The hundreds of thousands of Jews who served in the European armies during the First World War were, like all conscripts, torn abruptly away from their communities. Most Jewish soldiers from eastern Europe were also torn away from their culture, often definitively and irretrievably. Whatever theoretical right to religious practice they might possess while in uniform, in practice they found such basic mitzvot as Sabbath observance and kashrut difficult to maintain in armies in the field. If they survived at all, the soldiers returned home utterly changed men. The masses of Jewish civilians who fled their homes in the western parts of the Russian Empire as well as in Austrian Galicia faced different but often hardly less devastating upheavals that similarly loosened the moorings of their inherited value systems. The first stage of the dejudaization of the Jews of Europe had begun with the Enlightenment; the second started here.
In the accelerating flight of Jews from Judaism, the orthodox suffered more losses than other streams of Judaism, first because there were more of them and consequently more to lose; second because orthodoxy placed greater demands on its adherents than the rest and was, as a result, harder to reconcile with the requirements of modern life, whether military or civilian. An orthodox Jew, once he had ceased to lay tefillin (phylacteries) every weekday morning, pray in a minyan (quorum of ten men) three times a day, celebrate the Sabbath and festivals, and obey the remainder of the 613 positive and negative commandments, would generally find it more difficult to resume his previous practices than a Liberal Jew whose observances would in any case have been less punctilious from the outset.
The decade after 1914 therefore led to a sense of crisis in east European orthodoxy. Not only orthodox leaders but ordinary Jews with no axe to grind saw religion as in rapid retreat. “The only ones who pray are the middle class, the poor and the aged,” wrote an observer in Łódź in 1928.1 By the late 1930s many shops on Nalewki Street in the heart of the Jewish area of Warsaw were open on the Sabbath.
Ben-Zion Gold, in his memoir of his youth in Radom, recalls that the orthodox milieu in which he grew up was generally felt to be in a state of decay. The pressing demands of the secular world had impinged on the culture of the bet hamidrash, the study hall that was a fixture in every Jewish community of some size, and in which, in the previous generation, laymen would occupy their spare time in study of holy texts. Before the First World War this “unique, voluntary system of higher education without formal appointments, salaries, budget, or administration,” as Gold terms it, had been at the center of orthodox Jewish life and had been frequented round the clock by Talmudic autodidacts. But, Gold recalls, “what had recently been the norm became in my time an exception.” In his hometown, only one shtibl (prayer-hall) out of twenty was a place of study for young Talmudists; the rest were used for prayer but otherwise stood empty most of the time. “In cities with large Jewish populations such as Warsaw and Łódź,” he writes, “one could still find shtibls full of young men studying, but on the whole the traditional community was on the defensive and losing ground.”2
A Jewish religious map of Europe between the wars would show orthodoxy as still the dominant trend in much of east-central Europe. Elsewhere, however, it was weakening. In the Soviet Union religion was in the process of being eliminated altogether. In Germany the orthodox were no more than one-eighth of the community in the interwar years. In Hungary the dominant form was Neolog, a variant of Liberal Judaism. In areas where orthodoxy was nominally the main religious stream, it was either, as in France, besieged by secularist forces, or, as in Italy and the Balkans, more flexible than the Polish-Lithuanian variety.
Even in Poland, although orthodoxy predominated, non-orthodox elements controlled many central Jewish religious institutions. In Warsaw, for example, the Great Synagogue on Tłomackie Street was known, like such synagogues throughout the continent, as the “German shul,” on account of what was seen as the modernized and excessively formal nature of its services.
In western Europe roles were reversed. Here most Jews were non-orthodox but the orthodox maintained nominal control of major Jewish religious institutions, notably the Consistoire in France. Jewish religious observance was fading. An orthodox writer in Antwerp in 1936 spoke of the orthodox as she’erit hapleitah (“the surviving remnant”) who had “saved themselves from the tohu-bohu, the wild commotion of surrounding society.”3 Growing numbers of Jews there, as well as in France and Italy, were ignoring the minutiae of religious practice and in some cases abandoning the faith altogether.
The term orthodoxy, as applied to conservatively religious Jews, dates back only to the early nineteenth century. One of the earliest orthodox ideologists was Moses Schreiber (1762–1839) of Pressburg (Bratislava), known as Hatam Sofer. His uncompromising resistance to change, encapsulated in the dictum hadash asur min hatorah (“the Torah forbids anything new”), continued to serve as a lodestar to orthodox Jews in succeeding generations.
Their most revered Torah sage of the early twentieth century was Yisrael Meir Hakohen (1838–1933), known as Hafets Hayim, after a book he published in 1873, dealing with Jewish laws concerning gossip and slander. A leading figure in the Agudist movement, he opposed Zionism and fiercely criticized emigration to America, which he regarded as a den of modern iniquities.
After the death of Hafets Hayim, the most influential rabbi of the misnagdic tendency was Hayim Ozer Grodzenski of Vilna, who served as president of the rabbinical board of Agudas Yisroel. Recognized as an ilui (genius) from his youth, Grodzenski was an opponent of Zionism, though for a time he sought some accommodation with the Mizrachi party. He also opposed secular education, Reform Judaism, indeed any form of religious innovation. Assimilation and Reform Judaism, he argued in responsa issued in 1939, were responsible for the disasters that were befalling the Jewish people.4
Orthodox leaders such as Grodzenski felt that the only way to stem the modernist tide was to mount the ramparts of unyielding conservatism. This led them to expound a doctrine known as daas toyre, whereby they arrogated to themselves the power to go beyond the mere recital of Talmudic sources and precedents and, on their own authority, to issue rulings that would have the force of law. Yet in Grodzenski’s own family there were deviants from the straight path. His nephew left his yeshiva studies, embraced secularism, and became editor of the Ovent-kuryer newspaper in Vilna.
An even more painful domestic embarrassment confronted another orthodox eminence, Rabbi Joseph Rozin of Dvinsk (1858–1936), known as the Rogatchover Gaon. A renowned scholar, he was reputed to know the entire corpus of rabbinic literature by heart. Rozin was presented with an awkward dilemma when his son-in-law died and his daughter consequently found herself obliged to undergo the ceremony of halitzah. According to Jewish law, this must be performed by a surviving brother, who renounces the right to marry the deceased’s widow, leaving her free to wed whom she might please. The problem facing the gaon was that of his two remaining sons, one was a Communist in Leningrad, the other a convert to Christianity in Königsberg. Talmudists debated which should perform the ceremony. In the end the gaon decided that, since both sons were equally bad, he might as well select the Communist. The judgment, however, gave rise to controversy since it seemed to open the way to branding all nonobservant Jews as apostates.5
In Germany a radically different interpretation of orthodoxy had developed since the late nineteenth century. The two dominant figures in the formulation of this German neo-orthodoxy were Esriel Hildesheimer (1820–99) of Berlin and Samson Raphael Hirsch (1808–88) of Frankfurt. While regarding themselves as strictly orthodox, they embraced secular as well as religious studies and sought to reconcile Judaism with enlightened thought. Although they and their followers engaged in sometimes bitter rivalry, their outlooks were, in fact, quite similar. Both embraced the concept of torah im derekh-eretz (“Torah combined with common sense”) that had been advocated by thinkers of the haskalah. Hirsch had permitted some modest innovations: choirs (men only) could sing in the synagogue and weddings might be performed there; rabbis could wear robes and might preach sermons in German.
The twentieth-century epigones of Hirsch stiffened their resistance to change or accommodation to the modern world. But German neo-orthodoxy remained distinct from east European ultra-orthodoxy. It has been termed “a kind of stabilized dualism” or, as Hildesheimer put it, “a faithful adherence to traditional teachings combined with an effective effort to keep in touch with the spirit of progress.”6
Although Hasidim and misnagdim cooperated in Agudas Yisroel and other such organizations, and although most followers of each would have found it difficult to identify hard-and-fast doctrinal differences between the two camps, the historic animosities between them had in no way softened. Hasidic rebbes retained vast, if inchoate, followings, especially in central and southern Poland and parts of Hungary, Romania, and Czechoslovakia, as also in destination lands of Jewish emigration, above all the United States.
The two dynasties with the largest support in central Poland were those of Gur and Aleksandrów. In Galicia the Belzer Hasidim predominated. Other Hasidic groups ranged in numbers from thousands to a few dozen. They were generally not members of any formal organization, save for an inner core who might enroll as students in the rebbe’s yeshiva. His most devoted followers would gather as a loyal retinue in his court, generally in the shtetl in which the dynasty had its origin or to which the current rebbe had moved. In the cities to which many Hasidim migrated from their shtetlakh, each Hasidic group would establish its own informal shtibl, often in a private house or apartment, rather than a synagogue. Followers would visit the rebbe or write to him, seeking spiritual inspiration, business advice, permission to marry, solutions to problems, and cures for diseases.
Among the Hasidic leaders, the one who earned a reputation for the most vociferously uncompromising piety in this period was Hayim Eleazar Shapira, rebbe of Munkács in Subcarpathian Ruthenia. An excitable man, with a cracked, squeaky voice, he became notorious for his shrill maledictions against Zionism, other rebbes, Communism, America, and all existing governments, as well as visiting theatrical troupes, sports, and “any sort of festivity.”7 Nor were the Agudists exempt from his anathemas: “Di Agudisten, yimakh shmom vezikhrom, vos zenen erger als di klovim di Tsiyonisten …” (“The Agudists, may their name be blotted out, who are worse than those dogs the Zionists …”)—as he referred to them in a sermon in Marienbad, where he was taking the waters in the summer of 1930.8 He enjoyed undiscriminating, sometimes frenzied support from his followers. When he ventured forth in public, his carriage would be mobbed by enthusiasts who would have to be beaten off by his guard of honor.
Whereas most modernist Jewish ideologies placed a high value on labor, many of the strictly orthodox explicitly accorded it a secondary status: only Torah study was worthy of human endeavor, as opening the path to the messianic era. As the Munkácser rebbe put it: “One may not rely on any natural effort or on material salvation by human labor. One should not expect redemption from any source other than God.” In the same spirit he opposed all forms of secular education as well as modern medicine, technology, engineering, and architecture, since, after all, the revived Temple would be designed by God himself and “handed down to earth fully built and completely decorated and appointed.”9
The rebbe opposed emigration to the Holy Land or America, insisting that his followers remain in Europe to await the messiah, who would arrive at the time of the apocalypse, which he predicted would occur in 1941 (the rebbe died in 1937). “May the Lord rebuke you, O Satan, who choose Jerusalem!” he wrote.10 The much-sought-after immigration certificates to Palestine were shmadtsetlakh or toytnshayn (certificates of apostasy or death).11 The rebbe visited Palestine in 1930 but returned only more convinced of the satanic character of the Zionist enterprise. When Zionists persuaded the city council of Munkács to name the main street of the Jewish district after Yehuda Halevi, the twelfth-century Spanish-Jewish poet famous for his verses expressive of yearning for the Holy Land, the rebbe got the decision reversed and the street was instead named Ways of Repentance Street, after the title of a work by the rebbe’s late father.
The miracle-working capabilities and prophetic powers attributed to Hasidic rebbes were derided by misnagdim as well as by neo-orthodox, Reform, and secular Jews. Marriages between scions of different dynasties were celebrated like royal weddings between offspring of absolute monarchs. Festivities would last several days and would be attended by thousands. Some Hasidic customs aroused particular scorn, for example, the practice of khapn shirayim (grabbing leftovers) from the rebbe’s plate at festive meals.
The rebbes received voluntary donations (pidyoynes) from their followers and a few as a result became wealthy men whose courts acquired palatial accoutrements. The Munkácser rebbe, for example, enjoyed an assessed taxable income in 1928 of 621,500 crowns (equivalent at the official exchange rate to $18,833—then a considerable sum in Czechoslovakia).12 His revenues were the more impressive in that, unlike many other rebbes, who were happy to accept contributions from all and sundry, he would take money only from the “Torah-true,” in his narrow definition of the term.
Enlightened central European Jews regarded Hasidism with a mixture of horrified repulsion and yet, often in the early twentieth century, fascinated attraction. In the German-speaking lands, most became acquainted with it only indirectly through the medium of the writings of Martin Buber, whose foggy, völkisch romanticism briefly attracted even the future Marxist Georg Lukács.
An unusually far-reaching case of such attraction was that of the Czech-Jewish writer Jiří Langer, who embraced Hasidism wholeheartedly and for a time lived in Belz at the court of the rebbe. In Marienbad in 1916 Langer introduced his friend Franz Kafka to the Belzer rebbe. Introduced is perhaps the wrong word, since the rebbe was a virtually unapproachable figure, but Kafka was permitted to accompany the rebbe’s entourage as the great man went for his constitutional in the woods, all the while reciting to himself the Talmud (he too was said to know the entire work by heart). Every now and again, the rebbe paused to chat with ornamental wooden gnomes. Kafka was amused by the almost royal decorum that was enforced in the rebbe’s presence. He was fascinated by this encounter with Hasidic Judaism and talked and wrote about it extensively. The rebbe reminded Kafka of a sultan in a Gustav Doré illustration of the adventures of Baron Münchhausen.
The Hasidim were highly territorial and fanatically devoted to their respective dynasties. Some frowned on intermarriage with followers of other rabbinical rebbes, feuded bitterly with them, even engaging in physical violence, and, worst of all, impugned the kashrut of a rival rebbe’s tish (table). When the third Belzer rebbe, Isachar Dov Rokeach, fled from Galicia to Munkács in 1920, the Munkácser rebbe refused to countenance the presence of a rival on his turf. “There is no room for the two of us in this one place!”13 A war of “excommunications and bans, libels and slanders, propaganda and even violence” ensued.14 Eventually the Munkácser not only drove his competitor out of town but succeeded in mobilizing influence on the government to secure his expulsion from Czechoslovakia. The Belzers never forgot this slight.
In Judaism the rabbi is not, like the Christian priest, a mediator between man and God. He is rather a scholar, a teacher, and (but only since the nineteenth century) a preacher. Sometimes he may also be a judge (dayan) in a rabbinical court; but the authority of this institution by the early twentieth century was much more restricted than in the past. Under modern conditions, the rabbi, whether orthodox or not, also bore responsibility for seeking to ensure that his flock did not stray too far from the fold.
In interwar Europe the status of the rabbi was generally held to have declined over the preceding century. Save among the strictly orthodox, rabbis were no longer usually regarded as leaders of their communities. Nor were they, for the most part, seen as intellectual mentors.
Rabbis came in many forms and guises. The type of the Hasidic rebbe, revered as a miracle worker by his followers, remained little changed from earlier times. Liberal rabbis often wore clerical habits, similar to those of Christian clergy. In late imperial Russia the government had appointed “crown rabbis,” government officials who were required to know Russian, were responsible for population registers, and received secular as well as religious education. They were regarded by the orthodox as religiously unsatisfactory and by others as government stooges. The suspicion endured: after 1917, Soviet rabbis, whose appointments similarly depended on the government, were commonly regarded with intense mistrust by those Soviet Jews who still cared about such matters.
The office of chief rabbi existed in some cities, regions, or countries but not in all. Both Paris and France had a chief but Germany had none, though some regions had a Landesrabbiner and some cities an Oberrabbiner. In the Balkans, the title of haham bashi, equivalent to chief rabbi, was bestowed by the Ottoman imperial government and its successors on the religious heads of Jewish communities. For most Jews, especially the orthodox, the prestige of a rabbi depended not on such handles but on his reputation for learning.
The Sephardic Jews of the Balkans did not, by this time, retain much spiritual vitality. Few Sephardi yeshivot could rival in prestige the great Talmudic academies of Poland and Lithuania. The organ of the Union Universelle des Juifs Sépharadim complained in 1935 that the Sephardi rabbinate, “once upon a time so flourishing and which produced so many eminent men,” was now “diminishing day by day and the few worth-while rabbis who remain are getting older and older.” The journal warned that “it is to be feared that the rabbinate may disappear altogether one day.”15 The dearth of trained Sephardi rabbis was such that communities in southern Europe were obliged to import Ashkenazi rabbis from Poland. Israel Zolli (originally Zoller), for example, born in Austrian Galicia, was appointed rabbi of Trieste in 1929 and of Rome in 1939. In Bulgaria the three chief rabbis between 1889 and 1914 were all Ashkenazim. A Sephardi from Salonica was appointed between 1920 and 1925 but then Bulgaria had to do without a chief rabbi altogether until after the Second World War.
In German-speaking Europe, under the influence of the Enlightenment movement Wissenschaft des Judentums, a modern type of rabbi had emerged. Graduates of rabbinical seminaries and universities rather than yeshivot, the German rabbis were deeply affected by the German intellectual tradition, especially by Hegel and Goethe.
Traditionalists of the old school complained that “Herr Doktor” was not a rov (rabbi) and quipped that since rabbis had become doctors Judaism had become sick.16 Hayim Ozer Grodzenski compared the combination of university and Talmudic studies to the mixture of poison with water and maintained that Poland was “not in need of rabbis with doctorates.”17
A formidable rabbinical combination of secular and religious learning was Hirsch Perez Chajes, chief rabbi of Vienna from 1918 until his sudden death in 1927, at the age of fifty-one. Of Galician origin, he was in the difficult position of being the orthodox-inclined leader of a largely Liberal community. A man of unremitting energy and wide culture, an outspoken Zionist as well as a pacifist, he exemplified the modern, activist rabbi-politician. Chajes aroused both admiration and criticism for his impassioned sermons and speeches. “I do not speak what I want to speak but what I must speak, that which my inner being dictates,” he declared.18 His participation in 1925 in the opening ceremony of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem prompted one of his more orthodox Vienna colleagues to proclaim a fast day. Chajes nonetheless enjoyed the unusual distinction of being recognized as not only the religious but also the secular leader of Austrian Jews. At his death he was acclaimed, in a glut of mixed metaphors, as “a lambent flame, a glowing torch, a banner and a battle-cry.”19
Even before the accession of Hitler to power, German Jewish orthodoxy was becoming inclined to defer to rabbinical authorities in eastern Europe. An early test of relative authority came in May 1933, when the Nazi government, in one of its first actions against Jews, restricted shechitah in Germany, requiring that all animals be stunned before being slaughtered. In religious law, the matter was debatable. Some German rabbis favored compliance with the new regulation, lest German Jews turn to nonkosher meat; properly slaughtered meat imported from Holland or Denmark was expensive and in short supply. But Grodzenski feared that compliance would lead other countries to follow the Nazi example and pass similar legislation, as some, including Poland, in fact did. He accordingly used his influence to persuade German orthodox rabbis not to issue a ruling that would permit compliance with the new law.
After 1933, rabbis such as Joseph Carlebach in Hamburg, Joachim Prinz in Berlin, and, above all, Leo Baeck as head of the Reichsvertretung, overshadowed the lackluster secular leadership of German Jewry. In the early months of Nazi rule, Prinz’s lectures on Judaism attracted audiences of over five thousand people. But this enthusiasm, which led to talk of a renewal of Judaism, did not last. By 1937, in a farewell article on his departure from Germany, Prinz was lamenting the shallowness and brevity of the phenomenon: “The ‘return to Judaism,’” he wrote, “was no ‘proud march of the upright’ but a procession of the lame and the blind, as described by the prophet in his vision of the Return: veshavu ligvulam [‘and they shall return to their own borders’].”20
Traditional Jewish education, central to the practice and perpetuation of the faith, had generally been conducted at three levels: it began in the heder, continued in the more advanced talmud torah, and culminated in the yeshiva, the summit of religious learning.
No Jewish institution suffered from a worse reputation than the heder. The melamed was a pathetic figure, often of little intellectual ability (since the gifted would seek more respected positions, such as rabbi), miserably remunerated, and the butt of practical jokes by his pupils. From the Enlightenment onward, the heder was the object of withering social criticism. A common trope in autobiographies was exposure of it as a den of cruelty, filth, and superstition. Failing memory might have added some embellishments to these literary horror-stories but the reality was often dreadful enough. Classes were large and hours long, generally from 8 A.M. to 6 P.M. with an hour off for lunch. Pedagogic methods were old-fashioned, involving rote learning and sometimes violence. Inquiring young minds were bullied into submission rather than stimulated or inspired.
The youngest pupils, generally boys, though girls sometimes joined the lower levels, studied the Hebrew alphabet, reading and prayers, as well as the weekly portion of the humash (Pentateuch). From the age of eight they would add Rashi and other medieval biblical commentators and soon thereafter the Onkelos targum (translation) of the Pentateuch into Aramaic.
At the age of ten, they (boys only by this stage) embarked on the Talmud, starting with the seventh tractate of the order Mo’ed in the Mishnah. This deals with the laws concerning Jewish festivals and starts with the words “The egg that was born on a Sabbath.” The text discusses what should properly be done with such an egg, the product of labor by a chicken, given that all work by persons and animals alike is forbidden on the Sabbath. Dan Porat, who spent four years of his childhood after 1929 in Kuty, at the foot of the Carpathian Mountains, on the Polish-Romanian border, attended an old-style heder there: “I was awed,” he writes, “and it would never have occurred to me to ask for the relevance of these tractates to our daily existence.”21
Around the turn of the century in Russia, efforts to modernize Jewish elementary education had produced the heder metukan (“reformed heder”). Zionist in orientation, it used Hebrew rather than Yiddish as the medium of instruction. But such innovations gained only limited traction and the supposed improvements were superficial. Enemies of religion, for their part, regarded the reformed heder as more of a threat than the traditional version.
Even defenders of the heder recognized the need for reform. Joseph Carlebach, director of the Jewish high school in Hamburg in the early 1920s, had got to know and respect east European Jewry, during his service as a military chaplain with the German army on the eastern front in the First World War, when he had established modern Jewish high schools in Kovno and Riga. In a pamphlet published in Berlin in 1924, he proposed a program for root-and-branch reform of the heder: proper physical space and educational tools; separation of the classroom from the living quarters of the teacher; preparation of syllabi for religious and secular teaching; raising of the standard of the melamdim through better training and security of employment; provision of suitable Jewish educational literature; prohibition of corporal punishment “and other unpedagogic disciplinary methods”; and permanent supervision of hadorim by professionally qualified religious authorities.22
But change percolated slowly down to the shtetl. Dan Porat’s heder was in the home of the melamed who was also the rabbi of the town.
This was a very modest wooden structure, with a ceiling so low that even to a child it appeared stifling. The floor was compacted soil, and two rough-hewn tables plus four benches and a bookshelf complemented all the furnishings. The Rebbe’s wife was often doing the laundry in the adjacent room, filling the house with the smell of tallow soap, while his daughter, who suffered from tuberculosis, was always diligently working away at a weaving loom making kilims. We cheder [heder] children witnessed that scene daily since a big opening was cut in the wall between the study room and the kitchen-living-weaving room to let light into the latter from the only windows in the house.23
Porat’s education was multilingual, reflecting the multiethnic society in which he grew up. His general schooling was in Polish, all other daily activities being conducted in Ukrainian. He learned four alphabets: Latin for Polish, Cyrillic for Ukrainian, Hebrew for Yiddish, Aramaic, and Hebrew, and, in the heder, Gothic, “the latter a remnant from the old Austrian empire … to make the Jewish population literate in German. The Austro-Hungarian empire had collapsed a decade earlier but the custom of teaching Gothic script remained as part of the heder curriculum.”24
Porat’s experience was by the 1930s exceptional. The traditional heder was in its death throes—and not only in the Soviet Union. In interwar Poland it was strictly regulated by government legislation. On hygienic grounds it was no longer supposed to be in a private home but in a public building. In some areas it was modified into a part-time afternoon and Sunday school. In others it remained a full-time elementary school, still with very long hours. The legislation required that secular subjects such as history, arithmetic, and Polish language and literature be added to the curriculum. Since the melamed was rarely qualified in those, another teacher, often a non-religious Jew or a gentile, would teach them. But religious education remained the core of the curriculum, occupying at least twenty-seven hours a week as against a minimum of twelve hours for secular subjects. After 1932, when the school week was restricted to thirty-six hours, religious study was further limited but could still occupy a large portion of the school week.
Legislation, however, was not always translated into reality. In 1938 a school inspector’s report on the heder/talmud torah attended by 1,200 boys in Cracow complained of overcrowding, damaged premises, plumbing problems, lack of electricity, and dirt and filth everywhere.25
In many places the heder disappeared altogether, save as a supplementary afternoon school, since parents preferred to send their children free of charge to state elementary schools, rather than pay to send them to a full-time heder. In Warsaw, according to official statistics, the number of hadorim declined between 1931 and 1935 from 108 to 62.26 In Białystok just one heder remained.27 In the shtetl of Wołkowysk the thirteen hadorim that had existed before the First World War had all closed by the 1920s, leaving only a seven-grade talmud torah “with a more updated modern curriculum which included modern Hebrew, history, geography, natural science, Polish, and arithmetic.”28
Proposals for reform, whether inspired from within or imposed from without, probably came too late to save the heder. Reflecting on his boyhood experience in Radom, Ben-Zion Gold writes that the system led to an adversarial relationship between the melamed and the pupils and an alienation from religion. The result was that “children who came from homes that lived by the tradition, had contempt for heder, and those who came from homes where tradition was neglected came away from heder with contempt for tradition.”29
The two hundred or so yeshivot in Poland in the 1930s included some independent institutions but most were grouped in two federations. The first, the Khoyrev system in central Poland, was founded in 1924 as an offshoot of Agudas Yisroel. Its 103 yeshivot enrolled 10,200 students in 1934–35. The second federation operated under the aegis of the Vaad Hayeshivot, founded at a rabbinical conference at Grodno in 1924. Its executive director, and after the death of Hafets Hayim, also its titular head, was Hayim Ozer Grodzenski. From his base in Vilna, he coordinated the activities of sixty-four yeshivot in the five eastern provinces of Poland, with 5,700 students.
The total number of yeshiva students in Poland in the 1930s has been estimated at no more than 20,000, representing around 14 percent of Jewish male teenagers. These figures, as Shaul Stampfer has pointed out, clearly indicate that “traditional Jewish society in Poland was declining in the 1930s.”30 A few thousand more were studying in other countries, particularly Lithuania, Hungary, Romania, and Czechoslovakia, but they did not change the overall picture.
In earlier times, Hasidim had not established yeshivot, which remained the preserve of their opponents, the misnagdim. But from the early twentieth century many Hasidic leaders, notably the rebbes of Gur, Aleksandrów, Bobowa, and Lubavitch, founded yeshivot in Poland and elsewhere, though the Belzer dynasty remained resistant.
The pride of Polish orthodoxy was Rabbi Meir Shapiro’s Lublin yeshiva, a Hasidic institution, opened in 1930. Its six-story, 120-room building contained a large dormitory, an infirmary, a forty-thousand-volume library, and a scale model of the Temple. Shapiro’s program for daily study of the Talmud, known as daf yomi (daily page), attracted wide attention and the support of the influential Gerer rebbe. Thousands of students all over the world studied the same page each day in a seven-and-a-half-year cycle (the second ended in 1938). This was an innovation, but in pedagogy and dissemination, not substance. Even so, the Munkácser rebbe pronounced it impermissible.
The Musar movement inculcated an intense spirituality, asceticism, and ecstatic religious experience. Founded by Rabbi Israel Lipkin (1810–83, better known, from his place of residence, as Salanter), Musar, in Ben-Zion Gold’s later description, “was dedicated to deepening moral sensitivity in religious practice and in personal relations.” Its adherents “engaged in exercises that were designed to curb lust, arrogance and indolence and to nurture graciousness, fearlessness and generosity.” They tried to free themselves from the corruption of di gas (the street).31 The Slobodka yeshiva in Lithuania, founded in 1881, was the citadel of Musar. Its adherents further differentiated themselves from other yeshiva students in their manner of dress. Denizens of the yeshiva world had an unenviable reputation for poor hygiene and slovenly clothing but followers of Musar “were to be impeccably groomed and dressed in the manner of contemporary bourgeois society.”32 In contrast, some followers of Musar went to the other extreme, insisting on poverty, appearing in tattered clothing, eating sparse meals, and cultivating a doctrine of prishus (separation from the world).33
The yeshiva system of education did not allow for a large number of instructors. The 326 students of the Lublin yeshiva had ten teachers in 1937 and the 477 of the Mir yeshiva just four. In most yeshivot there was very little direct instruction and there were no exams. Occasionally there might be a lecture but usually students studied by themselves or with classmates. There was no particular point at which students had to leave a yeshiva and some remained for many years. At the Telz yeshiva in Lithuania, for example, which was regarded as one of the best organized, students ranged from sixteen to as high as twenty-eight years of age.
The yeshiva was not only an educational institution; it was also a disburser of welfare. Wealthier yeshivot provided dormitories and refectories for their students. Elsewhere, students found lodgings nearby or even slept on benches in synagogues or study halls. Many “ate teg,” meaning they were granted free meals on a particular day each week as an act of benevolence by pious families in the town. But the practice came to be frowned on as threatening students with exposure to untoward outside influences—another sign of the defensive posture of orthodoxy in this period.
The largest single item in the Lublin yeshiva’s budget for 1939 was not, as in most educational institutions, salaries of staff but provision of meals for students. They literally consumed 39 percent of the institution’s costs. The Lubavitch yeshiva in Otwock, the budget of which revealed a similar pattern, provided students “free of charge with food, clothing, and accommodation; also medical aid, convalescence etc.”34 Most of the students there also received free housing. Students’ fees, however, brought in only 0.5 percent of revenues. Other yeshivot such as those of Ponevezh and Slobodka had similar patterns of income and expenditure.
If, as was once maintained, the British Empire was a gigantic system of outdoor relief for the younger sons of the British aristocracy, then the yeshiva might with no less plausibility be viewed as a large-scale system of indoor welfare for offspring of the Jewish petty bourgeoisie.
The yeshivot had always relied on financial support in various forms from the wealthy. The dislocations of the years after 1914 rendered them heavily reliant on external support, particularly from the United States. The onset of the Depression accentuated this dependence. Many yeshivot were in precarious financial shape in the late 1930s. The Ponevezh yeshiva reported an income of $10,279 in 1938, but expenditure of $16,582.35 The accounts of the Mir yeshiva for 1937–38 show income amounting to less than half of expenditure; not surprisingly, the yeshiva was heavily indebted.36 Less distinguished yeshivot were even worse off, although, since many did not keep proper accounts, it is impossible to say how deeply they were mired in debt. In 1938 and 1939 the Vaad Hayeshivot was in deficit to the tune of half of its expenditure. By this time the entire yeshiva system was on the verge of bankruptcy.
Before the First World War, orthodox German Jews would not have dreamed of sending their sons to study in east European yeshivot though in 1918 a few did so. Gradually torah im derekh-eretz was replaced or admixed with Musar and religious-Zionist influences. In 1937, twenty-nine German-born students were enrolled at the Telz, Lithuania, yeshiva alone.
For the most part, however, German orthodoxy trained its religious leaders in rabbinical seminaries rather than yeshivot. The seminaries were permitted to function after 1933, although Gestapo agents attended meetings of their supervisory boards.
In Berlin the two main seminaries had long existed in a state of permanent religious tension with their surroundings. The Hochschule (Lehranstalt) für die Wissenschaft des Judentums, supposedly serving the whole Jewish community, in fact catered to more liberal elements. Originally intended less as a seminary than as a teaching and research institution at university level, it stressed the application of the highest scholarly standards to Jewish studies. The dismissal of all Jewish university teachers as a result of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935 led the Hochschule to hire several of the suddenly unemployed faculty members. The additional staff enabled it to broaden its curriculum so as to provide university-level teaching in a wide range of subjects in the humanities and social sciences. Such courses were open to Jewish students, all of whom faced increasing restrictions on admission to German universities. The objective was “to transform the Hochschule gradually and in a non-obtrusive manner into a Jewish university.”37
The neo-orthodox supported the Rabbinerseminar für das Orthodoxe Judentum, popularly known as the Hildesheimer Seminary, after its founder, Esriel Hildesheimer. His successors maintained the tradition of torah im derekh-eretz, combining adherence to halachah (Jewish law) with respect for the canons of contemporary scholarship. Secular studies were a required part of the curriculum. The seminary was on that account regarded with suspicion by the super-orthodox.
The appointment of the Lithuanian-born Jehiel Jacob Weinberg as rector of the Hildesheimer Seminary in 1931 did not bring peace. Weinberg had studied at Lithuanian yeshivot and held a doctorate from the University of Giessen. In the course of a long sojourn in Germany, he had gradually moved away from the closed world of Lithuanian Judaism toward the more sophisticated intellectual outlook of German modern orthodoxy. The suspicions of the strictly orthodox increased in 1937 when, in an unprecedented exercise in cooperation, students of the Hildesheimer Seminary joined those of the Hochschule in attending joint lectures on non-Jewish subjects. As a concession to critics, however, these lectures took place not on the premises of the Hochschule but in a “neutral place.”38
The Breslau Jüdisch-Theologisches Seminar, founded in 1854, and the Budapest Rabbinical Seminary, founded in 1877, were non-orthodox but traditionalist, akin to Conservative Judaism in the United States. They taught “positive historical Judaism.”39 The rules of conduct at these institutions were quite different from those at yeshivot. Raphael Patai, who studied at both Breslau and Budapest in the 1930s, recalled that he and other students went regularly to the cinema and even attended dance halls, both of which would have been regarded as scandalous behavior by a yeshiva bokher.40
Orthodoxy and Reform were two deeply entrenched camps but, as the records of the seminaries illustrate, there were all sorts of gradations within and between, as well as regional variations.
Reform Judaism had originated in Germany in the early nineteenth century. It sought to rid Judaism of what were seen as obsolete accretions. Halachah (religious law) was no longer regarded as changeless. The messiah was no longer expected imminently. The vernacular replaced Hebrew in services. Choirs, organs, and sermons were introduced into synagogues. Many strict observances were relaxed. In some cases the Sabbath was moved to Sunday.
Not only the orthodox despised the accommodationist tendency of the German Reformers. Joseph Roth wrote of them in 1933 with contemptuous insight: “Because they didn’t have the courage to convert, they preferred instead to have the entire Jewish religion baptised.”41
In the United States, Reform Judaism eventually became the largest Jewish denomination. Yet in the land of its origin it barely existed: in Berlin there was just one Reform synagogue.
Instead, the great majority of German Jews belonged to Einheitsgemeinde (“united communities”) that generally adhered to a Liberal form of worship. Liberal Jews, while sharing many of the basic principles of Reform Judaism in the United States, were less radical in their rejection of tradition. Liberal congregations, although most common in Germany, spread to many other parts of Europe. Neolog congregations in Hungary, about two-thirds of the community there, as well as in formerly Hungarian regions such as Slovakia, were similar in outlook and, as in Germany, attracted the more affluent, assimilatory class as well as those who aspired to join it.
One should not imagine that all Jews were equally concerned about the differences among these various denominations. Most, indeed, simply thought of themselves as Jews tout court. Some adopted positions that cut across established lines, for example ultra-orthodox Zionists, and many adapted their practice to external exigencies.
Few devoted much attention to issues of faith or belief: what counted in Judaism was practice, though that too was often flexible. The writer Primo Levi recorded that in his youth in Turin in the 1920s, his father, “a fundamentally secular man, did not eat pork ‘out of a kind of superstitious fear’; yet he ate ham, albeit ‘with a guilty expression.’”42 Robert Kanfer recalls that in his semi-assimilated home in Vienna in the 1930s, although the family ate matzot on the Passover, his father, “to make it more edible, turned it into a sandwich with butter and ham.”43
In Soviet Russia, all religious activity was subjected to an intense official campaign of antireligious propaganda. In 1917 there had been an estimated 12,000 hadorim in the Russian Empire, with 170,000 pupils.44 But in December 1920 the Central Jewish Bureau of the Department of Public Education issued an order for “the liquidation of hadorim and yeshivot”: “The children must be liberated from the terrible prison, from the full spiritual demoralization and from physical deterioration.”45
The following year a show trial of the heder took place at Vitebsk. Appropriately, given their performative character, the proceedings took place not in a court of law but in a local theater. The defendants included a former talmud torah teacher, a Yiddish poet, and a former left-Bundist. The opening of the trial was disrupted by a crowd of religious Jews, who assembled to defend the heder. After a postponement of several days, the trial reopened in the town’s main theater, which was filled to the rafters. Both sides brought claques of supporters to the theater, which resounded to the laughter, applause, and partisan cries of rival factions in the audience.
The prosecutor declared that pretrial investigations had disclosed the existence in the town of thirty-nine hadorim with forty-nine melamdim, most of them elderly, and 1,358 pupils, ranging in age from five to seventeen. Four hundred of these also attended a public school; for the rest the heder was their only source of education. The prosecution portrayed the heder as an institution that was faulty by every criterion—hygiene, personnel, pedagogy, and curriculum. The melamdim had a “medieval” outlook. Premises were filthy, some veritable pigsties. Pupils were said to have been “terrorized” by sadistic beatings. The heder was injurious to the physical and spiritual development of the pupils. It inculcated chauvinism and hatred for non-Jews. The prosecutor called for a “death sentence” against the heder.
In the course of the proceedings, conducted in Yiddish, the court heard testimony from witnesses for the prosecution who quoted from the works of writers such as Salomon Maimon, Peretz Smolenskin, and Y. L. Peretz, recounting the horrors of the heder system. One witness accused a melamed of pederasty. Witnesses for the defense were permitted to dispute the prosecutor’s contentions and counterquoted Philo and Maimonides, Froebel, Pestalozzi, and others, all to no avail. When one witness tried to defend a melamed who was present in the theater, the prosecutor retorted with the old adage “You can’t whiten a slop bucket with a spoonful of sour cream.”
Rabbi Shmaryahu Leib Medalia, appearing for the defense, complained that the trial was unequal, since one side, the prosecution, was supported by the political power. Medalia, according to the trial transcript, worked himself up into a state of “religious ecstasy,” declaiming several times in thunderous tones: “Di toyre iz min hashomayim” (“The Torah comes from heaven”), and invoking martyrs of old who had sacrificed their lives in its defense. The president of the court assured him that the Soviet state recognized freedom of religion. But Medalia would not be stilled. “You think you have already passed judgement on the heder and the Torah and that the Torah, God forbid, has been rendered null and void, that you’ve already torn up the Torah: no! Di toyre hot gelebt un vet lebn!” (“The Torah has lived and shall live!”) Medalia’s declaration undoubtedly reflected a significant part of Jewish public opinion in the town, as shown by frequent complaints by the prosecution, in the course of the trial, about demonstrations of support for the defendants.
The result, however, was not in doubt. After five days of proceedings, the final session lasted from six o’clock in the evening until five the next morning. A tensely hushed court heard the judges pronounce a verdict of guilty. They ordered all hadorim to be closed. Melamdim were required to sign statements undertaking that they would no longer teach. Pupils were to be transferred to Yiddish secular schools. The verdict, greeted with an enthusiastic mass singing of the “Internationale,” was hailed as a victory over “Jewish clericalism, Zionism, and nationalism.” But the transcript concluded by recording that the defense counsel sang in unison the second stanza of the Zionist anthem, “Hatikva: Od lo avda tikvatenu …” (“Our hope is not yet lost …”).46
In 1922 the Russian criminal code made the teaching of religion to groups of more than three children under the age of eighteen an offense punishable by up to a year’s hard labor. Melamdim were put on trial and, in at least one case, in Polotsk, near Vitebsk, pupils were called as witnesses against their former teacher.47 Some hadorim lingered on, especially in the shtetlakh of the former Pale. In 1928–29 they were reported still to be active in 183 towns.48 But by the late 1930s they had been altogether eliminated from Soviet territory.
The Vitebsk trial was the first of many such quasi-judicial, anti-religious morality plays that were mounted in these years. In Minsk in 1925 the trial of a shochet, accused of attempted murder of a rival, provided the occasion for attack on another central Jewish institution: kosher slaughter. Attended by three thousand people, the trial was widely reported in the press and formed the subject of a Yiddish play used in antireligious propaganda.49 A further trial, in Kharkov in 1928, placed in the dock yet another feature of traditional Jewish life, the practice of circumcision. That trial was brilliantly satirized by Isaac Babel in his story “Karl-Yankel” (1931), a vignette peopled with vivid grotesques.
The trials were partly propaganda from above. But they also reflected real internal conflict for the heart and soul of the Jewish population. Bolsheviks sought to portray this as a war between revolutionary activists and bourgeois upholders of the traditional order. In fact, they were struggles not so much between protagonists of the past and the future as over rival conceptions of the Jewish here and now.
These episodes were part of a larger campaign of antireligious warfare waged by Evsektsiia in the 1920s. Feasts were held on fast days and a “red bris” sometimes replaced the circumcision ceremony, though a majority of males in the 1920s were probably still circumcised. Religious Jews responded to government orders to close down synagogues with protests, petitions, and demonstrations, but to little effect.
In 1928–29, rabbis, like priests, together with their families, were deprived of rights to housing, social security, and higher education. Over the next decade, most synagogues and ritual baths were closed and kosher meat became almost unavailable.
In the small town of Slutsk, in Byelorussia, nearly all Jewish institutions, except Yiddish schools, were closed in 1926 and the synagogue was turned into a military warehouse. The rabbi of the town, Yehezkel Abramsky, a noted Talmudic authority and author of Hazon Yehezkel, a commentary on the Tosefta (“Additions” to the Mishnah), was able, in 1928, to publish the only rabbinical periodical ever to appear in the USSR, Yagdil Torah, but it was banned after just two numbers. Abramsky was arrested in Moscow in 1930 and accused of having provided information to a visiting ecclesiastical delegation from the United States that was investigating religious persecution in the USSR. He was sentenced, without trial, to five years’ hard labor in Siberia. After intercession by German rabbis with Chancellor Heinrich Brüning, he was released in 1931 in exchange for a Communist held in Germany and was put over the border to Latvia.
The closure of Evsektsiia in 1930 did not end antireligious propaganda, which was taken up with even greater intensity by other bodies, such as the League of Militant Godless, which published the Yiddish magazine Der Apikoyres (The Heretic) between 1931 and 1935.
A Yiddish Antireligiezer literarisher layenbukh (Antireligious Literary Reader) appeared in Minsk in 1930, designed, so the editors affirmed, “to illustrate the fact that religion, in all its historical metamorphoses, maintains its subversive and cannibalistic character.”50 The selected texts included the early-nineteenth-century anti-Hasidic satire of Yosef Perl; Yiddish socialist writers such as Morris Winchevsky, Morris Rosenfeld, and Dovid Pinski (all residents of the United States); and the familiar genre of dire memoirs of violence and filth in the heder. As for Yiddish literature, the editors had some trouble identifying suitable passages. Classical Yiddish literature, with the exception of the young Peretz, they explained, had been almost barren of antireligious, as distinct from anticlerical, themes. They therefore looked further afield, to authors such as Lucretius, Heine, and Sinclair Lewis. More surprisingly they included passages by two of the founders of modern Hebrew literature, Peretz Smolenskin and Yehuda Leib Gordon, whose works by this time were scarcely acceptable for publication in the USSR in any other context. Anticipating possible objections to such a contents list, the editors explained that, since some of the texts by “bourgeois” authors were defective in their approach, they had omitted certain words, phrases, or passages. With a few exceptions such as Shmuel Halkin, Peretz Markish, and Dovid Hofshteyn, and (translated from Russian) Ilya Ehrenburg, Soviet writers were lightly represented. Soviet literature, Yiddish and Russian alike, the editors lamented, had not tackled the subject directly: there was an urgent need, they declared, for it to do so.51 One Soviet writer was conspicuously absent: the former seminarian who now ruled the country.
Many Jews no doubt considered it possible to reconcile continued Jewish observance with loyalty to, or at any rate acquiescence in, the Soviet system, like Old Gedali in Isaac Babel’s story, who inquires: “So let’s say we say ‘yes’ to the Revolution. But does that mean that we’re supposed to say ‘no’ to the Sabbath?”52
Meanwhile, however, the introduction of a compulsory six-day workweek in 1929 made Sabbath observance by Jews virtually impossible. Failure to turn up for work on Saturdays or Jewish holidays became a punishable offense.
Such basic religious practices as observance of the Sabbath, kosher slaughter, and circumcision nevertheless continued to be practiced in the Soviet Union, albeit often surreptitiously and on a decreasing scale, particularly in large cities such as Minsk and in shtetlakh of the former Pale. The young Polish Communist Moshe Zalcman, who immigrated to the USSR in 1933, reports that on Yom Kippur in Kiev in the mid-1930s, Jewish factory workers would turn up for work but abstain from smoking or eating in the canteen.53 When he visited his uncle in Moscow, he found him teaching the humash to his two sons.
Yeshivot were not, initially, considered illegal by the Soviet regime, so long as students were over eighteen years of age. But in practice they were hounded out of existence. By 1928–29 they functioned in only twelve towns, with a total of just 620 students.54 Of these, 150 were in Minsk, but the single remaining yeshiva there closed at the end of 1930. The last report of the exposure of an underground yeshiva in the USSR came from Berdichev in 1938.55
The Chabad movement of the sixth Lubavitcher rebbe, Yosef Yitshak Schneerson, who had succeeded his father in 1920, was active in the USSR until the early 1930s. The family had left Lubavitch in 1915; the rebbe lived in Rostov until 1924, then in Leningrad. At a conference of Soviet rabbis in 1926 he was elected president— though he did not attend. In 1927–29, as Lubavitch yeshivot in other towns were closed, their students moved to a new, clandestine yeshiva in Vitebsk, which held classes in synagogue buildings. The number of students reached 150 but it proved hard to find Jewish homes ready to offer them the traditional free meals, especially after the authorities started seeking the names and addresses of such generous householders. In early 1928 the head of the yeshiva was arrested. For a time it continued to function secretly in private houses but shortly before Passover in 1930 it closed altogether and the remaining instructors were imprisoned.
The prisoners, with their long beards, peyes (sidelocks), and kapotes, were held in jail for several months. They managed to smuggle in talesim (prayer shawls) and even a shofar (ram’s horn), to be used in the celebration of the high holy days. But at New Year they were suddenly told they could go, provided only that they signed a receipt for all their belongings. This they refused to do on a holy day. Accordingly, they were held until the end of the feast, when they were released. Twelve students fled to Georgia, where Soviet control over religious activity was more lax.56 The Lubavitcher rebbe had meanwhile been imprisoned in 1927 but after foreign pressure on the Soviet authorities, he was released and permitted to leave for Latvia.
Claims of clandestine Chabad activity in the Soviet Union under Stalin may be exaggerated but we have at least some corroborating evidence. Isaac Bashevis Singer, then a little-known Yiddish journalist in Warsaw, on a visit to the USSR in 1926, was present at a “secluded midnight celebration” of Lubavitch Hasidim and “was surprised to find among them engineers, students, and other enlightened men” who had become pious after the revolution.57
In Uman and Tul’chyn, in Ukraine, remnants of the Bratslav Hasidim continued to maintain a religious life until the late 1930s. This was a unique sect of mystics who, unlike all other Hasidim, had no living leader: instead, they followed the teachings and gloried in the memory of their founder, Nahman of Bratslav (1772–1810), who died without issue. Hence they were known as the “dead Hasidim.” The Bratslavers regarded Nahman as the messiah and expected his imminent return from the dead, an event that would herald the dawn of the messianic era. Some moved to Poland (mainly Lublin and Warsaw) after the Russian Revolution but, given the central importance to the sect of the annual pilgrimage to their founder’s tomb in Uman, a few elected to remain there. Their kloyzl (small prayer hall) there was requisitioned, however, in the mid-1930s, and after a denunciation was sent to the authorities, several of the Hasidim were arrested.58
Two distinguished rabbis, members of the Twersky Hasidic dynasty, remained active in the Soviet Union throughout the 1930s: Shlomo Ben-Zion Twersky, the admor (a high rabbinic title) of Chernobyl, had moved to the United States after the revolution but returned to live in Kiev because, as it was said, “the materialistic life in America did not suit him.”59 The authorities even returned his apartment, which had been nationalized. He died in 1939. In the shtetl of Makhnovka (known from 1935 as Komsomolske), near Berdichev, Avraham Yehoshua Heschel Twersky, the admor of Makhnovka, maintained a Hasidic court, the last in the Soviet Union, though the local Jewish community had dwindled by 1939 to just 843 persons, a third of its size in 1897. These two cases, however, were exceptional.
In 1936–38, several of the most prominent remaining rabbis in the Soviet Union were arrested. Some were released after a short time. But Rabbi Shmaryahu Leib Medalia, secretary of the Bet Din (rabbinical court) in Moscow, who had been such an outspoken witness for the defense in the Vitebsk heder trial, was arrested with his family, accused of counterrevolutionary activities, and executed. Mordechai Feinstein, rabbi of Shklov, who had headed a yeshiva there until 1930, was arrested while seated at the festive table of Shavuot (Pentecost) and sent to Siberia, where he died. His brother Moshe Feinstein, rabbi of Luban, a shtetl near Minsk, and a contributor with Abramsky to Yagdil Torah, was permitted to leave for the United States. By 1939, fewer than 250 Jewish “clerics” remained in the whole of the USSR.
The secularization of Soviet Jewry was part and parcel of its rapid urbanization and modernization and was most strongly felt among the young. Jewish religious practice became almost exclusively the preserve of the prerevolutionary generation. Any form of religious observance by party members was regarded, by the mid-1930s, as deviant behavior.
In 1937, apparently in order to demonstrate the progress of the antireligious campaign, a question about religious belief was included in the Soviet census. The result was embarrassing: no less than 57 percent of the population as a whole declared themselves believers. Yet in this, as in other respects, Jews revealed themselves as the most perfectly sovietized Soviet nationality: just 10 percent of Jews pronounced themselves believers. Twice as many Jewish women as men did so.60
Yet here lay a double paradox, since while women were, in traditional Judaism, second-class citizens (actually, not citizens at all), in much of the rest of Europe they were in the vanguard of modernization and acculturation of Jewish society.