A History of the Jews in the Modern World by Howard M. Sachar

Author:Howard M. Sachar
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-01-02T16:00:00+00:00

IV

Incarceration: The Jews of Tsarist Russia

RUSSIA’S POLISH INHERITANCE

Catherine II was thirty-three years old in 1762 when she ascended the throne of imperial Russia. A princess of the minor German principality of Anhalt-Zerbat, she had been dispatched to Russia at the age of fifteen to marry another minor German dynast, Peter of Holstein-Gottorp, who as a nephew of the Tsaritsa Elizabeth had been “co-opted” as the future tsar by the Russian Empire’s still dominant nobility. Although Peter turned out to be a coarse and inattentive husband, the ingenue German princess accomplished more than survival at court. Earlier, Catherine had adopted the Russian Orthodox religion. Subsequently, to obtain a firm understanding of her new country, she mastered the Russian language and immersed herself in Russian literature. In 1762, moreover, when the Empress Elizabeth died and Peter was anointed the royal successor, it was Catherine who plotted with a group of intriguing magnates to depose him (although it is uncertain that she had anticipated his murder). Soon afterward, she herself ascended the throne as “Empress and Supreme Ruler of all the Russias.”

In the ensuing years, Catherine fortified her position by her shrewd distribution of honors and rewards to key aides. Time also worked in her favor. She reigned over so long a period, until her death in 1796, that her rule achieved the legitimacy of longevity as well as of outstanding competence. It was Catherine, far more than her early-eighteenth-century predecessor, the tyrannical genius Peter I (“the Great”), who brought Western ideas into Russia, who licensed numerous publishing houses, established dozens of schools in provincial and district towns, fostered education for girls, and introduced the first teacher-training program in Russia. A self-proclaimed disciple of the French philosophes, the empress particularly admired the writings of the Baron de Montesquieu and acknowledged Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws as the inspiration for her announced program of sweeping judicial reforms—an agenda that she never quite managed to enact.

But if Catherine the Great was enlightened, she was also a despot. The French Revolution, occurring late in her reign, strengthened the empress’s inclination toward political conservatism, and her decision to repudiate much of the cultural climate she herself had labored to foster. Intent on fortifying her autocracy, Catherine achieved that goal by lavishing grants of crown lands on the Russian gentry and thus drawing them into a self-interested alliance with the throne—a process that also vastly strengthened the institution of serfdom throughout the country, and with it the tribulations of millions of Russian peasants. Catherine’s equally ruthless imperialism drew her into a series of victorious but costly wars against the Turks, as well as the spoliation of the foundering Polish Commonwealth, in 1772, 1793, and 1795. It was the latter achievement that presented the empress with her most daunting challenge. Poland, more than any of her other acquisitions, encompassed a bewildering heterogeneity of fractious ethnic and religious communities. Besides Poles, these new elements included Ukrainians, Belorussians, Germans, Lithuanians, Estonians, Courlanders, Finns—and Jews.

In fact, long before its successive partitions of Poland, the Tsarist Empire encompassed small pockets of “indigenous” Jews.

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