Pale of Settlement

An area of Russia where Jews were most oppressed, the Pale of Settlement gave rise to amazingly good things.

The Napoleonic Enlightenment, which emancipated the Jews of Western Europe, did not make it to Eastern Europe where most Jews lived in the 18th-19th centuries.

The largest concentration of Jews—about 5 million—was located there, representing 40% of the Jewish population worldwide.

From 1791 until 1915, the majority of Jews living in Eastern Europe were confined by the Czars of Russia—starting with Catherine the Great—to an area known as the “Pale of Settlement” (meaning “borders of settlement”). The Pale consisted of 25 provinces that included Ukraine, Lithuania, Belorussia, Crimea, and part of Poland (which had been partitioned between Russia, Prussia, and Austria in 1772).

The western side of what had formally been Poland was absorbed into the Austro-Hungarian Empire. This western half of Poland (which contained important Jewish communities such as those located in Galicia) contained a smaller, but not insignificant, number of Jews. The physical and economic situation of these Jews of the eastern Austro-Hungarian Empire was generally much better than their fellow Jews living in western end of Czarist Russia.

The Jews of Russia were specifically expelled from Moscow and St. Petersburg and forced into the Pale. Later they were also expelled from rural areas within the Pale and forced to live only in shtetls.

Despite the oppression some amazing things happened in the Pale.

For one thing, charity—tzedakah, which in Hebrew means “justice”—thrived, as Jews helped each other. The historian Martin Gilbert writes in his Atlas of Jewish History that no province in the Pale had less than 14% of Jews on relief, and Lithuanian and Ukrainian Jews supported as much as 22% of their poor population:

“Among the charitable societies organized by Jews were those to supply poor students with clothes, soldiers with kosher food, the poor with free medical treatment, poor brides with dowries, and orphans with technical education.”

This was an incredibly sophisticated social welfare system. In times of great hardship, no Jew was abandoned.

This caring for each other did not escape the notice of non-Jews.

In fact, as far back as the Middle Ages Rabbis had instituted takanot(rabbinic enactments) which forbade conversion to Judaism.1 The primary fear was that there would be an anti-Semitic backlash against the Jews for “stealing” a Christian from his faith, but there was also another reason. Why would a Christian want to convert to Judaism-which could possibly lead to arrest and execution? They realized that no Jew ever starved to death in the street, whereas if you were a Christian peasant you could easily starve to death in the street because no one was going to take care of you. The government wasn’t going to do it and the Church wasn’t going to do it. Even though the Jewish community gave charity to their Gentile neighbors the rabbis didn’t want Judaism being flooded by insincere converts who were trying to save their lives by becoming Jews and benefiting from the Jewish social welfare system.

TORAH LEARNING

Another amazing thing that happened in the Pale, despite the oppression, was the creation of the modern Yeshiva (school for Torah study).

Torah studies (as we saw in
Part 52) was a “luxury” largely not available to the masses of Eastern European Jewry in the 18th century and had become a preserve of the elite.

In 1803, Rabbi Chaim ben Isaac of Volozhin (1749-1821), a student of the Vilna Ga’on, set about to revolutionize the concept of the Yeshiva. Most yeshivas during this period were small institutions of learning supported by individual towns in which they were based. Rabbi Chaim proposed to found a large institution, for the top students, and supported by many communities.

He sent letters to the chief rabbis of cities throughout Europe asking them to send to him their best students to study at his yeshiva in Volozhin, Lithuania, (which was later named Etz Chaim—“Tree of Life”—in honor of its founder) where he promised to provide them with financial support, top teachers, and a high-level standardized curriculum. The response to his letter was very positive and a large number of students were sent to the Volozhin Yeshiva, which eventually enrolled 450 students.

Unfortunately, the Volozhin Yeshiva didn’t last too long as the Czarist government of Russia saw what was going on and tried to force it to adopt a more secular curriculum as part of making it less Jewish. It was closed by the Czarist government in 1879 and was reopened in 1881. While the Volozhin Yeshiva was able to yield to some of the demands of the Czarist government, the demand that all faculty members have diplomas from recognized Russian educational institutions in order to teach “Russian language and culture” was not acceptable. And so, the yeshiva was closed in 1892 by Russian inspectors and its students exiled.

Although it had been in operation less than 100 years, it had become the model and inspiration for the modern yeshiva. By the time the Volozhin closed, other yeshivas based on its models were already in operation, many started by the students of the Volozhin. A letter written in 1865 by Rabbi David Moses of Krynki, a former student of the Volozhin, attests to greatness of Rabbi Chaim and the Yeshiva he founded.

...the yeshiva of Volozhin is the mother and source of all the yeshivot and Talmud Torahs in the world. The latter are as pipes which come from the source….before our holy rabbi (Rabbi Chaim) founded the “house of God” the world was empty, literally without form; it was void, for even the term yeshiva was unknown, let alone what activities took place in one….Were it not for the fact that our holy rabbi founded his yeshiva, the Torah would have-God forbid-been forgotten to Israel. 2

Another major educational innovation of the period was the founding of the Beis Yaakov School for girls. The school was founded by Sarah Schnirer in Cracow, Poland in 1918 and later developed in a large education network that spread to both America and Israel.

THE MUSSAR MOVEMENT

During the same period of time that saw the re-birth of Torah studies there arose in the Pale a new emphasis on what should be the primary focus of those studies. The impetus came from a very important movement within Judaism called the Mussar Movement (“Morality Movement”).

Its founder was a most unusual man, Rabbi Israel Lipkin of Salant (1810-1883), better known as Rabbi Israel Salanter.

Many stories are told about his goodness. Among the most famous is the story of his disappearance one Yom Kippur from his synagogue. As the congregation fretted for his safety, delaying services until he arrived, one young mother took the opportunity to rush back home to check on her baby, which she had left alone. There she found the rabbi, rocking the cradle. Hearing the baby crying, he had stopped to comfort it, putting the needs of another human being ahead of his personal spiritual fulfillment.

Rabbi Salanter, though the epitome of kindness, could also be confrontational when the question of ethics or morality was at stake. Such was his stance, when he learned that a poor widow’s two sons were drafted into the Russian Army, because a rich man had bribed the officials so that his son would not be taken. He confronted the entire community in the synagogue regarding the matter in order to win justice for the widow.

Rabbi Salanter was driven to establish the study of morality and ethics as a distinct subject within the larger curriculum of study in the yeshiva. He felt that the over emphasis on Talmudic study had neglected the methodology of developing one’s relationship to God or in becoming a better person in relationship to one’s fellows. The 18th century work by the Kabbalist Moshe Chaim Luzatto—The Path of the Just’—was adopted as the “manual” of the Mussar movement.

At the time that Rabbi Salanter initiated Mussar studies, his system was controversial simply because it was new. Orthodox Jews were worried at first that this might be another type of “reform” and the time spent on Mussar study would detract from the time spent on Talmud study.

But the Mussar movement overcame their misgivings and its teachings are now central to the curricula of many yeshivas.

The most famous of the yeshivas specializing in Mussar studies were the Navaradok Yeshiva, founded by Rabbi Joseph of Navaradok in 1896, a disciple of Rabbi Salanter and the Slobodka Yeshiva founded in 1863 by Rabbi Nassan Tzvi Finkel (which moved to Hebron, Israel, and when destroyed by the Arabs, to Jerusalem and Bnei Brak)

Other yeshivas, many of which were founded by the graduates of the Volozhin Yeshiva and which incorporated the teachings of Rabbi Salanter and the Mussar Movement, were:

the Mir founded in 1815 (the great yeshiva which migrated to Shanghai during the Holocaust and eventually relocated in Jerusalem and Brooklyn)
Telshe founded in 1875 (now in Cleveland, Ohio)
Slutzk founded in 1896 (now in Lakewood, New Jersey).
Pressburg founded in 1807 by Rabbi Moses Sofer (the Chatam Sofer) in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, (today called Bratislava in Slovakia) was the largest and most influential Yeshiva in Central Europe.

FORCED SECULARIZATION

While most of the students studying in the yeshivot accepted and embraced the Mussar movement after an initial hesitation, the non-Orthodox continued to oppose it.

Chief among the opponents was a group called the Maskilim (“the Enlightened Ones”), who opposed traditional Judaism in any way, shape or form.

This was the group that aided the Czarist government in the closing of the Volozhin Yeshiva. Why? Because the Maskilim wanted their fellow Jews to drop Judaism and join the Russian culture. They argued: “Let’s study Russian culture ... let’s speak in Russian and write in Russian ... let’s be just like them, and they’ll accept us, and we’ll be able to integrate more effectively into society and end the horrible poverty so many live under.”

An important figure among the Maskilim was Dr. Max Lilienthal (1813-1882), a German Jew who came to Russia as director of the “enlightened” Jewish school of Riga. He was eventually appointed by the Russian government (of Czar Nicholas I) as the Minister of Jewish Education and went about attempting to convince the Jews of the Pale of the Czar’s “benign intent” in establishing a new educational system for them.

A glimpse at part of the plan created by these maskilim for the Jews of Eastern Europe gives a clear sense of their plans for the Jews of Eastern Europe:

Maskilim to Govenors of the Pale-A Program for Russification -1841:

The Russian government’s objectives in the encouragement of enlightenment among the Jewish people [should be]:

special emphasis to the moral as opposed to the academic aspects of the education of the Jews…To pay special attention to the teaching of Russian history and language, for there is nothing which unites diverse ethnic groups…better than the dissemination of information concerning that nation’s history and literature.

3. In order to thwart the harmful influence of the Talmud, without at this stage destroying the book…the rabbis should be empowered to prepare a short religious text ...in accordance with the accepted principles regarding civil responsibilities to the tsar and the motherland.

8…the Jews must be ordered to change their dress for the clothing commonly worn throughout the country… 3

This was during the time when the Czar was attempting to “restructure” the Jewish society in Russia with laws forbidding the wearing of traditional clothing, decrees against Talmud study, and division of Jews into “useful” (farmers, artisans, skilled workers) and “useless” (unskilled workers, rabbis, orphans, the sick and unemployed).

In this climate, in 1843, a conference was convened on the subject of Jewish education, which pitted Lilienthal against Rabbi Yitzchak of Volozhin and Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneersohn, the Rebbe of Chabad Lubavitch also known as the Tzemach Tzedek. Lilienthal could not stand up to the arguments of these rabbis, who managed to win the right for Jews to retain their traditional school system in competition with Lilienthal’s new school system. (See Berel Wein’s Triumph of Survival, p. 157.)

Within a decade, Lilienthal’s schools closed for lack of faculty and students, though Lilienthal’s defenders claim that he left because he realized that the Czar’s “benign intent” was to convert Jews to Christianity. He migrated to Cincinnati, Ohio, where he headed up a Reform congregation.

(1) Israel Abrahams, Jewish Life in the Middle Ages, (Atheneum, 1969), p 59.
(2) Paul Mendes-Flohr & Yehuda Reinharz ed., The Jew in the Modern World, (Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 394-395.
(3) Paul Mendes-Flohr & Yehuda Reinharz ed., The Jew in the Modern World, (Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 385.

#56 of 70 in the Aish.com Jewish History Series
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The Czars and the Jews

In Czarist Russia, government-organized pogroms against the Jews kept the eyes of masses off the corrupt regime.

It is arguable which of the Russian Czars was the worst to the Jews. We’ll start with Czar Nicholas I (who ruled from 1825 to 1855) as one of the prime contenders and work our way down.

In 1827, Czar Nicholas I introduced what became known as the Cantonist Decrees. (The name came from the word “canton,” meaning “military camp.”) These decrees called for the forced conscription of Jewish boys into the Russian Army. These boys were between the ages of 12 and 18 and were forced to serve for 25 years! During their army service, every effort was made to convert them to Christianity.

Due to the horrendous conditions under which they were forced to serve, many of the boys who were conscripted didn’t survive, and if they did, few continued to identify themselves as Jews. As far as the Jewish community was concerned, either way was a death sentence.

Some Jewish parents were so desperate they would actually cut off the right index finger of their sons with a butcher’s knife—without an index finger you couldn’t fire a gun and you were exempt from service. Other people would try and bribe their kid’s way out.

The Cantonist Decrees raise the level of pressure on the Jewish community to new extremes. Each Jewish community was responsible to produce a certain number of boys for the army and the community leadership was held responsible for failure to meet this quota. It’s not to hard to imagine the turmoil caused by forcing community leaders to decide which boys had to go and which boys could stay.

If that wasn’t bad enough, there was the government-sponsored anti-Semitism.

PROTOCOLS OF THE ELDERS OF ZION

Around the turn of the century (It was first published in 1903), the Russian secret police began to circulate a forgery which became the most famous anti-Semitic “document” in history—The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. These protocols purported to be the minutes of a secret meeting of world Jewish leaders, which supposedly took place once every hundred years for the purpose of plotting how to manipulate and control the world in the next century.

As ridiculous as this might sound to us today, the Protocols were seized upon as “proof” that the world was dominated by Jews who were responsible for all of the world’s problems.

Fans and proponents of the Protocols have included such anti-Semites as: Henry Ford, the founder of Ford Motor Company; Adolf Hitler, as might be expected; Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser; and King Faisal of Saudi Arabia, among others.

Despite the fact that the Protocols are a proven forgery whose allegations are completely ridiculous, an expression of the worst kind of anti-Semitism, the Protocols continue to sell briskly today and are carried by such huge bookstore chains as Barnes and Noble and amazon.com in the name of freedom of speech.

POGROMS

We spoke of pogroms—mob violence against Jews—in Part 49 when we covered the murderous attacks of the Ukrainian Cossack Bogdan Chmielnicki in 17th century Poland.

In Czarist Russia, there were so many pogroms against the Jews that it is simply impossible to even begin to list them all. (In one four year period there were 284 pogroms, for example.)

These pogroms were seldom spontaneous, though incitement by Christian clergy around the Christian holidays could drive the masses into a frenzy. However, in Czarist Russia, most of the pogroms were government organized. Why would the Czarist government organize mobs to target Jews? Because Jews were the classic scapegoats for the economic problems of Russia (and many other countries in history).

Of course, the problems of Russia had nothing to do with the Jews. The problems of Russia had to do with a totally backward, feudal, and highly corrupt regime. One of the ways of diverting attention from the corruption was to blame the Jews and to allow the masses to blow off steam by taking it out on the Jews.

The problems of Russia got worse after Czar Alexander II (who was one of the more competent Czars and who was relatively benign to the Jews) was assassinated in 1881 by an anarchist who threw a bomb at his carriage. And when the problems of Russia got worse, the problems of the Jews got worse as well.

The government of the new Czar, Alexander III (who ruled 1881-1894) organized one pogrom after another to keep the anger of the masses focused on the Jews.

In addition to the pogroms, Alexander III promulgated a series of laws against the Jews. These laws were called the May Laws and they included such prohibitions as:

“It is henceforth forbidden for Jews to settle outside the cities and townships.”
“The registration of property and mortgages in the names of Jews is to be halted temporarily. Jews are also prohibited from administering such properties.”
“It is forbidden for Jews to engage in commerce on Sundays and Christian holidays.”

Writes Berel Wein in Triumph of Survival (p. 173) of the reign of Alexander III:

“Expulsions, deportations, arrests, and beatings became the daily lot of the Jews, not only of their lower class, but even of the middle class and the Jewish intelligentsia. The government of Alexander III waged a campaign of war against its Jewish inhabitants ... The Jews were driven and hounded, and emigration appeared to be the only escape from the terrible tyranny of the Romanovs.”

It did not help matters any that during the reign of Alexander III a terrible famine struck Russia in which 400,000 peasants died. Those who survived were bitter and their resentments grew (which would erupt eventually in an aborted revolution in 1905 and the successful Russian Revolution which ushered in Communist rule in 1917.)

THE LAST ROMANOV

When Alexander III died, he was succeeded by Nicholas II, the last of the Romanovs whose incompetence and inflexibility helped bring about the Russian Revolution. The new Czar had to cope with the mess left behind by his father and he did so badly.

During his reign one of the most famous pogroms took place—in Kishinev, on Easter (April 6-7), 1903.

The Kishinev pogrom happened when there was a lot of tension in Russia (two years before the first, unsuccessful revolution). Wanting to dispel the tension, the Czarist government once again organized a pogrom against the Jews.

Strange as it may sound, the Kishinev pogrom received a lot of international attention. This was because by this time pogroms were something that the “enlightened” Western World no longer found acceptable. (If only they knew what they themselves would do to the Jews 40 years later!)

Here is an excerpt from a description of the pogrom printed in the New York Times:

“It is impossible to account the amounts of goods destroyed in a few hours. The hurrahs of the rioting. The pitiful cries of the victims filled the air. Wherever a Jew was met he was savagely beaten into insensibility. One Jew was dragged from a streetcar and beaten until the mob thought he was dead. The air was filled with feathers and torn bedding. Every Jewish household was broken into and the unfortunate Jews in their terror endeavored to hide in cellars and under roofs. The mob entered the synagogue, desecrated the biggest house of worship and defiled the Scrolls of the Law.

“The conduct of the intelligent Christians was disgraceful. They made no attempt to check the rioting. They simply walked around enjoying the frightful sport. On Tuesday, the third day, when it became known that the troops had received orders to shoot, the rioters ceased.”

After two days of mayhem, the Czar said, “Okay enough—mission accomplished. Now it’s time to stop it.” And it stopped. 118 Jewish men, women and children were murdered, 1,200 were wounded and 4,000 families were rendered homeless and destitute. There were also 12,000 Russian soldier in the city who did nothing for two days. [1]

Until the next time.

Between 1903 and 1907 was a period of great internal unrest in Russia. Nicholas’s incompetence coupled with excessive taxation and the humiliating defeat of Russia during the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05) let to the first Russian Revolution in 1905 which led to a few short-lived reforms in the government. This period also proved disastrous for the Jewish community there were 284 pogroms with over 50,000 casualties. The level of violence was unbelievable.

There was only so much of this kind of thing that people could take. The Jewish community was being devastated and people were looking for a way out. Jews were running out of the shtetls and joining all of the anarchist, communist, socialist, bundist movements that they could find in the hopes that they would be able to change the situation in Russia. Jews have been history’s great idealists and during this time they were desperate to find some way of making things better. (We will cover their activism when we discuss the events surrounding World War I.)

Another thing that was happening in this time period was emigration. We see mass emigration of Jews out of Russia. Between 1881 and 1914, some 50,000 or more Jews left every year to a estimated total of 2.5 million Jews.

Despite these migrations, the Jewish population of Russia stayed constant—at about 5 million Jews, due the very high birthrate. Had these Jews not left Russia there would have been 7-8 million Jews there.

And it was America which absorbed most of the Jewish immigrants during this period of time.

GOLDEN LAND

We might recall (from Part 23) when the Jews were exile by the Babylonians, the exile had happened in two stages. First the Babylonians took away 10,000 of the best and the brightest, and that turned out to be a blessing in disguise because when the Jews arrive in Babylon, there is a Jewish infrastructure in place. Yeshivas had been established, synagogues built, there was a kosher butcher and a mikveh. Jewish life could continue and as a result we saw hardly any assimilation during the Babylonian exile.

However, when the poor Jews of Russia arrived en masse in America at the end of the 19th century—passing through the famous Ellis Island—they found no Jewish infrastructure in place. The Jews who had preceded them in the migration of the 1830s were German Jews (about 280,000 of them). These German Jews—who resented the poorer Russian Jews—were either Reform, (and did not believe that the Torah was God-given nor in any specific God-given law that Jews had to keep) or they were secular Jews who totally eschewed Jewish tradition. Thus, the poor Russian Jews stepped into the Golden Land of Assimilation as we shall see in the next installment.

[1] Paul Mendes-Flohr & Yehuda Reinharz ed., The Jew in the Modern World, (Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 409.

#57 of 70 in the Aish.com Jewish History Series
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Jewish Life in America

Jews gained untold riches in America, but lost their heritage and spirituality.

Part 58 - Jewish Life in America Jews gained untold riches in America, but lost much of their heritage and spirituality.

When we last left off the Jews of America—at the beginning of the 19th century—there were only about 6,000 of them. The idea that there was freedom in America as long as you were not “too Jewish,” kept most Jews away.

That changed in the 1820s when the Jews of Germany began to arrive.

The German Jews were not “too Jewish.” They were either Reform Jews who had dropped the basic tenets of traditional Judaism (see Part 54 for details), or they were “enlightened” secular Jews who had dropped Judaism altogether.

By 1850 there were about 17,000 Jews living in America. By 1880 there were about 270,000.

Most of these Jews moved to the New York area, which at this time had a Jewish population of 180,000. It would soon grow to 1.8 million.

In New York City, the Jewish area was the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The ones who made it quickly moved up to the Upper East Side. And these Jews did remarkably well in the New World. Some famous names of those who made it rich quick were:

Marcus Goldman, founder of Goldman, Sachs & Co
Henry, Emanuel and Mayer Lehman, founders of Lehman Brothers
Abraham Kuhn and Solomon Loeb, founders of the banking firm Kuhn, Loeb and Co.
Jacob Schiff, Loeb’s son-in-law and a major American finacier
Joseph Seligman, who started our as a peddler and who became one of the most important bankers in America.

These are just a few famous names. There were many others.(1)

AMERICAN REFORM MOVEMENT

The German Jews of New York built the largest Reform synagogue in the world, Temple Emanuel on the Upper East Side, and many others. By 1880 there were about 200 synagogues in America, the majority (90%) of them Reform, because these were the Jews who were coming to America from Germany.

With this migration, the focus of the Reform Movement moved from Germany to the United States. In America, the Reform movement continued in the tradition of its German origins, spelling out its ideology in the famous “Pittsburgh Platform,” which was drawn up and adopted in 1885 at a Pittsburgh convention of its leadership:

“We recognize in the Mosaic legislation a system of training the Jewish people for its mission during its national life in Palestine, and today we accept as binding only its moral laws, and maintain only such ceremonies as elevate and sanctify our lives, but reject all such as are not adopted to the view and habits of modern civilization…
“We hold that all such Mosaic and rabbinical laws as regulate diet, priestly purity, and dress originated in ages and under the influence of ideas entirely foreign to our present mental and spiritual state…
“We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community, and therefore expect neither a return to Palestine, nor a sacrificial worship under the sons of Aaron, nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state… (2)

This last statement—which detached the American Reform Movement from the 2,000-year-old Jewish longing to return to the Land of Israel (in imitation of the ideology espoused by the German Reform Movement)—is the reason why early American Reform Jews did not support the Zionist Movement, or the foundation of the State of Israel, as we shall see in future installments.

HEBREW UNION COLLEGE

The founding father of the American Reform Movement was Isaac Meyer Wise (1819 to 1900). He was a German Jewish immigrant who was the founder and the first president of Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, Ohio, which opened in 1875. It was the first American rabbinical seminary, and it had unusually liberal standards. Writes Joseph Telushkin in Jewish Literacy (p. 393):

“One issue that sets the Reform rabbinate apart… is its refusal to impose any religious standards on its rabbis. In many ways, this is a continuation of Reform’s historical commitment to free inquiry. Today, quite literally, there is no religious action a Reform rabbi can take for which he or she would be thrown out of the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the official body of Reform rabbis.”

When, in 1883, the first graduating class of Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati was ready to receive its diplomas, the seminary threw a lavish banquet.

The more traditional attendees were horrified when course after course presented one traif [non-kosher] dish after another: clams, soft-shell crabs, shrimps, frogs’ legs, and a meat meal followed by ice cream.(3)

The so-called “traif banquet” compelled the more traditional Jews—who thought that the Reform had gone too far but who did not want to be Orthodox—to find another alternative, and it led to the founding of another movement within Judaism.

THE CONSERVATIVE MOVEMENT

In 1886, more traditional Jews who were offended by the ideology of the Reform Movement founded an alternative to the Hebrew Union College. It was called the Jewish Theological Seminary, and it became the bastion of the new, purely-American, Conservative Movement.

The head of the Jewish Theological Seminary, a respected Jewish scholar from Cambridge, England, named Solomon Schechter (1850-1915) helped shape the ideology of the new movement. In his work, “The Catholic Israel,” Solomon Schechter spelled it out. (He chose a poor title for his work—by “catholic” he meant “universal.”)

“It is not the mere revealed Bible that is the first importance to the Jew but the Bible as it repeats itself in history. In other words, as it is interpreted by tradition. Another consequence of this conception of tradition is that neither scripture nor primitive Judaism but general custom which forms the real rule of practice. Liberty was always given to the great teachers of every generation to make modifications and innovations in harmony with the spirit of existing institutions. Hence a return to Mosaism [Orthodoxy] would be illegal, pernicious and indeed, impossible.” (4)

In other words, the ideology of the Conservative Movement would be to uphold the Torah as the revealed word of God, but that the interpretation of that word of God need not uphold the tradition as passed down from Moses.
This was a dramatic departure from the traditional attitude toward the interpretation and application of Jewish law. One of the pillars of traditional Jewish belief was (and is) that the Talmud is THE source for all Jewish law and that those rabbis who lived closer to the revelation at Mount Sinai had a clearer understanding of Jewish law and its application, and therefore their decisions could NOT be discarded. New rulings on modern issues must take into account established principles. (See Part 39.)

When the Conservative Movement discarded this pillar of traditional Judaism, it opened a door to countless problems. The end result was that, although the founders of the movement felt Reform had gone too far, the behavior of their followers proved virtually indistinguishable from those of Reform Jews. (We will discuss these repercussions further when we take up the subject of assimilation in a future installment.)

THE GREAT MIGRATIONS

This then was the spiritual state of the majority of American Jewry—defined chiefly by the German Jews who migrated in the 1830s—when the great migrations from Eastern Europe began around the turn of the century.

How many Jews came to America in this time period?

As noted earlier (see Part 57) between 1881 and 1914, some 50,000 Jews left Eastern Europe every year to a total of 2.5 million Jews, most of whom came to America.

The vast majority of these Jews were poor and arrived in New York with little or nothing. They had little to lose in coming to America (except perhaps their Judaism).

And, alas, this is what happened. The great rabbis did not come among them, and lacking teachers and religious leaders to act against the pressures from the Americanized German Jews, these poor Eastern European Jews assimilated quickly. (We will examine the problem of assimilation in America in future installments.)

The pious, yeshiva-educated Jews did not come in the great migrations. For the most part, the rabbis—fearing that America was the Golden Land of Assimilation disguised as the Golden Land of Economic Opportunity—preached against immigration.

The greatest test for vast majority of these new arrivals was the issue of the Sabbath. America in the late 18th and early 19th centuries had a six day work week. Sunday was the only day of rest. Many of the new arrivals found work in the garment industry working in the sweat shops. It was miserable work, for minimal wages, and often under appalling conditions. The Philadelphia-born social worker, Charles Bernheimer, described the conditions in a Philadelphia sweatshop in 1905:

Before you have reached the shop, you have probably climbed one, two or three flights of stairs, littered with debris…The room is likely to be ill-smelling and badly ventilated…Consequently, an abnormally bad air is breathed which is difficult for the ordinary person to stand long. Thus result tubercular and other diseases which the immigrants acquires in his endeavor to work out his economic existence…If we apply our ordinary standards of sanitation to these shops they certainly come below such standards…In [the] busy season the employees are required to work long hours, sometimes as high as fifteen, perhaps eighteen, a day.(5)

Under these conditions, taking Saturday off for Sabbath observance was simply not an option if you wanted to keep your job and if you lost your job finding new employment wasn’t so easy. Those who tried to keep Shabbat by not coming to work were immediately fired. The result was that the overwhelming majority stopped observing Shabbat. Once Sabbath observance was dropped the rest of Jewish observance usually followed. This same story repeated itself countless times until virtually all those who arrived in America as observant Jews dropped their religious observance soon after their arrival.

This is not to say that things were good in Eastern Europe—far from it. Two hundred years of Czarist Russian persecution and economic marginalization had taken a tremendous toll on the Jewish community. The anti-Semitism was constant, the hardships were many and the poverty was great. Spiritually and ideologically the Jewish community was also under tremendous attack and beginning to crumble from the onslaught. The lure of the secular enlightenment and other ideologies such as Marxism and socialism drew many Jews away from religious observance and even took some of the brightest out of the Yeshivot. Many of the maskilim (Jewish secular intellectuals,
see part 57) came from observant homes and even studied in the great Yeshivot of Eastern Europe.(6)

There can be little doubt that had the Nazis not snuffed out Jewish life in Eastern Europe during the Holocaust, the community would have gradually disintegrated under the internal strain and external pressure. Still the rabbinic leadership of Eastern Europe felt that the spiritual abyss of America posed a far greater threat than life in Eastern Europe-especially because it lacked virtually any Orthodox infrastructure.

Writer Arthur Hertzberg in The Jews of America (p. 157):

“In 1893, the most distinguished moralist among the rabbis of Europe, Israel Meir Ha-Kohen [better known as the Chafetz Chaim]... went beyond exhortation; he ruled against mass migration to America. He knew that this emigration could no longer be stopped, but he pleaded with those who would heed the views of rabbis to prefer persecution in Russia to economic success in the United States…

“These opinions became so fixed that they would remain firm among the major leaders of European Orthodoxy even in the inter-war period, as the situation of European Jewry was radically worsening for all Jews, for all socio-economic classes.”

Despite the decision by most of the rabbinic leadership to remain in Europe a number of important rabbis did arrive and began to lay the foundations for what would later become the thriving orthodox community of the United States. Some of the more notable personalities included:

Rabbi Yaacov Joseph from Vilna, who in 1887 became the first and only “Chief rabbi” of New York.
Rabbi Moshe Feinstein who arrived in 1936 to lead the Mesivta Tiferet Yerushalayim Yeshiva in New York. He went on to become the foremosthalachik (legal) authority in the Jewish world.
Rabbi Eliezer Silver who became the leader of the Orthodox rabbinate in America-the Agudas HaRabonim
Rabbi Shragga Feivael Mendlowitz who founded the first Orthodox school system, Torah Umesorah, in 1944.
Rabbi Aharon Kotler who founded the Lakewood Yeshiva in 1943 and was the driving force behind the growth of Orthodox Judaism in America.
Rabbi Moshe Soloveitchik and his son, Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik who were the rabbinic leadership of Yeshiva University in New York

THE TIRED AND THE POOR

While the German Jews for the most part succeeded easily in America, life was much harder for the Eastern European Jews who came in the great migrations. We find, for example, at the beginning of the 1900s there were 64,000 families packed into 6,000 tenement houses of the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

These poor, Yiddish-speaking, religious Jews reflected badly on the German Jews that came before them and who by this time had become quite Americanized. Therefore, the German Jews set out to get these Russian Jews to acculturate as quickly as possible and they invested heavily in this cause.

Their underlying fear was anti-Semitism. This fear was real, because despite the religious tolerance of America, anti-Semitism was alive and doing well in the New World. There were no pogroms, but there was social isolation and other types of discrimination.

For example, in 1843, a dozen young men applied for membership to the Old Fellows Lodge, but were refused membership because they were Jews. (They organized a club of their own—called the Independent Order of B’nai B’rith.)

Another example: in 1869, Joseph Seligman, the well-known banker, was refused hotel accommodations in Saratoga Springs, New York, the summer resort for the well-to-do of his day because he—no matter how rich and famous—was a Jew.

If those Jew who made it were not good enough to mingle with American non-Jews, one can just imagine how the unwashed immigrant masses were viewed.

In 1894, Henry Adams (a descendant of John Quincy Adams) organized the Immigration Restriction League to limit the admission to America of “unhealthy elements”—Jews being first among these.

In his famous book, The Education of Henry Adams, he wrote about those he was trying to keep out of America:

“Not a Polish Jew fresh from Warsaw or Cracow - not a furtive Jacoob or Ysaac still reeking of the Ghetto, snarling a weird Yiddish to the officers of the customs…”

He found many supporters for his cause, but he did not win. Indeed, one might say he lost when in 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt appointed a Jew—Oscar Straus—as the first Jew to serve in the U.S. cabinet, and as the secretary of commerce and labor (whose purview of responsibility was immigration).

However, the anti-Semites did not give up easily, as we will see next when we examine the factors which led to the baring of the evil face of anti-Semitism in the 20th century.

(1) For a fascinating look at Jewish life in America in the 19th and early 20th centuries see Stephen Birmingham’s books: “Our Crowd-The Great Jewish Families of New York” and “The Rest of Us-The Rise of America’s Eastern European Jews.”
(2) Ronald H. Isaacs & Kerry M. Olitzky editors, Critical Documents of Jewish History. (Jason Aronson Inc., 1995). Pp.58-59.
(3) Ronald H. Isaacs & Kerry M. Olitzky editors, Critical Documents of Jewish History. (Jason Aronson Inc., 1995). Pp. 60-61.
(4) Paul Mendes-Flohr & Yehuda Reinharz ed., The Jew in the Modern World, (Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 497-498.
(5) Paul Mendes-Flohr & Yehuda Reinharz ed., The Jew in the Modern World, (Oxford University Press, 1995), pp 481-82. Given these terrible conditions and the strong sense of social justice that has always been a part of the Jewish people, it is no wonder that Jews played such a crucial role in creating labor unions and fighting for worker’s rights and against child labor.
(6) One of the best examples was Chaim Nachman Bialik (1873-1934) who is considered the poet laureate of modern Hebrew and one on the leading Jewish intellectuals of his age. Born in southern Russia he attended the famous Volozhin Yeshiva, but broke with traditional Judaism at age 18.

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The Face of Anti-Semitism

The First Zionist Conference, held in 1897, was a major event in the establishment of the modern State of Israel.

In this installment we will briefly examine the anti-Semitism that—with the coming of the Enlightenment in the 18th century—hid itself under the veneer of “civil” society, only to bare its face of evil in the Holocaust.

(For a more detailed treatment of anti-Semitism in general, click here for the
Why the Jews? seminar)

Of course, in Russia and the Pale of Settlement of Eastern Europe, anti-Semitism never went underground (as we saw in Parts 56 and 57). But in the Western World the situation was different.

Some of the worst cases of anti-Semitism before the rise of the Nazis in Germany were instigated by the French, whose country was the birthplace of the Enlightenment.

It is shocking to learn, for example, that it was the French consul Ratti-Menton who brought a blood libel against the Jews in 1840, when a Capuchin monk disappeared in Damascus, Syria. In response to his accusations, the Syrian authorities seized more than sixty Jewish children to coerce their parents into confessing. Several Jews were arrested and tortured. Two died under torture and several others were permanently disabled; one “confessed.”

Pressured by French authorities, the Syrians would have tried these Jews on false charges had not the Jewish world reacted. Jewish organizations instigated a protest by British and American leaders (including President Martin Van Buren) that caused the Syrians to drop the charges.

French anti-Semitism continued however.

In 1886, a virulently anti-Semitic book La France Juive became the most-widely read book in France. This was followed in 1892 by the founding of an anti-Semitic daily newspaper La Libre Parole. Writes Berel Wein in Triumph of Survival (p. 233):

“Nowhere was [La Libre Parole] more popular than with the officer corps of the French army ... Stung by the anarchists and pacifists of the left, humiliated by its complete defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, the French army was frustrated, malevolent, and paranoid. One of its main enemies was the “Jewish influence” in French life. This made the military the logical candidate for an anti-Semitic incident. It would not be long in coming.”

THE DREYFUS AFFAIR

That anti-Semitic incident—which became known in France as “L’Affaire”—was the famous case of Alfred Dreyfus, a captain in the French Army who was falsely accused in 1894 of spying.

The actual spy was not a Jew—one Major Esterhazy—but even though this fact was discovered in 1896, the French army ignored or suppressed the evidence against Esterhazy and would not back away from its accusations for anti-Semitic reasons. “Secret” documents, some of which were really forgeries, were produced and Dreyfus was tried and convicted of treason in a closed courtroom before a military tribunal.[1] He was stripped of his rank and sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island off the coast of French Guiana in South America. On January 3, 1895, he was paraded through the streets of Paris while a mob jeered: “Death to the Jews.”

(One of those covering this fiasco was a Hungarian-Jewish journalist from Austria, Theodor Herzl, who was shocked to the core that Jew-hatred was so ingrained in the “civilized” French. He later wrote in his diary: “Where? In France. In Republican, modern, civilized France, a hundred years after the Declaration of the Rights of Man.” Even though Herzl, who was secular and quite assimilated, the Dreyfus trial made a powerful impression on Herzl and brought him closer to the realization that the only safe place for the Jews and the only answer to anti-Semitism was a land of their own—the Land of Israel.[2] While Herzl was not the founder of Zionism, he quickly rose to the top and convened the First Zionist Congress in Basle, Switzerland, in 1897, at which the World Zionist Organization was established. We will discuss Zionism in greater detail in a future installment.)

Meanwhile, the travesty of the Dreyfus trial created a controversy. France’s greatest writer, Emile Zola, published a stunning newspaper article in 1898 entitled J’Accuse (“I Accuse”) , charging the government with a miscarriage of justice. For this, Zola (who was not a Jew) was convicted of libel and had to flee to England.

Eventually, after another two travesties of a trial in which Dreyfus was again convicted, he was finally pardoned and, after having spent five years on Devils Island, was restored to his former military rank. (He was not fully exonerated until 1906!)

WORLD WAR I

On June 28, 1914, Archduke Francis Ferdinand, heir apparent to the Austro-Hungarian throne, was assassinated at Sarajevo by a Serbian nationalist. One month later, after its humiliating demands were refused, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. Other declarations of war followed quickly, and soon every major power in Europe was in the war. On one side were the Allies—chiefly France, Britain, Russia, Italy and later the U.S.; on the other were the Central Powers—Austro-Hungarian Empire, Germany and Turkey (i.e. Ottoman Empire).

World War I, which lasted four years, was an incredibly destructive war in which 10 million people died and another 20 million were wounded. This was largely because by the time World War I broke out, lethal weapons capable of killing huge numbers of people had been perfected. Soldiers no longer needed to stand close to each other to kill. Machine guns and heavy artillery did the job for them. And the end result was quite devastating.

The war also proved to be very damaging to both the spiritual and economic well-being of the Jewish communities especially in Eastern Europe. Poverty and hardship increased greatly. The chaos left in the wake of the war combined with the spread of Marxist, socialist and other revolutionary ideas greatly weaken the spiritual cohesion of Eastern European Jewry.

As for the Jews, 1.5 million fought in World War I. Jews fought in the Austrian army, in the German army, in the Russian army, in the French army. Jews (aligned with their host nations) fought against other Jews in this conflict, and 140,000 Jews died.

Interestingly, World War I—which without a doubt set the stage for the Holocaust—began on August 1, 1914 (when Germany declared war on Russia), corresponding to the 9th of the Hebrew month of Av (Tisha B’Av) the worst date in Jewish history. This was the same day on which the first and second Temples were destroyed, as well as many other terrible things that happened to the Jewish people as we have already seen.

In fact, World War I triggered a chain reaction that proved catastrophic to the Jews.

The two major links in the chain reaction were the Russian Revolution and the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany.

Hitler would never have come to power were it not for Germany’s defeat in World War I. As a result of that defeat, the punishing Versailles Treaty which brought Germany economically to its knees, and the world-wide depression following the war, Germany was thrown into economic chaos. But who was blamed for that economic plight by the “enlightened” Germans? The Jew, of course.

World War II, which followed World War I by only 21 years, was in many ways a continuation of the same conflict, as we will learn.

RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

Initially, the Czarist government did well in World War I against the Austro-Hungarian Empire but was badly beaten by the German army. As the war continued, the death toll and military setbacks proved more than Russia could handle.

The many years of corruption by the Czarist government had previously led in Russia to one aborted revolution in 1905. In March 1917, the revolution was finally successful. Initially, the Czar was deposed (The Czar and family were murdered by the Bolsheviks in 1918) and replaced by a socialist (Menshevik) government which kept Russia in the war (not a popular move amongst the masses, weary of the war) but, by November the government was overthrown by a Marxist (Bolshevik) government which took Russia out of the war. This Bolshevik takeover triggered a Civil War which was to last until 1921. The Bolshevik victory in 1921 led to the creation of the U.S.S.R. (The Soviet Union) which would remain in power until its collapse in 1990.

Of course, the Jews—who were among the most oppressed people in Russia, and who always gravitated to movements that professed to “change the world”—were involved in a major way in the Russian Revolution. (We saw earlier that the founder of the Communist ideology was Karl Marx, a Jew who converted to Christianity and then abandoned all religion.)

The motto of the Communist Party—“from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” - was attractive to many liberal minded Jews, who, imbued with the strong sense of social justice which comes from Judaism, felt that the socialist government would greatly benefit the masse and improve the conditions in Russia. Indeed, many of the key figures of the Bolshevik Revolution were Jews (see below).

The Jews who joined the Communist party were not religious Jews, but the drive toward tikun olam (“repairing of the world”) had not died. Indeed, in absence of religious expression, this drive (toward what is identified as a Messianic utopia in Judaism) dominated their Jewish souls. The American literary critic Edmund Wilson (1895-1972) summed up perfectly the Jewish attraction to communism when he said:

The Jew lends himself easily to communism because it enables him to devote himself to a high cause, involving all of humanity, characteristics which are natural to him as a Jew.[3]

Of course, just because secular Jews were involved in the Russian Revolution does not mean that the religious Jews of the shtetls were spared in the conflict. In fact, during the Russian Revolution huge numbers of Jews were killed.

The leader of the Russian Revolution, Vladimir Illych Lenin (1870-1924) did try to root out anti-Semitism. He made a strong stand against it, because it was such an intrinsic policy of the Czarist government. Furthermore, Lenin was well aware that there would probably not have been a Russian Revolution without the Jews.

Unfortunately, these Jewish Communists were following the Marxist dictum that “religion is the opiate of the masses,” and they did their level best to eradicate Judaism as a religion out of Russia.

Here is an excerpt from a propaganda piece by Yevsektsiya (the special department of the Soviet government set up to deal with Jews ) entitled “The Liquidation of Bourgeois Institutions” published in October 1918:

“The Jewish community has hitherto been dominated by members of the property class who want to keep the masses in the dark by superimposing a Hebrew culture upon them. While the upper classes have been sending their children to public schools they have provided only dark primary schools and synagogues for the offspring of the proletariat, in which nothing but nonsense is taught…. In the struggle against the authorized Jewish community no compromise can be made with the bourgeoisie.” [4]

So the Communist government of Russia, like the Czarist government of Russia Communism, embarked on a policy of forced secularization of Jews. (To be fair, they also did it to the Russian Orthodox Church.)

Thus the Jews of Russia were deliberately starved of their heritage, resulting in a huge Jewish population that is incredibly ignorant of Judaism. This, by the way, is a unique event in human history—the deliberate secularization of a community to such a large extent for such a long period of time. (It was unique to the Soviet Union and later duplicated by other Communist regimes, particularly in China.)

STALIN AND TROTSKY

When Lenin died in 1924, a power struggle ensued and Joseph Stalin (1879-1953) eventually seized power. In 1935, he initiated a series of purges which devastated Russia.

These purges made Stalin the second biggest mass murderer of the 20th century (after Mao Tze-tung), if we consider the sheer number of people he ordered killed and others whom he consigned to death in a vast network of labor camps. It is estimated that Stalin is responsible for the deaths of an estimated 25 million people (twice as many as Hitler, though probably only half as many as Mao).

An anti-Semite of the first order, even after the Holocaust, he was planning to deport 2-3 million Jews to Siberia where they would have been killed. However, he died under mysterious circumstances before he could put his plan into action. [5]

However, he did succeed in purging all the Jews out of the Communist government of Russia. The most famous of these was Leon Trotsky (1879-1940). The most important Jew in the Russian Revolution, Trotsky—whose real name was Lev Davidovich Bronstein—was a leading organizer of the Red Army. He engineered the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917 along with Lenin. When Lenin died he and Stalin were rivals for succession.

Stalin won and first ousted Trotsky as commissar of war, then expelled him from the party, and finally deported him from Russia—that happened in 1929. Trotsky survived in exile for more than 10 years; he was murdered in Mexico City in 1940 on Stalin’s orders.

Initially Stalin was meant to share power with two other men: Lev Kamenev and Grigori Zinovev, both Jews, but Stalin had them both arrested and executed after show trials in 1936.

AMERICAN ANTI-SEMITISM

Thus far, we have covered the open murderous anti-Semitism of the Russians and the insidious “intellectual” anti-Semitism of the French. But what about the land of tolerance—America?

In 1913, in Atlanta, Georgia, a Jew named Leo Frank was falsely accused of the murder of a 13-year-old Christian girl. So strong was the anti-Semitism in the American South that the testimony of a black man—a unique event in this racist region—was permitted against a white man. But, of course, the white man was a Jew.

Ironically, the black “witness” was the murderer—a fact that he had confessed to his own attorney, but this was kept secret. There had also been a real witness but he did not come forward until many years later.

Frank was convicted and sentenced to death, but the governor of Georgia, John Slaton, convinced that Frank was innocent, commuted his sentence.

Then a horrible thing happened.

A Georgia mob kidnapped Frank from prison and lynched him. The lynching was photographed and made into postcards which sold briskly.

Not until 1986—73 years later!—was Frank awarded posthumous pardon by the state of Georgia.

The Frank case led to the founding of the Anti-Defamation League by the B’nai B’rith. It became the leading Jewish group fighting anti-Semitism in America, and it had a lot of work on its hands, especially after 1918, the end of World War I, and in 1929 when the stock market crashed, and things heated up for the Jews in America.

As we mentioned in our discussion of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion(see Part 57), one of the big promulgators of anti-Semitism in America was Henry Ford, who spent a lot of his own money to get the Protocols translated into English and distributed in America as widely as possible.

The Protocols became the second biggest selling book in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s (after the Bible).

The Ford Motor Company’s plant in Dearborn, Michigan, had a sign posted in its parking lot:

“JEWS ARE TRAITORS TO AMERICA AND SHOULD NOT BE TRUSTED BY GENTILES. JEWS TEACH COMMUNISM, JEWS TEACH ATHEISM, JEWS DESTROY CHRISTIANITY, JEWS CONTROL THE PRESS, JEWS PRODUCE FILTHY MOVIES, JEWS CONTROL MONEY.”

Henry Ford was not the only one. There were others.

There were several conservative Christian political parties which were strongly anti-Semitic for example, William Pelley’s “Silver Shirts.” An anti-Semitic newspaper, Gerald B. Winrod’s The Defender had 110,000 subscribers.

These American anti-Semites were fledgling fascists. Under the guise of patriotism, they championed the idea that Jews were the underlying cause of the economic woes of America—such as the stock market crash of 1929—because it was the Jews who controlled business and banking. This kind of anti-Semitism rivaled that of Europe in the same period, but unlike Europe never took hold with the same fatal consequences.

But all this Jew-hatred did set the stage for the appeasement of Hitler when he took hold of power in Germany. It also was one of the primary reasons why America did not do more to save the Jews once they began to flee the Holocaust, as we shall see next.

[1] The one member of the French army who was truly interested in the truth, and who discovered that Esterhazy was the spy was Lieutenant General George Picquart. He was consistently ignored and hounded by the French army. When Esterhazy was finally brought to trial he was acquitted and sadly it was Picquart who sent to prison for sixty days.
[2] Ironically, today the number one excuse for hating Jews in the world is Zionism and the State of Israel. Even though it is merely an excuse, accusations against Israel and the supposed occupation of Palestinian lands are the fuel used to keep anti-Semitism alive and have lead to attacks against both Jews and Jewish targets around the world.
[3] Allan Gould ed., What Did They Think of the Jews? (Jason Aronson Inc., 1997), p.337.
[4] Paul Mendes-Flohr & Yehuda Reinharz ed., The Jew in the Modern World, (Oxford University Press, 1995), p.431-432.
[5]This event, known as the “The Doctors’ plot,” was an alleged conspiracy to eliminate the leadership of the Soviet Union by means of Jewish doctors poisoning top leadership. After the death of Stalin in March 1953, the new Soviet leaders declared that the case was fabricated. It was just a more modern variation on the more ancient blood libels common in medieval Europe.

#59 of 70 in the Aish.com Jewish History Series
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Palestine Institute

Monday, November 23, 2015