Chapter 17 Chapter 17From the thirteenth century and onward, the Jewish community also appeared in Eastern Europe. Jewish towns and villages, known in Yiddish as shtetls, prospered. Despite the persecution and violence that the Jewish people periodically had to face, these communities survived for centuries and have left behind a rich heritage of Yiddish culture.
In the year 1264, a very unique event took place. King Boleslav, the monarch of Poland, invited the Jews into his kingdom and granted them a charter unprecedented in its scope in terms of the rights it conferred. In this document, among other privileges, Jews were granted equal status with Christians in all forms of commerce. Christians who attacked Jews and their cemeteries would be punished, and Christians were obligated to protect their Jewish neighbors from any acts of violence—failing to do so constituted a crime. In exchange for royal protection and the granting of autonomy in running their lives, the Jews paid a tax rate of 30 percent.
In 1567, the Polish King Sigismund II Augustus issued another invitation to the Jews. In 1569, when Poland absorbed Lithuania, additional management and vocational opportunities arose for the Jews in these newly acquired lands.
It may be that this benign attitude toward the Jews had to do, at least in part, with the fact that Poland did not become a Christian nation until late in the eleventh century and that the Jews’ reputation as Christ-killers had not yet become ingrained in the people. It is also likely that the primary motive behind the issuance of the charter and the invitation to the Jews was the belief that they would prove a boon in developing the commerce of Poland, just as they had in other regions where they had lived. Finding themselves no longer limited to money lending, Jews in Poland became fiscal agents, tax collectors, managers of the nobles’ estates, craftsmen, and farmers.
At first, Jews trickled into Poland from Crimea, the Russian steppes, the Middle East, and Spain, but most of the arrivals were Ashkenazim, who migrated from the west as a result of expulsion. As a result, the Jewish population in Poland increased dramatically, from 20,000 in the year 1500 to 150,000 in 1575, representing 5 percent of the entire Polish populace. Indeed, by 1650, estimates have put the Jewish population in Poland as high as 500,000—the largest Jewish community in the Diaspora at that time.
Many Jews lived in small urban centers or towns (shtetls), where they constituted a majority. These independent Jewish communities were governed by their own kehillah, just as they had been centuries earlier, in the small towns in France and elsewhere in Western Europe. The kehillot collected the taxes to remit to the Polish nobles and monarchs and governed the Jews in all secular matters—the rabbis took care of religious laws. In time, these kehillot organized into regional and national federations in order to represent the Jews before the monarchy.
It was in Eastern Europe that Yiddish continued its long and colorful history as the mame loshen (the mother tongue). It earned this name because it was the language of the home. While men learned Hebrew, loshen ha-kodesh (the sacred language) in religious schools, women spoke only Yiddish, and they passed this language on to their children.
Is “Yiddish” synonymous with “Jewish”?
The word Yiddish literally does mean “Jewish,” as in “the Jewish language,” but Yiddish is not common to all Jewish people. It is only one of several languages (Ladino being another prominent one) that developed in the Diaspora among various Jewish communities.
Yiddish is a very social language, replete with nicknames, terms of endearment, and more than a good share of expletives. There are also plenty of proverbs and proverbial expressions, curses for just about every occasion, and idioms reflecting the fears and superstitions of the times. Although it arose as a spoken language, Yiddish also holds a prominent place in Jewish literature (see Chapter 22).
The Jews used Yiddish in everyday matters. Although a few Jews deemed themselves too sophisticated to speak this language of the common people, it nevertheless gained a prominent place in the hearts and minds of millions of Jews the world over. And in return, this language served the Jewish people well, adapting and changing from community to community, absorbing some traits of the tongues spoken in the places Jews lived. Consequently, even English words and phrases made their way into Yiddish after the waves of immigration into the United States by European Jewry at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Although the Polish crown remained beneficent toward the Jews, there were periodic incidents of violence against them at the hands of their Christian neighbors. Moreover, their position as tax collectors for the local nobles did not endear the Jews to the common folk, nor were they appreciated for their business acumen and skills as artisans, which made them formidable competitors in commerce.
Until the middle of the seventeenth century, by and large, conditions for the burgeoning Jewish community in Poland were mostly agreeable. But as had happened repeatedly throughout Jewish history, good times were often followed by bad.
When Lithuania had joined Poland in 1569, what we know today as the Ukraine and portions of Belarus also became a part of Poland. The Ukrainians did not like this change, and there was a popular revolt in 1635. Although the revolt didn’t succeed, a second rebellion followed in 1648–1649. This time, the Ukrainian populace was led by a petty Ukrainian aristocrat by the name of Bogdan Chmielnicki.
With his army of Ukrainian peasants and aided by Cossacks and Tartars from the Crimea, Chmielnicki waged a bloody campaign against the Polish nobility, the Catholic Church (Ukrainians themselves were Eastern Orthodox), and the Jews.
The number of Jews murdered in this two-year period was astounding. Estimates vary, but it is possible that as many as 100,000 Jews met hideous deaths at the hands of Chmielnicki, who justifiably earned a reputation in Jewish history equaled only by Hitler.
Thousands of shtetls were pillaged or abandoned in the path of Chmielnicki’s marauders. The Jews fled to fortified towns that turned into death traps. Frequently, they were denied admittance and left to stand helpless outside the ramparts to be slaughtered. On other occasions, if they were permitted entry, they were handed over to Chmielnicki’s forces to be killed once the city came under siege. In those instances where the Jews were granted complete asylum, once the town was seized by Chmielnicki, they met agonizing deaths.
Chmielnicki’s rebellion was staggering in its barbarity toward the Jews. Written accounts exist to this day describing how Jews had their flesh flayed or their limbs severed and their torsos thrown into the road to be trampled by carts. Children were murdered in front of their parents; pregnant women had their bellies slit open and the unborn babies tossed into their faces; many victims were buried alive.
Following the bloodshed, many Jews remained in Poland, and the Jewish population increased during the eighteenth century. However, the Jews never regained their prior standard of living, and many lived in poverty.
Chmielnicki’s carnage left in its wake a Jewish population decimated both physically and psychologically. Most of those who did survive found themselves living in dire poverty. To add to their woes, acts of violence and discrimination against them became everyday incidents for Eastern European Jews.
During such times, it is common for people to seek salvation and solace wherever they can find it. Many Jews came to prefer the spiritual nature of Kabbalah, Jewish mysticism first developed in the Sephardic community (see Chapter 16), to the legalistic approach of rabbinic Judaism. Many of the common people deeply resented the authoritarian and sometimes oppressive manner in which the rabbis controlled Jewish society.
In reaction to this, rabbinic studies became even more focused on Halakhah and conventional Talmudic rumination. The religious establishment grew fearful that the masses would flock once again to a false messiah—as they had in the seventeenth century, when many Jews became followers of Shabbetai Zvi. And indeed, a messianic pretender did appear in Poland during the eighteenth century. Jacob Frank had garnered a large following among the Jews, until he converted to Christianity.
Who was Shabbetai Zvi?
Zvi was a Jew from Smyrna, a town in Turkey. A charismatic, fervently religious man, he was proclaimed to be the messiah. And yet, when forced to choose between conversion and death, Shabbetai Zvi chose conversion, renouncing Judaism in favor of Islam.
As a pious fervor spread among the masses in Poland, who were often ignorant of formal religious learning, a deep schism developed between them and the rabbinical authorities. Out of this chasm emerged Rabbi Israel ben Eliezer (1700–1760), who became known as the Ba’al Shem Tov (“Master of the Good Name”) or Besht.
The Besht was born in Okup, a small town in Western Ukraine. He was an orphan who at various times supported himself by helping in the ritual slaughterhouse, digging for lime in the Carpathian mountains, serving as a watchman in the synagogue, and as an innkeeper.
The Besht had very little formal education and ultimately chose to roam the countryside, believing that it was the best way to commune with God. While many holy men at that time also performed practical Kabbalah that included dispensing folk medicine, amulets, and incantations, the Besht soon rose above their ranks, in part because of his genuine charisma and also because he never hesitated to criticize the pedantic reiterations of scholars and the rabbinical emphasis on formal learning.
When the Besht died, he left behind no written work of his own, except for a few letters. However, after his death, his oral teachings began to appear in stories that were circulated about him. These teachings or principles, which had been established by the Besht, remain the core of Hasidism today.
The Hebrew word hasid means “pious” or “pious one.” In classical Jewish sources, it referred to any person whose spiritual devotion extended beyond the technicalities of Halakhah. With the rise of the Hasidic movement over the last 200 years, the term “Hasid” is now used to describe a member of the movement.
The Ba’al Shem Tov conceived a revolutionary form of popular prayer conducive to ordinary and humble Jews, with the aim of breaking down the barriers inhibiting one from entering the divine world. How one prays, the Besht emphasized, is more important than where it is done. Sincerity is required not only in prayer but in all of life’s actions. This is accomplished through the following:
Kavana (pure intention)
Devekut (clinging—devotion to God’s presence)
Hitlavut (enthusiasm—joy in performing all deeds)
Sincere prayer
Simply put, the goal is to hallow life and thus awaken the holy reality in all things.
The Besht also revived the ancient concept of the tzaddik (the righteous one). Since the average Hasid could not be expected to achieve full religious perfection, he would devote himself to a particular tzaddik and obtain vicarious fulfillment through him. The different Hasidic sects can trace their roots to a specific tzaddik, often from a particular village or town in Eastern Europe.
A Hasidic Jew praying at the Western Wall.
The Hasidic movement met with intense opposition from many rabbis. Hasidism’s foremost adversary was Rabbi Elijah ben Shlomo Zalman (1720–1797), who was known as the Vilna Gaon (the Genius of Vilna). Zalman and those in support of traditional rabbinic Judaism—the mitnagdim (opponents)—feared the deintellectualization of Torah and the possibility of the Besht becoming a false messiah (though he never made such a claim). Many Hasidim were excommunicated for their practices, but ultimately, the mitnagdim disappeared, and Hasidism became a part of Orthodox Judaism.
Some of the Polish Jews came under Russian rule as a result of the partitions of Poland, between 1772 and 1795, and the awarding of the Napoleonic Duchy of Warsaw by the Congress of Vienna to Czar Alexander I. Up until this point, Russia had essentially kept Jews out; now, it found itself ruling over a Jewish population.
At first, Catherine the Great, whose rule extended from 1762 to 1796, did not view her new Jewish subjects unkindly. For the most part, they continued to live just as they had before—in Jewish shtetls, where they constituted a majority. However, at the instigation of Christian merchants in Moscow, who were concerned about competition from Jewish traders, limitations were established regarding the extent to which the Jews could participate in the economy.
At the turn of the nineteenth century, the Russian monarchy prohibited the lease of land by Jewish people. Commencing in 1804, Jews were expelled periodically from various villages, regions, and cities, including Moscow and St. Petersburg, and were consigned to reside in specific areas, known as the Pale of Settlement.
By 1812, the borders of the Pale of Settlement were finalized. From that point on, the Jews were limited to the twenty-five western provinces from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Black Sea in the south, in areas known today as Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, Crimea, and a portion of Poland.
Although it was possible to obtain special permission to live outside the Pale, only a few select Jews actually managed to do so—fully 95 percent of all Jews in Russia were confined to the Pale of Settlement.
Things were getting more and more difficult for the Jewish community, which was socially marginalized and economically restricted, but Russian Jews learned to make the best of their situation. Cut off from the mainstream of the Russian economy, it was difficult to earn a living, and many Jews became destitute.
However, it is a mitzvah and a cornerstone of Jewish tradition that the poor and unfortunate be cared for by those in a position to provide assistance. Charitable societies made sure that there was adequate food, clothing, shelter, and even a basic education for those who were in need. The only people who didn’t give to charities were those who benefited from their generosity. The Jewish community also saw a religious revival, with a resurgence in Torah study and adherence to Jewish religious practices.
Unfortunately, the Pale of Settlement was one of the first injustices in a series of many that marred Jewish life in the nineteenth century. Czar Nicholas I, who reigned from 1825 to 1855, was exceptionally harsh. Because he feared that the changes and new ideas that had begun to appear in western and central Europe might spread to Russia, his regime was both repressive and reactionary. The Jews made the Czar especially apprehensive.
In 1844, Nicholas decreed the elimination of kehillot, or Jewish councils, and he placed the Jews under the direct supervision of the police and local municipal authorities where they lived.
In 1827, Nicholas issued the Cantonist Decrees (“canton” means “military camp”). These edicts conscripted many Jewish males between the ages of twelve and twenty-five into military schools and military service for twenty-five years. Because the conditions were harsh, many of the Jews died before they could return home.
The purpose behind the Cantonist Decrees was to convert the Jewish conscripts, and this was often accomplished by forced baptism. While in the military, the Jews were unable to fulfill the commandments of Halakhah: Jewish soldiers were forced to eat pork, and they could not observe the Shabbat or other holidays. Those who were lucky enough to survive the service lost their Jewish identity.
Conditions improved somewhat during the reign of Alexander II (1855–1881). When he emancipated the serfs, he also ended the forced conscription of Jews. He also allowed specific groups of Jews—wealthy merchants, university graduates, and certified artisans—to live outside the Pale of Settlement.
In addition to forced conscription, a great deal of legislation was enacted to restrict the lives of Russian Jewry. Jews were banned from the civil service and could not teach non-Jews. Owning property outside the Pale was illegal. Strict quotas governed the number of Jewish children allowed to study at public schools. The wearing of yarmulkes was banned in public places. Jewish activities of all sorts was severely restricted or prohibited altogether.
Jews were classified as either “useful Jews” or “useless Jews,” with certain opportunities available to those in the former category. Sometimes, Jews could obtain a higher education or engage in a commercial enterprise by bribing officials—bribery was a way of life in corrupt czarist Russia.
Despite all the difficulties, the Jewish population in Russia continued to increase. In 1825, the 1.6 million Russian Jews represented about 3 percent of the total population. By 1850, this figure grew to 2.35 million; by 1880, 4 million Jews resided in Russia.
The first modern Russian pogrom took place in 1871 in Odessa and was incited by Greek and Slav ethnics who hated the Jews. The state-sanctioned pogroms commenced in 1881, when Alexander III ascended the throne following the assassination of Alexander II.
Pogroms were a result of the Russian peasants’ growing dissatisfaction with their standard of living and injustices. Hoping to provide an outlet for their frustration and anger, the Czarist government offered a scapegoat—the Jews.
The police instigated hundreds of violent pogroms; many others were the result of the clergy preaching against the Jews, particularly around Christian holidays. The Jewish community suffered great losses—property was destroyed, and thousands were maimed and killed. There was no relief and no safe place in Russia for Jews to feel secure. As a result, Jews began leaving Russia at the rate of 50,000 annually. Many of them made it all the way to the United States.
Meanwhile, the dissatisfaction within the Russian populace continued to rise. New ideas and modes of thinking made their way into Russia. The time was growing ripe to cast off the yoke of Czarist oppression. Revolutionary movements appeared throughout Russia; many of the revolutionaries were Jewish. Moreover, many of these Jews later aligned themselves with the Bolsheviks, the radical faction led by Vladimir Lenin that was successful in overthrowing the monarchy in 1917.
We don’t know why so many Jews joined the movement, though many reasons have been suggested. However, it’s important to realize that the Jewish Communists were nonobservant; many of them rejected Judaism, and some even grew to disdain their Jewish heritage. These people fought for social equality, even at the expense of their Jewish culture, and they accepted Karl Marx’s view that religion is the opium of the people, a way to keep them enslaved and obedient.
One such Jewish Communist was Leon Trotsky. Born Leon Davidovich Bronstein, Trotsky gave up his Jewish identity in favor of the Communist cause. At the time of the Revolution, Trotsky was at the helm, working closely with Lenin and the other leaders.
Trotsky took no interest whatsoever in anything Jewish or with the suffering of the Jews. His solution to end Jewish misery was assimilation. Eventually, the Communist regime adopted this policy, forbidding the practice of Judaism and labeling Zionism “Jewish Imperialism.”
Meanwhile, the Russian Revolution was followed by the Civil War. The Red Army fought against the White Russians and other factions that opposed the Communist regime, and the Jewish population was caught in the middle. For instance, the anarchist group led by Nestor Makhno in Ukraine was virulently anti-Semitic and supported Jewish pogroms, spreading rumors that all Jews were secretly Bolsheviks.
Some Jews did in fact join the Red Army. They accepted the Communist promise that in a communist society all people would be equal and that all the restrictions of the tsarist era would be lifted from them. One such revolutionary, Isaac Babel, worked as a journalist for the Red cavalry. His experiences led him to write several novels known, collectively, as Red Cavalry. However, Babel did not give up his Jewish identity. Some of his best stories recall the Odessa ghetto of his early childhood. Although Babel’s works were met with critical acclaim in the early 1930s, he became one of the victims of Stalinist repressions. Convicted of Trotskyite conspiracy, Isaac Babel died in a prison camp in 1941. Collections of his short stories have been translated into English, and he has received international acclaim posthumously.
During the first decade of Communist rule, Jewish life did improve. Jewish people were permitted to live in cities anywhere in Russia—even in Moscow; they could study at any institution and work in any position they merited. After the end of the Civil War, the pogroms became a thing of the past, partially due to the government’s strict control of the peasants, which were suffering collectivization (giving up all personal property to the collective farms).
The Jews were also allowed to maintain their distinct identity as a secular ethnic group. In Jewish public schools, children were taught in Yiddish; Yiddish Communist newspapers were widely available; the National Yiddish Theater toured all over the Soviet Union, giving performances in Yiddish. However, subsequent to the campaign against religion, which was anathema to communist doctrine, Jews were no longer allowed to practice Judaism. In 1919, all Jewish religious communities were dissolved. The study of Hebrew was banned, and Zionism was denounced.
Because the Jews were regarded as an ethnic group, the government decided to create a Jewish region. In 1930, they mapped out a small section in the southeastern part of Russia and gave it the name of Birobidzhan, the Jewish Autonomous Region, a secular Zion where the Jewish settlers were encouraged to go.
Unfortunately, this was a misguided idea at best and a cruel one at worst. The Jewish settlers, mostly idealistic communists, found themselves in an undeveloped region, previously occupied by native tribes and exiled Russians, with harsh winters and a poor soil that they were expected to cultivate. Many families faced starvation, and those who could leave eventually did. Today, the official language of the Jewish Autonomous Region remains Yiddish, but you would be hard pressed to find a Jew there.
There is evidence that shortly before his death, Stalin began working on plans to exile all of the Soviet Jews to Birobidzhan. The infamous Doctors’ Trial, in which Stalin’s Jewish doctors were accused of conspiracy against him, was meant to bring out the people’s outrage against the Jews, which would facilitate the mass exile.
After Lenin’s death in 1924, there was a power struggle between Trotsky and Stalin. Stalin emerged victorious, and his quest to consolidate power intensified over the years. Perhaps because many Jews were in positions of leadership within the Communist Party, they suffered more than other groups. In the years of the Great Terror of 1934–1939, all Jewish institutions were destroyed and activities banned. During Stalin’s infamous purge of the Communist Party, Jews were specifically targeted; by 1945, very few Jews remained in the Party.
Stalin’s anti-Semitism was becoming increasingly obvious. In 1948, Yiddish schools were closed, and beginning in the late 1940s—only a few years after the Holocaust—Jewish writers, artists, poets, musicians, and intellectuals were attacked as “cosmopolitan snobs.” Their work was discredited, and thousands were imprisoned or executed.
After Stalin’s death in 1953, conditions for the Jews did not improve. Under Khrushchev, most of the surviving synagogues were closed; by some estimates only sixty synagogues remained open in the entire country. Education quotas were established in colleges and universities, which made it very difficult for Jewish students to enter the school of their choice. And although officially there were no laws that prohibited Jews from certain areas of employment, it became increasingly difficult for Jews to find work without relying on bribery or family connections.
There was a brief respite in 1964 with the ousting of Khrushchev, but after Israel’s dramatic victory in the Six-Day War in 1967, anti-Semitism resumed in the USSR. This time, however, Soviet anti-Semitism appeared under the guise of anti-Zionism.
In spite of oppression, the Jews nonetheless managed to prove themselves beneficial and useful to the USSR, constituting a significant percentage of its best and brightest citizens—scientists, doctors, educators, and other professionals. So, when the Russian Jewish community saw the rise of the Zionist movement in the sixties, the government did not allow emigration.
In 1971, Brezhnev opened the gates for a time, and as many as 250,000 Jews were able to make their escape. As a result, more restrictive policies were reimposed in 1980, and those Jews who expressed a desire to leave the country were generally denied immigration. These people, known as the “refuseniks,” suffered discrimination—many could not find work and were socially ostracized.
However, through the efforts of the Jewish communities around the world, particularly the American Jewry, the Russian government was pressured to concede. In the mid-1980s, Mikhail Gorbachev finally agreed to allow Jewish emigration in return for economic assistance. As a result, the Jews left the USSR in large numbers, with most choosing the United States and Israel as their destination. Today, Russian Jews constitute as much as 20 percent of the population in Israel. 