Homes Away from Home

Jewish Belonging in Twentieth-Century Paris, Berlin, and St. Petersburg

Sarah Wobick-Segev

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781503606548
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du peuple juif

How did Jews go from lives organized by synagogues, shul, and mikvehs to lives that—if explicitly Jewish at all—were conducted in Hillel houses, JCCs, Katz's, and even Chabad? In pre-emancipation Europe, most Jews followed Jewish law most of the time, but by the turn of the twentieth century, a new secular Jewish identity had begun to take shape.

Homes Away From Home tells the story of Ashkenazi Jews as they made their way in European society in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, focusing on the Jewish communities of Paris, Berlin, and St. Petersburg. At a time of growing political enfranchisement for Jews within European nations, membership in the official Jewish community became increasingly optional, and Jews in turn created spaces and programs to meet new social needs. The contexts of Jewish life expanded beyond the confines of "traditional" Jewish spaces into sites of consumption and leisure, sometimes to the consternation of Jewish authorities. Sarah Wobick-Segev argues that the social practices that developed between 1890 and the 1930s—such as celebrating holydays at hotels and restaurants, or sending children to summer camp—fundamentally reshaped Jewish community, redefining and extending the boundaries of where Jewishness happened.

CHAPTER 1

A Room of Their Own

Friendship, Fellowship, and Fraternity

S. Y. Agnon’s short story “Yedidut” (Friendship) follows an anonymous man in an unnamed city. The protagonist moves from one encounter to another, increasingly irritated by those he meets. His purposeful excursion—to call on friends now that his wife has returned from a long journey—devolves into aimless and confused wandering through an urban landscape as his wife, sad and weary, carries on without him. Once separated from her, he loses his way home, unable to remember the name of the street on which he lives. Moving from one symbol of the city to another (shops, a streetcar, the post office), deliverance and direction finally come through an old friend, whom the main character meets by happenstance in a local café. Yet the first moments of their reunion are uncertain. Our protagonist is overjoyed to see his friend after twenty long years since their last meeting, and he rushes “into the coffeehouse and grip[s] both his [friend’s] arms from behind, clinging to them joyfully and calling him by name.” The friend turns toward the main character but remains unmoved. Confused, the protagonist wonders “why he was silent and showed me no sign of friendship. Didn’t he see how much I liked him, how much I loved him?” And then the reason for the friend’s cold response is made clear: The friend has gone blind. Their brief conversation refreshes the man’s memory, and he tells his son, “This gentleman was my friend.” Reunited, the old friend bids his son to help the protagonist find his way home. Yet the son is reluctant to leave his father alone in the café. The blind friend turns to the main character and gazes deeply into his eyes. Seeing his friend’s eyes now suddenly shining (symbolizing a moment of mutual recognition and renewed friendship), the disoriented protagonist realizes that he is, in fact, far from lost and is actually “standing beside my home.”¹

The urban European metropolis of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was by all accounts a marvelous, enchanting, and yet potentially overwhelming place. It was an environment where one could easily get lost, both literally and metaphorically. Not surprisingly, numerous contemporary scholars spent countless hours and pages analyzing urban space.² In fiction the city takes the role of backdrop and sometimes protagonist, and certain literary works even suggest that the bewildering nature of the city could pose a danger to one’s very soul.³ Agnon’s short story does not go so far. Yet it reflects both the disorienting nature of the modern urban landscape and the pressing need to find one’s place within the city walls. A story that could in many ways resonate with both Jews and non-Jews of the time, the tale has particular significance for a Jewish audience; it hints at the challenges faced by European Jews as they attempted both to integrate into European society and to maintain group cohesion during a time of significant social and cultural alterations and disruptions. As Agnon’s story stresses, friends and companions are essential if one wants to navigate the confusion of the city and find one’s way home.

Yet the turn of the twentieth century was not only remarkable for the fast-paced nature of urban development and cultural change (especially in the realms of consumerism and leisure); the increasingly common yet often jarring process of migration meant that individuals had to create new networks and social resources far from home, a socially and even emotionally complicated process for those who came from rural areas to Europe’s cities and metropolises. Furthermore, the last decades of the nineteenth century ushered in momentous political changes for Jews, with various civic developments and political movements pushing and pulling at Jewish self-definition. Civic emancipation and selective integration had altered the status of Jews, even if social integration frequently lagged behind. In Republican France most French Jews affiliated with the Republican camp, identifying their status as citizens with the French Revolution and the values that had made emancipation possible.⁴

Yet French society was far from united in its appreciation of secular Republicanism. Although French Jews enjoyed a relatively higher degree of professional integration in fields such as the officer corps and civil service than their coreligionists in Berlin (and especially in St. Petersburg),⁵ any sense of full acceptance was shattered when Captain Alfred Dreyfus was accused, tried, and then sentenced to life in prison for treason in 1894. The ensuing Dreyfus affair (which began in 1894, gained significant political attention in and after 1898, and finally ended in 1906)⁶ highlighted the sharp divide between secularist Republicans on the one hand and conservatives, Catholic traditionalists, and monarchists on the other. It also brought to the fore political antisemitism in a way that shocked Jews and non-Jews in France and across the continent. Importantly, antisemitism in France was not just popular in right-wing conservative circles. There were notable and vocal antisemites on the left. For example, Édouard Drumont, author of La France juive (Jewish France), blamed Jews for the various ills of “modern, urban capitalist economy,” including railways, industrial factories, and the department store.⁷

The Dreyfus affair did not discourage most French Jews from supporting the Republic and Republican values, but it did serve as an impetus for a number of them to re-identify with and take renewed pride in their Judaism and Jewish roots.⁸ The larger process of migration influenced France and French Jewry as well. Yet the growing population of Eastern European Jews in Paris were doubly if not triply outsiders. Foreign by birth, nationality, and language, they were not always welcomed by or accepted into the existing French Jewish community; socially, they were members of the working class; and politically, they found voice in trade unionism and, to a lesser extent, at least before World War I, in radical politics, including socialism, anarchism, and Bundism.⁹

Like the “native” French Jews who had identified politically with the movement and ideals that had led to their emancipation during the French Revolution, most German Jews supported liberal political parties, guarantors of full civic emancipation for Jews.¹⁰ The German Jewish population in Berlin was successful and overwhelmingly middle class. However, the professional glass ceiling in Germany was lower than that in France, and Jews were excluded from the civil service and officer corps and in many cases even faced difficulties obtaining positions as university professors.¹¹ In addition, a new political movement emerged that attempted to revoke Jewish emancipation and also suggested that Jews were not a religious group but a race. Antisemitism, a term coined in 1879 by Wilhelm Marr, was not only an ideology of intolerance and hate but also a political program that aimed to strip Jews of their equal legal status.

The growing acceptance and popularity of antisemitism on the political right in Germany, even in the more mainstream Conservative Party, had repercussions for center and center-left parties. More and more political parties refused to run Jewish candidates on their lists for fear of alienating their non-Jewish voter base. When the German Social Democratic Party (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, SPD), outlawed in 1878, returned to the Reichstag in 1890, it rejected the growing antisemitic atmosphere and ran Jewish parliamentary candidates on their list. Over time, larger portions of the Jewish population recognized the party as a strong and vocal opponent to political antisemitism.¹² Despite this obvious political ostracism, most German Jews in the Kaiserreich remained optimistic about their ability to overcome these challenges and believed in the overall progressive path of German society.

Politically, the position of Jews in Imperial Russia was even more unstable. Russia remained an absolutist monarchy until 1905. Jews were not emancipated, but some sectors of the Jewish population gained selective access to the two capital cities beginning in 1859, during the era of the Great Reforms under Tsar Alexander II. Wealthy and elite Jews in St. Petersburg, despite their economic fortunes, did not and could not gain access to the same levels of political power and social acceptance as Jews in Berlin or Paris did. Jews remained religious outsiders, despite efforts at partial integration, and over time were seen as a distinct national group. Moreover, the precarious nature of Jewish residency in the two capitals was made painfully clear when an imperial edict ordered the expulsion of numerous Jews from Moscow, first artisans in 1891 and then descendants of Jewish soldiers who had served during the time of Nicholas I in 1892. In addition, religious anti-Judaism was popular and highly influential, including in the highest offices.¹³ Repeated waves of pogroms broke out in 1881–1884, and with even greater brutality between 1903–1906,¹⁴ especially during the revolutionary year of 1905.

Jewish life in Imperial Russia could be precarious, and the Jews lived at the mercy of the tsar. Yet in many ways one could say much the same thing about all Russian subjects. Russian society was still based on estates (sosloviia) and thus on a series of complicated laws that defined each group’s set of privileges and duties in relation to the autocratic state and tsar. The movement for political representation in Russia was multidimensional and ideologically broad, with activists espousing socialism, anarchism, various forms and expressions of nationalism, and liberalism.¹⁵ Elite and intellectual Jews in St. Petersburg were no exception, though we can detect a strong interest in both liberalism and nationalism and, in the case of members of the influential OPE, an evolving combination thereof.¹⁶

The Revolution of 1905 and the resulting October Manifesto led to the creation of the first Duma (parliament) and the introduction of limited representative government: “Jewish liberals and socialists enthusiastically formed a coalition with centrist and left-wing Russian parties, convinced that a revolutionary front would bring justice and equality to all the peoples of the empire.”¹⁷ The Revolution of 1905 also brought with it a degree of freedom of assembly, precipitating the creation and expansion of social groups and movements in the city and of voluntary associations.¹⁸ But the long-term political successes of the 1905 revolution were few, and by 1907 the revolution had clearly failed. Russian liberals, socialists, anarchists, and nationalists, Jews included, nevertheless remained committed to a different political vision for the still autocratic state. The Great War and the political, social, and economic crisis it would engender occasioned a more decisive wave of revolutions in 1917.

The wider turn toward representative government across much of Europe marked a sea change that affected the ways in which citizens and potential citizens understood their relationship to political institutions and seats of power. Yet, just as many Jews across Europe found political voice through parties that sought to represent more than one religious group or social class, others sought out political representation that would speak to their needs as Jews. Linguistic, religious, and cultural difference served as centripetal justifications for the creation of specifically Jewish parties; new antisemitism and older forms of anti-Judaism both further reinforced this sense of difference and justified a need for explicitly and programmatically Jewish political representation.¹⁹

As the nineteenth century closed, the first Zionist Congress in Basel, held in late August 1897, marked the political beginnings of the Zionist movement (though not its practical inception), and roughly five weeks later the General Jewish Labor Bund in Lithuania, Poland, and Russia (Algemeyner Yidisher Arbeter Bund in Lite, Poyln un Rusland) was formed in Vilna. In the historiography both parties are identified with Eastern Europe, where they shared wide popular support. The Bund, created in and by the Jews of Imperial Russia, not surprisingly focused its political and practical attention on those lands, organizing strikes and in its early years politically working within the framework of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Workers Party. Moreover, after World War I the Bund made its most signi...