SLOW BUT IMPORTANT CHANGES took place in the social status of the Central European Jews in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Wealthy Jews could move out of the ghettos in Germany, and some of them became influential, the so-called Court Jews. Elsewhere in Europe, there were only a few ghettos in France, and none in Britain. During the age of the Enlightenment, voices were heard in Britain, France, and Germany advocating the emancipation of the Jews. The majority of European Jewry had moved from west to east at the time of the persecutions in the late Middle Ages; their fate would be determined by different forces.
While the leading thinkers of the Enlightenment fought for tolerance, their attitude toward the Jews was at the very least one of reserve. Voltaire had nothing but contempt for the Jews who, as he saw it, were intolerant and fanatical. As he put it on one occasion, “I would not be in the least surprised if these people would not some day become deadly to the human race.” Attempts have been made to explain Voltaire’s antisemitism against the background of his enmity to all established religion. What he wrote about Muhammad would certainly be interpreted in our time as an extreme case of Islamophobia.
Some commentators have argued that when Voltaire attacked the Jews he was really aiming at the Catholic church—but for political reasons could not be as outspoken. His general attitude toward the church establishment—ecrasez l’infame—is well known. But it does not explain the additional animus against the Jews, including the utter contempt for the Old Testament. Other leading figures of the Enlightenment were ready to make an exception for the educated Jews but not the bearded ones. There were, however, not many Jews at the time who had a good secular education.
By and large there was a built-in limit to the antisemitism of the French philosophers, for while preaching tolerance and humanism, they could not totally exclude the Jews. But they included them with a feeling of great disdain; as Paul-Henri Baron d’Holbach wrote, the Jewish character had been shaped by certain historical conditions, climate, and environment, and for the most part, these people were hopelessly foreign to Europe. He clearly underrated the eagerness and capacity of European Jewry to assimilate. The antisemitism of Voltaire—and other philosophes—was in some respects influenced by his attitude toward the Greeks and Romans, whom he admired and who had disliked this strange and zealous tribe which kept to itself and always emphasized its exclusivity. The Jews had remained, it was always pointed out, a state within a state, a nation within a nation. Voltaire’s anti-Judaism was also based on Spinoza’s critique of the Jewish religion. Spinoza and later rationalists had maintained (to simplify it) that the biblical stories were not to be trusted and that the Jewish religion in particular had become ossified.
Seen in historical perspective, the ideas of the Enlightenment led to the emancipation of the Jews, but they also contributed to the emergence of modern antisemitism, particularly in France. Count Clermont-Tonnerre in a famous speech declared that the Jews as individuals deserved everything, Jews as a nation, nothing. This was in part a concession to the members of the Assembly from Alsace Lorraine where most of the Ashkenazi Jews lived. The Assembly had argued that full rights should be given to the Jews only after they had adapted themselves to the norms of the society in which they lived.
The emancipation of the Jews encountered resistance on the part of the Catholic church, the reactionaries, and some Jewish apostates who had become ultraorthodox Christians (such as the brothers Ratisbonne), but it became the law of the land under Napoleon, albeit with some delays. However, political and intellectual hostility to the Jews and their emancipation continued throughout the nineteenth century; it reached its apogee in France at the time of the Dreyfus trial.
Very often attacks against the Jews were combined with a campaign against Freemasons. Thus a new ideology was born—that of a conspiracy of evil carried out by Jews and Masons in close collaboration. This doctrine found supporters not only in France but also in Eastern Europe, even though there was little in common between these two groups. The Masons had no particular predilection for the Jews, and for orthodox Jews, adherence to a Masonic lodge was an abomination.
If there had been resistance to the emancipation of the Jews in France, there was considerably more of it in Germany and the lands of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. The Napoleonic wars and the age of romanticism generated modern nationalism in Europe. Although there had been voices in Germany during the eighteenth century advocating the emancipation of Jews—Gotthold Lessing was the best known—there had been even more opposing it. Some of these were mainly theologically inspired; others expressed the fear that the character of the Jews was so negative as to make them virtually not reformable. Yet others adduced socioeconomic arguments—the Jews were incapable of engaging in productive labor and they would be a burden on society. Nor would Christian merchants be able to compete with the Jews in view of their close ties with other Jews inside and outside the country. Seen by these critics, Jewry was not so much a religious group but an exclusionist company that, being alien to society and the state, had no desire to give up its specific character.
These negative views about the Jews were shared by both populist pamphleteers and the leading German philosophers of the age. They were not in principle opposed to giving rights to the Jews, but they doubted whether the Jews were capable (as Johann Fichte put it) of changing their nature, as formed by their religion and their past, to achieve love of justice, love of man, and love of truth. He thought that the only way to achieve this was to decapitate them and to give them heads that did not contain Jewish ideas. Fichte claimed that the Jews were a state within a state and a very powerful one at that.
Kant was a milder man and less influenced by Christian religion (even though he defended it and thought it superior to all others). Still, he thought that old-style Judaism was not compatible with the morals of civilized society. He regarded Judaism as basically amoral: “The Palestinians living among us,” he wrote, “have acquired not without reason the reputation of swindlers.” However, he did not exclude the possibility that Jews could become full-fledged citizens if they underwent a basic, wholesale reform—in other words, if they gave up traditional Judaism and adopted Christianity, in practice if not in doctrine.
At the same time, other great German philosophers had their doubts about the consequences of conversion and assimilation—Judaism as they saw it was both less and more than a religion.
Hegel, the third of the great philosophers of that age, also thought Jews contemptible, beginning with Abraham, the first of the patriarchs. Judaism, according to Hegel, was not only unnatural and inhuman but had resulted in a petrified social system. Even Jesus had failed to liberate the Jews from their self-imposed limitations through his love. If the Jews had remained pariahs, it was simply a consequence of their beginnings as a group and their basic religious concepts.
Although in his later writings Hegel did not oppose the inclusion of Jews in society on the basis of equal rights, this was connected with his belief in the Prussian state, which had to treat all its subjects more or less equally. Neither Hegel nor Kant proposed that the Jews should be sent back to the ghetto forever, and they had esteem for a few emancipated Jews. Yet, on the philosophical level, their attitude remained hostile—the Jews were, as Johann Herder put it, an alien, Asian element in Europe. Herder called them corrupt, parasitic, and without honor. For this reason, even if the Jews were to be given equal rights, they should probably not become state officials or exercise any kind of authority over non-Jews. The day might come, Herder wrote, when no one in Europe would ask anymore whether a person was a Christian or a Jew—but this day was quite obviously in the very distant future.
The anti-Judaism of the great German philosophers was restrained by the impact of the principal ideas of the Enlightenment—human rights and tolerance. Such restraints applied to a much lesser extent (if at all) to the generation of romantic thinkers that followed them; their ideology was German-Christian, and while Jews, as they saw it, could change their religion, there was no such thing as conversion to being a German.
Among both the French philosophes and the German thinkers of the time there were some who took a less hostile attitude—Rousseau among the French, Schelling among the Germans—but they were the exception. To what extent was this negative judgment of the Jews explicable and justified? The condition of the Jews after centuries of persecutions and ghetto life was miserable, their contribution to European civilization, nonexistent. The accusations of the petrification of Jewish religion, of the unchanging ritual having all but squeezed out true religion and the religious impulse, were not unjustified; nor was the observation that Jews kept to themselves and tended to help and defend each other. Without such solidarity, the feeling of responsibility for each other, they would not have survived.
For most of these thinkers—Voltaire and Fichte perhaps excepted—Judaism was not a major issue. What surprises is the absence of Christian charity vis-à-vis a persecuted minority on the part of people who, Deists or true Christians, prided themselves not just on a rational approach in contrast to the dark Middle Ages but also on their humanity and their love of their neighbors. The question of responsibility for the misery of the Jews did not occur to them.
With all this skepticism, the emancipation began even during the last days of absolutist rule. The most prominent instance of this was Austria, where Emperor Josef II had decreed his tolerance edict in 1781. This gave the Jews all the duties and some of the rights of other citizens. Following Josef’s death, many of these laws were revoked and the Jews were given full equal status only after the revolutions of 1848. In Holland and England, emancipation had proceeded without much fanfare, though in England Jews could not enter state service or parliament prior to the abolition of the “Jewish oath” in 1832, and in Holland the guilds refused to give them membership for a long time. In the United States the constitution stated that no religious test should ever be required as a qualification for any office or public trust.
In Germany the emancipation of the Jews as decreed by Napoleon suffered severe setbacks during the era of reaction following the 1814 Congress of Vienna—in some cities, such as Frankfurt, Jews had to return to the ghetto; from a few others they were expelled. Anti-Jewish pamphlets mushroomed. There were small-scale riots (the Hep Hep disturbances of 1819—the origins and the meaning of the antisemitic Hep-Hep slogan remains unclear to this day); opposition by the church and the various professional associations and ideologues manifested itself in many ways. Only after the revolutions of 1848 did a decisive change in the legal status of the Jews take place.
There was opposition to the emancipation also in Slovakia and Hungary, where comparatively many Jews lived, and even the liberals there thought that emancipation was premature. Switzerland banned the presence of Jews in the country (except in the canton of Aargau, but there, too, Jews had no civil rights), and a plebiscite as late as 1862 overwhelmingly rejected giving citizen rights to Jews; these were granted eventually, in 1874, after a new constitution was adopted. It is difficult to think of a single European country with a significant Jewish presence in which emancipation passed without resistance.
What were the reasons underlying the physical attacks against the Jews in the first half of the nineteenth century? They were not widespread and could not possibly be compared with the pogroms in Russia in later years. There were local attacks against Jews in Italy (in Toscana and Livorno in 1799–1800); in France in 1848 and 1898; in Odessa in 1821, 1849, and 1871; in South Wales in 1911. The mood prevailing was nationalist-patriotic and the Jews were considered strangers, even more than in the age of absolutism when everyone had been a subject of a monarch or ruler. At the same time, with the downfall of the walls of the ghetto, Jews entered various trades and professions that had been closed to them before. As a result, the Jew was considered a competitor—all the more so since some had grown quite rich after leaving the ghetto.
In some German universities students demonstrated against Jewish writers who in their books had shown an unpatriotic spirit; elsewhere students helped to protect Jews who had been attacked in the riots. It was during this period, particularly during the revolutions of 1848, that Jews actively entered European politics, but the revolutions often also witnessed anti-Jewish manifestations and the birth of political antisemitism. The Jews became a target in some cases because of their role in the revolutionary movement (they were attacked as “destructive elements”), but in other cases, on the contrary, they were considered enemies of the people because of the protection they had previously enjoyed by the hated authorities.
Generalizations are difficult. Attempts to explain these riots mainly against the background of social tensions (as a “displacement of social protest”) on the whole have not been very convincing for a variety of reasons. There were attacks also against other minorities; furthermore, it is difficult to think of periods in the nineteenth century when Europe was entirely free of social conflict. The year 1819 was not a year of economic crisis in Germany—nor was 1881 in Russia. Had these been years of crisis, it can by no means be taken for granted that economic strain had led to fear and aggression and that this aggression, because of the stupidity of the masses (their “false consciousness”), had been directed against the perceived enemy (the Jews), who were not really responsible for the crisis. The Hep Hep riots of 1819 began in Würzburg in Franconia, but there were no obvious reasons that predestined Würzburg. They could have equally originated in nearby Bamberg or anywhere else.
There was a considerable upsurge of antisemitism in Austria in the 1880s and a decline in the influence of the antisemitic parties after the turn of the century. Since the 1880s witnessed an economic depression and since the economic situation improved later on, it would be tempting to see a correlation in these processes, but this is by no means certain. The upsurge of antisemitism probably had more to do with demographic change, with the fact that Jews moved into positions of influence in various fields in Austria, and, last but not least, with the presence of a charismatic antisemitic leader in Karl Lueger.
Local political incitement was a factor of considerably greater importance—as in later Eastern European pogroms such as the Kishinev pogrom in 1903. If the authorities suppressed the riots early on, employing strong forces and strict measures, riots did not spread; if they failed to do so, there was a good chance of repeat performances elsewhere. (There is an interesting parallel with the spread of militant Islamism in our time; its teachings lead to terrorist activities, not in regions that were particularly torn by social strife but in districts where radical preachers could spread their message without hindrance.)
The first half of the nineteenth century also witnessed the emergence of the socialist movement in Western Europe. While Catholicism continued to oppose the liberation of the Jews from the shackles of earlier ages, and the right wing was against the Jews because they did not truly belong to the nation, the early socialists, such as Charles Fourier and Pierre Proudhon, were hostile to the Jews because they regarded them as agents of capitalism, of commerce, speculation, and exploitation. The fact that the same period witnessed the rise to prominence and riches of some Jewish families such as the Rothschilds only strengthened these convictions. The anti-Jewish feelings of the young Marx have been mentioned; the fact that Jews took a leading role among the Saint-Simonians, part of the socialist movement, and were also counted among the Marxist Social Democrats mattered little in this context.
IF SOCIOECONOMIC REASONS played a limited role in Western and Central European antisemitism, the situation was quite different in Eastern Europe, where it was of greater importance. The number of Jews in Russia had been minimal up to the eighteenth century; furthermore, all Jews had been expelled from Russia and the Ukraine following imperial decrees in 1727 and 1747. When Empress Catherine II invited new immigrants in 1762, this applied to everyone but the Jews. Early anti-Jewish feeling was almost exclusively religious-theological in inspiration—Jews were feared because of their false teachings that might corrupt god-fearing Christians.
The situation radically changed as the result of the first division of Poland in 1772 when the Jewish population of Russia suddenly grew by 200,000, which made it the largest concentration of Jews in Europe. Many more Jews became part of the Russian empire after the later divisions of Poland. Jews had migrated from west to east during the Middle Ages, despite the resistance of the Catholic church in Poland, and had found there a safe haven. They were of considerable use to both the monarchy and the nobility as traders and as the representatives of absentee landlords, managing feudal estates as leaseholders. This was bound to bring them into conflict with the peasants and other parts of the population. They had to maximize profits in order to fulfill their obligations to the landlords, thus opening themselves to charges of exploitation and “bloodsucking.” The peasants felt exploited not by the owners of the estates, absentee landlords whom they never saw, but by the Jews whom they made responsible for their misfortunes.
In the towns, Jewish artisans competed with Christian craftsmen and merchants, which also led to considerable tension. Jews took a leading part in the production and the retail sale of wheat-based alcohol, and most of the inns were in Jewish hands; this too was to play a central role in anti-Jewish charges in Poland and Russia. There were even accusations that Jews added poisonous herbs to the alcohol.
A concatenation of circumstances contributed to the spread of antisemitism. Poland, once a major power, was falling behind Western Europe economically and politically; modernization and reform did not make much progress. The Jews, lacking secular education, could not adjust to changing circumstances and play a significant role in the development of industry and other branches of the economy. At the same time, the number of Jews located in Poland and Lithuania considerably increased—there were more and more people and fewer work opportunities. The Catholic church, never particularly well-disposed toward the Jews, intensified its attacks; at a time when blood libels in Western and Central Europe became rare, they began to appear in Poland and the Ukraine. As was to be expected, Catholic militants (and also the Russian Orthodox church) found a few converted Jews who confirmed their suspicions that Jews needed the blood of Christian children for religious purposes.
There was also criticism of the Jews on the part of the Polish Enlightenment and its more progressive thinkers when the question of equal rights for Jews was discussed. Jews, it was argued, had shown idleness and hypocrisy; they had become in their majority backward and useless; unlike their coreligionists in Western Europe, they had not lived up to the moral standards of the society in which they lived. They had made no effort to learn the language of their neighbors and stuck to their antiquated clothing and their conspicuous beards. Whereas in earlier times Jews in Central Europe had been compelled to wear their own specifically marked garb, in Poland, on the contrary, they were expected to conform to the rest of society.
Disputes about the granting of civic rights raged for a number of years, beginning in 1789, and ended inconclusively. Freedom of worship was given but little else; the Jews were legally nonpersons, excluded from public law, and could not own land, only rent it. They were considered by and large an unproductive and backward element, and they were at least in part blamed for the general decline of the country. For their part, most Jews, immersed in their community’s own internal problems and living in the religious world of the Middle Ages, made little effort to adapt to modernity. Enlightenment among the Jewish community was slow and encountered much resistance. Poland stagnated and the Jews were made responsible for the stagnation.
The situation in Russia was different in as much as prior to the divisions of Poland, the Jews were permitted to visit on business for short times certain places such as Riga and White Russia. The attitude of the czars and the ruling class toward Jews was one of suspicion and hostility, even though few of them had ever met a Jew in the flesh; this situation persisted well into the nineteenth century. The Russian government had decided early on to confine the Jews to the Pale of Settlement, which consisted of Poland, Lithuania, parts of White Russia and the Ukraine (but not Kiev), but excluded Russia proper. Only a very few Jews were permitted to live outside the Pale, such as merchants of the first class and those who had served in the army for nearly a lifetime. In 1827 Czar Nicholas I, in an attempt to force the Jews to convert, had introduced military conscription beginning at the age of twelve. This did not lead to many conversions but to a great deal of suffering. Given the general climate of corruption, Jewish communities managed in many cases to circumvent this requirement.
The socioeconomic situation of Jews in the Pale of Settlement was so bad and degrading that more-enlightened individuals among the Russian authorities developed various schemes to solve the Jewish problem, mainly through education (teaching secular subjects) but also by the reorganization of the economic and social life of the Jewish communities. Attempts were also made to induce Jews to work in agriculture, but given the miserable conditions of the peasants, this was not very successful.
Under Czar Alexander II, who ascended to the throne in 1855, various liberal reforms such as the abolition of serfdom were carried out, and Jews too benefited to a certain extent. Juvenile conscription was abolished. As a result of these somewhat friendlier measures, the Jewish Enlightenment (the Haskalah) made certain progress. By and large, however, the hopes that had initially been raised among Russian Jews were disappointed: the Pale of Settlement was not abolished; civic rights were not extended to the Jews. In fact, the general climate toward the Jews changed for the worse even among the intelligentsia after the Polish uprising of 1863; there was increasing distrust and hostility toward all non-Russian nationalities in the empire.
The 1860s witnessed the spread of ideological antisemitism, and Iakov Brafman’s Kniga Kahala became the bible of this new wave of Judeophobia. Brafman, a convert, served as a professor at a Russian Orthodox seminary in Minsk. His book played the role that Eisenmenger’s had in Germany in an earlier period, and that the Protocols would at a later date. He claimed that there was an all-embracing Jewish conspiracy, that the Jews were a state within a state, that in every city there was a Jewish executive committee which, based on the prescriptions of the Talmud, was trying to enslave and exploit the non-Jews.
The authorities who originally had been pressing for the Russification of Russian Jewry began to change their policies and introduced quotas—a numerus clausus—for Jews in schools and universities. This in turn induced young Jews who had turned their backs on orthodox religion and the traditional way of life, and who were only too eager to become submerged in a secular culture, to turn to the revolutionary movement as the only way out of the ghetto. For it was only among these groups of often-violent oppositionists that they saw a way to emancipation and assimilation. While Jews had not been among the founders of the Narodniki groups and not among its leading ideologues, they figured prominently among its militants. They were even more strongly represented among the Social Democrats (Mensheviks and Bolsheviks) and the Social Revolutionaries of the last decades of the czarist period.
The presence of Jews among the revolutionaries fueled antisemitism among the nationalists and the right-wingers, but it did not play a paramount role as far as the pogroms of 1882 were concerned; there had been only one person of Jewish extraction among the revolutionary group who had assassinated Alexander II. She had been a minor figure and the antisemitic press had hardly mentioned her.
Generally speaking, the pogroms had not been incited or organized by the authorities as was frequently believed at the time. Most of the leading officials (and the new czar) disliked and even hated the Jews, but they believed that the Jewish question should be solved by imposing laws from above rather than by popular riots—which could well get out of control and turn against other targets. The authorities feared popular violence and the pogroms were an embarrassment, for they painted Russia in a bad light abroad; during the second half of the nineteenth century it was widely believed in Europe that a more civilized spirit had prevailed in human relations and the pogroms were a throwback to bygone ages.
The security forces were understaffed when the riots broke out and pogrom activists who were apprehended were given only mild punishment. But if the government played no active role in fomenting the riots, who did? This is not easy to answer, for frequently various circumstances merged. The pogroms of the 1880s were on the whole limited to certain towns in the southern Ukraine (with some notable exceptions—such as Warsaw, Homel, and Nizhni Novgorod); they seldom spread to the countryside. They started, as so often in Russian history, at Easter, a time of processions and other church activities in which the role of Jews in killing Jesus was emphasized by militant preachers. While most Jews still lived in dire poverty, some had become relatively wealthy in the 1860s and 1870s and were the subject of envy. Often it was heard that the Jews were no longer humble but had become “impertinent,” that although they were inferior people, they claimed to be treated as equals. However, the Jewish victims of the attacks, as far as can be established, were poor people, not the rich. At the same time, there had been an influx to the cities of occasional laborers from Russia and the Ukrainian countryside, which constituted an element of instability and ferment. They were frequently involved in brawls that easily turned into pogroms.
All together, the wave of pogroms of the 1880s was much smaller than the later ones of 1904–06 and 1918–19, and its main impact was political and psychological. It was a fatal setback for the Russifiers among the Jewish community, who had believed in a gradual rapprochement with the Russian people and Russian society. It also greatly helped to trigger emigration of Jews from Russia on a small scale to Palestine and on a much larger scale to America and South Africa.
During the two decades after the pogroms of 1881, the antisemitic policy of the czarist government became more intense; the “Temporary Rules” of 1882, which had severely restricted the rights and movements of the Jews, became permanent, and antisemitic propaganda, official and unofficial, greatly increased. If the government had a concept of how to solve the Jewish question, it was the formula presented by Pobedonostsev, the procurator of the Holy Synod: one-third will die out, another third will emigrate, the rest will disappear without leaving a trace—that is, become Christian. This was the period in which the Black Hundreds came into being, a radical right-wing, populist political movement, largely inspired and financed by the government. This group played a leading role in the pogroms of 1904–06 and under one name or another continued to wield political influence for years thereafter. This period should be regarded in many ways as a transitional stage between traditional, old-fashioned antisemitism and modern, Nazi-style antisemitism, even though the role of the church was still quite prominent and it fervently supported the monarchy.
This was also the period in which the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was composed, the bible of modern antisemitism, which is still sold in millions of copies in many countries. But it should also be mentioned that the Protocols, fabricated apparently in the 1890s in both Russia and France, had no significant political impact at the time inside Russia or in any other country. Its political impact only followed the revolutions of 1917, the civil war, and the emigration of millions of Russians. Even though a great deal of research has been invested in the origin of the Protocols, there is no absolute certainty as to its authors and origins to this day.
A series of major pogroms began with the massacre in Kishinev, the capital of Moldavia, in early 1903. It lasted for two days and left more than forty Jews dead. While accusations against V. K. Plehve, the Russian minister of the interior, of having instigated and organized the pogrom were unjustified, the local security forces certainly failed to react—partly because they were outnumbered (some 1,500 to 2,000 rioters confronted 350 police), but mainly because their commanders had no particular desire to protect the Jews. The Kishinev pogrom caused a worldwide scandal; it also created much heart-searching in the Jewish community—why had there been no resistance in a city a third of whose inhabitants were Jews? (“The sons of the Maccabeans were hiding like mice,” Haim Nahman Bialik wrote in a famous poem.) The reasons for Kishinev were sustained anti-Jewish incitement by Besarabets, the only daily local newspaper; rumors about ritual murder; and accusations against the Jews that they were taking a prominent part in the revolutionary movement and that, at the same time, they were exploiting the native population, which was Moldavian rather than Russian in its majority.
The Homel pogrom occurred in September 1903; it started with a brawl between a fishmonger and a peasant on the town’s market square. The difference between Kishinev and Homel was that there was determined resistance on the part of the local Jews and, as a result, the number of victims was about equal. But the fact that the Jews defended themselves enabled the authorities to claim later that Homel had been a Jewish pogrom against Russians as an action of revenge for Kishinev. In the beginning, railway workers took a leading part in the Homel riots; later on peasants from the neighborhood joined in and there was a great deal of robbery and plundering. The reasons given by the czarist authorities were the usual ones—it was the conduct of the Jews that had provoked the native population.
But the great wave of Russian pogroms came only in the wake of the war against Japan in 1904–05, which had taken an unprepared Russian government by surprise. This wave can be divided into two subwaves—the minor one that began in the fall of 1904 and comprised about 40 riots, mainly inside the Pale. As usual it is not easy to establish a clear pattern of the pogroms during the earlier phase, except that they did not last long and were limited in scope wherever Jewish self-defense was strong and/or the authorities were determined and capable of stopping the rioting. There seems to be little doubt that there was a connection between these disturbances and the indiscriminate conscription policy of the government. But subsequently the conscription policy became more sensitive and the pogroms nevertheless continued.
A connection with the Russian fortunes in the war became even more obvious. After a few months, even before the surrender of the Russian garrison in Port Arthur in December 1904, it had become clear that the war was not going well and that the military and political leadership was ineffective. This caused political and social unrest and the usual polarization. While the liberals and the leftists blamed the incapacity of the government and the general lack of freedom and backwardness of the country, the right-wingers and the reactionary forces found the culprit in the seditious, unpatriotic forces, and the Jews were an obvious target.
There was the usual antisemitic propaganda, reinforced by rumors that Jewish international financial capital was conspiring to effect the downfall of the Russian government. In 1904–05, in contrast to 1882, the Black Hundreds movement, politically and materially supported by the government, served as the organizing force behind many—probably most—of the pogroms and it also provided the foot soldiers.
As the authorities lost control in a chaotic situation, however, the Black Hundreds achieved a momentum of their own and even independence. George Louis, the French ambassador, wrote at the time, “the Black Hundreds are ruling the country and the government obeys them because it knows that the emperor is inclined to sympathize with them.” (This was an understatement—the czar had called them a “shining example of order and justice to all men.”) Alexander Dubrovin, their leader, mobilized mass support through sympathizers in the clergy and patriotic organizations as well as in the police and the local administration.
The social base of the Black Hundreds was often called Okhotny Ryad—a small road in central Moscow which at the time housed Moscow’s game and meat market and other small shops owned usually by first generation Muscovites. These were people with little education, bewildered by the pace of social change and the rapid economic ups and downs, staunch believers in the monarchy and the church, enemies of the intelligentsia and the non-Russian nationalities.
Comparing the Black Hundreds with the Action Française, the main pillar of antisemitism in France at the time, one finds striking differences. The Action Française was predominantly middle class or upper-middle class and included the lower nobility, with considerable influence in the academic world. The Black Hundreds had a few aristocrats and professors among its supporters but considerably more hooligans and plain thieves, to quote Count Witte, a former prime minister. They engaged in riots but also individual acts of terrorism.
The Black Hundreds were populist and in this they resembled the Nazi party; they advocated limiting the working week and raising the living standard of the peasants. These demands and the unruly character of the movement became an embarrassment to their backers in the government, and official support for them dwindled once the danger of a revolution had passed. Internal squabbles in the Black Hundreds leadership as well as the temporary political stabilization in the country weakened the movement, and in 1908 they split and lost much of their momentum. But the tradition of the Black Hundreds survived, and its successor groups again became a political force in the civil war following the revolutions of 1917 and in the Russian emigration.
Lastly, it should be remembered that the whole climate of those years was one of political protest, mass strikes, demonstrations, and clashes such as the massacre of Bloody Sunday in St. Petersburg in 1905. The first phase of these pogroms, in which about a hundred Jews were killed, was part of a much larger historical development—the revolution of 1905.
Under considerable popular pressure and following the impact of the general strike of October 1905, the czar was compelled to announce far-reaching political reforms in his October 1905 manifesto. But the political climate did not immediately improve. On the contrary, during the three months following the publication of the manifesto there was an unprecedented wave of pogroms (between 600 and 700), which resulted in the murder of about 3,000 Jews; many more were wounded, and there were many cases of rape and plunder, with whole quarters burned. The worst pogrom was in Odessa, where some 800 men, women, and children were killed; there were 200 victims in Bialystok, 100 in Kiev, 100 in Minsk, and many more in smaller places.
The October Manifesto had been hailed as a victory by the left and the liberal forces. There had been mass demonstrations welcoming it, and the pogroms were part of the backlash by the unhappy extreme right. The authorities had not organized the pogroms, except in a few instances on the local level such as in Odessa; there was no need to because the Black Hundreds fulfilled this role. As the czar wrote to his mother, “the revolutionaries have angered the people . . . and because nine-tenths of the troublemakers are Jews, the people’s whole anger turned against them. That is how the pogroms happened . . .”
Nine-tenths of the troublemakers had not, in fact, been Jews, but the Jews were undoubtedly the easiest targets for the counterrevolutionary forces. The backlash was directed in principle not solely against them, but the democratic and liberal forces were more difficult to locate and to combat, while the Jews were dispersed and defenseless. The socialists were even more difficult to confront, only because their political demands were quite popular and the Black Hundreds quite liberally borrowed from them.
The pogroms had been preceded by a massive propaganda campaign supported by the monarchist forces, including the church. They came to an end after order in the country had been reestablished by the government. The immediate danger to the czarist regime had passed. Antisemitic forces were represented in the Duma (the lower house of parliament) but were not a significant force in the political life of the country.
The one major antisemitic affair that occurred in the following years was the 1911 Beilis trial in Kiev. A young Jewish tailor had been accused of killing a Christian boy for ritual purposes. The local authorities knew that this was a fabrication—they even knew the real killers—but they thought they were acting in accord with the wishes of the central government. This enterprise backfired, however; public opinion in Russia was overwhelmingly in favor of the man who had been falsely accused (less so in Russian Poland), and in the end Beilis had to be acquitted. Beilis left Russia with his family for Palestine just before the outbreak of the First World War. He did not find work there and went on to the United States. He died in the Bronx, New York, in 1934.