As a young professor, the German natural scientist Carl Vogt became a supporter of the 1848 revolution and was sent as a radical democratic deputy to the National Assembly in Frankfurt. After trying to incite a popular uprising in southwestern Germany in 1849, he fled to Switzerland. Later, from his post at the University of Geneva, he watched anti-Semitism spread throughout Germany and Europe.
In late 1880 and early 1881, in three articles for the Frankfurter Zeitung, he expressed his outrage at the “entirely repulsive” yet growing ideology in Germany. Vogt wrote of anti-Semites’ “impotent jealousy,” their “base greed,” and the “fury of the intellectually backward at the greater intelligence of an older and deeper civilization.” Vogt’s ire was prompted in particular by the anti-Semitic agitation of Heinrich von Treitschke and the Protestant pastor Adolf Stoecker. He tried to enlighten Germans about the positive Jewish characteristics he had observed “everywhere in the same fashion.” Jews, he wrote, were “hard-working, intelligent, frugal to the point of miserliness, mild-mannered, disinclined to violence or crime against other people and not prone to drunkenness.”
In 1885, when asked by the Viennese journalist Isidor Singer about the underlying causes behind anti-Semitism, the Dutch physiologist Jacob Moleschott answered: “Everywhere Jews rank among the best doctors, the most influential writers, and the wealthiest and best-educated merchants because they have been restricted to these areas, the only ones in which they have been allowed to achieve anything, yet people wonder why there are so many excellent Jewish doctors and journalists. They resent rich Jews and reject and envy their Oriental splendor, acting as if all religion were in jeopardy whenever a clever remark by a witty Jew burns holes through a thousand ignorant words from Messers Stoecker and Treitschke.” When the same question was asked of Vogt, he responded: “In my estimation, the answer to the question has nothing to do with religion, but with the instinctive hatred of the untalented for the gifted, the poor for the rich, and the sluggish for the ambitious.”1
The agrarian engineer Eugenio Righini, who lived in the northern Italian city of Ferrara and who also worked as a journalist, concealed his own anti-Semitism behind a scientific tone and a variety of objectivistic embellishments. But the observations of Italian society he published in his 1901 book, Antisemitismo e semitismo nell’Italia politica moderna, supported the insights gleaned from German culture by Vogt and Moleschott. These three men—as well as a number of others, including the pathologist Rudolf Virchow, historians Theodor Mommsen and Johann Gustav Droysen, industrialist Werner Siemens, and banker Ludwig Bamberger—all identified envy and greed as the central causes of anti-Semitism. It was a point the pro-democracy journalist Ludwig Börne had made as early as 1821.2 Righini proposed that although Jews were no more intelligent than the Christians around them, they were much better at applying their abilities. Their capacity for getting things done, their focus on goals, and their determined but flexible desire to get ahead irritated others, in particular “their economic competitors.” Righini wrote, “This tension gives rise to envy, and envy is the deepest, most general, and perhaps most important reason for anti-Semitism.”
A pro-democracy nationalist, Righini was at the time the chairman of the local socially integrative trade union società operaia. No doubt with a tinge of regret, he concluded that anti-Semitism in Italy “was definitely widespread but weakly developed and without goals.”3 Around 1900, Italy had some 34 million inhabitants, of whom a tiny minority—just 43,000—were Jews. These Jews lived well-integrated lives in cities such as Rome, Milan, Florence, Turin, Livorno, and Ferrara. They were allowed to become officers in the military and hold state positions, theoretically right up to the office of prime minister. Active anti-Semitism had little chance of thriving in Italy, wrote Dubnow in 1929.4 Neither Italian university students and merchants nor small business people and nationalists were particularly hostile to Jews. The illiberal anti-Semitism propagated by Pope Pius IX (1792–1878) had only a faint echo in Italian society.5
The situation was completely different in countries where Jews represented a greater percentage of urban populations and posed serious competition to gentiles. Fear and inability to confront the challenges of modernity drove the majority populations of both Russia and Romania to nip Jewish emancipation in the bud. Around the same time, in 1880, massive economic boom-and-bust cycles helped give rise to envy, jealousy, and xenophobia throughout Europe, even in France, whose comparatively small Jewish population had enjoyed legal equality for ninety years. There, too, social movements, not governments, called for an end to “Jewish predominance” in certain career sectors. In Greece, governmental forces encouraged hatred for Jews because they wanted to “cleanse” their territories of competitors and people viewed as foreigners. That, of course, was beneficial to the national majority. Let us now examine these four exemplary situations: Russia, Romania, France, and Greece.
Before the First World War, Russia extended westward to the border of the German Empire, encompassing large stretches of what would later become Poland. Moldova, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, and major portions of Ukraine were at the time also parts of Russia. According to an 1897 census, 125 million people lived in this gigantic nation. Of them, 5,216,000 (4.2 percent) identified with the Jewish faith—they represented half the entire world Jewish population. Almost without exception, their native language was Yiddish. Because of their linguistic distinctiveness, Russia considered Jewish people a nation unto itself within the state. In 1906, German Zionist Arthur Ruppin praised this situation as “the only case of a European state officially according Jews the character of a nation.”
Originally, Jews primarily settled in the territory of the former Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania. During the nineteenth century, driven by material privation, many migrated to Novorossiya, those parts of the Ottoman Empire that had been gradually conquered by the Russian army: southern Ukraine, Crimea, and later Transnistria and Moldova (Bessarabia). The major anti-Jewish pogroms of 1881 and 1882 put an abrupt end to this semivoluntary internal migration. As was often the case, officials, police, and officers had encouraged the outbreaks of violence. It was they who turned loose pogromshchiki, only reining them in after several days of brutality. The initial justification for the violence in the spring of 1881 was the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, which was carried out not by a Jew but by a Christian student.
In any case, most of these Jews lived in poverty, scraping by as peddlers, artisans, factory workers, and day laborers. In 1883 and 1884, a commission chaired by the Baltic-German Count Konstantin von der Prahlen studied the living conditions of these people and reported back to Tsar Alexander II: “Almost nine-tenths of the total Jewish population are a mass of people whose existence is secured by nothing and who live day in, day out in misery under the worst conditions. All other castes and classes of the populace live in better conditions than the Jews.”6
Balta, a city in the south of the administrative region of Podolia, provides an example of Jews’ pitiable lack of legal protection and opportunities for defense. Of the city’s 32,000 inhabitants, 80 percent were Jews, but despite constituting most of the population, they were still subject to savage acts of terror. In mid-April 1882, a pogrom raged for three days, during which a mob destroyed more than a thousand houses and three hundred businesses, robbing, pillaging, and raping. Forty-two Jews were murdered and 121 seriously injured. Clearly, for the Christian minority to get away with such brutality, they would have needed state accomplices.
Kiev (today Kyiv, Ukraine) had also been the scene of mass rapes, murders, plunder, and arson. An eyewitness report from the aftermath in the suburb of Predmestje described what happened during the pogrom of May 1881:
“On the right side of the street, nothing more can be seen of the fifteen one-story brick houses but scattered bricks and charred wood. Mr. Bornspolski suffered the worst of it. He led me through his warehouse and home. Every door and window had been smashed, every piece of furniture chopped up, the strings had been ripped out of the piano, then bent and cut, and the stone walls bore the traces of attempts to destroy them as well. The courtyard was full of broken household items and bed feathers. The cellar was burned out after a mob of about 150 people, bolstered by 500 workers from the sugar factory across the street, had literally rolled around in alcoholic spirits. The soap and lighting factory behind were destroyed, too. Bornspolski had rented out part of his building to a Christian druggist. Police officers had sat drinking vodka with the man. B.’s losses have been estimated as at least a hundred thousand rubles.”
The author of the report then visited the synagogue on Dmiyevka Street—here too, “nothing had escaped destruction.” In the outlying district of Salomenka, the mob had murdered three people. As the crowd approached, the wife of a certain Mordecai Wienarski had fled to the attic with her children but in her panic had left one behind. What had the “leaders of these dehumanized” people done when they stormed the house? “They seized the child by his little legs and purposely slammed him to the ground. He died instantly. All of this happened in plain view of military officers. The poor woman told me the story with tears in her eyes. And while I stood there in the bright sunlight, the laughter and chatter of the soldiers, loitering or sitting by the windows, echoed across the street and made her story all the more terrible. I could hardly believe that in this place, in the light of day, despite a barracks full of soldiers and military men in the streets, a three-year-old child had been murdered in such barbaric fashion.”7
Despite the hundreds of similarly shameful occurrences, Russia didn’t pass any new laws to protect those who had been persecuted. Instead, it enacted legislation that further curtailed Jews’ already scant rights. Interior Minister Nicolay Pavlovich Ignatyev, a Pan-Slavist to the core, was the man responsible for this. He justified the draconian new laws, which were named after him, as a means of protecting the Christian majority and thereby preventing future unrest. The “fundamental, indeed sole reason” for the pogroms, he claimed, was economic: “In the past twenty years, Jews have gradually taken over trade and commerce, acquired extensive property by purchase or lease and, relying on their internal solidarity, have tried everything to plunder the people, in particular the poorer classes.” For that reason, Jews had themselves to blame for “protests that have taken on the unpleasant form of violence.” After the government had pursued the ringleaders of the pogroms, it now had a duty “to immediately issue strict ordinances aimed at correcting the unjust relationship between the general populace and the Jews and to preserve the former in the face of the harmful activity of the latter.”8
Isaak Rülf, a rabbi in the Prussian town of Memel (today Klaipėda, Lithuania), tried to provide material help and publicize the plight of his coreligionists in neighboring Russia. Rülf characterized Ignatyev as a “coarse, heartless barbarian in the costume of a diplomat,” a man permeated “with envy and rage, like many of his comrades, at the skill, grace and superiority of Jews.” Born of feelings of inferiority, Rülf wrote, the anti-Jewish laws and nationalism Ignatyev encouraged in Russia were two sides of the same coin. Suddenly catchphrases about the “decayed and rotten West” were becoming increasingly popular, while the “rugged, authentic Slavic people” were celebrated as a group who were destined for “world domination” and who were now justly demanding “Russia for Russians” after many years of foreign exploitation. Courting the favor of the masses, Ignatyev demanded that regional and district officials answer leading questions such as: “To what extent has the economic activity of the Jews had a harmful effect on the living conditions of the original population?” The governor general of Kiev, the man responsible for the May 1881 violence, promoted Jewish emigration as the sole way of protecting the Christian populace from the “harmful consequences of the economic activity of Jews, their tribal separateness and their religious fanaticism.”9
Although rulers and ruled may have been at odds in autocratic Russia, anti-Semitism could be used to weld “the logic of the state and the impulses of the people into a powerful unity.” Such was the conclusion of the Austrian Zionist Berthold Baruch Feiwel, when he analyzed the consequences of the anti-Semitic symbiosis between people and state. Feiwel wrote: “Almost organically a common view of Jews established itself in the entire populace. It was drenched in both brutality and the sort of violence that articulates itself in a thousand small details of everyday life and that has gradually become a general Russian trait encompassing all classes of the people.”10 Feiwel put his thoughts to paper in 1903, directly after the pogrom of Kishinev, which we will examine shortly.
Even before the outbreak of pogroms, Russian politicians and officials had harassed and denigrated Jews with specially formulated ordinances, laws, and arbitrary administrative measures. After the Ignatyev Laws (also known as the May Laws) of 1882, Jews were essentially prohibited from residing anywhere but special settlement districts, the so-called Pale of Settlement, that were in effect giant ghettos. They included the ten governorates of the former Kingdom of Poland and the governorates of Bessarabia, Vilnius, Vitebsk, Volhynia, Grodno, Yekaterinoslav (Dnipropetrovsk), Kiev, Kovno (Kaunas), Minsk, Mogilev (Mohilev), Podolia, Poltava, Tauris (Crimea plus its hinterlands), Cherson, and Chernigov. On average, Jews made up 10 to 18 percent of the population in those places, although they numbered up to 30 percent in certain individual districts like Białystok. The Russian government had issued residence edicts as early as 1804 to keep “ur-Russia” free of Jews.
Of the 5.2 million Jews in the Romanov Empire, around 200,000 enjoyed the privilege of living wherever they wanted. In some cases, this right was either expanded or restricted according to local needs. That tended to benefit Jews with certain careers and levels of income: master tradesmen, graduates of Russian universities with higher degrees, physicians, and merchants of the highest order. But before merchants could choose their own places of business or residence, they were subject to five years of personal tax at high rates ranging from 500 to 15,000 rubles annually and then ten years of direct tax running from 5,000 to 15,000 rubles paid directly to the state treasury office. Even after those fifteen years had elapsed, this privileged class was still required to pay a special annual levy of 500 rubles. In other words, Jews had to purchase their freedom of movement every year by paying a special tax—although because of the horrendous sums required, few could afford this means of escaping the difficult living conditions in the districts where Jews were forced to live.11
The new laws also prohibited Jews from moving out of cities to the countryside even within the settlement districts, even though conversely they could be expelled from the country to urban areas. There were few cities in Russia, and few Christian Russians resided in them. As a result, Jews made up the majority in the urban centers of nine governorates: Minsk (59.1 percent), Grodno (58.3), Siedlce (53.7), Kiev (53.5), Vitebsk (52.7), Mogilev (52.5), Kielce (51.3), Volhynia (51), and Radom (50.6). With the exception of Crimea (where the number was less than 25 percent), their proportion of urban inhabitants in the rest of the governorships ranged from 25 to 50 percent. On average, 38.5 percent of the urban inhabitants of the settlement regions were Jewish. Their density was highest in Berdichev, with 78 percent. Overall, 94 percent of Russian Jews lived in cities, compared with only 7.4 percent of all Russian Christians.
The Ignatyev Laws and subsequent ordinances banned Jews from purchasing or leasing plots of land, required them to close their businesses on Sunday, and imposed special taxes on kosher meat, rental income, and inheritances. On January 28, 1884, Russia’s Council of Ministers shut down the Jewish trade school in Žitomir on the grounds that “in the cities and areas of the southwestern Pale, Jews already represent the majority of artisans and are hemming in the development of artisanship among the basic population.” A Jewish trade school was thus, in the absence of a comparable Christian one, an undesirable weapon Jews could use to “exploit the base population.” To undermine the position of Jewish merchants the state exempted gentile cooperatives from taxes. Armed with this advantage, the cooperatives tried to attract customers with the slogan, “Don’t buy from Jews!”12
A government order of March 28, 1891, compelled Jewish tradesmen, mechanics, and other skilled laborers to leave Moscow. Including their family members, this measure affected ten thousand Muscovites who had previously been allowed to reside in the city because of the head of the family’s special skills. They were now to be replaced by gentile tradesmen and mechanics. To increase opportunities for gentiles, Kiev had already expelled Jewish plasterers, masons, stonecutters, carpenters, stucco workers, carters, gardeners, servants, unskilled laborers, and butchers, together with their families, in 1885. An edict of June 11, 1892, prohibited Jews from directly electing representatives to the local council, as gentiles did. Within the Pale, administrators determined which Jews would be admitted to communal parliaments, and their numbers were never allowed to exceed 10 percent. In 1893, the Russian state made it a criminal offense for Jews to use Christian names.
These special laws, together with the pogroms either tolerated or directly unleashed by the state, achieved their desired effects. Masses of Russian Jews began emigrating. Some 880,000 of them left for the US between 1880 and 1904. All told, some 1,150,000 Jews fled Russia within the space of fifteen years, with conspicuous peaks coming after the pogroms of 1890–91 and 1903–05. But as common as emigration was, it was not enough to counteract the growth in Russia’s Jewish population—there were around 85,000 more Jewish births than deaths in the country annually.13
The average émigré to the US came from a poor artisan family, arrived there with only $8.70 to his name, and resettled his whole family. That made Russian Jews the poorest of all the immigrant groups, although they could count on the assistance of relatives who had already settled in the US. In the words of one historian, unlike other migrants, they were most likely to receive a “welcome reception.” The density of social relations among the East European Jews subsidized both passage and settlement. The result was a system of serial migrations of extended families that allowed even the poorest of the poor to pack up their scant belongings and flee their homeland, where they had few to no rights.14
Around 1900, 120,000 people lived in Kishinev (today Chișinău, Moldova), part of the Black Sea region called Bessarabia. Their numbers included some 30,000 Russians, 20,000 Romanian-speaking Moldovans, and 50,000–60,000 Jews. Kishinev was known as “the wealthy center of one of the most blessed Russian swaths of land.” Farmers benefited from the fertile soil, and Jews, too, suffered far less privation than elsewhere, although they were not permitted to own property or participate in banking and finance. They did, however, control trade and artisanship, since Moldovans “were neither talented nor hard-working enough” to market the products of their labor. For that, they needed Jews who were long tolerated by the “sluggish and epicurean” majority—that, at least, was the impression of the authors of a report drawn up in 1910 by a commission of the Zionist Relief Fund in London and titled “Anti-Jewish Pogroms in Russia.” The report went on to note that Christians in affluent Kishinev had not taken part in pogroms like those that flared up throughout southern Russia from 1881 to 1883, turning deaf ears to the common calls to “Smite the Jews!”
Although Kishinev prospered in the twenty years prior to 1903, and although there was neither an economic depression nor a failed harvest, on April 5 of that year, which marked both the final day of Passover and Easter Sunday, all hell broke loose. The primary document of the carnage for this and other subsequent pogroms was the 1910 report, which encompassed more than eight hundred pages and was published, with some delay, not in English but in German, the language most commonly spoken by the intended audience.15
Around noon on that spring day, several youths began attacking Jews. Police dispersed but did not arrest the attackers. That afternoon a crowd of men suddenly appeared at the city’s Novy-basar market. They were all wearing red shirts, fashionable holiday wear for Russian workers at the time, and shouted without interruption “Death to the Jews! Strike down the Jews!” They divided themselves up into twenty-four groups of ten to fifteen men and went on rampages throughout various city districts.
“They began hurling stones at houses in such numbers and with such force that they not only smashed windowpanes but shutters,” the report read. “Then they tore the doors and windows from their hinges, entered Jewish houses and apartments, and smashed and destroyed all the furniture and household effects. Jews were forced to turn over all their jewelry, money and everything they had of value to the thieves. Even the slightest act of resistance led to them being bashed over the head with broken pieces of furniture. The looting was particularly heavy in the warehouses. Goods were either stolen or tossed out into the street and destroyed. A large crowd of Christians—members of the ‘intelligentsia,’ state officials, seminarians and others—trailed in the marauders’ wake. Ladies from the ‘best society’ accepted clothing, donning silk coats and wrapping themselves in fine material where they stood. The looters themselves did much the same. They got drunk on spirits, put on the jewelry they had taken and dressed up in stolen clothing. On Gostinnaya Street, a shoe warehouse was plundered. The marauders threw away their old shoes and pulled on new ones. The police officers in attendance joined in. All polished boots were handed over to the police.”
In their frenzy, “with a kind of lust,” the plunderers and marauders hacked everything they didn’t steal into tiny pieces, throwing tables out the windows and ripping apart pillows, together with cushions they had cut open, so that the feathers “swirled like snow.” While several hundred people actively took part in the pogrom, the rest of the city inhabitants attended a Sunday concert or strolled around, saying to one another, “At least we can enjoy a nice walk without having to breathe in that Jewish smell.” While the attackers raged through the side streets, “the elegant world rode past in carriages enjoying the spectacle of such uncontrolled destruction.” The report added: “Christians were standing calmly in the doorways of their houses. Smiling, they watched the pogromshchiki go to work and helped out wherever they were needed.” An engineer named Baginsky, for instance, showed the furious and soon bloodthirsty mob “which were the Jewish and which the Christian warehouses.” At 5 p.m., the first person was murdered. “The plunderers descended upon a tram where a Jew was present and yelled to the other passengers ‘Throw the Jew out to us!’ The man was pushed out, and such terrible blows rained on his head from all sides that his skull broke open and his brains seeped out.”
Policemen out on patrol were indifferent to this spectacle. Later, the police chief rode through the streets, where he was surrounded by plunderers wanting to know whether they were allowed to kill Jews. The police chief said nothing. “His silence was the decisive factor,” the report concluded. “Those who had organized and led the orgy of violence had restrained themselves a bit. Now they and the other Christians recognized that they had nothing to fear from the police and that Jews were completely at their mercy.” The following day, high schoolers, theology students, and government officials marked Jewish homes with white chalk. Workers and bourgeois joined those who had wreaked such mayhem the day before. “Messengers were sent to nearby villages inviting the farmers to come to the city and help plunder Jewish homes and businesses. They were told to bring large sacks.”
In the end, forty-nine Jews were murdered in Kishinev. People from all segments of society—“soldiers and police, officials and priests, children and women, farmers, workers and vagabonds”—participated in this mass crime. Groups of plunderers, brawlers, and murderers quickly expanded from ten or twenty to eighty to one hundred people. “The murderers raped women, one after another, in front of their husbands and children,” the Zionist Relief Fund report explained. The most disturbing passages described in gruesome detail how individuals, all of them named, were humiliated, abused, tortured, and killed out in the open for all to see.
The mob stormed synagogues with “especial rage.” In one, the intruders murdered the beadle as he tried to protect the Holy Scriptures. The Torah was torn from its ark and the parchment ripped to shreds, which were then given to Christian children who immediately “sold them for a few kopeks as a ‘souvenir of Kishinev.’” The report adds: “Many people betrayed Jewish tenants who had lived in their houses for ten years or more to the marauding bands. It happened that Christians called out to Jews, promising protection, sometimes in return for money, only to beat them and join in the looting and destruction, when the raging mob arrived. People who had been employed by Jewish businesses for years themselves encouraged the bands of attackers to attack Jews.”
Fresh troops arrived and declared martial law, whereupon the situation calmed down. But within the space of a few hours all legal, moral, religious, and civic norms had been shattered, and in a savage frenzy, tens of thousands of people had “suffocated every human feeling” and “blurred all lines of gender, education, age, caste and class distinction.” Seemingly out of nowhere, envy, greed, and brutality had exploded in Kishinev on April 5, 1903. It was an “abrupt, terrible catastrophe during an era in which pogroms were considered things of the past.” Even worse, this pogrom was “the first in a long chain of misfortunes … that would befall Russian Jews” in the two years that followed. Kishinev itself experienced more days and nights of looting, destruction, and murder starting in October 18, 1905. Twenty-nine Jews were murdered, although the international public took little notion of this further mayhem. During the revolutionary turmoil of 1905, 656 pogroms took place in Russia, with some locations seeing multiple outbreaks of violence.16
In 1906 Wilhelm Münz, the rabbi of the town of Gleiwitz in Silesia, struggled to find words to describe how Jews had been butchered. In an open letter to world leaders, he wrote that people were dying “because they’re Jews” and that the “guardians of the law”—government officials, police, and soldiers—had become “murderers of the law.” As a result, “the horrible work of systematically prepared human butchery has been able to spread with unfettered wildness throughout the country.”17 Contemporaneous literature shows how accurate he was. Six years before the first Kishinev pogrom, the arch-reactionary, government-supported newspaper Besarabez was founded. It was the only regional newspaper in the area and was heavily influenced by Russified Moldavan finance official Pavel Krushevan. The highest ranking censor in the district, Vice Governor Ustrugov, authorized the paper and himself wrote articles hostile to Jews under a pseudonym. In 1903, in St. Petersburg, Krushevan was one of the people responsible for the notorious anti-Semitic pamphlet, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”
In the autumn of 1905, on the margins of the public agitation of Lenin and Trotsky, occurred the bloodiest pogrom by far. Christian inhabitants of Odessa had already launched pogroms in 1821, 1859, 1871, 1881, and 1900. The city had rapidly expanded during the nineteenth century, and new inhabitants poured in, bringing with them problems that prompted crises. From 1850 onward, Jewish merchants succeeded in gradually taking over the export of grain, a significant trading sector in the port city. Some Jews also became prominent bankers and stockbrokers. Greek merchants who made their homes there felt they were being pushed to the side and launched the pogrom of 1871 because they were “losing the competition over trade monopolies.”18
The majority of Odessa businesses and factories may have remained in Christian hands, and most Jews may have been poor, but Odessa’s Russian inhabitants became convinced that they were being exploited by Jews nonetheless. Day laborers, the jobless, and port workers, who were particularly susceptible to economic ups and downs, accused Jews of pushing down wages. “Several years ago, there was one Jew for every hundred Russian coachmen,” one carriage driver lamented. “But ever since the rich Jews have given the poor ones money [to buy or rent a horse and wagon], there are more Jewish carriage drivers than you can count.” Odessa’s Jewish population did, in fact, increase by a factor of ten, from 14,000 to 140,000, between 1860 and 1900. As a proportion of the general population, Jews went from 14 to 35 percent in that period.
The 1905 pogrom was preceded by revolutionary unrest among workers. In June of that year, protesters at the port set fire to wooden shacks, soldiers fired into the crowd, and by the following morning 2,000 people had been killed. On October 18, large numbers of demonstrators once again convened. Initially, they chanted “Down with the autocracy,” “Long live freedom,” and “Down with the police,” but soon many protesters, mindful of the catastrophe during the summer, gravitated toward groups who were agitating for a proud, nationalistically defined Russian fatherland and who carried pictures of the tsar and not the red flags of socialist revolution. The character of the marches completely shifted, and dissatisfied day laborers, port, factory, and construction workers, small shop owners, salesmen, low-level employees, rubberneckers, and passersby joined in. Ethnically, the marchers were Russians, Ukrainians, and Greeks. Together they sang religious and nationalist songs. Vodka flowed. Once an initial shot was fired somewhere, the October pogrom in Odessa—the most virulent in what turned out to be fateful months for Russian Jews—began to run its course. The attackers were largely working class and had fought against the tsar’s rule as recently as the previous June. According to police statistics, some 400 people, 300 of them Jews, were killed between October 19 and 21. Other serious estimates put the number of victims at double that.19 Thousands of people were wounded or had everything they owned taken from them. At least 1,600 houses, apartments, and businesses were destroyed.
The violence was sparked by profound social inequalities and the general agitation created by the ebb and flow of the June protests. State tolerance of violence against Jews legitimized proletarian hatred for Jewish grain exporters, who served as scapegoats for the economic crisis, working-class misery, and the dearth of decently paid work. Although port workers and day laborers had vented their anger and challenged state authorities in June by destroying harbor buildings, “in October the same workers directed their ire against Jews.” The economic situation had not changed, but the political one was now different. Forces wanting to preserve state authority had regrouped and won a significant portion of the impoverished Christian working class back over to the nationalist cause.
A few months later, the chief executive of the Relief Association for German Jews, Paul Nathan, offered his summary of the acts of terror sponsored by the Russian state but carried out by ordinary people. Nathan’s statistics were consistently conservative, but he still recorded anti-Jewish “butcherings,” as he called them, in no fewer than 639 places in the eighteen months after the Kishinev pogrom. Nine hundred sixty-five people were killed (300 alone in Odessa), and 38,225 families “affected by these terrible events.” In total, 162,700 people had been “plundered, wounded, abused and butchered in their home countries by their own fellow citizens,” and it had happened with “the friendly assistance and even direct assistance of government bodies.”
Jews’ “long period of suffering” didn’t end with this wave of violence, Nathan wrote in 1913. On the contrary, it was the start of “a new era of discrimination.” Russian Jews remained unable to freely choose a trade, buy property, live wherever they wanted, or send their children to secondary schools and universities as a matter of course. They enjoyed no legal rights. At the mercy of all, they were repeatedly subjected to arbitrary acts of violence.
When Russian prime minister Pyotr Stolypin took office in 1906, it briefly seemed possible that the restrictions on Jews might be relaxed. But any such hopes were quickly dashed. By December 1906, after Nathan had met with Stolypin on numerous occasions, he wrote that all their discussions had come to nothing. Stolypin, Nathan reported, had spoken “in the most critical terms” about the entirely wrongheaded laws concerning Jews. But when asked why he didn’t act on those beliefs, he had answered: “Because we cannot!”20 At the same time that “the boldest speeches for liberty” were being held in the duma, a resigned Nathan wrote in the association’s annual report, “organs of the government in the provinces continue doing whatever they want in concert with the Russian people and other criminal organizations of Russian bureaucracy.”
Russia’s leadership refused to consider Jewish emancipation because they feared provoking popular resistance and endangering public order. On January 23, 1907, when Tsar Nicholas II received a delegation from the “Real Russians Association,” the leader of that group said: “I beseech you, oh mighty emperor, not to grant the Jews any rights. Otherwise they will rule over us.” Every inch the monarch, Nicholas responded: “I will take that into consideration.” Indeed, nothing was done to ease the situation of the Jews. Following the Russian example, a group of “Real Romanians”—“many of them descendants of a curious mix of races,” as Nathan sarcastically noted—soon formed. In 1909, they set about terrorizing Jews in Turnu Severin, Fălticeni, and Bucharest.21
On August 19, 1907, Nathan once again sought out Stolypin but without getting any positive response. Ten days later, the Real Russians published their platform, according to which, as was the case in Romania, Jews were to be considered foreigners.22 In April 1910, a delegation from the Russian Rabbis Conference secured an appointment with Stolypin. The latter kept the clergymen “waiting for a long time, listened to their petitions impatiently,” and rebuffed them. “The improvement in the situation of Russian Jews is a matter for the distant future,” he said, explaining that “the Jewish question touches upon general political and civic questions.”23
WHAT HISTORICAL CIRCUMSTANCES bolstered anti-Jewish hostility in traditional Russia? In his book Easter in Kishinev: Anatomy of a Pogrom, Edward H. Judge writes of “the perceived ignorance and vulnerability of the Russian lower classes,” whose reactions and sensitivities the tsars had no option but to take into account. Exacerbating the situation were the destabilizing effects of industrial modernity, which happened comparatively slowly in Russia but which was perceived as very rapid, as no less a writer than Anton Chekhov depicted in The Cherry Orchard. Other contributing factors were the end of serfdom (more threatening than empowering when serfs lacked money, land, or education), the abrupt growth in the population, and the hunger and increasing readiness to revolt among the rural poor. In The Jewish Century, American historian Yuri Slezkine proposed a distinction between western and eastern anti-Semitism: “Fin de siècle Hungary and Germany (and later most of Russia’s western neighbors) contributed to the growth of political anti-Semitism by combining vigorous ethnic nationalism with a cautiously liberal stance toward Jewish social and economic mobility; late imperial Russia achieved a comparable result by combining a cautious ethnic nationalism with a vigorous policy of multiplying Jewish disabilities.”24
A further aggravation was the location of the Pale where Jews were permitted to settle. Sited on the disputed margins of the tsarist empire, which had only been conquered in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, the territory was still the subject of fierce nationalist acrimony. The Pale included Latvia, Belarus, the Kingdom of Poland-Lithuania, which extended well into Ukraine, formerly Ottoman Transnistria, Crimea, and heavily Romanian Moldava. In the latter part of the nineteenth century, separatist movements would flourish in all these places. Increasing the potential for conflict, the western parts of the Russian Empire were industrialized far more quickly than the central and eastern ones. Nationalist striving for independence and pressures caused by unequal industrial progress often discharged themselves in hostility toward Jews.
AT THE CENTER of all the conflict was education. On December 5, 1886, Russia restricted the number of Jews allowed to study at the country’s eight universities, setting different quotas for various institutions. The proportion of Jews in Moscow and St. Petersburg was capped at 3 percent; in Kharkov, Dorpat (Tartu), and Tomsk 5 percent; and in Warsaw, Kiev, and Odessa 10 percent. This drastically limited Jews’ opportunities to educate themselves and improve their lot in life. Before the implementation of the new regulation, Jews had represented 11.7 percent of students in St. Petersburg, 10.1 percent in Moscow, 28.4 percent in Kharkov, 14.8 percent in Dorpat, 15.5 percent in Kiev, and 29.8 percent in Odessa.25 If able to, young Jewish men hungry for knowledge went to Western Europe. One of them was the later president of Israel Chaim Weizmann, who studied chemistry in Darmstadt and Berlin.26
Even leftist constitutionalists in the duma followed the logic behind the discriminatory quotas. If Jews were allowed to develop without constraint, the reasoning ran, it would spell the end of the Russian people, who were deemed too immature “to resist the attacks of such a superior segment of the population.”27
In July 1887, the restrictions on Jews studying at university were followed by corresponding ones for university-track middle schools that, together with academies, were the gateway to a higher education. Those limits were intended to ensure a “normal numerical relation of Jewish school pupils to pupils of the Christian confession” and set a cap of 10 percent on Jewish pupils in the cities of the Pale. Here we should recall that Jews often made up 38 percent and sometimes as much as 50 percent or more of the population of such cities.
Between 1870 and 1881, the proportion of Jews in middle schools in Odessa had risen from 19.2 to 35.2 percent and in Vilnius from 10.4 to 26.7 percent. Politicians violently throttled back young Jews’ chances for education, among other things, because they sensed how well such edicts were received by “the Russian population at large” and how much the nationalist, imperial policies of Alexander III were greeted by “warm sympathies and moral support.”28 On educational policy as well, Russian state anti-Semitism proved an excellent means of provisionally plastering over the cracks in the social order.
No sooner had the education minister denied the majority of Jews access to middle schools than he turned his attention to the public specialized trade schools and academies. Again the justification was neither religious nor racial. The crucial element was the superior zeal for learning among all Jewish students, which to some extent originated in Jews’ pariah status and was anchored in their bright minds and intellectual training. “The Jew always strives with all his might to be one of the best students in class and never to fail an exam,” wrote the liberal former Russia Postal and Telegraph Minister Count Ivan Tolstoy in 1907. “This measure entails nothing other than seeing the overly strong drive of Jews for education as an anomaly.” Having “encouraged Jews to attend educational institutions for twenty years,” in 1886 the government was shocked “at the glorious results they had achieved.” Tolstoy wrote, “Usually he doesn’t have to repeat grades and finishes his studies in the regular time.” By contrast, Christian pupils much more frequently had to repeat classes or were expelled for poor marks. For Tolstoy, that was the explanation why despite strict quotas, Jews ultimately made up “a conspicuously large number” of the students who received university-qualifying degrees.
That ran contrary to the intended result, so the educational administration of the Kharkov governorate carried out a representative study of the situation. The governor had reported “a significant rush of people of Jewish origins” spreading “materialistic views” and exercising “a by no means salutary influence” on the youth of Russia. The Education Ministry then formed a committee to investigate “the overcrowding of educational institutions by Jews.” It recommended extending quotas to all places of learning that led to further education. Beginning in 1890, voluntarily or after state pressure, private educational institutions began to do precisely this. In 1901, the responsible minister reduced the quota from 10 to 7 percent in the Pale. The reduction wasn’t enshrined in law. It was instituted administratively.29 In 1911, the Russian Council of Ministers came up with another trick to lower the numbers of Jews in the higher ranks of schools. Quotas were no longer calculated on the basis of the number of young people enrolled in public high schools or middle schools, but also included children who studied at home or in private schools and went on to take university-qualifying exams. This additional hurdle led to the “near complete exclusion of knowledge-hungry Jewish young men from access to the necessary school qualifications.”
Even those few who did obtain such qualifications were often barred from attending university. In 1912, some 3,000 Jews applied for university places in Russia, but only 350 matriculated. In 1913, there were an equal number of Jewish applications, with a mere 164 matriculations, and not a single one at the universities of Warsaw and St. Petersburg. The official reason was that the quota had been exceeded in previous years, and balance had to be restored.
Similar restrictions were put on professional schools. In 1882, even before the quota edicts of 1886 and 1887, the Russian War Ministry capped the proportion of Jewish military doctors at 5 percent and instituted a moratorium on hiring Jewish physicians throughout the Pale. The ministry also reduced the proportion of Jewish students at the military medical academy first to 5 and then to zero percent. An edict of March 3, 1882, barred Jews from auditing university lectures outside the Pale and on May 22 barred Jewish private tutors with higher degrees from working as private tutors there. The only universities inside the Pale were those of Warsaw, Kiev, and Odessa.
On June 7, 1885, the tsar ordered that the number of Jews at the Kharkov Technological Institute be reduced to 10 percent. In the fall of 1885, the Russian government denied almost all Jewish applicants admission to the Royal Music Conservatory, the courses of the renowned Fröbel Foundation for Pedagogy, and Russia’s dentistry schools, which were all located outside the Pale. Moreover, as of 1889, Jews were no longer allowed to conduct military orchestras and were only permitted to make up at most 30 percent of the musicians. On January 27, 1887, a few weeks after the law restricting Jewish access to institutes of higher learning, the government had decreed that “Jews who studied in such institutions outside Russia do not belong to the privileged class of degree-holders free to live throughout the Empire, and thus they are not permitted to settle outside the Pale.” On August 22, 1888, the theater academies of St. Petersburg and Moscow were completely forbidden to admit Jews. On February 13, 1889, the same prohibition was applied to the Dombrova Mining Academy. On October 6, 1893, the Russian medical administration imposed quotas of between 3 and 5 percent on Jewish apprentice apothecaries.
A law of November 8, 1889, required Jews to obtain express permission from the Ministry of Justice to open legal practices. In the following fifteen years, every single application was rejected, and only an isolated few licenses were granted thereafter. One of the men behind the law was the chairman of the St. Petersburg Lawyers Association, Vladimir Spasovich, otherwise a political liberal. But faced with the fact that half the young lawyers in St. Petersburg court district were Jews, he concluded against his usual political convictions: “We are dealing with a colossal problem, one which cannot be solved according to the rules of cliché liberalism.”30 Following the same logic, the Russian interior minister ordered on December 23, 1894, that Jewish veterinarians would no longer be eligible for the civil service. In the meantime, the number of Jewish brokers had been capped at a third on Russia’s various stock markets. In 1890, a law was passed restricting Jewish participation in certain types of incorporated companies. That same year, a number of regional governors declared hundreds of market towns to be villages, in which Jews were forbidden to reside.31
The measures designed to protect the Christian majority slowed Jews’ education-fueled upward social mobility somewhat. Nonetheless, talented Jews constantly sought to find alternative paths to circumvent the increasingly severe restrictions. In his memoirs, Simon Dubnow wrote of traveling to St. Petersburg to study in the summer of 1880 “with a forged certificate of artisan training that was intended to help me gain ‘residence permission’ in a capital, which was closed off to Jews.” He succeeded in this aim with the help of the “unwritten Russian constitution”—bribes handed out to the relevant police officials. Large numbers of Jews paid off authorities in order to further themselves. In 1906, the sociologist and Zionist Arthur Ruppin would conclude that, despite all the barriers, none of the nationalities living within Russia in the past decades had made “anything like the progress concerning the acquisition of higher learning which Jews had.”32
As early as 1882, during a trip through Russia, the rabbi of Memel, Isaak Rülf, observed that “the Jewish doctor or apothecary is infinitely harder working and more diligent than the Russian one.” On his train journey from Vilnius to Minsk, he struck up a conversation with a salesman about the pogroms that had taken place the previous year. Rülf asked what had caused them. “The entire misfortune of the Russian Jew,” he was told, “resides in the fact that he is infinitely superior, cleverer, more useful, more ambitious and more ethical than the Russian.” That was why the charge was repeatedly leveled that “Jews were trying to push Christians aside everywhere and steal the bread from their mouths.” As a result, the “so-called educated, higher classes” were susceptible to particularly virulent hatred of Jews. This deadly enmity was sparked by “the subjects of envy.”33
The Polish-born social historian Arcadius Kahan, later on the faculty of the University of Chicago, wrote of the late tsarist period: “There was hardly an area of entrepreneurial activity from which Jewish entrepreneurs were successfully excluded. Apart from the manufacturing industries in the Pale of settlement, one could have encountered them at the oil wells of Baku, in the gold mines of Siberia, on the fisheries of the Volga and Amur, in the shipping lanes on the Dniepr, in the forests of Briansk … on railroad construction sites anywhere in European or Asian Russia, on cotton plantations of Central Asia, etc.” Jews had also founded the leading Russian banks, even though the wielders of political power had always sought to keep them out of such positions. In 1911, Stolypin tried to drive Jews out of the bread trade. In 1913–14, laws came into force that denied Jews the right to sell or manage property and serve on the boards of incorporated companies. Ultimately, such measures too were only partially successful. In 1914, the government determined to its shock that in Russia’s northwestern territories, only 8 percent of the employees of banks and incorporated companies were Russians, compared with 35 percent Jews, 26 percent Germans, and 19 percent Poles.34
Protectionism gave birth to further protectionism. One detail in particular speaks volumes about the effects of attempts to protect the majority. At first glance, it seems merely grotesque, but upon closer inspection it shows how central a motivator the Christian majority’s shamefully concealed incompetence was. Because only small numbers of Jews were allowed to continue their educations at higher levels, the best and brightest of them grabbed the few places available. But the meritocratic principles used as educational selection criteria only highlighted the inferiority of those Jews’ Christian schoolmates. To reduce what was perceived as a shameful gap in ability, in 1913 Russian authorities decreed that henceforth Jewish pupils would no longer be granted places at higher educational institutions on the basis of their grades but by lottery.35
Ultimately, the ever more variable and bureaucratically inflexible obstacles that were put in the way of Jews’ desire to better themselves only achieved one thing. Instead of increasing Russian national pride and enlisting it as an integrative force to benefit the tsar’s rule, they stoked hatred—all the more so when those supposed to be excluded managed to overcome such barriers. Despite being kept down in all these ways, Jews coped more ably with the new era than the majority of Russians. A thin but highly successful caste of Jewish merchants and bankers, entrepreneurs, engineers, and doctors shook up the country and earned good money in the process. They were granted privileges whenever it was in the government’s interest—yet another source of hatred in the mainstream against Russia’s Jewish minority, who were accused of exploiting simple, patriotic Christians.
Notwithstanding the many myths of the Romanian people’s long and glorious past, Romania only came into existence in 1859, when a group of aristocrats merged the principalities of Wallachia and Moldova. They soon made Bucharest the capital, established two chambers of parliament elected by census suffrage, confiscated church lands, and created a governmental administration based at least superficially on the French model.
Five years later, the new Romania abolished the last vestiges of serfdom. Yet because the power of the large landowners continued unbroken, the nominally liberated peasantry remained mired in poverty. As was also true in Russia, former serfs in Romania were largely unable to cope with their new freedom, deprived of resources and without entrepreneurial ability.36
According to the 1899 census, Romania had almost six million inhabitants, of whom 4.5 percent, or 266,000, were Jewish. Romanian Jews mostly worked as small-time merchants or independent tradespeople, for instance as bakers, carpenters, roofers, saddlers, clockmakers, tailors, tinsmiths, or masons. A minority of them were involved in the extremely tepid industrialization of the country. Around 1900, Jews owned around half of all glassmaking businesses and a third of the furniture and textile factories. In 1864, a year of massive reforms, Romania had introduced compulsory education and called upon Jewish communities no longer to teach their children at home but to send them to public schools. Inspired by the ideal of assimilation, the Romanian government hoped “to bring Jewish and Romanian young people in closer contact,” since otherwise “the division of the nation” would persist. Jewish parents did as they were asked, but the state administration, which was poorly run, had difficulty convincing illiterate Romanians of the value of formal education. For that reason by 1880, Jewish pupils made up 11 percent of the total school population. In the cities that figure was often 30, 40, 50, or even 75 percent.
Success was quick to come. As one historian writes, Jewish children “entirely adopted the language and customs of the Romanian people,” and before long assimilated Jews accounted for “a significant number of the doctors, engineers, authors and mathematicians” as well as the lawyers, financial administrators, and railway and telegraph project managers. The census documented how different Jewish parents, children, and young people were in their drive to educate themselves. That year, thirty-five years after compulsory education had been introduced, 82.7 percent of Romanians still classified themselves as illiterate.
Yet while Jewish assimilation seemed to be progressing nicely, Jews’ legal situation remained precarious. They were still considered “foreigners” and “aliens” no matter how long their families had lived on Romanian soil. A 1864 law on military service enshrined this legal category. It said that along with Romanian citizens, “foreigners who reside in the country and do not enjoy any other nation’s protection” were also subject to conscription. That was how Jews—foreigners who were not protected anywhere in the world—were officially described, and they were the only ones meant whenever there was talk about foreigners. In 1866, after lengthy debates, accompanied by serious acts of anti-Jewish violence, the Romanian parliament passed Article 7 of the country’s constitution, which deemed that only Christians could gain Romanian citizenship. Meanwhile extra-parliamentary social movements were started to exert an influence on the country’s lawmakers. An émigré to Lviv writing under the pseudonym S. Jericho-Polonius reported: “The first anti-Semitic outbreaks were inaugurated on the day Article 7 became law with the destruction of the grand, newly built synagogue in Bucharest. As usual, the national guard arrived too late on the scene—their mission consisted of nothing but watching over the ruins.”37
No sooner had Jewish pupils been integrated into public schools than journalists and parliamentarians began complaining that they had “assimilated too quickly and were too hungry for knowledge.” In 1883, a spokesman for the Romanian Teachers’ Association found that schools were “too full of Jews,” so that there was no room left for Romanian children. At first, authorities attempted to redress this putative imbalance on the level of administrative policy. French observer Bernard Lazare wrote, “Contravening the law, teachers began to send Israelite pupils home under the pretext that individual schools were already full.” But teachers also abused Jewish children and humiliated them in front of their peers, accusing them, for example, of tardiness because they had “helped their fathers in their usurious pursuits.”
In the summer of 1887, the Romanian minister of education openly advised the principals of public schools to preferentially admit Christian pupils. Encouraged in this way, educators turned away thousands of Jewish youngsters. Six years later, these policies were written into law. Foreigners—that is, Jews—were henceforth only to be admitted to schools insofar as there was “space for them.” Even when Jewish pupils were allowed to attend classes, their parents had to pay exorbitant special new school fees for foreigners—in cities those fees were double what they were in the countryside. In addition, there were foreigner-specific charges for getting documents and certificates stamped and for the administration of tests. Such discriminatory laws had the desired effect. In 1891–92 Jewish pupils represented 15.5 percent of the elementary school population, but ten years later that figure had declined to 5.5 percent—although part of this trend may have been due to better enforcement of compulsory education among Christian families.38
As they were making it as difficult as possible for Jewish children to attend grammar school, officials and lawmakers also tried to block the admission of Jewish young people to middle schools and university-track high schools. Discussions in parliament about the discriminatory laws concerning Jews and schools were mostly harmonious. One of the few deputies who spoke out against the legislation was the Anglophile, centrist economics minister Petre P. Carp, always a proponent of pragmatic compromise. On February 16, 1893, he was given the word on the floor at the Chamber of Deputies in Bucharest. The protocol reads:
Carp: You complain today as you did ten years ago that we are being held down by the Jewish element. You say that our nation is under threat. I say: our nation will be under threat if you don’t want to work the way the Jews do. Herein resides the solution to the Jewish question. Let’s give the Romanian everything he has a claim to. Then tell him: you are beautiful, and you are great and strong, but you must know that you will lose all these advantages if you refuse to preserve them by working hard. That’s what we have to tell the Romanian people. If we tell them that, if they get used to the sort of work they are not accustomed to … (cries of protest) …
You say the Jews have to be gotten rid of. I understand your logic as follows. The Romanian people are in danger. So either this particular element has to be driven out so that it doesn’t pose a threat any longer, or it will have to be killed. But since you retain this element in the country and are unable to kill it, then the question arises: What is in the best interests of the country? Is it better to have 200,000 ignoramuses, or is it better to have schools bring this foreign element more in line with our character? You want this foreign population to be a population of the uneducated, but then it truly does represent a danger for us. Or you want these foreigners to found their own schools. But these will be better than ours because these persecuted people work harder than everyone else. And then, the competition between them and us in some other area will be terrible since the Jew will be a foreigner with a foreign culture and not a foreigner with Romanian culture … (interjections, interruptions)
Oh, I see, you want to go a step further and say: ‘I’m not going to give you permission to attend school!’ Can you do this? No! Well, then, if you don’t drive them from the country or kill them or keep them in a state of ignorance, and you’re not able to prevent them from founding their own schools, what results do you think you can achieve? You’ll achieve nothing at all! And in reality, for decades we’ve done nothing but institute measures and defend ourselves against them without achieving any practical results. You don’t learn from experience. You’ve drowned them, the Jews, in the Danube. You’ve done whatever you wanted with them …
Calls: We object … you are denouncing our country … A Romanian minister has no business talking like that. (noise)
Carp: With your permission, it is my duty to confront you with the facts of the case. I’ve done nothing but cite the laws of this country back at you. I have brought up the expulsion [of Jews] from rural communities. I have cited all the measures you yourselves have taken.39
The expulsion Carp mentions refers to the driving of Jews from villages and smaller market towns, as had also happened in Russia. In Romania, this took place on the authority of a general law enacted on October 7, 1892. Parallel to the restriction concerning schools, state authorities erected barriers to Jews attending agricultural and technical academies, commercial and trade schools, and universities of all sorts. By this point, Jews could only gain admittance to institutions of higher education if “places were left open by the sons of Romanians,” and the total number of Jews was capped at one-fifth. If Jews did manage to continue their studies, they were also subject to special, sometimes exorbitant fees, just as Jewish school pupils were. On principle, they were not eligible for scholarships or any forms of assistance.
On February 18, 1909, Paul Nathan complained that the Romanian state was “de jure or de facto closing off all access to public, tax-funded schools” to Jewish young people. Starting in 1893, Jews had been forced to use private money to reestablish their own schools, but before long they, too, were subject to arbitrary state repression. In 1899, the education minister prohibited Sunday instruction, and the government levied a special tax on every child “attending a private school that doesn’t follow the public curriculum.” By the 1900–1901 school year, only 0.8 percent of Romanian secondary-school students were of the Jewish faith.
Jews were barred from the civil service and the military and, while allowed to study law, prohibited from legal practice. For a time they were permitted to become doctors, if they could afford the horrendous special taxes slapped on Jews studying medicine. A sizable number of Romanian Jews concluded that it was better to study abroad and then return with diplomas and qualifications. But the Romanian government reacted promptly by amending the law to stipulate that only Romanians could practice medicine in Romania with a foreign diploma. As foreigners, Jews were excluded from this privilege. The law was soon also applied to engineers.
In other areas of economic life as well, nothing got better and a lot got worse for Jews. Between 1867 and 1875, the Romanian government had banned Jews from producing or selling tobacco and alcohol. Similar bans concerning matches and cigarette papers followed. According to a 1898 ordinance, attorneys found to be “foreigners” were to be permanently disbarred. Comparable regulations were imposed on apothecaries, doctors, veterinarians, druggists, stockbrokers, police, and members of the chambers of industry and trade. And on April 6, 1881, foreigners who endangered the “public order” or the “internal security of the state” faced being forcibly relocated within Romania or deported.
At the Congress of Berlin in 1878, in return for recognizing newly constituted Romania as a nation, the great European powers had demanded that it grant full rights to all residents of the country without regard to ethnicity or religion. But the leadership in Bucharest resolutely ignored those obligations. Until 1913, Romania naturalized only around a thousand Jewish families while the remaining 55,000 remained stateless, enjoying no official legal protection. Some 450 Jews worked as doctors, 35 as lawyers, around the same number as journalists, a handful as engineers, and two as professors. Jews were forbidden from selling wares door to door, owning more than four hectares of land, occupying official posts, trading at farmers’ markets, or serving on the executive boards of trade guilds. Unlike “Romanians,” as “foreigners” Jews didn’t get treated for free in hospitals. Instead they were required to pay special fees for every day of medical attention.
When the electric tram in Jaşi was built, the city government brought in foreign workers because, according to the official justification, Romanians found the job too difficult and the government didn’t want to hire Jewish laborers. The elected administrators of Bucharest behaved in similar fashion when they decided not to employ Jews in the construction of city streets and transport routes. In 1899, the minister responsible for railway administration had “Jewish track-layers, coachmen, carriers and workers driven from the workplaces and prohibited Jews from being hired to paint rail stations—since there were no Romanian workers in the region of western Moldova willing to do the work, laborers were brought in from Wallachia.” If Jews were active politically or got involved in trade unions, they could be deported as “harmful foreigners” without further ado.
All told, such measures were intended to promote and protect a national middle class consisting of tradesmen, merchants, specialists, and university graduates who, it was hoped, would displace the Jewish competition. The fathers of these policies may have talked aggressively of “preventing the absorption of Romania by the Jews.” But they hardly proceeded from an inner conviction in their own strength, as Lazare recognized: “People feared that the educated Jew would be superior to the Romanian, so he had to be humiliated to make him less dangerous.” After a pogrom that raged in Bucharest in 1897, the Romanian interior minister characterized this act of terror as “a regrettable reaction against the over-elevation of the Jews.” He made this statement after being questioned by the conservative deputy Alexandru Marghiloman, who wanted to know why police had done nothing to stop the violence.
As a result of the interplay of state and societal discrimination, by that juncture Jews represented only 4.2 percent of students at the country’s universities. In 1910, Italian prime minister Luigi Luzzatti, who came from a Jewish family, called Romanian Jews “the last remaining slaves in Europe.” In 1913, when Leon Trotsky, then still a journalist, went to view the battlefields of the Balkans, he came away with the impression that anti-Semitism had become a state religion in Romania. Trotsky wrote of the “final psychological cement that holds the thoroughly rotten feudal society together.” He added: “The artisan, the shopkeeper, the restaurant owner and the doctor and journalist with them are enraged at competition from Jews. The lawyer, civil servant and officer are afraid that if the Jew has equal rights, he will snap up his customers or his position.”
In 1902, Lazare concluded that, “as was the case everywhere, in Austria, Germany and France,” anti-Semites in Romania gussied up their agenda with phrases taken from Christian anti-Judaism but pursued purely materialistic ends. “In reality, they do not distinguish their commercial and industrial interests from their religious prejudices and use the latter to advance the former.” Lazare had nothing but bitter condemnation for Romanian socialists. In their earlier days, he wrote, they had advocated Jewish rights but then had allied themselves with the Liberals (centrist democratic nationalists), betraying their ideals or revealing their own fundamental lack of principles. “With members also engaged in the chase for jobs and wanting to enjoy their share of the state budget, the party gradually disappeared. Those who remained in the Socialist Party merged with the Liberals and became, like them, nationalists, protectionists and anti-Semites.”
Enemies of Jews weren’t content with getting parliaments and governments to pass anti-Semitic laws. They repeatedly engaged in destruction of property, larceny, and murder: in Bakău and Botşani in 1890; in Bucharest in 1897; in Iași in 1898 and 1899; in Drânceni in 1900; and then with special vigor during the peasant riots of 1907. On November 8, 1895, Christian community leaders founded the Anti-Semitic Alliance, which took the Archangel Michael as its patron and was organized as a kind of lodge. Among its first members and pioneers were influential politicians, including government cabinet member and later Prime Minister Take Ionescu (1858–1922), and political scientist Alexandru C. Cuza (1857–1947), who would go on to be minister of state.
This cross-party alliance, which defined itself as primarily “economic,” was dedicated to “protecting the Romanian against the Jewish element,” breaking Jewish “financial preponderance,” and “paralyzing” Jewish influence in all other areas. According to its statutes, the group issued publications and held an annual congress of anti-Semites in the Romanian capital “in conjunction with all foreign anti-Semites’ alliances.” In article two of its constitutive document, the founders stressed the importance of driving Jews from Romania: “Because the Jewish element is incapable of assimilation, the alliance will oppose their being granted political rights. It will employ all allowable means that can help make the situation of Jews in Romania impossible and thereby encourage them to emigrate from the country.”
On May 16, 1899, in Iași, a university city, the alliance demonstrated what this meant practically. An eyewitness report published a year later, on May 3, 1900, in Vienna’s Tagblatt newspaper, described what happened:
A week in advance manifestos were posted calling upon the Christian populace to rise up, teach Jews a lesson and fly banners from their own homes so they could be recognized. Decorated with cockades and acting as official agents, the ringleaders went to surrounding villages, especially the suburb Ciurchi, whose inhabitants are known as larcenous rabble, and commanded the mob to turn up on May 16 in Circus Sidoli, armed with sticks, for a large-scale anti-Semitic meeting. There was no shortage of money and wine to elevate the mood of ‘the people.’ … The meeting commenced, hateful tirades were held, two ladies from the demimonde got up on stage to chant ‘Down with the Jews’ and ‘Death to the Jews,’ and then everyone marched through the city, led by a band playing gypsy music, the students carrying banners that read ‘Down with the Jews’ and ‘Death to the Jews!’ They were followed in wagons by the city prefect, the police prefect, the prosecutor, professors and high-level civil servants. After the mob had been sufficiently incited, the first stones began to rain down on Jewish houses. Gendarmes and police watched from both sides of the march, and they were stripped of their arms as soon as they gave a hint of calling for calm. A gendarme captain named Vrabie, who was naïve enough to take his job as a representative of public order seriously, had his skull split open before the eyes of the prosecutor. This was how the friends of Mr. Take Ionescu marched through the streets, demolishing and trampling everything in their path. Woe to the poor Jew who didn’t succeed in fleeing to safety quickly enough. The following day, the city was a terrible sight. Rubble and ruins were everywhere as well as closed-up shops and terrified people discussing how they might save their very lives. This was the beginning of the general commercial decline.
In addition to the general mistrust of Jews, credit restrictions further darkened their economic prospects and left them with no choice but the “colossal mass emigration” the organized anti-Semites had hoped to provoke. Within a few months, by the end of May 1900, more than 10,000 Jews had left Romania, many for New York, although 2,500 went to Turkey, 2,000 to London and Paris, and several hundred each to Cyprus and other Central European countries. By 1914, a quarter of Romania’s Jewish population had emigrated. The percentage of “foreigners” in the total population had declined from 4.5 to 3.3, and the Anti-Semitic Alliance celebrated its initial series of triumphs.40
Accused of libel, the renowned writer Emile Zola was called to answer for himself in front of a Paris court from February 7 to 21, 1898. His legal counsel was Georges Clemenceau, the later two-time French prime minister, who was then the editor in chief of the republican newspaper L’Aurore. At issue in the case was a Zola article titled “Lettre à M. Félix Faure,” an open letter to the French president. It was published in L’Aurore with the headline “J’accuse…!” on January 13, 1898.
Filled with republican outrage, Zola had taken up the cause of a French Jew who had been convicted of treason and dishonorably discharged from the French military in 1894. Army captain Alfred Dreyfus had been imprisoned and left for dead on “Devil’s Island,” French Guiana. Zola demanded that Dreyfus be exonerated and the witnesses against him be convicted of forging documents and perjuring themselves. In Zola’s eyes they were the real traitors to the French republic and the rule of law, having disgraced and condemned the impeccably loyal Dreyfus on trumped-up charges of betraying military secrets to France’s archenemy, Germany. Zola also accused them of merging antirepublican themes with anti-Semitic ones, claiming that Catholic and royalist France had branded Dreyfus a traitor for the sole purpose of whipping up popular rage against a supposed enemy lurking within and thereby increasing support for the chauvinist and clerical reaction. Zola wrote: “It is a crime to poison the minds of the meek and the humble, to stoke the passions of reaction and intolerance, by appealing to that odious anti-Semitism that, unchecked, will destroy the freedom-loving France of the Rights of Man.”41
No sooner had Zola published his article than French anti-Semites unleashed violent protests in fifty-five cities. They occurred in three waves over the course of several weeks, and “often the ones by students took the most extreme forms.” The protesters destroyed Jewish-owned workshops and stores. Egged on by organizers, demonstrators in Paris chanted “Death to the Jews” and “Send Zola to Hell!” Graffiti reading “Never buy from Jews” and “France must belong to the French” were scrawled on walls. In French-run Algiers, there were also extended pogroms.42
On February 9, 1898, upon leaving the court building, Zola might have been “beaten to death like a dog, had he not been protected by a strong circle of police and had his horse not been such a good runner.” On February 21, a criminal court sentenced him to a year in prison and a fine of 3,000 francs. After his sentence was upheld on appeal, Zola fled for a few months to England. It’s worth remembering that while as a republican he adopted the cause of an unfairly persecuted Jew, as a pioneer of the naturalist novel he also didn’t shy away from “quite unlikeable depictions” (Dubnow) of Jews in works such as Nana (1880) and L’argent (1891).
Colonel Marie-Georges Picquart, himself an officer of the French General Staff, took even greater risks than the world-famous novelist. Two years after the Dreyfus trial, Picquart, who had become the head of French military intelligence, was ordered to find further evidence to back up Dreyfus’s conviction for treason. Picquart initially set about this task in the belief that Dreyfus’s court martial had been completely aboveboard. After reading the secret dossiers on the case, however, he was disabused of that idea. Picquart discovered forged documents, and his investigation soon turned from Dreyfus to another officer, who was a well-known pleasure-lover and heavily in debt. The results of Picquart’s investigation didn’t sit well with his superiors. In the name of military fraternity, they cancelled the review of the Dreyfus case and transferred Picquart to another job.
But Picquart refused to go quietly, giving the results of his investigation to a notary for safekeeping and later writing a letter to the French prime minister offering to provide proof that the general staff had forged incriminating evidence against Dreyfus. Picquart established the foundation upon which Zola and his allies could launch their campaign and achieve a retrial of Dreyfus in 1899. Those proceedings only resulted in a pardon. It would take another seven years until Dreyfus was legally exonerated. He was then promoted to major and made a knight of the French Legion of Honor.
Picquart’s superiors had transferred the troublesome officer, with his stubborn dedication to the truth, to Tunisia in 1896. They seem to have hoped Arab bandits would shoot him. Two years later, when that hadn’t happened, they discharged him from the army and accused him of being the forger, sending him to prison for eleven months. Eventually, Marie-Georges Picquart was also rehabilitated. In 1906 he was promoted first to major general, then to war minister, serving in the first cabinet of Clemenceau. In 1899, writer Anatole France called Picquart a “gift” to the Third Republic.43
After twelve long years of internal struggles, France managed to overcome the shame of anti-Semitic intrigues within the military. Yet at the same time, in the Action Française political movement, antidemocratic, antimodern forces had found a new long-term vehicle. One of its leading thinkers, Charles Maurras, excoriated Dreyfus’s rehabilitation as a “profound and general triumph of Jewish money.” Maurras believed that the influence of a “chorus of Jewish ideas” went all the way back to the protagonists of the Protestant Reformation in 1517 and the French Revolution of 1789. As the Israeli historian Zeev Sternhell wrote, “Maurras made anti-Semitism into a pillar of nationalism” and of a biological notion of the French people “that grounded citizenship and national identity in history and ethnicity.”44 Two decades before Mussolini and Hitler, the Action Française developed a vision for a strict, authoritarian political order in which an ethnically defined people would feel liberated and socially secure. Confident nationalism and strong state leadership would be combined with the selling points of socialism to fight against Anglo-Saxon democratic liberalism. Protectionism would mitigate the consequences of technological progress. The slogan of the Action Française was “Protectionisme, socialisme, nationalisme!” The group’s propaganda leaders suggested that their enemies were backed by the “power of the Jews” and “Israelite financiers.”45 In 1906, with Dreyfus’s exoneration, the republican spirit prevailed. But it was only a momentary comeback, a “triumph without a future” that showed how fragile the democratic social order was even in a country like France.46
Out of France’s total population of 40 million around 1890, there were only about 70,000 Jews, 50,000 of whom lived in Paris. Most were long-assimilated Sephardic immigrants. A small group of Ashkenazi Jews, to which Dreyfus belonged, came from the departments of Alsace and Lorraine, which Germany had annexed in 1871. French Jews had been granted full legal rights in 1791 and had participated in the Industrial Revolution, the effects of which were milder in France than in England, along with the rest of the French population. Unlike in Germany, Jews were allowed to become civil servants, prefects, and military officers. And almost uniquely in Europe, Jewish ministers served in the government, for example Adolphe (Isaac Moïse) Crémieux and David Raynal in the Second and Third Republics. Thus, the social and national conditions for a radicalization of the “Jewish question” were lacking in France. In contrast to Germany and Austria, Dubnow wrote, “the small handful of assimilated Jews provided far less of a reason for silly talk about them gaining the upper hand economically and culturally.”47 So how could anti-Semitism nonetheless take hold in France, the country of the great revolution?
In 1892, after a few minor anti-Semitic publications had come and gone, the newspaper La Libre Parole (The Free Word) commenced publication. Its motto was “France for the French!” and the publisher was the popular author Édouard Drumont. In 1886 he had brought out his major work, La France juive, which had gone on to become a long-term best seller, attracting several hundred thousand readers in its first year alone. As of 1892, the massive inflammatory tome had been available in a popular illustrated edition, and translations of the book into languages such as German also sold well. By 1889, the German translation was already in its sixth printing, and by 1945 there were more than 200 editions available worldwide.
Drumont was a Catholic monarchist who considered the French Revolution a misfortune that needed to be reversed posthaste. He characterized the 1889 Paris World’s Fair, which celebrated the centenary of the Revolution, as a threatening internationalist invasion and the Eiffel Tower as a blasphemy of Babylonian proportions. “From its banal heights, it was intended to destroy the Paris of our fathers and our memories, the old buildings and churches of Notre Dame, the Arc de Triomphe, [the city’s] piety, glory and honor,” Drumont wrote.48 Ever fond of dramatic images, he described how a Jewish tidal wave was rolling in from the east “from the area around Vilnius, the vagina judeorum so to speak.” It had flooded Germany, “crossed the Vosges,” and was now breaking over France.
Images of flooding were misleading. The truth was closer to a swelling stream. In the wake of the Russian and Romanian pogroms, 30,000 to 40,000 Jews had immigrated to France by the start of the First World War. Almost all of them moved to Paris. In 1914, they made up nearly half of all Jewish immigrants to the French capital. This group of Jews stood out because of their clothing, language, and customs. But as a group, they were also particularly ephemeral since many of them were only stopping off in Paris en route to the US.49 Like Heinrich von Treitschke and Adolf Stoecker in Germany, Drumont developed his campaign at a time of economic and social upheaval and of Jewish migration from Eastern Europe. Drumont accused Jews of having no positive creative gifts and of being selfish, emotionless, lustful, avaricious, disrespectful, presumptuous, exploitative, craven, arrogant, argumentative, sly, treacherous, megalomaniacal, usurious, damaging to public morals, blasphemous, traitorous, and more. On the first pages of his book, Drumont attributed all these ugly characteristics to “the Semite”—itself a new, derogatory word. The author, who otherwise had nothing good to say about Germans or Protestants, imported the term “anti-Semitism” from Germany.
Drumont frequently ended his newspaper editorials with the slogan “Down with the exploiters and thieves!” In La France juive, he asked: “Why would a Christian leader, a man of firm convictions and broad vision who considers matters not from a conventional perspective but looks at them directly—why would he not confiscate Jewish assets?” Drumont calculated the wealth of French Jews to be around five billion francs, and when he ran in a municipal election in Paris’s seventh arrondissement in 1890 he promised: “With this five billion we will solve the social question—without any earthquakes and without violence.”50
The roots of Drumont’s ideas were in part traditionally leftist, and he described socialist Alphonse Toussenel, a disciple of Charles Fourier, as his “spiritual father.” Toussenel had been one of the first Frenchmen to combine love for the common man and for democracy with hatred of Jews. In his 1845 book Les Juifs, rois de l’époque, he demonized Jews as a “nation within the nation,” “speculators,” “parasites,” and “fraudulent wheeler-dealers.” In 1941, the Nazi-friendly Vichy government honored Toussenel as a “pioneer” and a “socialiste national antisémite.” One of his later disciples proudly claimed that “the Germans and particularly Dr. Goebbels would no doubt be amazed” to learn of “this French kindred spirit.” Furthermore, a “direct line” could be drawn from “Toussenel’s thought to Hitler’s,” even though in the 1920s the “young inmate of Landsberg prison,” Hitler, was almost certainly unaware of Toussenel’s ideas put forward eighty years earlier. In 1941, the author of an anti-Semitic and nationalist-socialist pamphlet would conclude: “Germany and France are so close to one another intellectually that they could join forces politically. If that were to happen, the Jew would have to leave Europe and Germans and French would be the joint lords of the continent.”51
A number of early French socialists, including Pierre Leroux, Pierre Proudhon, Georges Duchene, and Auguste Blanqui, maintained fervent anti-Semitic attitudes. Gustave Tridon and Albert Regnard were both leaders of the Paris Commune and anti-Semites. Moreover, as historian Edmund Silberner has shown, in the years after 1871 “the most important writings with anti-Semitic tendencies came from the pens of socialists.”52
Drumont was certainly not alone when he defamed Jews as “parasites on the economic body of the European peoples.” But he was far more concerned with his home country’s economy than any foreign ones. As was also true in Germany, the French government discontinued its free-trade policies in the 1880s, introducing protective tariffs first on metal and textile products and then, at the behest of various special interests, on a range of other goods. As in other countries, anti-Semitism in France was directed against Anglo-American economic liberalism. Espousing the slogan “travail, famille, patrie,” French anti-Semites found supporters among all groups in French society. It was a short leap from class-spanning protectionism to state corporatism. This iteration of the socialist idea no longer aimed at combating capital as such but at politically restraining the market and freedom of competition. In times of crisis, the focus quickly switched to foreigners in general and Jews in particular. The resulting social order, which was considered new and just, required a strong state and, if necessary, a strong leader, who would be capable of resolving what was felt to be a painful conflict between economics and social welfare.53
In the same vein, article three of the statutes of the Ligue nationale antisémitique de France, which Drumont cofounded, demanded that the “moral and economic, industrial and commercial interests of our country must be defended with all means available.” Drumont opposed “Jewish-modern civilization” and offered the following justification for why “the Jew” was a dangerous competitor and creator of unrest: “In an age in which people only live by their brains, he has the necessary boldness at his disposal, the boldness of mind.” For reasons like this, Drumont and his followers insisted that Jews be pushed entirely out of French politics and their assets nationalized.54
The special-interest politics that dominated 1880s France reinforced the alliance between traditional agriculture and newly established industries. But protectionism in its various forms led to elevated domestic prices, economic stagnation, and a chronic negative balance of trade. As a result, industry, especially the textile trade, remained noncentralized and underdeveloped. To divert attention away from domestic economic problems and the fact that France was falling further and further behind, a succession of governments pursued colonial expansion. Tunisia was declared a protectorate in 1881, and Indochina and Madagascar followed in 1885 and 1890, respectively.
The extent to which protectionism, the resulting economic stagnation and anti-Semitism merged into one can be seen in the donation campaign Drumont organized in 1898 on behalf of a witness who had perjured himself testifying against Dreyfus. It raised 25,000 francs. Some 40 percent of those who donated were workers and artisans, primarily from the textile trade, while 29 percent were military men, primarily officers. Both groups felt under threat. French textile factories and manufacturers were in decline, while the French military had lost the war against Prussia in 1870 and was afraid of being stripped of influence by republicans. “The anti-Semitism Drumont represented,” French historian Esther Benbassa writes, “united the divided forces of the nation, Catholics and workers, in the fight against the Republic, which was excoriated as capitalist, Jewified and of course anti-Catholic.”55
Against the backdrop of this broad appeal, French socialists began to flirt with French anti-Semites. They considered the enemies of Jews as “useful assistants.” Fearful of alienating their electoral base, they treated Drumont and his followers with kid gloves. In the words of Clemenceau, they “smiled at anti-Semitism because they believed that combatting Jewish capitalism would help them overcome capitalism as such.”
Following this logic, the socialist group in the French parliament reacted to Zola’s “J’accuse!” in a fashion not atypical of European socialists at the time. On January 13, 1898, the thirty-two deputies present unanimously called upon their followers and voters to remain neutral in the Dreyfus affair, citing two reasons. First, the reactionaries were using the conviction of a single Jew as an indictment of all Jews. But second, they argued, Jewish capitalists were exploiting Dreyfus’s rehabilitation as a way of “washing Israel clean of all stains.” The socialist deputies simultaneously warned against anti-Semitism while showing understanding for it: “In light of the involvement of the Jewish business world in all the scandals, certain segments of the populace, in particular from the petite bourgeoisie, think they are fighting against capital when they fight against Jewish power. These people are socialists in spe.” That was the position of France’s socialist press on January 20, 1898.56 At the same time, Drumont reached out to socialists as incipient anti-Semites, writing: “Christian civilization nurtured labor, ennobling and honoring it in well-chosen words—Jewish civilization, led by capitalist Jews, exploits labor.”57
By 1925, some 100,000 Eastern European Jewish immigrants had settled in France. Established French Jews were not well disposed toward them, fearing that their behavior, which was considered uncouth, would reflect badly on Jews as a whole and prompt further resentment.58 Nonetheless, the time between Dreyfus’s rehabilitation and the start of the Great Depression in 1929 was relatively calm. The First World War and France’s victory over Germany temporarily drowned anti-Semitism in a wave of patriotic enthusiasm. Most Jewish immigrants from Poland, Russia, and Greece were integrated as they “rose into the middle classes.” The second generation had already established itself in the free trades, the higher levels of administration, and the universities. As Benbassa wrote, “several immigrants’ sons, for example André Citroën, who was born in 1878 in Russian-Poland Białystock, succeeded in spectacularly climbing the social ladder.”59
Jews settled in Salonika in the first century BC. At the time, the port city was the center of the Roman province of Macedonia. Later Paul the Apostle preached in the synagogue there, trying to convince his reluctant listeners that the messiah was coming. In 1430, the Ottomans conquered the city. Fifty years later, expelled during the reign of Catholic King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, thousands of Sephardic Jews fled there from Spain, Portugal, Sicily, and southern Italy.
These refugees brought with them their language, later called Ladino, and modern techniques of textile production. Thanks to them, trade flourished, changing Salonika. The presence of a port and lots of surrounding land contributed to an upswing, as did the city’s ethnic, linguistic, and religious diversity and its efficient division of labor between Turks, Bulgarians, Albanians, Greeks, and Jews. These groups may not have always coexisted in harmony—there were isolated outbreaks of violence and economic setbacks. But compared with the Christian persecution of Jews and the European anti-Semitism present elsewhere in nineteenth-century Europe, this four-hundred-year-long epoch can fairly be called peaceful.
In the latter half of the nineteenth century, Salonika’s Jewish population had grown to more than 75,000—roughly one half of the city’s residents. The port became a link between the Ottoman Orient, which was beginning to open up economically, and the West, in which capitalism was progressing by leaps and bounds. Jewish merchants and entrepreneurs, who were multilingual, internationally experienced, and privileged over Greek competitors by Ottoman authorities, flourished.60 Jews made up the majority of the city’s inhabitants, and Ladino, evolved from fifteenth-century Spanish, became a kind of lingua franca used by Greeks, Turks, Albanians, and foreigners. Jewish historian Joseph Nechama wrote: “The Turkish tram driver, the Greek waiter, the Gypsy bootblack will converse with you in the language of Cervantes when they conceive a doubt about your nationality.”61
Jews dominated the port, the transport of goods, and the city’s industrial development, trading in grain, flour and baked goods, cotton and textiles, tobacco and cigarettes, ore from the surrounding mines, construction materials, agricultural products, and farm equipment. In 1908, Greek competitors launched a failed boycott of Jewish fruit and vegetable dealers. But Jews weren’t exclusively part of the economic bourgeoisie. They played a leading role in almost all segments of economic and social life. In 1913 they accounted for 300 master artisans, 40 apothecaries, 30 lawyers, 55 doctors and dentists, 10 journalists, 5 engineers, 1,105 self-employed merchants of various sizes, including bankers, 1,200 shop owners and grocers, and 2,200 unskilled workers. Eight thousand Salonika Jews worked in sales, while the same number labored in the tobacco industry. There were 400 shipbuilders, 500 coachmen and truck drivers, 600 movers, 150 customs officials, and some 200 waiters, servants, and street merchants. Jews ran twelve factories producing cloth and nine making textiles, four large mills (one for jute), six industrial knitting factories, tanneries, and a cigarette-paper factory.62
The Italo-Turkish War of 1911–12 imposed significant burdens on Salonika. The city was hit by cholera and immediately thereafter drawn into the Balkan conflict and the ensuing nationalism. Concepts like Bulgarianization, Hellenization, and Turkification were on the rise, and nationalist aggression challenged the city’s tradition of diversity. In early October 1912, the nascent, self-proclaimed Christian nations of Montenegro, Bulgaria, Serbia, and Greece staged a successful uprising against the tenuous rule of the Ottoman Empire, which was being continually attacked and worn down by the imperial powers of Europe. Soldiers who had been whipped up into a nationalist frenzy committed countless massacres of Muslims and Christians of other nationalities. In 1911 and 1912 they drove out tens of thousands of people seen as undesirable foreigners, including many Jews, who subsequently fled to Salonika.63
The city of Ịştip (today Štip in Macedonia) is a case in point. Conquered by Serbs and Bulgarians, it had 25,000 inhabitants, 800 of whom were Jews. Of the latter, everyone with the exception of six old men and two younger ones fled. Two of the older men were murdered, and all Jewish houses were looted and destroyed. Marauding Bulgarian and Serb Chetniks (self-proclaimed freedom fighters) burned down the synagogue, twenty-four houses, and six warehouses. War correspondent Leon Trotsky reported that at noon on November 2, 1912, “20 to 25 chetniks and highwaymen” had bashed in the skull of an elderly Jew.
Seven hundred and ten Jews who fled Ịştip found refuge in Salonika, which was still under Ottoman control and thus safe. But on November 9, 1912, Greek soldiers conquered the city, and allied Serbian and Bulgarian forces moved in as well. The Second Balkan War, which commenced in June the following year, was begun by Bulgaria battling its former allies Greece and Serbia. The refugees in Salonika waited in pitiful conditions to return to their homes. In February 1913, after the guns from the first conflict fell silent, a delegation from the Union des Associations Israélites visited Macedonia to help Jews living there. The second war was already under way when the delegates wrote in their report that the “former Balkan allies have created a new situation” and “new and perhaps more serious afflictions” could be added to the ones Jews had already suffered. Two years later, in 1914, the German-Jewish Relief Association determined that repatriation remained impossible: “Those household goods or utensils that were spared or could be hidden in the first war were destroyed in the second war.”
The Jews of Strumica, also in today’s Macedonia, suffered a similar fate. There, too, Bulgarian militias went on larceny and murder sprees. On top of that, the new Christian authorities moved market day from Monday to Saturday, the Sabbath, in order to exclude Jewish competition. In a short time, the 650 Jews who had been doing “relatively well” were completely devastated and had to flee to Salonika as well.64
Unlike its Romanian neighbor, the Bulgarian government hadn’t issued any anti-Semitic edicts or used the powers of state to stir up anti-Jewish hatred. On the contrary, it felt it had a duty to protect all peaceful citizens and “the culture that is of benefit to everyone.” The number of anti-Semitic incidents was limited as a result.65 It was only after Bulgarian wars of conquest met with little success that the desire to destroy things, see blood flow, and murder people erupted. The rampages were primarily directed against Muslims and secondarily against all “foreigners,” including the small numbers of defenseless Jews who could not be expected to offer any resistance or take revenge. While the actual battles against the armed enemy might be won or lost, they were repeatedly accompanied by risk-free acts of violence against Jews by all sides in the conflicts. The ancillary terrorizing of Jews during wars and national-revolutionary fighting would recur in a number of twentieth-century multinational and civil wars.
In the course of the fighting, Greek troops seized much of what is today northern Greece. In so doing they doubled the square area of their nation, which was founded in a number of stages starting in 1830. The population rose from three to five million. Only a minority of people in the newly acquired territories spoke Greek, so plans were made from the beginning to Hellenize the region. But progress was slow. At the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, which yielded the Treaty of Sèvres, Greek prime minister Eleftherios Venizelos falsified statistics to suggest that the majority of people in these areas were Greek.66
For the urbane and economic core of New Greece, the issue of Hellenization had particular relevance. In 1912, Salonika’s population of around 150,000 consisted of 27,000 Greeks, 33,000 Turks, 81,000 Jews, and 9,000 people of other nationalities. Two years later, Nechama still described Salonika as “a modern Babel of races, languages, faiths, customs, ideas and aspirations.”67 His description also applied to the whole of Thrace and Macedonia.
In contrast to the Greek minority, Jews had good reason to want Salonika to remain under Ottoman domination during the Balkan Wars. As Maria Margaroni has argued, “neither the anti-Semitic attitudes of their Greek fellow citizens nor the financial disadvantages” gave Jews any incentive to join economically weak Greece or any hope that they “would feel at home in the new Greek ‘fatherland.’”68 With Salonika’s annexation to a nation engaged in hostilities with all its neighbors, its economic heart, the port, went into steep decline. Cut off from its traditional trading partners, Salonika essentially disappeared from view. Greece’s strict isolationism robbed the city of its basis for existence: open borders and the internationalism of a unique Ottoman-European, Muslim-Jewish-Christian metropolis, whose downfall was now sealed. The new borders after the First World War soon similarly deprived Trieste, Chernivtsi, Timişoara, Gdansk, and Łódź of their functions.
One reason for the passivity of Salonika’s Jewish inhabitants was that they knew how violent Christian Greeks could be. During the wars for Greek independence from 1821 to 1829, Greeks had almost completely annihilated the Jewish communities of the Peloponnese, massacring both Jews and Turks and making them flee for their lives. The British consuls in Patras and Constantinople reported that thousands of Jews had been tortured or killed by Greek national fighters. A Jew who had fled to Corfu told of 5,000 Jews being butchered in Tripoli, the capital of the Peloponnese. That number may have been exaggerated, but what is certain is that after the Greek revolution, there were no Jews living there or in the other cities liberated by Greek nationalists. In 1821 Jewish residents had been “slaughtered en masse by enraged Greeks,” in the words of Dubnow, and the revolutionary movement had meant nothing for Jews in Greece other than “a gruesome bloodbath.” Some of those who had escaped being massacred fled to the Ottoman Empire, to Salonika, Constantinople, or Izmir, while others sought refuge on the British Ionian islands of Corfu and Zakynthos.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, as further parts of today’s Greece gained their independence, Greeks committed further atrocities. A good example is Corfu, which had joined Greece in 1864. There, to cite Dubnow again, “hatred of Jews and mercantile envy coincided.” Acts of terror recurred at odd intervals and forced many Jews to flee the island. On Easter in 1891, twenty Jews were killed in pogroms. Five thousand Jews lived on Corfu at the time, but by 1941 that number had shrunk to just 1,900. Pogroms also took place in Volos, Larissa, and Trikala in what is today central Greece, and hundreds of persecuted Jews fled to Salonika, while it was still under Ottoman rule, and to Izmir, Egypt, and Italy.
The regular Greek troops and paramilitaries who conquered Salonika in 1912 considered themselves liberators, but Muslims and Jews feared them and saw them as invaders. The Greek troops did everything they could to turn those fears into reality, and it was the Jewish community that suffered the most under them. Greek soldiers looted 400 Jewish businesses and more than 300 Jewish homes, raped more than 50 Jewish women, and arrested and extorted money from well-known Jews. They also murdered at least two Jewish men and massacred sixty Muslim civilians.69 “No sooner had the victors marched in than scenes reminiscent of the Thirty Years War played out on Varda Street in the middle of the Turkish-Jewish Quarter,” wrote the Berliner Tageblatt. “Who can tally up all the acts of violence, which were encouraged by the absence of gendarmes in the field? And there were fatalities as well—here and there you could see bodies lying on street corners.… What people said about this recalled the pogroms in holy Russia.”70
Nechama described how the atmosphere had changed: “The Greeks in our region were jealous of our mercantile success and wanted to permanently displace us. They ignored the handful of Turks, whom they didn’t consider serious competition, and proceeded directly to attacking Jews.” Hamburg merchants received this concerned message: “The Greeks are demanding government support for their struggle against the preponderance of the Jewish element.”71 In Athens, Greeks insisted on an offensive, prohibited under Greek law, against Jewish commercial houses, which were highly regarded internationally for their reliability. The Greek burghers of Salonika immediately put these illegal measures into practice. The “general lack of personal protection,” which seems to have been intentional, the absence of any guarantees under the law, and corruption among customs officials forced many Jewish and Muslim merchants to give up their businesses.72 Every day, when the increasing numbers of Greek ships docked at the port, the first thing the vessels’ captains asked was whether the dockworkers were Greeks or Jews. “They refused to hire Jewish workers. Jewish dockworkers were only allowed to unload non-Greek ships.”73
In August 1917, a major fire destroyed the heavily Jewish center of Salonika, leaving some 45,000 Jews homeless. The Greek government made small compensation payments but forbade most victims from rebuilding their homes in this two-square-kilometer area of devastation. The government policy amounted to a mass expropriation, and Jews were the ones affected in 75 percent of the cases. Those left unhoused were quartered in hastily erected barracks and tents on the edge of town. The winter of 1918–19 was a hard one, and 1,569 Jews died within a month. Those who neither perished nor emigrated dispersed, the ruins of the city center were rebuilt in modern fashion, and the property affected by the fire was sold off at high prices to private buyers. The fire thus accelerated the massive increase in the city’s Christian population and the emigration of thousands of Jews whose families had lived in Salonika for generations. They left for the US, France, Italy, and Alexandria, Egypt. When Germans occupied the city in 1941, roughly half of Salonika’s Jews were still living in emergency accommodations.74