The Resistible Rise of Antisemitism

Exemplary Cases from Russia, Ukraine, and Poland

Laura Engelstein

• Publisher: Brandeis University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781684580101
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Weltgeschichte

Antisemitism emerged toward the end of the nineteenth century as a powerful political movement with broad popular appeal. It promoted a vision of the world in which a closely-knit tribe called "the Jews" conspired to dominate the globe through control of international finance at the highest levels of commerce and money lending in the towns and villages. This tribe at the same time maneuvered to destroy the very capitalist system it was said to control through its devotion to the cause of revolution. It is easy to draw a straight line from this turn-of-the-century paranoid thinking to the murderous delusions of twentieth-century fascism. Yet the line was not straight.Antisemitism as a political weapon did not stand unchallenged, even in Eastern Europe, where its consequences were particularly dire. In this region, Jewish leaders mobilized across national borders and in alliance with non-Jewish public figures on behalf of Jewish rights and in opposition to anti-Jewish violence. Antisemites were called to account and forced on the defensive. In Imperial and then Soviet Russia, in newly emerging Poland, and in aspiring Ukraine—notorious in the West as antisemitic hotbeds—antisemitism was sometimes a moral and political liability. These intriguing essays explore the reasons why, and they offer lessons from surprising places on how we can continue to fight antisemitism in our times.

CHAPTER ONE

Against the Grain

Russians in Defense of the Jews

AT THE END OF the nineteenth century, the population of the Russian Empire included 5.2 million Jews, a total half again as numerous as all the Jews in Europe, of whom most were concentrated in Austria-Hungary. Jews constituted only 4 percent of the imperial population overall, but 12 percent in the so-called Pale of Settlement, the fifteen western provinces plus the Russian-ruled sector of Poland, where most of them were obliged by law to reside. Some cities in this region were over a third Jewish. By 1910 the figure for Warsaw was almost 40 percent.¹

The origins of the Pale of Settlement date back to the late eighteenth century, when by joining in the tripartite division of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Russian Empire first acquired a significant concentration of Jews. Over the following long century, the autocracy persisted in policies that narrowed Jewish access to the broader society and culture. Limits were imposed not only on residency but on admission to educational institutions at all levels, on access to certain professions, state service, and the military ranks. At moments of political crisis, notably after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881 and in connection with the 1905 Revolution, Jews were targets of deadly mob violence, the so-called pogroms, a term that entered the international lexicon. The 1907 edition of Murray’s New English Dictionary defined “pogrom” as: “An organized massacre in Russia for the destruction or annihilation of any body or class; chiefly applied to those directed against the Jews.”²

Despite these impediments, many Russian Jews nevertheless benefited from exemptions and opportunities.³ A considerable minority managed to leave the Pale and acquire residency in the big cities. A number made it into the universities and contributed to professional and cultural life. Jewish intellectuals and public figures, fluent in Russian and Polish, engaged in the common civic discourse that emerged in the monarchy’s closing years. Others used Hebrew and Yiddish to shape a public sphere oriented toward the communities of the Pale, which helped bring their distinctive traditions into the orbit of modern life.⁴ Within the Jewish fold, intellectuals and activists debated the question of the Jewish place in Russian imperial society, articulating positions and attitudes expressed in a range of political parties and ideologies.

In short, the Jews of the Russian Empire were both integrated and segregated. Antisemitism was enshrined in official policies and permeated the general culture at many levels: as a common attribute of village life, though only occasionally translated into violence; taken for granted in upper-class society and the bureaucracy; as an unabashed posture at court; as a guiding principle in the higher military administration. Jews who entered the civic mainstream used the public platform to challenge these attitudes and advocate for equal rights. This challenge was embedded in the larger initiatives on the part of liberal society to promote the rule of law even within the framework of the monarchy. It involved a collaboration, or symbiosis, between Jewish spokesmen for the Jewish cause and gentile proponents of liberal modernity.⁵

The broad push for constitutional reform began to coalesce at the turn of the twentieth century in the so-called Liberation Movement, a loose association of professionals and public figures. Revolution broke out in January 1905, when the long-simmering political discontent of educated society joined with the growing unrest in factories, villages, and the armed forces, a mood exacerbated by the pressure of the Russo-Japanese War, to generate a massive, empirewide challenge to the autocratic regime. In the broad spectrum of revolutionary grievances and demands, the cause of Jewish rights found its place alongside calls for ethnic, religious, and women’s equality, social justice, and the rule of law.

By conceding the revolution’s least radical demands, the autocracy survived the upheaval. The crisis forced Nicholas to issue a manifesto in October 1905, establishing a parliament—the State Duma, with actual, though limited powers—and promising the extension of civil rights. The subsequent legalization of political parties and the loosening of restrictions on the press established a public stage on which Jewish leaders could address issues of common, as well as specifically Jewish concern. But the revolution also generated an emboldened and militant antisemitic Right, enjoying the tsar’s endorsement. Two dozen monarchist organizations emerged after the October Manifesto, which they interpreted as an assault on the basic Christian values of Orthodox Russia. Their followers called themselves the “true Russian people” (istinno-russkie liudi)—as distinct from ethnic minorities, political subversives, and in particular, the Jews. Their enemies derided them as Black Hundreds (chernosotentsy) and pogromshchiki.⁶

The outbreak of war in 1914, a mere seven years after the revolutionary disturbances had subsided, intensified the xenophobia associated with Great Russian patriotism. Increasingly repressive policies directed at potentially hostile groups, in particular, Poles, domestic Germans, and Jews, justified on grounds of wartime security, only magnified the disruptive impact of the war. Meanwhile, failures of provisioning and materiel, blamed for Russia’s shocking military defeats, emboldened civil society to shoulder responsibilities the administration seemed unable to handle and sharpened public criticism of the regime. Punitive treatment of the Jews was rightly perceived by many, even in conservative spheres, as impeding Russia’s prospects for victory. Influential public figures who already, before 1914, had recognized the political importance of the so-called Jewish Question now joined with Jewish spokesmen in opposing official policies and propaganda targeting the Jews.⁷ They encountered strenuous resistance. Long taken for granted, hostility to the Jews had recently acquired a new lease on life, but its destructive consequences, long decried by Jewish and liberal spokesmen, had become even more damaging and more obvious.

Jewish participation in Russian political life not surprisingly followed the general contours of the broader mobilization of imperial society. Though far from a majority, Jews were prominent among the young people attracted to the revolutionary movement of the 1870s. The Jewish activists were dedicated not to the emancipation of the Jews, but to the cause of social justice.⁸ In 1881 a handful of populist radicals succeeded in assassinating Alexander II, the monarch who had liberated the serfs twenty years before. The populists had condemned the results of his reforms as ineffective and took aim at the pinnacle of power. Among those arrested for the deed, only one, Gesia Gelfman (1855–1882), had a Jewish surname, but the assassination was widely blamed on the Jews and gave rise to a massive wave of pogroms.⁹ In the 1890s, the populist impulses of preceding decades took the form of clandestine political parties attuned to the problems of the growing modern sector—industry, an emerging working class, increasing urban poverty. These included, most notably, the Marxist-oriented Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, along with a number of groups competing for a specifically Jewish constituency within the framework of the Left: the socialist Bund, the Zionists, and the socialist-Zionists of Poalei Zion.¹⁰

The Jewish presence on the revolutionary Left was the focus of official attention and provoked an antisemitic response. The primary thrust of Jewish public activity was not, however, to destroy the imperial system, but to improve the place of Jews within it. This took the form of community-oriented philanthropy, but also of participation in the movement for political reform that emerged at the turn of the century. In the context of an increasingly articulate imperial public sphere, politically moderate Jews with successful professional careers began to organize in defense of Jewish interests.¹¹ The wealthy Baron Horace Günzburg (in Russian, Gintsburg, 1833–1909), an active philanthropist and the most influential Russian Jewish figure at the time, had financed the establishment of Jewish welfare organizations; a Russian-language Jewish press had emerged in the capitals.¹² These developments were part of a broader sweep of Jewish civic activism that spread across Europe and the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century.¹³ In Russia, they were part of the general struggle for equal rights that engaged the liberal opposition to autocracy.

While the revolutionary parties focused on social and economic justice, the Liberation Movement pressed for political reform. In the years leading up to the Great War, the demand for Jewish rights remained integral to this struggle. Indeed, a series of landmark events affecting the Jews punctuated the opening years of the new century, prompting intensified organization and outreach, engaging the participation of Jewish leaders, gentile allies, and the transnational Jewish community.¹⁴ A sense of outrage and emergency was generated by an initial group of closely spaced incidents: the Blondes Case of 1900–1902, in which a Jewish resident of Vilna (Vilnius in today’s Lithuania) was accused by his housemaid of attempting to kill her and extract her blood for ritual purposes; the Kishinev pogrom of 1903, in which 49 Jews were murdered, a shocking number at the time, followed by another, though less murderous pogrom in Gomel (now in Belarus) four months later; climaxing in the surge of pogroms unleashed by the 1905 Revolution, most in the Ukrainian provinces and Bessarabia. Those fatalities counted in the hundreds. After a brief pause, two additional episodes in 1911 again turned the public spotlight on the Jewish Question. In February, a vigorous debate on the Duma floor concerning the Pale of Settlement attracted considerable attention. In July an ordinary Jewish employee of a Kiev brick factory, one Mendel Beilis (1874–1934), was arrested and charged with the murder of an adolescent Christian boy for ritual purposes, the so-called Blood Libel accusation. The trial that ensued in 1913 became an international sensation, amply covered in the domestic and foreign press.

The Jewish population responded to accusations, insults, and physical aggression in a variety of ways. When it came to the immediate impact of the pogroms, the mainstream Jewish press and the socialist Bund called on the inhabitants of the Jewish towns to organize in armed self-defense. The various trials of pogrom perpetrators—and, more prominently, the Beilis Case—provided the chance to publicize the issue of violence and injustice and demand official redress. The court transcripts appeared in the Russian and Russian Jewish press and as separate books and pamphlets,¹⁵ while reports on the pogroms were disseminated by Jewish organizations abroad.¹⁶ Jewish spokesmen used the courtrooms, beyond the immediate criminal charges, to highlight the broader question of Jewish rights and expose the fatal consequences of official policy and official antisemitism.

Around 1901, a group of lawyers established a so-called Defense Bureau (Biuro zashchity), with the financial backing of Baron Günzburg. Its purpose was to provide assistance to individual Jews in surmounting bureaucratic obstacles, but also to address the question of discrimination in political terms. In response to the pogroms, the bureau not only represented the victims in court, but used the legal forum to educate the public about the plight of the Jews.¹⁷ Its central figures were Maxim Vinaver (1862–1926); Oskar Gruzenberg (1866–1940), and Genrikh Sliozberg (1863–1937), all of whom had entered adulthood in the wake of the 1881–1882 pogroms.¹⁸ Born in the ethnic outposts of the empire—respectively, Polish Warsaw, Ukrainian Dniepropetrovsk, and Byelorussian Minsk Province—they were highly educated, Russian-speaking professionals, who shared a common mission. As Vinaver put it two decades later, in emigration, when reflecting back on his activist cohort: “Though fighting for equal rights for the Jews, aspiring to union with other Russian citizens and European education, they did not break the ties binding them to the Jews as a people in the cultural and historical sense of the word.”¹⁹

The attorneys in the St. Petersburg Defense Bureau were the animating force behind a broad program of domestic activism, focusing on three primary targets—the courts, the Duma, and public outreach, through cultural partnerships and the press.²⁰ In this endeavor, they enlisted the participation of well-known Russian personalities—fellow lawyers, popular writers, and cultural celebrities—in support of their campaigns.²¹ In the wake of the Kishinev events, the bureau delegated the lawyer Alexander Zarudny (1863–1934) to investigate.²² Zarudny’s father had been among the authors of Alexander II’s 1864 judicial reforms; he himself later served as minister of justice in the Provisional Government. Another scion of the reformist imperial elite who supported the Jewish cause was the lawyer Vladimir Nabokov (1870–1922), son of Alexander II’s enlightened minister of justice and the future novelist’s father.

The trial following the 1903 Gomel pogrom—opening on October 11, 1904, concluding on January 29, 1905, three weeks after the outbreak of revolution—in which Vinaver, Sliozberg, and Zarudny were all involved, was a staging ground for patterns that persisted into the post-1917 Civil War. It showcased the mixed messages of denial and complicity along the official chain of command and the limits of legal remedies absent the rule of law or lawfulness altogether. Among the defendants this time were thirty-six Jews, arrested for having in any way attempted to defend themselves against attack. In taking their case, the lawyers saw themselves as defending “the interests of the whole Jewish people,” which they understood as the true target of the trial.²³ They faced off against an opposing team that included the virulent antisemitic attorney and Moscow city council member Aleksey Shmakov (1852–1916), who would later make an appearance in the Beilis trial. An “implacable battle” ensued, in which the prosecution actively intervened to impede the work of the Jewish defense and discredit the Jewish witnesses.²⁴

So abusive and prejudicial were the actions of the court that two months into the proceedings the Jewish lawyers announced their refusal to proceed and demonstratively withdrew. The trial had nevertheless revealed the brutality of the violence visited on the Jews, the involvement of the authorities, and the impossibility of justice being served. The court concluded that the damage to Jewish lives and property had resulted from “the brazen and provocative behavior of the Jews themselves,” having allegedly started the ruckus that set the riots in motion. The verdict declared that “the Jews of Gomel had resorted to violence against the Christians in revenge for the sufferings of their fellow tribesmen and co-religionists in Kishinev and to demonstrate their solidarity and power.”²⁵

The trial had turned the case against the pogromists into an indictment of the Jews. As the Jewish editor of the unofficial published transcript put it: “Until the time that we have freed...