The Israeli Century by Yossi Shain

Author:Yossi Shain [Shain, Yossi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781642938463
Publisher: Post Hill Press
Published: 2021-09-02T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter VI: The View from Eastern Europe

While the Jews’ separate communal existence raised theological and practical difficulties in western Europe, those in eastern Europe remained mired in poverty. Most of them knew little or nothing about what was happening to Jews in the West.469 They dutifully obeyed their rabbis and entertained no thoughts of integrating into Gentile society. The Jewish Emancipation played no part in the socio-political life of the Russian Empire; this reality reinforced the separateness of Russian Jewry from the rest of Russian society.

In nineteenth century Germany, the major question was how a nation divided into multiple political entities could find a path to unification, and if the Jews could be part of this process. In Russia, the tsars’ greatest challenge was maintaining effective government over their vast realms and the many ethno-national minorities they contained. Their solution for the Jews was to confine them to their old places of domicile, which Russia annexed from Poland on the western reaches of the empire, extending from Black Sea port cities such as Odessa, and taking in what are today Lithuania, Belarus, eastern Poland, Moldova, and western Ukraine.

As a rule, the Jews were segregated outside the major areas of ethnic Russians and were prohibited from migrating to other parts of the empire.470 In the later part of the century, the success of this policy was confirmed by the fact that over 90 percent of the Jews resided in twenty-five provinces of the Pale of Settlement, legally barred from residing permanently in other parts of the empire.471 At the time, this population constituted the largest segment of Jews in the world.472

The differences between modern, industrialized Germany and the backward, pre-industrial Russian Empire led the Jews in each country to think and act differently regarding the viability of sovereign independence versus Diaspora-based solutions to their plight. First, the huge disparity in the size of the two communities—Germany’s was relatively small, Russia’s was enormous—affected how they thought about and acted upon their situations. Secondly, the fact that German Jews spoke German eroded their sense of belonging to a distinct tribe; within a short period, modernity had almost demolished the ghettos and the halakhic way of life. Many scholars believe that without the racial anti-Semitism that flourished in post World War I Germany, the Jews there might have assimilated and disappeared altogether.

This phenomenon had no significant parallel in imperial Russia, apart from Odessa, where there was no exclusively Jewish quarter and a modern Jewish community flourished. Only when the Nazis occupied Odessa during World War II was a ghetto first established there.

The Jews of the Pale of Settlement never faced a substantial threat to their identity or communal lifestyle. Life on the periphery of an anti-modernist, multinational empire that forcibly segregated and excluded them only reinforced their communal, ethno-national cohesion.

In the second half of the century, buds of “selective integration”—to use a term coined by historian Benjamin Nathans—began to appear, but they declined after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, an event that turned the lives of Russian Jews upside down.

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