History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

Damascus blood libel of 1840 was an important milestone in the radicalization of the Jews.

Such events fed a determination among young secularized Jews to combat injustice not just towards Jews but to mankind, and to take advantage of the growing political opportunities to end them for ever.

Tsarist Russia,

of the Jews

Indeed the Tsarist regime epitomized for radicals everywhere the most evil and entrenched aspects of autocracy. For Jews, who viewed it with peculiar loathing, it was the fourth, and probably the m...

What the Russians did was to engage in the first modern exercise in social engineering, treating human beings (in this case the Jews) as earth or concrete, to be shovelled around.

Firstly they confined Jews to what was called the Pale of Settlement,

Next, a series of statutes, beginning in 1804, determined where the Jews could live inside the Pale and what they could do there. The most damaging rule was that Jews could not live or work in villages, or sell alcohol to peasants.

the real aim was to drive Jews into accepting baptism, or getting out altogether.

1827,

Nicholas I,

‘Cantonist De...

conscripted all male Jews from twelve to twenty-five, placing the younger boys in canton-schools at the military depots, where they were liable to be forced into baptism, sometimes by whole units. The gov...

Enforcing these constantly changing codes was a nightmare for all concerned except the corrupt policeman or bureaucrat.

Jews were constantly humiliated in front of gentile neighbours, thus keeping alive the view that they were different, sub-human, and perpetuating the pogrom instinct.

Occasionally, the police organized massive ‘Jew Hunts’.

All Jews whatever were banned from any kind of state service in Moscow and St Petersburg.

There was not a single Jewish teacher in the state system.

not allowed to vote in municipal elections or stand for office;

They were forbidden to buy, rent or manage land beyond the immediate precincts of the Pale towns and shtetls.

As with military service, Jews were accused of being unwilling to work the land, but in practice the regulations made this impossible,

Next to the residence qualifications the anti-Semitic laws most hated by Jews governed education.

Jews were excluded completely from

top training inst...

Their attendance at secondary and high schools was governed by the quota system or numerous clausus.

The 25,000 chedarim schools, with 300,000 pupils, were forbidden to teach Russian, to stop children getting a secondary education.

The anti-Jewish codes of Tsarist Russia thus succeeded, chiefly, in corrupting every element in the state service. They were an extraordinary amalgamation of past and future–they looked back to the medieval ghetto and forward to the Soviet slave-state. What they did not do was ‘solve’ the Jewish problem. Indeed, by radicalizing the Jews, they ended, it could be said, in solving the Tsarist problem.

Hence the government code did nothing to reduce anti-Semitism. Quite the contrary. While baptized and smart Jews did well, the code impoverished or criminalized others, so ethnic Russians ended by both envying and despising the race, accusing Jews of being, at one and the same time, perfumed and filthy, profiteers and beggars, greedy and starving, unscrupulous and stupid, useless and too ‘useful’ by half.

anti-Semitism was the official policy of the government.

The object of the government was to reduce the Jewish population as quickly and as drastically as possible.

pogrom

after the murder of Alexander II in 1881, the state took over,

The major pogroms which began on 29 April 1881 were incited, condoned or organized by the Minister of the Interior,

The pogroms were followed by a mass of anti-Semitic legislation, known as the May Laws.

the thirty years 1881-1911 were a long calendar of anti-Jewish actions:

from 1881, this vicious, mounting and cumulatively overwhelming pressure on Russian Jewry produced the inevitable consequence–a panic flight of Jews from Russia westwards. Thus 1881 was the most important year in Jewish history since 1648, indeed since the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492.

Its consequences were so wide, and fundamental, that it must be judged a key year in world history too.

The net result was not to reduce the Jewish population of eastern Europe.

What the movement did was to take the natural population increase, some two and a half million, and transfer it elsewhere. Therein lay momentous effects, both for the Jews and for the world.

more than two million went to the United States alone,

creation of a mass American u...

completely new phenomenon, which in time changed the whole balance of Jewish power and influence in the wor...

In America Jews found they could conform to the pattern of the new life without difficulty. Like American Protestants, they became congregational, setting up multitudes of synagogues to suit their varying religious tastes. They became self-conscious during the Damascus protest, which brought them together as a national body for the first time. But mostly they continued to go their own ways.

Given the identification of American Jews with the particular part of the US landscape they inhabited, it is not surprising that during the Civil War they split with the nation, according to their states.

American Jewry during these years took its tone from the German-Jewish enlightenment.

From the 1840s onward Reform Judaism spread rapidly in America,

The Pittsburg Platform (1885), drawn up by Rabbi Kaufmann Kohler, which rejected all Torah laws ‘such as are not adapted to the views and habits of modern civilization’, became the standard creed of Reform Judaism until 1937. It rejected the old rules on diet, purity and dress, asserted that Jews were ‘no longer a nation, but a religious community’, denied the resurrection, heaven and hell, dismissed a return to Zion, and presented messianism as the struggle for truth, justice and righteousness in modern society–in which it would participate alongside other religions and people of goodwill generally.

These two million refugee Jews had very little in common with the quarter-million genteel, Reformist, well-heeled, American-minded and increasingly apprehensive established Jews who greeted them. They were overwhelmingly Yiddish-speaking, Orthodox or hasidic, wild-eyed and frightened, superstitious and desperately poor.

For the first time, American Jewry began to fear new arrivals, especially in such staggering numbers. They rightly judged that an anti-Semitic reaction was inevitable.

But, infinitely more important, the immigrants gave the kiss of life to American Jewry.