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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253333599 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 11/22/1997 |
| Edition description: | Annotated |
| Pages: | 344 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x (d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Bitter Legacy
Confronting the Holocaust in the USSR
By Zvi Gitelman
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 1997 Indiana University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-33359-9
CHAPTER 1
Soviet Jewry before the Holocaust
Zvi Gitelman
The Nazis' systematic murder of Jews in the Soviet Union caused enormous numbers of personal tragedies as well as the devastation of what had been the world's largest Jewish community in the nineteenth century Russian Jewry had created the most important modern ideologies and cultural movements of world Jewry, and by virtue of the emigration of millions of Russian Jews, it had made a great impact on the Jewish communities of Western Europe, North America, and Palestine. In 1897 there were more than five million Jews living in the Russian Empire, where they constituted the largest Jewish community in the world. They were never fully accepted by the tsarist authorities or by society. Until 1772 they were legally barred from residing in the empire. When the tsars annexed eastern Poland in the late eighteenth century, they found themselves "burdened" by a large Jewish population that had lived in Poland for centuries. In order to prevent the Jews from "contaminating" the rest of the population, the government decreed that they could reside only in the fifteen western provinces newly annexed to the empire. These provinces include roughly present-day Lithuania, part of Latvia, Belarus, Ukraine, and Moldova. At the time of the first comprehensive census, in 1897, about 97 percent of the Jews lived in these areas, known as the Pale of Settlement.
Other restrictions were imposed on the Jews from time to time. Under Tsar Nicholas I (1825-55), young Jewish boys were drafted into the military for terms of twenty-five years, sometimes undergoing preinduction military training for years that were added to their term of service. The aim was not so much to beef up what was already the largest standing army in the world, but to remove Jewish youngsters from their families and communities and thus to wean them away from their faith and people. It is estimated that about 50,000 Jewish teenagers were drafted in this way, and that about half of them were lost to the Jewish people. Moreover, since each community was assigned a quota of recruits it had to deliver to the authorities, and communal leaders generally selected the children of the poor and uninfluential for the draft, serious tensions were created within the Jewish communities. In the view of Marxist historians, this was the beginning of class conflict among the Jews of the empire, as the poor began to rebel against the coalition of the wealthy and learned, who manipulated the rekruchina to protect their own children.
A numerus clausus, or quota system, was imposed on Jewish aspirants to higher education and the professions. It set very low limits on the numbers of Jews who could be accepted to institutions of higher education and allowed to practice in the professions. These limitations were imposed even though the great majority of the Russian population was illiterate even as late as 1914, and Russia had to import professors, engineers, agronomists, and architects from abroad to meet the modest needs of an overwhelmingly agrarian and still essentially feudal country. By 1865, nearly a thousand Jews were enrolled in Russian gymnazii and by 1880 there were more than seven thousand (12 percent of all students). By the 1880s there were more than 1,800 Jewish students in Russian universities, where they constituted almost 15 percent of the student population. Nevertheless, at the end of the nineteenth century many Jews who sought higher education had to do so abroad. In 1888 there were fewer than sixty Russian Jews matriculating at German universities, but this number increased tenfold by the early 1900s. On the eve of World War I, between 2,500 and 3,000 Russian Jews were studying at German institutions of higher learning. Others were in France, Switzerland, England, and other West European countries.
An even more serious liability was the denial to the Jews of the right to own land, the primary source of wealth in an agrarian economy. From time to time the government would permit some Jews to settle on land in Ukraine or in newly acquired territories, but these were exceptional episodes, so that the vast majority of Jews became traders, craftsmen, workers in small factories and workshops, storekeepers, or simply luftmentshn, people without any profession, "living off the air" and making their livelihood from chance opportunities. In many communities 40 percent of the population fell into the luftmentsh category. In 1898 nearly 20 percent of the Jews in the Pale applied for Passover relief. A report by a non-Jewish statistician observed that in the Grodno (Belarus) region, "In most cases a pound of bread, a herring, and a few onions represent the daily fare of an entire family." In 1900 in Odessa, one of the wealthier cities in the empire, nearly two-thirds of the Jewish dead had to be buried at communal expense. At the turn of the century, about a third of the Jews were dependent on relief provided by Jewish institutions.
Finally, government antisemitism was complemented by popular anti-Jewish sentiment. In 1881, following the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, for which the Jews were held responsible, a wave of pogroms swept over Ukraine and Belarus and reached as far west as Warsaw. Anti-Jewish laws passed in May 1882 and pogroms in 1903 and 1905 impelled nearly two million Jews to flee the Russian Empire, most of them immigrating to Western Europe and North America, and smaller numbers going to Latin America and Palestine. As late as 1911 the government accused a humble Ukrainian Jew, Mendel Beilis, of murdering a Christian child in order to use his blood in Judaic ritual. High officials conspired to suppress evidence that Beilis was in no way involved in the murder, which had actually been committed by a gang of thieves. Beilis sat in prison for two years while the authorities tried to make a case against him. He was brought to trial in September 1913, and though he was acquitted, the government was still appealing the verdict up to the eve of the 1917 revolution. Thus, the tsarist government was committing its resources to sustaining a medieval canard right up to its own demise. This is eloquent testimony to tsarism's bankruptcy and to its obsessions.
* * *
Jewish Communal Life
Perhaps because society in general shunned and isolated them, Jews in the Russian Empire turned their energies and talents inward and developed a dynamic, vibrant communal and cultural life. Religious life was especially strong in the small towns (shtetlakh) and villages. In most of these, Jews constituted a majority of the population. This gave them a strong sense of community and solidarity, but it also induced conformity to powerful social pressures. Though the official community organization (kahal) had been abolished by the government in 1844, Jewish communities continued to regulate their internal affairs much as before. They had their burial societies, charitable organizations, educational institutions, orphanages, old-age homes, infirmaries, and other welfare institutions. In a country where four-fifths of the population could not read nor write, almost all Jewish boys and girls learned to read and write Hebrew and Yiddish, and a substantial proportion could read Russian as well. The most famous yeshivot, or schools of higher rabbinic learning, were in the Russian Empire, often in small towns. By the twentieth century, there were substantial numbers of Jewish students in Russian schools, as well as in Yiddish and Hebrew secular schools.
One of the remarkable achievements of Russian Jewry was that it produced two major modern literatures, Yiddish and Hebrew. Perhaps even more remarkable is the fact that two of the three "classic" Yiddish writers, Mendele Mocher Sforim and Y. L. Peretz — the other was, of course, Sholem Aleichem — were also among the creators of modern Hebrew literature. Usage of Hebrew as a living language, propagated by the "Haskalah" or enlightenment movement of the mid-nineteenth century, became a plank in the platform of the Zionist movement, and Yiddish became the cornerstone of the secular culture advocated by some elements in the Jewish socialist movement. But these languages and literatures stood on their own as cultural forces that attracted their loyalists, creators, and publics. Yiddish theater emerged at the end of the nineteenth century, and the beginnings of the Hebrew theater were also in Russia. Jewish folk and cantorial music were well developed, and there were some Jewish composers and performers of classical music, though many of them had to convert to Christianity in order to be accepted. By the first decade of the twentieth century, serious study and production of Jewish music was undertaken by a society established for that purpose. In addition, a Historical-Ethnographic Society was established, and important research was carried out. Russian Jewish scholars made contributions in Semitics, history, sociology, ethnography, and demography.
* * *
Efforts to Protect Jewish Rights
In the latter half of the nineteenth century, some Jews began to become politically active. Beginning in the 1860s and 1870s, some joined the radical youth who looked to the peasantry to rise against the tsarist autocracy and liberate the entire population, including the Jews, from political, social, and economic oppression. The narodniki (Populists) who regarded the peasantry as the revolutionary class were disappointed in the social conservatism and political inertness of this class. Jewish narodniki were shocked by the pogroms perpetrated largely by the peasantry, but even more so by the reactions of their fellow revolutionaries, some of whom welcomed the pogroms as a sign that the peasants were at last being activated, even though they were venting their frustrations in the wrong way. Disillusioned Jewish Populists generally tended either to emigrate, which meant that they had given up on Russia; or to become Marxists, which meant that they transferred their hopes from the peasantry to the proletariat; or to become Zionists, which signaled their despair of finding solutions to the "Jewish problem" anywhere in the Diaspora. By 1897 Russian Jewry had seen the birth of both the Jewish Labor Bund, a Marxist, secular, anti-Zionist movement oriented toward Yiddish, as well as of Zionism, a movement with several streams (including socialist, religious, culturalist) all of which saw the future of the Jewish people in a state of their own. The Bund, which helped found the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party out of which the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks emerged, advocated the overthrow of tsarism and the replacement of the feudal-capitalist system by socialism. This, they reasoned, would solve the Jewish problem, which needed no unique solution, as the Zionists argued, but would be part of the overall transformation of the world into a more just society in which ethnic and racial hatreds would be unknown. The Zionists, on the other hand, felt that only a Jewish state or homeland could provide Jews with security and equal opportunity. However, they decided that as long as Jews remained in the Diaspora, their rights would have to be protected and fought for. A group of generally wealthier, educated, and privileged Jews defended Jewish rights through legal channels and associated themselves with Russian constitutionalist movements and parties. They hoped that a constitutional democracy would be sufficient to guarantee civil rights to all and equal rights to Jews. But the tsarist system was unyielding, and concessions made in the aftermath of the 1905 revolution were soon withdrawn. The last tsar, Nicholas II, retreated into reaction and policies even less enlightened than those of his predecessors.
It should be remembered that only a minority of Jews were active in any of the movements described. The need to eke out a living, isolation from the larger society, and the self-contained nature of Jewish society, which had a well-developed institutional infrastructure and which was spiritually self-sufficient, enabled most Jews to live their daily lives outside the political arena. Contrary to popular belief, Bolshevism enjoyed little support among Jews. A census of Bolshevik Party members taken in 1922 revealed that there were only 958 Jews who had joined before 1917; in the latter year, the Bund had more than 30,000 members. The myth that Bolshevism was a "Jewish conspiracy" is based on the presence of a disproportionate number of people of Jewish origin — none of whom was a practicing or committed Jew — in the upper echelons of the Bolshevik Party in 1917 and for several years afterward. The myth gained credence in 1918-21 when many Jews joined the Party and became Soviet officials, largely because only the Bolsheviks did not pogromize the Jews, whereas their White opponents, Ukrainian nationalists, and others systematically attacked Jews; the new regime removed restrictions on their education and employment; and some former anti-Bolshevik socialists became convinced that the world revolution was at hand and that the Bolshevik analysis of the situation was correct. Thus, by 1922, when Jews comprised less than 2 percent of the population — there were about 2.4 million Jews in the country at the time — they were 5.2 percent of party members. That proportion declined to 3.8 percent by 1930.
Open political activity by Jews became possible only with the fall of tsarism in February-March 1917 when the legal impediments to Jewish equality were removed. For the first time in the history of Russia, Jews became full-fledged citizens. They greeted the revolution with great enthusiasm and set about creating a comprehensive public Jewish life. Publications, cultural groups, and political parties flourished in 1917. The Zionists, given a boost by the Balfour Declaration of that year wherein the British government promised the Jews a homeland in Palestine, emerged as the most popular political force among Jews.
All the activity was brought to a halt by the Bolshevik seizure of power late in 1917. The Bolsheviks were militantly opposed to Zionism, which they saw as splitting off the Jewish workers from the rest of the proletariat and retarding the assimilation of the Jews, which they considered a progressive phenomenon to be emulated by all nationalities. Ex-Bundists and other socialists who eventually joined the Communist Party persuaded the leadership to mount campaigns against the Hebrew language, now considered the language of the class enemy, the bourgeoisie and the clericals, whereas Yiddish was the language of the "toiling masses." In the 1920s, the foundations of traditional Jewish life were undermined by Communist assaults on Judaism, Hebrew, and Zionism. The Jewish religion was attacked as part of the general campaign against religion, Zionism was declared a subversive ideology and movement, and Hebrew was banned as a language of study, discourse, and publication. Religious Jews, Zionists, and Hebraists were hounded, driven underground, forced to change their ways of life, imprisoned, or exiled.
Some Communists, active in the Jewish sections of the party (Evsektsii), tried to devise a secular, socialist, Soviet Yiddish culture as a replacement for traditional Jewish culture. They created Jewish schools, theaters, newspapers, journals, and research institutes that operated in Yiddish and reflected the Bolshevik ideology. By 1931 there were 1,100 Yiddish state-supported schools, 40 daily newspapers in Yiddish, and trade unions and even party cells operating in Yiddish. Moreover, they tried to solve Jewish economic problems by settling Jews on land and making them into farmers. The Communists planned to settle 100,000 Jewish families on lands in Belorussia, Crimea, the Ukraine, and Birobidzhan, an underpopulated area of the Soviet Far East.
Neither the "Yiddishization" nor the agricultural settlement campaigns succeeded. Traditional Jews considered Soviet Yiddish culture ersatz and inimical to their values. They often preferred to send their children to non-Jewish schools, where Judaism and Zionism were not attacked as frequently or directly as they were in the Yiddish schools. On the other hand, most other Jews saw no reason for clinging to the shtetl culture and its language once the doors to a "higher" culture, Russian, were opened. The majority of younger Jews were quite content to trade the culture of their shtetl upbringing for the educational and vocational mobility offered by the drive to modernize and industrialize the Soviet Union. Millions of workers were needed to build the factories and plants that would propel a backward country into the modern industrial world. Therefore, thousands of Jews moved out of the shtetlakh of the former Pale areas, migrating to the larger cities of Ukraine and Belorussia, and to the cities of the Russian republic, especially Moscow and Leningrad, that had been off limits to almost all Jews before 1917. Now they were no longer luftmentshn but industrial workers, technicians, engineers, economists, and factory managers. They entered universities and technical institutes and took up governmental posts, reaching the highest echelons of the military, the state apparatus, the police, and the Party. Between 1926 and 1935, the number of Jewish wage and salary earners nearly tripled. At first, Jews became blue-collar workers, but very soon they moved into the white-collar ranks. By 1939 there were 364,000 Jewish white-collar employees. In 1934-35 Jews made up 18 percent of all graduate students. By the late 1930s, Jews were well established in the proletariat and in the managerial and professional strata.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Bitter Legacy by Zvi Gitelman. Copyright © 1997 Indiana University Press. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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