by Paul Johnson
Next to the residence qualifications the anti-Semitic laws most hated by Jews governed education. Jews were excluded completely from such top training institutions as the St Petersburg Institute of Civil Engineers, the Army Medical College, the St Petersburg Electrical Institute, the Moscow Agricultural College, the St Petersburg Theatrical School, the Kharkov Veterinary Institute and the various colleges of mines. Their attendance at secondary and high schools was governed by the quota system or numerus clausus. They could occupy up to 10 per cent of such places in the Pale, only 5 per cent outside and only 3 per cent in Moscow and St Petersburg. The 25,000 chedarim schools, with 300,000 pupils, were forbidden to teach Russian, to stop children getting a secondary education. As a result of these measures, the number of Jews in the higher schools fell dramatically, and parents fought desperately to get their children in, often bribing the gentile headmasters, who had a fixed scale of charges.
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. Despite all the restrictions, some Jews continued to prosper. Discrimination was purely religious and by getting themselves baptized Jews could evade it completely, at any rate in theory. In Russian music, for instance, Anton Rubinstein (1829-94) and his brother Nikolay (1835-81), whose parents had converted, ran the Petersburg and Moscow Conservatoires for many years and dominated the musical scene during the great age of the Russian symphony and opera. Even non-Christian Jews contrived to flourish in a rapidly expanding economy, being strongly represented in brewing, tobacco, leather, textiles, grain, banks, shipping, railways and—despite the bans—oil and mining.115
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. Russian anti-Semitism had all kinds of ingredients. The Tsarist regime persecuted other minorities besides the Jews but it was skilful at setting them off one against another, and in particular in inciting Poles, Letts, Ukrainians and Cossacks to go for the Jews. Indeed, Russia was the only country in Europe, at this time, where anti-Semitism was the official policy of the government. It took innumerable forms, from organizing pogroms to forging and publishing the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
The object of the government was to reduce the Jewish population as quickly and as drastically as possible. A glimpse of the mentality of the Tsarist regime can be found in the diaries of Theodor Herzl, who interviewed several ministers in St Petersburg in 1903 to solicit help for his Zionist programme. The Finance Minister, Count Serge Witte, by Tsarist standards a liberal, told him:
One has to admit that the Jews provide enough reasons for hostility. There is a characteristic arrogance about them. Most Jews however are poor, and because they are poor they are filthy and make a repulsive impression. They also engage in all sorts of ugly pursuits, like pimping and usury. So you see it is hard for friends of the Jews to come to their defence. And yet I am a friend of the Jews.
(Herzl commented: ‘If so, we certainly do not need enemies.’) Witte complained of the large number of Jews in the revolutionary movement. Herzl: ‘To what circumstances do you attribute this?’ Witte: ‘I believe it is the fault of our government. The Jews are too oppressed. I used to say to the late Tsar, Alexander III, “Majesty, if it were possible to drown the six or seven million Jews in the Black Sea, I would be absolutely in favour of that. But if it is not possible, one must let them live.” What, then, do you want from the Russian government?’ Herzl: ‘Certain encouragements.’ Witte: ‘But the Jews are given encouragements—to emigrate. Kicks in the behind, for example.’116
The first modern Russian pogrom came in 1871 in Odessa. It was instigated chiefly by Greek merchants. There was an ethnic element in most of the disturbances of the 1870s, Slav nationalists being particularly violent in their anti-Semitism. But after the murder of Alexander II in 1881, the state took over, and the ‘kicks in the behind’ followed in rapid succession. The major pogroms which began on 29 April 1881 were incited, condoned or organized by the Minister of the Interior, Ignatiev, an enthusiastic Slavophile. They spread over one hundred centres, lasted nearly a year, and in some cases involved huge mobs. Not only the government but the police and innumerable ethnic groups were involved. The far left joined in. The revolutionary Narodnaya Volya party incited the Ukrainians to kill the Jews in August 1881 under the slogan: ‘Rise against the Tsar of the pans [nobles] and the zhids [Jews].’117 Great liberal writers like Turgenev and Tolstoi remained silent. The pogroms were followed by a mass of anti-Semitic legislation, known as the May Laws. Indeed, the pogroms were used to justify the legislation, the argument running: mob attacks on the Jews, while deplorable in themselves, indicate the extent of popular indignation against this anti-social minority; therefore its activities must be restricted. Of course the government inspired and permitted the mob action in the first place, and the whole aim of the regime was to bolster its crumbling popularity by attacking an easy target. The Nazis were to use exactly the same technique of violence-led legislation. Hence the thirty years 1881-1911 were a long calendar of anti-Jewish actions: 1882, May Laws; 1886-9, restrictions of Jewish entry to the professions and reduction of the Pale area; 1891, over 10,000 Jews expelled from Moscow; 1893-5, huge expulsions from non-Pale areas; 1894-6, introduction of the spirits monopoly, an economic catastrophe for the Jews; from 1903, a series of vicious pogroms, in which Jews were not merely robbed but killed. At Kishinev in 1905 fifty Jews were murdered and 500 injured. In Odessa, a four-day pogrom in 1905 killed more than 400 Jews. In Bialystok, the police and the army joined in the pogroms of 1906. From 1908 to 1911 there were more large-scale expulsions.
Hence 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 first big rush to get out came in 1881-2. Thereafter Jews left at an average of 50,000-60,000 a year. With the Moscow expulsions, 110,000 Russian Jews left in 1891 and 137,000 in 1892. In the pogrom year 1905-6, over 200,000 Jews left. The exodus was by no means confined to Russia. Between 1881 and 1914 more than 350,000 Jews left Austrian Galicia. More Jews emigrated from Rumania, where they were also under pressure. The net result was not to reduce the Jewish population of eastern Europe. In 1914 there were still five and a half million Jews in Russia and two and a half million in the Austrian empire. 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. We must now examine them in turn.
Of these emigrants, more than two million went to the United States alone, and the most obvious and visible consequence, therefore, was the creation of a mass American urban Jewry. This was a completely new phenomenon, which in time changed the whole balance of Jewish power and influence in the world, and it came quite suddenly. The original Jewish settlement in America was small and slow to expand. As late as 1820 there were only about 4,000 Jews in the United States, and only seven of the original thirteen states recognized them politically. The slow growth of the community is hard to understand. As we have seen, there were few legal barriers to Jewish advancement. North Carolina denied public office to all non-Protestants, and in 1809 a Jew, Jacob Henry, made a s
peech which became famous, asserting his inalienable right to sit in the state’s House of Commons—the House took his part. Maryland had a ban on non-Christians holding office or practising law. From 1797, another Jew, Solomon Etting, campaigned persistently to have this barrier removed. He finally succeeded in 1826 and was immediately elected to the Baltimore City Council. There was some trouble over the Sabbath-Sunday conflict. In 1816 Abraham Wolf was convicted in Pennsylvania for ‘having done and performed worldly employment on the Lord’s Day, commonly called Sunday’; he appealed and lost. But all this seemed of minor importance compared with the fundamental issues and horrific injustices which wracked the Jews in the Old World. Dedicating a new synagogue in Savannah, Georgia, in 1820, the physician Jacob de la Motta preached a grateful sermon: ‘On what spot in this habitable Globe does an Israelite enjoy more blessings, more privileges, or is more elevated in the sphere of preferment, and most conspicuously dignified in respectable stations?…Have we not ample cause to exult?’118
There were 6,000 Jews in America when Etting won in 1826; 15,000 at the time of the Damascus affair in 1840; 150,000 on the eve of the Civil War. Old settlements like Newport or Norfolk did not grow. Jewish arrivals, overwhelmingly German-speaking, from Bavaria, north Germany and German-Jewish parts of Poland, Bohemia and Hungary, were poor, orderly, hard-working; many began as pedlars, then graduated to keeping shops or founding small businesses. They settled in Albany, Syracuse, Buffalo and Rochester in New York State; in Chicago and Detroit, Cleveland and Milwaukee. For a time Cincinnati was the second largest Jewish centre to New York. St Louis, Minneapolis, Louisville and New Orleans also became Jewish centres. About 10,000 Jews went to California in the 1840s gold rushes. By the Civil War, New York had a Jewish community of 40,000 with Philadelphia next in size. A sure sign of the security Jews enjoyed in America was that their communities there positively encouraged more Jews to join them. Emigrants were spurred by enthusiastic letters from relatives, word-of-mouth tales, success-stories printed by Jews in local German papers. Thus, Das Füllhorn of Bamberg wrote in 1836:
A Jewish journey-man baker from Bavaria who was ready and willing to work, who travelled through Germany and the neighbouring countries for ten years and obtained work only rarely, so that he could not even earn his bread in this way, migrated to North America last summer. Now he has written home to his parents that he has found a place as a journey-man in the house of a baker at Petersburg immediately after his arrival and that he receives 40 florins wages a month in addition to free board, laundry and room. Blessed land of freedom and prosperity!119
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. Like other ethnic or religious groups, they founded a few Utopian or agricultural colonies. Like other groups they produced pioneers and eccentrics. A US shipmaster complained to Washington about the vice-consul in St Thomas’s, ending: ‘PS. This N. Levy is a Jew and lives with a Black Woman and frequently Walks the Streets with her arm in arm to the mortification of all the Americans who are under the painful necessity of witnessing the Same’; but Consul Levy was not removed.120
A more interesting case was that of Mordecai Noah, the first Jew to have diplomatic status, whom James Monroe removed as US Consul in Tunis in 1815 on the grounds that ‘the Religion which you profess [is] an obstacle to the exercise of your consular functions’. Noah did not take this lying down and wrote a pamphlet about it. He was the first American Jew to emerge as a larger-than-life figure. A hundred years later he would certainly have become a movie mogul. As it was he was born in Philadelphia in 1785, son of a bankrupt pedlar. He was in turn a gilder, carver, clerk in the US Treasury, politician, editor of the Charleston City Gazette, then after his spell in Tunis (where he was accused of misappropriating funds), editor of the New York National Advocate, High Sheriff of New York and in 1824 grand sachem of Tammany Hall.
A year later he announced an ambitious scheme to found ‘a City of Refuge for the Jews’ on an island in the Niagara River opposite Buffalo. To support the project he wrote to the Rothschilds and other Jewish bankers, to rabbis and chief rabbis throughout the world, and proposed to levy ‘a capitation tax of three shekels in silver, per annum, or one Spanish dollar’ on each Jew throughout the world, ‘to be collected by the treasurers of the different congregations’. In a public proclamation he announced that the new settlement, ‘a Commercial City’, would provide Jews from all over the world with ‘that peace, comfort and happiness which have been denied them through the intolerance and misgovernment of former ages’. Among these he included ‘The Karaite and Samaritan Jews, together with the black Jews of India and Africa, and likewise those in Cochin, China and the sect on the coast of Malabar’; and he added: ‘The Indians of the American continent…being in all probability the descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel, which were carried captive by the King of Assyria, means will be adopted to make them sensible of their condition and finally reunite them with their brethren, the chosen people.’ Noah wore a ‘fine silk gown’, with a gold chain round his neck, and described himself as ‘citizen of the United States, late Consul of the said State to the City and Kingdom of Tunis, High Sheriff of New York, Counsellor at Law and, by the Grace of God, Governor and Judge of Israel’. He was mocked by rival newspaper editors and the Jewish press in Europe, and nothing much came of his plan. But he went on to create the Native American Party (precursor of the Know Nothings), organize Jewish protest against the Damascus atrocities, and support the Texas revolt of 1836, and ended a judge.121
It was part of the Americanness of the Jewish settlers that they were divided on every issue. Noah, for instance, was a Northern anti-abolitionist. In the South, American Jews were Southerners. They owned slaves. Jacob Jacobs, a Charleston auctioneer, directed in his will: ‘Item, I give and devise unto my said dearly beloved Wife Katey Jacobs during her widowhood and no longer all those my Negro and other slaves named Toby, Scipio, Jack, Jenny with her three children Peter, John and Eve, and Flora with her two children Rachel and Lucy and all the other slaves that I may be possessed of, at the time of my death.’ A Southern Jew, insulted in his religion and honour, reacted in Southern fashion. In 1832, Philip Minis, of a leading Jewish family in Savannah, was abused in Luddington’s Bar Room by a member of the Georgia legislature, James J. Stark, who told him he was ‘a damned Jew’, a ‘damned Israelite’ and that ‘he ought to be pissed upon’. There were negotiations over an apology, and then over a duel, and in the end Minis shot Stark dead in the public bar of the City Hotel, when Stark drew his pistol. He was tried for manslaughter but acquitted—to the satisfaction of Southern duellists.122
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. Some 7,000 Jews served the North, 3,000 the South. When they did react communally, and that rarely happened, it was in response to specific challenges to their rights. There was a famous instance during the War, on 17 December 1862, when General Ulysses S. Grant, in the Tennessee, issued an order reading: ‘The Jews as a class, violating every regulation of trade established by the Treasury Department, and also Departmental orders, are hereby expelled from the Department.’ The hostile response was immediate and overwhelming, and not only from Jews; on Lincoln’s instructions Grant revoked the order, 6 January 1863.
American Jewry during these years took its tone from the German-Jewish enlightenment. It was liberal, optimistic, sober, rational, patriotic, unostentatious and highly respectable. Jewish immigrants tended to speak English with German accents but their children went to public schools (and Jewish schools on Sunday) and merged wholly into local socie
ty. From the 1840s onward Reform Judaism spread rapidly in America, under the impulse of such progressive rabbis as David Einhorn, Samuel Hirsch, Isaac Mayer Wise and Samuel Adler. Leading American Jews were not interested in the Messiah or Zion; the road to Redemption, as they saw it, was to spread the message of ethical monotheism throughout the world. That accorded exactly with the general tone of American religion. There was a more conservative trend, especially in Philadelphia, which became perhaps the leading centre of the Jewish religion. There, Rabbi Isaac Leeser (1806-68), from Westphalia, a man of prodigious energy, produced the first Jewish translation of the Bible into English, completed English translations of the Ashkenazi and Sephardi prayer-books, founded the first successful Jewish newspaper, The Occident (1843), and later the first Jewish Publication Society in America, and produced a mass of American Jewish textbooks for the schools.123 But during the ‘German’ phase of American Jewry, Reform Judaism became dominant.