Here was a man, writing in Hebrew, propounding a coherent, if rigorous, philosophy which inspired millions of Jews and continues to be a living tradition in Judaism even today. But it was anathema to the enlightened. Far from using Hebrew to beckon the ex-ghetto Jews into the modern world, and bid them take a decent and honourable place there, it did exactly the opposite. It told the Jew to about-face, and turn his gaze to God–as pious Jews had always done. So the living Hebrew tradition, such as it was, could not be fitted into the master-plan of the enlightenment. Their scheme to run Hebrew in tandem with German thus made no progress. Jews simply learned German, and assimilated themselves. The maskils were not to foresee that Hebrew would indeed make a formidable re-entry into Jewish life–but as the instrument of Zionism, a form of Judaism which was as abhorrent to them as mystic messianism.

Ironically enough, the Jewish language which made most, and entirely spontaneous, progress in the nineteenth century was Yiddish. It is a pity that the maskils, whose ability to speak and write German was the certificate of their enlightened status, knew so little about it. It was not just a criminal argot. It was much more than a corrupt form of German. To pious Jews it was a ‘temporary’ language in that it was non-divine, non-historical (in Jewish terms). Once history got going again, as the Messianic Age approached, Jews would presumably revert to Hebrew, the language of the Torah, in which in any case important matters such as ritual, scholarship and often communal administration were conducted. But for a temporary language, Yiddish was old, almost as old as some European tongues. Jews first began to develop it from the German dialects spoken in the cities when they pushed up from France and Italy into German-speaking Lotharingia. Old Yiddish (1250-1500) marked the first contact of German-speaking Jews with Slavic Jews speaking a dialect called Knaanic. During the 200 years 1500-1700, Middle Yiddish emerged, becoming progressively more Slavic and dialectic. Finally, modern Yiddish developed during the eighteenth century. Its literary form was completely transformed in the half-century 1810-60, in the cities of the east European diaspora, as Yiddish newspapers and magazines proliferated, and a secular Yiddish book-trade flourished. Philologists and grammarians tidied it up. By 1908 it was sophisticated enough for its proponents to hold a world Yiddish conference in Czernowitz. As the Jewish population of eastern Europe grew, more people spoke, read and wrote it. By the end of the 1930s it was the primary tongue of about eleven million people.

Yiddish was a rich, living language, the chattering tongue of an urban tribe. It had the limitations of its origins. There were very few Yiddish words for animals or birds. It had virtually no military vocabulary. Such defects were made up from German, Polish, Russian. Yiddish was particularly good at borrowing: from Arabic, from Hebrew-Aramaic, from anything which came its way. On the other hand it contributed: to Hebrew, to English-American. Its chief virtue, however, lay in its internal subtlety, particularly in its characterization of human types and emotions.62 It was the language of street wisdom, of the clever underdog; of pathos, resignation, suffering, which it palliated by humour, intense irony and superstition. Isaac Bashevis Singer, its greatest practitioner, pointed out that it is the only language never spoken by men in power.

Yiddish was the natural tongue for a revived Jewish nation because it was widely spoken and living; and in the second half of the nineteenth century it began, quite rapidly, to produce a major literature of stories, poems, plays and novels. But there were many reasons why it could not fulfil its appointed destiny. Its role was riddled with paradoxes. Many rabbis saw it as the language of women, who were not clever or educated enough to study in Hebrew. The German maskils, on the other hand, linked it with Orthodoxy, because its use encouraged backwardness, superstition and irrationality. Among the large Jewish community of Hungary, for instance, the local language was used for everyday life, and Yiddish was the language of religious instruction, into which Jewish boys had to render the Hebrew and Aramaic texts–so it was associated with the uncorrupted Orthodox. In the Russian Pale, however, and Austrian Galicia, it was often the language of secularization. In the second half of the nineteenth century, almost every sizeable Jewish community in eastern Europe had a circle of atheists and radicals, whose language of dissent was Yiddish and who read Yiddish books and periodicals which catered to their views. Yet even in the East, where Yiddish was the majority Jewish tongue, it had no monopoly of worldliness. For the political radicals increasingly turned to German, then to Russian. The non-political secularizers usually, in true maskil fashion, accorded a superior status to Hebrew. The point was made by Nahum Slouschz, who translated Zola, Flaubert and de Maupassant into Hebrew:

While the emancipated Jew of the Occident replaced Hebrew by the vernacular of his adopted country; while the rabbis were distrustful of whatever was not religion; and rich patrons refused to support a literature which had not the entrée to good society–while these held aloof, the maskil, the ‘intellectual’, of the small provincial town, the Polish mehabber [author], despised and unknown, often a martyr to his convictions, who devoted himself heart, soul and might to maintaining honourably the literary traditions of Hebrew–he alone remained faithful to what had been the true mission of the Bible language since its beginnings.63

That was doubtless true. But there were many Yiddish writers who could make an equally heroic-pathetic case for themselves, with at least as strong a claim to be upholding the Jewish spirit.

In short, during the early decades of the nineteenth century, the Jewish linguistic outlook and future was confused, for reasons which had their roots deep in history and faith. This linguistic confusion was merely one part of a much wider cultural confusion. And this cultural confusion sprang, in turn, from a growing religious confusion among Jews themselves, which can be summed up in one sentence: was Judaism a part of life, or the whole of it? If it was only a part, then a compromise with modernity was possible. But in that case the Jews might simply fade into the majority societies around them. If it was the whole, then they had merely replaced the ghetto of stone with the ghetto of intellect. So in that case, too, most Jews would choose to escape from the prison, and be lost to the Law for ever. All the compromises we have examined collapsed before the majestic logic of this stark choice.

Hence the central fact of the Jewish predicament in the first half of the nineteenth century was the absence of an agreed programme or a united leadership. Where other oppressed and insurgent peoples could concentrate their energy on marching behind the banners of nationalism and independence, the Jews were rebels without a cause. Or rather, they knew what they were rebelling against–both the hostile society in which they were implanted, which gave them full citizenship grudgingly if at all, and the suffocating embrace of ghetto Judaism–but they did not know what they were rebelling for. None the less, though inchoate, the Jewish rebellion was real. And the individual rebels, though lacking a common objective, were formidable. Collectively, they constituted a huge force for good and evil. So far we have looked at only one side of the problem of emancipation: how could Jews liberated from the ghetto adjust to society? But the other side was equally important: how could society adjust to liberated Jews?

The problem was gigantic because for 1,500 years Jewish society had been designed to produce intellectuals. It is true they were sacerdotal intellectuals, in the service of the god Torah. But they had all the characteristics of the intellectual: a tendency to pursue ideas at the expense of people; endlessly sharpened critical faculties; great destructive as well as creative power. Jewish society was geared to support them. The community rabbi was designated in his writ of appointment ‘Lord of the Place’. He received the chief honour, as the spiritual descendant of Moses himself. He was the local model of the ideal Jew. He was the charismatic sage. He spent his life absorbing abstruse material and then regurgitating it in accordance with his opinions. He expected to be, and was, supported by the wealth of the local oligarchs. The Jews subsidized their culture many hundreds of years before the practice became a function of the Western welfare state. Rich merchants married sages’ daughters; the brilliant yeshiva student was found a wealthy bride so he could study more. The system whereby sages and merchants ran the community in tandem thus redistributed rather than reinforced wealth. It also ensured the production of large numbers of highly intelligent people who were given every opportunity to pursue ideas. Quite suddenly, around the year 1800, this ancient and highly efficient social machine for the production of intellectuals began to shift its output. Instead of pouring all its products into the closed circuit of rabbinical studies, where they remained completely isolated from general society, it unleashed a significant and ever-growing proportion of them into secular life. This was an event of shattering importance in world history.

Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) was the archetype of the new phenomenon. He was born in Düsseldorf of a mercantile family. Fifty years before he would have become, without question, a rabbi and talmudic scholar, no doubt of distinction. Instead he was a product of the revolutionary whirlwind. By the age of sixteen, without leaving his place of birth, he had undergone six changes of nationality. His family was half-emancipated. His mother, Piera van Geldern, had secular ambitions for him. When Napoleon’s armies advanced, she saw her son as a courtier, a marshal, a politician or governor; when the French retreated, he was transformed into a millionaire businessman.64 She saw that he got very little Jewish education, sending him to the Roman Catholic lycée. Heine lacked personal, religious, racial and national identity. His Jewish name was Hayyim. As a boy he was called Harry. Later he called himself Heinrich, but he signed his work H. Heine and hated the ‘H’ to be spelled out.⁶⁵ As a boy he had lived under the Napoleonic creation, the Grand Duchy of Berg, so he claimed his spirit was French. But the most important book of his childhood was the great Lutheran Bible, than which there is nothing more German. He moved to Paris in 1831 and did not return to Germany (except for two short visits). But he never applied for French citizenship, though eligible. He wrote all his works in German. He thought the Germans, though often evil, more profound; the French lived on the surface. Their poetry was ‘perfumed curds’.66

Heine’s ambiguities about his Judaism would fill, and indeed have filled, many books.⁶⁷ He did not learn to read Hebrew properly. He hated being a Jew. He wrote of ‘the three evil maladies, poverty, pain and Jewishness’. In 1822 he was briefly associated with the Society for Jewish Science, but he had nothing to contribute. He did not believe in Judaism as such and saw it as an anti-human force. He wrote the next year: ‘That I will be enthusiastic for the rights of the Jews and their civil equality, that I admit, and in bad times, which are inevitable, the Germanic mob will hear my voice so that it resounds in German beerhalls and palaces. But the born enemy of all positive religion will never champion that religion which first developed the fault-finding with human beings which now causes us so much pain.’⁶⁸ But if he rejected talmudic Judaism, he despised the new Reform version. The Reformers were ‘chiropodists’ who had ‘tried to cure the body of Judaism from its nasty skin growth by bleeding, and by their clumsiness and spidery bandages of rationalism, Israel must bleed to death…. we no longer have the strength to wear a beard, to fast, to hate and to endure out of hate; that is the motive of our Reform.’ The whole exercise, he said scornfully, was to turn ‘a little Protestant Christianity into a Jewish company. They make a tallis out of the wool of the Lamb of God, and a vest out of the feathers of the Holy Ghost, and underpants out of Christian love, and they will go bankrupt and their successors will be called: God, Christ & Co.’⁶⁹

But if Heine disliked both Orthodox and Reform Jews, he disliked the maskils perhaps even more. He saw them as careerists heading for baptism. He noted that four out of six of Mendelssohn’s children converted. His daughter Dorothea’s second husband was Friedrich Schlegel; she became a Catholic reactionary. His grandson Felix became the leading composer of Christian music. It may not have been Heine who said, ‘The most Jewish thing Mendelssohn ever did was to become a Christian.’ But he certainly remarked: ‘If I had the luck of being the grandson of Moses Mendelssohn, I would surely not use my talent to set the pissing of the Lamb to music.’⁷⁰ When Eduard Gans converted, Heine denounced him as a ‘scoundrel’, guilty of ‘felony’, of ‘treason’, worse than Burke (in Heine’s view the arch-traitor who betrayed the cause of revolution). He marked Gans’s baptism by a bitter poem, An einen Abtrunnigen, ‘To an Apostate’.

Yet Heine himself had become a Protestant only a few months before, three days after he took his doctorate. His reasons were entirely worldly. By a law of August 1822, Jews had been excluded from state academic posts–a ruling aimed specifically at Gans. Ten years later Heine defended his Protestantism as his ‘Protest against injustice’, his ‘warlike enthusiasm which made me take part in the struggles of this militant church’. But this was nonsense, for he also argued that the spirit of Protestantism was not really religious at all: ‘The blooming flesh in Titian’s paintings–that is all Protestantism. The loins of his Venus are much more fundamental theses than those the German monk stuck on the church door of Wittenberg.’ And at the time of his baptism, he wrote to his friend Moses Moser: ‘I should not like it if you saw my baptism in a favourable light. I can assure you, if our laws allowed the stealing of silver spoons, I would not have done it.’71 His saying that baptism was ‘the entrance-ticket to European culture’ became notorious.⁷²

Why, then, did Heine abuse Gans for what he did himself? There is no satisfactory explanation. Heine suffered from a destructive emotion which was soon to be commonplace among emancipated and apostate Jews: a peculiar form of self-hatred. He attacked himself in Gans. Later in life he used to say he regretted his baptism. It had, he said, done him no good materially. But he refused to allow himself to be presented publicly as a Jew. In 1835, lying, he said he had never set foot in a synagogue. It was his desire to repudiate his Jewishness, as well as his Jewish self-hatred, which prompted his many anti-Semitic remarks. A particular target was the Rothschild family. He blamed them for raising loans for the reactionary great powers. That, at any rate, was his respectable reason for attacking them. But his most venomous remarks were reserved for Baron James de Rothschild and his wife, who showed him great kindness in Paris. He said he had seen a stockbroker bowing to the Baron’s chamber-pot. He called him ‘Herr von Shylock in Paris’. He said, ‘There is only one God–Mammon. And Rothschild is his prophet.’ He said there was no more need for the Talmud, once the Jews’ defence against Rome, since every quarter-day the papal nuncio had to bring baron James the interest on his loan. None of this stopped him getting a lot of money out of the Rothschilds, or boasting that his relations with them were (as he put it) famillionaire.⁷³

Heine, in fact, expected wealthy Jews to maintain him, even though he was not a rabbinical student but a secular intellectual. His father had been a hopeless failure at business; his own efforts, such as they were, did him little good. So he was perpetually dependent on his uncle, Solomon Heine, a Hamburg banker who became one of the richest men in Europe. Heine was always in need of money, however much he got. He even stooped to accept an annual secret pension of 4,800 francs from the Louis-Philippe government. But usually he pestered Uncle Solomon, none too politely: ‘The best thing about you’, he wrote to him in 1836, ‘is that you bear my name.’ The uncle was sceptical about Heine’s deserts, remarking: ‘If he had learned anything, he wouldn’t need to write books.’ He thought his nephew was a bit of a schnorrer, a professional Jewish beggar. But, faithful to the ancient tradition, he paid up. When he died in 1844 he left Heine a legacy, but on condition the poet did not attack him or his family. The sum was less than Heine had hoped for, so he engaged in a long-drawn-out row over the will with Solomon’s son.74

This was the personal background to Heine’s astonishing genius. In the 1820s he superseded Byron as Europe’s most widely acclaimed poet. The turning-point came with his Buch der Lieder (1827), which contained such famous lyrics as his ‘Lorelei’ and ‘Auf Flügeln des Gesanges’ (‘On Wings of Song’). The Germans came to recognize him as their greatest man of letters since Goethe. When he settled in Paris, he was hailed as a hero of European culture. His prose was as brilliant, and as popular, as his poetry. He produced scintillating travel books. He virtually established a new genre of French literature, the short essay or feuilleton. Much of his energy was wasted on furious quarrels and character-assassination, in which his self-hatred (or whatever it was) found an outlet, and which were so extravagant that they usually aroused sympathy for the victim. But his fame continued to spread. He contracted a venereal infection of the spine, which confined him to a sofa for his last decade. But his final poems were better than ever. Moreover, his lyrics were perfectly adapted to the new German art-song, now sweeping Europe and North America, so that all the leading composers, from Schubert and Schumann onwards, set him to music. There was no escaping Heine, then or ever since, especially for Germans, in whom he stirred irresistible responses. His works were used as German school textbooks even in his lifetime.

Many Germans found it hard to admit that this Jew had such a perfect German ear. They tried to convict him of ‘Jewish superficiality’, as opposed to true German profundity. The charge could not be made to stick. It was so manifestly untrue. It was as though a superfine talent had been building up in the ghetto over many secret generations, acquiring an ever more powerful genetic coding, and then had suddenly emerged to find the German language of the early nineteenth century its perfect instrument. The point had now been established: the Jew and the German had a special intellectual relationship. The German Jew was a new phenomenon of European culture. For German anti-Semites, this posed an almost unbearable emotional problem, epitomized in Heine. They could not deny his genius; they found its expression in German intolerable. His ghostly presence, right at the centre of German literature, drove the Nazis to incoherent rage and childish vandalism. They suppressed all his books. But they could not erase his poems from the anthologies and were forced to reprint them with what every schoolboy knew was a lie: ‘By an Unknown Author’. They seized a statue of him, once owned by the Empress Elisabeth of Austria, and used it for target-practice. In 1941, on Hitler’s personal orders, his grave in the Montmartre cemetery was destroyed. It made no difference. In the last forty years, Heine’s work has been more widely and furiously debated, especially by Germans, than that of any other figure in their literature.

Heine had been banned in his lifetime too, at the insistence of Metternich–not as a Jew, but as a subversive. Therein lay another paradox, and a typical Jewish paradox. From emancipation onwards, the Jews were blamed both for seeking to ingratiate themselves with established society, enter it and dominate it; and, at the same time, for trying to destroy it utterly. Both charges had an element of truth. The Heine family was a case in point. Next to the Rothschilds themselves, who collected titles from half-a-dozen kingdoms and empires, the Heines were the most upwardly mobile family in Europe. Heine’s brother Gustav was knighted and made Baron von Heine-Geldern. His brother Maximilian married into the Tsarist aristocracy and was styled von Heine. His sister’s son became a Baron von Embden. Her daughter married an Italian prince. One of Heine’s close relatives became a Princesse Murat, another married the reigning Prince of Monaco.75 But Heine himself was both the prototype and the archetype of a new figure in European literature: the Jewish radical man of letters, using his skill, reputation and popularity to undermine the intellectual self-confidence of established order.

The notion of Heine as a lifelong radical needs severe qualification. Privately, at least, he always distinguished between the grim political progressives, and literary ones like himself. He hated their puritanism. He wrote to one of them: ‘You demand simple dress, abstemious habits and unseasonable pleasures; we, on the other hand, demand nectar and ambrosia, purple cloaks, sumptuous aromas, voluptuousness and luxury, laughing nymph-dances, music and comedies.’⁷⁶ Privately, again, his conservatism increased with age. He wrote to Gustav Kolb in 1841: ‘I have a great fear of the atrociousness of proletarian rule, and I confess to you that out of fear I have become a conservative.’ When his long final illness confined him to what he called ‘my mattress-grave’, he returned to Judaism of a kind. Indeed, he insisted, quite untruthfully: ‘I have made no secret of my Judaism, to which I have not returned since I never left it’ (1850). His latest and greatest poems, Romanzero (1851) and Vermischte Schriften (1854), mark a return to religious themes, sometimes with a Judaic cast of thought. Like thousands of brilliant Jews before, and since, he came to associate the Hellenic spirit of intellectual adventure with health and strength, while age and pain turned him to the simplicities of faith. ‘I am no longer’, he wrote to a friend, ‘a zestful, well-nourished Hellene, smiling down on gloomy Nazarenes. I am now only a mortally ill Jew, an emaciated image of misery, an unhappy man.’ Or again: ‘Sickened by atheistic philosophy, I have returned to the humble faith of the ordinary man.’77

Nevertheless, the public persona of Heine was overwhelmingly radical, and to a great extent remained so. For generations of European intellectuals, his life and work was a poem to freedom. For Jews in particular, he presented the French progressive tradition as the true story of human advance, which all gifted young men and women should seek, each in their time, to push forward another league or two. He came close to a public declaration of faith when he wrote:

Freedom is the new religion, the religion of our time. If Christ is not the god of this new religion, he is nevertheless a high priest of it, and his name gleams beatifically into the hearts of the apostles. But the French are the chosen people of the new religion, their language records the first gospels and dogmas. Paris is the New Jerusalem, the Rhine is the Jordan that separates the consecrated land of freedom from the land of the Philistines.

For a time Heine even became, or fancied he did, a disciple of Saint-Simon. There was a streak of the hippy, the ‘flower-person’, in Heine: ‘the part of flowers and nightingales is closely allied to the revolution’, he wrote, quoting Saint-Simon’s dictum: ‘The future is ours.’ Heine never committed himself to a specific theory of revolutionary socialism. But in Paris he associated with many trying to devise one. They were often of Jewish origin.

One such was the young Karl Marx, who came to Paris in 1843. He had been editor of the radical Cologne newspaper Rheinische Zeitung, which the Jewish socialist Moses Hess (1812-75) had helped to found in 1843. It lasted only fifteen months before the Prussian government killed it, and Marx joined Hess in Parisian exile. But the two socialists had little in common. Hess was a true Jew, whose radicalism took the form of Jewish nationalism and eventually of Zionism. Marx, by contrast, had no Jewish education at all and never sought to acquire any. In Paris he and Heine became friends. They wrote poetry together. Heine saved the life of Marx’s baby Jennie, when she had convulsions. A few letters between them survive, and there must have been more.78 Heine’s jibe about religion as a ‘spiritual opium’ was the source of Marx’s phrase ‘the opium of the people’. But the notion that Heine was the John the Baptist to Christ’s Marx, fashionable in German scholarship of the 1960s, is absurd. A huge temperamental gulf yawned between them. According to Arnold Ruge, Marx would say to Heine: ‘Give up those everlasting laments about love and show the lyric poets how it should be done–with the lash.’⁷⁹ But it was precisely the lash Heine feared: ‘The [socialist] future’, he wrote, ‘smells of knouts, of blood, of godlessness and very many beatings’; ‘it is only with dread and horror that I think of the time when those dark iconoclasts will come to power’. He repudiated ‘my obdurate friend Marx’, one of the ‘godless self-gods’.

What the two men had most in common was their extraordinary capacity for hatred, expressed in venomous attacks not just on enemies but (perhaps especially) on friends and benefactors. This was part of the self-hatred they shared as apostate Jews. Marx had it to an even greater extent than Heine. He tried to shut Judaism out of his life. Whereas Heine was deeply disturbed by the 1840 Damascus atrocities, Marx deliberately prevented himself from showing the smallest concern for any of the injustice inflicted on Jews throughout his lifetime.⁸⁰ Despite Marx’s ignorance of Judaism as such, there can be no doubt about his Jewishness. Like Heine and everyone else, his notion of progress was profoundly influenced by Hegel, but his sense of history as a positive and dynamic force in human society, governed by iron laws, an atheist’s Torah, is profoundly Jewish. His Communist millennium is deeply rooted in Jewish apocalyptic and messianism. His notion of rule was that of the cathedocrat. Control of the revolution would be in the hands of the elite intelligentsia, who had studied the texts, understood the laws of history. They would form what he called the ‘management’, the directorate. The proletariat, ‘the men without substance’, were merely the means, whose duty was to obey–like Ezra the Scribe, he saw them as ignorant of the law, the mere ‘people of the land’.

Marx’s methodology, too, was wholly rabbinical. All his conclusions were derived solely from books. He never set foot in a factory and rejected Engels’ offer to take him to one. Like the gaon of Vilna, he locked himself up with his texts and solved the mysteries of the universe in his study. As he put it, ‘I am a machine condemned to devour books.’⁸¹ He called his work ‘scientific’ but it was no more scientific than theology. His temperament was religious, and he was quite incapable of conducting objective, empirical research. He simply went through any likely material to furnish ‘proof’ of conclusions he had already reached in his head, and which were as dogmatic as any rabbi’s or kabbalist’s. His methods were well summarized by Karl Jaspers:

The style of Marx’s writings is not that of the investigator…he does not quote examples or adduce facts which run counter to his own theory but only those which clearly support or confirm that which he considers the ultimate truth. The whole approach is one of vindication, not investigation, but it is vindication of something proclaimed as the perfect truth with the conviction not of the scientist but of the believer.82

Stripped of its spurious documentation, Marx’s theory of how history, class and production operate, and will develop, is not essentially different from Lurianic kabbalah’s theory of the Messianic Age, especially as amended by Nathan of Gaza, to the point where it can accommodate any awkward facts whatever. In short, it is not a scientific theory at all, but a piece of clever Jewish superstition.

Finally, Marx was the eternal rabbinical student in his attitude to money. He expected it to be provided to finance his studies, first by his family, then by Engels, the merchant, as his endless bullying schnorrer-letters testify. But the studies, as with so many learned rabbis, were never finished. After the publication of volume one of Capital, he could never put the rest together, leaving his papers in total confusion, from which Engels assembled volumes two and three. So the great commentary on the Law of History ended in muddle and doubt. What happened when the Messiah came, when ‘the expropriators are expropriated’? Marx could not say; he did not know. But he prophesied the Messiah-revolution all the same: in 1849, in August 1850, in 1851, in 1852, ‘between November 1852 and February 1853’, in 1854, in 1857, in 1858, in 1859.⁸³ His later work, like Nathan of Gaza’s, was to a great extent an explanation for the non-arrival.

Marx was not merely a Jewish thinker, he was also an anti-Jewish thinker. Therein lies the paradox, which has a tragically important bearing both on the history of Marxist development and on its consummation in the Soviet Union and its progeny. The roots of Marx’s anti-Semitism went deep. We have already seen the part anti-Jewish polemic played in the works of enlightenment writers like Voltaire. This tradition passed into two streams. One was the German ‘idealist’ stream, going through Goethe, Fichte, Hegel and Bauer, in each of whom the anti-Jewish elements became more pronounced. The other was the French ‘socialist’ stream. This linked the Jews to the Industrial Revolution and the vast increase in commerce and materialism which marked the beginning of the nineteenth century. In a book published in 1808, François Fourier identified commerce as ‘the source of all evil’ and the Jews as ‘the incarnation of commerce’.84 Pierre-Joseph Proudhon went further, accusing the Jews of ‘having rendered the bourgeoisie, high and low, similar to them, all over Europe’. Jews were an ‘unsociable race, obstinate, infernal…the enemy of mankind. We should send this race back to Asia, or exterminate it.’⁸⁵ Fourier’s follower, Alphonse Toussenel, edited the anti-Semitic journal Phalange and in 1845 produced the first full-scale attack on the Jews as a network of commercial conspirators against humanity, Les Juifs: rois de l’époque: histoire de la féodalité financière. This became a primary source-book for anti-Semitic literature, in many languages, for the next four decades.

Marx absorbed both streams, adding to the turbid waters the outpourings of his own anguish. In his discussion of revolutionary Jews, the historian Robert Wistrich sees the self-hatred of some of them as reflecting the fury of very clever members of an underprivileged minority denied the position and recognition in society which their talents merited. Enlightenment thinkers, both French and German, argued that the objectionable features of Judaism had to be erased before the Jew could be free: Jews who were discriminated against accepted this, and thus often directed their rage more towards the unregenerated Jew than those who persecuted them both.⁸⁶ The self-hatred focussed on the ghetto Jew, who was of course the anti-Semitic archetype. Heine, who really knew very little about how most Jews actually lived, used all the standard anti-Semitic clicheés when in self-hating mood. Marx, who knew even less, borrowed his abuse straight from the gentile student café. And both used the ghetto caricature to belabour educated and baptized Jews like themselves, especially fellow progressives. One of Heine’s most vicious and almost incomprehensible attacks was unleashed on Ludwig Börne (1786-1837), born Lob Baruch, a baptized Jewish radical writer whose background and views were similar to his own.⁸⁷ Marx seems to have picked up this habit from Heine.⁸⁸ Thus, while himself attempting, whenever possible, to conceal his Jewish origins, he constantly attacked Jewish opponents for this very failing. Why, he asked, did Joseph Moses Levy, owner of the London. Daily Telegraph and a baptized Jew, seek ‘to be numbered among the Anglo-Saxon race…for Mother Nature has written his pedigree in absurd block letters right in the middle of his face’.⁸⁹

Marx’s most flagrant exercise in self-hatred, however, was directed at his fellow socialist Ferdinand Lassalle (1825-64), a Breslau Jew who changed his name from Lasal in honour of the French revolutionary hero and went on to become the founder of German socialism as a mass movement. His practical achievements in the cause were much more considerable than Marx’s own. Despite or perhaps because of this he was made the object of extraordinary vituperation in Marx’s correspondence with Engels. Marx called him ‘Baron Itzig’, the ‘Jewish Nigger’. He saw him as a Polish Jew and (as he put it), ‘The Jews of Poland are the dirtiest of all races.’90 Engels wrote to Marx, 7 March 1856: ‘[Lassalle] is a real Jew from the Slav frontier and he has always been willing to exploit party affairs for private purposes. It is revolting to see how he is always trying to push his way into the aristocratic world. He is a greasy Jew disguised under brilliantine and flashy jewels.’⁹¹ In attacking Lassalle’s Jewishness, and sneering at his syphilis, Marx did not scruple to use the oldest of all anti-Semitic smears. Thus he wrote to Engels, 10 May 1861: ‘A propos Lasalle–Lazarus. Lepsius in his great work on Egypt has proved that the exodus of the Jews from Egypt was nothing but the history which Manetho narrates of the expulsion of the “leprous people” from Egypt. At the head of these lepers was an Egyptian priest, Moses. Lazarus, the leper, is therefore the archetype of the Jew, and Lassalle is the typical leper.’⁹² Or again, 30 July 1862: ‘It is now perfectly clear to me that, as the shape of his head and the growth of his hair indicates, he is descended from the Negroes who joined in Moses’ flight from Egypt (unless his mother or grandmother on the father’s side was crossed with a nigger). This union of Jew and German on a Negro base was bound to produce an extraordinary hybrid.’⁹³

Marx’s personal anti-Semitism, however disagreeable in itself, might have played no greater part in his lifework than it did in Heine’s, had it not been part of a systematic and theoretical anti-Semitism in which Marx, quite unlike Heine, profoundly believed. In fact it is true to say that Marx’s theory of communism was the end-product of his theoretical anti-Semitism. Spinoza had first shown how a critique of Judaism could be used to reach radical conclusions about the world. His example had been followed by the French enlightenment, though their treatment of Judaism was far more hostile, and racial, in tone. Among radical German writers, the idea that solving the ‘Jewish problem’ might provide a key to solving the problems of humanity was much discussed. In the 1820s and 1830s, this was the route the much abused Ludwig Börne had taken towards socialism.⁹⁴ In 1843 Bruno Bauer, the anti-Semitic leader of the Hegelian left, published an essay demanding that the Jews abandon Judaism completely and transform their plea for equal rights into a general campaign for human liberation both from religion and from state tyranny.95

Marx replied to Bauer’s work in two essays published in the Deutsch-Francösische Jahrbucher in 1844, the same year Disraeli published Tancred. They are called ‘On the Jewish Question’.⁹⁶ Marx accepted completely the savagely anti-Semitic context of Bauer’s argument, which he said was written ‘with boldness, perception, wit and thoroughness in language that is as precise as it is vigorous and meaningful’. He quoted with approval Bauer’s maliciously exaggerated assertion that ‘the Jew determines the fate of the whole [Austrian] empire by his money power…[and] decides the destiny of Europe’. Where he differed was in rejecting Bauer’s belief that the anti-social nature of the Jew was religious in origin and could be remedied by tearing the Jew away from his religion. In Marx’s view, the evil was social and economic. ‘Let us’, he wrote, ‘consider the real Jew. Not the Sabbath Jew…but the everyday Jew.’ What, he asked, was ‘the profane basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly cult of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly god? Money.’⁹⁷ The Jews had gradually conveyed this ‘practical’ religion to all society:

Money is the jealous God of Israel, besides which no other god may exist. Money abases all the gods of mankind and changes them into commodities. Money is the self-sufficient value of all things. It has, therefore, deprived the whole world, both the human world and nature, of their own proper value. Money is the alienated essence of man’s work and existence: this essence dominates him and he worships it. The god of the Jews has been secularized and has become the god of this world.⁹⁸

The Jews, Marx continued, were turning Christians into replicas of themselves, so that the once staunchly Christian New Englanders, for example, were now the slaves of Mammon. Using his money-power, the Jew had emancipated himself and had gone on to enslave Christianity. The Jew-corrupted Christian ‘is convinced he has no other destiny here below than to become richer than his neighbours’ and ‘the world is a stock exchange’. Marx argued that the contradiction between the Jew’s theoretical lack of political rights and ‘the effective political power of the Jew’ is the contradiction between politics and ‘the power of money in general’. Political power supposedly overrides money; in fact ‘it has become its bondsman’. Hence: ‘It is from its own entrails that civil society ceaselessly engenders the Jew.’⁹⁹

Marx’s solution, therefore, is not like Bauer’s, religious, but economic. The money-Jew had become the ‘universal anti-social element of the present time’. To ‘make the Jew impossible’ it was necessary to abolish the ‘preconditions’ and the ‘very possibility’ of the kind of money activities for which he was notorious. Once the economic framework was changed, Jewish ‘religious consciousness would evaporate like some insipid vapour in the real, life-giving air of society’. Abolish the Jewish attitude to money, and both the Jew and his religion, and the corrupt version of Christianity he had imposed on the world, would simply disappear: ‘In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.’ Or again: ‘In emancipating itself from hucksterism and money, and thus from real and practical Judaism, our age would emancipate itself.’100

Marx’s two essays on the Jews thus contain, in embryonic from, the essence of his theory of human regeneration: by economic changes, and especially by abolishing private property and the personal pursuit of money, you could transform not merely the relationship between the Jew and society but all human relationships and the human personality itself. His form of anti-Semitism became a dress-rehearsal for Marxism as such. Later in the century August Bebel, the German Social Democrat, would coin the phrase, much used by Lenin: ‘Anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools.’ Behind this revealing epigram was the crude argument: we all know that Jewish money-men, who never soil their hands with toil, exploit the poor workers and peasants. But only a fool blames the Jews alone. The mature man, the socialist, has grasped the point that the Jews are only symptoms of the disease, not the disease itself. The disease is the religion of money, and its modern form is capitalism. Workers and peasants are exploited not just by the Jews but by the entire bourgeois-capitalist class–and it is the class as a whole, not just its Jewish element, which must be destroyed.

Hence the militant socialism Marx adopted in the later 1840s was an extended and transmuted form of his earlier anti-Semitism. His mature theory was a superstition, and the most dangerous kind of superstition, belief in a conspiracy of evil. But whereas originally it was based on the oldest form of conspiracy-theory, anti-Semitism, in the late 1840s and 1850s this was not so much abandoned as extended to embrace a world conspiracy theory of the entire bourgeois class. Marx retained the original superstition that the making of money through trade and finance is essentially a parasitical and anti-social activity, but he now placed it on a basis not of race and religion, but of class. The enlargement does not, of course, improve the validity of the theory. It merely makes it more dangerous, if put into practice, because it expands its scope and multiplies the number of those to be treated as conspirators and so victims. Marx was no longer concerned with specific Jewish witches to be hunted but with generalized human witches. The theory remained irrational but acquired a more sophisticated appearance, making it highly attractive to educated radicals. To reverse Bebel’s saying, if anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools, socialism became the anti-Semitism of intellectuals. An intellectual like Lenin, who clearly perceived the irrationality of the Russian anti-Semitic pogrom, and would have been ashamed to conduct one, nevertheless fully accepted its spirit once the target was expanded into the whole capitalist class–and went on to conduct pogroms on an infinitely greater scale, killing hundreds of thousands on the basis not of individual guilt but merely of membership of a condemned group.

Once Marx had generalized his anti-Semitism into his theory of capital, his interest in the Jews was pushed into the background. Occasionally, as on a palimpsest, it reappears in the pages of Capital. Thus: ‘The capitalist knows that all commodities, however scurvy they may look, or however badly they may smell, are in faith and in truth money, inwardly circumcised Jews.’101 More important was the general retention of the aggressive emotional tone so charcteristic of anti-Semitism. The archetype Jew was replaced by the archetype capitalist, but the caricature features were essentially the same. Take, for instance, Marx’s presentation of the capitalist monster himself:

Only in so far as the capitalist is personified capital has he a historical value…. Fanatically bent upon the exploitation of value, he relentlessly drives human beings to production for production’s sake…he shares with the miser the passion for wealth as wealth. But that which in the miser assumes the aspect of mania, is in the capitalist the effect of the social mechanism in which he is only a driving wheel…his actions are a mere function of the capital which, through his instrumentality, is endowed with will and consciousness, so that his own private consumption must be regarded by him as a robbery perpetrated upon accumulation.¹⁰²

Could such a weird personification of humanity ever have existed? But then, when had the anti-Semitic archetype Jew actually existed in real life? That Marx still, in his emotions, confused Jew and capitalist is suggested by the footnote he appended to the passage just quoted. He referred to the usurer, terming him ‘the old-fashioned but perennially renewed form of the capitalist’. Marx knew that in the minds of most of his readers the usurer was the Jew–as Toussenel put it, the terms usurer and Jew were interchangeable. Most of the footnote consisted of Luther’s violent polemic against the usurer already reproduced on page 242. That Marx should quote this brutal exhortation to kill from an anti-Semitic writer, in a work purporting to be scientific, is suggestive both of Marx’s own violence and of the emotional irrationality which expressed it, first as anti-Semitism and then as economic theory.

However, Marx’s paradoxical combination of Jewishness and anti-Semitism did not prevent his works from appealing to the growing Jewish intelligentsia. Quite the contrary. For many emancipated Jews, especially in eastern Europe, Capital became a new kind of Torah. Granted the initial leap of faith in both cases, Marxism had the logical strength of the halakhah and its stress upon abstract interpretation of events was highly congenial to clever Jews whose ancestors had spent a lifetime in talmudic studies or who themselves had started in the yeshivah–and then escaped. Throughout the century, the number of Jews of rabbinical type, from scholarly or merchant families, who turned their back on religion, increased steadily. By the end of it, Orthodox Jewry, despite the vast increase in the Jewish population almost everywhere, was becoming conscious of the haemorrhage. Ancient Jewish communities of Bohemia and Moravia, celebrated for their scholarship and spiritual leaders, found they had to import rabbis from more backward parts.

Most of the ‘missing rabbis’ seemed to have become radicals, and turned on their Judaism and Jewishness with contempt and anger. They turned on their parents’ class too, for a high proportion came from wealthy homes. Marx’s father had been a lawyer, Lassalle’s a silk merchant; Victor Adler, the pioneer Austrian Social Democrat, was the son of a real-estate speculator, Otto Bauer, the Austrian Socialist leader, of a textile magnate, Adolf Braun, the German Socialist leader, of an industrialist, Paul Singer, another leading German socialist, of a clothing manufacturer, Karl Hochberg of a Frankfurt banker. There were many other examples. Their break with the past, with family and community, often combined with self-hatred, promoted among them a spirit of negation and destruction, of iconoclasm, almost at times of nihilism–an urge to overthrow institutions and values of all kinds–which gentile conservatives were beginning to identify, by the end of the nineteenth century, as a peculiarly Jewish social and cultural disease.

There were four principal reasons why Jews, once they began to take part in general politics, moved overwhelmingly first to the liberal and then to the left end of the spectrum. In the first place there was the Biblical tradition of social criticism, what might be termed the Amos Syndrome. From the earliest times there had always been articulate Jews determined to expose the injustices of society, to voice the bitterness and needs of the poor, and to call on authority to make redress. Then too there was the talmudic tradition of communal provision, which itself had Biblical origins, and which adumbrated modern forms of state collectivism. Jews who became socialists in the nineteenth century and who attacked the unequal distribution of wealth produced by liberal, laissez-faire capitalism were expressing in contemporary language Jewish principles which were 3,000 years old and which had become part of the instincts of the people.

But was it not true, as Disraeli claimed, that Jews also had a high regard for authority, hierarchy and traditional order? It was true, but subject to important qualifications. Jews, as we have seen, had never accorded absolute power to any human agency. Rule resided in the Torah and the vicarious authority accorded to man was limited, temporary and recoverable. Judaism could never have evolved, as Latin Christianity did, the theory of the divine right of kings. Jews had the strongest regard for the rule of law, so long as it was ethically based, and they could and did become devoted adherents of constitutionally based systems, as in the United States and Britain. To that extent Disraeli was correct in arguing that Jews were often natural Tories. But they were also natural enemies to authority which was arbitrary and tyrannical, illogical or outmoded. When Marx wrote, ‘Thus we find every tyrant backed by a Jew, as is every pope by a Jesuit. In truth, the cravings of oppressors would be hopeless and the practicability of war out of the question, if there were not an army of Jesuits to smother thought and a handful of Jews to ransack pockets,’103 he was wrong. Rothschild loans to absolute monarchies were geared not to reinforce tyranny but to abate it, especially in securing better treatment for Jews (in which, of course, Marx was not interested). Jewish money power in the nineteenth century, in so far as it had any overall political policy, tended to be irenic and constitutionalist. ‘Peace, retrenchment and reform’, Gladstone’s famous Liberal slogan, was also the axiom of the Rothschilds.

Moreover there was one important respect in which Disraeli misunderstood the impact of the Jews. He tended to see the Jewish archetype as a Sephardi. The Sephardis indeed had a strong regard for ancient historical institutions, and thus conformed to his image of the Jew. But the Ashkenazis, whom he chose to ignore in his argument, were far more restless, innovatory, critical and even subversive. They were also becoming far more numerous.

Here we come to the second force pushing emancipated Jews to the left: demography. In the period 1800-80, roughly Disraeli’s lifetime, the Sephardi percentage of Jewry as a whole fell from 20 to 10 per cent. Most of them were concentrated in the Afro-Asian Mediterranean area, where standards of hygiene remained primitive throughout the nineteenth century. In Algiers, for instance, where Maurice Eisenbeth carried out a detailed analysis of the Jewish population, he found it rose from a maximum of 5,000 in the sixteenth century to a peak of 10,000-20,000 in about 1700, falling to 5,000 again by 1818.104 In Africa and Asia as a whole the number of Jews did rise, 1800-80, but only from 500,000 to 750,000. In Europe, during the same period, the total leapt from two million to seven million. The Jews, and the Ashkenazi in particular, were benefiting from the prime fact of modern times, the demographic revolution, which hit Europe first. But they did better than the European average. They married younger. Marriages between boys of fifteen to eighteen with girls of fourteen to sixteen were quite common. Nearly all Jewish girls married and tended to produce children soon after puberty. They tended to look after their children well, and with the help of communal welfare facilities, Jewish infantile death rates fell more quickly than the European average. Jewish marriages remained more stable. Jews lived longer. A survey of Frankfurt in 1855, for instance, shows Jewish life-spans averaged forty-eight years nine months, non-Jews thirty-six years eleven months.¹⁰⁵ The discrepancy was even more marked in eastern Europe. In European Russia, the Jewish death rate, at 14.2 per 1,000 per year, was even lower than that of the well-to-do Protestant minority, and less than half that of the Orthodox majority (31.8). As a result, during the period of most rapid growth, 1880-1914, the number of Jews increased by an average of 2 per cent a year, well above the European mean, raising the total number of Jews from 7.5 million to over thirteen million.

These ‘new’ Jews were overwhelmingly Ashkenazis, concentrated in big cities. In 1800 it was rare to come across a Jewish city community of more than 10,000–there were only three or four in the world. By 1880 Warsaw had 125,000 Jews, and there were over 50,000 in Vienna, Budapest, Odessa and Berlin. There were about this number in New York too, and from this time North America drained off a huge proportion of the European Jewish population increase. All the same, their numbers continued to grow. By 1914 there were eight million Jews in the two great empires of east-central Europe, Russia and Austria, nearly all of them in towns and cities. In short, Jewish demography reflected, but in an exaggerated form, both the European population revolution and its urbanization. Just as the teeming ghetto, in its day, force-fed Jewish popular religion, so now the crowded industrial quarters of the new or expanded towns, where traditional Jewish life was struggling to survive, bred an intense secular Jewish redicalism.

The third reason was that the Jewish sense of injustice was never allowed to sleep. Just as, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Jewish antennae everywhere were ever alert to pick up murmurs of a messiah, so in the nineteenth century an act of injustice to Jews anywhere stirred emotions in the growing Jewish urban centres. There were now hundreds of Jewish newspapers which related these outrages, and virtually all Jews could read. Among the secularized intelligentsia, there was no longer any disposition to attribute the sufferings of the race to sins, ancient or modern. The Damascus blood libel of 1840 was an important milestone in the radicalization of the Jews. The fifteen-year-old Lassalle noted in his diary, 21 May 1840: ‘Even the Christians marvel at our sluggish blood, that we do not rise, that we do not rather perish on the battlefield than by torture…. Is there a revolution anywhere which could be more just than if the Jews were to rebel, set fire to every quarter of Damascus, blow up the powder magazine and meet death with their persecutors? Cowardly people, you deserve no better fate.’106 Such events fed a determination among young secularized Jews to combat injustice not just towards Jews but to mankind, and to take advantage of the growing political opportunities to end them for ever. Lassalle went on to create the first major German trade union federation and to found German social democracy. Countless other young Jews took the same path.

There was no lack of stimulus. For instance, on the night of 23-24 June 1858, a six-year-old Jewish boy, Edgardo Mortara, living with his family in Bologna, was seized by the papal police and taken to the House of Catechumens in Rome. A Christian servant testified that five years before, thinking the child was dying, she had baptized him. Under the law of the papal states, the police and the church were within their rights, and the parents had no remedy. There was a world-wide chorus of protest, not merely from Jews but from Christian clerics and statesmen, but Pope Pius IX refused to give way and the boy remained in Catholic hands.¹⁰⁷ This unredressed outrage led directly to the foundation, in 1860, of the French Alliance Israélite Universelle, to ‘defend the civil rights and religious freedom of the Jews’, as well as other specifically Jewish organizations elsewhere. But, still more, it fed the Jewish secular hatred of absolutism everywhere.

It was in Tsarist Russia, however, that ill-treatment of the Jews was most systematic and embittering. Indeed the Tsarist regime epitomized for radicals everywhere the most evil and entrenched aspects of autocracy. For Jews, who viewed it with peculiar loathing, it was the fourth, and probably the most important, of the factors driving them leftwards. Hence the Russian treatment of the Jews, horrifying in itself, constitutes one of the important facts of modern world history and must be examined in some detail. It must first be grasped that the Tsarist regime from the very start viewed the Jews with implacable hostility. Whereas other autocracies, in Austria, Prussia, even in Rome, had preserved an ambivalent attitude, protecting, using, exploiting and milking the Jews, as well as persecuting them from time to time, the Russians always treated Jews as unacceptable aliens. Until the partitions of Poland, 1772-95, they had more or less succeeded in keeping Jews out of their territories. The moment their greed for Polish land brought them a large Jewish population, the regime began to refer to it as ‘the Jewish problem’, to be ‘solved’, either by assimilation or by expulsion.

What the Russians did was to engage in the first modern exercise in social engineering, treating human beings (in this case the Jews) as earth or concrete, to be shovelled around. Firstly they confined Jews to what was called the Pale of Settlement, which took its final form in 1812, and which consisted of twenty-five western provinces stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Jews could not travel, let alone live, outside the Pale except with special legal authority. Next, a series of statutes, beginning in 1804, determined where the Jews could live inside the Pale and what they could do there. The most damaging rule was that Jews could not live or work in villages, or sell alcohol to peasants. This destroyed the livelihood of a third of the Jewish population, who held village leases or ran village inns (another third were in trade, and most of the rest craftsmen). In theory the object was to push the Jews into ‘productive labour’ on the land. But there was little or no land available, and the real aim was to drive Jews into accepting baptism, or getting out altogether. In practice it led to Jewish impoverishment and a steady stream of poor Jews into the Pale towns.

The next turn of the screw came in 1827, when Nicholas I, one of the most savage of the autocrats, issued the ‘Cantonist Decrees’, which conscripted all male Jews from twelve to twenty-five, placing the younger boys in canton-schools at the military depots, where they were liable to be forced into baptism, sometimes by whole units. The government was also anxious to destroy the Jewish schools. The authorities tried repeatedly to force Jewish children into state schools where the languages of instruction were Russian, Polish and German only, the object again being to promote baptism. In 1840 a Committee for the Jews was formed to promote the ‘moral education’ of what was treated publicly as an undesirable, semi-criminal community. Jewish religious books were censored or destroyed. Only two Jewish presses were permitted, in Vilna and Kiev–and Jews were expelled from the latter town completely three years later. The government was quite cunning at dividing Jewish communities, and setting maskils against Orthodox. In 1841, for example, they put the maskil Max Lilienthal (1815-82) in charge of the new state Jewish schools, which were in effect anti-Talmud establishments designed, as the Orthodox claimed, to offer their children to ‘the Moloch of the Haskalah’. But he found the bitter battle which ensued too much for him and slipped out of the country four years later, to emigrate to America. The government also forbade Jews to wear traditional garments such as the skullcap and kapota. It divided them into ‘useful Jews’ and ‘useless Jews’, subjecting the latter group to triple conscription quotas.

Gradually, over the century, an enormous mass of legislation discriminating against Jews, and regulating their activities, accumulated. Some of it was never properly enforced. Much of it was frustrated by bribery. Rich parents could buy Jewish children to take the place of their own in state schools or in the army. They could pay to buy legal certificates entitling them to travel, to live in cities, to engage in forbidden occupations. The attempt to ‘solve’ the Jewish problem created, or rather immensely aggravated, another one: corruption of the Tsarist bureaucracy, which became incorrigible and rotted the heart of the state.108 Moreover, government policy was never consistent for long. It oscillated between liberalism and repression. In 1856 the new Tsar, Alexander II, introduced a liberal phase, granting certain rights to Jews if they were long-service soldiers, university graduates or ‘useful’ merchants. That phase ended with the Polish revolt of 1863 and his attempted assassination. There was another liberal phase in the 1870s, again brought to an end by an attempt on his life–this time a successful one. Thereafter the position of Jews in Russia deteriorated sharply.

In the last half-century of imperial Russia, the official Jewish regulations formed an enormous monument to human cruelty, stupidity and futility. Gimpelson’s Statutes Concerning the Jews (1914-15), the last annotated collection, ran to nearly 1,000 pages.¹⁰⁹ A summary of the position, compiled by the English historian Lucien Wolf, established the following facts.¹¹⁰ The Jews formed one-24th of the Russian population. Some 95 per cent of them were confined to the Pale, one-23rd part of the empire, and of these the vast majority were trapped in the Pale towns and shtetls, forming one-2,000th part of the territory. A Jew’s passport stated he was a Jew and where he might reside. Even in the Pale, most areas were banned to Jews, but ‘legal’ parts were constantly being eroded. Jews were banned from Sebastopol and Kiev. The Don territory was suddenly taken out of the Pale, then the Causcasian Kuban and Terek; then the Yalta health resort, a consumptive Jewish student being expelled in the middle of his treatment when the decree took effect. Jews wishing to use the Caucasian mineral springs had to pass an exam conducted by an army officer. Some resorts were ‘open’ but had quotas: thus only twenty Jewish families were allowed into Darnitza in any one season. Other Pale resorts were banned to Jews under any circumstances.

There were privileged categories of Jews permitted to travel or even reside outside the Pale–discharged soldiers, graduates, ‘useful merchants’ and ‘mechanics, distillers, brewers and artisans while pursuing their calling’. But they needed special papers, which were very difficult to obtain and had to be renewed constantly. All these categories tended to be whittled down, especially after 1881. Thus, ex-soldiers were suddenly limited to those serving before 1874. Merchants were abruptly forbidden to bring clerks or servants with them. Struck from the category of privileged artisans were tobacco-workers, piano-tuners, butchers, goloshes-menders, bricklayers, carpenters, plasterers and gardeners. There were particularly severe restrictions on women workers, except for prostitutes. (A prostitute who ceased to ply for hire was quickly spotted by the police and sent back to the ghetto.)111 A Jewish midwife privileged to practise outside the Pale could not have her children with her unless her husband was also a ‘privileged person’.

Students who took their degrees abroad, because of anti-Jewish quota restrictions at Russian universities, were not entitled to privileged status. In the Caucasus, so-called ‘Mountain Jews’, who claimed their forefathers were deported there by Nebuchadnezzar in 597 BC, had rights of residence; on the other hand, they could not go anywhere else. Jews privileged to live outside the Pale were not allowed to have even a son or a daughter sleep in their houses, unless they too were privileged. In fact privileged Jews faced an additional set of restrictions outside the Pale, and if they broke the rules were fined on the first offence, banished on the second. The law on all these points was exceptionally complex and subject to endless changes by votes of the senate, ministry circulars, rulings by the local authorities or arbitrary decisions by officials high and low.

Enforcing these constantly changing codes was a nightmare for all concerned except the corrupt policeman or bureaucrat. Visitors from the West were shocked to see troops of frightened Jews being driven through the streets by police posses in the early hours of the morning, the result of oblavas or night raids. The police were entitled to break into a house during the night using any force necessary and demand documentary proof of residence rights of everyone, irrespective of age or sex. Anyone unable to produce it instantly was taken to the police station. Jews were constantly humiliated in front of gentile neighbours, thus keeping alive the view that they were different, sub-human, and perpetuating the pogrom instinct. Even in first-class hotels, police stopped and questioned people on suspicion of ‘Jewish physiognomy’. They were quite capable of banning distinguished foreigners, Oscar Straus, the American ambassador to Constantinople, being one victim. Jewish pianists were allowed to compete for the International Rubinstein Prize in St Petersburg, but only on condition that they did not spend the night in the city.

Occasionally, the police organized massive ‘Jew Hunts’. In Baku, police surrounded the stock exchange, arrested every Jew and took them to the police station where each was forced to prove his right of residence. In Smolensky district, at Pochinok, mounted police in 1909 surrounded the entire town but flushed out only ten ‘illegals’; they had a big hunt through the woods and found seventy-four more.112 The Law of Settlement corrupted the entire police force, which milked the Jews. When business was slack, police chiefs would encourage Christians to draw up petitions calling for expulsions on the grounds that Jews were ‘causing local discontent’. Then poor Jews would be thrown out and rich ones ‘tapped’. The poor, returning to the Pale, became a growing social problem. In Odessa, for instance, over 30 per cent were dependent on Jewish charities.

The residence laws, however, were only the beginning of the Jews’ troubles. The government demanded fixed quotas of Jewish conscripts from the local communities. But these took no account of emigration. Jews should have provided no more than 4.13 per cent of recruits. The government demanded 6.2 per cent. Some 5.7 per cent were actually produced, and this led to official complaints about the ‘Jewish deficit’–provoking, in turn, anti-Semitic clamour that Jews evaded conscription. In fact they furnished between 20 and 35 per cent more than their fair share.¹¹³ From 1886 families were held legally responsible for non-service of conscripts and fined heavily; there was no possibility of successful evasion without massive bribes. But if the state forced Jews to soldier, it circumscribed narrowly how they did it. Jews were banned from the guards, the navy, the frontier or quarantine service, the gendarmerie, the commissariat and clerical grades. In 1887 they were banned from all military schools and army examinations, so effectively excluded from becoming officers. In 1888 they were banned from army dispensaries, in 1889 from military bands.

All Jews whatever were banned from any kind of state service in Moscow and St Petersburg. In theory, a Jew holding an MA or doctorate was eligible for certain posts elsewhere but, reported Wolf, ‘without undergoing the rite of baptism it is well nigh impossible for a Jew to fulfil all the conditions preliminary to employment by the state’.114 There was not a single Jewish teacher in the state system. There was no Jewish university professor and only a handful of lecturers. There were no Jews in the Justice Department, no examining magistrates, only one judge (appointed during the last ‘liberal’ period). Ministry circulars forbade the appointment of Jews as police inspectors: they were to be used only as spies or informers. Jews formed the majority of the urban population in six main regions and in many towns they were in a big majority, but they were not allowed to vote in municipal elections or stand for office; in the Pale government could ‘appoint’ them, up to one-tenth of the total. Jews were excluded from juries, from the boards of asylums or orphanages. From 1880 they were forbidden to practise as notaries, and from 1890 as barristers and solicitors, without special permission–Wolf reported none had been given for fifteen years. They were forbidden to buy, rent or manage land beyond the immediate precincts of the Pale towns and shtetls. They could not even buy land for cemeteries. As with military service, Jews were accused of being unwilling to work the land, but in practice the regulations made this impossible, and wrecked the few Jewish agricultural colonies which had been established. Moreover, the fear that Jews would evade property laws by third-party transactions led to a mass of additional regulations covering partnerships and joint-stock companies. Hence many companies excluded Jews even as shareholders, and the fact was marked on share-certificates. Jews were excluded by law from the mining industries, and a further set of regulations attempted to keep them from dealing in gold, oil, coal and other minerals.

Next to the residence qualifications the anti-Semitic laws most hated by Jews governed education. Jews were excluded completely from such top training institutions as the St Petersburg Institute of Civil Engineers, the Army Medical College, the St Petersburg Electrical Institute, the Moscow Agricultural College, the St Petersburg Theatrical School, the Kharkov Veterinary Institute and the various colleges of mines. Their attendance at secondary and high schools was governed by the quota system or numerous clausus. They could occupy up to 10 per cent of such places in the Pale, only 5 per cent outside and only 3 per cent in Moscow and St Petersburg. The 25,000 chedarim schools, with 300,000 pupils, were forbidden to teach Russian, to stop children getting a secondary education. As a result of these measures, the number of Jews in the higher schools fell dramatically, and parents fought desperately to get their children in, often bribing the gentile headmasters, who had a fixed scale of charges.

The anti-Jewish codes of Tsarist Russia thus succeeded, chiefly, in corrupting every element in the state service. They were an extraordinary amalgamation of past and future–they looked back to the medieval ghetto and forward to the Soviet slave-state. What they did not do was ‘solve’ the Jewish problem. Indeed, by radicalizing the Jews, they ended, it could be said, in solving the Tsarist problem. Despite all the restrictions, some Jews continued to prosper. Discrimination was purely religious and by getting themselves baptized Jews could evade it completely, at any rate in theory. In Russian music, for instance, Anton Rubinstein (1829-94) and his brother Nikolay (1835-81), whose parents had converted, ran the Petersburg and Moscow Conservatoires for many years and dominated the musical scene during the great age of the Russian symphony and opera. Even non-Christian Jews contrived to flourish in a rapidly expanding economy, being strongly represented in brewing, tobacco, leather, textiles, grain, banks, shipping, railways and–despite the bans–oil and mining.115

Hence the government code did nothing to reduce anti-Semitism. Quite the contrary. While baptized and smart Jews did well, the code impoverished or criminalized others, so ethnic Russians ended by both envying and despising the race, accusing Jews of being, at one and the same time, perfumed and filthy, profiteers and beggars, greedy and starving, unscrupulous and stupid, useless and too ‘useful’ by half. Russian anti-Semitism had all kinds of ingredients. The Tsarist regime persecuted other minorities besides the Jews but it was skilful at setting them off one against another, and in particular in inciting Poles, Letts, Ukrainians and Cossacks to go for the Jews. Indeed, Russia was the only country in Europe, at this time, where anti-Semitism was the official policy of the government. It took innumerable forms, from organizing pogroms to forging and publishing the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

The object of the government was to reduce the Jewish population as quickly and as drastically as possible. A glimpse of the mentality of the Tsarist regime can be found in the diaries of Theodor Herzl, who interviewed several ministers in St Petersburg in 1903 to solicit help for his Zionist programme. The Finance Minister, Count Serge Witte, by Tsarist standards a liberal, told him: