Where the Jews Aren't

by Masha Gessen

  Dubnow and Ahad Ha-Am conducted their argument in Russian, through published essays they called letters. Dubnow considered the Jews to be a nation. (My Soviet documents specified that, regardless of my citizenship, my “nationality” was Jewish.) In fact, he wrote that the Jews were, from an evolutionary perspective, the most advanced of nations. They had no trappings of a nation—only the essence of one.

  When a people loses not only its political independence but also its land, when the storm of history uproots it and removes it far from its natural homeland and it becomes dispersed and scattered in alien lands, and in addition loses its unifying language; if, despite the fact that the external national bonds have been destroyed, such a nation still maintains itself for many years, creates an independent existence, reveals a stubborn determination to carry on its autonomous development—such a people has reached the highest stage of cultural-historical individuality and may be said to be indestructible, if only it cling forcefully to its national will. We have many examples in history of nations that have become dispersed among other nations. We find only one instance, however, of a people that has survived for thousands of years despite dispersion and loss of homeland. This unique people is the people of Israel.1

  If Jewishness was a nationality, then one did not have to be religiously Jewish to remain a Jew. Converting to another religion, however, would be going a step too far because it would tear the person from the cultural fabric of his nation. “We aim only to negate the supremacy of religion, but not to eliminate it from the storehouse of national cultural treasures,” wrote Dubnow. He called Jews a “cultural-historical” kind of nation, and he stressed that “the religion of Judaism is one of the integral foundations of national culture.” Therefore, “a non-believing Jew may be counted as an adherent of Judaism so long as he does not identify himself with any other faith that conforms to his philosophical views.”2

  Part of what made the Jews what Dubnow called the “archetype of a nation” was the very lack of any trappings of a state, with its monopoly on and tendency toward violence. It was survival in diaspora that had shaped the Jews to near perfection.

  There is absolutely no doubt that Jewish nationalism in essence has nothing in common with any tendency toward violence. As a spiritual or historical-cultural nation, deprived of any possibility of aspiring to political triumphs, of seizing territory by force or of subjecting other nations to cultural domination (language, religion and education), it is concerned with only one thing: protecting its national individuality and safeguarding its autonomous development in all states everywhere in the Diaspora. It has no aggressive national aspirations even of the kind found among other peoples that lack political independence but live on their own soil and show the tendency to wipe out the national minorities living in their midst (for example the behavior of the Poles toward the Jews in Russian Poland, and toward the Ruthenians and Jews in Austria). The Jewish nationality is an outstanding example of a collective individuality which protects itself against attacks from the outside but never stops to attack on its own and is not able to do so. A nationality of this kind manifests the highest sense of social justice, which demands that the equality of all nations be recognized as an equal right of all to defend themselves and their internal autonomous life.3

  It would follow that Dubnow disagreed with the Zionists. But his most urgent argument, early in the formulation of his view of Jewish identity, was with the assimilationists. He saw the real and immediate danger in the desire of so many European Jews to trade national difference for full citizenship. He called this tendency “national suicide.”4 Assuming that territorial and political sovereignty were off the table, Dubnow proposed that Jews fight for “social and cultural autonomy,” which would include education in a Jewish language, community self-rule, and cooperation among Jewish communities living in the territories of different countries. In some of the European cities with significant Jewish populations, all of this was reality, or close to it, in the interwar period, but what Dubnow described as national rights often came at the expense of civil rights. The autonomist agenda called for securing national rights alongside full citizenship, as an essential part of it.

  And then there were the Zionists. Early on, Dubnow had no patience for them. “Political Zionism is merely a renewed form of messianism that was transmitted from the enthusiastic minds of the religious kabbalists to the minds of the political communal leaders,” he wrote. “In it the ecstasy bound up in the great idea of rebirth blurs the lines between reality and fantasy.”5 The Zionist idea of persuading the bulk of European Jewry to move to Palestine, of securing the right for them to do so, of then establishing a Jewish state there—none of this appeared the least bit realistic to Dubnow, and he saw the fantasy as siphoning much-needed energy from the business at hand, the task of securing Jewish autonomy in the diaspora. The Zionists argued that it was the autonomist idea that was, at base, a fantasy.

  “The Jewish question exists wherever Jews live in perceptible numbers,” wrote Theodor Herzl in his Zionist manifesto, The Jewish State. “Where it does not exist, it is carried by Jews in the course of their migrations. We naturally move to those places where we are not persecuted, and there our presence produces persecution. This is the case in every country, and will remain so, even in those highly civilized—for instance, France—until the Jewish question finds a solution on a political basis. The unfortunate Jews are now carrying the seeds of Anti-Semitism into England; they have already introduced it into America.”6

  In Dubnow’s view, this Zionist argument was blind to the political and cultural shifts that had changed Europe in the nineteenth century, as well as to the opportunities they presented. Dreaming of Zion was bound to inspire the few to move to Palestine and the many simply to lose hope of seeing a future of equality, either in their current homeland or in the ancestral one. Over the decades, noticing that many more Jews were finding their way to Palestine than he had expected, he moderated his critique of political Zionism, though he still could not envision a Jewish state. More important, he stressed the simple mathematics of the problem: even if hundreds of thousands moved to Palestine, even if a million did, the majority of the world’s Jews would still be living in dispersion. Before the Second World War, more than nine million Jews were living in Europe, most of them in lands that were or had been part of the Russian Empire.

  In Odessa, Dubnow chaired the Committee on Nationalization, a discussion club that included writers of his acquaintance and other thinkers, like Meir Dizengoff, who would later become mayor of Tel Aviv. On April 7, 1903, the committee hosted a large audience that gathered to listen to the young writer Vladimir Jabotinsky, who had recently pronounced himself to be a Zionist. On that day, Jewish refugees began streaming into Odessa from Kishinev, a city just over a hundred miles to the north, in Bessarabia. Jabotinsky had grown up there.7

  The pogrom in Kishinev had begun a day earlier, on the last day of Passover. It raged for forty-eight hours. At the end, forty-nine Jews were dead and some five hundred had been injured or raped. This was not just the first pogrom of the new century; it was the first pogrom that had been openly, and pointedly, incited by the regime.

  Dubnow did what writers do. He called the essay “A Historic Moment (The Question of Emigration).” It was the ninth of his “letters” on Jewish identity. He noted, “The last twenty years bequeathed to us two forms of national self-help: (1) energetic work in the lands of the Diaspora; (2) mass exodus from the place of danger.” The story of Jewish emigration from Russia had begun with the pogroms and expulsions of the early 1880s and, wrote Dubnow,

  a mighty historic revolution has been taking place before our eyes: the transfer of the chief center of our people. Just as four hundred years ago the center of the Jewish people was transferred from western to eastern Europe and Jewish national hegemony passed from Spain to Poland, and then to Russia, so part of our great center is now being transferred by an uninterrupted exodus from Russia to other countries
. Where is the main stream of migrants going? Not to our ancient homeland, Palestine, where, in spite of all our efforts, we succeeded in bringing only 20,000 persons during the last two decades (if the urban population is added to the agricultural); not to Argentina, where only several hundred families were settled on the land at the cost of millions of dollars, but to North America, especially to the United States. Close to a million Jews left Russia during the last twenty years and nine-tenths of this number went to North America.8

  Dubnow called the wave of emigration he had been witnessing “second in importance only to the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492.” By his estimate, between twenty-five and thirty-five thousand Jews a year had been leaving, mostly for North America. He expected the Kishinev pogrom to prompt another hundred thousand to leave. Editing the essay for publication in Hebrew years later, he noted that he had underestimated by about half.

  As for the first option for national action—“energetic work in the lands of the Diaspora”—it was Jabotinsky who founded a Jewish self-defense movement in Odessa then. He also threw himself earnestly into the study of Hebrew and changed his name to Ze’ev. Dubnow joined the self-defense effort and a larger campaign to educate the public. It drained him of the time and energy required for writing and ultimately drove him to leave Odessa, though not to emigrate from the Russian Empire.

  In 1905 Dubnow moved to St. Petersburg, where the first Russian revolution was about to usher a parliament into existence. The second and third revolutions came a dozen years later, shattering the world Dubnow inhabited. The events of 1917 devastated him—unlike many Jewish intellectuals, he seemed to have no illusion that a Bolshevik Russia would be good for him, or for the Jews. He left for Berlin in 1922. His eldest child, a daughter, was living in newly independent Poland with her family; a son and a daughter and their families stayed behind in Moscow.

  What I find remarkable about Dubnow’s perception of Berlin is how quickly the worry set in. Emigration necessarily involves a charmed honeymoon, which serves as a payoff, however illusory, for the deprivations and the sheer misery of waiting to leave one place for another. In Dubnow’s case, there were months and years of not knowing whether he would be able to leave Bolshevik Russia, then protracted and stressful negotiations regarding his library, and then, finally, complicated, difficult, fragmented travel to Berlin itself. Yet within a year of arriving, he wrote in a letter, “We are suffering now together with Germany, and Germany itself may make us suffer still.”9

  Still, Berlin was the new center of Jewish intellectual and literary life. Writers and thinkers from the Russian Empire had fled there, and young and old now frequented the same cafés and competed for the same commissions from American Jewish publications—getting paid in dollars was the best way to survive Germany’s galloping inflation. Dubnow managed, and in 1930 he and his wife were even able to buy an apartment. For the first time since emigrating, the writer had his desk as he wanted it and his books around him. But on the eve of Yom Kippur in 1931, the secular thinker wrote to a friend, “I have returned to my work, but my mood befits the Day of Judgment: I sense that a black cloud is hovering over the world.”10 His instincts were still in good working order.

  An exodus from Berlin began, tentatively at first, and then, following the March 1933 election in which Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party triumphed, everyone Dubnow knew seemed to be leaving. (Altogether, about 130,000—roughly one in five German Jews—emigrated in the 1930s, some 50,000 of them to Palestine.)11 For a person who has emigrated once, the option of changing countries is always on the table—and the suitcase, packed, is always standing by the door. Some people returned to Soviet Russia; some sought refuge nearby, too close: in Austria and Czechoslovakia. Some schemed, successfully, to secure a visa to move to Palestine. A significant number were relocating to Paris, which seemed, for the moment, to be housing Eastern European Jewry’s endlessly movable intellectual center.

  Dubnow knew that he had to leave, but he struggled to choose his destination. Paris seemed to him too noisy and crowded. He considered Zurich but ultimately settled on Latvia, the tiny Baltic state that had only recently become an independent country. “Many things speak in favor of Riga,” he wrote to a friend. “The environment will feel more familiar. We will be closer to our children, both those who live in Warsaw and those who are in the Soviet Union. We are leading a sorrowful life here, quiet on the surface but full of internal anxieties. The period of transition is difficult, the émigré’s state of mind a burden. My friends in Palestine are surprised at my decision not to move there: they cannot understand that at our age the change of climate, language, and the entire way of life would take our remaining energies, which we need for other things.”12

  Dubnow had picked Latvia in part because the government’s policies promoted what he had long advocated: Jewish self-governance. The tiny country had a network of Yiddish-language schools, several Jewish newspapers, and even a permanent Jewish theater. But by 1934 its politicians began emulating neighboring Germany—or, more likely, seeing in German politics the inspiration and an excuse to promote ideas that had been bubbling under the surface. In 1934 the prime minister disbanded the parliament, establishing authoritarian rule. Overnight all civic organizations, including Jewish ones, ceased to exist. The slogan “Latvia for the Latvians” rapidly gained currency; it referred to ethnic Latvians and excluded Jews. Still, there were no explicitly anti-Semitic laws, and Latvia even accepted several thousand Jewish refugees from Germany.

  Dubnow began to consider moving to Poland, even though by this time that country also had an authoritarian government, one that had instituted some blatantly anti-Semitic policies. He was playing a key role in YIVO, the Institute for Jewish Research, formed in Wilna (the Polish name for Vilnius) in 1925. In addition, his older daughter, Sofia, was living in Warsaw with her husband, Henryk Erlich, one of the leaders of the Bund, a party that promoted the Jewish labor movement. But then, one day in the summer of 1935, Dubnow and his daughter and her family boarded a small riverboat in Poland. Their boat, as it turned out, was already carrying a large group of Polish college students from the city of Poznan, near the border with Germany, who had been visiting some Catholic monasteries in the east of the country. The students grew livid at being joined on board by Jews. They declared their intention to throw Erlich overboard (apparently, they were willing to spare the lives, if not the dignity, of Dubnow, who was by now an old man, and his daughter and her small children). The captain docked the boat at the first opportunity and begged the Jews to leave. Dubnow retired the idea of emigrating to Poland.13

  “My life can now be measured in the quarter-centuries,” Dubnow wrote in 1935. “It is a great gift to a historian, to have lived in three generations, three dimensions, as it were, for this allows him to better understand the mystery of the change of epochs. But it can be a great sorrow, too, if the transition leads to the worse, for then the fear arises that one’s life might end during a dark period. We are living through a frightening time, and only my double faith in my lives as a Jew and as a chronicler gives me the strength to withstand it all.”14 Here was a life goal articulated: to die in a better time and place than the ones into which you were born.

  That goal seemed more and more elusive. “It has become just so hard to breathe in Europe today,” Dubnow wrote in a letter to a friend living in Paris in January 1938. “It is too hard to fight the degradation of entire nations.”15

  At the end of that year, following Kristallnacht—the Night of Broken Glass—and the concomitant deportation of thousands of Jews from the Third Reich to Poland, Dubnow wrote, “For the first time in all of the centuries of modern history have we witnessed a pogrom carried out by a government, but this also, for the first time, drew protest from all over the world.”16

  Would protest and sympathy translate into actual help? Dubnow wrote passionately about the need to organize the mass emigration—evacuation, really—of Jews from Europe, but at the end of a letter detai
ling this need, he took himself out of the picture: “I am not at all concerned about the need to save myself from the storm. I am not contaminated by the panic raging around me—and anyway, where would I run? I must hope that the small Baltic states will remain neutral.”17 He decided that he was safe in Latvia.

  It had been more than thirty years—moved by the Kishinev pogrom of 1903—since Dubnow had begun focusing on the need for Jews to have the option of leaving any land where they were in danger. Addressing critics of fleeing as a solution, he wrote, “If you deprive the Jew of the hope of changing his place, the hope that he will be able to escape from danger, if things are bad, to a country where thousands of his brethren have found refuge, you will crush his soul into the dust. Then he will really despair because he will feel hemmed in on all sides and deserted by the whole world without refuge from oppression and persecution. What you say is quite true, the Jews stand with one foot in Russia and with the other in America; but if they were to stand with both feet on the Russian volcano, they would not have a firm foothold for fear of the possible terrors of the near future….If those who pin all their hopes on the liberation movement now bury the emigration movement, they will be forced to exhume it later.”18

  Dubnow envisioned a multipolar Jewish world, with centers in the United States, perhaps Argentina and South Africa, certainly Poland and Palestine. He despaired when he considered Russia after the Bolshevik revolution, though more than a million Jews still lived there. He grieved the destruction of the Jewish civilization in Poland at the start of the Second World War, but he did not live to see the world in which the restoration of that center was inconceivable. When he died, he could still imagine a worldwide web of Jewish communities that had secured the autonomy sufficient to maintain Jewish languages and cultures and the communication necessary to help one another and to provide escape routes if a community was endangered. Unlike the Zionist fantasy, this vision was rooted in reason. Unlike the catastrophe to come, it could be imagined.