Europe: A History (172 page)

The Haskalah, which first appeared in Berlin, was associated with the name of Moses Mendelsohn (1729–86) the prototype of Lessing’s ‘Nathan der Weise’. A natural outgrowth of the Enlightenment which had been at work in the Christian world for some time, it sought to modify the exclusively religious content of Jewish education, and to give Jews access to the mainstream of European culture. Its disciples, known as
maskilim
or ‘men of understanding’, found some adherents in the
shtetlakh
further east, especially in Galicia, where German-language Jewish secular schools began to open. A ban on the
maskilim
pronounced in 1816 by the Rabbi of Lemberg revealed the anxiety of Orthodox Jewish leaders.

In due course the limited educational ideals of the early Haskalah were extended. Some Jewish leaders began to advocate full-scale assimilation, whereby Jews were urged to participate in all branches of public life. This trend sought to confine Jewish practices to the private circles of family and synagogue, and to turn out Jews who were otherwise indistinguishable from their co-citizens. In so doing it broke many of the traditional taboos, and necessitated the foundation of Reformed Judaism, a new denomination which appeared in Germany in 1825. Reformed Judaism sought to reconcile the principles of Jewish religion with the demands of life in a modern society; its adherents were not required to observe the same degree of rules and restrictions. It became the norm for the majority of migrant Jews in Western Europe and the USA, but did not affect the great mass of traditional Jewish communities in Central and Eastern Europe.

In Western Europe, and in some of the larger centres of the East, the combination of legal relaxations and of growing Jewish assimilationism created unprecedented opportunities. Jewish names appeared ever more frequentiy on the lists of financiers, lawyers, doctors, writers, scholars, artists, and politicians of the age. It was an era, in the words of one of its beneficiaries, Sigmund Freud, when ‘every industrious Jewish schoolboy carried a Cabinet Minister’s portfolio in his satchel’. Important landmarks were reached in Britain, for example, when in 1841 the City of London elected Baron Lionel de Rothschild as its (disqualified) Member of Parliament, and in 1868, when Disraeli emerged as Europe’s first Jewish Prime Minister.

To be exact, Benjamin Disraeli (1804–81), Earl of Beaconsfield, grandson of a Sephardi immigrant from Venice, would have counted himself in the category of ex-Jews. Having been baptized with his entire family into the Anglican communion, he had broken for ever with Judaism, which, his father said, ‘cuts off the Jews from the great family of mankind’. ‘Yes,’ he told his friends, ‘I have climbed to the top of the greasy pole.’

Yet, as Disraeli’s career well illustrates, the success of assimilation posed a threat to the very existence of a Jewish community. If all Jews had followed his example, all would soon have become ex-Jews. As a result, as migration and assimilation accelerated, a serious reaction set in. The onset of Jewish nationalism (Zionism), first in cultural and later in political form, was part of the Europe-wide nationalist trend; but it was boosted by anxieties born of specifically Jewish experiences. Cultural Zionism appeared in the work of the so-called Hebrew Revival, which succeeded in transforming Hebrew from a ‘dead’, liturgical language into a vehicle for modern literary and political usage. Its pioneers included the Galician satirist Jozef Perl (1774–1839), the philologist I. B. Levinsohn (1788–1860) of Krzemieniec, the historian Nachman Krochmal (1785–1840) of Tarnopol, and the poet Jehudeh Loeb Gordon (1830–92) of Wilno, author of
Hakitzah Ammi
(Awake, my people). It was important in founding the brand of secular Jewish culture which was to be adopted a century later in Israel; but it enjoyed only marginal influence in Europe.

The opposing Yiddish Revival occurred at a slightly later date. In 1897, 90 per cent of Jews in the Pale and in Galicia still spoke Yiddish as their mother tongue. The Hasidim used it widely in written form, but only for religious purposes. At the turn of the century, Yiddish written in Hebrew characters was promoted by leaders opposed both to Zionism and to assimilationist education in Polish, Russian, or German. For 40 or 50 years it gave life to a thriving press, a lively collection of
belles-lettres
, and a secular school system supported in particular by
the Bund. Its best known practitioners were I. L. Peretz (1852–1915) of Zamoác” and Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904–92), both of whom began their careers as Polish writers.

Political Zionism differed from other manifestations of European nationalism mainly in the fact that its sacred national soil lay outside Europe. Otherwise, it possessed all the characteristics of the other national movements of the day—a dedicated, visionary élite; a complex ideology based on nationalist interpretations of history and culture; a wide spectrum of political opinions; a mass clientele that still needed to be convinced; a full panoply of enemies; and, at the outset, no obvious chance of practical success. It began in the 1860s with the first attempts to send Jewish colonists to Palestine. One of the colonist associations,
Hoveve Zion
(Friends of Zion), obtained financial support in 1882 from Baron Edmund de Rothschild. Their first federal conference was held at Kattowitz (Katowice) in Silesia two years later; and a united World Zionist Organization (WZO) was created at the congress at Basle in Switzerland in 1897. The movement’s founding fathers consisted largely of independent-minded Polish rabbis such as Zvi Hirsch Kalischer (1795–1874) of Thorn or Samuel Mohilever (1824–98) of Biafystok. But leadership of the WZO fell to lay activists, headed by the Budapest-born journalist Theodore Herzl (1860–1904) and later by figures such as David Wolfson (1856–1914), a Cologne banker, and Chaim Weizmann (1874–1952), an academic chemist working in Manchester. Zionist ideology can be traced to Krochmal’s
A Guide to the Perplexed
(1851), but received its most persuasive texts in the tract
Autoemancipation
(1882) written by Dr Leo Pinsker, a physician from Odessa, and in Herzl’s
Der Judenstaat
(1896).

From the start, deep divisions separated the religious wing of Zionism, the
Mizrachi
or ‘spiritual centre’, from the dominant secular nationalists. Bitter differences also separated the socialist wing, based on the
Poalei Zion
(Workers of Zion) party of David Gruen, alias Ben-Gurion (1886–1973), who was born at Plock on the Vistula, from the integral Jewish nationalists, who duly emerged in the Zionist Revisionist grouping of Vladimir Jabotinsky (1880–1940). The one thing which they shared was the conviction that life for Jews in Europe was becoming less and less tolerable. For the time being the future of Zionism turned on three great imponderables—the fluctuating levels of antisemitism, the radicalization of the Jewish masses in Eastern Europe, and negotiations for a suitable tract of land. No Zionist could yet feel confident of an early solution. Negotiations for the acquisition of a Zionist homeland produced few results. Herzl’s audiences with the Ottoman Sultan in 1901–2 did not bear fruit; and in 1903 the British offer of a land grant in the Kenyan highlands of East Africa split the WZO from top to bottom. This last experience strengthened the conviction that the Zionist dream could not be divorced from the historic ‘land of Israel’ in Palestine. No progress could be made on that front until the British conquest of Jerusalem in 1916, and the Balfour Declaration which followed.

Antisemitism in the sense of ‘Jew-hatred’ had been endemic throughout European history. Its causes have been classified as religious, economic, social,
and cultural. But it is essentially a vicious psychological syndrome, where the stereotyping of Jews precedes accusations of conspiracy and treachery. It turned the Jewish community into the archetypal scapegoat for all sorts of ills. Its embers were always alight, bursting into flame and dying down in patterns that are not easily explained. In the late nineteenth century, however, it was fanned by the migrations which brought many Europeans into contact with Jews for the first time, by adverse social conditions, especially in the burgeoning cities, and by the rising tide of nationalism, which made many people less tolerant of ethnic and cultural diversity. It came to the surface in the Russian pogroms, in the Dreyfus Affair in France, and in the sinister invention of the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’.
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On the other hand, liberal opinion held that patience and education would eliminate the prevailing frictions. Well-integrated Jewish communities, such as that represented by the Anglo-Jewish Association in London, decried what they saw as the Zionists’ desire to exaggerate antisemitism for political ends. In 1911 the view was expressed by the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
, for instance, that ‘With the passing away of anti-Semitism, Jewish nationalism will disappear’.
⁵³
It could not have been more mistaken. For both antisemitism and Jewish nationalism were due to increase. To a degree, they fed off each other. What could not have been easily predicted was that antisemitism, which was widespread in those countries, such as Russia, Poland, and Ukraine, where Jews were most numerous, would assume its most virulent form in Germany and Austria, where Jews were relatively few.

Radical Jewish politics thrived particularly among the Jewish masses of the East. Zionism was only one of the competing trends. Revolutionary communism, which condemned all forms of nationalism, including Zionism, gained a large number of Jewish, or rather ex-Jewish, recruits. They formed an important segment of the phenomenon which one of their number defined as ‘the non-Jewish Jew’.
⁵⁴
The socialist Jewish Workers’ League or
Bund
, which aimed to improve conditions for Jews within the societies where they actually lived, opposed both Zionists and communists.

There remains the fascinating puzzle of why Europe’s Jews should have made such a formidable contribution to all aspects of European culture and achievement. This development of the period aroused both envy and admiration, and has generated a wide variety of speculation. Jewish prowess undoubtedly touched the raw nerves of the last-ditch defenders of Europe’s Christian civilization, and of those inadequates who felt threatened by the success of ‘rootless cosmopolitans’ and ‘aliens’. In retrospect, however, it can reasonably be connected to the psychological drives mobilized in families struggling to overcome both the rejection of the closed Jewish communities which they had left and the suspicions of the predominantly Christian society where they strove to gain acceptance. It was clearly related, too, to the Jewish passion for education, which was rooted in the study of the Torah, but which could be easily redirected to the early acquisition of foreign languages, of legal qualifications, or of scientific expertise. It must also be
related to the expanding frontiers of knowledge and communications, where people with international contacts stood at an advantage over their homegrown confrères. For talented individuals, the right measure of insecurity could prove positively beneficial.
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Most Jews, of course, did not either shine or thrive. Statistically, the greater part of European Jewry in the early twentieth century remained exactly what it was 100 years before—a scattered mass of poor, ultra-religious, rural communities huddled in the unchanging backwaters of the former Polish provinces. In many ways their outlook had less in common with their children who had migrated to the West than with the poor, ultra-religious, rural peasants among whom they had always lived. These downtrodden
Ostjuden
were the butt of much prejudice, not only from the locals but also from their fellow-Jews who had made the grade in Germany and Austria, and who had left the old Jewish world completely behind.
⁵⁵