Read an Excerpt
Return to Zion
The History of Modern Israel
By Eric Gartman UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS
Copyright © 2015 Eric Gartman
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8276-1253-2
CHAPTER 1
A Pillar of Fire on the Road to Zion
Beginning of the Return, 1881–1896
The World of the Shtetl
On the afternoon of March 13, 1881, Czar Alexander II of Russia rode with his entourage through the narrow streets of St. Petersburg. It was a Sunday, and as was his custom for many years, the czar was headed to view a military roll call. He was an impressive-looking man: sixty-three years, tall and immaculately dressed, wearing a red cap, a red-lined overcoat with a beaver collar, and gold epaulets with his family crest. Snow still covered the ground; the long Russian winter was not yet over. The czar was accompanied by six horsemen and two sleighs, carrying the chief of police and the chief of the emperor's guard. Policemen lined the street, guarding the route.
The czar himself rode in a closed coach. The coach was bulletproof — a gift from Napoleon III of France to cement their relationship. The security measures were more than mere precautions. They were quite necessary. Alexander II had survived three assassination attempts in the two years prior. In one attempt an assassin fired five times at the fleeing czar, but Alexander II fled in a zigzag pattern to avoid the bullets and escaped unharmed. Another time the "People's Will" revolutionary group set an explosion on a rail line, but the attack missed the czar's train. The bloodiest incident occurred the year before: a People's Will agent set off a massive charge beneath the dining room of the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, killing eleven people and wounding thirty. The czar himself escaped harm only because he was late for dinner.
Alexander II was by no means a reactionary ruler. The twenty-six years of his rule were the greatest period of restructuring since Peter the Great had first attempted to modernize Russia. Like his illustrious forebearer, Alexander II had initiated a series of reforms intended to modernize the vast but backward empire. By far his most important act had been to emancipate the serfs twenty years earlier. Forty million peasants were freed of their legal obligations to their landlords in one sweeping gesture. With this move the czar hoped that Russia might catch up with the West. But the emperor had to be cautious: he could not move too fast. Russians might have envied the wealth and power of their Western neighbors, but they still looked upon their freedoms with suspicion. Democracy would mean the end of the old order and the historic union of the Orthodox Church, the military, and the aristocracy. To the old order, the czar was moving too fast. But to the liberals — and especially the radicals — he was moving too slowly, and they meant to start a social revolution with the czar out of the way.
The entourage followed the same route it always did, via the Catherine Canal and over the Pevchensky Bridge. It would be the czar's undoing. For on that Sunday afternoon no fewer than three People's Will revolutionaries waited as the procession made its usual trip. As Alexander rode in his secure coach, a young man carrying a small white package wrapped in a handkerchief stood on the narrow sidewalk. He went unnoticed by the policemen. As the imperial procession arrived, he threw the package under the czar's horses. The bomb inside exploded, killing one rider and knocking the would-be assassin into a fence. The energetic czar emerged from his coach unharmed, and he began to survey the scene. He approached the assassin, who was already being held down by no fewer than four soldiers. His men begged him to return to the safety of the coach, but the czar insisted on viewing the site of the explosion. As they moved toward it, another bomb landed at his feet. This time there was no escape: the explosion rocked the street, knocking the czar and his men to the ground as a cloud of white smoke covered the street. The police chief described the ghastly scene:
I was deafened by the new explosion, burned, wounded and thrown to the ground. Suddenly, amid the smoke and snowy fog, I heard His Majesty's weak voice cry, "Help!" Gathering what strength I had, I jumped up and rushed to the emperor. His Majesty was half-lying, half-sitting, leaning on his right arm. Thinking he was merely wounded heavily, I tried to lift him but the Czar's legs were shattered, and the blood poured from them. Twenty people, with wounds of varying degree, lay on the sidewalk and on the street. Some managed to stand, others to crawl, still others tried to get out beneath bodies that had fallen on them. Through the snow, debris, and blood you could see fragments of clothing, sabers, and bloody chunks of human flesh.
The czar's attendants took him back to the palace, where he died a few hours later. Had the reform movement died with him? It was the question that consumed all of Russia. It was not clear how his son, Alexander III, would rule. Perhaps no group within the vast, multiethnic realm was more affected by this question than the Jews. Roughly five million Jews — the vast majority of world Jewry — lived hemmed into the "Pale of Settlement," the area where they were legally allowed to reside, which ran from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea in western Russia. Theirs was a world vastly different from modern America. Their language was Yiddish, a combination of Hebrew and German. Their home was the shtetl (the Yiddish word for "town"), where almost all of them lived, having been barred from owning land or living in the cities. A contemporary vividly described the shtetl as
a jumble of wooden houses clustered higgledy-piggledy about a market-place ... as crowded as a slum.... The streets are ... as tortuous as a Talmudic argument. They are bent into question marks and folded into parentheses. They run into culs-de-sac like a theory arrested by a fact; they ooze off into lanes, alleys, back yards.... [At the center] is the market-place, with its shops, booths, tables, stands, butchers' blocks. Hither come daily, except during the winter, the peasants and peasant women from many miles around, bringing their livestock and vegetables, their fish and hides, their wagonloads of grain, melons, parsley, radishes, and garlic. They buy, in exchange, the city produce which the Jews import, dry goods, hats, shoes, boots, lamps, oil, spades, mattocks, and shirts.
From this clever depiction we also gain an insight into the Jews' economic role. With farming and the professions barred to them, they became merchants or artisans, peddlers, blacksmiths, tailors, butchers, shoemakers, bakers, and the like. According to historian Dan Kurzman, "In his tiny shop or factory, or in a candle-lit nook of his dismal house, a bearded figure with side curls might weave fiber into rope, hammer tin into utensils, tan a cowhide that would be transformed into shoes and gloves, stitch by hand the traditional caftan that was worn by most Jews, or distill brandy or brew beer."
Plonsk, another typical shtetl town, is described by Kurzman:
Branching out from the huge market square in the heart of town was a web of alleys paved with pink, red, and blue cobblestones that were often blackened with the slime of open, overflowing sewers. Along the alleys were lines of rickety two-story wooden houses that seemed almost to hold each other up. Inside, wobbly, creaking staircases led to dark rooms with smoky stoves, iron beds, and shelves laden with patched clothing — reeking dungeons, totally cut off from sunlight by the houses on the other side of the narrow street. The poorest Jews lived here: the market women and their pale Talmud-studying husbands, the seamstresses, the food peddlers who sold hot beans to schoolboys.
Other poor Jews were known as luftmenschen (Yiddish for "flying men"), who moved from town to town, looking for regular work and gathering in the market or other public places in search of even the lowliest job.
The Jews of the shtetl practiced a highly ritualized way of life. They followed the 613 commandments of piety that dictated the everyday rites of life, from eating to working to clothing. This is the "tradition" that Tevye the Milkman so lovingly sings of in Fiddler on the Roof. And while Tevye admitted that he did not know how or why the traditions came into being, they were in fact adaptations for a group living on the fringes of society, a way of instilling law into a region pervaded by lawlessness, chaos, and fear. If the Jews of the shtetl could not have security in their external life, they would impose order on their internal life, for it was in religion that the Jews of the shtetl found their only solace. Life revolved around religion and around God. Luftmenschen would crowd into their wooden synagogues, where they could come closest to God through the chanting of the Torah and Talmud. One memoir of this time read: "Carried away by the mellow, melting chant of Talmud-reading, one's mind soared high in the pure realm of thought, away from this world of facts and worries, away from the boundaries of here and now, to a region where the Divine Presence listens to what Jews create in the study of His word."
In a society where religion was so highly valued, the schools that taught the word of God were very important. Boys began religious study at an early age and continued for many years. The day when a son began his religious lessons was one of immense significance to his parents. A nineteenth-century Jewish writer vividly captured one such scene:
Soon a poorly clad couple entered, the man carrying in his arms a young boy of about six, wrapped in a talit [prayer shawl]. Both father and mother were weeping with joy, grateful to God who had preserved them that they might witness this beautiful moment. Having extended a cordial welcome to the newcomers, the melamed [teacher] took the hero of the celebration into his arms and stood him upon a table. Afterwards the boy was seated on a bench and was the first to receive cake, nuts, raisins and dainties of which the happy mother had brought along an apron-full. The leader then sat down near the youngster, placed a card with the printed alphabet before him and, taking a long pointer, began the first lesson by blessing his newly-initiated pupil that he may be raised for the study of Torah, marriage, and good deeds.
The boys' parents' zeal notwithstanding, the conditions of these schools were quite shabby. A turn-of-the-century report called them "filthy rooms, crowded from nine in the morning until nine in the evening, with pale, starved children. These remain in this contaminated atmosphere for twelve hours at a time and see only their bent, exhausted teachers.... Their faces are pale and sickly, and their bodies evidently not strong."
Events in the outside world rarely gave the denizens of the shtetl cause for hope. The nadir of their fortunes came during the thirty-year reign of Alexander II's father, Nicholas I. Calling the Jews "regular leeches," Nicholas attempted to cleanse Judaism from the land. According to one of his secret edicts, "The purpose in educating Jews is to bring about their gradual merging with the Christian nationalities and to uproot those superstitious and harmful prejudices which are instilled by the teachings of the Talmud." Consequently Nicholas issued over six hundred anti-Jewish decrees designed to disrupt Jewish life. These included censoring Yiddish and Hebrew books, stifling religious education, mass expulsions, and the conscription of young boys into the army for periods of up to twenty-five years. Jews remained barred from the professions, barred from holding land, barred from living outside the Pale of Settlement. His son, the reformer Alexander I, reduced compulsory military service to five years, allowed Jews into some universities, and allowed Jewish businessman to travel to parts of Russia that had been off-limits. They were still not allowed to own land, enter the professions, or live outside the Pale. Nonetheless, the winds of change were blowing, even into the deepest recesses of the backward empire.
This was the situation the Jews faced when Alexander II was assassinated. Would his son continue the reforms, including possible emancipation, as had been bestowed on their Jewish brethren in Western Europe? The answer came within weeks — it was a resounding "No." Alexander III ended all reforms, including leniency for the Jews. The Jews had no place in the new czar's plans. He would restore the old order. As a wave of pogroms (violent riots) spread from rumors that the Jews had killed the beloved czar, the regime did little to quell the unrest. All across the country, drunken peasant mobs formed and attacked Jewish settlements, killing, maiming, and raping in an orgy of unbridled violence. A Jewish man in Odessa recorded a chilling description of the pogrom as he and his family hid in a cellar: "The situation is terrible and frightening! We are virtually under siege. The courtyards are barred up, and we keep peering through the grillwork to see if the mob is coming down on us.... We all sleep in our clothes and without bedding ... so that if we are attacked we immediately will be able to take the small children ... and flee. But will they let us flee? ... Will they have mercy on the youngsters? ... How long, O God of Israel?" Two days later: "The rioters approached the house I am staying in. The women shrieked and wailed, hugging the children to their breasts, and didn't know where to turn. The men are dumbfounded. We all imagined that in a few moments it would be all over with us."10 The police held back the mobs in Odessa, but Jews elsewhere were not so fortunate. Hundreds were attacked and maimed.
The attacks continued on and off for the next year. A Jewish man in Vilna recorded:
If someone gets into an argument with a Christian the latter immediately says: "Just wait, soon we'll settle all the scores," or something similar or even worse. What kind of life is this? If I had the courage I would kill all those close to me and then myself, and the farce would be over. If I do not, some drunken riffraff will come along, ravish my wife and daughter and throw my infant Sonia from the third-floor window. Would it not be better for me to kill everyone? What a miserable creature is the Jew! Even when the advantage is clear to him he cannot summon the courage to do a good thing. Death awaits us in any case, so why should we wait?
The following spring the czar passed the May Laws, further restricting where Jews could live and sending them even deeper into poverty. But that was what the government wanted. The czar's top adviser declared, "One-third will die out, one-third will leave the country, and one-third will be completely dissolved in the surrounding population."
It was a cold, hard slap in the face to the Jews, who had been so hopeful that emancipation was on the way. Now it seemed like a distant dream, shattered in the blood and fire of the pogroms. One Jewish writer described the situation starkly: "The Russian peasant, poor as he may be, is the proprietor of a small piece of land. And his condition is not hopeless — one feels that sooner or later it will improve. But Jewish poverty is utterly without a cure; the Jew has no available means for improving his condition, which will remain abject as long as he lives among alien peoples." With crisis gripping the Jewish community, a conference convened in St. Petersburg to debate emigration from Russia. Many spoke out against it. Emigration would appear unpatriotic and might undermine the struggle for emancipation.
But to others, the situation was quite clear: "Either we get civil rights or we emigrate. Our human dignity is being trampled upon, our wives and daughters and being dishonored, we are looted and pillaged; either we get decent human rights or else let us go wherever our eyes may lead us." As for appearing unpatriotic, one writer scoffed at the very idea: "Sympathy for Russia? How ironical it sounds! Am I not despised? Am I not urged to leave? Do I not hear the word zhid constantly? Can I even think that someone considers me a human being capable of thinking and feeling like others? Do I not rise daily with the fear lest the hungry mob attack me? ... It is impossible ... that a Jew should regret leaving Russia."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Return to Zion by Eric Gartman. Copyright © 2015 Eric Gartman. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS.
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