The Story of the Jews Volume 2: When Words Fail: 1492--Present

by Simon Schama

Where the Jews were concerned, he argued, it was not the Sabbath service which mattered but how they lived and what they lived for, which was, always, money. In this deep sense, being Jewish was to worship at the golden calf of capitalism: the two habits were one and the same. There were two extraordinary and baleful aspects to Marx’s analysis of what it meant to be Jewish. First it was astonishing, especially at a time when the first modern histories – social and religious – of the Jews were being written by the scholars of Wissenschaft des Judentums, Heinrich Graetz and Leopold Zunz, that Marx saw what he judged to be reprehensible economic practices, not as the results of persecution and the enforced restriction of Jews to odious occupations, but rather to ingrained and incorrigible habits, so that the usury of the Middle Ages became the vicious banking of the modern age. It was Marx who gave a modern gloss to the ancient libel that Judaism was, in effect, interchangeable with, and nothing more than, the worship of Mammon. Worse still – and ominous for the future – was Marx’s echoing of the contemporary commonplace, owned by Judaeophobes of both right and left, that the Jews were hardly in need of emancipation since they were the masters of the modern age. ‘The Jews have [already] become emancipated in so far as Christians have become Jews.’

The timing of Jewish emancipation had been terrible for its beneficiaries, albeit not of their choosing. For it came about exactly when Enlightenment cosmopolitanism, the universal brotherhood, that short-lived little flame, had burnt out. By the second quarter of the nineteenth century, resistance to the dominion of the machine took the form of a militant cult of history, religion, nature and nation, against which the Jews seemed to personify the opposite: a people – a dynasty like the Rothschilds – indifferent to borders, a race who were everywhere and nowhere since now they could not be reliably identified by marks on their clothing, not at any rate until Wagnerian ears picked up their ugly, comical wheezing, croaking and snuffling. Now they had mastered the perpetuation of their ancient viciousness by disguising it as modern practice. Leroux saw banking as a latter-day form of crucifixion. And in the railways they had found the perfect instrument of their dominion. For the railways were, after all, against nature. They murdered space; turned the serene contemplation of landscape into a mad whirl, a ‘kaleidoscope’. Travel, said Ruskin, dulled in exact proportion to its velocity, and the railways did nothing except turn humans into ‘living parcels’. By contracting time and killing distance, they scrambled a sense of being somewhere. When Heine famously described his being able, courtesy of the railways, to smell the Berlin lindens while still in Paris and sense the North...

But in 1834 frock-coat Jewry was not paying much attention to tarboosh Jewry whose condition, apart from the occasional murder, was in any case shocking. The vast majority lived in poverty, ignorance and especially fearfulness. There exists today a romance of Jewish life in the Islamic world, imagined as one of neighbourly harmony, irremediably altered by the rise of Zionism and the creation of Israel. It is true that in cities like Cairo, Alexandria, Baghdad and Aleppo, at the end of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, a Jewish middle class, much of it identified with the forces of modernisation, lived a culturally vibrant life alongside Muslim and Christian co-citizens. But this was the creation of colonial modernising, and the Jews paid a heavy price for their identification with empire. For centuries before that, the mass of Jewish poor in Syria, Egypt, Palestine and the Maghreb states lived a back-alley life, hammering metalwork or selling brightly woven textiles and leather goods. In so far as their children were educated at all, it was in religious schools, the cheders, where they were taught to recite the Torah by rote much as their Arab peers chanted passages from the Quran. Those same children had to get used to being spat on in casual encounters with Muslims in the street, and showered with stones whenever it amused anyone to do so. The Jews of the Muslim world were still more or less legally powerless, prohibited from testifying on their own behalf i...

Once Christian, Benjamin famously smelled opportunity in Scott’s romance of the Jewess in Ivanhoe to inaugurate a whole literary industry of the Noble Semitic-Exotic, beginning with a daily look in the mirror and extending to Eva the charismatic Jewess of Tancred, who draws her infatuated Christian into the depths of Hebrew mystery in the Holy Land so that he would receive an epiphany with an angel on Mount Sinai.

So when a grand meeting of protest against the atrocities in Damascus was called for at Mansion House, there was no doubt that it would be packed, as indeed was the case, nor that there would be vocal friends of the Jews to say their piece. The most passionate of all was the Irish ‘Liberator’, the great orator of Catholic emancipation, Daniel O’Connell. ‘Every feeling of humanity,’ O’Connell roared, ‘is contradicted by the foul, the murderous charge . . . was there a being so degraded as to believe that they [the Jews of Damascus] made human blood a part of their ceremonies . . . was not the Hebrew exemplary in every relation of life . . . was he not a good father, a good son?’ With only the egregious exception of The Times, which opined that it was for the Jews now to prove their innocence, the entirety of the British press followed in denouncing not just the cruelty in Damascus itself but anyone so bigoted and credulous as to believe the ancient slander.

Riding a wave of visceral anti-Catholicism in America, Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise in Cincinnati actually claimed the conversion of the Mortara boy was just a pretext for the Pope and his ‘soulless lackeys’, the Jesuitical inquisitors, to enforce their power.34

Marx using many of Hess’s own ideas and writings, rather than the other way round, especially for the Communist Manifesto. It had been Hess, not Marx, who had first articulated the idea that money was the religion of the modern age, one which doomed its millions of devotees to lives of barren alienation. ‘Money is human value expressed in numbers, the mark of our slavery.’ A revolutionary Exodus was needed. Given his background, Hess truly meant it when he described capitalism as a kind of fetishistic cult, a Golden Calf – in effect the opposite of the Judaism in which he had seen a code of ethics. Marx took this and flipped it, making religion a kind of sneering metaphor, and identifying it, notoriously and exclusively, with the Jews.

The Jews of the cities had taken a bet on modernity, but now they were faced with a self-consciously archaic, rural-Teutonic and mythic attack in which the part they were assigned was that of subhuman goblins whose elimination, one way or the other, was the precondition not just of a flourishing German future but of its very survival. Only one side could win this war to the end, Marr made clear, and the purpose of his work was to sound the battle cry and ensure it would not be Aryan Germans who would be the vanquished race. Not long before his death in 1904 Marr had a sudden and complete change of heart, publishing his Testament of an Anti-Semite and publicly asking forgiveness from the Jews. It was too late. His League of Anti-Semites had created a new kind of political party and the toxin had been released into the bloodstream of German nationalism. Paul de Lagarde, Germany’s most eminent scholar of oriental languages, described anti-Semitism as ‘the mainstay of our national movement . . . the most essential expression of genuine popular conviction’. It was this equation of anti-Semitism with political engagement, a tonic against bourgeois complacency, which would be so deadly to the people most associated with middle-class urban materialism. Put another way, anti-Semitism was the way to restore national health. To be vigorously German, then, rather than just paying lip service to the national ideal, meant being robustly, forthrightly anti-Semitic.

Never confuse neighbours with friends. None of this proximity, the sharing of districts, the common experiences of work and play, made the slightest difference when every twenty years it was time once more to attack the Jews. An out-of-towner coming into a pogrom-struck city – Kiev, Elizavetgrad or Odessa – would have been met by a snowfall of feathers, lying on the streets, blown into the water, hovering on the marine gusts, the insides of what had been ripped apart: pillows, bolsters, cushions, the comforters of the Jews; the first target of their assailants who stabbed and tore and hacked at them before moving on to the hard furniture and glass and crockery and then on to the householders caught at home or running for their lives. Then your nostrils would pick up the stink of burnt-out houses, the wooden shacks of the poorest the easiest to set alight.

The charge of ‘separateness’, a staple accusation directed against religious Jews, was neatly transferred to revolutionaries and became tantamount to treason. The fact that the Jews were notoriously literate, studious not just in the Talmud (which had once functioned as the same text of satire and subversion in Christian demonologies) but also now in secular disciplines, with a strong presence in journalism and political and philosophical literature, only intensified this police paranoia. Where once their esoteric religious texts had been the scripture of subversion, now it was their immersion in, and propagation of, anarchism and socialism that marked them out as enemies of Mother Russia and the world beyond. Brafman pointed to the international meddling of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, ostensibly to protect Jews from persecution, but actually to act as the institutional front for the international conspiracy, as the most obvious proof of his argument.

It was once thought that the Russian government must have instigated the pogroms as a way of redirecting antipathy for the countless social ills affecting Russia. But there is no evidence of government collusion.

There is, however, plentiful evidence of slow or shaky response.

But even if soldiers were present, their orders usually were not to use firearms against the mobs. That, and the relatively lenient punishment of the rioters, signalled to incendiaries in other towns that the authorities were winking at the violence against the Jews even when that was untrue. Sometimes, too, Jews on the receiving end noted a kind of chilly indifference on the part of the authorities amounting to grim satisfaction. The general attitude was that the Jews had brought it on themselves by their cupidity and greed.

The disaster was, as usual, timed for Passover, late March 1891. Of Moscow’s 30,000 Jews, 20,000 were to be expelled; almost all its working artisan population plus shopkeepers and merchants were arbitrarily deemed desirable. The decree became known on the morning following the first Seder as Jews were assembling for synagogue. The tragic variation on the exodus fell hard on them. Different groups were to be deported in phases depending on how long their residence had been; last in, first out. But the uprooting, the panic selling of property – movable and immovable – the liquidation of assets, with the Church looking on in satisfaction, seemed not so much an Egyptian tale as a replay of the expulsion from Spain.

If anyone had reason to assume that his Jewish and Russian identities were unproblematically twinned, it was Pinsker; yet the pogroms and the tepid attitude of authority to both prevention and correction taught him this was not so. He also came to the shocking realisation that the optimism of the Society for the Promotion of Enlightenment among Odessa Jews was all idle piety. The truism that hatred would dissipate with education, and with easy social familiarity between Jews and non-Jews, was a vain comfort. Anti-Semitism was not an anachronism destined to disappear with the conquest of modernity; it was modernity, as up-to-date and future-friendly as electricity and the railway. This was because it was a psychic disease, one capable of infinite mutation. Pinsker the diagnostician observed a moral metastasis eating through the body of modernity. Better than almost any other Jewish commentator on anti-Semitism, he understood how ancient phantasies cohabited with modern habits; and the particular madness, ‘a demonopathy’, he identified was the fear of ghosts, zombies. The Jews walked through the fears of the non-Jewish mind as alien beings, neither wholly alive nor satisfyingly dead; both there and not there; mercurial, slippery, immune to exorcism through banishment, conversion or any number of brutal bashings. Worse, they kept coming back as successes, masters of the modern world; hobgoblins of capitalism. The Jews themselves were not without responsibility for this phobia...

‘Eretz Yisroel’, the place where language and collective identity had been formed; where kings of Israel and Judah might have disappeared out of sight but never out of mind; where in fact there was already a Jewish majority in Jerusalem. It was not, as is often claimed, the first Zionists who spoke of Palestine as empty, ‘a land without people for a people without land’. That was the comment of an American missionary earlier in the nineteenth century. But it is true that even if you look very hard amid all these passionate, desperate yearnings for Zion, you will not find, anywhere at all, the word ‘Arab’.

the whole of Palestine, was full of Arab immigrants, many of them descendants of Ibrahim Pasha’s army, who had conquered the country on behalf of Muhammad Ali, the Khedive of Egypt, in the 1830s. After the conquest was complete in 1841, many of the military families were settled in Palestine. The majority were native Egyptian but there were also Maghrebi Arabs from Algeria and Morocco, Circassians and Bosnians. At the same time, there was some immigration from Syria and Lebanon, including Druze and Christians. The assumption that, before the arrival of Jews in the nineteenth century, Arab Palestine was a place of timeless continuity, the same indigenous people immemorially inhabiting the same villages and cultivating the same plots of ancestrally inherited land, overlooks all these shifts of population.

What unfolded, as the first Jewish villages appeared in Galilee, the coastal plain of Samaria and the Shephelah, was not a case of an unbroken agriculture disrupted by colonial intrusion. The ecology of Palestine in the second half of the nineteenth century was unstable and, in many parts of the country, deteriorating.30

Environmental degradation created commercial opportunity. When villagers chose not to register their land use with the Turkish authorities for fear of taxation, they produced legal vacancies which were instantly filled by opportunistic buyers from Jaffa and Jerusalem but also much further away in the region. A class of absentee landlords arose in the area, almost entirely Christian and Muslim Arabs, who then leased their properties to those who would bring improvements – drainage and irrigation above all – and with it dramatic capital appreciation. Enter, in the first place, those Americans and German Templars, followed not long afterwards by the Jews.

Thus the fellahin, partly by their own doing and partly by circumstances completely beyond their control, had beome tenants of landlords who had never lived or farmed in their plains, hills and valleys. To begin with just who was selling and who buying – effendi, Turk, French consul or Jerusalem Jew – was a matter of utter indifference to those who ploughed fields, scattered seeds from their opened fists, tended and grazed sheep and goats, so long as they could get on with providing a subsistence for their families and village. But these belt-and-braces young men were not Jerusalem Jews and were impervious to ancient, sacrosanct customs. Customary convention prescribed that those who had sown and harvested a summer crop were then entitled to follow with a winter crop; and the stubble fields after harvest were always theirs for grazing. But both local officials and Jewish farmers had new, office-paper versions of rights. Even at this early stage, hostilities erupted. The Jews drove grazing animals from their land, or even confiscated them as a ‘lesson’. Infuriated Arab villagers responded with violent attacks, smashing up cabins, and physically attacking men and women. The situation was made worse by the refusal of the settlers to take up the customary offer of ‘protection’ from Arab watchmen, preferring instead to defend themselves. Armed Arabs then made the Jews experience first-hand the cost of denying themselves that protection. In both the grazing wars and the watchmen...

1899, Méliès inaugurated the genre which would become a staple of the cinema: the injustice drama. Méliès’s twelve one-minute-fifteen-second Dreyfus films would be as much a work of personal conviction as shrewd commercial showmanship.

Four years later in 1899, that same journalist, Theodor Herzl, would insist that the Dreyfus case had been his dark epiphany,

Thus was Der Judenstaat brought into the world. Though the title is habitually known in English as The Jewish State, Jacques Kornberg is right to point out that this is, in fact, a mistranslation of what Herzl actually had in mind, which was much more like ‘The State of the Jews’. The difference was, and is, important. A Jewish state presupposes the political realisation of either Torah Judaism or some less straightforwardly religious notion of Jewish ethos. That, indeed, was very much the ideal of Alkalai, and later ‘cultural Zionists’ like Ahad Ha’am. It was suffused through the centuries with the ancient tradition of messianic redemption. But though his name would, in eastern Europe and Russia, come to be spoken of in that way, Herzl, for all his self-regarding obsession with charismatic leadership, repudiated any such pretensions. His state for the Jewish nation was to be a more worldly, matter-of-fact entity, a place where, at last, Jews could live whichever way they wanted, speak whichever language came naturally to them (though he would prefer it be German), a country where the heterogeneity of the Jews, not their uniformity, could be protected and celebrated.

Herzl then ends the famous passage with the perennial ‘plea of the Jews’ – ‘If we could only be left in peace’ – and follows it with his clear-eyed, ominous prophecy: ‘But I think we shall not be left in peace.’28

Despite the mordant sarcasm of Ahad Ha’am congratulating Dr Herzl on discovering the Jews and their sorrows, there had been a Judenstaat effect, just as when American colonials read the Declaration of Independence and understood, at the most basic level, what had to be fought for; or in Ireland when Daniel O’Connell gave voice to the oppressed (at one point Herzl said he wanted to be the Parnell of the Jews); or in India when Gandhi spoke and walked. It was the nimbus around the idea of a state for the Jews, a place where being a Jew was the norm rather than a problem, which cast its glow through Jewish Europe.

In his caustically grand way, Ahad Ha’am had a point about the content-free quality of Herzl’s notion of ‘Jewishness’ defined more by how the Gentiles felt, for ill or good, than by the core of Judaism itself. But the counterpoint is that for all his devotional eloquence and penetrating intellect, Ahad Ha’am also was unclear about what true Judaism was, for the simple reason that at least since Maimonides this had not been an agreed truism. It was not pure Torah or the Karaites would be right. It was not unexamined Talmud (not that that was a monolithic work) or Maimonides would be wrong. It could not accommodate the reforming Judaism by which millions now defined themselves as Jews. But all that Ahad Ha’am knew was that it was richer, weightier, more serious than anything the irreligious Herzl was offering, which was Jewish secularism, and that for the Jews to be reborn as a nation, they needed to find Judaism first. Thus an enmity, a civil war, was seeded at the very birth of Zionism. It has yet to be reconciled.

Ha’am pointed to the fact that most cultivable land was already being worked by the local population. For the moment, he said, landowners were content to sell to Jews for tidy sums, for the population was sparse. But should there come a time when that Jewish presence was substantial and seemed threatening, no Zionist should be under any illusion that they would not be fiercely resisted. Ahad Ha’am thought that Herzl, in his fancy suits and with his deracinated German attitude to everything, had no answer to this near insuperable problem.

Two visions of how a Jewish life could be lived in Palestine confronted each other, two visions of how Jews and Arabs could or would live in one land. Jerusalem or Tel Aviv; spiritual or secular. The two visions refused to marry up, to agree on what constitutes a truly Jewish life. They still do.

it’s safe to say anyone whose mouth waters at the prospect of cold poached minced carp crowned with a little yarmulka of boiled carrot can only be Ashkenazi.

My childhood chazzan, the Rev. Tashlitzky, taught me my bar mitzvah portion, steering me through the cantillation while simultaneously training his dachshund to bark impressively every time an ‘omeyn’ (amen) was called for.

gerush exile. Jews can get the feeling wherever they are.

Hasidim a term often but inaccurately used as a synonym for Orthodox or ultra-Orthodox Jews; or still less accurately for anyone dressed in That Hat and sporting long payes and beard. Hasidim are specifically followers of the mystical teachings of the zaddikim of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, often associated with the Baal Shem Tov. See chapter 12.

for a year

Eleven months

Klezmorim are often assumed to come from the Polish–Ukrainian–Lithuanian heart of the Pale and klezmorim are documented performing for non-Jewish Polish aristocratic celebrations in the eighteenth century. In fact, both their repertoire and the distinctive combination of instrumental sounds originated in the Balkan borderlands between the Ottoman and south Slavic worlds, hence the unmistakable Romany influence.

As per usual, the style and size of the mezuzah (conventionally small) represents a fine negotiation between inconspicuousness and self-declaration.

tsuris troubles. Not all of Jewish history.

Riccardo Calimani, The Ghetto of Venice (Milan, 1985), is still in its way a narrative classic.

12. Samuel Purchas, Purchas, His Pilgrimage (London, 1613), 165; Holmberg, 77.

45. ‘The Relation of Antony Montezinos’, trans. Moses Wall, in Menasseh ben Israel, The Hope of Israel, reprinted in Lucien Wolf, Menasseh ben Israel’s Mission to Oliver Cromwell (London, 1901: reprinted Cambridge, 2012). See also Richard H. Popkin, ‘The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Indian Theory’, in Kaplan et al. (eds.), Menasseh ben Israel and his World, 63–8; Benjamin Schmidt, ‘The Hope of the Netherlands: Menasseh ben Israel and the Dutch Idea of America’, in Paolo Bernardini and Norman Fiering (eds.), The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, 1450–1800 (New York, 2001), 86–106; Ronnie Perelis, ‘“These Indians Are Jews!”: Lost Tribes, Crypto-Jews and Jewish Self-Fashioning in Antonio de Montezinos’ Relación of 1644’, in Kagan and Morgan (eds.), Atlantic Diasporas, 195–211.

4. Ibid., especially 15–66. ‘Lurianic’ Kabbalism does indeed have a strong purchase on the diaspora and the Jewish yeshivot of Palestine and Egypt in this period, but there was also fierce resistance to it in the Rabbinate, both Sephardi and Ashkenazi, and the masses of Jews who became Shebbatians were certainly not all adepts of its rarefied cosmology and metaphysics. It seems to me that it was precisely when, in its Hasidic incarnation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it found a simplified vernacular that a dilute Kabbalism morphed into a genuinely popular mass movement.

35. The Pitigliano synagogue is still very much as it was in the eighteenth century, as is much of the whole town. Though the community was all but wiped out during the last war, no one interested in Jewish Italy should miss it.

5. The richest work of revision along these lines based on a prodigious trove of primary sources is Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, The Golden Age of the Shtetl: A New History of Jewish Life in Eastern Europe (Princeton, 2013).

19. The classic account of the revolutionary impact of the railways on culture as well as economy is Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 1979).

one of the most vivid portraits of Jewish Odessa is Vladimir Jabotinsky’s novel, The Five: A Novel of Jewish Life in Turn-of-the-Century Odessa, trans. Michael Katz (Ithaca, 2005).

Hillel Halkin, ‘What Ahad Ha’am Saw and Herzl Missed’, Mosaic (October 2016), online.

Melvin Konner, Unsettled: An Anthropology of the Jews (New York, 2003), and Howard M. Sachar, A History of the Jews in the Modern World (New York, 2006). Paul Johnson’s A History of the Jews (London, 1987) covers four millennia and is still a wonderful read. Many of the books of Cecil Roth

A History of the Jews in England (rev. edn, Oxford, 1978).

Mozes Heiman Gans’s enormous, spectacularly illustrated Memorboek: A History of Dutch Jewry from the Renaissance to 1940 (Baarn, 1977);

Todd M. Endelman, The Jews of Britain, 1656–2000 (Berkeley, 2002);

Synagogues360 offering online tours of synagogues throughout the world from Kerala to South Carolina. The eloquently beautiful little meditation by the medieval historian Yitzhak Baer, Galut,