shouted kedusha in the reader’s repetitions. No sermons, no great cantorial oratorios for them. The grandiloquent service in the temple (or for that matter in the Seitenstettengasse synagogue where Jellinek moved in 1865) would have seemed no more truly Jewish to them than High Mass in St Stephen’s Cathedral. Nonetheless, during the most solemn moments of the religious year – on Rosh Hashanah or Kol Nidrei, when ‘all Israel’ was said to stand before God’s judgement – even if just out of curiosity, some of them did crowd into the big space and then the ideal of Kol Israel, a single people, became real. So that at the Great Synagogue on Duke Street in London, or the spectacular Eldridge Street Synagogue in downtown New York, in the synagogue on the rue Notre-Dame-de-Nazareth in Paris, all of them drenched in light and flooded with song, the imploring prayers which conducted Jews to self-scrutiny, the chants and songs making up the storehouse of common memory, bound together the living and the ghosts of Jews long dead, with bright, expectant children standing beside their parents.
If the interiors of the great metropolitan synagogues were designed to give Jews a sense of their solidarity, especially in the face of anti-Semitic hostility, the outward grandeur of the buildings was directed towards Gentile society.14 This unapologetic claim to a visible place in the civic world of Europe had begun majestically in Amsterdam two centuries before, but the synagogues of the 1670s had been a striking exception. Mostly, facades were discreetly hidden away; even in Amsterdam where their roofs were certainly visible, the bodies of the buildings were enclosed by a courtyard wall. When much of the Dutch design was transposed to London at Bevis Marks in 1701, the London parnassim made sure to site it within a courtyard away from the street. Two centuries later, the building plan was eloquently more confident: towering facades right to the street, or even more grandly set back with a garden court entrance, and only light railings as obstruction. (These days, of course, the fencing is fortified by concrete barriers, metal detectors and heavily armed security guards.)
But the metro-synagogues in their glory days were meant to hold their own with cathedrals. They had to be fit to receive chancellors, prime ministers, princes and kings, as indeed they often did. The inauguration of the Neue Synagogue in Berlin in 1866 was attended by Otto von Bismarck in the company of his friend and banker, Gerson (now) von Bleichröder, whose funds had made possible the wars by which Prussia led German unification. In London, the Prince of Wales and (more dubiously) the emperor of Brazil were visitors to the Central Synagogue in Great Portland Street. Before his suicide in the love nest at Mayerling, the Crown Prince Rudolf was a friend of the charismatic and learned Adolf Jellinek. Most dramatically Emperor Franz Joseph proclaimed that ‘I will tolerate no Judenhetze [persecution of Jews] in my empire’. A few years later he would diagnose anti-Semitism as ‘an illness which has spread now to the highest circles’.
One of the emperor’s most forthright criticisms of the anti-Semites had come in 1882, which perhaps was why Jellinek thought his visitor from Odessa, Dr Leon Pinsker, was overdoing it when he prophesied that anti-Semitism, sooner or later, would make life intolerable for Jews in Europe. This, Jellinek felt, was news from Russia. Tsar Alexander III was not the decent Franz Joseph. But he would have known perfectly well that there was good reason to turn pessimistic in the German lands as well. The crowning moment of acceptance when Gerson von Bleichröder had been summoned to Versailles to manage the indemnity extracted from vanquished France was not a reliable predictor of the future. Back in Charlottenburg, Adolf Stoecker, the court chaplain to the kaiser, preached regularly on the Christ-killing infamy of the Jews and the alien character which would make them forever strangers to Germans, incapable, short of mass conversion, of ever being truly integrated into the body of the nation. The emancipation of the Jews had been a terrible mistake. Now was the time to reverse it.
Jew-hatred burned through Europe. The financial crash of 1873, especially disastrous in central Europe, was blamed on the Jews, just as the collapse of the Crédit Mobilier in France was characterised as another act of fraud perpetrated on the persons of Christians by those criminal Jews the Péreire brothers. In 1879, the ex-radical, anarchist and atheist Wilhelm Marr, three of whose four wives had been Jewish, published a pamphlet, Der Weg zum Siege des Germanenthums über das Judenthum (The Way for the Victory of Germanness over Jewishness), the operatically Wagnerian title of which said it all. (Wagner himself had republished his polemic in 1869, this time under his own name, obsessing over the power of Jewish money to boycott his operas or defame his reputation.)15 There was a strong social element to Marr’s polemic. In his vision ‘Judenthum’ was as much the destructive ethos of modern commercial life that had ripped the heart out of the traditional world of German artisans, as it was any kind of racial epithet. The sacrifice of craft to the Moloch of modern industry was the result of that alien presence in German life which Marr called ‘Semitism’, and the only known antidote was its opposite. As a result his polemic was instantly popular to anyone fearing the dislocations of the modern world, selling 20,000 copies in its first run and going into eleven editions. Even more lethally, the epigram coined by the journalist Otto Glagau, ‘Die soziale Frage ist die Judenfrage’ (‘The social question is the Jewish question’), recruited all those alienated by the corrosions of modern life to the cause of anti-Semitism. The Jews, he wrote, were ‘hated strangers who are nowhere at home and lack all feeling for the Volk wherever they live’.16
The Jews of the cities had taken a bet on modernity, but now they were faced with a self-consciously archaic, rural-Teutonic and mythic attack in which the part they were assigned was that of subhuman goblins whose elimination, one way or the other, was the precondition not just of a flourishing German future but of its very survival. Only one side could win this war to the end, Marr made clear, and the purpose of his work was to sound the battle cry and ensure it would not be Aryan Germans who would be the vanquished race. Not long before his death in 1904 Marr had a sudden and complete change of heart, publishing his Testament of an Anti-Semite and publicly asking forgiveness from the Jews. It was too late. His League of Anti-Semites had created a new kind of political party and the toxin had been released into the bloodstream of German nationalism. Paul de Lagarde, Germany’s most eminent scholar of oriental languages, described anti-Semitism as ‘the mainstay of our national movement … the most essential expression of genuine popular conviction’. It was this equation of anti-Semitism with political engagement, a tonic against bourgeois complacency, which would be so deadly to the people most associated with middle-class urban materialism. Put another way, anti-Semitism was the way to restore national health. To be vigorously German, then, rather than just paying lip service to the national ideal, meant being robustly, forthrightly anti-Semitic.
There was something about the new anti-Semitism which lent itself to catchphrases which stuck. The stickiest and deadliest was ‘Die Juden sind unser Unglück’ (‘The Jews are our misfortune’), and the fact that it was coined by someone hitherto unknown as an anti-Semite and ensconced in two of the highest institutions of the new German Empire – the University of Berlin and the Reichstag – made the epigram even more lethal. Heinrich von Treitschke was the author of the multi-volume history of Germany, and so not just widely respected but in some ways treated as the personification of the new nation, a role he was not shy of embracing. It was as the oracular seer of the new identity that he undertook to review the eleventh and last volume of Heinrich Graetz’s History of the Jews. In some ways their works were parallel productions but such an assumption would have horrified Treitschke, who chose to make them profoundly antithetical. In the last section of his review in the Preussische Jahrbücher, a monthly review of politics, and elaborated the next year in his pamphlet Ein Wort über unser Judenthum (A Word about Our Jews), Treitschke made anti-Semitism intellectually respectable for anyone devoted to the cause of the nation. There was a pretence, or at least an affect, of holding his nose at the coarseness of popular anti-Semitism, which he managed to blame on authors like Johann Eisenmenger whom he wrongly identified as Jewish (a common libel). But at the same time as deploring its crudeness, Treitschke congratulated the ordinary people of Germany for their healthy aversion. They had sensed what was poisoning the country, and the necessity of purging it from the national bloodstream if its history was to go forward. If you were an ardently patriotic Jewish German newspaper editor, businessman, lawyer or especially a professor, you might be able to write off Wilhelm Marr and Otto Glagau as gadfly journalists. But the hatred of Treitschke came as a violent shock, and to those who wanted to take stock of it, an awful warning.17
Treitschke wrote from the heart of the Reich. But pan-Germanists beyond its borders like Ernst Vergani could be even more deranged in their insistence that the excision of Jews was the paramount condition for the reborn nation. Vergani – who had grown up in Lwów where Jews made up a third of the population, and who had insisted that the issue between Germans and Jews was ‘racial, a matter of blood … and can only be decided by blood’ – was being only partly facetious when, in the Austrian legislature, he called for bounties to be given to those who shot Jews like game. The biologising of Jew-hatred, first spelled out in Alphonse Toussenel’s book, had come on apace with the arrival of race theory and even epidemiology. Paul de Lagarde wrote of the ‘de-Judification’ (Entjudung) of Germany, an excision from the body politic. It was a simple matter of national health. Since the Indo-Germanic race and the Jews were biologically incompatible, the latter had to be ‘crushed like vermin. Trichinella and bacilli could not be negotiated with; trichinella and bacilli could not be nurtured; they must be destroyed as quickly and thoroughly as possible.’
As pathological as these sentiments were, they only became politically incendiary through the work of Georg Ritter von Schönerer. Schönerer could glory in his inherited title only because his father had been ennobled for his contribution to the railways of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. And it may well be that Schönerer Senior’s work for and with the Viennese Rothschilds was one of the sources of the son’s resentments, especially after the financial crash of 1873. But it was then that Georg first turned to the soil, studied agronomy, patronised the peasants, and began to grumble about those responsible for the disaster, including the reprehensible Jews. Nonetheless, for a while Schönerer collaborated with Jewish liberal politicians like Viktor Adler who were at least as enthusiastic about pursuing an aggressive German nationalism. With the arrival of Russian Jews fleeing the pogroms of 1881, Schönerer moved sharply to the far right and brought two forms of traditional Jew-hating into modern politics: the hostility of peasants and artisans who thought that Jews had destroyed their world, and that of Christianity which had never abandoned its ancient revulsion for Christ murderers.18 As the enemies of Aryans and Christians, Schönerer wanted not just to reverse the emancipations but to place Jews under ‘special laws’. In person he was too gruff and grim to be the charismatic leader of a mass movement, but he succeeded in getting the first expressly anti-Semitic politicians elected to the Austrian legislature. Most ominously it was Schönerer who made a war against the Jews, as he put it, ‘a basic pillar of the national idea’, describing the anti-Semitic crusade as ‘the greatest national achievement of this century’. There was nothing that Adolf Hitler, born around this time in 1889, would end up saying which had not been anticipated in the writing and speeches of these first vehement German-nationalist anti-Semites.
None of this could have been missed by Adolf Jellinek. In 1881 he had become editor of the weekly paper which best represented the concerns and opinions of Vienna’s liberal Jews, Die Neuzeit. It had been in existence for twenty years, the brief heyday of Austrian liberalism, and was thought to be the vehicle for Jellinek’s hopeful belief in the interdependent future of the empire and its Jews. Its co-founder and previous editor, Simon Szanto, was a fierce adversary of what he thought of as retrograde orthodoxy, and his collaborator Leopold Kompert, through his fiction about the Bohemian ghettos, was the medium (often sentimental) by which the Jews of Alsergrund and the Innere Stadt could flatter themselves that they understood the world of the Ostjuden without having to get too close to its social reality.
Nothing written by Marr or de Lagarde, or said by Schönerer, gave Jellinek enough reason to change the generally optimistic tone of Die Neuzeit. It was a German contagion and would lose its force in the multinational empire of the benevolent Franz Joseph. But there was another writer in Vienna in whom Jellinek had taken a personal interest, and he had an altogether darker view of what the future held for Jews in central Europe, and for that matter everywhere else. Like Dr Pinsker, Peretz Smolenskin was from Odessa, had been brought up Orthodox and had turned to the Haskalah, but instead of contenting himself with European languages had become obsessed with the idea of giving Hebrew a new life, of turning it into a genuinely modern vernacular. After Smolenskin moved to Vienna in 1868, Rabbi Jellinek had helped him found the periodical Ha-Shahar (The Dawn), which both championed and embodied this momentous rebirth. As hostility towards the Jews of Vienna kept pace with their worldly and educational success, Smolenskin began to lose faith in the victory of the Menschenfreundlichkeit, the fraternal universalism preached by Die Neuzeit. ‘Do not listen to the words of those who glorify this era as a time of human justice and honest opinion,’ he told his student followers. ‘It is all a lie!’ As long as Jews were in denial about their own collective existence as a nation, so they would be hostage to the fickle goodwill of states and empires, any of whom could be infected with the anti-Semitic strain.
Jewish students in the Austrian universities, especially Vienna, who had been excluded from the Burschenschaften fraternities, paid attention to Smolenskin’s dark but inspiring theme. When they were the target of some of the most vicious abuse, they understood full well that anti-Semitism was, especially, a young person’s ideology. Under Smolenskin’s guidance, three of them – Moritz Schnirer, Reuben Bierer and Nathan Birnbaum – formed a reading group based on the premise that the Jews had a national as well as a religious history. Until the Jews embraced their own national self-determination they would be, as they had been for centuries, everyone’s punchbag. In 1883 the trio founded the first Jewish student fraternity, Kadimah. It was Smolenskin who came up with the name, loaded with a double meaning: ‘forward’ and ‘eastward’. What was in the east was not Odessa; it was Zion. It was one of the co-founders of Kadimah, Nathan Birnbaum, who would later coin the term ‘Zionism’.
So when, in March 1882, Leon Pinsker, the author of an anonymous booklet saying much the same as Smolenskin, came calling on Adolf Jellinek, the rabbi had a good idea of what he was going to be told and assumed an expression of resigned patience. Pinsker’s father, a scholar, had been a good friend of Jellinek’s over many years. Now here was the son, himself middle-aged, a grey-beard, lecturing him on the indifference of the Viennese Jews to the plight of the Russian refugees; or if not that exactly, then their willed slowness to draw the right pessimistic conclusions, and to do something other than perform the usual acts of charity. Dr Pinsker was going to ask him to support the settlement of Jews in agricultural colonies, a place where they could be free to make their own lives with ploughs and hoes. Baron Maurice de Hirsch was already doing this in Argentina; but, really, kosher gauchos? Jellinek was doubtful. However, it was the bigger idea at the back of it, a giving up on Jews in the city, which weighed on him. Now that there was fighting to be done against the anti-Semites he was not one to give up. One imagines competitive sighing descending on the men in the apartment, with their cakes and tea. Pinsker broke a silence oddly, as if the rabbi needed reminding who he was: ‘I visited you here with my father.’ (This had been nearly twenty years before, in 1864.) And then with a note of dramatising self-consciousness: ‘I’m perfectly aware I look distraught and melancholy and bear the traces of great sorrow on my face … but you seem to have changed too, not in your outward appearance but your spiritual personality.’ Pinsker implied that the change he saw was not altogether for the better. What was it – complacency? resignation? What was he going to give him: that guff about Jews being at home wherever they were, good patriots of their respective fatherlands? God knows, even in Russia they had tried, he, Leon, had tried, served loyally and bravely in the medical corps at Crimea. It made no difference. Jews would always be treated as alien invaders of someone else’s fatherland. What Jews needed was their homeland! Pinsker’s voice rose:
a piece of earth where we can live like humans. We are tired of being driven like animals, outcast by society, insulted, robbed and plundered; we are sick of having constantly to fight back the outrage rising inside us … against the abuses and torments inflicted on us by upper and lower sorts of people alike … I tell you with all the power of my soul we want to be a people, to live on our own national land, to make our communal and political institutions … to found a state however small … help to find a territory for us where we persecuted Russian Jews can live as a free people.
But Adolf Jellinek had spent his life arguing against those enemies of the Jews who insisted they thought of themselves as a separate nation, apart from the country in which they lived. To agree with that premise was, as he told Pinsker, to abandon the principles he had held and promoted for more than thirty years; the rock on which Jewish rights had been built. He acknowledged to Pinsker that this was a worrying time but told him his fears were exaggerated, that organised anti-Semitism – the ‘poisonous plant grown on the banks of the Spree’ (in Berlin) – had no deep roots in the soil of history, and thus was a passing phase.
Really? said Pinsker. Let me tell you about Odessa.
… love child of the marriage between Black Earth and Black Sea, high cliffs and deep water, Odessa, the sibilant word pushed gently out between the teeth, a name so soft it didn’t even sound Russian, no surprise since it had been ‘Hacibey’ to Tatar and Turk, and only baptised Greek Odyssos by the German empress of Russia Catherine the Great when her Spanish-Irish Neapolitan general José de Ribas took it from the Ottomans in 1792.19 There was not much Russia in this part of New Russia. The first governor of the place the locals liked to call ‘little Paris’ was the French Duc de Richelieu, and the architect who gave the city its hundred-foot-wide boulevards and grand limestone public buildings was the Swiss-Sardinian Francesco Boffo, a name so irresistible that when Yankel Adler, the kid boxer, found a gang of street toughs, ‘pavement roamers’, to run with, they had to call themselves the ‘Boffi’.
You could be a new kind of Jew in Odessa, a place where everyone smoked in the streets and Jewish girls were bat-mitzvahed by the open-minded (if non-Russian-speaking) Rabbi Dr Shimon Arieh Schwabacher.20 Welcome to the Talmud Torah of the future: Mishnah in the morning, metalwork in the afternoon, when the rabbi, sleeves rolled up, did a little light welding before the Mincha prayers. ‘Learn the crafts,’ he would say, ‘become artisans!’ Enough with the pawnshops and the boxes of old clothes. Plane, file, burnish! The Jews did; even today you can find manhole covers with the word ‘Trud’, the name of the Odessa Jewish Artisans Association, many of them graduates of Dr Schwabacher’s workshops, stamped on the pretty iron lid. A rabbi for a new age was Dr Schwabacher, so his appreciative congregation thought. So what if his Russian was non-existent. They could get by with Yiddish, and besides, his German sermons were a nice excuse to take a snooze or a smoke. The doctor-rabbi was a cultivated man who could, if asked, recite in French, Polish, Italian. What more could you ask for? At the big, beautiful Brody synagogue with its choir of angels, Arieh Schwabacher was a reasonable rabbi, assailed by unreasonable enemies who arrogated to themselves rights of judgement.
So indeed they did. In Lithuania and in the yeshivot of Berdichev and Zhitomir, Schwabacher was denounced as the usher to ruin; the hastener of the disappearance of the Jews. Hands were wrung when yeshiva bokhurim hightailed it south to the fleshiest of fleshpots, which, during the desperate Lithuanian famines of the late 1860s, they did in ever increasing numbers. Peachy Odessa was waiting. Denouncing it as ‘Babylon’ or ‘Sodom’ only reinforced its magnetic pull. The rabbis fulminated that it was lit by the fires of hell, but who cared when carts made it through the moral inferno with boxes of French silk, Italian wine and Belgian lace. At last there were dockland Jews. The opening to the sea got rid of that age-old feeling Jews had, even when it was not literal, of being walled-in.
The runaways from the shtetls filled their bellies and turned their faces to the sun. Why should a Jew not warm his kishkes where and when he could? When the poet Yakov Fichman got on the train he ‘stood nearly the entire night at an open carriage window breathing in the fragrance of the vast, dark, southern steppe’.21 Winter left early by the Black Sea. On May Day the whole city took time off, the acacia hung out their yellow cords of blossom and a Jew could open up his nostrils, take a pull on the heady perfume, before promenading down Deribasovskaya Street, or down the two hundred steps of Boffo’s Gigantskaya, pausing on one of the nine landings to twirl his cane and look out at the rippling sea, the first that many Jews had ever set eyes on. Even on cloudy mornings the soft waves were dusted with silver light.
Jewish life sounded differently in Odessa. Martinet melameds of the cheder, swishing their switches as they made boys parrot the Shulkhan Arukh, had been replaced by schoolteachers of the ‘Russian Schools’ in waistcoats; and for the girls, strong-minded young women in broad-belted dresses and pinned-back hair recited Pushkin and Shakespeare to the class. Melisma had given way to the mass choir and organ of the Brody synagogue, founded to accommodate Jews from that Galician border town who wanted a modern – four-cupola, two-gable – affair, which they duly got, standing on the fashionable Pushkinskaya Street. Its cantors taught opera and lieder, and at Pesach Piotr Stolyarsky’s music academy students (like the Oistrakhs) were on their way to becoming Jewish Paganinis.
By 1870 there were 50,000 Jews in Odessa, one in four of the boom town’s population; twenty years later, 130,000, a third of the city, and not the kind of Jews who flapped around in long black kapotes and heavy beards, but Jews who had their chins and cheeks shaved close and anointed with eau de cologne until their skin shone, Jews who waxed the tips of their moustaches before they set off for the boulevards in their shiny patent shoes; boatered Jews, panama-hatted Jews, Jews for whom, thanks to Alexander Tsederbaum’s weekly Kol Mevasser (originally folded as a supplement into his Hebrew paper Ha-Melitz), Yiddish had become, sensationally, the language of politics, literature, poetry!22 But if it was a rule in your little group of readers, writers and shouters that you did all this in Russian, then you’d read Tsederbaum’s Rasvet (The Dawn). Having urged Russification for years, it was typical of the officials to be unsure, when it came, that it was Good for the Jews and for everyone else. When Tsederbaum applied to the censors, he was initially only given licence for a Yiddish- not a Russian-language publication, and had to press harder and longer before it was granted in 1858. But it always proved a tougher sell for its publisher than the Yiddish and Hebrew journals, lasting just three years, though it was succeeded by the Vestnik russikh evreev (The Herald of the Russian Jews).
You could be a beach Jew in Odessa, fill your lungs with ozone out at Langeron, or the pleasure park at Arkady, then take a clifftop stroll past the dachas of the big shots, the Ephrussis and the Brodskys, peering over the walls to marvel at the shrubbery. So Jewish gardening was not just potatoes! Any number were habitués of the Public Library with its 150,000 volumes. It was a home from home for Jewish girls and women, who could prop their elbows on the reading tables, push their glasses up the bridge of their nose and get stuck into Chernyshevsky, Pisarev, Lavrov and Tolstoy. Theatre Jews (which was most of them) got their first sight of Yisroel Gradner’s outrageous talents, the face-pulling comedy alternating with the tear-jerking honey-dark voice, at Akiva’s restaurant where Abraham Goldfaden’s Yiddish company, fresh (he said) from triumph in Bucharest, emerged from behind a drawstring curtain to do one of their farces. When Goldfaden moved to more exalted quarters at the New City Theatre, there were full-on plays like Schmendrick. At curtain time the cast was rewarded with a bedlam of happiness, hands clapping till they hurt.
On summer nights there were plays and music on Langeron beach; klezmer on the water, or performances at the big wooden theatre on Kuyalnitzky Liman. Who could go home after the show? Time for brandy and coffee at Fankoni, Italian pastries at Zambrini or down into Gambrinus beer hall on Deribasovskaya Street where Sedner Perel, ‘Sasha the Fiddler’, played like a madman and all the roughnecks from Peresyp roared and belched and threw themselves on the tavern girls. Or if you hankered for a sweeter end to the evening you could walk in the direction of the nearest sharmanka street organ, programmed with slow, lilting waltzes, Odessa-style, the kind that let you take your girl for a gentle sway under the stars. Those who were already four sheets to the wind found themselves, without quite meaning to, in shadier territory deep in grubby Moldavanka at Josja Feldman’s whorehouse on Glukhanka, the ‘Deaf Street’ full of alley rats with cocked ears, some of them the foot soldiers of the female con artist Sonka ‘Golden Hand’, lurking in alleys and doorways, waiting for the purses and watches of obligingly sloshed johns. Those who woke with pounding heads and lighter purses could nurse the damage at Isaac Solomonievich Isakovich’s baths where, if they had seventy kopecks left, they could pull on a hookah and down a shot of healing Turkish coffee.
In all this urban carnival, Jews were constantly rubbing shoulders with the rest of Odessa: Greeks, Albanians, Germans, Armenians, Azerbaijanis, Poles, Italians, Turks, Georgians, the odd Russian here and there. Though there were some obviously Jewish districts, there was nowhere purely Jewish; even down in the shacks of Moldavanka, poor Jews had neighbours who were stevedores. All Odessa shopped at the same ‘English’ department stores, or in Primoz market; took the same horse trams; listened to the same music.
Never confuse neighbours with friends. None of this proximity, the sharing of districts, the common experiences of work and play, made the slightest difference when every twenty years it was time once more to attack the Jews.
An out-of-towner coming into a pogrom-struck city – Kiev, Elizavetgrad or Odessa – would have been met by a snowfall of feathers, lying on the streets, blown into the water, hovering on the marine gusts, the insides of what had been ripped apart: pillows, bolsters, cushions, the comforters of the Jews; the first target of their assailants who stabbed and tore and hacked at them before moving on to the hard furniture and glass and crockery and then on to the householders caught at home or running for their lives. Then your nostrils would pick up the stink of burnt-out houses, the wooden shacks of the poorest the easiest to set alight. So what with the feathers and the scorch, the town smelled like singed, plucked goose. But it was the Jews who had felt the butchery just round the corner, while children, away from their hand-wringing elders, ran around picking bits and pieces from the debris.
Kiev in May 1881 was four days of terrorising hell; the poorer Jewish houses in Podol and Pobskaia down near the Dniepr smashed, burnt and plundered (while those of the local sugar barons like Israel Brodsky up on the heights getting such police protection as was available). Most of those Jews, Yiddish-speaking, often dressed in the traditional garb, were more obvious targets of the zhid-haters. But Odessite Jews discovered in the most painful way that dressing like everyone else and speaking Russian was no protection. In fact, Odessa – which in many ways was a model for a new, integrated kind of Jewish life – suffered more regularly from mass violence than almost anywhere else in the Russian Empire. So much for cosmopolitanism.
Economic resentments were part of the reason (as they were in Kiev). When the Jews began to move into Odessa in the 1790s, liberated from the occupational restrictions prevailing in the rest of the Pale, the Greek community of merchants bridled at competition in the grain trade, the business that made serious money. After the Napoleonic Wars a grain shortage in western and central Europe was made good by supplies from the black earth of Ukraine, which in short order became the granary of Europe. Enormous quantities of rye and wheat came to the port city on plodding caravans of ox carts before being shipped out from the harbour to destinations primarily in the west. With their international connections, especially in port cities like Livorno and London, the Jews had a ready-made onward-trading network, one to rival the Greeks’, and capital resources on a Rothschildian scale which the Greeks, despite their own commercial diaspora, couldn’t match. Hence the swiftly rising fortunes of the Ephrussis, the Rafaloviches and (yet again) the Brodskys. They in turn filled their offices with co-religionists: sorters, weighers, quality inspectors, warehouse clerks. Together they made up a whole community of import/export harbour Jews just as they did in Bombay and Livorno.
Maritime competition did not go down well with the Greeks, many of them dockers and sailors but also, anciently, merchants and chandlers. Competition became envy; envy could, if a cause presented itself, turn into violence. Such causes were almost always a dangerously volatile mix of religious and national feelings. When the patriarch of Constantinople, Gregory V, was made an ‘example’ to the Greeks who had risen in revolt in 1821, his executed corpse thrown into the Bosphorus, Greek communities all over the Aegean and Levant mourned and raged and looked for someone they could blame and on whom they could exact retribution. In Odessa, the Jews with their kin all over the Ottoman were treated as quasi-Turks, villains of convenience, and were set on accordingly. Gangs of Greek sailors and stevedores reached for their clubs, axes and iron bars. Rumours of church blessings on the assaults only made matters worse.
There were only three thousand Jews in Odessa in 1821, yet there were synagogues enough to sack. But the principal targets (as they had been in all Judaeophobic violence since the Middle Ages) were homes and belongings. It was easy enough to storm and burn, to inflict the terror of the smashed-in door, the shattered glass, the ripped featherbed, the looted silverware, though what was being destroyed in these early ‘pogroms’ (the Russian word for a devastation or a ruin, hitherto associated with invading armies) was an idea: the notion that the Jews could have homes somewhere; that they might have their share of domestic peace; that they could be seated in the furniture of their lives. One of the most common occupations for Jews in Odessa, right up until the mass murders inflicted by Romanians and Nazis in the war, was that of furniture makers: carpenters, cabinetmakers, French polishers – the suppliers of ease and comfort. So the breaking of chairs, the stabbing of sofas, the wrenching of table legs, was a way of telling the presumptuous Jews that they would never be able to sit down in their houses and even in cosmopolitan, sun-warmed Odessa feel themselves safe.
Intermissions between pogroms grew shorter. The next outbreak was thirty-eight years on, in 1859, when a blood-libel story triggered the violence; once again with some connivance by rogue clerics in the Greek Church and fomented by the Greeks of the dockyards. By this time, especially after the Crimean War, the grain barons had established themselves as some of the most powerful (and showy) in the city. But as in Kiev, their grand houses on Pushkinskaya and Deribasovskaya were the ones which got most protection.
Twelve years later, in 1871, it happened again, when Easter and Passover were close enough to generate maximum Christian antipathy, almost as if Jews were shamelessly celebrating the crucifixion all over again with their Paschal meals and rejoicings. Rumours that the Jews had stolen a cross mounted on churchyard fencing for some sort of ritual desecration, a mockery of the Passion, was the trigger for violence. Greek and Russian Orthodox Churches were sufficiently alike in their rituals and liturgy for them to share a common enemy, and this time, when the axes hacked at the homes, the clubs also rained down on Jewish bodies, any men daring to defend homes or families. Beating up Jews, leaving them bloody, mutilated, or in six cases dead, making sure the children were screaming with terror, now became part of the pogromnik assault. Synagogues big and small, dispersed across Odessa, became targets, and since the informal Jewish trade guilds – from butchers and tailors to metalworkers and clerks – each also had their own little synagogues, there was no shortage of places to desecrate and burn. The standard attack always involved slashing and tearing the Torah scrolls before dumping them on an improvised bonfire. This time, the attacks happened in rich districts and poor, on Pushkinskaya Street where the Brody synagogue stood as well as in Moldavanka; Jewish stalls knocked over in Primoz market; the bathhouses smashed up.
Sympathy in non-Jewish Russia was limited. For there was an additional element now enriching the stew of hatred: conspiracy theory. The instigator was (as had been the case in eighteenth-century Lwów) a converted Jew, Jacob Brafman, who turned the kahal, the governing body of Jewish communities, abolished by the tsarist government in 1844, into sinister cells of secret Jewish organisation. The kahal was said to live on as an underground plot against church, state and all Christians everywhere. Brafman had offered his services to the tsarist government as a spy on his former co-religionists, claiming the usual secret underground knowledge. When the paranoia about revolutionaries undermining the regime gathered force, the sense that the Jews were an incorrigibly estranged, dangerously subversive element in Russian society became a standard mindset in certain quarters of the government. The charge of ‘separateness’, a staple accusation directed against religious Jews, was neatly transferred to revolutionaries and became tantamount to treason. The fact that the Jews were notoriously literate, studious not just in the Talmud (which had once functioned as the same text of satire and subversion in Christian demonologies) but also now in secular disciplines, with a strong presence in journalism and political and philosophical literature, only intensified this police paranoia. Where once their esoteric religious texts had been the scripture of subversion, now it was their immersion in, and propagation of, anarchism and socialism that marked them out as enemies of Mother Russia and the world beyond. Brafman pointed to the international meddling of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, ostensibly to protect Jews from persecution, but actually to act as the institutional front for the international conspiracy, as the most obvious proof of his argument. It was natural, then, that when one of the revolutionaries involved in the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, Gesya Gelfman, was identified as a Jewish woman, the violent death of the sovereign could, at the popular level, be characterised as the fruit of a malevolent Jewish plot. ‘The Jews killed the tsar’ was the wildfire rumour among peasants who believed his successor Alexander III was a friend of the landlord class in cahoots with the Jews. The fact that the new tsar surrounded himself with famous anti-Semites and characterised the Jews as ‘repulsive’ economic predators made no difference.
A wave of pogroms broke out around Easter/Passover 1881, often again with some sort of quasi-religious detonator so that the murdered Christ and the murdered tsar became one and the same victim of you-know-who. In towns like Elizavetgrad, the first of the serious riots began in a Jewish-owned tavern where a fight broke out between a drunk and the landlord, the former charging into the street shouting the zhidy were trying to kill him.23 Liquor was the explosive. Russian Easter was a week’s celebration with much heavy drinking and free time for crowds; vodka and brandy were among the first things looted from a smashed-up Jewish inn. Particular social groups were the shock troops: artisans who hated Jewish market vendors, and railroad workers who believed Jews stole baggage from unsuspecting travellers while they had to make do with long hours and low wages. Since they could get on trains at any time, it was easy enough for them to find their way to trouble. Then there were out-of-town peasants who had come to Elizavetgrad or Kiev for Easter and who belonged to an ancient ‘death to the Jews’ culture.
It was once thought that the Russian government must have instigated the pogroms as a way of redirecting antipathy for the countless social ills affecting Russia. But there is no evidence of government collusion. On occasions – in 1859 in Odessa, for example – the violence might have been much worse had not Cossack troopers intervened and arrests been made. And in 1881, police and troop dispositions made by the local governor, notwithstanding his own anti-Semitism, contained the violence. No one died in Odessa that year, as they did in Kiev and Elizavetgrad.
There is, however, plentiful evidence of slow or shaky response. Often local police forces were inadequate in a situation which many predicted would get out of control. Elizavetgrad had just forty-seven police for its population of 43,000, so order depended on the presence of troops, who in this case had been sent off at exactly the wrong time. But even if soldiers were present, their orders usually were not to use firearms against the mobs. That, and the relatively lenient punishment of the rioters, signalled to incendiaries in other towns that the authorities were winking at the violence against the Jews even when that was untrue.
Sometimes, too, Jews on the receiving end noted a kind of chilly indifference on the part of the authorities amounting to grim satisfaction. The general attitude was that the Jews had brought it on themselves by their cupidity and greed. When Rabbi Schwabacher went to see the governor of Odessa, Count Kotzebue, after the pogrom of 1871 to complain about the lack of police protection, he was given a brusque dressing-down and told that the Jews had ‘started it’. Alexander III himself subscribed to these economic myths. While regretting the pogroms, the tsar predicted violence would continue as long as the Jews did not mend their evil ways. If any Jew living in the areas of south Russia terrorised by the pogroms of 1881 and 1882 expected much in the way of security they were quickly disabused by Alexander III’s new minister of the interior, the hearty anti-Semite Count Nikolai Pavlovich Ignatiev. Ignatiev had had a long military and diplomatic career and it had not escaped his attention that Russia had been robbed of the fruits of its victory over the Turks in the war of 1877–8 by the arbitration of the Jew Disraeli. ‘His’ people needed restraining, correcting.
Even before the wave of pogroms abated in 1882 (though there were a few outbreaks in 1883 and 1884) Ignatiev had issued ‘Temporary Regulations’ (which became near permanent) for the Jews, which continued to punish them for their own misfortunes. For more than half a century their woes had been blamed on their obstinate separateness. The abolition of the kahal, its replacement by state-appointed institutions and the creation of Russian Schools were meant to bring them into the world of non-Jewish Russia, and under Alexander II it had done its work only too well. Now it was the Jews’ invasiveness which, as in the German-speaking lands, was said to be the problem. The Regulations were meant to contain if not reverse that. Rural Russia was to be locked off again; back to the shtetls with them! No more free settling in the countryside wherever they chose, even if they were in the commercial and educational classes approved under Alexander II. There were altogether too many educated Jews getting up to mischief, so ferocious quotas were set on their numbers in high schools and universities and in the professions. Jewish doctors were forbidden to hire Christian orderlies, and to appease one of the prime grievances of the rioters, there was to be no more Sunday trading.
The police now had the power to detain those who were where they were not supposed to be, and they used it. Night raids broke open Jewish apartments in Moscow and St Petersburg, and hammered on the doors of shtetl houses to determine that the Jews were in their properly registered location. In the end, even this failed to satisfy the reactionary urge to de-Judaise urban Russia. The presence of Jewish merchants and artisans in St Petersburg, and especially the ancient capital Moscow, was somehow an intolerable indecency to guilds and the Orthodox Church. The head of its Most Holy Synod (the highest lay office), Konstantin Pobedonostsev, was eager to remove them. The disaster was, as usual, timed for Passover, late March 1891. Of Moscow’s 30,000 Jews, 20,000 were to be expelled; almost all its working artisan population plus shopkeepers and merchants were arbitrarily deemed desirable. The decree became known on the morning following the first Seder as Jews were assembling for synagogue. The tragic variation on the exodus fell hard on them. Different groups were to be deported in phases depending on how long their residence had been; last in, first out. But the uprooting, the panic selling of property – movable and immovable – the liquidation of assets, with the Church looking on in satisfaction, seemed not so much an Egyptian tale as a replay of the expulsion from Spain. Families, livelihoods, lives were broken by it. To add another twist of cruelty, those who were unable to sell off everything in time to comply with police orders were arrested in their houses and packed into common prisons, where some of the aged perished. Despite their total destitution and exposure to the bitter cold, the last category of deportees – those who had lived in the city twenty or thirty years – fled to the freight cars at Brest station rather than risk being taken to prison. Dressed in rags, women and small children trembled in terror and died of hypothermia. In a further irony, the governor of Moscow had decided to suspend the deportations until the worst of the cold had passed but his order came too late for many of the victims. Newspaper stories kindled the usual expressions of indignation and regret from Vienna to Washington, where President Harrison and Congress conveyed their abhorrence to the Russian ambassador (while regretting it should darken the normally cordial relations between their countries). But it was Alphonse de Rothschild’s declining to subscribe to the latest issue of Russian government bonds which made the authorities have second thoughts. Pressure from the Rothschilds of course only confirmed to anti-Semites their conviction that Jews were extortionists.
In any case, many Russian Jews did not need this latest misery to persuade themselves that the dream of civil equality, of living alongside other Russians, was just that. Some thought this would be the case until there was revolutionary alteration in the country. To have a Jewish life you needed to be rich enough and powerful enough to be indispensable even to Russians who hated you. So the people who aroused the most resentment, whose very success made old families and the Orthodox Church speak of a ‘Jewish conquest’, were the last people to feel the blade edge of oppression.
Whoever said life in Russia was fair? Or for that matter life anywhere? Not Moshe Leib Lilienblum.24 Odessa had made him free but, as he bitterly recorded in a memoir written when he was thirty, free to be unhappy. But then Lilienblum was one of the ancient line of virtuosi of tsuris, poets of misery. The memoir was called Sins of Youth, and was written just a year or two after his arrival in Odessa in 1869, on the invitation of the enlightened, so that he might escape persecution as a religious reformer in Lithuania. With no sense of irony at all Lilienblum divided his still youthful life into ‘Chaos’, ‘Heresy’ and ‘Despair’: the first when, as an Orthodox yeshiva boy (and later its teacher), he had begun to doubt the very existence of God. Worse, those doubts ate at him most deeply on the solemn occasions of the ritual calendar – Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur! He donned the shroud of woe like a man born for it: there was the wife, betrothed to him when they were still more or less children; the children she had borne to a loveless marriage. Forced to live with his in-laws, Lilienblum’s claustrophobia was now doubled, the strangling grip of the Talmud tightened by the suffocation of his domestic life.
He began to murmur against the Talmud even as he dived more deeply into its sixty books as if he had missed something, the nugget of wisdom which would make sense of everything. But the bright gem eluded him. The Kabbalah of the Hasidim seemed even more wilfully esoteric, if not actually nonsensical. Still the question gnawed at Moshe Leib Lilienblum as it had so many other distracted Jews for a thousand or so years: how could God make the universe from nothing; from, please, ‘a word’? Why had he been given the faculty of reason if not to worry over such matters, before which the work of every day and especially his teaching in the yeshiva shrank into paltry insignificance? The dog of doubt sunk its teeth into his shins and would not let go. Murmuring to himself became verbalising to friends and then in writing to the whole of Wilkomir, the shtetl; and for his honesty he was made instant pariah: hooted at in the streets by children; his own children bullied and ostracised; denounced on the Sabbath. Anguished that this stifling, unthinking conformity was losing Jews altogether, and that if certain changes were made to strictures that were not even in the Torah, they might remain Jews, Lilienblum was castigated yet again. It was in vain that he protested that he himself could hardly have been more orthodox in the ways of his life; that he never touched cheese until six hours had elapsed following a meal of meat! He was met with the laughter of hating disbelief. It was unbearable.
The reforming publications reached Odessa where he found sympathisers in the Society for the Promotion of Enlightenment among Odessa Jews, from whom he received an invitation to teach. It had been a relief but also bewildering. Being Lilienblum he soon felt the loss of Wilkomir more acutely than the joy of escape. The shtetl wraparound which had all but suffocated him he now missed like an old blanket. The weather was warm but the society cold. Pleasure eluded Lilienblum; he barely went through the motions. He yearned for what he had once hated: the closeness of people he knew well. You went your own way in Odessa; dropped off in its world like a passenger from a horse tram. Co-editing Tsederbaum’s journals was, somehow, not family. His brain was full of notions but the deeper part of Moshe Leib Lilienblum was empty. ‘My heart is wood,’ he wrote, ‘I am twenty-nine and old age has already overtaken me. I have given up the idea of living a vital life. My eyes are heavy with weeping … I am a failure.’
But then, as if it was good for something, the big tsuris called Pogrom showed Lilienblum the way. Amid the flying trash, murderous din and crowds of unsheltered Jews, stumbling glassy-eyed through the streets, he came to a bleak conclusion: houseless meant homeless meant hopeless. While the madness was raging he saw a woman ‘ragged and drunk dancing in the streets shouting “this is our country, this is our country”’. ‘Can we say the same,’ he asked rhetorically, ‘without the dancing, without being drunk? We are aliens not only here but in all of Europe for it is not our fatherland … we are Semites among Aryans, the Shem among the sons of Japhet, a Palestinian tribe of Asia in the European land.’ This ‘orientalism’ was the very complaint some of the anti-Semites voiced when they saw another synagogue dome on their streets. The government was apparently ‘collecting data on Jewish activities which harmed natives. We, then, are not natives.’ Better to embrace the difference with fortitude and pride ‘than dream that we will become children of the European nations, children with equal rights [for] what can be more fatuous?’
Elsewhere in the city Dr Leon Pinsker was coming to the same painful conclusion. Though they were not yet close, it is unlikely that Lilienblum and Pinsker had not heard of each other; but they came to what was not yet called Zionism by different routes and through different worlds. Lilienblum was so steeped in rabbinic Judaism that even when he was trying furiously to shake it off, the tradition clung to his self-interrogating habits of thought. The Pinskers were long-established Odessites. Leon’s father had taken the family south from the shtetl of Tomaszow (in what is now Belarus) when he was offered a post at the new Hebrew school teaching both Jewish and non-Jewish subjects. It gave him the chance to pursue his owlish, scholarly passions: the medieval Karaites and the vocalisation of Assyriac. Educated in that broad-minded curriculum, and with opportunities finally opening up, Leon was destined for – what else? – the law or medicine; he tried the first, and settled on the latter. As a young physician he did everything he could to demonstrate his patriotic selflessness. In 1848–9 he volunteered to work directly with cholera patients, at real risk to his own life; six years later during the Crimean War he was courting even greater peril working in the lethal typhus-stricken wards of the Russian army.
If anyone had reason to assume that his Jewish and Russian identities were unproblematically twinned, it was Pinsker; yet the pogroms and the tepid attitude of authority to both prevention and correction taught him this was not so. He also came to the shocking realisation that the optimism of the Society for the Promotion of Enlightenment among Odessa Jews was all idle piety. The truism that hatred would dissipate with education, and with easy social familiarity between Jews and non-Jews, was a vain comfort. Anti-Semitism was not an anachronism destined to disappear with the conquest of modernity; it was modernity, as up-to-date and future-friendly as electricity and the railway.
This was because it was a psychic disease, one capable of infinite mutation. Pinsker the diagnostician observed a moral metastasis eating through the body of modernity. Better than almost any other Jewish commentator on anti-Semitism, he understood how ancient phantasies cohabited with modern habits; and the particular madness, ‘a demonopathy’, he identified was the fear of ghosts, zombies. The Jews walked through the fears of the non-Jewish mind as alien beings, neither wholly alive nor satisfyingly dead; both there and not there; mercurial, slippery, immune to exorcism through banishment, conversion or any number of brutal bashings. Worse, they kept coming back as successes, masters of the modern world; hobgoblins of capitalism. The Jews themselves were not without responsibility for this phobia because they refused to gather themselves into a physically recognisable national existence, an entity which would command respect. Instead they left their destiny in the hands of the Almighty, stuck forever in the waiting room for an appoinment with a Messiah who never showed up. Meanwhile the blows rained down on their heads. But ‘if we are ill-treated, robbed, plundered, outraged we do not defend ourselves, worse still we look upon it almost as a matter of course … if a blow is dealt we soothe it by rinsing our burning cheeks with cool water; if we receive a bloody wound we apply a bandage … what a pitiful figure we cut’.
It would always be thus as long as the powers thought of the Jews as so many individuals rather than the nation they were; always they would be treated like beggars or refugees, ‘and where is the refugee to whom a refuge may not be refused?’ The Jews were the world’s perennial refugee, manhandled or granted civic crumbs from the table as it suited those who had absolute power over them. The response was first to rouse the dormant spirit of collective existence and then to give it institutional reality. The foundations for such a national rebirth were, he thought, already in place. It was just a matter of convincing the grandees of Vienna, Paris, Berlin, Frankfurt and London that they needed to move from charitable relief, educational projects and the periodic mobilisation of public opinion when yet another hideous blood libel came to light, towards a forthright, international organisation for the dispersed Jewish nation. Let the anti-Semites rail that this was the age-old Jewish conspiracy revealing its true colours; they would do that anyway. What was urgently needed was to give the Jews who had lived forever in the ethereal world of abstractions, an earthier, material existence. What was wanted was a homeland.
With these revolutionary principles circling inside his head, Leon Pinsker decided to go on the road and set them out before Jews who mattered in the great capitals. That was when he knocked on the door of Rabbi Dr Adolf Jellinek even as another wave of pogroms was erupting in southern Russia around Easter/Passover 1882. His cool reception in Vienna was dispiritingly repeated in Berlin and Frankfurt. In Paris, where anti-Semitic literature was blooming with poisonous virulence, he had a more sympathetic hearing from the chief rabbi Zadoc Kahn, who wanted to introduce him to the one man who might turn Pinsker’s notions into working reality: Baron Edmond de Rothschild. Oddly, and perhaps because he was already so discouraged by meetings with rich Jews who failed to share his zeal, Pinsker did not wait around for another.
It was only in London that he found someone who took what he was saying, his call to action, seriously: Arthur Cohen, Liberal Member of Parliament for Southwark. Despite the name, Cohen was from the cream of the Anglo-Jewish ‘Cousinhood’, the nephew of Sir Moses Montefiore, around whom it was impossible not to be interested in the fate of Jews in Palestine. Cohen was also president of the Board of Deputies, so all in all the kind of British Jew likely to greet Pinsker with lukewarm sympathy but no more. But Arthur Cohen was neither parochial nor complacent. His father Benjamin, City merchant and broker, had sent him to a Frankfurt gymnasium for his schooling and afterwards to the only college freely accepting Jews, University College London. But Benjamin thought nothing except Cambridge could possibly be good enough for his son, who showed an aptitude for mathematics. Two colleges refused him before Prince Albert prised open the gates of Magdalene on Arthur’s behalf, a favour which embarrassed the young man. At Cambridge, rowing and hunting took him away from advanced calculus, and in 1852 he became president of the Cambridge Union. The result was that Arthur was placed as just Fifth Wrangler in his examinations, a grievous blow to Pa. But what bit further into Arthur’s own equanimity was that he was forced to wait until the Cambridge University Act of 1856, which did away with an oath to the Church of England, before he was allowed to graduate.
Two years later Lionel de Rothschild took the oath as an incoming Member of Parliament on the Old Testament with the words ‘So help me Jehovah’. Arthur, who was also related to the Rothschilds, was himself elected in 1880, following the wave of Liberal success which ended the government of the most famous (albeit baptised) Jew in Europe, Benjamin Disraeli. And in 1882 Cohen listened to the gaunt, worn figure of the doctor from Odessa, and without the raised eyebrows, the armchair fidgeting or the diplomatic ahems to which Pinsker had become depressingly accustomed. Cohen, who might have considered himself a living example of why a Jewish homeland was gratuitous, thought Pinsker right; so right, in fact, that he urged him to publish his opinions as soon as possible.
Back in Odessa with this one decisive encouragement to sustain his convictions, Pinsker wrote and published Auto-Emancipation.25 Its anonymity was curiously at odds with the clarion-call forthrightness of the message, though the doctor who always felt himself ailing (he had another nine years of life) wanted to uncouple the man from the message, and avoid any dominant role in the movement he was committed to launch. A charismatic leader, he often said, was needed; but he was not that person.
Moshe Leib Lilienblum did not agree. Reading Auto-Emancipation was akin to an epiphany for him; a dramatic statement of all the arguments that had been tumbling around his fevered mind. Nor did anyone else who got their hands on a copy think it less than revolutionary. In New York the wealthy Sephardi poet and essayist Emma Lazarus, moved by the news coming from south Russia, responded ardently to the burning eloquence of the writing. ‘For the living the Jew is a dead man, for the natives an alien and a vagrant, for property owners a beggar, for the poor an exploiter, for patriots a man without a country.’ Nudged by Lilienblum, Pinsker emerged from anonymity, accepted his fame as a mission, moved into an office with his new comrade-in-arms (the address marked today with a small plaque), and from there set about organising a movement they called with biblical flourish Hovevei Zion, the Lovers of Zion.
Two years later, on 6 November 1884, the first Congress of the Jews assembled in the Polish-Silesian town of Katowice. Naturally, the delegates all expressed their love for Zion by arguing with each other. Pinsker gave the opening and closing addresses, still genuinely reluctant to assume any kind of leadership. Somewhere, he thought, there was a Moses waiting in the wings.
It was all very well to love Zion, and to send Jews to till its soil, but where was it exactly? In Auto-Emancipation, Pinsker spoke of the desperate need for a refuge, in particular for Russian Jews who were facing the bitterest and most unrelenting hostility. He did not, he wrote, have any expectation of course that the whole of the world’s Jews would emigrate to the self-governing homeland, and the territory itself could be a mere patch of land, just enough to give protection and self-respect. Thus modestly defined it could be an autonomous territory within the United States (though somewhat bigger than Mordecai Noah’s Ararat); or perhaps a province of Ottoman eastern Anatolia? But for most of the Lovers, Zion could only have one possible location and that was ‘Eretz Yisroel’, the place where language and collective identity had been formed; where kings of Israel and Judah might have disappeared out of sight but never out of mind; where in fact there was already a Jewish majority in Jerusalem.
It was not, as is often claimed, the first Zionists who spoke of Palestine as empty, ‘a land without people for a people without land’. That was the comment of an American missionary earlier in the nineteenth century. But it is true that even if you look very hard amid all these passionate, desperate yearnings for Zion, you will not find, anywhere at all, the word ‘Arab’.
Winter sun rose on the village at the foot of Tel Qatra. The usual chorus began: roosters, donkeys, goats, an occasional dog. At the edge of the village, where arable fields took over from olive groves, a mule and an ox were being tethered to a light-yoked plough. Inside the houses the first tea of the day was brewing: comfort against the season’s chill.
The Shephelah where Qatra stood was the region of low hills dividing the coastal plain of Palestine from steeper, rockier, limestone Judaea. Its cube-houses were all grey, and greyer still after winter rain when the rudimentary streets turned muddy. Downstairs: a hearth, a bed, sometimes a goat; upstairs, a rug and a bigger, better bed. It was a village of fellahin, tenant-cultivators; families, in the case of Qatra, who had come earlier in the century from Libya. The whole region, indeed the whole of Palestine, was full of Arab immigrants, many of them descendants of Ibrahim Pasha’s army, who had conquered the country on behalf of Muhammad Ali, the Khedive of Egypt, in the 1830s. After the conquest was complete in 1841, many of the military families were settled in Palestine. The majority were native Egyptian but there were also Maghrebi Arabs from Algeria and Morocco, Circassians and Bosnians. At the same time, there was some immigration from Syria and Lebanon, including Druze and Christians. The assumption that, before the arrival of Jews in the nineteenth century, Arab Palestine was a place of timeless continuity, the same indigenous people immemorially inhabiting the same villages and cultivating the same plots of ancestrally inherited land, overlooks all these shifts of population. Beduin tribes (also in many cases ex-soldiers) – called (unfairly) by settled fellahin ‘creators of the desert’ – fought with cultivators and still more fiercely with each other. Every so often Beduin would descend on village pasture with flocks of camels, letting them graze and challenging the locals to take them on. Pitched battles broke out over pasture and water. Once their camels had grazed the pasture down to the barest stubble, the Beduin would break camp and move on, leaving the fellahin wringing their hands.
As everywhere in this part of the world, there were ruins. The villagers of the Shephelah, where every hill seemed to have its khirbet, had become accustomed to seeing Europeans, and the odd American, dismount, poke and peer at the fallen stones, take a trowel or a little shovel to the surrounding dirt, then kneel down and sift a handful through their fingers. A tripod would appear with extending legs, then the massive camera, while another of the group pulled drawing materials from a flat canvas bag, found a flat stone to sit on and made sketches; yet another would be busy with survey instruments, pacing out preliminary measurements. Most of these busy pink men in their pressed khaki shorts and long socks came with guides from Jaffa or Ramle. But sometimes they tried out their own Arabic, spoken slowly and flatly, unlike the galloping run of the Libyan- or Egyptian-accented vernacular. After 1858, when a new Turkish land law required registration of titles, another class of surveyors from Jaffa, Jerusalem and Haifa appeared with their own surveying instruments. The fellahin knew that registration would be followed by taxation, as was exactly the case. Everything that could be taxed would be: livestock, crops, houses, even beehives.
But nothing prepared the villagers of Qatra for the latest arrivals. At twilight on the second day of Hanukkah, two Russian Jews, self-described Lovers of Zion, walked into the middle of an empty field south of the village, their arms loaded with twigs. Setting them on the ground, they arranged them into two small pyramids, each one signifying a day of the festival. Once lit, the twin bonfires became an outsize Hanukkah lamp flaring up into the evening sky. A few days later they were joined by seven more student types including, briefly, Israel Belkind, who two years before in January 1882 in Ukraine had brought a group of fourteen Kharkov University undergraduates to his house, and with the solemnity only twenty-year-olds in search of a mission can muster, had formed them into a phalanx of pioneers. No self-respecting group of this kind could be without an acronym, and after fishing about in the Bible they settled on a verse from Isaiah: Beit Ya’akov Lechu Ve’nelcha (House of Jacob come, let us go). Thus, by a slight twist of acronym, they became the ‘Bilu’. Pinsker’s stirring utterance had not yet been published in Odessa but the pogroms of 1881 had thrown sparks over many other communities and they bloomed from one end of the Pale to the other, from Kovno to Kherson, with ardent little flames.
Romancing the land, by which was meant actual physical soil, was not unique to these young Jews. The wheat fields of Russia were thick with bespectacled idealists hearkening to Chernyshevsky or Tolstoy, bent on redeeming the country and themselves with scythe and sickle, and fraternising with the long-suffering peasantry. In a half-hearted attempt to wean the incorrigibly urban Jews from their addiction to petty commerce, the Russian state in its socially evangelical mode had established agricultural colonies for Jews in Kherson province not far from Odessa, with mixed success. So Jews could hoe and harrow, milk and thresh. More influential on the Bilu were the majestically eloquent appeals from two rabbis, one Ashkenazi and one Sephardi, Zvi Hirsch Kalischer and Yehuda Alkalai, both in Hebrew, the reborn language of redemption, both preaching a return to the soil of Israel. Once established, the Lovers of Zion in Odessa acted as a kind of clearing house for the emigrants, and it was from Odessa, after another cycle of pogroms reinforced their convictions, that the Bilu sailed to Zion.
So there they were, nine Jewish peasants, shivering together in a wooden shack, nursing blisters and swatting away the insects, their hands raw from pulling up esparto and wild alfalfa, briar and nettle.26
It was not quite what had been anticipated; a little short on the olives and vines and not much sign of milk and honey. The original fourteen Biluim, including the owlish Belkind (who it quickly transpired was not cut out for the Jewish peasant life), arrived in the summer of 1882: prime mosquito season; the insect which would have almost as much of a decisive effect on the fate of Zionism as the words of Leon Pinsker. An agricultural school, Mikveh Israel, established in 1870 by the Alliance Israélite Universelle on a modest patch of land south of Jaffa, was waiting to receive its first cohort. It was managed by Charles Netter, one of the few men in this early chapter of Jewish farming in Palestine to combine steely resolution with practical wisdom.27 After learning which end of a plough was which, off the Biluim went to Rishon LeZion, its name (First in Zion) jumping the gun, as the very first settlement was actually Motza, established in 1854 in the hill country outside the walls of Jerusalem. Though the land in these earliest farms was leased to groups, each cultivator was responsible for his own plot. That had been the idea of Zalman David Levontin, a religious Jew from Mogilew. Moved by the plight of refugees from the pogrom-struck cities, Levontin had promoted a scheme for land purchase, and with a promise of investment from a wealthy uncle he had travelled to Palestine in the summer of 1882 to execute the plan. Six refugees and ten other settlers moved into Rishon LeZion. Almost immediately the settlement was compromised by bitter disputes as to whether it ought to be run from Jerusalem or by the settlers themselves. But the quarrels were as nothing compared to the impossibility of finding adequate supplies of water. Within a few months, it was obvious the farmers at Rishon LeZion were unlikely to make a go of it. Eaten alive by malarial mosquitoes, not to mention horseflies and sand leeches, unable to produce even a minimal harvest of wheat or barley, reduced to surviving from plates of potatoes and radishes, Rishon was abandoned less than a year after it was initially occupied.
Help was needed, and where else to find it if not from a Rothschild? One in particular, Baron Edmond – the youngest son of the railroad and banking founder of the Paris end of the dynasty, James – was said to have an interest in the replanting of Palestine with Jews.28 Through the mediation of the chief rabbi Zadoc Kahn and Netter, deputations of the desperate made their way to the great house on the rue Laffitte for an audience with the formidable magnate. They included a rabbi from Brody, Shmuel Mohilewer, who reported to the baron on the dire situation in his own town, crowded as it was with fugitives from the pogroms. Mohilewer treated the great baron as though he were a resh galuta, a leader of the exile (which was not far off the truth), and secured support for the transplantation of a group of families from Rozhany in Poland. But the most effective impact on Edmond was made by Joseph Feinberg, a Zion Lover chemist working for the Zaitsev Sugar Company in Odessa. Feinberg had waited but a few weeks after the arrival at Rishon LeZion before judging it would fail without immediate help. Edmond saw this not as a sign of premature pessimism but the anxiety of a practical man who understood that Zion would need more than Love if its crops were to grow. It needed investment so that sand could be stabilised, wells dug and – a Rothschild obsession – Australian eucalyptuses planted to fix the sand.
Edmond was willing to provide the needful, but on condition that the settlers agreed to be managed by men Edmond judged to have what it took, technically, to make these seedling communities take root. He also saw that the transplantation of refugees from persecution could be badly handled from Odessa. A boatload of refugees from Romania had been denied landing by the Turkish officials and were reduced to sailing up and down the coastline with almost no food and less sanitation before getting a mercy landing at Jaffa, where they were promptly locked up. When they got to their promised patch of land, it was the usual mix of rock and swamp. This all needed better management, Rothschild thought, but it also needed grandeur of vision. With a modicum of investment why should Palestine not produce the kind of things he himself valued: wine, silk, perfume? Once, the Bible made clear, Israel and Judah had been thick with vineyards. Why should they not reappear?
Intensive western agriculture – irrigation, crop rotation, iron-yoked ploughs that turned the soil rather than just raked furrows into it with a single metal spike, manuring and even steam-driven combines – had actually been first introduced into Palestine by American evangelicals from Maine and Pennsylvania, and, still more improbably, by the German Order of the Templars, all of whom had a messianic interest in seeing the Holy Land blossom into fruitfulness. The Templars managed to create colonies near Jaffa and Haifa, build flour mills and lay down paved roads. But with the experiment, as usual, came unsupportable debt and near collapse; Edmond de Rothschild, though, had his own characteristic notions of what modern Jewish farming might yield, and the willingness to fund the great experiment, even if it went into the red.29 Cadres of European-trained specialists were dispatched to see if the country was right for wine, silk and even perfume. Sericulturalists came from Padua, jardiniers from the Horticultural School at Versailles, oenologists who had put in time at Rothschild chateaux in the Médoc, and hydraulic engineers from the École des Ponts et Chaussées. It was all very Napoleonic, with the emperor of cultivation back in Paris or at the chateau at Ferrières, impatiently waiting results, berating anyone he thought was obstructing success, threatening to pull funds if ‘insubordination’ against his managers compromised the accomplishment of the ‘experiment’. For many of the immigrants – from Poland and Romania as well as Russia – the addition of Gallic-Jewish dressing-downs on how they lived and worked, in addition to plagues of yellow fever, malaria and the terrible eye disease trachoma carried by the sandflies, was altogether too much, and they departed, back to Europe, or to Jerusalem (where Israel Belkind became a teacher), or to an early grave. Charles Netter himself died at the end of 1882 from malaria. By the time that Rishon LeZion became independently viable in the 1890s, both its major founders, Levontin and Feinberg, had returned to Russia.
But there were some who stuck it out, even as the vines withered (disastrously when phylloxera and mildew struck in the early 1890s) and the worms fell off the mulberry trees (though the trees themselves endured). At Qatra, the little Jewish colony called itself Gedera and stayed put. The Arab village watched the odd determination of the Jews to rent ploughs and draught animals from them, and to toil over the land themselves, with bemused suspicion. This was not what Jews did; they wouldn’t last. But when the first stone houses were built at Gedera it was apparent they meant to stay, and then what the Jews were doing lit up arguments in the village. The angriest said that land had been taken, and they had been robbed of the use of it. Legally this was untrue. The parcel of land which became Gedera had reverted to the Turkish government when the village disclaimed the property a few years earlier. That disclaimer had been made to avoid liability for a murder which had taken place within the boundaries of the parcel. Moving the village limits of Qatra shifted responsibility away from their doorstep while they carried on, as usual, using it for grazing. The legal vacancy allowed the Turkish authorities to reassign the land to the neighbouring village of Mughar which in turn sold it to the French consul in Jaffa, a M. Polivierre. Finally, the consul had sold it to Yechiel Michal Pines, who had come to Palestine as an agent for the Montefiore Foundation.
Faithful to the spirit of Montefiore, Pines wanted to remake Palestinian Jews as artisans and farmers, and in Jerusalem romantically created a society for ‘The Return of Craftsmen and Smiths’. When, in 1882, he encountered Eliezer ben Yehuda, whose life was devoted to the recreation of Hebrew as a daily vernacular tongue, Pines saw the outlines of what a reborn Jewish society in Palestine might be and what it might sound like. But even as he made himself patron and protector of the Lovers of Zion and jumped on the opportunity to buy that plot of land south of Qatra, he was not oblivious to Arab sensibilities. Where he could, Pines tried to find land compensation for villagers who felt that, despite lots being legitimately bought, they had had working property taken from them. Sometimes Pines succeeded and calmed an inflamed situation down; sometimes, as at Qatra, he did not.
What unfolded, as the first Jewish villages appeared in Galilee, the coastal plain of Samaria and the Shephelah, was not a case of an unbroken agriculture disrupted by colonial intrusion. The ecology of Palestine in the second half of the nineteenth century was unstable and, in many parts of the country, deteriorating.30 The great event of the century had been the earthquake of 1837, with its epicentre in Galilee. Ruined villages had been abandoned and depopulated. Deforestation had had an even more dramatic impact. Until the 1840s, much of the Sharon Valley had been covered with a Mediterranean dry oak forest. A century later most of it had been denuded for charcoal and lime kilns. Timber taken by the Turkish state for the construction of railways took more of the oaks. Upland topsoils eroded; nearer the coast, the line of sand dunes advanced into previously cultivable land. Drifting dirt clogged natural water flows, creating stagnant ponds and marshes where there had been running brooks and rivulets. Different incoming populations treated these changes in their own ways. The Arab el Damair tribe of Egyptian Beduin who had come to the region with Ibrahim Pasha moved to the edge of the Huzera swamp where they raised water buffalo and cut reeds in the manner of the marsh Arabs of Mesopotamia.31
Environmental degradation created commercial opportunity. When villagers chose not to register their land use with the Turkish authorities for fear of taxation, they produced legal vacancies which were instantly filled by opportunistic buyers from Jaffa and Jerusalem but also much further away in the region. A class of absentee landlords arose in the area, almost entirely Christian and Muslim Arabs, who then leased their properties to those who would bring improvements – drainage and irrigation above all – and with it dramatic capital appreciation. Enter, in the first place, those Americans and German Templars, followed not long afterwards by the Jews.
Thus the fellahin, partly by their own doing and partly by circumstances completely beyond their control, had beome tenants of landlords who had never lived or farmed in their plains, hills and valleys. To begin with just who was selling and who buying – effendi, Turk, French consul or Jerusalem Jew – was a matter of utter indifference to those who ploughed fields, scattered seeds from their opened fists, tended and grazed sheep and goats, so long as they could get on with providing a subsistence for their families and village. But these belt-and-braces young men were not Jerusalem Jews and were impervious to ancient, sacrosanct customs. Customary convention prescribed that those who had sown and harvested a summer crop were then entitled to follow with a winter crop; and the stubble fields after harvest were always theirs for grazing. But both local officials and Jewish farmers had new, office-paper versions of rights. Even at this early stage, hostilities erupted. The Jews drove grazing animals from their land, or even confiscated them as a ‘lesson’. Infuriated Arab villagers responded with violent attacks, smashing up cabins, and physically attacking men and women. The situation was made worse by the refusal of the settlers to take up the customary offer of ‘protection’ from Arab watchmen, preferring instead to defend themselves. Armed Arabs then made the Jews experience first-hand the cost of denying themselves that protection. In both the grazing wars and the watchmen rejection, then, Arab sensibilities were already confused, dismayed and wounded by what they encountered. ‘They are up in arms,’ the local Lovers of Zion agent wrote to Pinsker in Odessa, ‘for how will they sustain themselves?’ It was a good question.
In the late spring of 1887, Edmond de Rothschild’s yacht anchored off Port Said. He had come to inspect the results of his ‘experiment’ though the journey had been kept, or so he thought, a secret. In all the correspondence about his trip he insisted he be referred to as ‘REB’ (a reversal of the initials of Baron Edmond de Rothschild) as if that would fool anyone, or if for that matter anyone cared. The Ottoman governor, Rauf Pasha, it is true, had banned all Jewish immigration after 1882, with the exception of Turkish subjects moving around the empire, but even they were forbidden to own land outright. So purchases had to be made through local surrogates. Edmond was concerned not to jeopardise what was in any case a precarious foothold, but he exaggerated the offence that would be taken by his presence. For the Turks in Jaffa, Jerusalem and the Galilee, as for much of the rest of the world, the appearance of a Rothschild was an event and an opportunity, whatever they might have said behind his back and after he had departed.
Since it humoured him, the pretence of incognito was kept up. From Jaffa, the baron in his panama hat and impeccable tropical suit travelled with his long-suffering wife Baronne Adelaide, in a closed carriage despite the broiling heat, the first khamsin sirocco of the season blowing burning grit against its windows. In Jerusalem the baron, like all the grand philanthropists, expressed his dismay at the poverty and ignorance of the religious, at their degrading dependence on halukah charity, and voiced the usual social pieties about Useful Trades and Crafts. He did Jewish tourism: the optimistically identified Tomb of Rachel, a site of pilgrimage, especially for childless women; and the Western Wall which, naturally, Edmond attempted to buy.
When he visited the settlements, the baronial side got the upper hand. At Rishon LeZion – which he had been told had become a nest of rebellion – he delivered imperious lectures to the farmers and ordered Joseph Feinberg, who he thought had misled him at their Paris meeting, out of the village. When Feinberg demurred, Edmond told him he was henceforth ‘a dead man’. Feinberg would later reply that he had duly reported to the pearly gates only to be turned away as still living. ‘There must be some mistake,’ Feinberg told the angels, ‘Baron Edmond has declared me dead so surely I am.’ It was outrageous enough for the autocratic philanthropist to crack a smile and retract the sentence of expulsion. By the time Edmond returned in 1893, Feinberg, like many others, had left of his own accord.
The land bought for the Romanians at Samarin had become the village of Ekron, named for an ancient Canaanite and Philistine town but then speedily renamed Zikhron Ya’aqov (Memory of Jacob) for Edmond’s father James. There he found much to please him: a row of neat stone houses, pantiled and whitewashed as if in Languedoc or Provence, each with a small barn for tools and draught animals. Vines were growing and surviving; a bottling plant had been built, and at the centre was an ornamental fountain, pure Rothschild style. Guided by his manager Elie Scheid, Edmond threw a banquet for the Arab villagers and their sheikh in celebration of their part in the hamlet’s success. For that one evening, Jew and Arab exchanged smiles and stories as the stars came out in the darkening sky.
Horatio Spafford had every reason to call his little group of immigrants to Jerusalem ‘the Overcomers’. He and his wife Anna had endured the afflictions of Job, if not worse. A successful lawyer, Spafford had invested in Chicago real estate only to see that investment go up in flames when a large part of the city burned down in 1871. Two years later Anna and their four children departed for an exciting European vacation. After some real estate business was seen to, Horatio would join them. But in mid-passage the Ville du Havre was struck and sunk by a British vessel. Anna was picked up, unconscious, clinging to a spar. All four of her children were lost. From Cardiff she telegraphed her husband piteously: ‘SAVED ALONE. WHAT SHALL I DO?’
It was a rhetorical question. Anna Spafford bore more children, yet their lives seemed cursed by precariousness, the boy, Horatio Junior, dying at four of scarlet fever. It was enough to make them abandon the Presbyterian Church but not hope. Instead the Spaffords would do good works in the Holy Land in the hope of hastening the Second Coming. Horatio quit the Chicago law firm and along with the two surviving children and thirteen adults emigrated to Palestine to realise their utopian Christian mission. Lodgings were rented inside the Old City close to the Damascus Gate from where the ‘American Colony’ served soup and vegetables to the destitute.32
Around Passover 1882, on one of their evening walks, Horatio and Anna came across a group of families, camped in open fields outside the city walls. They were in a pitiful condition: covered in sores and flies, many emaciated, all of them squatting beneath bits and pieces of cloth which served as primitive tents. At first sight they appeared to be Arabs, and indeed spoke a thickly accented Arabic. But the long, oiled corkscrew sidelocks of the men, the unusual headdresses, long heavy wool skirts and silver bracelets of the women suggested otherwise. With the help of an interpreter the Spaffords learned these were Yemeni Jews. Believing the Appointed Time had come, their remnant of the tribe of Gad must make its way to Jerusalem in preparation for a messianic moment. The devotion and the ordeal were as old as the diaspora. They had walked from their Yemeni villages across Arabia to a port on the Red Sea where for an extortionate price they were given passage to Aqaba. Other Jews had warned them not to attempt the journey but they were in the grip of belief. The Torah was in their heads, every line of it memorised.
But this was of no help when they got to Jerusalem. The religious of the city brusquely rejected their claim to be Jews at all. How could that be possible, given the colour of their skin, the barbaric way they dressed and spoke? Desperate and destitute, they camped either in the fields where the Spaffords found them or in the rock-cut caves near the Mount of Olives and the Kidron Valley, amid tombs from the days of the Hasmoneans and the Romans. But on Shabbat they recited the Torah, since no one could take away their sacred memory. Even when they heard their Hebrew, the religious inside the Jewish quarter referred to the Yemenites as ‘Arab Jews’. It was not meant as a compliment.
Yet the Overcomers who had once been Presbyterians believed in the ‘Gadites’, took them in, fed first the children, then the adults. For the guardians of orthodoxy inside the Old City walls this only confirmed the prejudice that these people could not possibly be Jews, since they ate from Christian tureens.
The Gadites stayed. Their scribes wrote the holy books from their heads. One of them whom the Spaffords loved, crippled to the point where he could not use either hand, wrote holding the goose quill between his toes. Hundreds, then thousands, followed the first cohort. By 1900 Yemenite Jews were fully 10 per cent of the Jewish population of Palestine. They built synagogues and began to recover the ancient skills of silver- and goldsmithing. They turned what had been a temporary shelter in Siloam into Kfar Hashiloach, their own village, with a religious school for the boys. For better or worse they became a fixture on the itinerary of travelling photographers specialising in the peoples of Palestine. The usual commonplaces followed: how beautiful the women were; how charming the children; how picturesquely exotic the long-bearded elders and rabbis; how wild the music; how spicy the food; who would have thought such noble types could be Jews? And eventually they ended up in large numbers on the land where the two Russian boys had lit their bonfires: Gedera.
Back at the American Colony, an elderly Yemeni rabbi did what he had to do: compose a mi sheberach blessing. ‘He who blessed our fathers Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, bless, guard and keep Horatio Spafford and his household and all those that are joined with him for he showed mercy to our children and little ones. Therefore may the Lord make his days long in righteousness … in his and our days may Judah be helped and the Redeemer come unto Zion and let us say Amen.’