A Convenient Hatred: The History of Antisemitism (37 page)

Herzl proposed a solution: the establishment of a Jewish state. He believed that Jews must have their own country.

Although the rising antisemitism in democratic France in the late 1800s stunned many people, few were surprised to learn that it was also increasing in Russia. After all, Russian tsars had long used their almost unlimited power against Jews. For centuries, they had refused to permit Jews to live in Russia or even to visit there. In 1772, Russia then joined Austria and Prussia in a takeover of Poland and the first division of its land and people (two more partitions followed). Russia gained about nine million Roman Catholic and nearly one million Jewish subjects.

The Eastern Orthodox, or Byzantine, Church was Russia’s official church—and as “defenders of the Orthodox faith,” the tsars of Russia did not want to open their country to Jews. In the end, however, the tsar at the
time of the division decided that Jews could remain in the formerly Polish parts of the empire but could not settle or work in the heart of Russia.

The area to which the Jews were confined was known as the Pale of Settlement. A
pale
is an enclosed space; it can also be a fence or a pole that marks a boundary. The Pale of Settlement was made up of 25 provinces in western Russia, from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Black Sea in the south. It was never home only to Jews—they made up only about 9 percent of the total population in the Pale. Other residents included Poles, Ukrainians, Germans, Belorussians, Lithuanians, Turks, and Russians.

Over the years, the boundaries of the Pale shifted occasionally, but the idea of confining Jewish settlement to a limited area remained unchanged. Yet even as the tsars tried to keep Jews apart from “real” Russians, they also supported a seemingly opposite policy—assimilation. The idea was to turn Jews into Russians by converting them to the Russian Orthodox faith. Once they had all converted, there would be no need for a Pale of Settlement.

The first step was to open the Russian army to Jews. In 1825, Tsar Nicholas I issued a decree stating that all Jewish men were now subject to a military draft when they reached the age of 18 and that they would be required to serve for 25 years. According to a memo the tsar sent his generals, “The chief benefit to be derived from the drafting of Jews is the certainty that it will move them most effectively to change their religion.”
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When Nicholas discovered that very few Jewish soldiers were converting to Christianity, he issued a new order. Now the army would conscript 12-year-old Jewish boys and give them six years of “special training” to prepare them for military life at age 18.

Jewish parents tried desperately to keep their sons out of the army. Wealthy Jews were allowed to purchase substitutes to serve in their sons’ places. The substitutes were Jews from poor families. Every Jewish community had to provide a certain number of 12-year-old recruits; if a community could not meet its quota, boys as young as 8 or 10 were forced into the army to make up the required number.

In 1835, Alexander Herzen, a Russian writer, saw a group of these very young Jewish draftees at a train station several hundred miles from Moscow. He asked who the children were and where they were being taken. An officer told him that they were “cursed little Jew boys of eight or nine years old.” He went on to say that half would die before they reached their destination. Herzen asked if there had been an epidemic. The officer replied:

“No, not epidemics, but they just die like flies. A Jew boy, you know, is such a frail, weakly creature, like a skinned cat; he is not used to tramping in the mud for ten hours a day and eating biscuit—then again, being among strangers, no father nor mother nor petting; well, they cough and cough until they cough themselves into their graves. And I ask you, what use is it to [the authorities]? What can they do with little boys?”

Herzen watched the soldiers round up the boys. He noted:

They brought the children and formed them into regular ranks: it was one of the most awful sights I have ever seen, those poor, poor children! Boys of twelve or thirteen might somehow have survived it, but [not] little fellows of eight and ten…
.

Pale, exhausted, with frightened faces, they stood in thick, clumsy, soldiers’ overcoats with stand-up collars, fixing helpless, pitiful eyes on the garrison soldiers who were roughly getting them into ranks. The white lips, the blue rings under their eyes bore witness to fever or chill. And these sick children, without care or kindness, exposed to the icy wind that blows unobstructed from the Arctic Ocean, were going to their graves.
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Once in camp, the boys were pressured to convert and punished if they tried to practice Judaism in any way. After months of beatings, harassment, and even jail sentences, about two-thirds of the boys became Christians. Nicholas also tried to convert Jewish children who were still at home by opening special state schools designed to teach them Russian culture and the Russian Orthodox religion. Not surprisingly, most Jewish parents refused to let their children attend.

Nicholas also encouraged the assimilation of “useful Jews” (those few with money or with skills that were in short supply) by permitting them to live in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and other Russian cities. The millions of other Jews whom he considered “useless” remained in the crowded Pale, where jobs were hard to find.

By 1855, the year Nicholas died, many Russians were calling for economic and political reforms. Jews were not the only vulnerable group in Russia, and many other minorities were also threatened. In response to the discontent, Alexander II, the new tsar, announced plans to modernize
Russia and provide “education, equal justice, tolerance, and humaneness” for every citizen. Almost immediately, he relaxed censorship laws and eased restrictions on foreign travel. Universities were opened to students from all parts of Russian society, the poor as well as the rich. Alexander reduced the length of military service from 25 years to 6—even less for those who attended high school or college—and he abolished the military preparation program for young Jewish boys.

In March 1861, Alexander freed Russia’s 47 million serfs and announced that all Russian citizens were equal before the law. In fact, however, the serfs were not as free as Alexander claimed, nor were all Russian citizens truly equal before the law. Nevertheless, the proclamation marked a step forward for everyone except Jews. Even though many Jews still hoped that he would eventually expand their rights, Alexander privately told officials that he expected Jews to “earn” their civil rights through “moral improvement.” To the tsar, “moral improvement” meant conversion to the Russian Orthodox Church. To his surprise, some Russians disagreed. An editorial in a newspaper published by the Ministry of War declared:

Let us be worthy of our age. Let us abandon the childish habit of presenting the Jews in our literary works as [ridiculous and disreputable] creatures. On the contrary, remembering the causes that brought them to such a state,… [let] us offer them a place among us, let us use their energy, readiness of wit, and skill as a new means for satisfying the growing needs of our people.
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Such statements reflected a belief that Jews would make a positive contribution to Russia if they had more freedom. Although Alexander had no intention of granting Jews equal rights, he did increase the number of Jewish businessmen who could live and work outside the Pale. He granted similar privileges to Jewish artisans, university graduates, and veterans of the army. He had hoped these Jews would energize the economy and encourage investment by Jews in other countries. They fulfilled his expectations. With the help of foreign Jews, they opened factories, founded banks, and helped build more than 75 percent of the nation’s railroads.

The success of these Jews inspired tens of thousands of young people in the Pale to enroll not only in secular schools run by various Jewish groups but also in government-sponsored schools for Jewish students—the same schools Jews had shunned during Nicholas’s reign. Now fewer parents objected, mainly because young men who attended government-sponsored schools could avoid army service. In the 1860s, a new law
opened the Russian state school system to Jewish students, and the government-run schools for Jews gradually disappeared. Young Jews, like their non-Jewish neighbors, were attracted to state schools because graduates were eligible for government employment as well as for a variety of commercial and professional careers in the heart of Russia.

Despite such successes, or perhaps because of those successes, antisemitism intensified throughout Russia in the 1870s. Many Russians believed that Jews were becoming too powerful and had too many privileges. Articles in Russian newspapers reinforced that view by warning of the danger Jews posed to Russia. They claimed that the presence of Jewish students in state schools would lead to Jewish domination of such professions as law, engineering, medicine, and architecture—occupations that had once been open only to Russians.

Other publications held Jews responsible for the revolutionary movement that was arising in Russia as well as the evils associated with both socialism and capitalism. Socialism, which was popular with many young revolutionaries, is an economic system in which the means of production and distribution are publicly owned and controlled. Capitalism, on the other hand, is an economic system in which the means of production and distribution are privately owned. In the real world, there has never been a purely capitalist economy or a purely socialist one. Most economic systems contain elements of both but lean a little more to one than to the other. It is illogical to think that “the Jews” could have been advocates of both these systems, since they are opposites of one another. But antisemites had no difficulty in claiming that both were being advocated as part of a Jewish plot to control Russia. Hatred has never been logical.

Jews and non-Jews who tried to use facts and logic to counter antisemitic remarks were ignored. One writer provided statistics showing that non-Jews in the Pale of Settlement were better off economically than those who lived outside it. A government study conducted in the late 1880s confirmed his findings. Although no one disputed the facts, this information did not change the widespread belief that Jews were a “mass of usurers and hucksters of dubious honesty, who will enrich themselves by exploiting gullible Russians.”
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Many Russians also held Jews responsible for Russia’s foreign policy failures. They were particularly outraged by British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli. At the Congress of Berlin in 1878 (see
Chapter 10
), he had supported equal rights for Jews in countries that Russia had recently freed from Ottoman rule. The Russian press pointed to Disraeli’s Jewish ancestry and suggested that he wanted to take personal revenge on Russia
for denying civil rights to Jews. The attacks were so vicious that Jews in one town in the Pale published a declaration in a Moscow newspaper stating that they had nothing in common with Disraeli and were loyal to Russia.
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This kind of antisemitism was not new anywhere in Europe, and in ordinary times, it might have blown over. But an unexpected event on March 1, 1881, changed everything. Pauline Wengeroff described it as the day “on which the sun that had risen over Jewish life in the 1850s was suddenly extinguished.”
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Alexander II was shot to death on the banks of the Moika Canal in St. Petersburg.

Some Jews compared the days immediately following Alexander’s assassination to “living on top of a volcano.” Rumors spread like wildfire. Many of these rumors claimed that the new tsar, Alexander III, had ordered Russians to attack Jews and that anyone who failed to do so would be punished severely. Why would he or anyone else blame Jews for the tsar’s death? The revolutionary group responsible for the assassination included a Jewish woman named Gessia Gelfman. Although she was tried and convicted along with her non-Jewish comrades, the rumors maintained that only by “beating the Jews” would Alexander III be able to avenge his father’s death. Even though the tsar denied the rumor, many people insisted that he really did want them to beat the Jews. They were convinced that he issued a denial to quiet foreigners.

The violence began on April 15, 1881, in Elizavetgrad (now Kirovograd). The rioting quickly spread to other parts of the Ukraine and much of southern Russia. On April 26, 1881, it reached Kiev, the Ukrainian capital. A witness described the first day of rioting:

At twelve o’clock at noon, the air echoed with wild shouts, whistling, jeering, hooting, and laughing. An enormous crowd of young boys, artisans, and laborers was marching. The entire street was jammed with the barefoot brigade. The destruction of the Jewish homes began. Windowpanes and doors began to fly about, and shortly thereafter the mob, having gained access to the houses and stores, began to throw upon the streets absolutely everything that fell into their hands. Clouds of feathers began to whirl in the air. The sound of broken windowpanes and frames, the crying, shouting, and despair on the
one hand, and the terrible yelling and jeering on the other, completed the picture…. Shortly afterwards the mob threw itself upon the Jewish synagogue, which, despite its strong bars, locks and shutters, was wrecked in a moment. One should have seen the fury with which the riff-raff fell upon the [Torah] scrolls, of which there were many in the synagogue. The scrolls were torn to shreds, trampled in the dirt, and destroyed with incredible passion.
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P
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