Who Knew?
Page 10
When Napoleon invaded Germany, William was forced to flee, leaving Rothschild in charge as his financial agent. It so happened that William possessed a large amount of bullion, which the French soldiers searched for diligently. Their efforts were in vain, because Rothschild had hidden it in secret catacombs built by the Jews as a hiding place during the murderous pogroms that periodically devastated the Jewish community. Despite threats and bullying by the soldiers, Rothschild was not intimidated into revealing the hiding place of the fortune in bullion.
Through shrewd investing, Rothschild was able to quadruple William’s capital while earning healthy commissions in the process. By the time William returned from exile, Meyer had enough capital from the commissions to go into business for himself, and the Rothschilds’ empire was born.3
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1. A German count having jurisdiction over a large territory of land.
2. One of the German princes entitled to vote for the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire.
3. Howard M. Sachar, The Course of Modern Jewish History (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 130.
...if you talk during services, you will pay a fine
In 1756, Frederick II of Prussia (also known as Frederick the Great) issued the Règlement, a constitution governing Prussian Jewry. Two barons in the Franconian village of Sugenheim immediately followed suit with their own constitution regulating Jewish life in their village. While Frederick’s constitution covered thousands of Jews, the Sugenheim document covered only twelve households.
The Sugenheim document levied fines for various infractions of the constitution. Minor fines were paid in wax to be used for candles for the synagogue or in cash. Major fines were paid in cash, and the proceeds were divided evenly between the local Jewish community and the village. Some of the constitutional provisions are as follows:
Article I. There will be a fine levied for anybody failing to come to the synagogue on Mondays and Thursdays (when the Torah is read).
Article II. There will be a fine levied for anybody failing to come to the synagogue for prayers on the day before the celebration of the New Moon.
Article III. The cantor will call the people to services and will be subject to fine if he fails to do so.
Article IV. There will be a fine levied for idle talk in the synagogue.
Article VI. Fines are levied for wrangling in the synagogue.
Article VII. Fines are levied for quarreling, fighting, and striking one another in the synagogue.
Article XIV. A fine will be levied for wrangling about bookstands.
Article XV. A fine will be levied against anybody who moves a bookstand so as to interfere with the worshiper taking his three steps backward.
Article XXIII. limits excessive celebrating on the festive holidays of Purim and Simchat Torah. Fines will be levied against revelers who overstep the bounds of decorum.1
It seems strange that two Christians would write such a treatise on synagogue behavior. It probably was the last resort for Jewish factions who couldn’t police themselves.
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1. Jacob R. Marcus, The Jew in the Medieval World: A Source Book, 315–1791 (New York: Atheneum, 1938), 212–19.
...Goethe had to hire a Christian to teach him Yiddish
Before his twelfth birthday, the encyclopedically learned Johann Wolfgang Goethe of Germany took up the study of Judeo-German, more commonly referred to as Yiddish, a language spoken almost exclusively by European Jews. The Yiddish lexicon at that time consisted of about 70 percent German, 20 percent Hebrew, and 10 percent “Slavic and other elements.”1 Goethe’s interest in Jews and Jewish topics was not limited to the study of Yiddish. His exercises in translating material into Latin included stories about David and Goliath, Joseph in Egypt, and Moses freeing the Jews from slavery. He was a sometime visitor in the ghetto, frequently went to services in the synagogue, and attended a circumcision and a Jewish wedding. He also became familiar with the Feast of Tabernacles (Sukkot), an eight-day Jewish holiday commemorating the wandering of the Israelites in the desert.
In order to practice the array of languages Goethe had acquired, he wrote a play in the form of letters sent among family members. One family member wrote in German, another in a German vernacular, another in Latin, one in English, one in French, one in Italian, and the youngest member of the family contributed his part in Yiddish. Unfortunately, this work of Goethe’s has not survived.
However, one of Goethe’s Yiddish productions has outlived the author. It is Die Judenpredigt (the Jewish sermon). It deals with a Jewish Messiah legend in which the Jews are saved, but the Christians come to an unfortunate end.2
It is ironic that Goethe’s instructors in Yiddish and later on in Hebrew were Christians, since Jews were by law not permitted to serve as tutors of non-Jews.
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1. Mark Waldman, Goethe and the Jews: A Challenge to Hitlerism (New York: Putnam, 1934), 36.
2. Ibid., 58–60.
...Felix Mendelssohn was Jewish until he sang a Christian song
Felix Mendelssohn, the grandson of the famous Jewish intellectual Moses Mendelssohn, was an accomplished pianist by the age of nine. At the age of ten, he was enrolled in the Berlin Singakademie, where he was exposed to the finest of choral music. At the age of twelve, he had already composed several symphonies, fugues for string quartets, operas, and other works.
One day, while the chorus was singing Bach’s Passion According to St. Matthew, another boy in the group taunted young Felix, saying, “The Jew boy raises his voice to Christ!”1 Felix went home in tears. His father, feeling that being Jewish would hamper Felix’s prospects for succeeding in the world of music, took his son and his sister Fanny to be baptized in the Protestant religion. The parents, Abraham and Leah Mendelssohn, soon followed their children into Christianity.
Abraham Mendelssohn added the name Bartholdy to their last name, saying that “a Christian Mendelssohn is an impossibility.”2 His father wanted Felix to perform under the name of Felix Bartholdy, but Felix refused and achieved fame as Felix Mendelssohn. His sister Rebecca often signed her letters Rebecca Mendelssohn Meden Bartholdy.3 The Greek translation of meden is “never.”4
Fanny Caecille (Zipporah) Mendelssohn was a musician in her own right, and Felix relied on her advice and taste in music. He incorporated six of her songs with his, but he did not identify her as the composer. So similar in style were her works that they were indistinguishable from those of her famous brother. Under her own name, Fanny published four books of piano pieces, two books of solo songs, and one book of part-songs. She died suddenly at age forty-two. More of her work was published posthumously.5
The combination of Fanny’s untimely death and Felix’s busy schedule of composing, directing, and playing wore him out, and he died at the age of thirty-eight.
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1. Milton Cross and David Ewen, eds., Milton Cross’ Encyclopedia of the Great Composers and Their Music, vol. 1 (New York: Doubleday, 1953), 473.
2. Dika Newlin, “Felix Mendelssohn,” Encyclopedia Judaica, CD-ROM Edition (Jerusalem: Keter, 1997).
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
...if you are a prostitute, you can stay
For many years, the objective of the czarist Russian government was to exclude Jews from their empire. In 1823, there were no fewer than 1,230 clauses in the Code of Disabilities heaped upon Jews.1 The last survey of Russian regulations concerning the Jews was Gimpelson’s Statutes Concerning the Jews, which ran for an astounding thousand pages.2 A giant step forward in this direction was the establishment of the Pale of Settlement, an area to which all Jews were supposed to be confined.
However, there were exceptions to the rule of confinement of Jews to the Pale. People belonging to certain professions were permitted to travel or live outside the Pale. Among these were discharged soldiers, some mechanics, distillers, brewers, and artisans. Jews privileged to reside outside
the Pale were permitted to have two assistants or servants.
The police would run periodic checks to see if these aides were indeed employed in the work designated on their permits.3
A rather bizarre case involved a young Jewish woman wishing to continue her university training. Unable to gain entry to St. Petersburg or Moscow as a student, she gained her “yellow ticket” by registering as a prostitute. When the police discovered that she was studying instead of practicing prostitution, she was summarily expelled from the city.4
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1. Simon M. Dubnow, History of the Jews in Russia and Poland, vol. 2 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1918), 34.
2. Paul Johnson, A History of the Jews (New York: Harper and Row, 1987), 359.
3. Ibid., 360.
4. Dubnow, History of the Jews, 345.
...Jewish soldiers might have to serve for thirty-one years
The Russian government had long seen Jews as an unassimilated body within their midst. This they felt needed correction.1 The answer lay in a scheme to neutralize the Jews by taking them into the army for a period of twenty-five years. Their purpose was to render them as “un-Jewish” as possible. In 1827 an order was sent out to begin drafting Jewish boys.
In order to ensure that the conscripts would be rendered as assimilated as possible, the army would take children as young as twelve years of age. Since they could not be considered useful soldiers until the age of eighteen, the draftees would undergo a period of indoctrination prior to their actual military service. Only upon reaching the age of eighteen would a conscript’s term of service begin. This system ensured that a Jewish cantonist would be obliged to serve from a minimum of twenty-five years to a maximum of thirty-one years, if he was enrolled at the age of twelve.2
Once the boys were in the military setting, the process of removing their Jewishness began in earnest. They were subjected to lectures designed to convert them to Christianity. Those who resisted baptism were beaten, and food was often withheld from them. Refusal to eat non-kosher foods also resulted in severe punishments. The mortality rate for the conscripts was alarmingly high. The younger the recruit, the more likely he was to be dead within a very short time.3
Responsibility for supplying recruits was forced upon the Kahal, the Jewish organization responsible for governing the Jewish community and collecting and remitting taxes due to the government and providing Jewish recruits for the army.
Many of the young men eligible for the draft fled. Others resorted to chopping off the index finger (trigger finger) of the right hand.4 However, since the Kahals were responsible for supplying the required number of recruits, they had to be meticulous about hunting down Jews for service in the Russian army.5 The “hunters,” as they were called, resorted to violating the law by kidnapping boys under the age of twelve. Sometimes they took boys as young as eight by falsifying their ages. They often snatched their recruits by nighttime home invasions.
In this way, as in many other eras before and since, the Jewish community was forced to terrorize its own members.
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1. Simon M. Dubnow, History of the Jews in Russia and Poland, vol. 2 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1918), 14.
2. Ibid., 19.
3. Ibid., 26–27.
4. Stephen Birmingham, The Rest of Us: The Rise of America’s Eastern European Jews (Boston: Little, Brown, 1984), 36.
5. Dubnow, History of the Jews, 23.
...the House of Rothschild made a bad investment
In 1851 Pope Pius IX reimposed restrictions on Jews living in the Papal States. He also brought pressure against other rulers to revoke Jewish rights granted in 1848. In several cases he was successful in getting revocation of rights granted to Jews.1
In 1858, a Jewish child named Edgar Mortara was forcibly removed from his parents’ home. The Christian babysitter claimed that she had had the child secretly baptized when he was seriously ill. Under the laws, a baptized child could not be raised in a Jewish home. The case went to Pope Pius IX, who ruled against the Jewish family, and the child was taken to be raised as a Catholic.2
In 1867 this same pope supported a charge of ritual murder against the Jews, and lent support to the charge that Jewish law required the murder of Christian children. The pope even declared a holiday commemorating a Christian child who allegedly was the victim of a ritual murder by the Jews.3
All of these actions against the Jews were taken after the House of Rothschild made a fifty-million-franc loan to the pope on condition that the ghetto walls would come down. Pope Pius IX took the money, but the ghetto remained.4
1. David I. Kertzer, The Popes against the Jews: The Vatican’s Role in the Rise of Modern Anti-Semitism (New York: Knopf, 2001), 114–15.
2. Ibid., 119.
3. Ibid., 127–28.
4. Ibid., 115.
...converts from Judaism still made contributions to their people
When rabbis predicted dire consequences from the Haskalah (enlightenment), they were often very accurate. Many Jews converted to Christianity, but a large number of the converts continued to write in Hebrew on Jewish topics and to participate in Jewish activities.
One such person was Daniel Chwolson (1819–1911). Son of Orthodox parents, he received a traditional Jewish education in a yeshiva, a school of rabbinical studies. In 1841 he left for Germany to pursue studies in Oriental languages. By 1855, he was back in St. Petersburg, accepted an appointment to the university as professor of Hebrew and Semitic languages, and converted to Russian Orthodox Christianity.
His writings made important contributions to Hebrew paleography, the study and interpretation of ancient writings. He also tried to maintain his membership in the Society for the Promotion of Culture among the Jews, but his apostasy led to his being expelled from the group. However, he still maintained contact with Jewish scholars and leaders and was sensitive to the dangers surrounding his people.
When the Russian government threatened closure of yeshivas, Chwolson was quick to intervene on their behalf. He also intervened when the Russian government sought to prevent the publication of new printings of the Talmud.
Perhaps the most noteworthy of Chwolson’s contributions to the Jewish people was his successful defense against the Russian government’s attempts to outlaw Jewish ritual slaughter.1
It is interesting to note that Chwolson’s scholarly pursuits were a direct outgrowth of his earlier Jewish education.
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1. Masha Greenbaum, The Jews of Lithuania: A History of a Remarkable Community, 1316–1945 (Jerusalem: Gefen Publishing House, 1995), 122–23.
...Freud was a staunch Jew but had strange ideas about Judaism
Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, was born to a Hasidic Jewish family in Moravia. He studied medicine but soon gravitated toward treating problems of the mind. Freud theorized that religion was a form of collective delusion.1 For example, he said that Moses was an Egyptian who taught an Egyptian monotheism to the children of Israel. He further postulated that the Israelites rebelled against Moses and had killed him, thereby creating self-perpetuating unconscious guilt feelings felt by Jews.2
When we look at Freud’s writings, we might see him as estranged from Jews and Judaism. This was not the case. None of his children converted or married outside the faith. One of his sons became a Zionist. Freud himself went out of his way to declare that he was neither a German nor an Austrian, but a Jew.
When he was savagely criticized, he turned to his B’nai B’rith lodge brothers for solace. Freud would never accept royalties when his writings were translated into Hebrew or Yiddish.3 Moreover, Freud ascribed great powers to the Jewish spirit. At one point he counseled his friend Max Graf, “If you do not let your son grow up to be a Jew, you will deprive him of those sources of energy which cannot be replaced by anything else.”4
Freud further wrote regarding the Jews, “We preserved our unity through ideas, and because of them,
we have survived to this day.” He also believed that the founding of the religious school at Yavneh after the destruction of the Jewish state by the Romans was “for me one of the most significant manifestations in our history.”5
One might wonder how Freud would have analyzed a person who cultivated his Jewish identity and lauded Jewish values while proclaiming that “religion is a form of collective delusion.”
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1. Paul Johnson, A History of the Jews (New York: Harper Row, 1987), 413.
2. Louis Miller, “Sigmund Freud,” Encyclopedia Judaica, CD-ROM Edition (Jerusalem: Keter, 1997).
3. Johnson, A History of the Jews, 414.
4. Quoted in Moshe Gresser, Dual Allegiance: Freud as a Modern Jew (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994), 110.
5. Johnson, A History of the Jews, 414.
...the Madonna hung out with Lithuanian Jews
Lev Samuilovich Rosenberg, later Léon Bakst, was born in Russia in 1864. After graduating from the high school, he was a non-credit student at the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts and supported himself as a book illustrator.1
Bakst created quite a controversy when he chose as his subject in a contest The Madonna Weeping over Christ. In an effort to emphasize the Jewishness of Christ, he painted the Madonna surrounded by a group of Lithuanian Jews. The enraged judges defaced the painting and Bakst was expelled from the academy.2
However, Bakst was not finished with the world of art. He associated himself with the Russian Ballet, commonly known as the Ballets Russes. Between 1909 and 1914, Bakst was the designer of sets and costumes for eleven ballets and outfitted such greats as Pavlova and Nijinsky.3