A Convenient Hatred: The History of Antisemitism (40 page)

Accusations of disloyalty have consequences, particularly in a war zone, and according to the American Jewish Committee, “one-half of the Jewish population of the world was trapped in a corner of eastern Europe that is absolutely shut off from all neutral lands and from the sea.”
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The American Jewish Committee had been founded in 1906 by American Jews who wanted to protect Jews in Russia from the pogroms (see
Chapter 11
). Now, ten years later, they feared for the safety of Jews throughout eastern and central Europe.

The war in Europe was being fought on two fronts, or lines of battle. On the western front, which stretched from Belgium to Switzerland, the two sides were mired in trench warfare, each determined to exhaust the
other. Neither was strong enough to win a decisive victory. On the eastern front, however, large stretches of land shifted back and forth from one side to the other.

Early in the war, the Russians won control of much of the Austrian province of Galicia and then bombarded the German state of East Prussia. But as the war progressed, the Germans prevailed. In a battle fought near the city of Tannenberg in August 1914, Germans nearly destroyed the Russian army. To exploit their victory, the Germans went on the offensive. Within two months, they controlled the northwestern part of Russian Poland and parts of Lithuania and the Ukraine. As the Russians retreated, they set fire to homes, farms, and businesses. Millions of people—Jews and Christians alike—were left homeless.

In the eyes of the Russian government, not all of those homeless civilians were loyal. During the war, a Jewish playwright and journalist who called himself S. Ansky traveled through the small towns, or shtetels, that dotted the Pale of Settlement and Russian-controlled Galicia to organize aid to Jewish communities there and investigate accusations that Jews were spying for the Germans. He summarized his findings:

At first, the slanderers did their work quietly and furtively. But soon they took off their masks and accused the Jews openly…
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From the generals down to the lowest ensign, the officers knew how the czar, his family, the general staff, and [the commanders] felt about Jews; and so they worked to outdo one another in their antisemitism. The conscripts were less negative but hearing the venom of their superiors and reading about Jewish treason day after day they too came to suspect and hate Jews…
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Every commander and every colonel who made a mistake had found a way to justify his crime, his incompetence, his carelessness. He could make everything kosher by blaming his failures on a Jewish spy. The officers, who accepted lies against Jews without question or investigation, were quick to settle accounts with the accused…
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The persecution reached mammoth proportions…. When the Russian army passed through many towns and villages, especially when there were Cossacks [members of the army’s elite cavalry], bloody pogroms took place. The soldiers torched and demolished whole neighborhoods, looted the Jewish homes and shops, killed
dozens of people for no reason, took revenge on the rest, inflicted the worst humiliation on them, raped women, injured children…. A Russian officer talked about seeing Cossacks “playing” with a Jewish two-year-old: one of them tossed the child aloft, and the others caught him on their swords. After that, it was easy to believe the German newspapers when they wrote that the Cossacks hacked off people’s arms and legs and buried victims alive…
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On the assumption that every Jew was a spy, [the Russian government] began by expelling Jews from the towns closest to the front: at first it was just individuals, then whole communities. In many places Jews and ethnic Germans were deported together. This process spread farther and farther with each passing day. Ultimately all the Jews—a total of over two hundred thousand—were deported from Kovno and Grodno provinces.
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At a meeting in St. Petersburg, N. B. Shcherbatov, the Russian minister of the interior, confirmed the charges made by Ansky and other Jews. He told fellow officials that even though “one does not like to say this,” military officers were attributing to Jews “imaginary actions of sabotage against the Russian forces” so that they could hold the Jews “responsible for [the army’s] own failure and defeat at the front.”
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Another official noted that the Jews “are being chased out of the [eastern front] with whips and accused… of helping the enemy”—with no attempt to distinguish the guilty from the innocent. He feared that when these refugees arrived in new areas, they would be in a “revolutionary mood.”
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By late summer of 1915, the Russian army had uprooted more than 600,000 Jews. A non-Jewish deputy in Russia’s parliament described their removal from the province of Radom:

The entire population was driven out within a few hours during the night…. Old men, invalids and paralytics had to be carried in people’s arms because there were no vehicles. The police… treated the Jewish refugees precisely like criminals. At one station, for instance, the Jewish Commission of Homel was not even allowed to approach the trains to render aid to the refugees or to give them food and water. In one case, a train which was conveying the victims was completely sealed and when finally opened most of the inmates were found half-dead, sixteen down with scarlet fever and one with typhus.
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Thousands of Jewish families were displaced during World War I. Some were forced out by the fighting, but many more were expelled from their homes because the Russians saw them as potential traitors.

Soldiers who “catch” toddlers on their swords and police officers who force “old men, invalids, and paralytics” from their homes are not protecting their country from treason. Rather, they are seeing Jews as stereotypes, not as human beings. A stereotype is more than a label or judgment about an individual based on the real or imagined characteristics of a group. Stereotypes dehumanize people by reducing them to categories; in this case, officials treated babies and paralytics as traitors despite all evidence and logic.

Similar stereotypes shaped the irrational decisions of the tsar, his ministers, and top generals. For example, by 1916, Russian soldiers experienced shortages of food, fuel, ammunition, and other necessities, partly because the government was using freight trains and supply wagons to
remove thousands of Jewish civilians from cities and towns in western Russia and resettle them farther east.

Although the Council of Ministers expressed no regret for the expulsions or the pogroms, its members did worry about their impact on Russia’s ability to borrow money abroad. The stereotype of the “rich Jewish banker” encouraged the ministers to exaggerate Jewish wealth and influence. In 1915, Jacob Schiff, a German-Jewish American banker, had refused to help the Allies secure a large loan if even “one cent of the proceeds” went to the Russian government. Russian officials saw his action as proof of a “Jewish plot” to overthrow the tsar. But, despite the power attributed to Schiff, the Allies easily found other bankers willing to lend them the money they needed. Although some of those bankers were Jews, the vast majority of them were Christians.

The Russian ministers who saw evidence everywhere of an “international Jewish conspiracy” were not alone. A number of British, French, German, Austrian, and other European officials also routinely exaggerated the power of Jews—particularly American Jews.

Throughout 1915 and 1916, the United States did not take sides in the war, despite the efforts of the Allies and the Central Powers to win the nation’s support. Both believed that American Jews could tip the decision to one side or the other. Why were they so convinced that about three million Jews (most of whom were penniless immigrants) in a nation that was home to more than 88 million people had so much power?
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That belief was based in part on the old myth that Jews controlled the world’s wealth. It was also influenced by the vigor with which Jews defended one another. Every time a group of Jews protested an injustice or helped a poverty-stricken Jewish community at home or abroad, some non-Jews saw those efforts as evidence of an international conspiracy and concluded that Jews were loyal only to one another and not to the countries they lived in.

David Lloyd George, who became Britain’s prime minister in 1916, was among those who believed that “the Jews” had enormous power. He was also convinced that 1917 would be the critical year in the war and that the Allies must make a tremendous effort to ensure their victory—especially after Russia was rocked by a revolution in the spring. He later wrote that he had faced two major problems that year: how to convince the new government in Russia to continue fighting the war and how to persuade the Americans to join the Allies. “In the solution of these two
problems,” he noted, “public opinion in Russia and America played a great part, and we [believed]… that in both countries the friendliness or hostility of the Jewish race might make a considerable difference.”
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The Ottoman Empire, which controlled Palestine and other parts of the Middle East, was an ally of Germany and Austria-Hungary. Early in the war, the Ottoman governor of Palestine had feared that Arab and Jewish nationalists there would side with the Allies. So he arrested some of them and banished about 6,000 of the 85,000 Jewish settlers in the province. Many of them found refuge in British-controlled Egypt.

Almost everyone the governor deported was a Russian Jew. In his view, all Russian Jews were enemy aliens, even though many of them considered themselves refugees from Russian persecution. He ordered their newspapers, schools, banks, and political offices closed. When David Ben-Gurion and other Zionist leaders protested, they too were exiled.

That policy persuaded some Zionists and Arab nationalists to help the Allies. In 1916, the British offered to aid the Hashemites, a powerful Arab family, in creating an independent Arab kingdom in exchange for their military support for the Allies. Zionists were interested in a similar arrangement. They wanted the British to recognize the rights of the Jewish people in Palestine. To show their commitment to the Allies, a group of young Jews organized a Jewish legion that fought on behalf of the British. About one-third were from Palestine (including many Russian Jews, some of whom had been expelled by the Ottomans earlier in the war); another third came from the United States. The rest were from various countries, including Britain, Canada, and Argentina.
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On November 2, 1917, Arthur James Balfour, the British foreign secretary, issued a declaration that stated, in part: “His Majesty’s Government view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object.” To many antisemites, the Balfour Declaration, as it became known, was “proof” that “the Jews” controlled Britain. To Lloyd George, Balfour, and other government leaders, it was a rational decision that, they believed, would result in strong support for the Allies.

In nations that were already committed to the Allies’ cause, most Jews celebrated the announcement. But some were wary; they thought the declaration suggested that Jews were more loyal to other Jews than to the countries they lived in. And it did not change the way most German and Austrian Jews viewed the war—they remained loyal to their countries.

The Central Powers shared the British government’s view of Jews as a “united race,” and therefore they saw the Balfour Declaration as a
powerful piece of propaganda for the Allies; they believed it would prompt Jewish bankers to lend more money to the Allies. To minimize the effects of the declaration, Ottoman officials ended restrictions on Jewish immigration to Palestine. And in January 1918, when the Germans approved their own plan to create an autonomous Jewish settlement in Palestine, the Ottomans reluctantly agreed.

Although the Balfour Declaration would have important long-term effects, it had no impact on the two problems that British Prime Minister Lloyd George struggled with in 1917. As he had hoped, the United States did declare war in April 1917—but the decision could not be attributed to Jewish influence because it occurred about seven months before the Balfour Declaration was issued. In addition, by November 1917, a second revolution was under way in Russia. Not only had the tsar been overthrown but now Russia’s first democratic government had been replaced as well. Russia’s newest government, led by a Communist group known as the Bolsheviks, officially withdrew from the war and signed a peace treaty with the Germans. In spite of Lloyd George’s hopes, Jewish public opinion had no effect on that decision, either.

Thanks to that treaty, Germany was able to transfer thousands of soldiers from the eastern front to battlefields in the west. There they faced a new opponent, the United States. By June 1918, American troops were arriving in France at the rate of 250,000 a month. By fall, the Americans were helping the Allies push the Germans back. On November 1, they crashed through the center of the German line. It was then only a matter of days until Germany surrendered and the war was finally over.