History of the Jews (64 page)

Most of the ‘missing rabbis’ seemed to have become radicals, and turned on their Judaism and Jewishness with contempt and anger. They turned on their parents’ class too, for a high proportion came from wealthy homes. Marx’s father had been a lawyer, Lassalle’s a silk merchant; Victor Adler, the pioneer Austrian Social Democrat, was the son of a real-estate speculator, Otto Bauer, the Austrian Socialist leader, of a textile magnate, Adolf Braun, the German Socialist leader, of an industrialist, Paul Singer, another leading German socialist, of a clothing manufacturer, Karl Hochberg of a Frankfurt banker. There were many other examples. Their break with the past, with family and community, often combined with self-hatred, promoted among them a spirit of negation and destruction, of iconoclasm, almost at times of nihilism—an urge to overthrow institutions and values of all kinds—which gentile conservatives were beginning to identify, by the end of the nineteenth century, as a peculiarly Jewish social and cultural disease.

There were four principal reasons why Jews, once they began to take part in general politics, moved overwhelmingly first to the liberal and then to the left end of the spectrum. In the first place there was the Biblical tradition of social criticism, what might be termed the Amos Syndrome. From the earliest times there had always been articulate
Jews determined to expose the injustices of society, to voice the bitterness and needs of the poor, and to call on authority to make redress. Then too there was the talmudic tradition of communal provision, which itself had Biblical origins, and which adumbrated modern forms of state collectivism. Jews who became socialists in the nineteenth century and who attacked the unequal distribution of wealth produced by liberal,
laissez-faire
capitalism were expressing in contemporary language Jewish principles which were 3,000 years old and which had become part of the instincts of the people.

But was it not true, as Disraeli claimed, that Jews also had a high regard for authority, hierarchy and traditional order? It was true, but subject to important qualifications. Jews, as we have seen, had never accorded absolute power to any human agency. Rule resided in the Torah and the vicarious authority accorded to man was limited, temporary and recoverable. Judaism could never have evolved, as Latin Christianity did, the theory of the divine right of kings. Jews had the strongest regard for the rule of law, so long as it was ethically based, and they could and did become devoted adherents of constitutionally based systems, as in the United States and Britain. To that extent Disraeli was correct in arguing that Jews were often natural Tories. But they were also natural enemies to authority which was arbitrary and tyrannical, illogical or outmoded. When Marx wrote, ‘Thus we find every tyrant backed by a Jew, as is every pope by a Jesuit. In truth, the cravings of oppressors would be hopeless and the practicability of war out of the question, if there were not an army of Jesuits to smother thought and a handful of Jews to ransack pockets,’
¹⁰³
he was wrong. Rothschild loans to absolute monarchies were geared not to reinforce tyranny but to abate it, especially in securing better treatment for Jews (in which, of course, Marx was not interested). Jewish money power in the nineteenth century, in so far as it had any overall political policy, tended to be irenic and constitutionalist. ‘Peace, retrenchment and reform’, Gladstone’s famous Liberal slogan, was also the axiom of the Rothschilds.

Moreover there was one important respect in which Disraeli misunderstood the impact of the Jews. He tended to see the Jewish archetype as a Sephardi. The Sephardis indeed had a strong regard for ancient historical institutions, and thus conformed to his image of the Jew. But the Ashkenazis, whom he chose to ignore in his argument, were far more restless, innovatory, critical and even subversive. They were also becoming far more numerous.

Here we come to the second force pushing emancipated Jews to the left: demography. In the period 1800-80, roughly Disraeli’s lifetime,
the Sephardi percentage of Jewry as a whole fell from 20 to 10 per cent. Most of them were concentrated in the Afro-Asian Mediterranean area, where standards of hygiene remained primitive throughout the nineteenth century. In Algiers, for instance, where Maurice Eisenbeth carried out a detailed analysis of the Jewish population, he found it rose from a maximum of 5,000 in the sixteenth century to a peak of 10,000-20,000 in about 1700, falling to 5,000 again by 1818.
¹⁰⁴
In Africa and Asia as a whole the number of Jews did rise, 1800-80, but only from 500,000 to 750,000. In Europe, during the same period, the total leapt from two million to seven million. The Jews, and the Ashkenazi in particular, were benefiting from the prime fact of modern times, the demographic revolution, which hit Europe first. But they did better than the European average. They married younger. Marriages between boys of fifteen to eighteen with girls of fourteen to sixteen were quite common. Nearly all Jewish girls married and tended to produce children soon after puberty. They tended to look after their children well, and with the help of communal welfare facilities, Jewish infantile death rates fell more quickly than the European average. Jewish marriages remained more stable. Jews lived longer. A survey of Frankfurt in 1855, for instance, shows Jewish life-spans averaged forty-eight years nine months, non-Jews thirty-six years eleven months.
¹⁰⁵
The discrepancy was even more marked in eastern Europe. In European Russia, the Jewish death rate, at 14.2 per 1,000 per year, was even lower than that of the well-to-do Protestant minority, and less than half that of the Orthodox majority (31.8). As a result, during the period of most rapid growth, 1880-1914, the number of Jews increased by an average of 2 per cent a year, well above the European mean, raising the total number of Jews from 7.5 million to over thirteen million.

These ‘new’ Jews were overwhelmingly Ashkenazis, concentrated in big cities. In 1800 it was rare to come across a Jewish city community of more than 10,000—there were only three or four in the world. By 1880 Warsaw had 125,000 Jews, and there were over 50,000 in Vienna, Budapest, Odessa and Berlin. There were about this number in New York too, and from this time North America drained off a huge proportion of the European Jewish population increase. All the same, their numbers continued to grow. By 1914 there were eight million Jews in the two great empires of east-central Europe, Russia and Austria, nearly all of them in towns and cities. In short, Jewish demography reflected, but in an exaggerated form, both the European population revolution and its urbanization. Just as the teeming ghetto, in its day, force-fed Jewish popular religion, so now the crowded
industrial quarters of the new or expanded towns, where traditional Jewish life was struggling to survive, bred an intense secular Jewish redicalism.

The third reason was that the Jewish sense of injustice was never allowed to sleep. Just as, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Jewish antennae everywhere were ever alert to pick up murmurs of a messiah, so in the nineteenth century an act of injustice to Jews anywhere stirred emotions in the growing Jewish urban centres. There were now hundreds of Jewish newspapers which related these outrages, and virtually all Jews could read. Among the secularized intelligentsia, there was no longer any disposition to attribute the sufferings of the race to sins, ancient or modern. The Damascus blood libel of 1840 was an important milestone in the radicalization of the Jews. The fifteen-year-old Lassalle noted in his diary, 21 May 1840: ‘Even the Christians marvel at our sluggish blood, that we do not rise, that we do not rather perish on the battlefield than by torture…. Is there a revolution anywhere which could be more just than if the Jews were to rebel, set fire to every quarter of Damascus, blow up the powder magazine and meet death with their persecutors? Cowardly people, you deserve no better fate.’
¹⁰⁶
Such events fed a determination among young secularized Jews to combat injustice not just towards Jews but to mankind, and to take advantage of the growing political opportunities to end them for ever. Lassalle went on to create the first major German trade union federation and to found German social democracy. Countless other young Jews took the same path.

There was no lack of stimulus. For instance, on the night of 23-24 June 1858, a six-year-old Jewish boy, Edgardo Mortara, living with his family in Bologna, was seized by the papal police and taken to the House of Catechumens in Rome. A Christian servant testified that five years before, thinking the child was dying, she had baptized him. Under the law of the papal states, the police and the church were within their rights, and the parents had no remedy. There was a world-wide chorus of protest, not merely from Jews but from Christian clerics and statesmen, but Pope Pius
IX
refused to give way and the boy remained in Catholic hands.
¹⁰⁷
This unredressed outrage led directly to the foundation, in 1860, of the French Alliance Israélite Universelle, to ‘defend the civil rights and religious freedom of the Jews’, as well as other specifically Jewish organizations elsewhere. But, still more, it fed the Jewish secular hatred of absolutism everywhere.

It was in Tsarist Russia, however, that ill-treatment of the Jews was most systematic and embittering. Indeed the Tsarist regime epitomized for radicals everywhere the most evil and entrenched aspects of
autocracy. For Jews, who viewed it with peculiar loathing, it was the fourth, and probably the most important, of the factors driving them leftwards. Hence the Russian treatment of the Jews, horrifying in itself, constitutes one of the important facts of modern world history and must be examined in some detail. It must first be grasped that the Tsarist regime from the very start viewed the Jews with implacable hostility. Whereas other autocracies, in Austria, Prussia, even in Rome, had preserved an ambivalent attitude, protecting, using, exploiting and milking the Jews, as well as persecuting them from time to time, the Russians always treated Jews as unacceptable aliens. Until the partitions of Poland, 1772-95, they had more or less succeeded in keeping Jews out of their territories. The moment their greed for Polish land brought them a large Jewish population, the regime began to refer to it as ‘the Jewish problem’, to be ‘solved’, either by assimilation or by expulsion.

What the Russians did was to engage in the first modern exercise in social engineering, treating human beings (in this case the Jews) as earth or concrete, to be shovelled around. Firstly they confined Jews to what was called the Pale of Settlement, which took its final form in 1812, and which consisted of twenty-five western provinces stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Jews could not travel, let alone live, outside the Pale except with special legal authority. Next, a series of statutes, beginning in 1804, determined where the Jews could live inside the Pale and what they could do there. The most damaging rule was that Jews could not live or work in villages, or sell alcohol to peasants. This destroyed the livelihood of a third of the Jewish population, who held village leases or ran village inns (another third were in trade, and most of the rest craftsmen). In theory the object was to push the Jews into ‘productive labour’ on the land. But there was little or no land available, and the real aim was to drive Jews into accepting baptism, or getting out altogether. In practice it led to Jewish impoverishment and a steady stream of poor Jews into the Pale towns.

The next turn of the screw came in 1827, when Nicholas
I
, one of the most savage of the autocrats, issued the ‘Cantonist Decrees’, which conscripted all male Jews from twelve to twenty-five, placing the younger boys in canton-schools at the military depots, where they were liable to be forced into baptism, sometimes by whole units. The government was also anxious to destroy the Jewish schools. The authorities tried repeatedly to force Jewish children into state schools where the languages of instruction were Russian, Polish and German only, the object again being to promote baptism. In 1840 a Committee for the Jews was formed to promote the ‘moral education’ of what was
treated publicly as an undesirable, semi-criminal community. Jewish religious books were censored or destroyed. Only two Jewish presses were permitted, in Vilna and Kiev—and Jews were expelled from the latter town completely three years later. The government was quite cunning at dividing Jewish communities, and setting
maskils
against Orthodox. In 1841, for example, they put the
maskil
Max Lilienthal (1815-82) in charge of the new state Jewish schools, which were in effect anti-Talmud establishments designed, as the Orthodox claimed, to offer their children to ‘the Moloch of the Haskalah’. But he found the bitter battle which ensued too much for him and slipped out of the country four years later, to emigrate to America. The government also forbade Jews to wear traditional garments such as the skullcap and kapota. It divided them into ‘useful Jews’ and ‘useless Jews’, subjecting the latter group to triple conscription quotas.

Gradually, over the century, an enormous mass of legislation discriminating against Jews, and regulating their activities, accumulated. Some of it was never properly enforced. Much of it was frustrated by bribery. Rich parents could buy Jewish children to take the place of their own in state schools or in the army. They could pay to buy legal certificates entitling them to travel, to live in cities, to engage in forbidden occupations. The attempt to ‘solve’ the Jewish problem created, or rather immensely aggravated, another one: corruption of the Tsarist bureaucracy, which became incorrigible and rotted the heart of the state.
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Moreover, government policy was never consistent for long. It oscillated between liberalism and repression. In 1856 the new Tsar, Alexander
II
, introduced a liberal phase, granting certain rights to Jews if they were long-service soldiers, university graduates or ‘useful’ merchants. That phase ended with the Polish revolt of 1863 and his attempted assassination. There was another liberal phase in the 1870s, again brought to an end by an attempt on his life—this time a successful one. Thereafter the position of Jews in Russia deteriorated sharply.