The Russian-Jewish Tradition: Intellectuals, Historians, Revolutionaries 9781618115577

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The Russian-Jewish Tradition Intellectuals, Historians, Revolutionaries

Jews of Russia & Eastern Europe and Their Legacy Series Editor:  Maxim D. Shrayer (Boston College) Editorial Board

Ilya Altman (Russian Holocaust Center and Russian State University for the Humanities) Karel Berkhoff (NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies) Jeremy Hicks (Queen Mary University of London) Brian Horowitz (Tulane University) Luba Jurgenson (Universite Paris IV—Sorbonne) Roman Katsman (Bar-Ilan University) Dov-Ber Kerler (Indiana University) Vladimir Khazan (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) Mikhail Krutikov (University of Michigan) Joanna Beata Michlic (Bristol University) Alice Nakhimovsky (Colgate University) Antony Polonsky (Brandeis University) Jonathan D. Sarna (Brandeis University) David Shneer (University of Colorado at Boulder) Anna Shternshis (University of Toronto) Leona Toker (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) Mark Tolts (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)

The Russian-Jewish Tradition Intellectuals Historians Revolutionaries

Brian Horowitz Introduction by William Craft Brumfield

Boston 2017

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names:

Horowitz, Brian, author.

Title: The Russian-Jewish tradition: intellectuals, historians, revolutionaries / Brian Horowitz. Description:

Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2017.

Series:

Jews of Russia & Eastern Europe and their legacy

Identifiers: LCCN 2016042038 (print) LCCN 2016042920 (ebook) ISBN 9781618115560 (hardcover) ISBN 9781618115577 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Jews—Russia—Intellectual life—19th century. | Jews—Russia—Intellectual life—20th century. | Jews—Russia— History—19th century. | Jews—Russia—History—20th century. | Jewish scholars—Russia—Biography. Classification: LCC DS134.84. H685 2017 (print) LCC DS134.84 (ebook) DDC 947/.004924—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016042038 ISBN 978-1-61811-556-0 (hardback) ISBN 978-1-61811-557-7 (electronic) Copyright © 2017 Academic Studies Press All rights reserved Book design by Kryon Publishing www.kryonpublishing.com On the cover: Jewish house and store in Nerchinsk, Russia. Photograph by ©William C. Brumfield. Reproduced by the author's permission. Published by Academic Studies Press in 2017 28 Montfern Avenue Brighton, MA 02135, USA [email protected] www.academicstudiespress.com

Table of Contents Introduction:  William Craft Brumfield

vi

PART I:  Russian-Jewish Historians and Historiography

1

Chapter 1 The Return of the Ḥeder among Russian-Jewish Education Experts, 1840–1917 Chapter 2 ‘Building a Fragile Edifice’: A History of Russian-­Jewish Historical Institutions, 1860–1914 Chapter 3 Myths and Counter-Myths about Odessa’s Jewish Intelligentsia during the Late Tsarist Period Chapter 4 Saul Borovoi’s Survival: An Odessa Tale about a Jewish Historian in Soviet Times Chapter 5 The Ideological Challenges of S. M. Dubnov in Emigration: Autonomism and Zionism, Europe and Palestine PART II:  Russian–Jewish Intelligentsia’s Cultural Vibrancy Chapter 6 Semyon An-sky—Dialogic Writer Chapter 7 Russian-Jewish Writers Face Pogroms, 1880–1914 Chapter 8 M. O. Gershenzon, Alexander Pushkin, the Bible, and the Flaws of Jewish Nationalism Chapter 9 Battling for Self-Definition in Soviet Literature: Boris Eikhenbaum’s Jewish Question Chapter 10 Vladimir Jabotinsky and the Mystique of 1905 Chapter 11 Vladimir Jabotinsky and Violence

2 19 38 53 70 85 86 111 123 139 156 177

PART III:  Jewish Heritage in Russian Perception

197

Chapter 12 Vladimir Solov’ev and the Jews: A View from Today Chapter 13 Fear and Stereotyping: Vasily Rozanov and Jewish Menace

198 215

Bibliography 233 Index 275

Introduction

Brian Horowitz’s work over the past two decades has provided us with a multifaceted examination of the Jewish intelligentsia in its quest for a proper place in Russian society. This quest was fraught with ambiguity, particularly in a tsarist regime that frequently attempted to delegitimize the Jewish presence. In these circumstances the discipline of history has assumed an urgent role in defining and claiming Jewish legitimacy in Russia. The pursuance of historical narrative has involved no less than an existential meaning. The three parts of this book bring together various aspects of an enormously rich and complex enterprise. The efforts of Jewish historians and political activists to define as well as implement strategies for Jewish existence in Russia form a unifying element in this astute collection of essays. The essay form seems to play to Horowitz’s eclectic strengths as a scholar, who in the midst of gathering significant archival material has not been limited by a narrowness of vision and interpretation. In the first part Horowitz gives us a history of institutions, the ḥeder, newspapers, and works of history to show how a historiography developed—a self-consciousness of Jews in Russia. The pinnacle of that effort was richly embodied in the seventeen-volume Evreiskaia entsiklopediia, published by Brakgauz-Efron in St. Petersburg from 1907–1913. Concurrently, he offers studies of two historians: Semyon Dubnov, the doyen of the East European school of Jewish historiography, and Saul Borovoi, a less-known figure, but critical for understanding the Soviet Jewish experience. They not only embody the writer’s craft and the emotional dimension of a professional choice but also view their own experience through a socio-cultural lens that allows them to express the philosophical depth of interpretation in the twentieth century. (Dubnov perished during the Holocaust and Borovoi barely escaped).

Introduction vii

In the second part Horowitz illuminates the writings of such pivotal figures as the folklorist Semyon An-sky, the Zionist and writer Vladimir Jabotinsky, the philosopher and historian Mikhail Gershenzon, and the eminent critic, Boris Eikhenbaum. The central point is not the conventional life and works, but an insight into the intellectual within a concrete historical context, an intellectual fashioning of a worldview at pivotal historical moments. For Jabotinsky it is 1923, the year he writes “The Iron Wall,” for Gershenzon it is 1921 and 1922, when he returns to the origins of culture in order to make sense of Russia after 1917. For Eikhenbaum the shock comes in the early 1930s, when he must face Stalinist literary politics. What should he do? How will he preserve his place or create a new role? The last part is devoted to studies of two Russians, Vladimir Solov’ev and Vasily Rozanov, and the role of Jews in the construction of a Russian idea. Despite his reputation as a philosemite, Solov’ev perhaps was not aware of his acceptance of the Enlightenment premise of Jewish conversion to Christianity. Rozanov acknowledged his disdain for Jews, yet they were essential to him in his reexamination of Christianity. The last essay deals with the little known topic of Jewish writing on the pogroms in the Russian language. Horowitz shows that deeply engaged writers despaired of the evanescence of integration that they saw vanish in their lifetimes. Horowitz has combined studies of institutions and individuals in order to play both sides, so to speak, on the question of historical agency. Was the earnestly dedicated Society for the Promotion of Enlightenment an indication of the future for modern Jewish intellectual life in Russia? Equally compelling, it seems, are the personalities and complex experiences of those who did not participate in the organized Jewish collective. They all make their appearance in this stimulating and amply researched collection. The book concludes with a telling counter-narrative advanced by Solov’ev and Rozanov. William Craft Brumfield, New Orleans, 2016

PART I Russian-Jewish Historians and Historiography

CHAPTER 1 The Return of the H.eder among Russian-Jewish Education Experts, 1840–1917 The role of the ḥeder in the modernization of Jewish education in the tsarist empire is a fascinating, albeit little-known, story. Most laymen and even scholars view the ḥeder monochromatically. They repeat the criticisms of the maskilim1 of the 1840s and later decades: the ḥeder was the obstacle to successful integration; nothing was learned there, the melamed beat the children, it was one of the vilest of religious institutions. However, there was a change in attitude toward the ḥeder at the beginning of the twentieth century among some of the most important specialists in the field of Jewish education in Russia. Some of these experts discovered in the ḥeder previously unnoticed dimensions that could be salvaged in future schools, while others saw parallels between the values of the ḥeder and the new national-leaning Jewish institutions. Still others were impressed by the ḥeder’s longevity, its success with the public, and its low costs. The School Commission of the Society for the Promotion of Enlightenment among the Jews of Russia (Obshchestvo dlia rasprostraneniia prosveshcheniia mezhdu evreiami v Rossii, or, OPE) along with Zionists and Bundists were involved with these questions. Research into the ḥeder and modern schools in the tsarist empire is largely divided between those who studied the question during tsarist times and those who approached these issues starting in the 1960s in Israeli and American universities. The kinds of questions each group posed were different because each group had its own political and cultural agendas.

 1 A maskil was a Jew who was educated in a secular institution and strove for Jewish integration.

The Return of the H.eder among Russian-Jewish Education Experts, 1840–1917 3

During tsarist times the ḥeder was the object of study by “activists”: individuals, mainly men, who sought either to eliminate the ḥeder or to transform it. Attitudes changed, growing more positive around 1900 and reflecting the views on politics and the Jewish cultural ferment of the time. Experts—nonZionists such as Menasheh Morgulis, Pinkhus (Petr) Marek, Leon Bramson, Jacob Katsenelson, Hayim Fialkov, and Saul Ginzburg—gradually and grudgingly discovered much to like in the ḥeder. The majority of these individuals were trained as lawyers but worked as journalists, teachers, or activists. Zionists, such as Avram Idelson and Chaim Zuta, admired the institution, although they demanded its modernization.2 Incidentally, some of the s­ tatistical information and much of the anecdotal material come from studies produced in tsarist times. The other group is composed of university professors in Israel and the United States. Individuals such as Zevi Scharfstein, Shaul Stampfer, Steven Zipperstein, Michael Stanislawski, Jacob Shatzky, Yossi Goldstein, Eliyana Adler, and Brian Horowitz intended to produce objective scholarship independent of political motives, although they relied on earlier statistics and to a degree on previous analyses. Despite their professed objectivity, these university-trained professors were sometimes influenced by revisionist thinking about Jewish history in Russia that was typical of the late years of the Cold War. Such thinking was characterized by the rediscovery of a good deal of positive aspects of Jewish life (“it was not all gloom and doom”). The “re-imagination” of Jewish life in Russia was undoubtedly connected with disappointment regarding Jewish life in the West, which was seen as decaying in spite or because of the free atmosphere for Jewish religious observance. Russian Jews, it turned out, had much to offer in the construction of Jewish community.3 Although this chapter does not deal directly with the differences between these two groups and their agendas, it does implicitly show the premises that underlie sympathies toward the traditional ḥeder. The history of the ḥeder in the Russian empire is connected largely with struggles between the religiously orthodox and the maskilim (supporters of   2 Yossi Goldstein, “‘Haḥeder hametukan’ berusiyah kebasis lemerekhet hahinukh hatsiyonit,” Inyanim beḥinuch 45 (1986): 147–57. Chaim Zuta was an educator and social activist. For more on him, see Steven J. Zipperstein, Imagining Russian Jewry: Memory, History, Identity (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999), 49–52.  3 Zipperstein, Imagining Russian Jewry, 3–4.

4 PART I | Russian-Jewish Historians and Historiography

the Haskalah). The maskilim emphasized Russian language learning, basic secular knowledge, and the acquisition of useful skills such as mathematics. Despite a good deal of support from the government, including subsidies and even free tuition, for most of the nineteenth century few parents would permit their male children to attend secular schools. Besides the religious obligation to teach their children Torah, study at a ḥeder conveyed prestige. Parents showed they could afford a place in a ḥeder and implied at the same time their assent to the established order in the community. In addition, a ḥeder education gave their boys a chance at upward mobility: success at the ḥeder might lead to study in a yeshiva and in some cases to a coveted rabbinic position.4 With success in Torah and Talmudic learning came other potential tangible benefits such as marriage to the daughter of wealthy parents and status in the community. For these and other considerations, parents continued to send their boys to the ḥeder even when schools were available. Regarding the education of girls there were more options. Alternatives to the ḥeder began to appear in the 1840s when the Russian government established special Jewish schools. The government’s goals appear contradictory to us now, but at least some of the intentions were positive: to educate young Jews in order to facilitate their integration into Russian society.5 The government opened over one hundred schools, as well as two teacher-­training and rabbinical seminaries, in Vilna and Zhitomir. After the schools were up and running, the government still had trouble convincing parents to send their children there, because the government’s intentions did not appear unambiguous to the Jewish communities: perhaps the schools were the first step toward conversion to Christianity, so why educate Jewish children for jobs that were closed to them?6 When OPE was established in 1863, its members devoted their energies to reforming government schools to make them more attractive to parents. The unanimous opinion of the early leaders was that the ḥeder was retrograde and unredeemable. From the mid-1860s until the 1890s the society spent the  4 Shaul Stampfer, “Heder Study, Knowledge of Torah and the Maintenance of Social Stratification in Traditional Eastern European Jewish Society,” Studies in Jewish Education 3 (1988): 271–89.   5 Michael Stanislawski, Tsar Nicolas I and the Jews: The Transformation of Jewish Society in Russia, 1825–1855 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1983), 172.  6 Stanislawski, Tsar Nicholas I and the Jews, 72–76.

The Return of the H.eder among Russian-Jewish Education Experts, 1840–1917 5

bulk of its resources on sending small numbers of students to universities. The idea was to produce university graduates who could serve as role models. What little the organization devoted to primary and secondary education was earmarked for private schools. Such schools appeared to satisfy society’s goals of providing a secular education to Jews with the aim of both integrating them into Russian society and giving them vocational skills.7 Private schools for Jews promised instruction in reading, writing, mathematics, geography, and literature. The teachers of these schools purposely avoided religion and usually allowed students a choice of a half day of instruction in order to give boys the opportunity to attend ḥeder in the morning.8 Private schools catered to primarily for girls, who, as Eliyana Adler has shown, had more choices than boys.9 They could do without any education, acquire training in crafts, engage in home schooling, and attend a state school, a private Russian school, or even a modern Jewish school. Girls were permitted to study secular subjects more readily than were boys, since parents condoned non-religious education if it helped a woman acquire gainful employment so that her husband could devote his time to Torah study—the Jewish tradition asserted that the religious responsibilities for a woman were less onerous, and therefore girls did not need to study Hebrew or Talmud. It was enough to read the Pentateuch with simple commentaries in Yiddish translation (The Tsenerene). Adler notes that, in opposition to what many people think, in the nineteenth century “many [ Jewish] girls were educated, and secondly, their educational paths differed significantly from that of their brothers.”10   7 Benjamin Nathans, Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 55–56; Brian Horowitz, Jewish Philanthropy and Enlighten­ment in Late-Tsarist Russia, (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009), 178– 84. Benjamin Nathans gives the St. Petersburg elite enormous credit for its services to the Jewish people of Russia; Brian Horowitz similarly lauds the elite, while underscoring their limitations.  8 Ilya Cherikover, Istoriia Obshchestva dlia rasprostraneniia prosveshcheniia mezhdu evreiami v Rossii, 1863–1913 (St. Petersburg: Komitet OPE, 1913), 23–24; Horowitz, Jewish Philanthropy and Enlightenment, 17–20. Scholars of OPE such as Cherikover and Horowitz share the view that in its early period the society was top heavy with wealthy members who sought to create a small elite among university-educated Jews.   9 See Eliyana R. Adler, “Private Schools for Jewish Girls in Tsarist Russia” (PhD diss., Brandeis University, 2003), 55–90. 10 Adler, “Private Schools for Jewish Girls,” 84.

6 PART I | Russian-Jewish Historians and Historiography

Just as private schools found a way to supplement the local ḥeder, shraybers (“writers,” or, itinerant private teachers of Russian and secular subjects) complemented the ḥeder by providing instruction in subjects that were not included in the ḥeder’s curriculum. The shraybers, mostly young unmarried men, gave lessons in private homes and were widely employed.11 Shraybers underscored how a single institution could not fulfill the function of educating Russia’s Jews: at least two, the ḥeder and something else, were needed. The need for multiple educational institutions irked modern educators. In the 1890s experts—secular Jews who had studied the question of Jewish education—were still bewildered by the enormous popularity of the ḥeder. Although educators thought that private schools lost the competition because they were too costly, in fact, studies of the ḥeder found that massive sums were spent on its upkeep. What was especially disconcerting was the fact that the masses had the money to fund modern schools if they really wanted them. Jacob Katsenelson, a journalist on Jewish education, calculated that in Russia 700,000 families paid a minimum of thirty roubles for a ḥeder, Talmud Torah, or yeshiva, and therefore altogether 21,000,000 roubles were spent annually on Jewish education.12 That sum was more than the total budget for elementary education in Austria and one and a half times the amount spent in Italy, a country of thirty million people. Clearly, the ḥeder could not be displaced because it was popular; and it was popular because it met the needs of the population. This at least was the conclusion of Katsenelson and Menasheh Morgulis—a lawyer, civic leader, and editor of the Jewish newspaper Den’ from 1870 to 1871. What were the needs of the Jewish community? According to Morgulis, who wrote a great deal about Jewish education, the existing schools did not meet the community’s basic needs, among them, cheap child care.13 Children 11 Shraybers are depicted in the fiction of Semyon An-sky (Rapoport) and Sholem Aleichem (Rabinovich). Sholem Aleichem was himself a shrayber in his youth. 12 Jacob Katsenelson, “Shkol’noe delo,” Ezhenedel’naia khronika Voskhoda 9 (1894): 12. On the Korobochnyi sbor (meat and candle tax), see Yuly Gessen, “Korobochnyi sbor,” in Evreiskaia entsiklopediia: Svod znanii o evreistve i ego kul’ture v proshlom i nastoiashchem, eds. L. Katsenelson and D. G. Gintsburg (St. Petersburg: Brakauz i Efron, 1908–13), 9:758–71; see also Yuly Gessen, “K istorii korobochnogo sbora v Rossii,” Evreiskaia starina 3 (1911): 305, 484. 13 M. G. Morgulis, Voprosy evreiskoi zhizni: Sobranie statei (St. Petersburg: Tip. A. N. Mikhailova, 1903), 200; originally published in Evreiskaia biblioteka 1–3 (1871–73).

The Return of the H.eder among Russian-Jewish Education Experts, 1840–1917 7

arrived at the ḥeder early and stayed until late in the evening, thereby allowing mothers to spend longer days in the shop or market stall. By contrast, the schools let their pupils out in the early afternoon. Additionally, the school had higher expenses (rent for a building, the teacher’s salary) and sometimes its instruction offended parents’ religious principles.14 It was hard to argue with Morgulis, although a number of critics objected to his proposition that schools needed to provide longer hours.15 Among other reasons for the ḥeder’s survival was its reliability. Parents considered that the ḥeder had served Jewish children well over the centuries. Nonetheless, Jews, especially in the southwestern region, began to favour Russian schools during the 1870s and 1880s until restrictions on Jewish enrollment were enacted in 1887. Significantly, these quotas had the twin result of enhancing the value of Russian schools and of reviving interest in the ḥeder, since Jews were now forced to attend exclusively Jewish educational institutions.16 The attitude of the modernizers toward the ḥeder did not drastically change in the 1890s. For example, in 1893, when OPE set out to design their ideal elementary school, its members divided the existing types of schools into four categories, according to the time spent on Jewish and general subjects. Ḥeders had only Jewish subjects; Talmud Torah schools concentrated on Jewish subjects, but included secular subjects as well; government Jewish schools had a mixture of religious and secular with an emphasis on the secular; and private schools gave preference to secular knowledge. In part because of the law of March 1893, which prohibited secular subjects from being taught in ḥeders, and perhaps because of a personal animus of the members of the commission, the members gave the ḥeder short shrift. They were convinced that the ḥeder could “not be transformed into a modern school.”17 14 Morgulis, Voprosy evreiskoi zhizni, 200. 15 Saul M. Gintsburg, “Iz zapisok pervogo evreia-studenta v Rossii,” Perezhitoe 1 (1908): 4–5. 16 Horowitz, Jewish Philanthropy and Enlightenment, 80–96. Many scholars see the rise of Jewish nationalism as a response to the pogroms of 1881–82. Horowitz regards the government’s educational quotas in 1887 as a large factor in producing activities that furthered national interests. 17 “Otchet o deiatel’nosti obshchestva za 1894,” n.d., Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv, St. Petersburg (hereafter RGIA), f. 1532, op. 1, d. 49, l. 15. Nevertheless, the members had noted that they had recently received indications that several melamedim in the southwestern region had petitioned the Ministry of Education for the right to offer instruction in Russian. Therefore, it was important to wait and see how the law was applied.

8 PART I | Russian-Jewish Historians and Historiography

The organization and curriculum of OPE’s modern Jewish school was conceived both in opposition to and in conformity with the ḥeder. The way the schools were organized—with proper ventilation, furniture, and a concern for the hygiene and health of the students, including breaks between classes and for lunch, as well as for proper bathing—showed a desire to break with the ḥeder. The request that the schools have their own buildings and that the classrooms not be used as the teacher’s home was also directed against the ḥeder, since in the ḥeder the melamed lived in the same room in which he taught. In the ḥeder there was often inadequate lighting, few windows, and filth on the walls because of the smoke from the oven. Little thought was given to ventilation. In addition, there were no breaks between classes or concern about backbreaking benches.18 During the 1890s, administrators of OPE’s education programs, such as Leon Bramson, slowly began to realize the ḥeder’s strengths. In his 1896 essay “On the History of the Elementary Education of Jews in Russia,” Bramson set himself the goal of explaining why Jews had remained isolated from Russian society, why government-sponsored Jewish schools had been necessary, and why Jews themselves now had to take control of their own education.19 In addition, at the end of the essay Bramson sketched his ideal school. In contrast to those who wanted a completely secular school and those who preferred the ḥeder, Bramson sought a compromise: “In a modern school there should be enough of those subjects that attract Jewish children to the ḥeder, i.e., the Jewish religion, and one should give the school a vocational character as much as possible. In addition, instruction should be at the highest pedagogical level. Only in these conditions, so the advocates of this view contend, can the school be ready to replace our unique age-old institution.”20 Although Bramson preferred vocational schools—he became the head of the Society for Trades and Agricultural Labour (Obshchestvo remeslennogo i zemledel’cheskogo truda)—others continued to see positive aspects of the 18 Goldstein, “Hah  .eder hametukan’ berusiyah,” 147–48. It is important to realize that some modern historians view the h .eder more positively as a place where students learned religious values, Hebrew, and the essential texts of the Jewish religion. 19 Leon Bramson, “K istorii nachal’nogo obrazovaniia evreev v Rossii,” in Sbornik v pol’zu nachal’nykh evreiskikh shkol (St. Petersburg, 1896). 20 Bramson, “K istorii nachal’nogo obrazovaniia,” 353.

The Return of the H.eder among Russian-Jewish Education Experts, 1840–1917 9

ḥeder, especially as national feeling began to grow among the Jewish intelligentsia. The revival of Hebrew in particular had a strong influence on reconsiderations of the ḥeder, as did the emergence of political Zionism.21 There were many signs of Hebrew’s revival in the Russian empire, but the school debates in the Odessa branch of OPE in 1902 embody best the relationship between schools, Hebrew, and the nationalist-leaning Jewish intelligentsia. Challenging the ideology of integration, so-called nationalists, predominantly Zionists, launched an attack on the number of hours of Jewish and secular subjects in schools subsidized by the society. Their goal was to get more hours of Hebrew and fewer of Russian. The Zionists called themselves “nationalists” and gave their opponents the mocking epithet “assimilators.” The nationalists were represented by Ahad-Ha’am, Ben-Ami (Mark [Mordecai] Rabinovich), Meir Dizengoff, Yehoshua Ravnitsky, and Semyon Dubnov. Dubnov was the only non-Zionist. They pressed the point that Jewish schools had to instill national values, since anything less would amount to yielding to assimilation. Preparing a vocation or advancing integration were less important than inculcating national feeling with a series of courses in Hebrew, the Bible, and Jewish history. Moreover, at least twelve of the thirty school hours in the week had to be given over to Jewish subjects, and Hebrew had to serve as the primary concentration of the curriculum in order to spur an interest in the “customs, way of life, and literary creativity of the Jewish people.”22 The study of the Bible, they wrote, also had the goal of “acquainting students with Judaism’s main religious and ethical precepts.”23 Although both the assimilators and nationalists were in favor of schools, the 1902 debates reflect a major change in attitude. Most significantly is the focus on Hebrew (rather than Yiddish) as the means to attaining the proper Jewish identity and purpose. With a cluster of hours devoted to Hebrew and the Bible, the nationalists’ school curriculum had elements in common with that of the traditional ḥeder. Similar positive attitudes toward the ḥeder appeared elsewhere. At the meeting of provincial representatives with the OPE board in 1902, the question of the ḥeder was widely debated and the seeds of a new, positive 21 Goldstein, “Hah .eder hametukan’ berusiyah,” 148. 22 Bramson, “K istorii nachal’nogo obrazovaniia,” 353. 23 Ibid.

10 PART I | Russian-Jewish Historians and Historiography

evaluation were detected. Lev Katsenelson, the long- standing leader of OPE and a well-known Hebrew writer, explained that “educated” Jews had long been convinced that even in the instruction of Hebrew the ḥeder was a wornout institution that had to yield to the superiority of the modern school. However, results had proved otherwise: “Experts in Hebrew, which the ḥeder produced, did not emerge from the modern school.”24 In other words, the ḥeder gave rise to experts in Hebrew literature. Schools, in Katsenelson’s view, had not produced that kind of brilliance. At the beginning of the twentieth century the dominant viewpoint among nationalists was that the ḥeder provided Jewish children with an important part of a total educational package. However, the ḥeder needed to be supplemented by secular studies. Both the ḥeder and the school were needed, but ideally they would not be separate but joined in a single institution. Serious discussions of how to restructure the relationship between the school and the ḥeder took front-and-center place in the first journal devoted to Jewish education in Russia, Evreiskaia shkola. The journal, which appeared monthly for almost two years from 1904 to 1905, expressed the nationalist viewpoint that assimilation was the primary danger to the Jewish people and was much more dangerous than antisemitism. Among the contributors were some of the major intellectuals in the Jewish scene: V. O. Harkavy, Dubnov, Avram Idelson, Jacob Katsenelson, Mikhail Krol, Miron Kreinin, Pinkhus (Petr) Marek, A. Ravesman, Avram Konshtam, and Yakov Galpern. Arguing in favor of the ḥeder, individuals such as Marek, Kreinin, and Idelson insisted that it be included in any comprehensive Jewish educational program. Marek wrote: Over the course of two centuries, fifty years after their appearance in Russia, our modern schools for boys (state, private, and community schools) have barely reached 400 in the Pale of Settlement (outside Poland). In the Pale of Settlement, several tens of thousands of ḥeders can be counted. The simple comparison of these figures shows how little the opponents of ḥeders have accomplished in half a century. And if, instead of a politics of neglect for the ḥeder, on the contrary, we had paid it serious attention, and if, instead of 24 Ibid.

The Return of the H.eder among Russian-Jewish Education Experts, 1840–1917 11 an unrealizable dream about uniting it with the school, we had studied the conditions for the joint, equal, and peaceful coexistence of both schools and tried to help them cooperate, then our schools would function better than they do now.25

Marek added that it was an illusion to think that the school would “swallow” the ḥeder. More likely, the ḥeder would swallow the school.26 Because of the loyalty of Jewish parents to the ḥeder and the difficulty and expense of organizing two schools at once, the School Commission came to realize that no progress could occur without some idea of how the school interacted with the ḥeder. As one member put it, “naturally, the two contradictory systems of education cannot be justified by logical and practical considerations. A pedagogue must do everything in his power to diminish the abyss between the school and the ḥeder in order to bring them as much as possible closer together.”27 Despite much hard work to promote the modern school, the fact became clear that a stalemate had occurred: the ḥeder could not replace the school, nor the school the ḥeder. Simultaneously, it was equally impossible to unite them in a single institution, as much as the educators wanted to. The problem was the uncompromising difference in programs and goals and the difference in the kind of teachers that each school required. For one thing, legally, secular courses could not be introduced into the ḥeder. Moreover, the institutions catered to different audiences: attendance in the ḥeder was the natural decision for parents in areas where traditional Jewish life was still strong, such as the northwestern territories, while secular schools were popular in the south. For example, in the southwest in 1903, there were eighteen reformed ḥeders (modern schools), which had been established by medical doctors.28 The idea of gaining information about ḥeders had actually been realized to an extent by the beginning of the twentieth century. In fact, as early as 1895, OPE, in collaboration with the Russian Imperial Free Economic Society 25 Pinkhus (Pyotr) Marek, “Natsionalizatsiia vospitaniia i evreiskie uchebnye zavedeniia,” Evreiskaia shkola 3 (1904): 9. 26 Marek, “Natsionalizatsiia vospitaniia,” 10. 27 Pinkhus (Pyotr) Marek, “Nabliudeniia i vyvody po shkol’nomu voprosu,” Nedel’naia khronika Voskhoda 20 (1902): 6. 28 Miron Kreinin, “Nabliudeniia po shkol’nomu delu,” Nedel’naia khronika Voskhoda 5 (1903): 15.

12 PART I | Russian-Jewish Historians and Historiography

(Imperatorskoe vol’noe ekonomicheskoe obshchestvo), set out to learn more about “Jewish home schools,” their name for the ḥeders. Sending a questionnaire to several hundred state rabbis and civic leaders, the School Commission hoped to “gain a full portrait of folk education in [the] country.”29 The questions focused on the age and experience of the melamed, the number of students in each school, and whether the students attended other schools besides the ḥeder. In addition, members of the OPE School Commission wanted to know if Russian was taught and whether Yiddish was used in teaching Torah. From this and from another survey conducted in 1898–99, members of the OPE School Commission were able to get reliable statistics about ḥeders.30 According to the Jewish Colonialization Association ( JCA), there were approximately 24,540 ḥeders in a population of 4,874,636 Jews. According to these statistics, there were thirteen students per ḥeder in the Pale, which meant that there were 343,000 children in ḥeders, plus another 20,000 in organized schools. Combined, these figures give a total of 363,000 Jewish elementary school students in the Pale.31 According to this survey, in ḥeders 95 percent were boys and only 5 percent were girls.32 This fact was surprising because it differed radically from other groups in the empire. For example, although Muslims also refused to part with folk schools, 17 percent of the students in Muslim schools were girls. Educational experts also asserted that among students, the largest group in the ḥeder was under school age, seven years old (23 percent). In addition, the majority of students came from the so-called middle class (55 percent), as opposed to the poor (28 percent) or wealthy (17 percent). The concept of middle class may be misleading, however, since it meant a family with a single room to themselves. 29 S. Aviromov et al., “Sovremennyi kheder, kak ob’’ekt issledovaniia,” Nedel’naia khronika Voskhoda 12 (1895): 308. 30 Spravochnaia kniga po voprosam obrazovaniia evreev: Posobie dlia uchitelei i uchitel’nits evreiskikh shkol i deiatelei po narodnomu obrazovaniiu (St. Petersburg: Obshchestvo dlia rasprostranenie prosveshcheniia, 1901), 287. In the second investigation, educational experts from the Imperial Free Economic Society took interviews from various locations and their findings were compared with responses from the OPE questionnaire. On the Free Economic Society, see Joan Pratt, “The Russian Free Economic Society, 1765–1915,” (PhD diss., University of Missouri-Columbia, 1983). 31 Aviromov et al., “Sovremennyi kheder,” 293. 32 Adler, “Private Schools for Jewish Girls,” 74–77.

The Return of the H.eder among Russian-Jewish Education Experts, 1840–1917 13

The study also found that for the most part the ḥeder teacher was either a representative of the synagogue—the gabai, for example—or someone who had failed at another profession.33 He could be a former contractor, storeowner, confectioner, or craftsman. Often such melamedim were older men. Among the melamedim in the Kiev district, for example, 66 percent were between the ages of forty and sixty. The majority received some training in a yeshiva, although about 25 percent had left the yeshiva by the age of sixteen. The statistics supported prejudices regarding the average melamed’s lack of skill. According to statistics from OPE, each student paid on average twenty-five roubles annually in cities and eighteen roubles in rural regions. Adding up the number of ḥeders with these prices, the investigators calculated that Jews spent between 6.5 and 7.5 million roubles on ḥeders every year. Furthermore, the ḥeder composed 31 percent of the total of “unorganized” schools in the empire, which showed that Jews were particularly attached to their traditional “folk” education. In the years following the revolution of 1905, some educators had come around to the view that the best school was the so-called ḥeder metukan (improved ḥeder). Zionists in particular were enamored of the ḥeder metukan because it permitted a mixed curriculum and was designed to teach and use Hebrew in the classroom.34 At the same time, under the influence of what appeared to be life-changing events, OPE professionals lost interest in the ḥeder as optimism grew in the society’s ability to expand the school program throughout the country. Unfortunately, events unfolded in ways that were inimical to these plans. In the last years before the First World War many intellectuals came out strongly in favor of the ḥeder, reversing their former views. In a meeting of OPE with its provincial members in 1912, speaker after speaker defended the ḥeder, attributing to it the virtue of keeping the Jewish people united and strong.35 The thrust of the discussion pivoted around the indifference of Jews to Judaism, the threat of assimilation, and the potential dissolution of the Jewish people. 33 Sovremennyi kh .eder po obsledovaniiu OPE (St. Petersburg: s.n., 1912), 14. 34 Zevi Scharfstein, Toledot hahinukh beyisra’el bedorot ha’aharonim ( Jerusalem: Re’uven Mas, 1960–65), 2:42–47. 35 The proceedings were published as Otchet o soveshchanii komiteta OPE s predstavitel’iami otdelenii, 25–27 dekabria 1912 (St. Petersburg: Obshchestvo dlia rasprostranenie prosveshcheniia, 1913).

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Hayim Nahman Bialik, the renowned Hebrew poet, fulminated against the intelligentsia’s traditional attitude toward the ḥeder: “For the past fifty years ‘smart thinking’ excluded a concern with Jewish subjects, the Bible was something religious, rather than educational. Pushkin, yes, he’s a poet, but Jewish poets—why should one know them? . . . Your child, the generation you brought up lies dead. The living child, the future Jewish generation, is ours. And we will not give him up!”36 Bialik’s hostility was perhaps too simple, since he characterized the Zionists as defenders of everything Jewish and everyone else as defectors from a just cause. Nevertheless, his passionate speech in favour of the ḥeder in 1912 was influential. For example, even Hayim Fialkov, the leading educator of OPE, changed his mind about reforming ḥeders: “Vilna’s improved ḥeders show how one can initiate huge projects if one wants to meet the needs of the broad masses of Jews . . . I want to acknowledge respect for those who labour on behalf of these schools, whose activities do not entirely coincide with our educational ideals.”37 Words went together with action. In 1911 the St. Petersburg OPE established a Ḥeder Commission.38 The goal of the commission was to incorporate the ḥeder into the society’s school program. As a consequence, St. Petersburg sent four educational experts to different areas: the southwest, Volhynia, Lithuania, and Poland. The research was published in 1912 in a volume entitled, The Contemporary Ḥeder According to an OPE Study.39 Acknowledging the importance of the ḥeder for Jewish life, the editors nonetheless expressed overwhelmingly negative opinions. That conclusion did not interfere with expressions of nostalgia, however: Despite our consciousness of the extremely anti-pedagogical, distorted and often distorting aspects of the ḥeder, we nevertheless feel that this special ancient school of traditional Judaism has left an intimate mark on our soul. The ḥeder with its unique Jewish atmosphere, in spite of all its dark aspects, 36 37 38 39

Otchet o soveshchanii komiteta OPE 19; see also Zipperstein, Imagining Russian Jewry, 48–57. Otchet o soveshchanii komiteta OPE, 34. It was the second in the society: Odessa had opened a h .eder Commission in 1904. Sovremennyi kh  .eder po obsledovaniiu OPE. It was also published in Vestnik obshchestva rasprostraneniia prosveshcheniia mezhdu evreiami v Rossii 17 (1912). The teachers who travelled to carry out the study were S. Avirom (south), I. Shulkovsky (Volhynia), F. Shapiro (Lithuania), and B. Alperin (Poland).

The Return of the H.eder among Russian-Jewish Education Experts, 1840–1917 15 has a warm spot in our distant memories, and together with the synagogue gives strength to our connection with Judaism.40

The scholars concluded that, while it had much to offer the modern Jewish school, the ḥeder itself had to be transformed. On the eve of war the educational experts among the Jewish intellectuals embraced the notion that they had to be involved in the running of ḥeders, in curricular development, in teacher training, and in reform of the institution’s format—from the form of the chairs to the location of instruction. It is hard to say what would have happened had war not broken out, but the war changed the situation drastically. Jewish educators reacted slowly to the war. The chaos that interfered with Jewish civil life can only be imagined: men were drafted, women found themselves without work, and families were exposed in the war zones. It was only in August 1915 that Jewish organizations in Russia—members of the Jewish Committee for the Relief of Victims of War (Evreiskii komitet pomoshchi zhertvam voiny), the Society for the Preservation of the Health of the Jewish Population (Obshchestvo okhraneniia zdorov’ia evreiskogo naseleniia), OPE, and JCA—organized a meeting to coordinate efforts and assign responsibilities. The job of organizing schools for refugees was turned over to OPE. By the end of 1915 OPE had opened or subsidized ninety-three schools—eighteen for boys, sixteen for girls, and fifty-nine mixed.41 In 1916 the number of schools and ḥeders supported by OPE already reached 222, serving 29,688 students. Although the St. Petersburg OPE was working with a limited budget, OPE leaders immediately understood the need to expand their reach. They turned to Russian Jewry with a plea for money: We believe that if Jewry’s vital forces work together, the destructive whirlwind of war will pass over our heads without rupturing our internal life, which would occur if we were not organized. The ark of our cultural life, the Jewish school, must survive the present deluge. Twenty centuries ago the Jewish school saved our nation when it stood on Jerusalem’s ruins.

40 Sovremennyi kh .eder po obsledovaniiu OPE, 3. 41 “Otchet o deiatel’nosti komiteta Obshchestva za 1914–1917,” n.d., RGIA, f. 1532, op. 1, d. 1308, l. 16.

16 PART I | Russian-Jewish Historians and Historiography The school will save our present generation after the collapse of the Polish– Lithuanian cultural center.42

The appeal was signed by leading educators: Hayim Fialkov, A. Strashun, E. Kantor, and S. Groisman. OPE experts set out to design a curriculum for schools for refugees that would be familiar and would contain a large selection of Jewish subjects. However, they made the fateful decision to use Yiddish as the language of instruction. This decision was based on the solid pedagogical grounds that Yiddish was the refugees’ native language: “The board is convinced that the Jewish school must replace that national environment which the children of refugees lost when they left their homes and faced the alienating, de-nationalizing influence of the new environment.”43 The decision also meant that the school resembled the traditional ḥeder.44 Educators in OPE explained, Concerning the language of instruction, besides Russian and Hebrew as subjects in their own right, all the other subjects in the school for refugees will be taught in most cases in Yiddish. In addition to general considerations about the significance of using one’s native language in teaching, one should also keep in mind that even at home these shtetl children did not attend normal 42 “Otchet o deiatel’nosti komiteta Obshchestva,” 11–12. 43 Ibid., 11. In his memoir Ben-Zion Dinur credits himself with the use of the students’ native language, since it made no sense to teach Baltic Jews whose native language was Russian or those students who were proficient in Yiddish. Actually, Dinur tried first to advance Hebrew as the language of the future Jewish state. He describes how the Yiddishists perceived him as a Hebraist and the Hebraists condemned him as a Yiddishist. See Ben-Zion Dinur, Biyeme milhamah umahpekhah: Zikhronot ureshumot miderekh hayim ( Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1960), 76. 44 See OPE na voine (Petrograd: Obshchestvo dlia rasprostraneniia prosveshcheniia mezhdu evreiami v Rossii, 1917), 13. In December 1914 OPE presented the government with a new charter for the Grodno Teachers Academy that requested general instruction in Yiddish and instruction of Jewish history in Hebrew. Although there was already some Yiddish in the school and a 1914 law permitted Yiddish (or any native language) to be used in elementary schools, the changes in the charter were requested to prepare teachers to offer a more intensely Jewish school experience. The government, however, rejected the new charter, making it more difficult for OPE to prepare teachers for schools that were closing the gap with the ḥeder.

The Return of the H.eder among Russian-Jewish Education Experts, 1840–1917 17 schools. They studied in ḥeders where they acquired knowledge of Hebrew, but they are total beginners when it comes to secular subjects. They have not been prepared for school. They do not even know how to study. We have to teach them how to pay attention and teach them discipline. The ḥeder, in which they studied independently, did not teach them these things. Children of various ages are coming to the school for refugees, therefore one has to use Yiddish.45

Although strong condescension towards traditional Jews is apparent from the St. Petersburg Jewish elite, especially in the claim that the refugees had to be taught to concentrate and that Yiddish had to be used because students of various ages studied together, the educators intended to promote real learning: “Simultaneous with the establishment of the old type of ḥeder, which undoubtedly will appear in these new communities, we will try to make several improvements.”46 Permitting children as young as six into the school, OPE leaders decided that the schools should have twenty-six or twenty-seven hours per week of instruction for the younger classes and up to thirty-six hours for the older ones. It was necessary to increase the school day, wrote one educator, in order to find time for secular subjects in addition to Hebrew, the Bible, Yiddish, and Jewish history.47 The length of the program was five years for boys and four for girls. It is impossible to deny both that the study of Yiddish as an academic subject was a novelty and that the decision to teach in Yiddish had ideological underpinnings. OPE leaders were strongly influenced by Semyon Dubnov’s ideas of cultural nationalism, especially his view that eastern European Jews formed a “center” with their own native culture. Although Dubnov favoured tri-linguism, the idea of the eastern European center presumed Yiddish as a legitimate language, while at the same time, Bundists and other Jewish socialists expropriated Yiddish as the language of the folk and the Jewish proletariat.48 45 Obshchestvo dlia rasprostraneniia prosveshcheniia mezhdu evreiami v Rossii na voine (St. Petersburg: Obshchestvo dlia rasprostranenie prosveshcheniia, 1918), 12–13. 46 OPE na voine, 8. 47 “Otchet o deiatel’nosti komiteta Obshchestva za mart–avgust 1916,” n.d., RGIA, f. 1532, op. 1, d. 1446, l. 2. 48 Semyon Dubnov, “O sovremennom sostoianni evreiskoi istoriografii,” Evreiskaia starina 1 (1910), 149–58.

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Yiddishists such as Kreinin, Saul Gintsburg, and Israel Zinberg viewed Yiddish as the national language of the Jewish people, powerfully influencing school policy.49 Hebrew, previously the darling of the nationalists, was still advanced by Zionists and older intellectuals who remembered the services Hebrew had rendered in the struggle for enlightenment. Nonetheless, a Yiddish-speaking school with Jewish subjects had a strong resemblance to the ḥeder, and the ḥeder was the model from which the educational experts built their wartime schools. The picture of Jewish education in the 1920s is part of the larger context of the communist government’s treatment of Russia’s Jews generally. As complicated as that story is, a few general observations can be made. Right away, the Zionists, the Bund, and the Communists established their own independent school programs.50 Nevertheless, with the outbreak of the Russian Civil War, Jews gravitated toward support for the Bolsheviks, viewing them as defenders against the pogrom making of the Whites. In time the Bolsheviks consolidated their power and the new regime made it more and more difficult for independent educational organizations to survive. In 1924 the Communist government uniformly closed all the ḥeders, eliminating in a single day an institution many centuries old and denying religious Jews and Zionists an institutional foothold. The attack on the ḥeder occurred simultaneously with attacks on Jewish religious institutions, synagogues, study houses, and rabbis.

49 Semyon Dubnov, Kniga zhizni: Materialy dlia istorii moego vremeni. Vospominaniia i razmyshleniia ( Jerusalem: Gesharim, 2004). 50 Jehoshua Gilboa, A Language Silenced: The Suppression of Hebrew Literature and Culture in the Soviet Union (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1982), 25–55.

CHAPTER 2 ‘Building a Fragile Edifice’: A History of Russian-Jewish Historical Institutions, 1860–1914

As national states began to develop in Western Europe during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, historical research was encouraged as a means of legitimizing them.1 Jewish historiography followed a different course. During most of the nineteenth century, European Jews were struggling for integration into their host societies, and educated Jews felt ambivalent about emphasizing Jewish difference. European states established government archives, departments of history in universities, and historical museums in their capital cities; Jews could not found equivalent institutions. European historians became paid professionals; Jewish historians remained amateurs. No Jewish historian in the early nineteenth century attained the celebrity status of a Jules Michelet, a Thomas Macauley, or a Leopold von Ranke. Not until Heinrich Graetz in the second half of the nineteenth century did the Jewish people produce a national historian.2 But Jewish historiography was not entirely undeveloped. In the German states in the 1820s, maskilim began to study Jewish history. However, in eastern Europe it took almost an entire century longer for historiography to free itself from a religious worldview that places responsibility for historical events   1 See Ernst Breisach, Historiography: Ancient, Medieval and Modern (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 228–29.   2 See Ismar Schorsch, From Text to Context: The Turn to History in Modern Judaism (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1994); also Salo Baron, History and Jewish Historians: Essays and Addresses (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1964).

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on God. At the same time the slow development of Jewish historiography was attributed to the absence of source material. In 1892 Simon Dubnov stated: [The Jewish historian] does not have any official government chronicles, but has to look for facts in the most usual and unusual places, in religious books, scientific, philosophical, or mystical writings, the authors of which “unintentionally expunged” historical material; in folktales, legends, prayers, or tombstones, and in the literature of those countries where Jews lived and where a chronicler or memoirist exploited a chance opportunity to speak about them.3

Complaining of his own lack of a reliable source of income, Dubnov observed that Jewish historians in Russia did not receive a state salary and were “left with only [their] inner strength and work at [their] own risk.”4 Dubnov correctly noted that there existed at the time no institution or study of eastern European Jewish history. An investigation of these institutions will illuminate the development of Jewish historiography in tsarist times. Russian Jewish historiography from 1800 to 1850 lacked academic standards that during the nineteenth century Russia’s Jews had established in a number of institutions. Often works of Jewish history consisted of nothing more than stories from the Bible infused with religious doctrines, such as God’s consideration for his people.5 Although some writers engaged with modern ideas, the early Russian maskilim lacked proper conceptual frameworks and understanding of historical evidence.6 From the 1840s and especially in the 1860s the tsarist government sought information about the structure and character of Jewish communities in order to pursue more effective policies with regard to the introduction of secular education into schools.7 Although some of the studies reveal anti-Jewish attitudes, the authors used evidence in a relatively sophisticated way, presenting statistics   3 Semyon Dubnov, “Geinrikh Grets, ego zhizn’ i trudy,” Voskhod, no. 3 (1892): 65.   4 Dubnov, “Geinrikh Grets,” 65.  5 Shmuel Feiner, Haskalah and History: The Emergence of a Modern Jewish Historical Consciousness, trans. Chaya Naor and Sondra Silverston (Portland, OR: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2002), 48.  6 Feiner, Haskalah and History, 1–2, 5.  7 Nathans, Beyond the Pale, 31–38.

‘Building a Fragile Edifice’: A History of Russian-Jewish Historical Institutions, 1860–1914 21

about income, education, and family institutions. Most of them appeared in the government-sponsored Zhurnal ministerstva narodnogo prosveshcheniia. In articles such as “Jewish Schools” and “In a Rabbinical Seminary,” officials provided a good deal of material on Jewish life.8 In fact, much of the work is of high quality because the authors were often converts who were both knowledgeable about Jewish life, having had a yeshiva education, and who had studied in Russian schools or universities.9 By the 1860s Jewish history writing had begun to expand beyond the religiously informed works of earlier periods. Samuel Joseph Fuenn’s Kiryah ne’emanah was published in 1860, and Moses Berlin’s Ocherk etnografii evreiskogo narodonaseleniia v Rossii appeared in 1861.10 These two works mixed examinations of contemporary Jewish life with studies of the past. As is typical of the historical work of this period, political goals were emphasized. Berlin’s study was sponsored by the Russian Ethnographic Society (Russkoe etnograficheskoe obshchestvo) and was conducted to gain information about the Jewish population, while Fuenn demonstrated that Jews deserved the full privileges of the city of Vilna as they had been there before the Russians had arrived. Avram Harkavy and Daniel Khvolson can be considered Russia’s first professional Jewish historians. In the 1850s the government sent them to study in Germany and later provided them with employment: both were offered chairs at the University of St. Petersburg on condition that they convert to Christianity. Harkavy rejected the offer and instead took a position in the National Library in St. Petersburg. They were both competent in several languages and familiar with the practice of history in Western Europe, and they often preferred to publish abroad. Early in their careers neither wrote about Jews in Russia: their research subjects, rabbinical writings and medieval texts, reflected the influence of the German Wissenschaft des Judentums.11 Later they both studied Russian   8 A. Gordon, “Evreiskaia uchilishcha,” Zhurnal ministerstva narodnogo prosveshcheniia (1859): 254–83; A. Gordon, “V ravvinskom uchilishche,” Zhurnal ministerstva narodnogo prosveshcheniia, no. 123 (1864): 136–45.   9 Vasily Shchedrin, “Jewish Bureaucracy in Late-Imperial Russia: The Phenomenon of Expert Jews, 1850–1917” (PhD diss., Brandeis University, 2010), 117. 10 Samuel Joseph Fuenn, Kiryah ne’emanah: . . . korot edot yisra’el be’ir vilna (Vilna, 1860); Moses Berlin, Ocherk etnografii evreiskogo narodonaseleniia v Rossii (St. Petersburg, 1861). 11 For the attitudes of Russian intellectuals to Wissenschaft des Judentums, see Horowitz, Jewish Philanthropy and Enlightenment, 39, 47.

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Jewish history. Khvolson wrote two monographs defending Jews against blood libels.12 Harkavy wrote “On the Language of the Jews Who Lived in Ancient Times in Russia” and “Tales of the Jewish Writers Regarding the Khazars and Their Kingdom.”13 The leaders of OPE, including Harkavy, who was its secretary, idealized Wissenschaft des Judentums and hoped that a Russian equivalent would facilitate Jewish integration in Russia.14 The society’s original charter had expressed an intention to “publish works of scholarship in Russian,” arguing that “until the government’s plan for the gradual conferral of the equal rights of Jews with the native citizens in civic affairs [is realized] . . . the leaders of our people and our society should call into existence a Jewish literature in the Russian language.”15 A contemporary had even noted that, “not only are non-Jewish scholars in Russia unfamiliar with the history and contemporary life of the Jews, but the Jews themselves do not know their own historical past and do not have even a rudimentary knowledge about Jewish achievements in theology, literature, and science.”16 For Jews, as for other disenfranchised groups such as the raznochintsy (non-aristocratic intellectuals), literary and historical work could facilitate entry into Russian society. Successful Jewish ventures into Russian historiography served to disprove claims that Jews lacked ability or that they kept themselves aloof from Russian society. The Jewish activist and journalist Menasheh Morgulis suggested the creation of a center in which anyone who wants to can dedicate himself to Jewish scholarship: “It is necessary to copy foreign Jews, organize scholars in seminaries and departments from which monographs in various disciplines of Jewish scholarship will pour forth annually. To our shame, I should add, we have not produced a single volume on the history of Jews in general and Russian Jews in particular.”17 12 Daniel Khvolson, Upotrebliayut-li evrei khristianskuyu krov’? Rassuzhdenie (St. Petersburg, 1879); Daniel Khvolson, O nekotorykh srednevekovykh obvineniiakh protiv evreev: Issledovanie po istochnikam (St. Petersburg, 1880); see also Andrew Reed, “For One’s Brothers: Daniil Abramovich Khvol’son and the Jewish Question in Russia, 1819–1911” (PhD diss., Arizona State University, 2013). 13 Avram Harkavy, Ob iazyke evreev, zhivshikh v drevnee vremia na Rusi, i o slavianskikh slovakh, vstrechaemykh u evreiskikh pisatelei (St. Petersburg, 1865); Avram Harkavy, Skazaniia evreiskikh pisatelei o khazarakh i khazarskom tsarstve (St. Petersburg, 1874). 14 Cherikover, Istoriia Obshchestva, 42. 15 Ibid., 34. 16 Ibid. 17 Morgulis, Voprosy evreiskoi zhizni, 219–20.

‘Building a Fragile Edifice’: A History of Russian-Jewish Historical Institutions, 1860–1914 23

In 1866 OPE published its first volume, Collection of Articles on Jewish Literature and History.18 Harkavy submitted a translation of A. Munk’s “Historical Sketch of the Philosophy of the Jews,” Morgulis offered “The Right of Inheritance according to Mosaic-Talmudic Law,” and Ilya Orshansky, “Talmudic Legends about Alexander the Great.” The only article that dealt with the present was “An Account of the Construction of a Jewish Cemetery and Monument to the Soldiers Who Fell in the Defence of Sevastopol.” The articles were too esoteric to be of much use to Jews trying to learn how to fit into Russian society and too specialized for Russians interested in contemporary Jewish life. According to Lev Levanda, a leading Jewish writer of the time, such a volume would have been important ten years earlier “when Jews writing in Russian were rare,”19 but it made little sense now that Jews were successfully publishing without the society’s help. Levanda asked who the intended audience was and noted that literate merchants, traders, and government officials would find a Jewish newspaper more useful than a new translation of Flavius Josephus. In fact, after Sion closed down in 1861, no Jewish newspaper in Russian appeared until 1869, when Aleksandr Tsederbaum began publishing Vestnik russkikh evreev in St. Petersburg and Den’ appeared in Odessa. Elias Tcherikower, the historian of Russian Jewry, explained the reasons for OPE’s meagre results in the 1860s: “You cannot create a literature solely by means of financial aid. The conditions were not right. . . . There were not enough talented, original writers.”20 Jews had just started to enter universities, and students were more concerned about gaining employment. As a result, most Jews studied medicine, because there were plenty of opportunities as doctors in the military, in hospitals, or even in private practice. The same could not be said about an academic, who had no recourse but to seek state employment, which in nearly all cases required conversion to Christianity. In addition to the problem of obtaining an education and reaching an audience, would-be historians had to face censorship by government and church authorities. Publication of OPE’s first volume was delayed for nearly four years. 18 “Protokoly OPE,” 17 November 1868, Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv, St. Petersburg, f. 1532, op. 1, d. 9, l. 36; Sbornik statei po evreiskoi istorii i literature, izdavaemyi obshchestvom dlia rasprostraneniia prosveshcheniia mezhdu evreiami v Rossii (St. Petersburg, 1866–67). 19 Lev Levanda, “L. Levanda k A. E. Landau,” Evreiskaia biblioteka 9 (1901): 57–58. 20 Cherikover, Istoriia Obshchestva, 125.

24 PART I | Russian-Jewish Historians and Historiography

Avram Harkavy complained that, “the religious censor levied a heavy blow to the task of Russifying the Jews.”21 After the second volume came out in 1867, the government withdrew permission for any further volumes. OPE sponsorship of historical studies nonetheless influenced the kind of work that was produced. Authority in OPE was very centralized, and the leaders, who tended to be the wealthier members, dictated conditions. This often interfered with OPE’s goal of reaching the Jewish masses. Thus, writers were assigned esoteric subjects that held no interest for their readers, who were still occupied with mastering the Russian language and obtaining rudimentary knowledge of Russian society. In the 1870s Jewish historiography in Russian no longer revolved around a single institution, such as OPE. After the closure of Den’, scholars, educators, and writers contributed to various periodicals, including the Hebrew-language Hamelits and the annual Jewish journal Evreiskaia biblioteka, published in St. Petersburg under the editorship of Alfred Landau.22 Evreiskaia biblioteka in particular tried to imitate the “thick” Russian monthlies that contained poetry, fiction, and reports from Russia and foreign countries, as well as historical studies. Because the advancement of Jewish rights had stalled, the political struggle overshadowed other goals.23 Historical research was directed primarily towards the examination of the condition of Jews in Russia, its causes, and the possibility of change. Sergey Bershadsky and Ilya Orshansky both responded to this challenge. Bershadsky investigated Jewish life in the northwest, especially Lithuania, using material from government archives.24 He concluded that Jews isolated 21 Avram Harkavy, letter to the Russian Holy Synod, 22 December 1866; see Horowitz, Jewish Philanthropy and Enlightenment, 40. Because passing the religious censors was so arduous, OPE decided not to wait for all the articles to be approved, but to divide the work into two parts and publish them separately. 22 See Yehuda Slutsky, Ha’itonut hayehudit-rusit bame’ah hatesha’esreh ( Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1970), 86–101. Ten volumes of Evreiskaia biblioteka: Istoriko-literaturnyi sbornik appeared between 1870 and 1903. 23 Benjamin Nathans, “Jews, Law, and the Legal Profession in Late Imperial Russia,” in Evrei v Rossii: Istoriia i kul’tura. Sbornik nauchnykh trudov, ed. Dimitry Elyashevich (St. Petersburg: Evreiskii universitet, 1998), 104. 24 See S. Bershadsky, “Privilegii Velikogo Kniazia Vitovta litovskim evreiam: Otryvok iz issledovanii evreev v Litve ot vremen Vitovta do Lyublinskoi unii,” Voskhod, nos. 7–12 (1882); “V izgnanii: Ocherki iz istorii litovskikh i pol’skikh evreev v kontse 15 veka,” Voskhod, nos. 1,

‘Building a Fragile Edifice’: A History of Russian-Jewish Historical Institutions, 1860–1914 25

themselves not because of hostility to non-Jews but solely to ensure their own safety. Acknowledging growing antisemitism in the Russian press, Bershadsky insisted that Jews were loyal members of society and that prejudice against them was misplaced. The fact that he was not Jewish gave his conclusions greater weight among Russians. Orshansky drew attention to a systematic bias in Russian law. Instead of the usual legal premise that whatever is not expressly prohibited is permitted, for Jews alone the opposite was true: whatever was not expressly permitted was prohibited.25 Orshansky concluded pessimistically that, although exceptions for individual Jews could be arranged, as a group, Jews had little hope of changing their situation without major reforms of the legal code, which he acknowledged was unlikely, as the attitudes that underpinned it remained strong. Nonetheless, Orshansky regarded antisemitism as temporary and claimed that capitalism would intensify integration and lead inevitably to Jewish assimilation, which would solve the problem of discrimination.26 His death in 1875 saved him from seeing how wrong he was. Pogroms broke out in 1881 and the anti-Jewish May Laws were implemented in 1882. In years immediately following the pogroms, OPE emerged from a decade of inactivity. Avram Harkavy hoped to spur efforts by concentrating on collecting source materials.27 In 1882 OPE helped fund the first of two volumes of Russko-evreiskii arkhiv, in which 660 documents from Bershadsky’s collection appeared.28 In his introduction, Harkavy paid tribute to Heinrich Graetz and called for further studies of Jews in Russian. In 1882 Harkavy also published

25 26 27

28

2, 4, 6–8 (1892). At the time of his death, several influential OPE members wrote obituaries: A. B. Braudo, “S. A. Bershadskii (podrobnoe izlozhenie ego osnovnykh vyvodov),” Voskhod, nos. 4, 11, 12 (1896); Maxim Vinaver, “Pamiati S. A. Bershadskogo,” Voskhod, nos. 5–10 (1897). See also “Sergei Bershadskii,” in Evreiskaia entsiklopediia, 4:340–47; and Paul Eric Soifer, “The Bespectacled Cossack: S. A. Bershadskii (1850–1896) and the Development of Russo-Jewish Historiography” (PhD diss., Pennsylvania State University, 1975). Ilya Orshansky, “Russkoe zakonodatel’stvo o evreiakh,” Evreiskaia biblioteka 3 (1872): 94. Ilya Orshansky, Evrei v Rossii: Ocherki ekonomicheskogo i obshchestvennogo byta russkikh evreev (St. Petersburg, 1877), 178–79. Harkavy was remembered by his colleagues in Baron D. v. Günzburg and I. Markon, eds., Festschrift zu Ehren des Dr. A. Harkavy aus Anlass seines am 20. November 1905 vollendeten siebzigsten Lebensjahres (St. Petersburg: Druck von H. Jitzkowski, 1908); see also I. Berlin, “A. Ya. Garkavi (k 50-letnemu yubileiu),” Evreiskaia starina 4 (1910): 592. Russko-evreiskii arkhiv: Dokumenty i materialy dlia istorii evreev v Rossii, vol. 1 (St. Petersburg, 1882).

26 PART I | Russian-Jewish Historians and Historiography

a Russian translation of the fifth volume of Graetz’s Geschichte der Juden von den ältesten Zeiten bis auf die Gegenwart. In response to claims in the press that Jews sought worldwide control, Harkavy echoed Graetz in saying that throughout history Jews had sought spiritual strength rather than political power.29 At OPE’s general meeting in 1887, Harkavy suggested establishing a commission for the “collection and study of material concerning the history of the Jewish people in general and Russian Jews in particular” in honour of Graetz’s seventieth anniversary, to be known as the Historical Ethnographic Commission (Istoriko-etnograficheskaia komissiia).30 The following year he was granted 150 rubles for the project.31 Harkavy expressed his list of what the group needed to accomplish: The unique historical documents concerning Jews located in state archives and private holdings need to be collected. All the material artifacts belonging to Jews need to be catalogued: for example, inscriptions on gravestones, manuscripts, and buildings. A collection of historical reports about Jews in all European and non-European languages needs to be compiled. The historical reports and information about Jews contained in the literary works of every country need to be classified. This huge work can be carried out only with the help of local historians in every country.32

He provided readers with his home address so that they could send him material directly. Harkavy promised to publish “reports about Jews from Russian chronicles and other Russian sources, stories by Jewish and other Eastern and Western writers about Russian Jews, the protocols of rabbinical congresses, community registers [pinkasim] from various cities of the country, ancient funerary inscriptions, and similar historical material,” although 29 On attacks on Jews in the Russian press, see John Doyle Klier, “I. S. Aksakov and the Jewish Question, 1862–1886,” in Evrei v Rossii: Istoriia i kul’tura, 155–74. 30 Otchet Obshchestva dlia rasprostraneniia prosveshcheniia za 1887 (St. Petersburg, 1888), 6. 31 Otchet Obshchestva dlia rasprostraneniia prosveshcheniia za 1888 (St. Petersburg, 1889), 7. 32 Avram Harkavy, “Ob izdanii russko-evreiskogo arkhiva,” in Russko-evreiskii arkhiv, ed. Sergei Bershadsky (St. Petersburg: Obshchestva rasprostranenie prosveshcheniia, 1882), 1:1.

‘Building a Fragile Edifice’: A History of Russian-Jewish Historical Institutions, 1860–1914 27

he acknowledged that a great deal more material had to be collected before scholars could sit down to write.33 He made a hierarchy of tasks: Compile a volume of evidence about Jews in Russian, Polish, Lithuanian, and Baltic chronicles; compile a collection of attitudes and ruminations of Russian and Polish historians regarding events that involved Jews; make a geographical atlas according to printed sources about Jews: that is, list all the cities and towns in Russia, Poland and Lithuania, and the Baltic provinces where Jews lived; compile a list of Slavonic Jewish names: that is, list all the Slavonic names and nicknames which are used by Jews; make a list of all Slavonic words that Yiddish has adopted and designate their dialectical origins; compile a volume of writings about Jews by church representatives from Russia, Poland, and other countries, especially from those authors who had personal relationships with Jews.34

He did not demand knowledge of Hebrew or Yiddish, as many of his coreligionists did not know Jewish languages. Maxim Vinaver described a meeting of the Historical Ethnographic Commission: Whoever peeked into this crowded room in which a play of personalities took place, would be amazed at the scene before him. Ten or fifteen people appeared, each with a packet of cards which he took out his pocket with pride, showing off the abundance of his catch. And the reading began. The unfortunates who had not succeeded in locating a single mention of the word zhid, looked depressed and confused and asked everyone to take them at their word that they had indeed read through the fat tome, alas, entirely fruitlessly.35

33 Harkavy, “Ob izdanii,” 6. 34 Avram Harkavy, “O zaniatiiakh komissii po istorii evreev pri obshchestve rasprostraneniia prosveshcheniia mezhdu evreiami v Rossii v 1893 g. (doklad, chitannyi A. Ya. Garkavi v obshchem sobranii obshchestva 28 sentiabria 1893 goda),” Voskhod, no. 1 (1894): 3. 35 Maxim Vinaver, “Kak my zanimalis’ istoriei,” in Evrei v rossiiskoi imperii XVIII–XIX vekov: Sbornik trudov evreiskikh istorikov, ed. A. E. Lokshin (Moscow: Evresikii universitet v Moskve, 1995), 70.

28 PART I | Russian-Jewish Historians and Historiography

None of the commission’s members were professional historians, although some had training in economics.36 However, most of the first generation were lawyers who had entered law school in Moscow or St. Petersburg before the quotas on Jewish enrollment in Russian institutions were fixed in 1887, and who had earned the right to live outside the Pale of Settlement by graduating from a Russian university. Their interests in law, politics, and journalism defined the historiography of an entire generation.37 Unlike earlier Jewish historians in Russia, such as Orshansky, who worked in relative isolation, Maxim Vinaver, Genrikh Sliozberg, Leon Bramson, and Abraham Passover joined together to study historical documents that could be of use in actual court cases. Furthermore, they were Russified and inspired by Russian populism, which promoted the rights of the underprivileged and disenfranchised. The corporate nature of Russian student groups with their emphasis on tolerance for minorities inspired many Jewish students with a commitment to service, self-sacrifice, and the ideals of equality and justice.38 The participants in the Historical Ethnographic Commission helped assemble a bibliography of the existing literature on Jews in Russian, which was published in 1892.39 According to the volume’s editor, Leon Bramson, the group intended to point to those particularities in the external condition and internal life of Russian Jews, which seemingly have been fully studied, but in actuality, hardly at all. For example, the question of the historical past of the Jews in ancient Russia, which is tightly linked with questions concerning their legal and social status in the present, has hardly been investigated. How little we know about the conditions of the personal and social life of Jews, although 36 Nathans, Beyond the Pale, 361. They were, however, prevented from attaining the highest honours in their profession. In accordance with the decree of 1884, Vinaver, Sliozberg, Bramson, and Oscar Gruzenberg were permitted to work as lawyers’ assistants, but they had to wait until new rules were introduced in 1904, to become fully qualified barristers. 37 Genrikh B. Sliozberg, Dela minuvshikh dnei: Zapiski russkogo evreia (Paris: Izd. Komiteta po chestvovaniiu 70-ti lietniago iubileia G. B. Sliozberga, 1933), 2:2. 38 Samuel D. Kassow, Students, Professors and the State in Tsarist Russia (Berkeley: University of California, 1989), 87. 39 V. I. Mezhov, Sistematicheskii ukazatel’ literatury o evreiakh na russkom iazyke so vremeni vvedeniia grazhdanskogo shrifta (1708 g.) po dekabr’ 1889 g. (St. Petersburg, 1892).

‘Building a Fragile Edifice’: A History of Russian-Jewish Historical Institutions, 1860–1914 29 people write indiscriminately about it. . . . A full and serious study of the history of the conditions of real life can result in something salutary only when one has a bibliography of the entire literary material that exists on this question that can serve as a basis for future works.40

It is something of a fortunate coincidence that, at the same time that the St. Petersburg OPE was expanding its support for historical studies, Semyon Dubnov was formulating a program for the study of Russian Jewish history.41 Like Harkavy, Dubnov envisioned the creation of a Russian Jewish historical society to promote Jewish historical studies but acknowledged that he did not have the resources or support.42 He decided that the next best thing was to begin systematically collecting materials. Dubnov’s evolution as a historian is complicated, as he united his historical work with the politics and ideology of Jewish nationalism.43 Intensely hostile to assimilation, Dubnov thought the more one knew about one’s history, the more intense one’s feeling of national identity. In Letters on Old and New Judaism, Dubnov articulated his principles 40 Sistematicheskii ukazatel’ literatury, 5. 41 Dubnov, Kniga zhizni, 221–31. See also Robert M. Seltzer, “Simon Dubnow: A Critical Biography of his Early Years” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1970); Robert M. Seltzer, “From Graetz to Dubnov: The Impact of the East European Milieu on the Writing of Jewish History,” in The Legacy of Jewish Migration: 1881 and its Impact, ed. David Berger (New York: Brooklyn College Press, 1983), 49–60; Koppel S. Pinson, “Simon Dubnow: Historian and Political Philosopher,” in Nationalism and History: Essays on Old and New Judaism, by Simon Dubnow, ed. Koppel S. Pinson (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1958), 3–65; R. Mahler, “Shitat dubnov umif’alo behistoriografyah hayehudit,” in Simon Dubnow: The Man and his Work, ed. Aron Steinberg (Paris: World Jewish Congress, 1963); Y. Rosenthal, “He’historiografyah hayehudit berusyah hasovyetit veshim’on Dubnov,” in Sefer Shim’on Dubnov, ed. Simon Rawidowicz (London: Ararat Publishing, 1954), 201–20; David H. Weinberg, Between Tradition and Modernity: Haim Zhitlowski, Simon Dubnow, Ahad Ha-Am, and the Shaping of Modern Jewish Identity (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1996), 145–216; Shneur Levenberg, “Simon Dubnov, Historian of Russian Jewry,” Soviet Jewish Affairs 12, no. 1 (1982). 42 Semyon Dubnov, Ob izuchenii istorii russkikh evreev i ob uchrezhdenii Russko-evreiskogo istoricheskogo obshchestva (St. Petersburg, 1891), 78; originally published in Voskhod, no. 4 (1891): 1–91. Members of the society would devote themselves to the collection and analysis of material pertaining to the history of Jews in eastern Europe exclusively. Dubnov thought that collecting the material would take at least fifteen years. 43 Semyon Dubnov, Pis’ma o starom i novom evreistve (St. Petersburg: Obshchestvennaya pol’za, 1907); see Simon Rabinovitch, “Diaspora, Nation, and Messiah,” in Jews and Diaspora Nationalism: Writings on Jewish Peoplehood in Europe and the United States (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2012), 22–24.

30 PART I | Russian-Jewish Historians and Historiography

in an attempt to convince Russian readers to join his diaspora nationalist political party, the Folkspartay.44 By 1910 Dubnov had fully articulated a sociological conception of history. In opposition to Graetz’s view that Jewish creativity was revealed in the great works of sages and rabbis, Dubnov stressed the achievements of the Jewish community: its political, educational, and cultural institutions. In different times and places, he maintained, Jews established strong institutions that promoted self-governance, economic survival, and autonomous culture. Positive examples included the institution of the exilarch in ancient Babylonia and the Va’ad Arba Aratsot (Council of Four Lands) in Poland in the seventeenth century. As a non-Zionist, Dubnov did not believe Palestine would provide a solution for the Jewish people. Dubnov inspired the amateur historians of St. Petersburg because he offered a plan of action. In response to their requests for advice, he counselled them to view the commission as a surrogate for the future independent historical society that could not “be legally established within the conditions of police control existing at that time.”45 During the 1890s the first generation of professional Jewish historians appeared: those who held a university degree in humanistic studies. In this group were Yuly Gessen, Mikhail Kulisher, Saul Gintsburg, Israel (Sergey) Zinberg, David Gintsburg, Elias Tcherikower, Joseph Klausner, Isaiah Trunk, and Ben-Zion Dinur (Dinaburg). These scholars, who worked as journalists, editors, and teachers, wrote in Russian, Hebrew, and Yiddish. The majority supported the idea of Jewish nationalism. Although he was without a proper university degree, in 1904 Dubnov was invited to teach at the Higher Courses of P. F. Lesgaft in St. Petersburg by OPE. He considered St. Petersburg the center of Jewish intellectual life in Russia but had difficulty in obtaining permission to live there permanently.46 Following the revolution of 1905 the OPE School Commission left the par­ ent organization and formed a new body whose purpose was the establishment of a Jewish university. In December 1906 David Gintsburg organized a meeting 44 Simon Rabinovitch, Jewish Rights, National Rites: Nationalism and Autonomy in Late Imperial and Revolutionary Russia (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2014), 99–100. 45 Dubnov, Kniga zhizni, 164. 46 Ibid., 290.

‘Building a Fragile Edifice’: A History of Russian-Jewish Historical Institutions, 1860–1914 31

with his father, Horace, his father’s assistant, David Feinberg, and the scholars I. Markon and Dubnov to design a Jewish college.47 Although the government was initially hostile, David Gintsburg, Russia’s wealthiest Jew, had influence, and he ultimately gained the necessary permission. The government insisted on one condition, that the institution had to hide the school’s Jewish character: it was called Vysshie kursy vostokovedeniia (Higher Courses in Eastern Studies).48 The first semester started in January 1908, with twenty-two students enrolled.49 In the school’s second year, three women were enrolled. According to Dubnov, the majority of the students were self-taught provincials, university auditors, and former yeshiva bokhers (youth) who were educated in Jewish subjects but did not possess a secular education. Only a few students satisfied the definition of “educated,” the handful of university students who came to our evening lectures. There were also a few girls from the Advanced Women’s Courses (Bestuzhev Institute).50 In theory the institution offered a full curriculum worthy of the best rabbinical seminaries.51 First-year students were to be introduced to Aramaic, Torah, Talmud and Midrash, the history of the Jews in general and of Russian Jews specifically, Jewish literature and liturgy, medieval Arabic philosophy, and medieval Hebrew poetry. The curriculum 47 Z. Shazar, “Raboteinu bebeit midrasho shel Baron Gintsburg,” He-Avar 6 (1958): 88–100. 48 Dubnov, Kniga zhizni, 282. According to Dubnov, the “government did not want the Higher Courses to have a Jewish name and therefore covered this blemish with the epithet ‘Eastern Studies,’ which [Gintsburg] suggested, having been a former student of the Eastern faculty [of St. Petersburg University] and a student of the Orientalist Daniel Khvolson” (ibid., 292). 49 To increase the prestige and visibility of the school, the advisory committee included individuals from eighteen cities, including London, New York, Berlin, and Frankfurt. Friends from Moscow were generous with donations. 50 Dubnov, Kniga zhizni, 292–93. 51 “Protokoly zasedanii popechitel’nogo komiteta i pedagogicheskogo soveta Kursov vostokovedeniia za 1908,” n.d., RGIA, f. 5312, op. 1, d. 952, ll. 7–9. During the first semester David Gintsburg offered three courses: medieval Judaism, Arabic, and the Book of Job; Horace Gintsburg taught a course on the Talmudic tractate, Sanhedrin; Dubnov offered an introduction to Jewish history; Lev Katsenelson gave a course on the Mishnah; A. Zarzovsky taught an introductory course on the Hebrew Bible; V. Ashkenazi taught pedagogy; Daniel Khvolson taught Hebrew; and Mark Wischnitzer taught medieval Jewish history. German and French languages were obligatory. The courses were offered in the evening, from 7–11 p.m., first in the building of the St. Petersburg Jewish Gymnasium and later in its own building.

32 PART I | Russian-Jewish Historians and Historiography

continued with courses in world history and the history of philosophy, as well as in Russian history and literature. French and German were subsequently added. A similar collection of courses was assigned for the following five years.52 Although the program was impressive on paper, there were not enough faculty members or students. In fact, the faculty consisted primarily of OPE members, which irritated Dubnov because he felt that the courses were insufficiently rigorous. Dubnov was especially unforgiving towards David Gintsburg, whose lectures he regarded as epitomizing the school’s flaws: It was closer to something amateurish, intellectual sport, than a scholarly lecture. Two of [Ginsburg’s] “Eastern” protégés gave similar chaotic lectures: a bit about the Khazars, the geonim, the Talmud, and so on. It was painful to watch the unsatisfactory realization of such a good idea, but I still hoped that in time the school would improve, in all likelihood by means of natural selection among the teachers.53

Dubnov was too harsh in his judgment. The term “amateur” does not seem appropriate for such scholars as Ginsburg, Khvolson, and Lev Katsenelson. The finest Jewish historians of the time, Dubnov, Gessen, and Zinberg were self-taught (Zinberg had a degree in chemistry). Russian universities taught biblical Hebrew, but offered no courses in Jewish history. However, rather than denigrate these men for their lack of institutional training, their remarkable contribution should be acknowledged. The breadth of courses indicates that Ginsburg and Dubnov were trying to establish a genuine institution of higher Jewish learning. In the school’s archive are reports on the rabbinical institutes of Padua, Breslau, New York, and Cincinnati, and similarities in programs show that Ginsburg and Dubnov were trying to emulate them.54 Just as at these more illustrious institutions, the Higher Courses in Eastern Studies were supposed to prepare modern rabbis as well as scholars. 52 “Programma uchebnykh predmetov, izuchaemykh na Kursakh vostokovedeniia,” n.d., Tsentral’nyi gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv, St. Petersburg, 2049-2-53: 2505. 53 Dubnov, Kniga zhizni, 293. 54 “Protokoly zasedanii popechitel’nogo komiteta,” 9–10.

‘Building a Fragile Edifice’: A History of Russian-Jewish Historical Institutions, 1860–1914 33

In 1907 the Historical Ethnographic Commission also broke away from OPE to form its own body, the Jewish Historical Ethnographic Society (Evreiskoe istoriko-etnograficheskoe obshchestvo). As recognition of his determination and stature, Dubnov was elected to the leadership, as was Vinaver. A scholarly journal, Evreiskaia starina, edited by Dubnov, was supposed to appear four times a year.55 The constitution gives a sense of the society’s mission: The Jewish Historical Ethnographic Society has the goal of (a) the study of all fields of Jewish history and ethnography and (b) a concern with theoretical questions of historical and ethnographic scholarship. For the attainment of this aim, the society: (a) organizes meetings of its members for scientific exchange; (b) organizes public readings on questions of Jewish history and ethnography with proper permission; (c) publishes books, collections, and journals, according to the laws regarding these things; (d) proposes tasks and for their accomplishment offers monetary awards and stipends. The expanse of the society’s activity is the entire territory of the Russian empire.56

The wide scope of the society’s activities was impressive. Dubnov envisioned scholarly conferences and support for book publishing and imagined heated discussions of methodological questions. Although he was interested in Jewish history from the Bible to the present, he limited the geographical focus of the society to eastern Europe. The journal, Evreiskaia starina, was supposed to provide scientific treatment of Jewish history and ethnography primarily in Poland and Russia. “In [it] will appear research from first-hand sources and rare materials, documentary materials in the original and translations, exemplary sketches and monographs, memoirs, correspondence, lists of new books (in all areas of

55 Evreiskaia starina survived until 1930. It came out regularly from 1909 until 1915. During the war, censorship caused delays and Hebrew script could not be used: there was one issue a year in 1915, 1916, and 1918. Lev Shternberg took over the editorship when Dubnov emigrated in 1922. He managed to produce one issue in 1924 and one in 1928. The last issue appeared in 1930. 56 “Izvlechenie iz ustava evreiskogo istoriko-etnograficheskogo obshchestva,” Evreiskaia starina 2 (1910): 64–66.

34 PART I | Russian-Jewish Historians and Historiography

Jewish knowledge), and information about the activity of the Jewish Historical Ethnographic Society.”57 Evreiskaia starina became a formidable vehicle for the realization of Dubnov’s vision for Jewish historiography, because it provided space for the publication of archival materials, original research, book reviews, and speeches from the society’s meetings. Thanks to Dubnov’s reputation, the Jewish Historical Ethnographic Society attracted the finest scholars. Not only did well-known figures, such as Ben-Ami (Mordecai Rabinovich), Lev Sternberg, Majer (Meir) Balaban, Yuly Gessen, and Israel Zinberg, contribute but the journal served to cultivate new talent. The first works of Majer (Meir) Balaban, Israel Sosis, and Mark Wischnitzer appeared in Evreiskaia starina. In his memoirs, Dubnov claimed that his single-minded dedication kept the journal alive.58 He complained about shortages of funds and weak scholarship and lamented that “activity expands extremely slowly.”59 Dubnov was especially distraught that the society seemed distant from current events in Russia: “It is painful to reconcile oneself to the thought that at the moment of the birth of national self-consciousness, the Jewish intelligentsia is doing so little for the development of the institution called upon to deepen and strengthen national consciousness.”60 However, Evreiskaia starina played a central role in early twentieth-century Jewish historiography, offering its own conception of eastern European Jewish history. Chronologically, its articles spanned the period from the early Middle Ages to its present, covering such topics as economics, politics, education, and culture. According to Abraham Duker: The activities of the [ Jewish Historical Ethnographic] Society were many and varied. . . . Its most important activity was the publication of the Evreiskaia Starina quarterly, the first two volumes of which appeared in 1909. Works on Jewish history in Russia have appeared in many 57 Ibid. 58 See Viktor Kelner, Missioner istorii: Zhizn’ i trudy Semena Markovicha Dubnova (St. Petersburg: Mir, 2008), 405–6. 59 Semyon Dubnov, “Prilozhenie,” Evreiskaia starina 1 (1912): 2. 60 Dubnov, “Prilozhenie,” 2.

‘Building a Fragile Edifice’: A History of Russian-Jewish Historical Institutions, 1860–1914 35 Russo-Jewish periodicals. But here we have an organized and ably edited periodical devoted almost entirely to the study of this problem. This was the first organized attempt in the field of Jewish history in Eastern Europe, and as such it has succeeded in becoming a scholarly magazine of the first rank.61

Although Dubnov promoted a vision of kelal yisra’el (“all of Israel,” or, adherence to the Jewish people regardless of class or politics), its contributors represented different political positions, and the current situation was often addressed indirectly. It would be hard to read about blood libels in the past without thinking about the Mendel Beilis Affair, which took place between 1911 and 1913. Dubnov himself wrote about Jews under the antisemitic regime of Alexander III.62 Several scholars, including Jeffrey Veidlinger and Anke Heilbrenner, have argued that the journal adopted the values and assumptions of the state and that there was a pro-Russian bias in the editors’ choice and treatment of political questions. For example, Veidlinger points to the implied recognition of the borders of the Russian empire and its institutions.63 However, the Jewish Historical Ethnographic Society followed Dubnov’s liberal and nationalist politics, which reflected ambivalence toward the Bund and radicalism generally, and only tepid support for Zionism.64 As important as Dubnov was, he and his fellow nationalists did not have an ideological monopoly. Several historians rejected the use of historical studies to promote political programs. Perhaps the most well known of what one might call the empirical group was Yuly Gessen, who studied the economic, 61 Abraham G. Duker, “Evreiskaia Starina: A Bibliography,” Hebrew Union College Annual 8–9 (1931–32): 525–26. 62 Semyon Dubnov, “Iz istorii vos’midesiatykh godov,” Evreiskaia starina 8 (1915). 63 Jeffrey Veidlinger, “Simon Dubnow Recontextualized: The Sociological Conception of Jewish History and Russian Intellectual Legacy,” Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 3 (2004): 411–27; Anke Hilbrenner, Diaspora-Nationalismus. Zur Geschichtskonstruktion Simon Dubnows, Schriften des Simon-Dubnow-Instituts 7 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014), 219–20. 64 Brian Horowitz, “Semyon Dubnov’s Ideological Challenge in Emigration: Autonomism and Zionism, Europe and Palestine,” Scripta Judaica Cracoviensia 11 (2013): 11–20.

36 PART I | Russian-Jewish Historians and Historiography

political, and social life of Jews in relation to the government.65 Dubnov was critical of Gessen, because he thought his project was part of Russian history, not of Jewish history.66 Dubnov wanted to separate historical works into two categories, the study of Jewish society from within and the study of the attitudes of non-Jews towards Jews, but the distinction was not that clear-cut. Many important works by Russian Jewish historians belong in the latter category, such as those of Boris Brutskus and Jacob Lestschinsky.67 Closer to Dubnov’s own work were the investigations of Haskalah literature by Zinberg and Klausner.68 However, some excellent monographs fit neither category. Ginsburg and Sosis depicted the Jewish intelligentsia in the nineteenth century from both internal and external perspectives.69 By providing a public forum for ideas and research, Evreiskaia starina played an important role in professionalizing the study of Russian Jewry. In the decade before the First World War journals devoted to historical research on eastern European Jewry in Russian proliferated, such as Perezhitoe: Sbornik, posviashchennyi istorii i kul’ture russkikh evreev and Evreiskaia mysl’. Additionally, Hebrew writers found a home in Hashilo’ah, and Yiddish writers in Der Fraynd, among others.70 The vibrancy of the times can be perceived in the sixteen-volume Evreiskaia entsiklopediia: Svod znanii o evreistve i ego kul’ture v proshlom i nastoiashchem (Jewish Encyclopedia: A Body of Knowledge about Jewry and Its Culture in the Past and Present) that appeared between 1907 and 1913. It was a major accomplishment because the articles were original and produced with a particular focus on the history of the Jews in Russia. The preface to the first 65 See Yuly Gessen, Evrei v Rossii: Ocherki obshchestvennoi, pravovoi i ekonomicheskoi zhizni russkikh evreev (Moscow: Tip. A. G. Rozena, 1906). 66 See Kelner, Missioner istorii, 501. 67 Boris Brutskus, Professional’nyi sostav evreiskogo naseleniia Rossii: Po materialam pervoi vseobshchei perepisi naseleniia 1897 goda (St. Petersburg: Siever, 1908); Jacob Lestschinsky, Vilenskaia Evreiskaia obshchina: Ee uchrezhdeniia i financy (Kiev: Idisher Folksvarlag, 1911). 68 On Zinberg, see Galina Eliasberg, ‘. . . Odin iz prezhnego Peterburga’: S. L. Tsinberg—istorik evreiskoi literatury, kritik i publitsist (Moscow: Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi gumanitarnyi universitet, 2005); on Klausner, see Sincha Kling, Joseph Klausner (New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1970). 69 Saul M. Ginsburg, Historishe verk, 3 vols. (New York: Tsiko Bikher-Verlag, 1937); Joseph Klausner, Historiyah shel ha-sifrut ha-‘Ivrit ha-hadashah, 6 vols. (Jerusalem: Ahi’asaf, 1949–54). 70 Avraham Greenbaum, “Newspapers and Periodicals,” in YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 2:1260–68.

‘Building a Fragile Edifice’: A History of Russian-Jewish Historical Institutions, 1860–1914 37

volume demonstrates the ambitions of the Russian Jewish historians. The editors, among them Dubnov, Ginsburg, and Katsenelson, boasted of expansive ambitions: The task of the Jewish Encyclopedia is to give, as much as is possible according to contemporary science, a full representation of Jewry, its historical fates, its centuries-long cultural creativity, and its contemporary conditions in every country. In this “universe of knowledge about Jewry and its culture in the past and present” every period of Jewish history is represented: the ancient or biblical, Judaeo-Hellenic, medieval talmudic and rabbinic, early modern and modern. In addition every aspect of spiritual and material creativity of the Jewish people [is covered]: religion, philosophy, literature, law, social-economic forms, quotidian affairs, folklore, and linguistics. Biblical and Judaeo-Hellenic texts, the Talmud, rabbinic writings, kabbalah, religious philosophy, reformism, and the writings of the new humanist and national movements [are also treated].71

Here is manifested the enormous advance of Jewish historiography in Russia from its origins to the start of the First World War. From an inauspicious beginning, Russia’s Jews had created a sizeable body of Jewish knowledge. Russian Jewish historiography had reached its highest stage of quantity and quality. This accomplishment was especially impressive because for most of that time Jews had little political power, no government support, and difficult economic prospects. Moreover, Russian Jewish society contained many powerful religious traditionalists who were far from sympathetic to the whole historiographical project. During the Soviet period Jewish historians would be scattered across the globe in their search for safety and livelihoods, but for a brief period Russian Jewish history had reached heights equal to those of the greatest Jewish cultures in any time and place.

71 “Ot izdatelei,” in Evreiskaia entsiklopediia, 1:iii.

CHAPTER 3 Myths and Counter-Myths about Odessa’s Jewish Intelligentsia during the Late Tsarist Period

When one hears of Odessa today, it is not the city that exists that comes into mind, but the multi-layered myth of the city—the Odessa myth. The landscape, the buildings and places, its historical events, and its famous citizens are perceived through imagery from literature, folklore, music, and art.1 Because of the power of the myth, historical reality—truth with a capital “T”—gets lost. Therefore, the scholar who seeks to discover “what actually happened” (to quote Leopold von Ranke) has an inescapable epistemological problem. Since it is impossible to go back to some pristine time before the accumulation of myth, the investigator of Odessa faces a conundrum: is it possible to understand how reality and myth interact? The theoretical problem is complicated by a diversity of opinion about what constitutes the Odessa myth. Many scholars would agree with Jarrod Tanny, who offers the conventional and consensus view when he writes that the myth is “an improbable fusion of criminality, Jewishness, and humor.”2 Charles King, for example, emphasizes the relationship between history and geography: Odessa was the site of a new southern Russian culture.3 Joachim   1 Rebecca Jane Stanton, Isaac Babel and the Self-Invention of Odessan Modernism (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2012), 3–4.   2 Jarrod Tanny, City of Rogues and Schnorrers: Russia’s Jews and the Myth of Old Odessa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 5.   3 Charles King, Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2011), 99–100.

Myths and Counter-Myths about Odessa’s Jewish Intelligentsia during the Late Tsarist Period 39

Schlör investigates multi-ethnic Odessa, especially the formation of a psychology from the interaction of its many ethnicities.4 Maxim Shrayer describes Jewish literary Odessa with its psychological traumas of Jewish integration and alienation.5 Despite the range of opinions, one unified idea emerges: myth is defined in contrast to reality as an idea that is given life through the consciousness of the community.6 With that definition—consciousness of community—we can turn directly to my topic, Odessa’s Jewish intelligentsia and its myths during late tsarist times. Here new questions arise. How is communal consciousness gauged? How is the myth created? According to Oleg Gubar and Patricia Herlihy, the Odessa myth emerges through a blending of reality and fictional treatments: “Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, local historians, filmmakers, poets, novelists, journalists, and memoirists universally extolled Odessa as a cosmopolitan, energetic oasis of freedom and beauty and elaborated on the Odessa myth.”7 In other words, the myth emerged from verbal and visual expression. This position is confirmed by Rebecca Stanton, who maintains that the myth emerges from the many diverse imprints left on the minds of the city’s inhabitants.8 Although the conception is perhaps only part of a larger discussion, the perspective parallels the empirical evidence I have found. The material basis of my essay—the presentation of official documents, newspaper articles, diary entries, memoirs, and letters—demonstrates attitudes, opinions, feelings, and thoughts—the myth-making expressions of Jewish Odessa at the end of the nineteenth century. My study shows that both myth and reality served as material for the stories about Odessa’s Jewish intelligentsia and that these stories are characterized by paradoxes and contradictions. One can make opposing claims at one   4 Joachim Schlör, “Odessa: In Search of Transnational Odessa (or ‘Odessa the Best City in the World: All about Odessa and a Great Many Jokes’),” Quest: Issues in Contemporary Jewish History 2 (October 1911).   5 Maxim D. Shrayer, Russian Poet/Soviet Jew: The Legacy of Eduard Bagritsky (Lanham, MD: Rowen and Littlefield, 2000), 45–85.   6 A similar definition of the Odessa myth can be found in Oleg Gubar and Patricia Herlihy, “The Persuasive Power of the Odessa Myth,” in Cities after the Fall of Communism: Reshaping Cultural Landscapes and European Identity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 137–65.   7 Gubar and Herlihy, “The Persuasive Power,” 139.  8 Stanton, Isaac Babel and the Self-Invention, 4.

40 PART I | Russian-Jewish Historians and Historiography

and the same time: Odessa was a city of enlightenment and was indifferent to enlightenment; it was a Jewish city, but lacked Jewish characteristics; Zionists dominated Jewish politics but were irrelevant in Odessa; Odessa was a haven for Jewish intellectuals from religious centers elsewhere, but it could never become a true home to these immigrants. The Jewish intelligentsia embodies the idea that Odessa was a site of individual freedom and a center for the development of secular Jewish culture and modern Jewish politics.9 These paradoxes have even seeped into “objective” scholarship. Steven Zipperstein has written, “Though several of the most successful modern Jewish institutions in the Pale of Settlement were in Odessa, and though it attracted many of Russia’s most distinguished intellectuals . . . the city was seen as curiously inhospitable to Jewish cultural concerns. Odessa’s achievements, it was suggested, were the work of outsiders new to the city and thus little affected by it.”10 One could certainly argue the opposite, that Odessa was the center of modern Jewish life and that its intelligentsia contributed a great deal to the city’s character.11 It is worthwhile to ponder about paradoxes in the portrayal of Odessa’s Jewish intelligentsia. Contradictions reflect, I will try to argue, an expression of uncertainty about Jewish identity in Odessa. Neither religious nor assimilated, the Jewish intelligentsia offered portrayals of identities that were in unity and at odds with the character of the city as a whole. Therefore, we encounter clashes in views and in paradoxical expressions about what the Jewish intelligentsia stood for. A study of the Jewish intelligentsia in Odessa matters a great deal because of the importance of those who created it: Leo Pinsker, Moses Leib Lilienblum, Ahad-Ha’am, Mendele Mocher Sforim, Semyon Dubnov, Joseph Klausner, and Hayim Nachman Bialik.12 The history of this group (often dubbed “The Wise 9

In this context, one might note that the latest scholarly literature on Odessa reflects the role of the city as embodying an alternative model in Russia. The literature on Odessa is extensive, but many of the works reflect the idea of Odessa as unique. For example, see works by Charles King, Alexei Hofmeister, Joachim Schlör, Jerrod Tanny, Maria Vassilikou, Matthias Stadelman, and Nicholas Iljine. 10 Steven J. Zipperstein, The Jews of Odessa: A Cultural History, 1794–1881 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985), 3. 11 Patricia Herlihy, Odessa: A History 1794–1914 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute/Harvard University Press, 1986), 15. 12 Among famous Odessans, I refrain from mentioning musicians or artists because I concentrate on Jewish journalists, writers, and other intellectuals.

Myths and Counter-Myths about Odessa’s Jewish Intelligentsia during the Late Tsarist Period 41

Men of Odessa”) is essential for an understanding of Jewish intellectual history of the twentieth century. A discovery that the facts and interpretations regarding the intelligentsia are largely contradictory affects long-accepted understandings of the nature of Jewish Odessa and its Jewish intelligentsia. My goal is to demonstrate the depth of contradictions in the experience and depiction of the Jewish intelligentsia in three different contexts. The first deals with the Jewish newspaper Rassvet; the second investigates the level of contentment of Jewish intellectuals who ran to Odessa from shtetlach (small traditional communities), and the third treats the debates between so-called “nationalists” and “assimilators” over school curricula in the Odessa branch of the Society for the Promotion of Enlightenment among the Jews of Russia. Altogether three examples reflect different time periods and make use of different kinds of documentary materials. It is my belief that the quality and quantity of the examples will provide convincing proof of the contradictory portrayal of the Jewish intelligentsia in Odessa in tsarist times as well as suggesting reasons for the ambiguous expressions. It is often thought that the movement to reform Jewish backwardness was first promoted in Odessa.13 The first Jewish newspaper in Russian, Rassvet, appeared in Odessa from March 1860 until May 1861. The paper’s initiator and editor was Osip Rabinovich, a lawyer (chastnyi poverennyi) and well-known writer who had been agitating for better treatment of Jews since the early 1850s. In stories such as “Shtrafnoi” (The Punished) (1859) and “Nasledstvennyi podsvechnik” (The Family’s Candlestick) (1861), Rabinovich pointed to the oppressive treatment by government representatives during the reign of Nicholas I.14 When Alexander II came to the throne, Rabinovich requested permission to open a Jewish newspaper, insisting moreover that it be in Russian. Although awarded approval for a Yiddish journal in 1858, he nonetheless insisted on a Russian publication on the grounds that citizenship required knowing the state language. Rassvet’s short life reveals much about the level of support for Jewish emancipation in Odessa.15 Among intellectuals initial optimism turned to 13 Tanny, City of Rogues and Schnorrers, 36. 14 On Osip Rabinovich as a writer, see Shimon Markish, “Osip Rabinovich,” Cahiers du Monde russe et soviétique 21, nos. 1–2 (1980). 15 For a broad study of Rassvet, see Alexander Orbach, New Voices of Russian Jewry: A Study of the Russian-Jewish Press of Odessa in the Era of the Great Reforms, 1860–1871 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1980).

42 PART I | Russian-Jewish Historians and Historiography

pessimism. Hoping to build on the process of Jewish acculturation in Odessa, Rabinovich unveiled his conception of full emancipation. By 1860, Alexander II had implemented important reforms for Jews, such as abrogating the recruitment of underage boys (cantonists) and permitting various categories of Jews (for example, merchants of the first guild) to live in Russia proper. These developments gave cause for optimism. According to the emancipation contract as it was understood in Western Europe, Jews needed to prove to the government that they were ready for the rights and responsibilities of citizenship.16 In their understanding of emancipation, Rassvet’s contributors, Lev Levanda, Ruben Kulisher, Abraham Passover, and Leo Pinsker, proposed a series of changes in Jewish life that would modernize Russia’s Jews. Instead of a ḥeder, Jewish children should study in schools; instead of an Orthodox rabbi, a secularly educated rabbi should lead the congregation. Since Jews should integrate fully into Russian society, they needed to know Russian. Questioning the system of Jewish political representation, Rabinovich also rejected shtadlanut, the conventional political institution for Jewish-Gentile relations in which a wealthy member of the community would serve as an intercessor with government officials; Rabinovich proposed instead that Jews create a democratically elected body, a popechitel’stvo (inspectorate) of officials, who would publicly discuss problems and solutions for the community as a whole. In the first issue of Rassvet, Rabinovich explained that he did not intend to prettify or distort, but to write about Jewish life as it was, with all its blemishes. Only truth, he explained, would permit a proper diagnosis of Jewish life and set the right course for the improvement of the Jewish people: Confidently we begin the first review of the internal life and movement of our people in a journal devoted exclusively to its interests. Time will tell if we will have to report happy events more often than sad ones or the other way around; we do not pretend to be able to predict the future. In any case we will forcefully hold to the truth with the consciousness that only it [truth] 16 Israel Sosis, “Period ‘obruseniia’: Natsional’nyi vopros v literature kontsa 60-kh godov i nachala 70–kh godov,” Evreiskaia starina 8 (1915): 144.

Myths and Counter-Myths about Odessa’s Jewish Intelligentsia during the Late Tsarist Period 43 is the soul of any activity and that without this soul any activity already contains the seeds of death at the time of its birth.17

Although the writers were optimistic that historical development favored them, they were not blind to the fact that the majority of Jews in Russia opposed Haskalah (Enlightenment). At the same time, Rabinovich was disappointed at the loss of subscribers due to the paper’s sharp critical tone and its promulgation of ideas that offended traditionalists. Rabinovich was also disappointed by the lack of government support for what he saw as a loyal enterprise. With increasing expenses and declining readership, Rabinovich felt compelled to close the paper. In the March 31, 1861, issue Rabinovich explained his decision: How did such a deception happen? Were we too confident or did we rely too much on others? . . . Doubtless both. On the one hand, we believed that everything was ready for a general agreement of interests between the moderate and advanced groups, which together make up a serious number. On the other hand, we hoped that we could support and gradually deepen this promising situation. Therefore one group would always act to help the other group. But our faith in the first assertion appears to have been premature and trust in the second was unfounded; maybe the latter situation occurred from the former or the other way; we will not try to answer the question.18

According to historian Saul Gnsburg, if Rabinovich had not closed the paper, Governor General Stroganov was ready to do it for him.19 Empirical evidence suggests that the Jewish community of Odessa did not support the enlightenment effort. Furthermore, the closure of Rassvet by the government demonstrates that the regime had no preference for enlighteners over others. Lev Levanda noted that Rabinovich “wrote for a readership one half of which could not and the other half which was not willing to understand him.”20 17 Osip Rabinovich, “I skazal Bog: Da budet svet!” Rassvet 27 (1 May 1860): 1. 18 Osip Rabinovich, “Poslednii god,” Rassvet 45 (31 March 1861): 715. 19 Saul M. Gnsburg, Minuvshee: Istoricheskie ocherki, stat’i i kharakteristiki (Petrograd: Izdanie avtora, 1923), 88. 20 John Doyle Klier, Imperial Russia’s Jewish Question, 1855–1881 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 359. A similar tale of optimism and pessimism from the history of the Jewish press of Odessa is offered in the example of Den’ (Day), a weekly Jewish

44 PART I | Russian-Jewish Historians and Historiography

Rabinovich’s failure to win the loyalty of his readers poses a conundrum: was Rassvet just ahead of its time or was there no interest in its message? Certain sympathizers may have cancelled their subscriptions to avoid an accusation of heresy. Sympathizers who acknowledged the need for reform of the Jewish community often disapproved of Rassvet’s controversies since they played into the hands of critics. Since many of the reforms that Rabinovich suggested came to pass, one can assume that Haskalah had strong roots in Odessa. Thus it is possible that Jews who supported Haskalah rejected Rabinovich’s bold formulations. Indeed, the Haskalah was facilitated by pragmatic needs more than by ideology. Steven Zipperstein observes, “The economic and social opportunities available to Jews in Odessa motivated many to adapt to gentile society in ways that would have been unthinkable, or at least unlikely, elsewhere in the Pale. Utility, not ideology, was the primary motivation.”21 Rassvet successfully formulated ideas that would come to pass, but it failed in rallying the masses. At the same time it had symbolic value for many reasons. It represented a salvo in the internecine Jewish war over modernization and it reveals an early stage in the new relationship with the government in which Jews did not merely follow orders but also made demands. With the Russianlanguage Rassvet, Jews entered the Fourth Estate as Jews. Rassvet both defies and confirms myths of Haskalah for Jews in Russia. Perhaps the most widespread view about Odessa is that it served as a haven for the individual Jew. But few have checked whether the city was hospitable to new immigrants. Scholars today laud Odessa for welcoming Jewish freethinkers who faced danger from persecution in their hometowns. In memoirs by maskilim, Odessa is contrasted with the protagonist’s original home in

paper in Russian that appeared from 1870–71. The two editors, Ilya Orshansky and Mikhail (Menasheh) Morgulis, viewed themselves as carrying the unfulfilled mantel of Rassvet (and the proceeding paper Sion, 1861–62). The editors were convinced that a receptive audience for a message about reforms existed and that the best way to fight “ignorance and backwardness” was to insist on absolute truthfulness. They too found that there was no group in Russian society—not Jews, nor government officials, nor Russian society—that supported Jewish emancipation, and the paper closed after the pogroms of 1871 in Odessa. 21 Zipperstein, The Jews of Odessa, 5.

Myths and Counter-Myths about Odessa’s Jewish Intelligentsia during the Late Tsarist Period 45

the shtetl or provincial small town.22 An opposition is therefore constructed: freedom versus oppression, secular versus religious, and comfort versus poverty. But after examining two memoirs, we see that immigrant intellectuals were not necessarily content to live in Odessa. Although the many thousands of immigrants came to Odessa without protesting anything but poverty, some Jewish memoir writers complained about the city’s hospitality. In Hatot neurim (Sins of My Youth) (1873), Lilienblum describes his life in Vilkomir, Lithuania, where he endured mistreatment at the hands of the Orthodox Jewish leaders. Because he had been exposed as a heretic, he was shunned everywhere. As a consequence, all his students cancelled their lessons and he was bereft of any income to feed his family. In addition, his wife divorced him and his children were taken from him. After writing about his woes in the Jewish press, he was invited to move to Odessa in 1869. He writes about Odessa’s Jewish elite, They saw the troubles I suffered at the hands of the fanatics, and they found a place of refuge for me, where the reach of the fanatics would not extend. Had these not tried to drive me out of town because of my articles, the Odessa committee would never have heard of me. My only lament is that my upbringing had stunted my abilities and hung a millstone on my neck before I was sixteen. Now, with a wife and three children, I am a miserable creature unsuited to any kind of work.23

Although the transformation appears complete—the hero moves from Vilkomir to Odessa, darkness to light, oppression to freedom—in Lilienblum’s autobiography things does not work so simply. Life in Odessa brings Lilienblum little succor. He expresses profound pain that he has no skills that would permit him to make a living. Despairing about his lost children, he laments that Odessa 22 For a discussion of Jewish memoirs, see Marcus Moseley, Being for Myself Alone: Origins of Jewish Autobiography (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 1–36; also Michael Stanislawski, Autobiographical Jews: Essays in Jewish Self-Fashioning (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004), 3–17. 23 Moses Leib Lilienblum, “The Sins of My Youth,” in The Golden Tradition: Jewish Life and Thought in Eastern Europe, ed. Lucy S. Dawidowicz (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1996), 125.

46 PART I | Russian-Jewish Historians and Historiography

deprived him of everything dear to him, especially the beauty and intimacy of the Judaism of his youth: All the treasure that was stored up in my brain, all the wealth that I had gathered in my mind during my life—all was captured in a single moment. . . . Theology was lost to me; literature, which with us is purely theological and not practical, became contemptible; the question of uniting religion and life, on which I had worked so hard and for which I had suffered so much, became a question without meaning. I was like a philosopher who had lost his system, or a business house whose ledgers have been burnt. . . . I found myself deserted, alone in the world. . . . I took the last theoretical step and found dismay, emptiness of mind and confusion of soul.24

A religious person may comprehend the depth of depression that is signified by “emptiness of mind and confusion of soul.” The alienation and depression that Lilienblum expresses about his life in Odessa has its parallel in the pain and agony of life in Vilkomir. It is hard to decide which is worse. As his biographer, Leon Simon shows, Lilienblum did not love Odessa, could not adapt to it, and did not resolve his life’s problems by coming to live in it.25 In Mendele Mocher Sforim’s fictional autobiography written in Yiddish (Shloyme reb khayims) and translated into English as Of Bygone Years (1899), two periods of time are juxtaposed.26 Abramovitch, the real author, portrays Odessa as the time of his adulthood, where he has a warm and comfortable home and a job as the principal of a government Jewish school. In the section that is pertinent here, the narration begins in medias res when Abramovitch hears a knock at the door and finds a stranger, a yeshiva bokher who asks to sleep in his school for one night since a storm has appeared on the horizon. Abramovitch refuses and chases the boy away, but immediately after feels a pang of guilt that stimulates memories of childhood in Kapulie, Ukraine, where he spent his youth. Here the narrator remembers his long walks in nature and 24 Quoted in Leon Simon, Moshe Leib Lilienblum (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1912), 1–13. 25 Simon, Moshe Leib Lilienblum, 13–14. 26 Mendele Mocher Sforim, Of Bygone Days, in A Shtetl and Other Yiddish Novellas, ed. Ruth R. Wise, trans. Raymond P. Sheindlin (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1986), 249–358.

Myths and Counter-Myths about Odessa’s Jewish Intelligentsia during the Late Tsarist Period 47

days spent in the company of the village blacksmith. The author intimates that Kapulie captured his heart. There he learned the skills of storytelling from the blacksmith and acquired aesthetic inspiration from nature. The two places are contrasted. Odessa is the site of cruelty and vanity, whereas Kapulie is the picture of human warmth. About Odessa we have this portrait that is offered to console the narrator for his meanness to the bokher: “Nevertheless, you oughtn’t take it so seriously,” I consoled Reb Shloyme, “Things like this happen every day among us, and no one thinks about them twice. What about those big businessmen, famous bankers, gentlemen of substance, who exploit their servants unmercifully—who are they? By and large, they’re servants who have risen from their humble station and who now put on airs. As boys, they worked in shops and inns and hostels, and heard their masters curse them and the mother that bore them a hundred times a day. That’s been the way of the world since the day of creation: everyone forgets. Whoever has the whip in hand uses it, and never stops to think that his own back was beaten just yesterday, and with the same weapon. A fat belly and a fat wallet protect you from memory, your own and others’; for money, people are ready to overlook anything.”27

We have a very different image of Kapulie: The candelabrum is the household sun, giving light and warmth and pleasure to everyone. The family passes winter evenings around it, engaged in various tasks or just talking. The women of the house, and sometimes a neighbor or two, sit together on the meat or dairy bench plucking feathers and indulging in gossip of both the innocent and the not-so-innocent kind. On Saturday nights the table is moved close to this lamp and the entire family sit around eating boiled potatoes to their heart’s content and listening to someone read aloud from The Greatness of Joseph or The Book of the Righteous. On the nights of Chanukah the children play dreydl at the table, while the grown-ups play cards and eat potato pancakes. And whenever the

27 Mendele, Of Bygone Days, 267.

48 PART I | Russian-Jewish Historians and Historiography fatty skin of a goose is being fried, the household is up the whole night telling stories and eating cracklings.28

It does not take too much acumen to see that Mendele Mocher Sforim has created a dichotomy in which city is compared negatively to country, the alienation of urban life set against the warmth of family. For Mendele the shtetl nourished his creative talent and provided the material for his fiction. Little good can be said about the city. Although such contrasts were conventional in autobiographical literature of the nineteenth century, nonetheless, we note that Jewish intellectuals do not portray Odessa as a paradise.

***

In 1902 Odessa witnessed one of the first public collisions between Zionists and integrationists in Russia. Zionism is often depicted in the historical literature as though it dominated political life in Russia generally and in Odessa in particular.29 Zionism was not the leading political group in Odessa and its ideology of integration remained firmly in command among the city’s modernized community. In the years following the pogroms of 1881–82, almost two million Jews emigrated to the United States, Western Europe, Latin America, and Australia. In Russia itself Jewish intellectuals entertained post-liberal ideas, such as Zionism, Territorialism, and Cultural Autonomy. Zionism in particular had a following in Odessa. Leo Pinsker, the author of Autoemancipation, was an Odessan, having worked as a doctor in the city for nearly forty years.30 He was asked in 1884 to lead Hovevei Tsion (Lovers of Zion), the philanthropic society where members met to allocate small contributions to worthy pioneers in the land of Israel.31 Among those intellectuals in the city who later became 28 Ibid., 282–83. 29 Yossi Goldstein, “Some Sociological Aspects of the Russian Zionist Movement at its Inception,” Jewish Social Studies 47, no. 2 (1985): 167. 30 For a short biography and abbreviated bibliography of Leo Pinsker, see Evyatar Friesel, “Lev and Simhah Pinsker,” in The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, ed. Gershon David Hundert (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 2:1362–63. 31 Steven J. Zipperstein, “Representations of Leadership (and Failure) in Russian Zionism: Picturing Leon Pinsker,” in Essential Papers on Zionism, eds. Jehuda Reinharz and Anita Shapira (New York: New York University Press, 1995), 191–209.

Myths and Counter-Myths about Odessa’s Jewish Intelligentsia during the Late Tsarist Period 49

involved in the Zionist movement were the writers and intellectuals associated with Hashilo’ah, the Hebrew-language journal published in Odessa, such as Ahad-Ha’am, Yehoshua Ravnitsky, and Joseph Klausner. The Odessa branch of the Society for the Promotion of Enlightenment among the Jews of Russia was split between Zionists and the defenders of integration in debates over school curricula.32 The society’s adherence to conservative views had shifted by 1902. Earlier, Odessa’s intellectuals struggled for integration, but now nationalists were rushing to stop the powerful surge of Jewish assimilation.33 By 1902, Zionism differed from Hovevei because Theodor Herzl’s political Zionism had displaced Ahad-Ha’am’s Cultural Zionism, although it must be added Ahad-Ha’am still claimed the loyalty of some young people in the Cultural Fraction group whose ideas included boosting Jewish education, especially the study of Hebrew, and promoting Jewish culture generally.34 Challenging the ideology of integration, Zionists objected to the lack of attention to Jewish and secular subjects in schools subsidized by the Society for the Promotion of Enlightenment. Although ostensibly the goal was to get more hours of Hebrew instruction, in fact Zionists wanted to shift the general goal of Odessa’s Jews from integration to separatism. The Zionists gave their opponents the mocking epithet of “assimilators.” Ahad-Ha’am, Ben-Ami, Dizengoff, Ravnitsky, and Dubnov represented the nationalists and pressed the point that Jewish schools had to instill “national” values; anything less would be yielding to assimilation.35 Their petition read, It is even more unnatural to acknowledge a school that teaches its pupils in the spirit of another nationality. Alienated from their native group and artificially assimilated to a foreign environment that has dominated their 32 For a history of the Odessa branch of the Society for the Promotion of Enlightenment, see Horowitz, Jewish Philanthropy and Enlightenment, 42–55. 33 In his book Alexis Hofmeister treats the Society for the Promotion of Enlightenment in Odessa in detail. See Selbstorganisation und Bürgerlichkeit: Jüdisches Vereinswesen in Odessa um 1900, Schriften des Simon-Dubnow-Instituts 8 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2007). 34 Shlomo Almog, Zionism and History: The Rise of a New Jewish Consciousness (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987), 84–100; David Vital, Zionism: The Formative Years (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 190–98; and Yitzhak Maor, Sionistskoe dvizhenie v Rossii, trans. O. Mintz ( Jerusalem: Biblioteka Aliyah, 1977), 108–17. 35 Among them, the Jewish historian and theorist Dubnov was the only non-Zionist.

50 PART I | Russian-Jewish Historians and Historiography education, pupils of such schools suffer a moral dichotomy. Later they make up that morally undefined element in society which everywhere turns out deracinated and unstable. . . . The school should propagate a strong Jewish identity and must not be occupied with vocational training or learning Russian. It should instead consist of courses in Hebrew, Tanach, and Jewish history, subjects that instilled Jewish feeling. The school can do this best when subjects are presented not merely as bare facts, but integrated into life, linking the Jewish present with its past.36

The nationalists were adamant that at least twelve of the thirty hours in the week, if not more, should be devoted to Jewish subjects and that Hebrew should serve as the primary concentration in the curriculum.37 In their response to the Zionists, the members of the steering committee of the Odessa branch justified their decision to limit Jewish courses by asserting a concern for economic viability in difficult times. Specifically, the spokesmen, Jacob Saker—a banker—and Menasheh Morgulis, the civic leader, explained that the society was providing funds to three professional schools for girls with two or three hours of Jewish studies and five boys’ schools with five hours of Jewish courses. The limitations on such courses were due to an emphasis on vocational training. They maintained, “From a pragmatic point of view the steering committee maintains that a Jewish elementary school must give its pupils instruments for the difficult struggle of survival, and from this viewpoint, we do not find it possible to diminish the teaching of such subjects as Russian grammar, writing, mathematics, and so on. . . .”38 The timing of this debate in 1902 coincides with changes in Zionist strategy. Up to that point, the movement’s goal was focused exclusively on Palestine, but Zionists in Odessa suggested devoting more attention to combating assimilation in Russia. This approach would be ratified at the Third Conference of Russian Zionists in Helsinki in 1906 (known as the Helsingfors Conference). It made sense at that time to concentrate on activities in Russia after the 1905 36 Semyon Dubnov, “O natsional’nom vospitanii,” Ezhenedel’naia khronika Voskhoda 1, no. 6 ( January 1902): 12, 15. 37 Dubnov, “O natsional’nom vospitanii,” 15. 38 “Mnenie komiteta odesskogo otdeleniia obshchestva rasprostraneniia prosveshcheniia o evreiskoi narodnoi shkole,” Ezhenedel’naia nedelia Voskhoda 16 (19 April 1902): 6.

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Revolution because for the first time in the country’s history opportunities opened up for Jews to participate in Russia-wide politics, including election to a State Duma. The actual vote at the Society for the Promotion of Enlightenment in 1902 went against the nationalists, seventy-nine to seventy-one.39 The result, although close, showed that the majority of members in the Society for the Promotion of Enlightenment in Odessa favored integration. Although Zionism would emerge as the ideological winner among all the Jewish political movements of Eastern Europe (this would become clear only after the Holocaust), in the first years of the twentieth century it was one movement among many and clearly not the most popular even in its power bastion, Odessa. In other areas such as Lithuania, Zionism, as we know, was not nearly as popular as the Bund. Even the myth of Zionist dominance in Odessa proliferated in pro-Zionist literature turns out to need numerous caveats and extensive redaction. Odessa’s Jewish intelligentsia from the nineteenth century was characterized as contradictory. Some Jewish intellectuals who devoted themselves to the struggle for Jewish rights and political reforms in the city displayed ambivalence about Odessa. Osip Rabinovich imagined a new kind of Jew, only to discover that critics on every side wanted him silenced. Moses Leib Lilienblum had to run from his Lithuanian shtetl, but that did not stop him from complaining bitterly about his new home. Although members of the nationalist camp fought for secular Jewish education in Odessa in 1902, within two years both Semyon Dubnov and Ahad-Ha’am had left, preferring life elsewhere. As we have seen, popular history and reality do not agree: the city and its Jewish intelligentsia were often at odds, and the myths of Odessa interacted with and transformed realities. With regard to the question of why Odessa’s Jewish community viewed its intelligentsia as paradoxical, I speculated earlier about the ambiguities of Jewish identity among the city’s Jews.40 That is undoubtedly accurate. The Jewish intel39 “Po povodu vybora v obshchstve prosveshcheniia,” Budushchnost’ 2 (11 January 1902): 22. 40 One may recall that my examples belong to the nineteenth century (and two years into the twentieth century), before Isaac Babel endowed the myth with his own imagery and before the Soviet Union appeared to complicate the Odessa story further. Jarrod Tanny treats the Soviet period of the Odessa myth in detail. See City of Rogues and Schnorrers, 131–72.

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ligentsia reflected the rifts and struggles for self-definition among Jews in the city. But there are also deeper issues regarding the intelligentsia itself in nineteenth-century Russia and its elastic role as a blend of political opposition, fourth estate, and emerging middle class.41 It is significant to recall that the Jewish intelligentsia, consisting mostly of immigrants, had complicated relations with the Odessa’s natives, with its business and political elite. At the same time, one should recall that the vision of the Jewish intelligentsia changed in the second half of the nineteenth century from integration to various forms of nationalism. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the intelligentsia was, ideologically speaking, all over the map. By the end of the nineteenth century it was hardly a unified group, as various members promoted conflicting ideas.42 Is it surprising that regarding the Jewish intelligentsia of Odessa reality and myth, inseparable from one another, evoked contradictory images that were true and genuine despite being irreconcilable?

41 For definitions of the Russian intelligentsia see Marc Raeff, “Russian Intellectual History and its Historiography,” Forschungen zur Osteuropäischen Geschichte 25 (1978): 169–93. 42 The Vekhi (Landmarks) debate in 1909–10 was a sign in Russia of the breakup of any unified intelligentsia. Similar signs, such as the breakup of the Jewish People’s Party, could be identified as harbingers of the Jewish intelligentsia’s divisions.

Chapter Four Saul Borovoi’s Survival: An Odessa Tale about a Jewish Historian in Soviet Times In the late 1980s, a revival of Jewish historical studies in the Soviet Union took place. A leader in this process was Saul Iakovlevich Borovoi (1903–89), the historian whose life spanned from before the October Revolution until a mere two years before the breakup. His younger colleagues widely praised him. In 1994, in the authorative journal Otechestvennaia istoriia (Fatherland History) the noted historians Rafail Ganelin, Sergei Lebedev, Il’ia Lur’e, and Arsenii Taratakovskii stated that Borovoi had been more than just a historian of Jewish life: he had also written widely about Odessa and Ukraine. In addition, his voluminous work included such diverse topics as the origins of banking in Russia, the Decembrists, Alexander Pushkin, and the aristocratic culture of the nineteenth century. As Ganelin states, “Saul Iakovlevich Borovoi’s contribution to our nation’s historical scholarship was so broad and multifaceted that one can only regret that fame and appreciation during his life were not extended to him in full.”1 However, it is primarily as a Jewish historian that Borovoi is remembered today through such definitive monographs as Evreiskie khroniki XVII stoletiia: Epokha ‘khmel’nichiny’ (Jewish Chronicles of the 18th Century: The Epoch of Khmelnitsky) and Evreiskaia zemledel’cheskaia kolonizatsiia v staroi Rossii: Politika-ideologiia-khoziaistvo-byt (Jewish Agricultural Colonization in Old Russia: Politics, Ideology, Economics, Everyday Life). Furthermore, his memoirs provide a fascinating view of his life as a Jewish historian in the Soviet Union.2   1 Rafail Ganelin et al., “Saul Iakovlevich Borovoi,” Otechestvennaia istoriia 3 (1994): 161.  2 Saul Borovoi, Evreiskie khroniki XVII stoletiia: Epokha ‘khmel’nichiny’ (Moscow: Gesharim, 1997); Borovoi, Evreiskaia zemledel’cheskaia kolonizatsiia v staroi Rossii:

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Borovoi provides a unique voice among historians. In his studies of Jewish history he reflected the evolution of Jewish scholarship from intellectual history as it had been practiced in late tsarist times to a distinctly Soviet kind of scholarship in which economic and class issues took prominance. In contrast to many historians who emigrated in the 1920s, his intellectual biography coincides with changes in Soviet politics—from the NEP period to full-blown Stalinism, followed by post-Stalinist revisionism. In explaining his survival when other Jewish intellectuals were repressed, Borovoi claims that he benefitted from extraordinarily good fortune.3 For example, in a personal denunciation, a fellow student went to the director of the academy, informing him “o poloticheskoi neblagonadezhnosti” (about Borovoi not being trustworthy politically) and calling Borovoi socially “chuzhoi” (alien).4 Later in 1953, he was the object of a more extensive denunciation in the prominent Odessa newspaper Chernomorskaia kommuna (Blacksea Commune) in an article with the title of “Burzhuaznyi natsionalist pod maskoi uchenogo” (“Bourgeois Nationalist Under the Mask of a Scholar.”) According to Borovoi, on the paper’s margins was a secret denunciation with the words of an anonymous official, “Long live the Jewish bourgeoisie.”5 At the same time, Borovoi protected himself by “meeting the needs” of the Soviet historical establishment. He selectively interpreted the past, adopted aspects of the Soviet ideology from his time, and presented Jews in ways that conformed to the political climate and demands of the Communist Party. In fact, he became an accepted member of the intellectual elite. Although he was not the outsider implied by his memoir, he was not politically subservient. His works retained integrity as serious studies of Ukrainian and Russian-Jewish history. In general, the Soviet intellectual milieu in the 1920s was characterized by contradictions. Judaism was condemned and its representatives (rabbis, communal leaders, and teachers) were repressed, but at the same time the Politika-ideologiia-khoziaistvo-byt (Moscow: M. and S. Sabashnikovykh, 1928); Borovoi, Vospominaniia (Moscow: Evreiskii universitet v Moskve, 1993).  3 Borovoi, Vospominaniia, 18.   4 Ibid., 137.   5 Ibid., 326. It is likely the secret police did not know that Borovoi had a brother, Boris, who had left Soviet Russia and was living in Palestine. That relationship might have caused Borovoi even more complications.

Saul Borovoi’s Survival: An Odessa Tale about a Jewish Historian in Soviet Times 55

government offered support for secular and pro-Communist Jewish culture.6 The Communist government frequently funded Jewish schools, museums, and scholarly institutions. In Kiev and Minsk special Jewish scholarly institutions especially for Yiddish were established, scholars were employed, and valuable libraries and artifacts (expropriated from other centers) were collected for study. Strides made by scholars in the last years of tsarist Russia significantly advanced Jewish studies. Yet the Soviet government wanted to keep such scholarly work within strict ideological bounds. In particular, the authorities prohibited mentioning Zionism or using Hebrew, while promoting Yiddish as the language of the Jewish working class. In the mid-1920s, there was a push to integrate Jewish scholarship into the general literary life of the Ukrainian Soviet republic. The production of Judaica in Ukrainian noticeably increased.7 In this way the government showed sensitivity to Ukrainian language and culture as part of a policy to cultivate the loyalty of the national minorities.8 In the mid-1920s, in Soviet historical and educational institutions— libraries, graduate schools, and the like—the initial attempt to replace representatives of the former pre-revolutionary intelligentsia with new cadres was deemed a failure.9 As a result, many non-Communist experts found employment. By virtue of their knowledge and experience, the inclusion of professionally trained scholars to positions of responsibility had a positive effect. During the 1920s, several significant volumes of historical scholarship appeared, including the last issue of Evreiskaia starina (1924), Evreiskaia mysl’ (1922), and three volumes of Evreiskii vestnik (1924-1928).10 Significantly talented representatives of the old school as Israel Zinberg, Saul Ginsburg, and Israel Sosis contributed.

  6 Benjamin Pinkus, The Jews of the Soviet Union: The History of a National Minority (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 123–24; David Shneer, Yiddish and the Creation of Soviet Jewish Culture, 1918–1930 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 69–70.   7 See Viktor Kelner, “‘Kak istorik istoriku . . .’ (Pis’ma Saula Borovogo-Semenu Dubnovu),” Vestnik Evreiskogo Universiteta v Moskve 17 (1998): 190–92.   8 Terry Martin, Affirmative Action Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 175.   9 Yury Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 247; also Elissa Bemporad, Becoming Soviet Jews: The Bolshevik Experiment in Minsk (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 38–42. 10 Alfred Abraham Greenbaum, Jewish Scholarship and Scholarly Institutions in Soviet Russia ( Jerusalem: Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1978), 13.

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As a historian, Saul Borovoi came of age in the period between the Bolshevik Revolution and the start of World War II. He was born in Odessa to parents who enthusiastically supported modern Hebrew literature. Family guests included Mendele Mocher Sforim, Hayim Nachman Bialik, and Yehoshua Ravnitsky.11 Borovoi’s father, involved in the transportation of grain, was a funder of Moria, the renowned Hebrew publishing house. In 1924, Borovoi received a law degree from Odessa’s Commercial Institute (Odesskii institute narodnogo khoziaistva). During the same period, he enrolled in the Institute of Archeology. He moved his studies to Odessa’s main library and where he worked on his kandidatskaia (dissertation), which he defended in 1938. Soon thereafter, in 1940, he defended his doctoral dissertation with a thesis on the Jews in Ukraine in the sixteenth and seventeeth centuries. Although there were voices against his promotion, influential scholars supported his advancement.12 Borovoi obtained a position on the faculty at the Commercial Institute in Odessa in 1932. During World War II, he spent three years in Samarkand, and after his return to Odessa, he resumed employment. In 1952, he was targeted for arrest during the Doctor’s Plot, but apparently escaped harm by virtue of his cramped living quarters. According to Borovoi’s account, NKVD agents were disappointed to find that he lived in a communal apartment when, as a professor, he could have acquired a three-bedroom flat.13 In fact, he left Odessa to escape arrest and stayed with relatives in Moscow. Stalin’s death saved him from further harm and within a year he was rehired at the Commerical Institute. Unable to publish on Jewish history, Borovoi turned to general economic history with the 1958 monograph Credit and the Banks of Russia—a work that has been acknowledged as one of the first and fundamental treatments of the subject.14 His memoirs, Vospominaniia (Memoirs), published posthumously in 1993, provide a masterful portrayal of Jewish Odessa. Vividly transmitting the atmosphere of pre-Soviet and then Soviet Odessa, Borovoi portays notable portraits 11 Borovoi, Vospominaniia, 42. Borovoi writes that, “Ḥ[ayim] N[aḥman] Bialik was a close friend of our family. Not a single family event, birthdays, holidays, and so on, was held without him.” 12 Ibid., 206–10; also Ganelin et al., “Saul Iakovlevich Borovoi,” 14. 13 I have not been able to verify this claim. 14 Ganelin et al., “Saul Iakovlevich Borovoi,” 162.

Saul Borovoi’s Survival: An Odessa Tale about a Jewish Historian in Soviet Times 57

of the age, as well as disquisitions on central historical themes and academic problems that he himself experienced.15 It can be argued that Borovoi belongs to a distinctly southern school of Russian-Jewish historiography. His colleagues included Il’ia Vladimirovich Galant, Ben-Zion Dinaburg (Dinur), and Ia. Izrael’son, scholars who analyzed Eastern Ukraine and the southwest of Russia. In Odessa he was a student of Iulian Oksman, Fedor Evstaf ’evich Petrun’, and Evgenii Aleksandrovich Zagorodskii. Borovoi was connected with the historical institutions of his time and was befriended by major Soviet historians, among them S. N. Valk, B. A. Romanov, B. P. Kozmin. Even when there was opposition to Borovoi’s promotion within academic circles, his work was defended by such important figures as S. V. Bakhrushin (a professor of Moscow University), B. D Grekov (Director of the Moscow Institute of History) and V. I. Picheta. This support played a crucial role in Borovoi’s successful doctoral defense in Moscow in 1940.

***

Odessa played a major role in his life and work. Odessa’s significance evolved in the Soviet period and no longer possessed the colorful aura of the turn of the twentieth century. In Jewish consciousness of the nineteenth century, Odessa was imagined as a center isolated both from its Ukrainian surroundings and also other Jewish cities. It was the antithesis of Vilna and Minsk. It was not the shtetl, and it certainly was not similar to such Ukrainian towns as Zhitomir or Uman, which were known as centers of Hasidism. In contrast, Odessa was modern, secular, and economically forward moving. It was a place where Jews lived like non-Jews and partook of secular pleasures. As an international city with relative economic opportunity, Odessa implied freedom, individuality, and capitalism. In the pre-revolutionary period it had been the cradle of modern Jewish literature, with writers such as Ahad-Ha’am, Mendele Mocher Sforim, and Hayim Nachman Bialik. It was also a center of Jewish politics of all varieties— integrationism, nationalism, and Zionism. It was the home of Osip Rabinovich, Ilya Orshansky, Leo Pinsker, and Vladimir Jabotinsky. For modern Jews, it was a 15 It is possible that parts of the memoir were excised due to excessive caution by the volume’s anonymous editors and/or Borovoi’s widow.

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Russian city, where one went to learn Russian language and see how “Russians” lived. Transcending the shtetl, Jews embraced Russian, instead of Yiddish. As the Soviet system evolved, the image changed. Every city in the former Pale of Settlement fell under the same regulations and Odessa’s unique status was threatened. It no longer held the same attraction to non-religious and ambitious Jews. This period also witnessed the waning of Odessa’s economic fortunes. Lacking its former vital connection with the imperial Russian capital, post-revolutionary Odessa gradually entered into the orbit of Ukraine. Indeed, its fate was similar to that of the region as a whole. Occupied after the Revolution by German and French soldiers, the city subsequently came under the authority of Petliura and other White forces. A short-lived Ukrainian Republic gave way in 1921 to Bolshevik rule. The earlier paradigm (simplified here) with Russians in the posts of administration, Ukrainians in the countryside, and Jews in the role of middlemen, vanished. The immediate instability after the Bolshevik Revolution no doubt influenced Borovoi’s fascination with political and social upheaval. He adapted to a required emphasis on Ukrainian politics and economics and left behind the tunnel vision of Jewish life. Nonetheless, he surveyed the relations between Jews and non-Jews and examined the evolution of a new kind of Jewish identity—less traditional, fully independent of the Jewish community, and at home in a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural world.

***

In his articles from the early and mid-1920s, Borovoi portrayed the types that would reappear throughout his work. They include tsarist-era converts to Christianity, Jewish nihilists and revolutionaries, Jewish advisers to the tsarist government, and even merchants who collaborated with antisemites—“bad Jews,” in the words of Shulamit Magnes, a specialist on modern Jewish history.16 The article “Novoe ob A. Kovnere” (“New Information about Kovner”) describes two Jewish nihilists, Abram Kovner and Yehuda-Yosef Lerner, followers of the Russian radical social critic Dmitry 16 Shulamit Magnus, “Good Bad Jews: Converts, Conversion, and Boundary Redrawing in Russian Jewry: Notes Toward and New Category,” in Boundaries in Jewish Identity, ed. Susan A. Glenn and Naomi B. Sokoloff (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2010), 132–60.

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Pisarev.17 In the same work we read about Boris Fedorov, a government censor in Kiev whose original name was Grinbaum, and Moses Gurovich, a government adviser in Vilna—both high officials who converted from Judaism to Russian Orthodoxy. Borovoi also focuses on the internecine fighting among non-religious Jews from various factions, including radicals and government experts. Each side attacked the other using denunciations and gossip even though they had the same goal, radical russification. In his 1924 article “Evreiskie gazety pred sudom ‘uchenykh evreev’” (“Jewish Newspapers in Judgement Before the Government’s ‘Jewish Advisers’”) Borovoi describes Abraham Gottlober’s attempt to open a Hebrewlanguage newspaper, Haboker Or (The Dawn), in Odessa in 1867. The idea was suppressed due to the exertions of Solomon Mandelkern, a Jewish intellectual with considerable influence among government officials.18 In this early period Borovoi shows a debt to Jewish historians from the pre-revolutionary period—Semyon Dubnov, Israel Zinberg, and Saul Ginsburg, all of whom had practiced intellectual history. Their efforts were concentrated on portraying the elite, the maskilim, in a struggle with traditional Judaism due to an effort to modernize and integrate Jews into Russian society.19 At the same time Borovoi’s attention to the tactics of the maskilim—denunciations, blackmail, deceit—revealed the morally negative aspects of the Haskalah movement, a movement that was usually portrayed positively by secular educated historians. Borovoi’s contrarian treatment is evident in the comparison of his representation of Abram Kovner with the treatment by Israel Zinberg in the widely read historical journal, Perezhitoe (1910).20 Zinberg depicted Kovner 17 Saul Borovoi, “Novoe ob A. Kovnere,” in Evreiskaia mysl’: Nauchno-literaturnyi sbornik (Leningrad: Seiatel’, 1924). 18 Saul Borovoi, “Evreiskie gazety pred sudom ‘uchenykh evreev,’” in Evreiskaia mysl’, 282– 293. 19 See Kelner, “Kak istorik istoriku,” 192. In 1927, for example, Borovoi wrote in a letter to Semyon Dubnov that he was the latter’s student. 20 S. L. Tsinberg, “A. Kovner: Pisarevshchina v evreiskoi literature,” in Perezhitoe: Sbornik posviashchennyi obshchestvennoi i kul-turnoi istorii evreev v Rossii, vol. 2 (St. Petersburg: Brakauz i Efron, 1910), 130–59. See also Leonid Grossman, Confession of a Jew (New York: Arno Press, 1975); Max Weinreich, Fun beyde zaytn ployt: Dos shturemdike lebn fun Uri Kovnern, dem nihilist (Buenos Aires: Tsentral-Farband fun Poylishe Yidn in Argentina, 1955); Harriet Murav, Identity Theft: The Jew in Imperial Russia and Avraam Uri Kovner (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003).

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as a hero for his innovative critical analysis of a budding Hebrew literature. Furthermore, Zinberg praised Kovner’s talent as a Hebrew writer even as he gave a sympathetic portrayal of Kovner’s psychological collapse.21 Borovoi by contrast maintained an emotional distance from Kovner and focused only on a brief period in Kovner’s youth. Borovoi’s criticism of Jewish radicals would have been favorably viewed during the Soviet period since officials criticized “nationalist deviations.” It should be noted that Zinberg himself was arrested in 1936 for Jewish national sympathies.22 Perhaps Borovoi’s experience as a student in Odessa lent him a sensitivity to the use of denunciations among the maskilim. He wrote about his own experience as the object of a denunciation: “What did the denunciation consist of? I don’t know. [. . .] I remembered forever the feeling of revulsion that I felt and my vulnerability and humiliation.”23

***

Under the influence of the first Five-Year Plan and collectivization of agriculture, Borovoi turned to economic issues. He was particularly interested in the tsarist government’s encouragment of the formation of Jewish agricultural colonies at the beginning of the nineteenth century. He viewed the agricultural colonies as a necessary response to an economic crisis following the partitions of Poland: “The last decades of the eighteenth century consisted of hard shocks for East European Jewry. These were years of rising impoverishment and the intentional uprooting of Jews from their old economic positions, years of political crises and decisive changes.”24 Borovoi treated the crisis in all of its many facets. Both the Russian government and its elite (merchants and aristocracy) were unprepared to integrate Jews into the existing socio-economic paradigm. Instead, legal liabilities were imposed: “The new administration quickly mastered the simple anti-Jewish political-rhetorical tradition of Polish times, but could not acquire 21 Michael Beizer, “New Information on the Life of Izrail Tsinberg,” Soviet Jewish New Portraits 2 (1991): 31–38. See also Eliasberg, Odin iz perezhnego Petersburga, 145–48. 22 See Beizer, “New Information,” 31–32. See also Eliasberg, Odin iz perezhnego Petersburga, 145–48. 23 Borovoi, Vospominaniia, 137. 24 Borovoi, Evreiskaia zemledel’cheskaia kolonizatsiia, 7.

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understanding of the special economic-legal position of Polish Jewry. Russia still did not develop ‘models’ [to deal with] Jews. In order to resolve a series of ‘Jewish questions,’ it utilized tools designed in a different historical context.”25 Borovoi noted the government’s inability to place Jews into Russia’s clearly defined soslovie (social classes). He even wrote with a certain sympathy for the government’s dilemma, when he stated about its Jews that, “Russian got a nasty ‘inheritance.’”26 In Borovoi’s interpretation, the remaining solution was the settlement of Jewish farmers on the enormous southern territory of Ukraine. This in term would relieve overcrowding and competition in the traditional areas of Jewish habitation.27 His own experience frequently provided insights in the Jewish past. He noted these parallels between past and present in the introduction to his authoritative monograph, Jewish Agricultural Colonization in Old Russia: Politics, Ideology, Economics, Everyday Life: The population of the Jewish town suffered terribly from every kind of marauder, the regular soldiers of various “governments” (Petliura’s boys, the volunteers, etc. . . .). But when the threat of physical elimination was sidelined, it became clear that in the new socio-economic framework created by the October socialist revolution, the Jewish town with its idiosyncratic cultural and historical way of life lacked the conditions for sustenance; and things weren’t going to go back to the way they were. What were the thousands of petty traders, multitudes of agents, artisans (usually of low qualification), “people who make money out of air,” and the like, going to do in the new society under construction? Soviet industry had only just taken its first steps. There was still high unemployment in the cities, they could not swallow the “excess” population of the towns with offers of jobs. [. . .] The problem could only be resolved by transporting the Jewish masses to the countryside, creating Jewish agricultural colonies.28 25 Ibid., 14. 26 Ibid., 12. 27 Ibid., 15. At the same time, the area had been open to Jewish inhabitation unofficially since 1764, and officially from 1769. 28 Borovoi, Vospominaniia, 179.

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It should be noted that his research on Jewish agricultural colonization followed the brief period of activity with Agro-Joint, which provided American aid to Jewish farmers in the Soviet Union.29 Borovoi hoped for successful results from this collaboration. The book’s conclusion states, “Presently Jewish agricultural colonization is experiencing the first years of a new epoch in its history. Only promising perspectives appear ahead and big successes have already been noted. Still this period won’t soon become an object of historical study. But of course its time will come and a much more joyful book will appear than the one presented here to the reader.”30 Borovoi was especially attuned to the relevance of historical questions in contemporary Soviet society. How to transform outmoded artisanal structures, how to integrate the Jews into the new Soviet economy? It is now known that such agricultural attempts in the Crimea had mixed success, but, like others, Borovoi overestimated how easy the establishment of productive agricultural settlements would be.31 Jewish Agricultural Colonization demonstrates Borovoi’s evolution from “bourgeois” intellectual history in the direction of a Marxist interpretation of Jewish history. In this context he portrayed poor and powerless Jews who could be construed as, in effect, a Jewish peasantry and proletariat. It cannot be denied that he took a risk in studying a distinct ethnic group. In Soviet times Jews had the reputation of being at one and the same time petit-bourgeois individualists and collective nationalists. Nonetheless, the study of economic issues regarding Jews had urgency in view of Ukraine’s large Jewish population. In “Jewish Agricultural Colonization,” Borovoi again discovered “bad Jews”: Nota Notkin and the so-called “Jew” Girshovich, who broke with the traditional collective. Notkin, who advised the government, promoted the idea of choice; some Jews might wish to become farmers. Although Notkin rejected the use of force to remove Jews from the countryside, he voiced the interests of the Russian aristocracy in his opposition to the promotion of industry.32 Significantly Notkin had little patience with the opinion of Jews themselves and in this aspect he resembled the Russian officials whom he served. It is telling 29 Jonathan Dekel-Chen, Farming the Red Land: Jewish Agricultural Colonization and Local Soviet Power, 1924–1941 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 69–75. 30 Borovoi, Evreiskaia zemledel’cheskaia kolonizatsiia, 7, 197–98. 31 Dekel-Chen, Farming the Red Land, 129. 32 Borovoi, Evreiskaia zemledel’cheskaia kolonizatsiia, 23–24.

Saul Borovoi’s Survival: An Odessa Tale about a Jewish Historian in Soviet Times 63

that he refused to criticize Gavriil Derzhavin’s Memorandum of 1804 and its libelous message that Jews were responsible for exploiting and ruining the Russian peasant.33 However, Jewish Deputies who came to St. Petersburg to complain in the early 1800s were equally ineffective, although they succeeded in delaying the government’s evacuation of Jews from the countryside.34

***

In the mid-1930s, Borovoi faced a perilous political situation directed against historians who “deviated” from the party line. Arrests for “bourgeois” leanings and “nationalist deviations” were just some of the trumped up charges. During this period Borovoi began his analysis of Jews in the Ukrainian uprising in the seventeenth century. Although he portrayed Jews who broke from the Jewish collective, here he also emphasized Ukrainian-Jewish unity. Making use of documents that had not been available to scholars earlier, Borovoi took issue with the conventional interpretation that Jews were innocent victims, torn between Polish noblemen and Khmelnitsky’s Cossacks.35 According to Borovoi, Jews were fully engaged on the side of the Polish landlords whom they served and on whose victory their livelihood depended. At the same time Borovoi made an unexpected discovery—that there existed Jewish Cossacks who aided the Ukrainians. In his view two kinds of Jews lived among the Cossacks. One group consisted of Jews who converted to Russian Orthodoxy and joined as fighters (rarely) or as Christian clergy. For such Jews, membership in the Hetmanate offered escape from the sale of captured Jews as slaves or for ransom. According to Borovoi, Cossacks also found allies in merchants who abetted the exploitation of peasant labor. Jews who earlier had bought and sold the peasants’ produce for the Polish lords fulfilled the same function for the Cossacks. In this way Jews helped expand trade with the Turks in the southwest and with Europeans in the West. 33 See John Doyle Klier’s analysis of the Memorandum in Klier, Russia Gathers Her Jews: The Origins of the ‘Jewish Question’ in Russia, 1772–1825 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1986), 102–3. 34 Borovoi, Evreiskaia zemledel’cheskaia kolonizatsiia, 34. 35 Saul Borovoi, “Evrei v zaporozhnoi sechi (po materialam sechevogo arkhiva),” Istoricheskii vestnik 1 (1934): 141. See also Saul Borovoi, “Natsional’no-osvoboditel’naia voina ukrainskogo naroda protiv pol’skogo vladychestva i evreiskoe naselenie Ukrainy,” Istoricheskie zapiski 9 (1940): 81–124.

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Eventually Cossack fortunes fell as the tsarist government shifted trade routes to avoid a Cossack transit tax.36 Although documentary evidence offers little information about Jews who came to live in the Hetmanate, Borovoi identifies certain individuals by name—for example, Moisei Gorlinskii and Musia Iosifovich. Surprisingly, he claims that Jews who worked for the Cossacks were not objects of discrimination: “Our materials testify with enough conviction that Jews in the Sech (Cossack camp) at this time were not subject to any special discipline and did not experience any special inhibition in their activities. Therefore, we have the right to speak of Jewish ‘equality’ in the Sech, of course in that framework where equality could exist for the non-Cossack population of Zaporozh’e [that was] restricted in participating in its political life.”37 Oddly Borovoi uses the term ravnopravie (equality)—a goal of Jews in tsarist Russia—in a situation of coercion based on fear of Cossack violence. Rather than criticize Jewish Cossacks for betraying their co-religionists at a time of crisis, Borovoi focused on their unity with the Ukrainians. Although the number of Jewish Cossacks was statistically insignificant, Borovoi exaggerates their importance, presumably to demonstrate the friendship between Jews and Ukrainians. Continuing the theme of Ukrainian-Jewish alliance in the twentieth century, Borovoi published a fundamental article, “The Destruction of Odessa’s Jewish Population during the Romanian Occupation.”38 After returning from evacuation, Borovoi gathered evidence about the atrocities that occurred in the city between October 1941 and April 1944 for a chapter in the famous Blackbook of Nazi Crimes on Soviet Territory, edited by Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman.39 Borovoi’s article, however, was not included in the volume and was not published until 1999.40 36 Borovoi, “Evrei v zaporozhnoi sechi,” 184. 37 Ibid. 38 Saul Borovoi, “Gibel’ evreiskogo naseleniia Odessy vo vremia ruminskoi okkupatsii,” in Katastrofa i opir ukraïns’koho evreistva (1941–1944): Narysy z istoriï Holokostu i oporu v Ukraïni, ed. S. Ia. Elizavetskii (Kyiv: Natsional’na akademiïa nauk Ukraïny, 1999), 118–53. 39 Vasily Grossman and Ilya Erenburg, eds., Chernaia kniga: O zlodeiskom povsemestnom ubiistve evreev nametsko–fashistskimi zakhvachikami vo vremenno-okkupirovannykh raionakh Sovetskogo Soiuza i v lageriakh unichtozheniia Pol’shi vo vremia voiny, 1941–1945 gg. ( Jerusalem: Tarbut, 1980). 40 See note 39.

Saul Borovoi’s Survival: An Odessa Tale about a Jewish Historian in Soviet Times 65

However, in that article Borovoi portrayed the heroism of the Soviets and the suffering of Jews as two moral absolutes.41 Estimating that only six hundred individuals survived from the city’s original sixty thousand Jews, he explains that Jews fortified their will to live by remembering Soviet patriotism: “Yes, it was hell. But all these people did not lose faith for a moment in the future, in their salvation. [. . .] They preserved their spirit and cultivated an for indestructible feeling of moral and intellectual superiority over the executioners and the whole bestial fascist gang. They believed in the indomitable Soviet Army, in whose ranks so many relatives and friends fought; they believed in the immortality of their people.”42 Refusing to differentiate betwen Ukrainians and Russians, Borovoi underscored the link between Jews and non-Jews. Although noting examples of collaboration by officials and certain intellectuals, he expressed pride in the help extended by Odessa’s non-Jewish population. He writes, Towards the end of spring of 1942, they [ Jews] began to receive a tiny ration (around 200 grams of bread, frozen potatoes, and so on). Furthermore, their position gradually worsened. Although Jews lived and worked in isolation, nonetheless between them and the local population some contact developed. The majority of the local population related to Jews with sympathy, and this was something fundamental, almost essential, that helped save those whom the bullet of the executioner and epidemics had missed. Thanks to the peasants they [ Jews] could somehow feed themselves and hold out until liberation day.43

Borovoi also gives special praise to Soviet partisans who perished in the flight against Fascism, noting that a number of these patriots were Jewish.44 Yet Borovoi never forgot Jewish suffering during this period. Having acknowledged the pain inflicted on all Soviet peoples by the Nazi invasion, 41 Borovoi, “Gibel’ evreiskogo naseleniia Odessy,” 118. 42 Ibid., 145. 43 Ibid., 143. 44 See Diana A. Dumitru and Carter Johnson, “Constructing Interethnic Conflict and Cooperation: Why Some People Harmed Jews and Others Helped Them During the Holocaust in Romania,” World Politics 63, no. 1 ( January 2011): 1–42. Scholars of our own day corroborate Borovoi’s observation that the Soviet population in the area provided aid to Jews under Nazi persecution.

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he described the martyrdom of the Jewish people in particular. Transmitting eye-witness accounts of mass shootings, the suffering of marches in the terrible cold, and other impossible horrors, Borovoi mapped out the areas of Odessa and its suburbs that had been transformed into a killing field: “The Domanev territory located in the north-eastern part of Odessa county was the most abandoned and far from Odessa’s train routes. It was designated as the best place for the creation of the ghetto—or to put it precisely—the place of mass extermination. Bogdanovka entered into our tragic history forever as the Majdanek of the Transnistria. . . .”45 And we have this description: “The other terrible place that one should remember is Akhmechet Headquarters—a real death camp located twelve kilometers from the village of Akhmechet on a pigfarm. It was not a coincidence of course that pigfarms were chosen as places of extermination. In this [decision] the ‘humor’ of the fascist executioners was expressed.”46 Although Borovoi had earlier minimized the significance of the Jewish collective, here he expressed his deep sympathy for the martyrs. Yet at the same time, Borovoi expressed his deep disdain for Jews who denied their heritage to save themselves.47 It is possible that Borovoi felt survivor’s guilt.48 With his escape from Odessa as a member of the institute’s faculty, he left his father and brother in danger. His father died on the road and thousands of his neighbors went to their graves because they did not have sufficient influence to acquire a spot on the list of the saved. In any case he now praised the Jewish collective that he had earlier viewed with skepticism. Regarding his own life, Borovoi asserted that antisemitism did not play a significant role. Yet he commented on post-war Odessa; I looked hard at the traits of my native city. A great deal was new, that was difficult to get used to, and to which one could not become reconciled. On the gates of many houses one could see crosses painted haphazardly. It signified 45 Borovoi, “Gibel’ evreiskogo naseleniia Odessy,” 128. 46 Ibid., 142. 47 Borovoi, Vospominaniia, 243. 48 Ibid., 236. Borovoi writes about his leaving Odessa: “I am ashamed to say that my first reaction was this: the ‘problem’ had been resolved that had tortured me from the morning of that fateful day. Should I telegraph father or not. At the time I thought that father will never again see Odessa, the city to which is connected years of his greatest material and civic ‘flights.’ He had less than a half a year to live. . . .”

Saul Borovoi’s Survival: An Odessa Tale about a Jewish Historian in Soviet Times 67 that the house had been cleansed of Jews. The house managers and officials were not hurrying to erase them. They were still visible almost a year after liberation. More than once and for a long time one could hear from behind, “The pests have come back.” The word “pest” in the mouth of Odessites who had survived the occupation acquired a distinctly ethnic connotation.49

In the last years of Stalin’s rule the Jewish theme was off limits even to Borovoi. His book on the Jews in Ukraine in the seventeenth century was never published, although a leading Moscow publishing house, the Sabashnikov Brothers, had accepted it for publication. Nonetheless, parts of the book appeared as articles in journals.50 Such a prohibition presented problems for Borovoi’s concentrated research on Jewish history. As he noted, “But the most important thing is that I lost my subject. I was deprived of almost all openings to publish on the Jewish theme, this defined my [future] scholarly-literary work.”51

***

The goal of this article has been to concentrate on Borovoi’s identity as a Jewish historian in the Soviet Union.52 Was Borovoi a Marxist-Leninist? According to Mark Sokolyansky, he was embarrassed by the Marxist nomenclature obligatory at the time he wrote his books. Sokolyansky claims that Borovoi would have written differently if that had been possible.53 At the same time it should be emphasized that a number of Borovoi’s acute insights occurred within his focus on economics and class identity.54 For example, he described his emphasis on peasant themes in passages such as this one: In contrast to all the previous historians of Odessa, I emphasized that it was impossible to exaggerate the role of foreigners in the establishment 49 Borovoi, Vospominaniia, 290. 50 Borovoi, “Natsional’no-osvoboditel’naia voina,” 83–124. 51 Borovoi, Vospominaniia, 192. 52 I have mentioned that Borovoi published a good deal after World War II. For a partial bibliography, see Mark Sokolyansky, “Reflecting Odessa’s Jews: The Works of Saul Borovoi, 1903–1989,” Jahrbuch des Simon-Dubnow-Instituts 2 (2003): 359–72. 53 Mark Sokolyansky, “Dolgo i shastlivo,” in Vospominaniia, 12. 54 Sokolyansky, “Reflecting Odessa’s Jews,” 359. Sokolyansky writes, “So, in his last few years of life, Professor Borovoi was able to ensure a certain modicum of continuity in this field of historical studies.”

68 PART I | Russian-Jewish Historians and Historiography and development of the city, so that one can only understand its history by connecting its fate with the processes of control by the local peoples over the southern plains оf New Russia. The creation of the city and its rapid development are the result of difficult acts of heroism by the Ukrainian and Russian peasants who under the conditions of serfdom, nonetheless were able to bring the Northern Coast of the Black Sea to a renewed life in order to begin dismantling the system of serfdom and developing capitalist norms earlier than in other regions of the country, despite the paralyzing interference of serfdom.55

Incidentally, this quotation comes from Borovoi’s memoirs in which he was entirely free to write as he liked. Regarding how he conceived of the region’s identity, in his Jewish writings Borovoi focused on Ukraine. He viewed Jews as defined by and integrated in the local economy and social fabric. In this sense, too, he differed from his predecessors and teachers Dubnov and Zinberg, who viewed phenomena from the perspective of the center, St. Petersburg, and from the response of the state. In his works Borovoi minimized the importance of the state. In this sense he was an innovator with his colleague, Ilya Galant, in demonstrating the local, intimate, and quotidian aspects of Ukraine and its Jews in contrast to other parts of Russia.56 Borovoi’s longevity (he died in 1989) was due in part to his low profile and to his refusal to join to the Communist Party during the purges. He also refrained from defending his dissertation until he was thirty-five. However, he always affirmed his loyalty to the Soviet Union. In his memoirs Borovoi stated, “Nonetheless I have been happy in my life. I survived the difficult years of revolution, civil war, hunger, and epidemics. I was not repressed in the thirties or the early fifties, and that was a happy coincidence. The most serious illnesses

55 Borovoi, Vospominaniia, 282. 56 Ilya Galant (1867–1941) was a historian of Russia’s Jews who wrote such works as K istorii umanskoi rezny of 1768: Material and research on the history of the Jews in Poland and Southestern Russia (Kiev: A. O. Shterenzon, 1908) and Cherta evreiskoi osedlosti (Kiev: Rabotnik, 1910).

Saul Borovoi’s Survival: An Odessa Tale about a Jewish Historian in Soviet Times 69

passed me by. I was able to spend my life engaged with my favorite subject. I was lucky to meet many good, kind, and smart people. . . .”57 Regarding antisemitism, he also rejected the idea of Jewish victimization in several important respects. The government, always a villain in Dubnov’s work, is analyzed in a more balanced fashion. Borovoi depicted the JewishCossack fight not as ethnic conflict, but as part of an economic struggle in the region. In his book on Jewish agricultural colonies, Borovoi finds fault with Derzhavin’s 1804 Memorandum, but he also criticizes the prejudice of others— Polish merchants, enlightened Jews, and Russian officials. Although Borovoi conformed to his times, it would be wrong to view him as an ideological spokesman for the Party. His treatment of history is far from one dimensional. Borovoi offered compelling studies that showed the fissures, internecine conflicts, and internal weaknesses among the Jews of Eastern Europe. The absence of a Jewish collective gave Borovoi the ability to depict Jewish individuals differentiated by class and identity, educational achievement, and professional status. Even so-called “bad Jews” were symbols of modernity and radical change. Although Borovoi practiced an ideologically acceptable Soviet historiography, his life and work revealed an engaged participant who benefited from and helped form the particular set of circumstances that constituted his life.

57 Borovoi, Vospominaniia, 18. Quoted by Mark Sokolyansky in the book’s introduction, “Dolgo i shastlivo.”

Chapter Five The Ideological Challenges of S. M. Dubnov in Emigration: Autonomism and Zionism, Europe and Palestine

The purpose of this essay is to examine Semyon Dubnov’s attitude toward Jewish nationalism in the period when he was in emigration after leaving Soviet Russia in 1921.1 My conclusion is that Dubnov was surprised to find that his ideas were not applied in eastern Europe or the United States—where he expected—but in Palestine, the Jewish outpost under British mandate still only sparsely populated by Jews. The admiration for Dubnov’s conceptions of Jewish autonomy in the Yishuv was a challenge: how would he respond? Did he modify his ambivalent attitude to Zionism?2 The answer is yes and no. Yes, in the sense that he expressed sympathy with the aims of the growing Yishuv; no, he did not extol the idea of a Jewish state in Eretz Yisrael (the Land of Israel) that would dominate the diaspora. To begin, I will summarize Dubnov’s ideas on Jewish nationalism, then turn to the situation in eastern Europe in the 1920s and his attitude toward the   1 See Viktor Kelner, Missioner istorii; Simon Rabinovitch, “Alternative to Zion: The Autonomist Movement in Late Imperial and Revolutionary Russia,” (PhD diss., Brandeis University, 2007); Roni Gechtman, “Creating a Historical Narrative for a Spiritual Nation: Simon Dubnov and the Politics of the Jewish Past,” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 22, no. 2 (2011): 98–124; Jeffrey Veidlinger, “Popular History and Populist History: Simon Dubnov and the Jewish Historical and Ethnographic Society,” in Sefora ve-sayefa: Semyon Dubnov: Historion ve-ish sibur, eds. Avraham Greenbaum, Israel Bartal, and Dan Haruv ( Jerusalem: Merkaz Zalman Shazar Center for Jewish History, 2010), 71–86.   2 Dimitry Shumsky, “Tsionut be’merka’ot kafulot: Ha’im haya Dubnov lo tsioni?” Zion 77, no. 3 (2012): 369–84.

The Ideological Challenges of S. M. Dubnov in Emigration 71

Yishuv in pre-state Palestine. At the end I will speculate about why Dubnov remained in Europe, although he was invited to come to the United States before the outbreak of World War II. This research illuminates unanswered questions about Dubnov’s self-presentation and his ideological position in the last years of his life. The extent of Dubnov’s fame precludes the need for a long introduction. He was born in Mistislav—today’s Belorus, then the Russian Empire—in 1860. More than just a historian, he was also a political theorist, literary critic, and politician. His accomplishments are many; most notably he wrote Pis’ma o starom i novom evreistve (Letters on Old and New Judaism) (1907), published the pinkasim (journals) of the Lithuanian Jewish community (1928), and completed his magnum opus, Weltgeschichte des jüdischen Volkes (World History of the Jewish People), in Berlin in 1929. He also penned a memoir, Book of Life, Reminiscences and Memoirs: Materials for a History of My Time, one of the most important testaments about Jewish politics in tsarist Russia.3 He died in Riga, killed by a Nazi collaborator in 1941. Dubnov differs from other thinkers who have sought a metaphysical purpose for Jews in diaspora in that he was agitated first and foremost by assimilation.4 He declared, Assimilation is not so much a doctrine as a fact of life, unavoidable under the present circumstances against which nationalism struggles. It is the direct   3 Semyon Dubnov, Kniga zhizni: Materialy dlia istorii moego vremeni. Vospominaniia i razmyshleniia. 3 vols. (Riga: Jaunātnes Grāmata, 1934–35 [vols. 1–2]; New York: Soiuz russkikh evreev, 1957 [vol. 3]). There are several republications in Russian. Scholars such as Jonathan Frankel, Mark Yudel, and Viktor Kelner follow Dubnov’s own conception, as he described it in The Book of Life, according to which his career can be divided into three parts: thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. Thesis stands for the religious Jew divorced from secular culture; antithesis is the opposite (secular knowledge without Jewish learning); while synthesis is the unity of the two, secular and Jewish knowledge. Jonathan Frankel is right when he notes that Dubnov went through two major intellectual transformations. For a discussion, see Jonathan Frankel, “S. M. Dubnov: Historian and Ideologist,” in Crisis, Revolution, and Russian Jews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 240–41S. Benjamin Nathans is preparing a translation of the memoir, which should soon be published by Wisconsin University Press.   4 Allan Arkush, “From Diaspora Nationalism to Radical Diasporism,” Modern Judaism 29 (2009): 326–50. Arkush discusses two recent pro-diaspora theories that are based on multiculturalism and acculturation.

72 PART I | Russian-Jewish Historians and Historiography practical result of the rejection of the national idea. If you are not a Jewish nationalist, you inevitably will become assimilated, if not in the first, then in the second generation. And that is why we have a full moral right to call those who reject Jewry’s national evolution facilitators of assimilation, whether they are conscious of it or not.5

He was convinced that, unless one battled against it, assimilation would inevitably succeed in destroying the Jews as a distinct people. Thus, Jews needed autonomous institutions—schools, theaters, newspapers, lectures, and civil courts—as well as political institutions, such as a Jewish parliament, to manage the people’s internal life. Dubnov imagined that these institutions would contribute to the development of an autonomous Jewish sphere and protect it against the tide of assimilation. Because Dubnov wanted above all else to preserve the Jewish nation, he had to define what he meant by nation. In his Letters on Old and New Judaism, he claimed that there were three conditions of nationhood corresponding to levels of moral progress. The first stage consisted of primitive social formations, such as tribes, that joined for practical purposes, such as defense or hunting. The second and higher stage of national identity was based on material factors, such as geography, language, and a specific way of life, while the last category was spiritually the highest because it was founded on features independent of material life, such as shared culture, historical memories, and emotional attachment across many lands and epochs. According to Dubnov, the Jews were the only people who deserved the appellation “spiritual nation.” He writes in Letters on Old and New Judaism, But there is still another difficult test of national maturity: when a nation loses not only its political independence, but also its own territory, when, because of history, it is divorced from its physical land, dispersed among foreign countries and gradually loses even its single language. If in the course of many centuries the nation nonetheless exists and creates in its own way, revealing a stubborn struggle for further autonomous development, despite   5 Semyon Dubnov, “O rasteriavsheisia intelligentsia,” Voskhod, no. 12 (1902): 74–75.

The Ideological Challenges of S. M. Dubnov in Emigration 73 a break occurring in the external national chain, then such a people has reached the highest degree of cultural-historical individuality, and even if it encounters further strain on its national will, it can be considered invincible. History gives many examples of the disappearance of nations because of the loss of territory and dispersion among other peoples, but it knows of only one example of the preservation of a landless and dispersed nation. This unique example in history is the Jewish people.6

The Jewish nation that he lauds is represented by the Jews of eastern Europe. They are the nation that has lost its territory but still struggles for autonomous development. Dubnov thought the best chances for the spiritual nation’s preservation occurred in a liberal democracy and not in a politically repressive state like the tsarist empire.7 Liberal democracies offered the ideal conditions for autonomy because they provided full civic rights for the individual and collective rights for minority nations. Dubnov explains, “A Jewish nationalist says, ‘As a citizen of the country, I participate in its political and civic life in accordance with the rights given to me. But as a member of the Jewish spiritual nation, beyond those rights I have my own internal national interests, and in this sphere consider myself autonomous to the degree that autonomy is permitted for political dependent nationalities in the state and in the realm of interests.’”8 Although encouraged by the experience of national parties in AustriaHungary, he was also inspired by the Council of the Four Lands, the self-regulating institution of political administration among the Jews of seventeenth-century Poland. In his History of the Jews in Russia and Poland, Dubnov describes the virtues of the Council: This firmly-knit organization of communal self-government could not but foster among the Jews of Poland a spirit of discipline and obedience to the   6 Dubnov, “O rasteriavsheisia intelligentsia,” 5–6.   7 Ezra Mendelsohn, On Modern Jewish Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 38. Mendelsohn noticed that Jews expressed group identity most boldly under governments that discriminated against Jews.   8 Dubnov, “O rasteriavsheisia intelligentsia,” 13.

74 PART I | Russian-Jewish Historians and Historiography law. It had an educational effect on the Jewish populace, who were left by the government to themselves and had no share in the common life of the country. It provided the stateless nation with a substitute for national and political self-expression, keeping public spirit and civic virtue alive in it, and upholding and unfolding its genuine culture.9

In the early-modern period the autonomous Jewish community had provided diaspora Jews with a purpose that kept their spirits alive and preserved their cohesion as a nation. In order to make the ideas of Jewish autonomy relevant for modern times, Dubnov had to make two modifications: to democratize and to modernize it. Democratizing the Jewish community meant the introduction of the ballot box as the way of selecting leaders.10 Dubnov insisted on one vote per person regardless of a voter’s economic status; he also demanded suffrage for women. Modernization involved a new position on who was a Jew. Arguing that anyone who declared himself a Jew was one, Dubnov took a position that sidelined religion. Membership was not entirely voluntary, since all Jews were included in the community until they renounced their Jewish affiliation. In Dubnov’s scheme the government would provide funding from taxes collected from all citizens and allocated according to the percentage of each national group.11 During the 1905 Revolution and in post-1905 Russia, Dubnov attempted to win political power in order to implement his ideas.12 He played an integral role in the establishment of the so-called Achievers (Dostizhniki, i.e. Soiuz dlia dostizheniia polnopraviia sredi evreev v Rossii), an umbrella political group that consisted of Jewish politicians from different parties who had united to fight for Jewish equality. In 1906, he helped establish the Folkspartay, an independent political party that ran candidates in elections to the State Duma. The Folkspartay’s program emphasized Jewish autonomy,

  9 S. M. Dubnow, History of the Jews in Russia and Poland: From the Earliest Times Until the Present Day, trans. I. Friedlaender (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1918), 1:113. 10 Semyon Dubnov, Volkspartei: Evreiskaia narodnaia partiia (St. Petersburg: Ts. Kraiz, 1907), 12. 11 Dubnov, Volkspartei, 12. 12 Rabinovitch, “Alternative to Zion,” 66.

The Ideological Challenges of S. M. Dubnov in Emigration 75

embodying many of Dubnov’s central ideas.13 The Folkspartay was not very popular and Dubnov grew distant from the party’s day-to-day affairs by mid-1906.14 In the years before World War I, Dubnov refined the concept of autonomy, harnessing it to immigration (which was a major feature of the times—two million Jews left eastern Europe from 1881–1924). Instead of characterizing Jewish communities solely by their autonomous institutions, now Dubnov highlighted an evolutionary trajectory. During the course of history, diaspora Jews had created “national hegemonies” or institutions of communal autonomy that were mobile. Jews set up communities in Babylonia, Rome, the Germanic lands, the Iberian Peninsula, Ottoman Turkey, Poland, Russia, and the United States. From the earliest days to the present, Jews built homes, cemeteries, and synagogues. More importantly, they created political institutions of self-government—the autonomous community, a kind of state within a state. In early times examples of Jewish autonomy were the Sanhendrin, later the Exilarch and the Gaonim, community representatives in Spain, the local Kehillas, and the Council of the Four Lands in Poland and Lithuania. Dubnov writes, “National hegemony passes from center to center, from Spain to France and Germany, from there to Poland and Russia. In and around each center Jewish nationality fights for its individual character.”15 Although it was impossible for Dubnov to realize his ideas in tsarist Russia, he hoped that the Provisional Government in February 1917 would enact legislation to give minority nations collective rights in addition to individual civic rights. Unfortunately, the Bolsheviks took power shortly thereafter and scuttled the plans. However, the newly independent Poland and Baltic states seemed to offer possibilities for the realization of Jewish autonomy. Although the Soviet government gave Dubnov an exit visa in response to a request of the Lithuanian government, Dubnov moved to Berlin.16 Berlin 13 Ibid., 98–100. 14 Simon Rabinovitch, Jewish Rights, National Rites: Nationalism and Autonomy in Late Imperial and Revolutionary Russia (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2014), 99. 15 Simon Dubnow, Nationalism and History: Essays on Old and New Judaism, ed. Koppel S. Pinson (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1958), 330. 16 Simon Rabinovitch, “The Dawn of a New Diaspora: Simon Dubnov’s Autonomism, from St. Petersburg to Berlin,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 50, no. 1 (2005): 273–74.

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offered good libraries to complete his magnum opus, World History of the Jewish People, and his translator, Aron Shteinberg, with whom Dubnov attempted to bring out new German editions of his works, lived there.17 In the late-1920s, he was invited to take up a position as a professor of Jewish history in Kaunas in Lithuania, but ultimately the invitation was rescinded due to opposition among the faculty.18 Although scholars have debated about why Dubnov turned down offers to come to Lithuania to try to advance ideas of Jewish autonomy, it is clear that he was not confident about the experiments taking place in eastern Europe.19 The signatory nations at the Paris Peace Conference, including Poland and Romania, impressed Dubnov with their promise to respect the rights of the national minorities and especially Jews for collective national life. However, over time it became clear that promises were not kept. While Lithuanian and Polish Jews had internal Jewish political organizations, political parties, schools, newspapers, cultural associations, and libraries, the governments only provided rare and sporadic support. In fact, the renaissance of Jewish cultural autonomy in eastern Europe was concentrated in the first years after World War I (1918–21). By the mid-1920s, the institutions of an independent Jewish community lost much of their power as brokers for the Jewish community before the central government. Social and state antisemitism grew during the period. The two essential parts of Dubnov’s conception, liberalism and state cooperation, were missing from Jewish autonomy in eastern Europe. In North America, secular Jewish autonomous institutions, in particular the schools of Tsibo and Tarbut, lasted at most two generations before petering out. Similarly, experiments in Western Europe, England, and South Africa did not succeed for lack of interest. In this context Dubnov’s rejection of the many offers to devote himself to building autonomous institutions makes sense.20 He undoubtedly weighed 17 Rabinovitch, “The Dawn of a New Diaspora,” 273–4. 18 Ibid., 274. 19 Cecile Esther Kuznitz, “The Origins of Yiddish Scholarship and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research” (PhD diss., Stanford University, 2000), 68–70. 20 Rabinovitch, “The Dawn of a New Diaspora,” 282.

The Ideological Challenges of S. M. Dubnov in Emigration 77

the concrete benefits of collective activity against his own desires to finish his research projects.21 Just as in the past, once again he left collective activity to concentrate on his own projects.22 At the same time, in eastern Europe in the 1920s Jews were objects of discrimination and were forced from positions in the economy and kept from political power.23 Their ability to stave off destruction was compromised even before the German army arrived.24 In the early 1930s, Dubnov left Berlin with the majority of other Russian immigrants, fleeing high inflation, increased street violence, and anti-foreigner feeling as well as antisemitism. He moved to Riga, Lativa, where he hoped to enjoy his final years in peace in order to finish his research projects. Nonetheless, he did not find his political ideal there.

***

Dubnov’s theories gained traction precisely where Dubnov least of all expected it, in pre-state Palestine in the 1920s. There were political institutions (the Jewish Agency, World Jewish Congress, the Histadrut) and political parties (Achdut Ha’avoda, Revisionists, Agudat Israel), Jewish cultural associations (theater, music, art, libraries), and Jews had civil rights under (British) law and collective rights as a Jewish community. Although only a small community in the early 1920s, it was growing quickly, becoming a haven for Jewish immigrants worldwide especially after the appearance of stringent limitations on immigration to the United States in 1924.25 Often scholars presume that Dubnov was indifferent to Jewish cultural activities in Palestine because he had articulated doubts about Zionism.26 21 Kuznitz, “The Origins of Yiddish Scholarship,” 69. 22 Viktor Kelner discusses this flight from politics in his biography, Missioner istorii, 497. 23 Ezra Mendelsohn, “Politics in Interwar Poland: An Overview,” in The Jews of Poland Between the Two World Wars, eds. Yisrael Gutman, Ezra Mendelsohn, Jehuda Reinharz, and Chone Shemruk (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1989), 16. 24 Piotr Wróbel, “Jews in Poland before the Holocaust,” (talk, conference on violence in eastern Europe between the wars, University of Jena, Germany, May 7, 2012). 25 Howard M. Sachar, A History of Israel: From the Rise of Zionism to Our Time (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1996). 26 Dubnov expressed his doubts about the prospects in Palestine in many places, but also in his Letters on Old and New Judaism in the chapter entitled, “Avtonomizm, kak osnova natsional’noi programmy,” Voskhod, no. 12 (1901).

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However, Professor Dimitry Shumsky makes convincing arguments that it is anachronistic to consider Dubnov hostile to Zionism in the 1920s.27 One should realize that Dubnov’s comments about Zionism were connected primarily with Ahad-Ha’am and his ideas of cultural Zionism.28 Secondly, the Yishuv at the beginning of the twentieth century consisted of small agricultural settlements that had little in common with the community that developed later. Although he hadn’t recinded his view expressed in his polemic with AhadHa’am that Palestine, even in the most optimistic estimate, could hold only a small portion of the Jewish people, Dubnov was enthusiastic about practical immigration to Palestine. In addition, he conceded Ahad-Ha’am’s point that a Jewish Palestine would inspire diaspora Jews thanks to the renewal of Hebraic culture.29 But he insisted that the real solution to the “Jewish problem” was elsewhere because the opportunities for accommodating Jewish immigrants in Palestine were small in comparison with the size and strength of Europe or the United States. Dubnov, however, was not slow to realize that many of his ideas found application in Palestine. In a chapter in his World History (1925–29) he starts by describing new facts on the ground: “The strengthening of Jewish positions in ‘Palestine’—this is how the catchword sounds. Once under the unfavorable policies of the Turkish regime, now the program of Zionism in its newest phase consists of the possible gradual enlargement of the Jewish population in the cities and countryside, the purchase of land, attraction of capital for the development of industry, and the expansion of the net of financial, social and cultural institutions.”30 Turning to the national meaning of these changes, he writes, “At the same time in the [ Jewish agricultural] colonies the Arab day-laborer is being replaced by Jewish workers in increasing numbers which is lending 27 Shumsky, “Tsionut be-merkaut kefolot,” 380–82. 28 Ahad-Ha’am, “Avar ve atid (1891),” in Kol kitve Ahad-Ha’am (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1956), 81–82; see also Yossi Goldstein, “Merecht ha’yichasim bin Ahad-Ha’am le’semyon dubnov be’aspeklariya idiologit,” in Sefora ve-sayefa, 115–26. 29 Dubnov, “Avtonomizm, kak osnova natsional’noi programmy,” 118–19. 30 Simon Dubnow, Weltgeschichte des Jüdischen Volkes (Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1925–29), 10:483.

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the settlements a stark national character.”31 And he continues, seemingly with pride, to announce the establishment of schools with instruction in Hebrew, such as the so-called Herzl Gymnasium in Tel Aviv and the Technion in Haifa.32 It is worth recalling that Dubnov had called for schools in the national language, Hebrew, and later in Yiddish, but had been rebuffed earlier by fellow Jews, members of the Society for the Promotion of Enlightenment in Odessa in 1902.33 If these successes weren’t enough, Dubnov could hardly have failed to notice that the thinking of Zionist immigrants in Palestine closely resembled his own. Comparing Yiddish and Hebrew, the Yishuv and the diaspora, he writes, In the same way that “Yiddishism” is the banner of the democratic class in the diaspora, the young [ Jewish] Palestiners are inspired by “Hebraism.” In both cases the same motivation is decisive; the knowledge that the smaller the chances for the Jewish nation to gain a solid territorial basis, the more emphasis has to be placed on strengthening Jewish culture, and for one, there is tending to the old national language, while for the other it is the cultivation of the colloquial language of the folk masses that serves as the primary means for this.34

Dubnov realized that the Jews of Palestine had a common goal: to strengthen Jewish culture and identity through communal institutions, although he was likely wrong that the members of the Yishuv had given up their dream of attaining a “solid territorial basis.” Concretely, among cultural activities, Dubnov aggressively pursued the translation of his works into Hebrew.35 Perhaps he understood that if he wanted to play a role—even if only to defend the diaspora—he would have to write for a Palestine audience in Hebrew. In this context it is interesting that 31 Dubnow, Weltgeschichte des Jüdischen Volkes, 10:483. 32 Ibid., 10:487. 33 Brian Horowitz, Jewish Philanthropy and Enlightenment, 174–76. 34 Dubnow, Weltgeschichte des Jüdischen Volkes, 10:486–87. 35 See Shmuel Verses, “Derecho shel Semyon Dubnov be-sibach ha-loshonot,” in Sefora ve-sayefa, 93.

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he carried through a decision to write his three-volume updated monograph on Hasidism in Hebrew (finishing in 1929) rather than leaving it to translators.36 In the introduction to the book he explains his motivations. Because of its importance, I am quoting at length: Until recent times I wrote all my books and most of my studies exclusively in Russian, the language through which the generation to which I belonged played an honorable role in the largest Eastern Jewish center since modern times. (I only wrote Hebrew as well as Yiddish in isolated instances). But the reason why I refrained from using our old national language was not that I did not value it highly enough (after all it was my written language before I became a writer). Rather, it was because I followed the ordinary literary career of the time when even the Hebrew national poet, Jehuda Leib Gordon, had abandoned it with the doubtful cry, “For whom do I Toil?” My perspective was directed far away, and for my contemporaries inspired by progress, this language, although intelligible, could not serve to express the vast part of the newly minted concepts and nuances of thought. The Hebrew writer of the time, in so far as he was incapable of not distorting content because of form, was weighed down by a double obligation to create content and form anew, the new science itself as well as its means of expression. In creating my historical edifice, I had to use all my strength to shape the content, it would have been impossible at the same time to form the language anew.

He continues, focusing directly on The History of Hasidism: Now that I stand before the task that in its first contained version I had barely finished, I decided to write the whole book in Hebrew and for the following two reasons. First, because almost all of the material that I used comes from Hebrew sources, and it seemed therefore to make no sense to translate the original texts into another language, and second of all, because for a long time I felt the need to write at least one book in our national language in which I could show my debt to the first literary impressions of my childhood. To these two reasons I add a third one: shortly before his demise, I promised 36 Verses, “Derecho shel Semyon Dubnov,” 93.

The Ideological Challenges of S. M. Dubnov in Emigration 81 my friend, Ahad-Ha’am, who constantly reproached me for writing in a foreign language, that I would write the work on Hasidism in its new version in Hebrew from beginning to end. I hereby keep my promise.37

This statement contains a few simple confessional elements and a discussion of Hebrew in the late 1870s in Russia. Depicting the condition of Hebrew at the time of his youth, he unwittingly makes clear the distance Hebrew had traveled. Not only was he fully capable of writing a book in Hebrew from start to finish without having to invent the language anew in order to produce the content, but also an audience in Palestine eagerly awaited the book. By writing in Hebrew, Dubnov acknowledged the obvious: Judah Leib Gordon was not the last Hebrew writer, as Gordon had feared.38 But Dubnov was silent on a serious point. Hebrew was the language of the Bible and religion. In the 1870s, people like him ran from it, from the religious authorities and religious life. He was eager to integrate into Russian culture, and it was only Russian society’s rejection that awakened him to the need to remain within the Jewish world. In other words, his embrace of secularism and Jewish culture was typical of many Jews, including many who became Zionists. In fact, the project of studying the history of Hasidism from a secular perspective but through the Hebrew language would have been unimaginable in 1929 were it not for the Zionists who had resurrected Hebrew as a living language. Despite his support for Hebrew, Dubnov continued to find flaws in Zionist ideology.39 He was quick with Schadenfreude to draw conclusions regarding the feasibility of the Yishuv in the shadow of Arab violence in 1929: “The conflict sharpens more and more, and its consequences are hard to foresee. In the midst of the triumph of the Zionist idea, such a dark shadow emerges, calling to mind that even at the threshold of its historical homeland, wandering Israel’s tragedy has not yet come to an end, and that even an inner ‘Galut,’ an ‘Arab Galut,’ is present.”40 In other words, because the return to Zion has not ended pogroms 37 Simon Dubnow, Geschichte des Chasidismus (Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1931), 1:14–15. 38 See Michael Stanislawski, For Whom Do I Toil?: Judah Leib Gordon and the Crisis of Russian Jewry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 4. 39 Sophie Dubnov-Erlich, The Life and Work of S. M. Dubnov: Diaspora Nationalism and Jewish History, trans. Judith Vowles (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 245. 40 Rabinovitch, “The Dawn of a New Diaspora,” 284.

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even in Palestine, the Yishuv has no advantage. In fact, one should view Zion as merely one of several potential emigration destinations. On Zionism Dubnov took the position of a fellow traveler.41 In an article written in 1924, he took issue with Zionist “extremists,” such as Vladimir Jabotinsky, who were uncompromising on the idea of a sovereign state. In contrast, Dubnov suggested that Zionism as a political movement should serve as a broad tent open to individuals of diverse commitment and political attitudes. He supported Chaim Weizmann’s ideas about enlisting non-Zionists, especially American plutocrats, who were eager and capable of contributing financially to the improvement of Jewish life in Palestine.42 But he did not fail to note (in the early 1920s) that emigration to Palestine had stalled and, despite all the efforts, the Jewish population was still only one sixth as large as the Arabs. Dubnov writes, “Zion is more important than Zionism, and its true ‘home’—although it is not large—is to make room for only a small part of the people, which is more important than all the utopian castles of ‘Altneuland.’ All those who want to build should enter the ‘Jewish Agency’ no matter how they portray it, a large home or a modest house.”43 It is impossible to escape the feeling that Dubnov felt an ambivalence toward the Yishuv and wished that Zionism repudiate the plank that it “negates the diaspora.” In the introduction to the Hebrew edition of his Letters on Old and New Judaism (1937), Dubnov states that, “In all the severity of my criticism of political Zionism, I was not in opposition to the positive and practical side, to those who came to build the land, but to the negative side, the negation of the Galut.”44 In tsarist times Dubnov had already articulated similar arguments and he did not change. In 1903, he maintained that, “according to the nature of things it (the Zionist organization) will be pulled into a wider national-cultural organization that will have as its goal the internal renaissance of Jews in all the places that history has scattered them.”45

41 Kelner, Missioner istorii, 381. Kelner also notices a sympathetic attitude toward Zionism on Dubnov’s part. 42 Jehuda Reinharz, Chaim Weizmann: The Making of a Zionist Leader (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 376. 43 Semyon Dubnov, “Partiinoe i narodnoe delo,” in Svershenie (Das Werden): Sbornik pervyi (Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1925), 100. 44 Rabinovitch, “The Dawn of a New Diaspora,” 284. 45 Dubnov, “Avtonomizm, kak osnova natsional’noi programmy,” 40.

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Near the end of his life Dubnov was offered sanctuary in the United States, invited by the Jewish National Workers Alliance in New York.46 His daughter, Sophie Dubnov-Erlich, encouraged him to come as she had recently arrived with her two sons.47 Dubnov, already a widower, did not budge from his decision to stay in Riga. As we now know, a Latvian guard who was serving German orders to round up Jews who had been called upon to gather in June 1941 shot Dubnov. One theory is that the soldier did not know who the old man was.48 There is another theory that the assassin was actually one of his students.49 Nonetheless his decision to remain in Europe is pregnant with meaning. It echoes the fact that Dubnov lived by his ideas and was willing to die for them. His sacrifice would not have had the same resonance if he had died in the United States or in Palestine. At the same time one cannot help seeing a deep historical justice in the fact that he died at the hands of antisemites. His whole life long he had battled with Amalek (historic enemy of the Jews) in the form of the tsar, the right-wing politicians, and pogromists. It rings true to the tragedy of the situation that Dubnov would have his life end among his people in the eastern European Jewish diaspora.

46 Dubnov-Erlich, The Life and Work, 239. 47 Ibid. 48 Kristi Groberg and Avraham Greenbaum, eds., A Missionary for History: Essays in Honor of Simon Dubnov (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1998); also A. M. Kayzer, “In the Jewish Iasnaia Poliana: With Dubnov in Riga,” in A Missionary for History, 51–54. 49 Elie Wiesel, “Reflections on Science and Ethics,” Rambam Maimonides Medical Journal 1, no. 2 (October 2010): 2. According to Wiesel, the murderer was Dr. Johann Silber, the head of the Gestapo in Vilna. This Silber apparently “came to the ghetto just to taunt Dubnov, to ridicule him, saying, ‘Professor are you still a humanist? Dubnov answered, ‘Yes.’ ‘Do you still believe in the human condition?’ ‘Yes,’ Dubnov said. And then Silber said: ‘Last week we executed with my participation, 700 Jews. And you still declare that you believe in human nature?’ And Dubnov took out his pencil and paper: ‘Exactly how many Jews did you say you executed?’ . . . He remained a historian to the end!” For Wiesel this story reflects the highly educated and refined German who paradoxically was able to kill and torture. Wiesel ends his article, “Therefore dear colleagues, please be aware that science, with all its greatness, with all its depth, and with all the fascinating vision that you own about universe and its galaxies, is not sufficient if it stands by itself. Please remember, that while the mystery of the human being may reside in the galaxies, it lies even more so in the human heart.” I thank Gabriel Mayer for the reference to this article.

PART II Russian–Jewish Intelligentsia’s Cultural Vibrancy

Chapter Six Semyon An-sky—Dialogic Writer

In his fiction An-sky inscribes the “other.” However, rather than treating nonJews, Russians, or Ukrainians, An-sky devotes most of his fiction to depicting fellow Jews. In his world Jews are diverse. Portraying the religious and the secular, revolutionaries and nationalists, the young and the old, the rich and the poor, women, men, children, and even their animals, An-sky emphasizes Jewish multiplicity. A key feature of An-sky’s fiction is its “dialogic” character. Refraining from imposing his worldview, he gives his protagonists opportunities to present their vision of the world. Although such views oftentimes contradict the author’s own position, An-sky is committed to a faithful depiction of the “other” among Jews themselves.

***

In the final sentence of his introduction to An-sky’s literary collection in English translation, David Roskies expresses this evaluation: “It would have pleased him to know that besides the riveting—and downright inspirational—story of his life, he had also left behind a literary legacy of varied and formidable proportions.”1 However, outside of Roskies’s own essay on An-sky’s life and a few articles written primarily in An-sky’s own time, there have been only a handful of serious studies of his “formidable” literary legacy.2 Since he wrote over fifteen stories, a novel, and two novellas in a career that spanned more than three   1 David G. Roskies, introduction to The Dybbuk and Other Writings, by Semyon An-sky, ed. David G. Roskies (New York: Schocken Books, 1992), xxxvi.   2 The studies that I allude to are Mikhail Krutikov, “The Russian Jew as a Modern Hero: Identity Construction in An-sky’s Writings”; Gabriella Safran, “An-sky in 1892: The Jew and the Petersburg Myth”; and my own “Spiritual and Physical Strength in An-sky’s Literary Imagination”; all three articles are located in Gabriella Safran and Steven J. Zipperstein, eds., The Worlds of S. An-sky: A Russian Jewish Intellectual at the Turn of the Century (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 119–36, 53–82, and 103–18, respectively. For a description

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decades, it is no exaggeration to assert that An-sky-the-creative-writer deserves more critical attention. The lack of interest in An-sky’s fiction can be explained in part by the fact that from An-sky’s multifaceted career, scholars have concentrated on the “useable past,” i.e. those aspects that can be adapted to enhance or rebuild modern Jewry.3 First of all, his ethnographical efforts have interested scholars, while his famous play, The Dybbuk, has gained celebratory status in part as a medium for recovering memories about the shtetl for contemporary audiences.4 Even his biography (at least as its has been interpreted by David Roskies)—the story of an Orthodox Jew who became a cosmopolitan revolutionary, but “returned”— has caught the attention of those who want to find in the past a model of a cultural “Baal tchuva,” a prodigal son who reunites with his people.5 We have not found an equivalent interest in his fiction, the vast part of which was originally written in Russian. Perhaps one can blame An-sky himself. It is hard to imagine who today would identify with the subjects of his fiction. In the 1890s An-sky described self-loathing Jews, revolutionaries attacking Orthodox Jewry, and impoverished Jewish tutors and teachers who naively hoped for a world without discrimination. Not only don’t these figures and problems resonate well today but they seem time bound to the crisis years of late tsarist Russia. But perhaps scholarly indifference to his fiction may have another cause: the low status of Russian-Jewish literature. Before the Revolutions of 1917, Russian-Jewish literature—literature written by and about Jews in the Russian language—was considered inferior in quality. In fact, Russian-Jewish literature was supposed to disappear. Its critics predicted that writers would either ultimately fully join Russian literature or adopt the Yiddish and Hebrew

of An-sky’s oeuvre see the bibliography of An-sky’s work in Safran and Zipperstein, The Worlds of S. An-sky, xxxii–xxxiv.   3 See David G. Roskies, The Jewish Search for a Usable Past (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), especially chapter 1, “The Jewish Search for a Usable Past,” 1–16.  4 The Dybbuk has appeared most recently in Israel. See the article in Mavo from January 7, 2010 regarding the conference on the Dybbuk in Jerusalem, accessed July 17, 2016, http:// www. mako.co.il/news-israel/education/Article-08ef90926790621004.htm.   5 See the Jewish Heritage On-Line Magazine, accessed November 5, 2009, http://www.jhom. com/personalities/ansky/index.htm.

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languages exclusively.6 In fact at the end of the nineteenth century RussianJewish literature was thought as existing only as a political mouthpiece. Its role was to describe Jewish life in order to win the sympathy of non-Jews to the cause of Jewish liberation.7 An-sky was assigned a place in a group that included such writers as David Aizman, Semyon Yushkevich, and Rachel Khin. Together they were classified as bytopisateli (observers of daily life). Their goal was to depict the negative sides of life to elicit sympathy for the Jewish plight.8 It seems possible now to dispute some of these claims about RussianJewish fiction (in particular that this literature has little aesthetic value). I want to reclaim An-sky’s reputation largely because his fiction repudiates the political function. It is occupied less with eliciting sympathy and more interested in revealing the diversity of and conflict in Jewish life during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Furthermore, his fiction helps us understand An-sky’s intellectual development. While An-sky may not be a genius on the level of Osip Mandelshtam or Isaac Babel, his dialogic approach gives us inimitable depictions of Jews in specific times and places.

***

An-sky’s fiction features the “dialogic” method made famous by Mikhail Bakhtin in his analysis of Dostoevsky’s novels. According to Bakhtin, The plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses and the genuine polyphony of full-valued voices are in fact characteristics of Dostoevsky’s novels. It is not a multitude of characters and fates within a unified objective world, illuminated by the author’s unified consciousness that unfolds in his works, but precisely the plurality of equal consciousnesses and their worlds, which are combined here into the unity of a given event, while at the same time retaining the unmergedness. In the author’s creative plan, Dostoevsky’s principle heroes are indeed not only objects of the author’s   6 A salient expression of this view can be found in Saul Tchernikhovsky’s entry on RussianJewish Literature: “Russko-evreiskaia khudozhestvennaia literatura,” in Evreiskaia entsiklopediia, 13:641–42.   7 Vasily Lvov-Rogachevsky, A History of Russian-Jewish Literature, ed. Arthur Levin (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1979), 113.   8 E. Bronshtein, “Bytopisateli evreiskoi massy (S. A. An-skii),” Knizhki voskhoda (10 October 1905): 105–29.

Semyon An-sky—Dialogic Writer 89 word, but subjects of their own directly significant word (neposredstvenno znachashchee slovo) as well. Therefore the hero’s word is here by no means limited to its usual functions of characterization and plot development, but neither does it serve as the expression of the author’s own ideological position (as in Byron, for example).9

An-sky’s fictional writing reveals the kind of polyphony described above. In his stories and novels An-sky gives individual characters distinct voices and ideological independence. He presents ideas that diverge from or even contradict his own views. Since the author identifies with more than one character or viewpoint, many of his stories, plays, and novels conclude on a note of indeterminacy, leaving tensions unresolved. Undoubtedly this assertion might strike one as curious. After all, if An-sky was known for anything at all, it was for his strong opinions. When he advocated Socialism, he was a passionate advocate; as a representative of Jewish nationalism you could hardly find a more dedicated zealot. The same can be said for his advocacy of assimilation, pacifism, Hasidism, and Zionism.10 How then, one might ask, could An-sky be a dialogic writer when he embodied ideological preferences? Looking at his ideological affinities, however, one cannot deny his contradictions. A dedicated revolutionary, he also supported Semyon Dubnov’s Folkspartay, and later Zionism, which rejected revolutionary struggle. It was in his fiction, however, that he gave full voice to ideological diversity, refraining from offering a final pronouncement. Fiction, it seemed, provided the space where he could try out, weigh, and compare ideas. I separate An-sky’s oeuvre into three periods: an early period in Russia when he began writing short stories; a middle period in the emigration, which is characterized by the use of longer genres, such as the novella and novel; and a final period when An-sky returned to Russia and published the novella V novom rusle (In a New Way). By 1906, he stopped writing fiction, concentrating instead on the study of Jewish ethnography, leading the first Jewish Ethnographic Expedition (1912). This chronological framework is useful for   9 Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. R. W. Rotsel (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1973), 4. 10 See Horowitz, “Spiritual and Physical Strength,” 103–18.

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illuminating the close relationship between his biography and the larger historical context.

***

Born in Chashniki, a town in Vitebsk province (now in Belarus) in 1869, as a young man An-sky embraced the change that affected many Jewish youths at the time. A description of An-sky is found in the memoirs of Hayim Zhitlowski, An-sky’s childhood friend, who became a well-known spokesman for Jewish Territorialism. Zhitlowski recounts that the two did not feel anger or prejudice toward the Jewish religion but rather expressed enthusiasm for a new cosmopolitanism that was then just coming to life: For us (An-sky and I) there was no contrast, such as Jewish and non-Jewish, but a contrast between “old” people, ideas, ways of thinking and living and “new” people with new ideas, new strengths, and a striving to higher, more noble, more conscious ways of life. In this regard, there was no difference between Jew and non-Jew. School and heder were equally cast away, synagogue and church equally hated, [Dmitry] Pisarev and Lilienblum equally beloved and cherished, because both stormed the old fortress with revolutionary drive.11

After a period as a tutor of Jewish children in Liozno, Belarus, An-sky fled to the south of Russia, to the Don Basin (Dnepr) in the Ukraine, becoming a miner.12 The movement in space was paralleled by an ideological shift. He accepted as an uncompromising moral truth that the intelligentsia owed a debt to the lower classes, agreeing too with the idea, as articulated by Pyotr Lavrov (with its romantic overtones), that the individual was the decisive agent of history.13

11 Hayim Zhitlowski, Zichronos fun meyn lebn (New York: Dr. Zhitlowski Jubilee Committee, 1935), 1:18. 12 Gabriella Safran, “Timeline: Semyon Akimovich An-sky/Shloyme-Zanvl Rappoport,” in The Worlds of S. An-sky (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), xvii. Today’s Dnepr (since 2016) was formerly called Dnepropetrovsk. In pre-revolutionary times it was named Ekaterinoslav. 13 James P. Scanlan, introduction to Historical Letters, by P. L. Lavrov, trans. and ed. James P. Scanlan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 10–12.

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Despite close contact with the Jewish Bund, An-sky rejected the economic determinism characteristic of Marxism that was a part of the Bund’s ideology. These political ideas clearly shaped An-sky’s early attempts at fiction writing. His first published story, “Istoriia odnogo semeistva” (“A Family History”) (1884), is a good example.14 Describing a poor family of four daughters, the author interweaves the plot lines to depict the hopelessness of life for the poor and powerless. One tells about Chiena, who, having become a maid, was raped by her employer. She wants to turn to prostitution, but even that fails when she discovers that she has become pregnant. Another sister, Sora loses everything when a wall falls on her husband in the workplace, leaving her without a breadwinner. As a result, she becomes a wet nurse for a wealthy family, while her son is undernourished.15 The injustice of the situation is deepened by the fact that her husband’s employer refuses to provide a pension, although he knew about the risk of the wall. The description of the dreary town and of the family’s poverty is conventional in Haskalah literature. What makes An-sky’s treatment different is that, in contrast to maskilim who satirized the situation, An-sky introduces a strong class consciousness, accusing the wealthy of persecuting the poor.16 In his treatment of poverty and hopelessness one can notice the influence of Russian authors of the time, such as Nikolai Nekrasov, Vsevolod Krestovsky, and Gleb Uspensky. In “Na torgakh (rasskaz)” (“At the Auction [A Tale]”), published some eight years later, An-sky protrays what is conventionally called “Jewish selfhate.”17 The story takes place in an indescript village inn the night before and 14 Although most critics consider “Istoriia odnoi semeistva” (“A Family Story”) to be An-sky’s first published story, there are good reasons not to accept this claim and to categorize it as juvenilia, despite the fact that it appeared in issues 9–12 of the 1884 Voskhod, the leading and only Jewish journal published in Russian and in Russia at this time. One should also know that the story was originally written in Russian and translated by An-sky himself into Yiddish for possible publication in a Yiddish journal. While the manuscript was passing back and forth, an unknown person sent it to Voskhod, where it was retranslated back into Russian from the Yiddish and then published anonymously. An-sky himself did not know that it had been published until some time after it appeared. 15 Semyon An-sky, “Istoriia odnoi semeistva,” Voskhod, no. 9 (1884): 126. 16 An-sky, “Istoriia odnoi semeistva,” 132. 17 Semyon An-sky, “Na torgakh,” in Sobranie sochinenii (Petersburg: Samoobrazovanie, 1911), 5:103–64.

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then during a local auction of sheep. Using their monopoly power to set the price, Jewish traders agree among themselves, paying off anyone who would dare undercut them. Although the peasants realize that they have been cheated, they are unable to interfere. However, leaving the town, the Jews are pelted with rocks. The story ends with two traders admitting that the peasants had the right to take revenge. By portraying the Jewish merchants this way, An-sky upholds the view that Jews exploit the peasantry. Although such an image butressed the claims of antisemities, it was typical of radical writers to revile Jewish businessmen. Nonetheless, it is striking that the story’s message concurs with the spirit of the government’s so-called May Laws of 1882, which had the intention of removing Jews from the countryside to protect the peasantry. In the same year as “At the Auction” was published, “Mendl-Turk” (“Mendel Turk”) appeared. In this story An-sky shifted his narrative mode, offering a positive image. Placing the story in an unspecified town in Belarus during the Russo-Turkish War (1878–80), the narrative focuses on Mendel, a Hasidic schoolteacher, who assures everyone that the Turks will win, despite the overwheming contrasting evidence. Although the story seems to mock Hasidism since Mendel’s convictions are shown to have no basis in reality, An-sky treats Mendel with sympathy. The first-person narrator, a maskil who resembles An-sky himself, gives this initial description of Mendel: “For some reason I pictured him as a beastly-looking old man. Actually, he turned out to be young, 27–28 years old with fine features and a small sharp beard. Deep pensive black eyes and sharp furrows on his forehead gave his face a particularly serious expression. A velvet yamulkah and fine ‘pais’ curled in a spiral that fell from his ears provided as it were a suitable frame for his face.”18 Besides registering an attraction toward Mendel, the narrator also expresses sympathy for the Hasidic way of life. The narrator feels nostalgia for the traditions that he once experienced. On his way to the local synagogue to see for himself how the Hasidim debate politics, the narrator recalls his own childhood: [. . .] Mincha was over. Part of the congregation hurried home to finish the obligatory third shabbas meal and quickly return to synagogue. Others 18 Semyon An-sky, “Mendl-Turk,” in Sobranie sochinenii, 1:17.

Semyon An-sky—Dialogic Writer 93 remained. They, quiet and satisfied, walked in deep meditation back, forth, and around the synagogue, holding their hands behind their backs and softly singing a tune. [. . .] The congregation dreamt. Everyone’s mood was soft and sublime. The store, business affairs, and worries—now they flew far away somewhere. In various corners a national motif was heard not too loudly and sporatically, ‘Bim-bam-bam,’ in which each injected his own dream. . . . Now someone was astute enough to ask, and even beg, Borekh or Zarekh, who was a famous singer in our synagogue: ‘Zarekh! Say something!’ Zarekh did not need to be asked twice. Staying where he was, he began to sing a “piece” from the Rosh Ha-Shanah or Yom Kippur prayers, at first softly and then more and more loudly. Gradually others began to join in and everyone started singing. And for a long long time above the high arches of the synagogue that were hanging in the dark there resounded synagogue singing that was at times tender, at times victorious, and at times infinitely despairing.19

The sentiments of the narrator clearly parallel An-sky’s own perspective in his memoirs, where he expresses nostalgia for the emotional warmth of the Orthodox Jewish milieu abandoned long before.20 In a display of honesty, An-sky has the Hasid Mendel express the reasons why he cannot have interacted socially with non-Jews. Instead of blaming religious differences, Mendel attributes the cleft between himself and his Russian neighbors purely to social antipathy. His acute evaluation entirely contradict the image of a Hasid as largely ignorant of external society: “What could be the connection between me and them? I am not even speaking about the fact that I am a Jew and they are Christians, but generally speaking. . . . Well, let me give you an example, one that is not abstract at all, you 19 An-sky, “Mendl-Turk,” 1:31. 20 An-sky’s memoirs can be found in abridged form in English translation as “Between Two Worlds: ‘I Enlighten a Shtetl’,” in The Golden Tradition: Jewish Life and Thought in Eastern Europe, ed. Lucy S. Dawidowicz (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1996), 305–20. In the same memoirs An-sky also expresses his regard for Moses Leib Lilienblum’s autobiography. See Moses Leib Lilienblum, Hat’ot neurim, o, Vidui ha-gadol shel ehad ha-sofrim ha-‘ivrim (Vienna: Buchdruckerei von Georg Brög, 1876).

94 PART II | Russian–Jewish Intelligentsia’s Cultural Vibrancy yourself. . . . I think, do not be offended for my franknesss, I am telling you honestly: I look at you as . . . a Goy. A Jew who shaves, eats treyf, openly breaks the shabbas laws, what is there to say!—this Jew is already not a Jew! Nonetheless, I have some connection with you, I can talk to you, I understand you and you understand me. Why? Because you also have a spiritual life, one that is different—whether good or bad, that’s another question—but you have one. Well, what kind of connection can I have with them. With whom, I ask you? With the muzhik whose life begins with pork and ends in the tavern? Or with the aristocrats who do not know anything and do not want to know more than a fine lunch, pretty clothing, and—excuse me—a lovely nekeva, a female? My God, they are as foreign to me as that table over there!

“On the other hand”—he finished with a light ironic smile on his lips—“on the other hand, I fully understand that they too cannot consider me an especially close relative. What kind of person am I after all if my name is Mendl and not Ivan, if I don’t eat pork and wear a long caftan! Certainly I am worse than the worst!”21 Although at first glance the story appears to recount the awakening of provincial Jews to modern politics either as a parody or perhaps in a pseudo-­ documentary mode, by the end we realize that we have been shown a Hasid’s inner psychology. An-sky gives full voice and ideological independence to Mendel, permitting him to defend his views and therefore win the reader’s sympathy. Although Mendel’s self-conscious candidness seems unrealistic—would a Hasid open up to a maskil?—one cannot help noticing the absence of authorial criticism toward the Hasidim. In fact, the lack of disparaging comments jars with the conventional maskilic treatment of the Hasidism and in An-sky’s case contradicts his own experience. After all, An-sky was forced to leave Vitebsk and later Liozna by religious Jews who accused him of apostasy and threatened forced military service.22 Such positive treatment of religious Jews has to be recognized as the first of its kind in the Russian language. While Grigorii Bogrov described religious Jews in Zapiski Evreia (Notes of a Jew) (1871–73) and Lev Levanda in a number 21 An-sky, “Mendl-Turk,” 1:47. 22 Semyon An-sky, “Zichrones,” in Gezamelte Shriftn (New York: An-sky, 1920–25), 10:18.

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of his stories, religious Jews were always shown as tragically flawed if not fully nefarious to the cause of enlightenment. Such political goals are foreign to this story. In his story from 1900, “V meshchanskoi sem’e” (“In a Bourgeois Family”), An-sky again withholds from criticizing religious Jews.23 Treating a middle-class family, albeit one barely holding on to its petit-bourgeois position, he begins in medias res by describing a Sabbath weekend. As it happens, Borekh, the father, is able this week to return home from his job in the logging industry. The cast also features Hana, who doubles as maid and Leibka’s godmother. We also encounter Ivan, a Russian servant; Leibka’s melamed; and the family cat. The story begins on Thursday, which incidentally falls on a rosh hodesh sometime in early spring about a month before Passover. The narrator provides detail about how Jews prepare for the Sabbath, explaining as if to those unacquainted with Jewish rituals (Russian readers?) the rules of what is not permitted on this day. He explains, for example, that a woman is not allowed to cut her nails on Thursdays because the new nails would begin to grow on Shabbat. The female members of the family discuss at length which hen to slaughter now and which to save for Passover. With such details, An-sky gives us in Russian a rare anthropological portrait of a religiously observant Jewish family. Although Borekh has a relatively well-paying job, we learn that the family is failing economically, since he is not paid regularly. Moreover, an earlier attempt to open a store failed when a fire broke out, causing Borekh to lose his investment. Thus, despite the fact that they own their own house, Malka, his wife, has to borrow money for necessities. The question of how much money Borekh has brought home that weekend raises suspense in the story’s first part. The story’s second part concerns the family’s response to the melamed’s beating of Leibka, the son. Although at first the parents react angrily, they calm down when the teacher explains his reasons. However, a civil war breaks out when Hana, Leibka’s adopted mother (the parents sold Leibka to Hana once when he was very ill in order to fool the angel of death), refuses to forgive the teacher and demands that Leibka attend a different ḥeder . This part ends with Borekh and Malka threatening to fire Hana. 23 The story was republished in 1900 as “V evreiskoi sem’e (ocherk)” (“In a Jewish Family [A Sketch]),” Russkoe bogatstvo 6 (1900). I am using the newer version on the grounds that it was the final version produced during the author’s lifetime.

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The next and last scene is short. On Saturday night, the loan shark visits Borekh and demands payment, fifty-three rubles, or he will pursue his case in court, which will force him to sell his home. The story ends with Borekh and Malka, unable to think of a way out, turning to Hana: “All the family’s hopes were turned to Hana, capable Hana. Hana can do it, Hana will save us.”24 Although An-sky retains a proper conventional political perspective, condemning the loan shark and showing Hana, the representative of the working class, as the family’s savior, he nonetheless creates characters that have their own viewpoints and are capable of independent thought. They express ideas that one can recognize as legitimate and justified, although they diverge from An-sky’s own viewpoint. For example, An-sky gives the teacher an opportunity to exonerate himself for beating Leibka: “Sit down and listen carefully,” replied the old man more softly now. “On Thursday was ‘Reysh-choydesh.’ “After lunch I let them out, but told them nonetheless to come back to the heder and silently study Gemorrah (Talmud). I do not like it when children act silly. After lunch I felt like picking up the Zohar (a book of the Kabbalah) that I left in the heder. I went to the heder. I approached the house and I heard noise coming from the yard. I immediately guessed that they were playing. I entered the room and saw that the books were lying open on the table, but no one was there. I left for the yard and I heard them in the barn. I approached the barn, looked through a crack and what do you think I saw?”

He leaned a bit toward Borekh, put his hand on his knee and spoke out slowly and expressively: “My pupils were in the barn and a whole group of Christian boys were with them holding hands and dancing in a circle around an empty barrel on which a girl of 7 or 8 was lying and she was singing a Russian song. . . . Well? What do you say about that? Should I have given them a pat on their heads?”25

Although in real life, presumably, An-sky would condemn the melamed, it is impossible to know his position from the story itself. The parents and grandmother 24 Semyon An-sky, “V evreiskoi sem’e (ocherk),” Evreiskoe bogstvo 6 (1900): 163. 25 An-sky, “V evreiskoi sem’e (ocherk),” 149.

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take the melamed’s side, while Hana and Ivan remain adamant that a “crime” has been committed. Ivan’s commitment, however, is suspect, since the author tells us that he sided with Hana only because she gives him food. In fact, he was of the view that schools existed only “to whip boys.”26 Although one feels that Hana is right, one also understands that the melamed can justify his behavior. According to the values of the community, the boys deserve a beating for playing with non-Jewish boys and dancing around a barrel; the scene implies eroticism and resembles the worshipping of the Golden Calf. For that crime in the Bible, one recalls, Moses had his enemies put to death. It is remarkable that the reader confronts multiple points of view. Regarding the beating, the family’s indebtedness, whether to fire Hana, and what to do about the loan shark, each character makes his own convincing case without, it seems, authorial interference or the author’s clear identification with any single character. Another surprise is that the author depicts traditional Jewish practice with sympathy and nostalgia. Although the context—the Russian language of the story and the appearance of footnotes to explain Jewish practices to non-Jews— leads one to think that the author is not a religious Jew, An-sky portrays Jewish rituals positively. In one scene Borekh returns with Leibka from synagogue on Friday night. The author describes the scene: “Borekh, pacing around the room, placed his hands behind him and began to hum the psalm, ‘Sholem Aleichem,’ in which are greeted the ‘angels and servants of the highest one, the Master of those who lord over the lords.’ Then the psalm was sung already in another key, ‘Who acquires a good wife for she is more valuable than a pearl.’”27 Although his creative writing at this time still reveals a political tendentiousness, An-sky not only gives individual characters viewpoints that diverge from his own, but convincingly serves as their mouthpiece so that the reader does not know exactly where the author stands.

***

In 1889, An-sky took up (what he believed was) an invitation from the writer Gleb Uspensky to come to St. Petersburg.28 Hired by Russkoe bogatstvo, the 26 Ibid., 152. 27 Ibid., 140. 28 Safran, “An-sky in 1892,” 27.

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leading progressive journal in Russia of which Vladimir Korolenko and Nikolai Mikhailovsky were editors, An-sky was nonetheless unable to secure a legal permit to live in the city. According to Gabriella Safran, having been jailed once, An-sky grew weary of evading the police and looked to emigrate in part to seek out his love, Masha Reines, Hayim Zhitlowski’s cousin who lived in Bern, Switzerland.29 However, when he confessed his love, she rejected his advances. Considering returning to Russia, he nevertheless continued on to Paris, where he worked odd jobs, including book binding, before being hired as the personal secretary of Pyotr Lavrov, the famous radical philosopher and leader of the Russian socialists in emigration. Writing for socialist journals and giving talks in a number of European cities, An-sky struck up a friendship with the Socialist Revolutionary leader Viktor Chernov, who was planning to incite revolution in the Russian countryside. For his part, An-sky hoped to create a Jewish section in the Socialist Revolutionary Party as an alternative to the Bund. In emigration, An-sky attempted longer genres, writing the novella Pervaia bresh’: Povest’ (iz epokhi 70-k godov) (The First Crack: A Novella [From the 1870s]) and the novel Pionery (Pioneers). An-sky also wrote some of his finest short stories, including “Pod maskoi” (“Behind a Mask”) and “Pogovorit’ s goem” (“Go Talk to a Goy”). It goes without saying that the early years of the twentieth century were tumultuous, especially for Jews in France. From the beginning of the Dreyfus trial in 1894, continuing with the endless controversies that erupted in response to Emil Zola’s Open Letter to the President of France, “J’accuse,” and then the reversal of Dreyfus’s conviction, there was clearly much to ponder. Moreover, the year 1897 was a watershed. The Bund announced its establishment as a political party and the Zionists, under the leadership of Theodor Herzl, held their first international congress. However, judging from An-sky’s fiction you would hardly notice anything was occurring at all. Instead of dealing with these issues, An-sky returned to the time of his youth in the 1870s and to a place that resembled Vitebsk or perhaps a similar town in the Russian Pale of Settlement. An-sky fixed his sights on this particular time and place in Jewish history because he believed that it held enormous significance as the pressure point between the old and new. In the 1870s, the resistance to religious Judaism as 29 Safran, “Timeline,” xix.

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a way of life, which had earlier been practiced by a small number of maskilim, took on a massive dimension. Literally thousands of young men and women abandoned their parents’ way of life. The result was an enormous change in Jewish society, one that had explosive consequences. In the introduction to “The First Crack,” An-sky writes, It was at the end of the 1870s, that time when the enlightenment movement captivated wide layers of the Jewish intelligentsia. It was a fantastic time, but in many ways a deeply tragic time too. A wide gap broke through the bedrock of the religious and cultural foundations of Judaism. A whole generation of intellectuals, having thrown off their religious chains, ran toward the light, to a new life. That burst of energy was not commensurate with the individual’s strength or external conditions. The brave leap across a millennium cost Judaism dearly. This purely destructive movement placed what would seem to be the whole existence of Judaism on a single card, without replacing it with a new national creativity. It left behind an entire generation of crippled and mutilated people who had left one shore but not arrived at the other. But this burst of energy was also beautiful in its expanse. It was a forceful and bold burst of energy from a people who had awoken to political life.30

Pointing out that the radical insurgency paradoxically grew out of the institution that lay at the heart of the Jewish religion, the yeshiva, An-sky noted that boys there became acquainted with secular literature and Western ideas, which led them beyond the borders of Jewish life, even to apostasy. In “The First Crack,” An-sky dealt with these issues, contrasting the main character, Itsikovich, who is depicted as weak willed and dull, with the perception of his strength by the Jewish community: The young people were on the teacher’s side. The heartbeat of the young girls sped up. A fine, sweet dream carried them far away from the dirty marketplace, from the daily grind with its infinite gray background. In contrast, old women expressed the darkest suppositions about the teacher, frightening 30 Semyon An-sky, Pervaia bresh’: Povest’ (iz epokhi 70-kh godov), in Sobranie sochinenii, 2:18.

100 PART II | Russian–Jewish Intelligentsia’s Cultural Vibrancy one another, sighing, despairingly shaking their heads and repeating in a whisper: “The hour of the Messiah!” And at night during dinner in many homes the men were brought into the discussion and together with dissatisfied exclamations and distressed sighs, phrases were uttered such as “one has to do something!” . . . “we cannot leave it as it is!” . . . “we must speak with the rabbi!” and so on.31

The thin plot features Itsikovich, a young teacher who has turned from Orthodox Judaism, and involves the competing influences on his future. On the one side, the local priest and government officials ask the teacher to convert to Russian Orthodox Christianity, offering blandishments such as entrance to a university and monetary rewards. When the Jewish community becomes aware of this tactic, the elders come to Itsikovich and promise him an honored place in the community, hinting at a very favorable marriage. For a few days Itsikovich walks in the village in the traditional caftan and is celebrated by the traditionalists. However, the victory does not last long because Itsikovich disappears from the town entirely after permitting himself to be baptised. As in earlier stories one cannot be certain where exactly the author stands vis-à-vis the plot or the main character. In his story “Under a Mask,” An-sky brilliantly exploits the “dialogic approach.” Recounting the life of a group of fiery maskils who “starve” for the sake of the Haskalah, An-sky describes how they conceive of a plan to gain a livelihood. Krants, the group’s leader, should go to Bobiltseve and lie to Hillel’s parents, telling them that their son is a star pupil in the yeshiva. If Krants succeeds, they reason, Hillel’s parents will send him money. At the same time Krants will find work as a tutor, earning an income and having opportunties to undercut the religious piety of his students. Although the plan works perfectly, Krants, having gotten used to freedom from religious ritual and work, becomes frustrated with his new situation and gradually lowers his guard, smoking on the Sabbath and making blasphemous remarks. Hillel’s mother, Krayne, grows suspicious and finally decides to take a trip to check on her son. In “V” (Volozhin?) she discovers the truth. Returning to Bobiltseve, she confronts Krants. Prepared for the meeting, Krants counterattacks by threatening that if she harms him in any way, he will order Hillel to 31 An-sky, Pervaia bresh’, 2:37–38.

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convert to Christianity. The next few days pass quietly, but a few days later, while Krants is packing to leave, Krayne comes to him and confesses to having planned to poison him. When Krants objects that she would have been sent to Siberia, Krayne merely laughs and tells him that no one would have cared about his death. In the end, Krayne’s full-blown insanity and Krants’s exit from the town occur simultaneously. David Roskies is right that the story depicts the tragic consequences of the break in Jewish society in the 1870s for both the parents and the children. Morally the story reflects an antinomy. Neither character actually offers a positive model. Neither do Krayne—the suspicious mother—or her untalented husband, who spent his days in Talmud study, have answers for the next generation. Meanwhile, neither do the maskilim. Although the young boys dream of a new world of equality and justice, in fact they are slothful and ineffective; no one knows about or is affected by their existence. An-sky shows that at this time in Jewish history both generations were tragically isolated, antagonized, and incapable of compromise. Moreover, both were morally corrupt. Convinced that the justice of their cause gave them the right to use people as a means toward an end, both groups inflicted unnecessary damage on themselves most of all. In his celebrated novel Pioneers, An-sky takes up the same milieu, portraying the young intellectuals who simultaneously embrace the Haskalah and Russian culture. In contrast to the treatment in earlier works, here An-sky depicts the young men positively, emphasizing their optimism and the salutary effect of their actions on themselves and on those around them. Depicting once again a circle of young Jewish intellectuals who have run from small towns to the town of “M,” An-sky creates a novel of atmosphere, where action is subordinated to discussions about the big questions of Jewish life: what is the Haskalah, what will become of breaking from traditional Judaism, what kind of education will facilitate integration, and how should one live—for oneself alone or for one’s neighbor? The intellectuals, in some cases boys of fifteen or sixteen, live in a house on the outskirts of town that is symbolic of their outsider status vis-à-vis the traditional community, but that also provides the central location of action. They are depicted as serious about studying and acquiring knowledge that will permit them to take entrance exams to become “externs” at the university

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and therefore to get their university diplomas. The young men are not cynical or angry, nor are they dispirited or listless. Led by Mirkin, who organizes the group for the members’ mutual benefit—the more educated give lessons to the newcomers—the boys share their scant wealth by dividing up the tutoring lessons, their primary source of income. The novel is unique in that An-sky faithfully transmits the debates of the maskilim of the 1870s to the 1880s. Having little patience for Judaism and the traditional way of life, the young men focus on debating whether the Haskalah is valuable or should be thrown over in favor of cosmopolitan individualism and full russification. The young men argue about whether Dostoevsky and Pushkin are better than Peretz Smolenskin and Moses Leib Lilienblum, and whether one should keep kosher or not (as one boy says about eating pork, “My mind allows it, but my heart doesn’t”). An-sky also presents the views of the older generation of maskilim. One of the fathers encourages the boys to respect the Talmud: You are perhaps smart and educated, but without knowledge of Talmud something is lacking. . . . A person who studies Talmud has in addition to his five senses still another that does not have a particular name, but is expressed in the sensitivity, vivaciousness, and subtlety of thought, in the speed of understanding. . . . Just like many of your comrades, you do not have this sixth sense! . . . Everything you do comes out coarse somehow!32

Allowing each character to present fully his own point of view, nonetheless An-sky lets the reader realize that the smartest individuals in the group value the idealism of Judaism and the education that they received in the ḥeder. At the same time their hero, bar none, is Pisarev. But still the members debate, each making his own evaluation. One prefers Mikhailovsky, another Smolenskim, while still another sings his praise for Chernyshevsky and the famous novel Chto delat’: “‘That book,’ Tsivershtein erupted curiously . . . ‘If you placed the whole of literature on one side of the scale, Pushkin, Pisarev, Mikhailov and Dostoevsky, everyone, and on the other side this book alone—it would outweigh them!’”33 32 Semyon An-sky, Pionery (St Petersburg: Prosveshchenie, 1909). 33 An-sky, Pionery, 3:126.

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Although one would expect the narrator’s irony to slip in, An-sky holds back. A portrait of conflicting points of view is left unresolved. In his novel An-sky does not leave out the subject of gender. The narrator shows that the intellectuals adopted the prejudices of their parents, considering that a woman could never be a man’s equal. Moreover, any talk of love or feelings is entirely condemned as inappropriate. Yet even this taboo starts to change. An acquaintance with a Russian girl, Olga, awakens erotic feelings and emotional warmth in Mirkin, who realizes the stupidity of treating women as subordinates. The view that women are entitled to free choice, just as men are, motivates the group to help a young Jewish woman, Beriasheva, run from home to escape a prearranged marriage. The success triggers a utopian epiphany in Mirkin: For Mirkin Beriasheva’s escape gradually ceased looking like a singular event and appeared to him as a huge victory of light over darkness, Haskalah over conservatism, freedom over coercion. Yes! The end of the old world is coming! It cannot endure these more and more powerful, decisive, and lethal blows. Yesterday the dark “wall” that for ages separated the Jewish people from the rest of the world, life, light, and knowledge was unassailable, now it has become completely unstable. Large holes have been made and it is finally ready to fall! The time is not far off! People, all the people are beginning to think clearly and rationally, rejecting their religious and habitual prejudices. They will begin to live by healthy and useful work, create for themselves friendly relations endowed with mutual trust and understanding. And there will be no distinctions between Jews and other people, between those with privilege and without, the strong and the weak. Everyone will be equals and become brothers. Everyone will study and work. Yeshivas, heders, and other institutions of ignorance will disappear. High schools and universities will be filled with students. Young people will devote free time to serious reading, scholarly endeavors and will forget about vulgar courting, will not waste valuable time on the useless play of writing poetry. . . . A great epoch, unique in the history of the world, has arrived. The break occurred only a few decades ago. Suddenly in a blinding light “Truth,” great and immutable, appeared to those wandering in the deep darkness. And everything in humanity that is rational and vivacious went towards it as to a new testament that promised to revive the world. And it was carried like the sacred tablets to the furthest

104 PART II | Russian–Jewish Intelligentsia’s Cultural Vibrancy corners of the world and in the name of “Truth” declared a holy and merciless war against the entire old world! Victory is near!34

In this inner monologue composed of a litany of hopes and convictions, one can see the mindset of the revolutionary Jewish youth of the 1880s. Mirkin uses revolutionary vocabulary—“a holy and merciless war,” “a new Bible,” “a new epoch,” “victory.” Emboldened, Mirkin decides to change his plans and leave without taking the qualifying exams for the university and also decides to forgo a relationship with Olga. Instead he leaves for Mstislav, deep in the Pale of Settlement, where he will continue the work of spreading the Haskalah. Pioneers resembles the works in Russian literature that it self-consciously mentions, those by Pisarev, Mikhailovsky, and Nikolai Chernyshevsky. The boys dedicate their lives to the cause, to be useful to society and bring enlightenment to themselves and others.35 Clearly the novel has a biographical subtext: in his youth An-sky was like Mirkin, ready to sacrifice his own happiness in the struggle for progress. Since An-sky reveals his ideological preference for Mirkin, Pioneers is not really a dialogic novel. Nonetheless, it bears some of the characteristic of the dialogic form. The novel is built upon the conversations and views of the main characters who, while not extremely dissimilar from one another, present different ideas of what the Haskalah is and should be. An-sky does present one ideological rival to Mirkin, Ular’s father, and depicts the traditionalist viewpoint, although admittedly giving it short shrift. One possible way to understand the author’s open sympathy with Mirkin is to employ intertextuality and recall the critical treatment of the maskilim in his other works. It is possible to view the sympathy for the maskilim in Pioneers as part of the author’s internal dialogue regarding the Haskalah.

***

An-sky returned to Russia on December 31, 1905, thanks to the government’s amnesty for political prisoners. Although his views had changed a great deal 34 Ibid., 3:221–22. 35 Nowhere does An-sky mention terror (he was apparently not in favor of terror). Gabriella Safran, “Zrelishche krovoprolitiia: S. An-skii na granitsakh,” in Mirovoi krizis 1914–1920 godov i sud’ba vostochnoevropeiskogo evreistva, ed. Oleg Budnitsky (Moscow: Rosspen, 1005), 302–17.

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during the fourteen years of emigration, An-sky threw his support to his old comrades, the Socialist Revolutionaries. Despite the outbreak of pogroms against Jews in October and November, An-sky held to his belief that Jews had no other choice but to continue the fight. He was especially incensed by a series of articles that Semyon Dubnov published in early 1906, claiming that the Revolution of 1905 was less like 1848 and more like 1648, the year of the Khmelnitsky uprising in Ukraine, and 1881–82, the years of pogroms.36 Emphasizing that Jews were singled out for pogroms because they were Jews, Dubnov claimed that it was time for Jews to confront the truth: assimilation did not ameliorate the Jews’ low civil status. Instead of fighting for an illusion— equal rights in a cosmopolitan, democratic state—Russia’s Jews should devote themselves “to the security and development of the people as a cultural historical indivisible unit.”37 An-sky viewed the pogroms of October not as a symbol of the Russian people’s complicity, but just as in 1881–82, as a provocation by the conservative elite to deflect popular discontent. Revolutionaries were not blind to national concerns, but those interests had to yield to the defense of all the minorities. By forming self-defense militias, for example, Jewish revolutionaries properly resisted. The failure to stop the pogroms was not a sign of the revolutionaries’ moral decline, but merely a fact about the inequality of forces in the present struggle.38 Debates over 1905 played a significant role in the creation of V novom rusle: Povest’ (In a New Way: A Novella).39 In the short novel An-sky explored the conflict between loyalty to the Jewish cause and commitment to the larger revolution. Choosing as his subject the Bund organization in “N,” a Belarus town during a few days in the summer of 1905, he focuses on Basya, a young girl from a working-class family who is a member of the Bund’s central 36 Semyon Dubnov, “Uroki strashnykh dnei,” Voskhod, nos. 47–48 (1905): 9. 37 Dubnov, “Uroki strashnykh dnei,” 2. 38 Semyon An-sky, “‘Uroki strashnykh vekov’ (Po povodu stat’i S. M. Dubnova ‘Uroki strashnykh dnei’),” Voskhod, no. 8 (1906): 8–9. 39 The novel was first published in Yiddish as “In shtrom: Ertselung fun der yiddisher revolutsionerer bavegung,” Der Fraynd 2 (3 January 1907); and republished as “In shtrom: Ertselung,” in Sh. An-sky, Gezamelte shrifn, vol. 9 (Warsaw: Verlag An-sky, 1928). The Russian version appeared as V novom rusle: Povest’, in Novye veianiia: Pervyi evreiskii sbornik (Moscow: S. Skirmunt, 1907), 88–286; and also in his Sobranie sochinenii, 4:33–212.

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committee.40 Tracing her experiences and inner consciousness, An-sky stuctures his story loosely, giving other characters opportunties to present competing viewpoints. On one level the plot pivots around a mystery: someone has killed a tsarist police officer, which will likely attract the government’s revenge. However, the main bulk of the story is occupied with discussions in which various characters argue about why revolution is needed, whether Jews should fight for Jewish rights or for general rights, and whether Russians and Jews can really join arms in a common struggle. Using the “dialogic method,” An-sky presents mulitfarious perspectives. Not announcing where he stands himself, the author has Basya present the view that, despite appearances to the contrary, all revolutionaries are joined by an invisible thread that cannot be broken. The thread is the knowledge that only through unity can the revolution win and give Jews their basic rights: Dozens of individual little “clubs” exist and they feel eternal hatred—war toward one another. Nonetheless, they are always together and cannot separate. Something sharply divides them and simultaneously unites them. It seems that the parties and fractions, circles and groups that compete and antagonize each other, are nothing other than splinters of a broken whole, splinters that complete their orbit on the same latitude. Although at first glance one only sees broken and disordered confusion, in fact the great labor of creating the people’s future idea is already taking place, the all-­encompassing idea, the synthesis of a new life—universal and national is being formed.41

At the same time that An-sky gives Basya this perspective, he also lets another character express the opposite viewpoint. Dovid, a fellow Bund leader from a wealthy family, doubts that true unity can ever be achieved. 40 Jonathan Frankel, “In Shtrom and the Instant Fictionalization of 1905,” in The Worlds of S. An-sky. Jonathan Frankel writes that, “the town was clearly modeled on Vitebsk, which An-sky knew well from his school days and in which he spent lengthy stays in 1906–7.” He also notes that this novel, in contrast to others written on the same theme, focused on the “excitement, euphoria, of the heady days when the revolution gained momentum from day to day” and not on the pogroms of October (ibid., 140 and 155). 41 Semyon An-sky, V novom rusle: Povest’, in Sobranie sochinenii, 4:97.

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People’s egoism, their ambitions and basic cultural differences, prevent harmony from enduring: Does the worker, no matter how much he earns, share his earnings with the starving man? Doesn’t the skilled worker treat the unskilled with disdain? Doesn’t there exist among the workers a division between “higher” and “lower” and isn’t it drawn in a very sharp way? Doesn’t a worker who has read a dozen political booklets already strut around and act pretentious in front of one who hasn’t read them? Don’t you know that among conscious workers, those fine fighters, petty arguments break out, huge fights go on for the party’s leadership roles and honors, and some show their envy, while others reveal a desire to command, give orders and shout at their comrades? In your view isn’t all of this an example of bourgeois habits? Therefore I say to you: the workers do not have the right to demand from the intelligentsia what they wouldn’t demand from themselves. . . . 42

If the author himself doesn’t answer, the novel’s plot resolves some of these questions. An-sky shows us that the traditional Jews, the parents’ generation, lends support to the Bund. The father of one of the members of the Bund, a pious scribe, perceives the Bundists as veritable saviors. The narrator announces, The entire society, young and old, have given their assent and consider the Bundists the community’s legitimate leaders. A unity among generations and groups is achieved according to the values and interests of the whole. As much as they were able to do so, the young people took up the work of bringing order to our disordered life, took the fate of the old neighborhood into their hands, guarded its interests and its human dignity. The neighborhood, sick and exhausted, acknowledged the power of the children over itself, started to feel pride for them, repeated their words, felt joy for their joys, depair over their woes. Gradually the neighborhood began to absorb the profound belief in a bright future.43

42 An-sky, V novom rusle, 4:120. 43 Ibid., 4:208.

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While An-sky shows respect for the Bund, he also portrays the self-destructive and narrow-minded attitudes of the leaders who are driven by petty concerns, foremost among them, vanity. For example, An-sky presents the leader, Sender, who envies Russians their physical strength and strong character, while Dovid—intellectual, pretentious, and boastful—has little respect for the working masses.44 Another leader, Barkanov, makes the claim that all the “loyal” Jewish intellectuals are prepared to run off and assume positions in the larger Russian radical parties at the first opportunity.45 Basia, the only person in touch with the problems of actual workers, defers to her educated colleagues and takes her orders from them. While the leaders are preoccupied with interpersonal conflicts, they neglect to resolve the murder that has endangered the community. By not turning the murderer over to the authorities, they are responsible indirectly for the pogrom that is about to occur. Although the murderer’s identity is finally exposed at the story’s end—it turns out that Gersheon, a pacifist and member of the Politbureau, did it as an act of personal revenge for the murder of his sister and blinding of his father—it is too late to save the community. The final paragraph recounts the sounds of beating hoofs; the Cossacks have arrived to begin a pogrom that will presumably cause the deaths of many Jews. What does the ending mean? Should one interpret it as an acknowledgement that the counterrevolution destroyed Jewish communal unity, or will the Jewish community enter a new period of harmony? It is impossible to say which interpretation is more accurate, since one can argue both convincingly. Although “In a New Way” can be interpreted as a reproach to the authorities for using violence unlawfully, An-sky also blames the revolutionaries. He shows that the causes for the failure of the 1905 Revolution lie in the Jews themselves; they follow personal urges rather than fulfilling collective needs. “In a New Way” reflects An-sky’s biography in closely tracing his initial support for the Revolution and his subsequent criticism of the failures of 1905. 44 Ibid., 4:170–71. 45 Ibid., 4:152. “The Jewish intellectual seeks [a] broad, great and huge role and cannot be satisfied with modest and protracted work. I know comrades who went over to the ‘Party’ and the Socialist Revolutionaries not for reasons of principles, but because they felt crowded in the Bund. What really is the interest in occupying oneself with the proletariat of a small nation of six million, when you can play a role in a nation of one hundred and forty.”

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However, it is also true that An-sky judiciously presented the viewpoints of the Bundists, the Jewish street, and the Orthodox community, permitting each a full hearing. After publishing “In a New Way,” An-sky stopped writing fiction. It is perhaps clear that now back in Russia he had a different idea of where his contributions could be most effective. Turning to the study of Jewish folklore, An-sky organized the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition, which began working in 1912.46 The collection of artifacts—among them stories, legends, artworks, manuscripts, and transcribed and recorded music—that he acquired during these years served as the basis for the first Jewish museum in Russia. Just before World War I, he wrote The Dybbuk, which was supposed to be performed by the Moscow Art Theater.47 During World War I, An-sky volunteered to distribute aid to Jewish war victims on both sides of the conflict. It was very dangerous work because many of the areas he visited were in the direct line of fire. Moreover, he had the unpleasant job of collecting money, knocking at the doors of the Jewish magnates of Kiev, Petersburg, Odessa, and Moscow.48 After the Bolsheviks disbanded the Constituent Assembly in January 1918, in which An-sky was supposed to serve as a representative of the Socialist Revolutionaries, a warrant was put out for his arrest. Dressed as a priest, An-sky fled Russia for Vilna, where he resided until 1920.49 Then he moved to Warsaw where he died outside the city at a health resort in 1921 at age fifty-one.

***

How should one ultimately evaluate An-sky’s fiction in connection with the “other”? It is impossible to accept the view that he was a mere observer of reality since his fiction is richer than that. By shaping his stories in order to make the 46 Abraham Rechtman, Yidishe etnografye un folklore (Buenos Aires: YIVO, 1958), 11–34. 47 Seth Wolitz, “Inscribing An-sky’s Dybbuk in Russian and Jewish Letters, in The Worlds of S. An-sky, 164–203. The Revolutions of 1917 interferred; it was ultimately first performed in Yiddish and was never performed by Stanislawski’s famous troupe. 48 S. An-sky, Der yiddisher khurbn fun Poyln, Galitsye un Bukovine fun togbuch 1914–17, in Gezamelte shrift, vols. 4–6 (Vilna: An-sky, 1927). 49 He was in a sense chased away from Vilna by a pogrom that occurred in the city in 1919 and in which his close friend, the playright A. Vayter (pseudonym; real name Isaac-Mayer Devenishski) was killed.

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characters confront one another in ideological battle, An-sky, like Dostoevsky in Bakhtin’s interpretation, provides a broad space for these debates. Firm in their ideological positions, the characters are permitted to develop their views to the final conclusion. At times it even seems as though the hand of the author were lifted and the characters able to act freely according to their own “will.” From An-sky’s dialogical fiction, we learn a great deal about the internal life of Jewish revolutionaries, older maskilim, and traditionalists, and especially their relations toward one another. In addition, his sympathetic and extensive treatment of traditional Jews is unprecedented in Russian-language fiction. Just as important as its timing, An-sky’s fiction opens the readers’ eyes to the great cleft in Russian Jewry that occurred in the 1870s. Moreover, at a time when Russian Jewry seemed to be disintegrating, the Haskalah as an ideological challenge to Jewry and as a way of life came under intense scrutiny. Thus, although he does not provide a full-blown analysis of the problems of Russian Jewry, his fiction offers important evidence for such a prognosis. For example, Professor Mikhail Krutikov has observed that in An-sky’s stories and novels we encounter in its earliest form the revolutionary type that would take power over Russia’s Jews in Soviet times.50 How did An-sky discover the dialogic approach? Although he might have imitated Dostoevsky—I have no documentary evidence to support such an assertion—An-sky likely came to use polyphony thanks to ideological and emotional contradictions that were unique to him alone. Although An-sky yearned for a unity that would overcome difference, his knowledge of reality gained from empirical experience told him of diversity. Honing a narrative method that permitted him an insider’s viewpoint, he put respect for diversity to use in his fiction, perceiving the multifarious, contradictory, and incongruous dimensions of the “other” in Russian Jewry at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. 50 Krutikov, “The Russian Jew as a Modern Hero,” 123. Krutikov shows that An-sky was able to create characters that outlived their creator. According to Krutikov, the author’s open-mindedness and keen interest in signs of the future enabled him to identify and portray certain types that later became the leaders Russian Jewry. While An-sky’s more traditionalist contemporaries were focused on the core elements of Jewish life, he creatively explored its periphery. According to Professor Krutikov, his best characters are not “organic”; they are artificially constructed out of heterogeneous, sometimes conflicting elements. He does not depict life according to certain pre-existing schemes and concepts, but attempts to create new ones out of raw material. This makes his characters dynamic and open to the future.

Chapter Seven Russian-Jewish Writers Face Pogroms, 1880-1914

Violence against Jews in Russia from 1871 to 1919, so-called pogroms, brought death to many Jews, wounded and maimed others, and caused millions of rubles in property damage.1 In nearly all cases the responsible parties were never punished for their crimes. In the few instances where perpetrators were brought to justice, Jewish defenders were also arrested and in some cases convicted. In addition to Jewish losses, pogroms damaged Russia’s international prestige. After the pogroms of 1881–82 and again after the Kishinev pogrom in 1903, there were demonstrations in London and New York against the Russian government’s inhumanity. Increased state oppression against Jews after 1882, the so-called May Laws, made it increasingly difficult for the tsarist government to get foreign loans. Jews themselves, faced with danger to their lives and property, confronted existential questions: What was the future for Jews in Russia? Should they stay or emigrate? Was there any hope for improvement? Would the Russian government defend them, or was it itself complicit in these crimes?2   1 Shlomo Lambroza, “Jewish Responses to Pogroms in Late Imperial Russia,” in Living with Antisemitism: Modern Jewish Responses, ed. Jehuda Reinharz (Hanover: Brandeis University Press, 1987). “The casualties in the pogroms of 1881–82 were not huge by today’s figures (40 dead), but the numbers multiplied in later pogroms. For example, but in the pogroms that broke out after 1905 almost 3,000 individuals were killed. Damage to pogroms between 1903–6 was estimated to be 57.84 million rubles within the Pale and an additional 8.2 million outside it” (ibid., 268–69). For a good introduction to scholarship, see John D. Klier and Shlomo Lambroza, eds., Pogroms: Anti-Jewish Violence in Modern Russian History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 271.   2 Historians have widely debated who should take responsibility for the pogroms. Although at the time of the pogroms many believed the government had a hand in their preparation, scholarship over the last fifteen years or so has successfully repudiated this point of view.

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Debates over these issues inevitably found their way into creative literature by Jews. Although Jewish culture in Russia was trilingual, in Russian, Yiddish, and Hebrew, literary treatments by Jewish authors writing in Russian created unique problems, since these work were implicitly aimed toward a dialogue between Jews and Russians—as opposed to works in Yiddish and Hebrew that were intended exclusively for Jewish readers.3 For this reason, Jewish authors who wrote in Russian, if they had not assimilated completely, as had many Jews who joined radical political parties, tended to occupy an ambiguous position between the two cultures.4 If such authors as Lev Levanda, Grigory Bogrov, Sergei Yaroshevsky, Semyon An-sky, Rachel Khin, and David Aizman were too sharp in their criticism, they ran the risk of seeming unpatriotic or anti-Russian. Thus, treatment of the pogrom theme in the Russian language Jewish literature inevitably serves as a gauge of the attitudes of Jewish writers toward Russia, the Russian government, the press, and the Russian people.5 Russian-Jewish writers writing in Russian who had chosen a life outside the constraints of religious Judaism were by no means either religious heretics or “self-hating” Jews. The vast majority of Russian-Jewish writers—those who defined themselves or allowed others to define them this way—retained strong allegiance to their Jewish background and often saw themselves as defenders of their brethren.6 There was, at least until the first decade of the twentieth century (and it can be argued that there still exists), a genre known as

  3   4   5   6

For a discussion of the literature see, Michael Aronson, Troubled Waters: The Origins of the 1881 Anti-Jewish Pogroms in Russia (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990); Hans Rogger, “Government, Jews, Peasants and Land in Post-Emancipation Russia,” Cahiers du Monde russe et sovietique 17, nos. 1, 2–3 (1976): 5–21, 171–211; Rogger, “The Jewish Policy of Late Tsarism: A Reappraisal,” Wiedner Library Bulletin 25, nos. 1–2 (1971): 42–51; John Doyle Klier, “The Russian Press and the Anti-Jewish Pogroms of 1881–82,” CanadianAmerican Slavic Studies 17, no. 1 (Spring 1983): 199–221; Shlomo Lambroza, “Plehve, Kishinev and the Jewish Question: A Reappraisal,” Nationalities Papers 12, no. 1 (1984): 117–27; Lambroza, “Jewish Responses to Pogroms,” 253–74. For a persuasive discussion about Russian in Jewish literature, see Shrayer, “Editor’s General Introduction,” 1:xxx–xxxii. There are good reasons not to consider as Jews such radicals of Jewish descent as Leon Trotsky, Lev Kamenev, and Grigory Zinov’ev, since they did not consider themselves as members of the Jewish people. Shimon Markish dealt with some of these issues in his article, “O evreiskoi nenavisti k Rossii,” Dvadtsat’ dva, no. 38 (1985). An interesting discussion of how Russian-Jewish literature should be defined can be found in Shimon Markish, “A Propos de l’Histoire et de la Méthodologie de l’étude de la Littérature

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“Russian-Jewish fiction” published in so-called Russian-Jewish journals.7 In its early stages, Russian-Jewish literature asked of its practitioners that they treat narrowly Jewish problems from a defensive and pro-Jewish point of view.8 This literature was supposed to express an appropriately “liberal” political viewpoint; indeed, political issues, such as support for the extension of legal rights for the Jews, dominated aesthetic ones. Didactic goals were so constraining that one critic doubted that a free creative literary work could emerge from Russian-Jewish literature.9 Nevertheless, greater freedom of expression became possible during the modernist period, as Jewish writers began publishing more and more often in Russian journals where aesthetic goals often outweighed didacticism. Those Russian-Jewish writers of the late imperial period (up to 1914) that I deal with here negotiated a fine line between their feelings of affiliation with Jews and with Russians. In order to preserve their sympathy for Russia, they needed to focus their anger on “bad” Russians, on those who committed acts of violence. According to Jewish writers who felt themselves Russian, even the boorish toughs who carried out pogroms weren’t necessarily guilty, but rather acted as pawns controlled by more powerful and nefarious forces. The truly guilty parties were the government and other forces opposed to progress, democracy, and justice. In this interpretation, Jews were merely a convenient scapegoat used to deflect the anger of the Russian people away from their own economic servitude and oppression. One of the first treatments of a pogrom appears in the story “Ranniaia mogila (iz zapisnoi knizhki)” (“Early Grave [From a Sketchbook]”), which the young Jewish poet, Semyon Frug, wrote immediately after pogroms broke out in 1881.10 In the story Frug describes how a young Jewish girl, a student

  7   8

  9 10

Juive d’Expression Russe,” Cahiers du Monde Russe et Soviétique 36, no. 2 (April–June 1985): 139–53. The first of these journals was Rassvet (1860–61). It was followed by, among others, Sion (1862), Den’ (1869–71), Vestnik russkikh evreev (1871–73). The first work in the genre was “Vopl’ dshcheri iudeiskoi,” by Leiba Nevakhovich, published in 1803. For more on this work, see Yuly Gessen, “K stoletiiu russko-evreiskoi literatury: Pervoe sochinenie na russkom iazyke, napisannoe evreem v zashchitu evreev,” Nauchnyi sbornik Budushchnosti 3 (1902): 114–17. Tchernikhovsky, “Russko-evreiskaia literatura,” 13:640. Semyon Frug, “Ranniaia mogila (iz zapisnoi knizhki),” Voskhod, no. 12 (1881): 79–82.

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of medicine in St. Petersburg, returns to visit her father in a provincial city in southern Russia. There she is raped and her father is murdered. Writing so closely to the real events, Frug emphasizes the tactile experience of violence. He depicts the pogrom naturalistically, using broken syntax and a lexicon that transmits confusion, violence, and pain. The following conversation we hear is between the father and his daughter, Sonya: Scream, howl, roar. . . . A moan hangs in the air. . . . The despairing cries of women and children, furious screams of drunk bandits in a frenzy. . . . The crash of furniture breaking, ring of windows shattering. . . . “Break it! . . . Hit. . . .” “Help! . . .” “Run away? . . . Where to hide? . . . They are already here! . . . They are breaking into my room. . . .” “Sonya! Sonyechka! . . . Where are you? Come here. . . . Hide! . . . My God, where are you? . . .” But it was in vain. A large blond guy fell on him. “Kike! . . . Hey, come here, here! . . .” The old man fell. A knot of grey hair fell from the hand of the man. Screams, a snap, a crash was heard from the street. . . . “Sonya, Sonya! . . .” wheezed the old man, beaten and covered with blood, and trying to move through the crowd which was becoming more and more insane. But there something which flashed in the darkness and got hidden behind the doors of the barn. . . . “Sonya! . . . My God! Let me through! . . .” But a peasant, disgusting, wild from drink and carousing, entirely in dirty rags threw himself after him. . . . An animal-like, despairing scream rang out from the barn. . . . The struggle lasted ten minutes. . . . [. . .] Suddenly the doors to the barn opened and a girl ran out, entirely full of dirt, bloodied in a shirt that was ripped apart. . . . She ran to the gates of the house and tripped and fell on something warm, barely moving in a smoking, red puddle. . . . 11

The warm object is of course the girl’s father. Frug ends the story by stating that after the pogrom ended Sonya had to bury her father and that she decided to indefinitely suspend her studies. Although Frug gives us the micro-experience of two individuals, the reader is invited to assume that Sonya’s fate is shared by many. The Jewish dream of assimilation through education and service was shaken by the pogrom violence. 11 Frug, “Ranniaia mogila,” 81–82.

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Frug himself was strongly affected by the pogroms of 1881–82.12 One of three young journalists from the Jewish journal Rassvet, Frug demanded that Baron Horace Gintsburg, the unofficial head of Russian Jewry, hold a meeting with Tsar Alexander III to demand a public statement in defense of the Jews.13 Frug also called for the establishment of an official emigration society that would aid Jews trying to leave Russia. Although such a society was rejected at the time, various proto-Zionist organizations emerged in subsequent years, and the Society for the Promotion of Artisans and Farmers in Palestine received official recognition in 1891.14 Although graphic depictions of violence did not cease, in the following decade writers began to search for the reasons for the outbreak of pogroms and to contemplate ways to stop them.15 In his novel Konets vykhodtsev (The End of the Emigrants) (1896), Sergei Yaroshevsky offered a sociological portrait of attitudes among Russians and Jews, showing the forces that were ripping the two groups apart.16 Yaroshevsky sets his story in a small city in Belarus, Mezhepol’, and its outskirts, Parogi, during the 1880s, when Jews were suffering under the oppressive Laws of 3 May 1882, known as the “May Laws.” 12 Vasily Lvov-Rogachevsky has written about Frug and much else in his book A History of Russian-Jewish Literature. 13 Alexander Orbach, “The Russian-Jewish Leadership and the Pogroms of 1881–1882: The Response from St. Petersburg,” The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies 308 (1984): 12. Orbach describes the action of Zalman Lur’e, Morgekhai Ben Ha-Cohen, and Frug: “Since there were no initial public reactions from the capital city’s Jewish leaders to the Elizavetgrad pogrom of April 15, 1881, three young men, living in the capital city and associated with the journal Rassvet, issued invitations in the name of a fictitious Jewish organization to all of the prominent Jews in the city to an emergency meeting at the home of Baron Horace O. Guenzburg, the titular head of the community. As a consequence, the Baron was compelled to convene a meeting on May 9, 1881, of the prominent Jews in the community in order to discuss and agree to a course of action.” 14 At the end of his life Frug sold some of his work to the Russian popular press, some of which aired openly antisemitic articles, which angered some Jewish intellectuals. He was nevertheless lauded as a Jewish poet and considered an important influence on Jewish poetry in Russia. 15 Vladimir Jabotinsky’s 1908 translation of Hayim Nachman Bialik’s 1903 poem, “In the City of Slaughter,” was perceived as part of the Russian literary tradition because of its powerful rendition. The poem in both its original Hebrew and Russian translation had a large effect on Jewish youth in Russia. 16 Sergei Yaroshevsky, Konets vykhodtsev, Voskhod, nos. 1–4, 8–10, 12 (1896). In the encyclopedia article in Evreiskaia entsiklopediia the author gives as the date for the novel 1891–92 and gives it a different title, Vykhodtsy iz Mezhepolia. See Evreiskaia entsiklopediia, 16:408.

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According to a government decree, Parogi is about to be declared a rural area, and Jews therefore will be prohibited from living there. Attempting to stop the eviction, Joseph Mezhepol’skii, a Jewish intellectual, has petitioned the authorities in St. Petersburg. It turns out that the petition has no chance of success unless it contains the original decree of Jewish habitation, which is located in the personal archive of a certain Beliaev, a conservative landowner known for his anti-Jewish views. Frida, Joseph’s younger sister, has also returned to Mezhepol’. She is the object of love of the narrator, a Jewish doctor, who has devoted his life to social activism. Beliaev becomes interested in her too. As the situation becomes more and more desperate for Parogi’s Jews, violence breaks out when a Jewish storekeeper who has lost his mind returns to his former store, which he had been forced to sell for a fraction of its value. The new owners give him a beating and one blow to his head kills him. This altercation incites a pogrom, which inflames much of the city. At exactly this time Frida realizes that she loves Beliaev, and Beliaev, who unexpectedly repudiates antisemitism, asks her to marry him. Beliaev provides Joseph with the document necessary to save the Jews. Although everything seems to have worked out perfectly, Iaroslavsky ends the novel with a tragedy. A local antisemite, Skal’kov, challenges Joseph to a duel and kills him, and Frida dies in a huge fire that devours the synagogue. Yaroshevsky draws clear lines between good and evil. He places blame on the government for enacting laws that create inhuman situations. Furthermore, he accuses the petty merchants who exploit the Jews’ misfortune to steal their property and who are eager to carry out a pogrom. To these malicious figures he contrasts such kind characters as Beliaev; Beliaev’s sister, who has become Joseph’s fiancé; Joseph; Frida; and the doctor-narrator. The two pairs of romantic lovers underscore the possibility that Russians and Jews can get along. Moreover, Frida, modeled after the biblical Esther, nearly saves the Jews. Nevertheless, Yaroshevsky does not allow the private happiness of a few to conquer the countervailing powers of hate among the many. The duel and the pogrom put into question whether the Jews of Parogi will be rescued after all. In any case the author doesn’t tell us how things end, but with Joseph and Frida’s deaths, it doesn’t seem to matter anymore. Just as with Frug’s story, this novel can be read as a polemic against the ideology of integration and the idea that Jews could make Russia their home.

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The doctor confesses, “You see before you a fiery nationalist. . . . I cannot explain to you how it happened. They say that narrow nationalism is a sign of regression. I admit this and feel it. My nationalism is just as vulgar and egotistical as those others who promulgate it. But it is a sweet poison and why shouldn’t we, castoffs of humanity, not drink it to the full?”17 Joseph responds by arguing that nationalism can logically justify killing, to which the doctor replies that either it will “kill us or heal and revive us.”18 Such pessimism can be understood in terms of the generation from which Yaroshevsky emerged. The two decades after the pogroms of 1881–82 were bitter times for intellectuals like him, who were unwilling to sacrifice their old ideal of integration. Moreover, hostile to Jewish nationalism, Yaroshevsky and other contributors to the politically centrist Jewish journal Voskhod retained their hope that sooner or later Russia’s Jews would gain equal rights and that integration would be possible.19 In the first decade of the twentieth century David Aizman wrote a series of stories dealing with pogroms from the viewpoint of Jewish emigrants who had left Russia.20 Eschewing entirely the naturalist approach of Frug and the sociological scope of Yaroshevsky, Aizman focuses on the psychological dilemma for the Jews. Setting his story in provincial France, Aizman features Russian emigrants who grapple with the question of whether Russia can be a real homeland for Jews. For example, in the story “Na chuzhbine” (“Abroad”) (1901), Aizman depicts a Jewish doctor, Joseph, and his wife, Sarah, who argue whether they should return to Russia. Although Sarah was almost raped during a pogrom, she still wants to return home in order to give aid to Ukrainian peasants during an epidemic then raging in southern Russia. Joseph, a doctor and the narrator of the story, shares none of her populist idealism. Instead he expresses the views of the pro-emigration camp: “Return!” But what will meet us there! Have you forgotten? Now just recall a bit. Only think what will happen to your son. What will become of him 17 Yaroshevsky, Konets vykhodtsev, 1:29. 18 Ibid. 19 Slutsky, Ha’itonut hayehudit-rusit bame’ah hatesha’esreh, 174. 20 Among such stories are “Na chuzhbine,” “Vragi,” “Zemliaki,” and “Krovavyi razliv.” For an introduction to Aizman’s work, see Maxim D. Shrayer, “Editor’s Introduction,” in An Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature, 1:111–12.

118 PART II | Russian–Jewish Intelligentsia’s Cultural Vibrancy there? Here he can study wherever he wants, whatever he wants, his talents will be developed properly, without any obstacles, and perhaps he can become a famous person. What do I know? He’s a very talented boy. . . . And if he won’t be famous, then he’ll simply be a free citizen of a free country. . . . But there, where will you [find a school to] teach him? Where will you find a place for Jacob Joselevich Izraelson? There you’ll have to make him a money lender, make him work in the wheat business!21

Despite such cogent reasoning about the opportunities in Russia for Jews in the 1890s, in the end Sarah wins, and the family returns to Russia. Even though she admits that the Ukrainians commit pogroms, she exonerates them, saying that “they don’t understand what they are doing.” Even if the government is guilty, she claims, she and her husband do not have the right to leave Russia for the sake of personal happiness. Although Joseph has better arguments, their decision to return demonstrates that idealism can be more powerful than reason. In particular, the ending refutes the argument that Jews are unpatriotic. Against all self-interest and wisdom, Joseph and Sarah leave France, although by doing so they bring danger to themselves and to their son.22 In this and in other stories, Aizman underscores divisions within the Jewish camp. Unsure whether to turn away from or to Russia, Aizman’s Jews are unable to rest easy with whatever decision they make. This idea fits well with Aizman’s political views, which place the blame for anti-Jewish violence at the door of the government, since he believed the government was capable of stopping the pogroms if it wanted.23 Equally chided are the Russian people who at best are indifferent and who at worse take pleasure in pogroms. In the story “Krovavyi razliv” (“Bloodletting”), Aizman depicts Russians who have descended to a sub-human moral level. Although Aizman describes some 21 David Aizman, “Na chuzhbine,” in Krovavyi razliv i drugie proizvedeniya ( Jerusalem: Institut russkogo evreistva, 1991), 2:80. 22 Mikhail Vainshtein, “Svidetel’stvo ochevidtsa,” in Krovavyi razliv i drugie proizvedeniia, by David Aizman, ed. Mikhail Vainshtein ( Jerusalem: Institut Russkogo Evreistva, 1991), 245. One critic writes about “Abroad, ” “I don’t know a more penetrating and deeply felt depiction of irrational love for this land [Russia], this people who, it would seem, have done everything to inspire hate.” 23 Aizman published his works in the influential liberal thick journal, Russkoe Bogatstvo, and later in Maxim Gorky’s Znanie.

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Russians who are also friendly with Jews, significantly he does not present any Russian person who is deeply distraught by the violence against them. The myriad treatments of pogroms by Jewish authors writing in Russian between 1881 and 1914 shows that Jewish authors felt the need to deal with contemporary events that affected Jews. At the same time, these stories reveal the attachment of Jewish writers to the political tradition of Russian literature. Because of government censorship that repressed free expression in politics, belles-lettres became a place for the discussion of important social questions. As the small sample of stories examined here shows, Jews themselves were confused by the violence, and the stories often posed questions rather than answered them. The pogroms called into question their previous ideals and hopes. Jewish writers in Russian had earlier tended to seek integration, looking to Western Europe as a model that could work for Russia too. Rachel Khin described this attitude in her characterization of the hero of “Dreamer” (“Mechtatel’”), a story published in 1896.24 An educated Jew forced to leave his home of more than twenty years during the eviction of Jews from Moscow in 1891, the title character writes, “Our common friends consider me a Jewish fanatic. This is a mistake. I consider Jews unconscious fighters for the freedom of the spirit, and perhaps no one as ardently as me yearns for the day when the word ‘Jew’ will disappear. This will occur when each person will say to the other, ‘My brother, pray however your soul desires.’ On that blessed day tortured Agaspherus will lay down his heavy staff.”25 Khin’s hero dreams of the days when the so-called “wandering Jew” will finally find a place of rest, fully welcome among his neighbors and completely at peace with himself. In that case, the word “Jew” would have no negative connotations and would be equal or the same as “Russian.” It is not a coincidence that Khin depicts a man whose entire self-identification is linked to Russia, since Russian-Jewish authors fully identified the fate of the Jews with the fate of Russia. Considering the Jew as a sign standing for progress and liberalism, these authors portrayed pogroms as an attack on progress itself. 24 Very little has been written about Rachel Khin. For information about her, see Shrayer, “Editor’s Introduction,” 71–72. 25 Rachel Khin, “Mechtatel’,” in Sbornik v pol’zu nachal’nykh evreiskikh shkol (St. Petersburg, 1896), 243.

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In his powerful editorials written in response to the pogrom violence of 1881–82, the journalist and writer Lev Levanda juxtaposed pogroms with everything that was good, decent, honest, and legitimate in Russia. Levanda, among others, also raised the question as to whether Jews could consider themselves real members of the Russian state—whether the patch of land where they were born was their homeland or whether they really were foreigners, as antisemites claimed. In one of his hard-hitting and despairing editorials written during the period of violence, Levanda chastised the Jews themselves. Juxtaposing the desire for abstract justice and the very real beating that was occurring, Levanda defended emigration and self-defense. He writes, In my view this sheepish passivity makes the affair more complicated because when the fist, coarse physical strength, is in high regard, passive thought, love of peace and a petition for legality, law and justice are pointless and ridiculous in the highest degree. Therefore if Jews don’t want to be beaten by the first son of a bitch who meets them, the more secure method is not to let it happen and they have enough strength not to let it happen if they would only have more confidence in themselves. Aide-toi; et Dieu t’aidera. The organization of pogroms and their periodic return from holiday to holiday are calculated to work above all thanks to the Jews’ passivity and their stupid custom not to defend themselves, but to seek defense in places where it doesn’t exist and cannot exist according to the logic of things.26

Although the quality of the literary works treated above was not always top tier, works by Isaac Babel were. In “Moia golubiatnia” (“My Dovecoat”), Babel distanced his narrative from the actual pain and therefore aestheticized a pogrom as a part of a literary construction. With his depiction of violence from the viewpoint of the boy victim, the act is shown as deplorable, but also comic too. Here the boy-narrator describes his own experience of a pogrom: He dealt me a flying blow with the hand that was clutching the bird. Kate’s wadded back seemed to turn upside down, and I fell to the ground in my new overcoat. 26 Lev Levanda, “Mimokhodom (letuchie mysli nedoumevaiushchego),” Ezhenedel’naia khronika Voskhoda 17 (23 April 1882): 464.

Russian-Jewish Writers Face Pogroms, 1880-1914 121 “Their spawn must be wiped out,” said Kate, straightening up over the bonnets. “I can’t a-bear their spawn, nor their stinking menfolk.” She said more things about our spawn, but I heard nothing of it. I lay on the ground, and the guts of the crushed bird trickled down from my temple.  They flowed down my cheek, winding this way and that, splashing, blinding me. The tender pigeon-guts slid down over my forehead, and I closed my solitary unstopped-up eye so as not to see the world that spread out before me. This world was tiny, and it was awful. A stone lay just before my eyes, a little stone so chipped as to resemble the face of an old woman with a large jaw. A piece of string lay not far away, and a bunch of feathers that still breathed. My world was tiny, and it was awful. I closed my eyes so as not to see it, and pressed myself tight into the ground that lay beneath me in soothing dumbness.  This trampled earth in no way resembled real life, waiting for exams in real life. Somewhere far away Woe rode across it on a great steed, but the noise of the hoof beats grew weaker and died away, and silence, the bitter silence that sometimes overwhelms children in their sorrow, suddenly deleted the boundary between body and the earth that was moving nowhither. The earth smelled of raw depths, of the tomb, of flowers.27 

This narrative is fascinating because the pogrom, although never released from view, is subordinate to the narrator’s inner world, his perceptions, emotions, and thoughts. The violence acted out on him is a pretext for cognition, self-awareness, and impressions of the moment that draw the reader’s attention from the violence itself to an aesthetic appreciation of language. The earlier treatments by Jews in Russian emphasized the brutality and left out to a large degree an awareness of the aesthetic.

***

Pogroms did finally come to an end with the consolidation of Soviet power, and with them, this literary theme. Unfortunately, the last round of pogroms that occurred in Ukraine in 1918–20 brought terrifying numbers of victims and

27 Isaac Babel, “My Dovecoat,” in The Collected Stories of Isaac Babel, edited by Nathalie Babel and translated by Peter Constantine (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 2001), 608.

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is often regarded as a predecessor to the Holocaust.28 The physical violence and legal disabilities that beset Russia’s Jews between 1881 and 1917 led to huge changes in Jewish life. Between those years over two million Jews emigrated from Russia; most ended up in the United States, but many in Western Europe and Palestine. In Russia itself the inability of the Jews to integrate led to autonomous Jewish political movements, such as Zionism, Bundist Socialism, and various stripes of nationalism. Significantly, these groups organized self-­ defense corps that had some success in Kishinev (1903), Gomel (1905), and elsewhere. Oppression against Jews could not help but drive them into the arms of the radical political parties and make them wish for the goal of overthrowing the tsar. Jewish writers in Russian for the most part were convinced that a day would come when “Agaspherus would put down his staff,” when Jews would be accepted as equals and when those who had left would return home to Russia. Although many Jewish political activists dreamed of the benefits that Russian Jewry would attain under a form of government different from tsarist rule, the Bolshevik rise to power created new fissures. Jews aligned with the political left tended to put their stock in the new Socialist state as the means to achieve freedom, while Jews on the political right were disappointed that the fall of tsarism had merely brought about a more lethal autocratic police state.29 But Jewish identity itself seemed to have changed. In Soviet Russia writers with Jewish origins but without any concrete attachment to either Jewish religion or ethnicity, such as Isaac Babel, Osip Mandelshtam, and Eduard Bagritskii, found ways to reinvent a Jewish discourse. Repudiating the previous identities of the feckless and weak Jew or the Jew as a wise elder, these writers had Jews accompany the dash into modernity. Jews were now described as engineers, Red Army officers, workers, or farmers. In this way they were like the non-Jews who lent support to the new Bolshevik regime.

28 See Oleg Budnitsky, “Jews, Pogroms, and the White Movement: A Historical Critique,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, New Series 2, no. 4 (Fall 2001): 251– 72. It is estimated that 300,000 Jews were killed in that conflagration, although the numbers have been debated. 29 Among the Jews on the political right were such individuals as Semyon Dubnov or Lev Shestov.

Chapter Eight M. O. Gershenzon, Alexander Pushkin, the Bible, and the Flaws of Jewish Nationalism1 In 1917 Moscow, as the war raged, Mikhail Osipovich Gershenzon (1869– 1925) had a revelation that bourgeois life was worthless. The technology that had built great cities, given comfort and freedom, now terrorized humanity.2 Gershenzon wondered: could the Bolsheviks be Russia’s salvation, could an empowered working class be a force for good? In a letter to the journalist I. V. Zhilkin, Gershenzon explains his feeling: In me it [the Kadet liberal principle] awakens a much more hostile feeling than even Bolshevism because the Bolsheviks are passionate and often saintly honest, but Kadets are cold, well-mannered, calculating. In general Bolshevism is an amazing phenomenon (I want to say—the maximalism in our revolution, its utopianism). It is clear to me that the revolution will fail, but I am no less certain that that descendents will say: the reasons why the Russian Revolution did not succeed or barely succeeded were the most wonderful part of it, like Don Quixote-insane was without a doubt the best man in Spain. I prefer such a failure—from utopianism—which will leave forever seeds of great promise rather than a Kadet success which Miliukov wants and is likely to get.3   1 Thanks are extended to Professor William Craft Brumfield, and to professors Alexander Kulik and Roman Timenchik, who invited the author to give this work in a seminar at the Hebrew University in January 2015.   2 Mikhail Gershenzon and Viacheslav Ivanov, Perepiska iz dvukh uglov (Moscow: Alkonist, 1921), 27.   3 Mikhail Gershenzon to I. V. Zhilkin, August 1, 1917, I. Zhilkins’ archive in RGALI, Moscow, 200-1-18.

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His philosopher friends—Nikolai Berdiaev, Viacheslav Ivanov, and Lev Shestov—were opposed to this view: they rejected Bolshevism.4 The liberals with whom Gershenzon was identified opposed the Bolsheviks as well.5 Gershenzon ignored them and embraced Red October but he was not enamored of Bolshevism. Rather, he perceived in them a vague outline of a spiritual transformation that he had imagined in earlier days; for example, in his Vekhi (Landmarks) article from 1909, “Tvorcheskoe samosoznanie” (“Creative SelfConsciousness”). He recognized a spiritual transformation in such Russian thinkers as Pyotr Chaadaev, the Decembrists, Nikolai Stankevich, Alexander Herzen, and Ivan Kireevsky. Gershenzon soon rejected Bolshevism, yet he remained loyal to the idea of humanity’s liberation and the immediate and full-scale transformation of the old world, that is to say, the nineteenth-century Weltanschauung.6 In the years following the revolution—years of deprivation, cold, and hunger—Gershenzon turned his attention to the study of ancient cultures, comparative religion, and the formation of early societies. He read extensively about myth, language, and psychology. From these investigations arose books such as Mudrost’ Pushkina (Pushkin’s Wisdom), Gol’fstrem (Gulfstrem), and Kliuch very (Key to Faith). Contemporary with these works also wrote Sud’by evreiskogo naroda (Fates of the Jewish People) a treatise on Zionism and Jewish history. Although it would seem that these philosophical studies had little to do with the current political situation, in view of the sufferings that he and his family experienced it is possible that he was engaged in an attempt to understand the ensuing chaos of the revolution. In a letter to Lev Shestov from 1922, this attitude is clearly in view: Then I was preoccupied for an even longer time with a crazy idea and for three years read incessently about primitive culture, aboriginal peoples, and went deep into comparative linguistics, and finally I wrote Gulfstream.   4 Brian Horowitz, “The End of a Friendship: The Russian-Jewish Rift in Twentieth-Century Russian Philosophy: N. A. Berdiaev and M. O. Gershenzon,” Russian Review 53, no. 4 (October 1994): 502–4.   5 William G. Rosenberg, “Russian Liberals and the Bolshevik Coup,” Journal of Modern History 40, no. 3 (1968): 328–47.   6 Mikhail Gershenzon, “Vtoroi god voiny,” Birzhevye vedomosti (28 June 1915).

M. O. Gershenzon, Alexander Pushkin, the Bible, and the Flaws of Jewish Nationalism 125 It is now being printed in Moscow in “Shipovnik,” the publishing house that’s been reopened. I was drawn to first sources, to the beginning of days, the roots of the human spirit. Do not beat me for it, it was not on purpose; I just went, not thinking, an irresistible feeling pulled me and only in these studies could I find satisfaction.7

For a sense of how contemporaries regarded Gershenzon at the time, one might quote a passage from the memoirs of the publisher, Mikhail Sabashnikov: “Differences in ideology did not prevent us from working together while we were dedicated to purely educational and humanistic aims. But Mikhail Osipovich felt constricted in this ‘academic’ frame. He was attracted to publicistic work with a dollop of mysticism. I inhibited him with my ‘positivism,’ he openly said to me.”8 It should be noted that the Silver Age culture of which Gershenzon was a prominent member had long been interested in the ancient world. In fact, many of the members viewed their own civilization as linked to the early centers of world culture. In his memoir, Mezhdu dvkh revoliutsii (Between Two Revolutions) (1934), Andrey Bely has written that Russia of the early twentieth century did not only imagine itself as a bridge to the ancient past, but through its experiments in zhiznetvorchestvo (life-creation) it dissolved a sense of time and connected the modern and the ancient in a real emotional way.9 Many of the intellectuals, including Bely and Viacheslav Ivanov, felt themselves transmitters of the cultures of ancient Greece and Rome. In a word, Gershenzon’s comparisons of early civiliation and his own age were conventional for his time and place. It was also conventional to try to comprehend the war and revolution through the lens of history.10 Gershenzon was trying to understand how humanity, which had reached such a high level of comfort, could engage in a three year worldwide bloodbath and then make a revolution in Russia characterized by   7 Mikhail Gerhsenzon, “Pis’ma k L’vu Shestovu M. O. Gershenzona,” ed. V. Alloy, Minuvshee 6 (1988): 254–55.   8 Mikhail B. Sabashnikov, Vospominaniia (Moscow: Kniga, 1988), 410.   9 See Irina Paperno, “On Meaning of Art: Symbolist Theories,” in Creating Life: The Aesthetic Utopia of Russian Modernism, eds. Irina Paperno and Joan Delaney Grossman (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1994), 13–23. 10 Viacheslav Ivanov’s discussions in Perepiska iz dvukh uglov fit this paradigm.

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terror and unfreedom. Gershenzon hoped that a study of the history of human experience might produce knowledge that would explain what had happened. Perhaps secrets could be discovered in the origins of language, emotion, religion, maybe even in God. In any case Gershenzon gave up his historical studies and surrendered to these new intellectual passions.

***

M. O. Gershenzon’s biography might not be familiar; a short introduction might be helpful. Born in 1869 in Kishinev (today Chisinau, Moldova) in a middle-class Jewish family, Mikhail Osipovich Gershenzon did not graduate high school with a gold medal and therefore could not gain entrance to a Russian university.11 After spending two years in Berlin studying engineering, he applied to Moscow University’s history department, where, as Vladislav Khodasevich put it, a “miracle” occurred; he was accepted, the only Jew to apply that year.12 In Moscow he studied with leading historians, Yury Got’e and Pavel Vinogradov. In his final year of study, he published two papers on ancient Greek history and was offered the opportunity to prepare for a chair at the university—with the condition that he convert to Christianity. Although he was not religious or committed to the Jewish community, he found the demand offensive and he refused. Vinogradov then produced another miracle; he organized a private scholarship for Mikhail Osipovich and found him translating jobs for the Sabashnikov Brothers, a family publishing house in which Gershenzon worked for over twenty years.13 In short time Gershenzon gave up Greek history; it was impossible to earn a living as an independent scholar in that field. Having been told about a closet full of papers from Russia’s leading intellectuals of the nineteenth century, Gershenzon traveled to meet Elizaveta Nikolaevna Orlova.14 There he found the materials for his future books and articles: Istoriia molodoi Rossii (History of Young Russia), Istoricheskie zapiski (Historical Sketches), Obrazy proshlogo (Images of the Past), Griboedovskaia Moskva (Griboedov’s Moscow), 11 A new decree was announced in 1887 putting quotas on the enrollment of Jews in Russian state universities and schools. 12 Vladislav Khodasevich, Nekropol’ (Paris: YMCA, 1976), 155–56. 13 Brian Horowitz, Russian Idea—Jewish Presence (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2013), 153. 14 Horowitz, Russian Idea—Jewish Presence, 217.

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Brat’ia Krivtsovy (The Krivtsov Brothers), and Zhizn’ V. S. Pechorina (Life of V. S. Pechorin). To readers of Russian history, Gershenzon became a familiar name. Among others, Vasily Rozanov considered Gershenzon “far and away the best historian of Russian thought.”15 In his home on Nikolskii pereulok, off the Arbat Street in Moscow, Gershenzon befriended philosophers, writers, and poets. In 1922, he went to Germany for health reasons, but returned to Russia in 1923, where he took a position in GAKhN (The State Academy for the Arts). He died in Moscow in 1925.

***

The kind of writing that Gershenzon adopted after 1918 was not exactly academic scholarship but something like ruminations on human experience, “first and last things,” and metaphysics. In Gershenzon’s case the change in genre from intellectual history to comparative religion symbolized something more important: a mental transformation. Feeling that civilization was broken, Gershenzon examined civilization’s origins to reconstruct how humanity had arrived at its present moment. One of the first results of these investigations was Pushkin’s Wisdom (1919). He asserted that Pushkin was actually a philosopher of an essential duality, polnota and nepolnota (holism and deficiency): “Pushkin’s most general and basic dogma that defines all of his thought is the certainty that life appears as two types: as holism and deficiency, decline. And I immediately thought, entirely consistently, that in holism, internal satiety, one finds imperturbable quiet, while deficiency ceaselessly searches. Deficiency is eternally tortured with hunger and therefore always strives and moves; it alone acts in the world.”16 According to Gershenzon, Pushkin says that in the cosmos there exist two opposing elemental forces, deficiency and satiety. Satiety represents contentment, peace, and contemplation; deficiency reflects movement, activity, and desire. A conflict occurs eternally between them and an unending circularity becomes established in which deficiency never acquires satisfaction, constantly running after satiety. This keeps the world in motion. In Pushkin’s works Gershenzon pointed to Evgenii Onegin and Tat’iana, Aleko and Zemfira, and Zarema and Mariia as indicative of this dichotomous philosophy. 15 Vasily Rozanov, “Levitan i Gershenzon,” Russki bibliofil (1916): 78. 16 Mikhail Gershenzon, Mudrost’ Pushkina (Moscow: Kn-vo pisatelei v Moskve, 1919), 14.

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Composed of elements that are physical and metaphysical, the universe in Gershenzon’s conception is beyond human control. Fate is blind; some people are blessed with inspiration or peaceful contemplation, while others are cursed with an incurable feeling of dissatisfaction. Gershenzon contradicts the traditional views of the poet that saw in him a classicist, enlightener or a rationalist: “. . . Pushkin says ‘yes’ to every kind of insanity because any kind of satiety, even senseless or satanic satiety, is better than deficiency, e.g. rational existence.”17 Man’s true desire is to liberate himself of his reason, to feel intensely. From this idea Gershenzon concludes that Pushkin hates culture, enlightenment, and reason.18 In his thought Pushkin resembles a primitive and only superfically belongs to our age. As Gershenzon claims, In his ideas Pushkin is a member of our family, the flesh of the flesh of contemporary culture. But it is strange: while creating, he becomes transformed; the dusty wrinkles of Agasfer form on his familiar European face, the heavy Wisdom of the ages appears from his eyes as though he has lived through all the centuries and has extracted from them reliable knowledge about secrets. In his poetry he is dead to the present. What are ancient passions and the sufferings of people, worries of nations to him? Everything that occurs, has always occurred and will be repeated eternally; the forms of a rainbow change, but the essence is the same; the world and man remain forever unchanged.19

Gershenzon continued his explorations in his 1922 book, Gulfstream, in which he compared Pushkin and the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus. The book’s form is revealing since it is divided into two parts. The first part, “Heraclitus,” is a description of Heraclitus’s philosophy and the second, “Pushkin,” contains an abundance of quotations intended to demonstrate a genetic relation between the two thinkers. For Gershenzon, Pushkin and Heraclitus share the idea that the mind or soul is composed of three possible qualities represented by heat, cold, or a mixture 17 Gershenzon, Mudrost’ Pushkina, 25. 18 Ibid., 37. 19 Ibid., 13.

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of the two extremes: “Pushkin distinguishes precisely between three states of mind: gas ‘when the mind flies far away,’ liquid ‘when the mind boils’ or is ‘agitated,’ for example, by doubt, (semi-liquid, ‘when the mind is still flexible in judgments’) and hard when the mind ‘affirms its thinking.’”20 Spirituality is found in things which partake of heat, and spiritual perfection can be measured by the amount of heat contained by a particular being or thing: “The same as Heraclitus, he measures the worth of things, phenomena, and spiritual conditions and personalities exclusively by the quantity of heat in them.”21 From his investigations, Gershenzon concluded that wisdom has a single origin that encompasses all thought, belief in God, ethics, and science. This all-­ encompassing source he calls a “gulfstream,” a spiritual force running through the history of humanity. Although it is possible to find many sources for Gershenzon’s ideas—his studies of Greek thought from his youth, German romantic philosophy, and Slavophilism—the bibliographies in the books themselves show titles in comparative religion mainly in German, French, and Russian languages. Some of the names, Lucian Lévy-Bruhl, Alfred Bertholet, and Karl Bötticher, may be familiar to readers with some background in the field, while others are little-­ known specialists whose names have long passed into oblivion.22 At the time that Gershenzon’s books appeared, critics attacked him for substituting his own philosophy for Pushkin’s and for distorting the “real” poet.23 These accusations did not entirely stick because it was common practice among philosophers to study Pushkin from different intellectual positions. And this act of imagining Pushkin was not just characteristic of the Russian modernist period. Vissarion Belinsky and Fyodor Dostoevsky did it. At the end of the nineteenth century we find a proliferation of Pushkins—a Pushkin in the image of Merezhkovsky, Briusov, Veresaev, Vasily Gippius, Viacheslav Ivanov, as well as those by more conventional scholars, Nikolai Lerner, Semyon Vengerov, and Ivan Ermakov.24 Apparently there was a similar movement in 20 Mikhail Gershenzon, Gol’fstrem (Moscow: Shipovnik, 1922), 90. 21 Gershenzon, Gol’fstrem, 95. 22 Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (1857–1939); Alfred Bertholet (1868–1951); Karl Bötticher (1806–99). 23 Brian Horowitz, The Myth of A. S. Pushkin in Russia’s Silver Age: M. O. Gershenzon, Pushkinist (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1997), 4–5. 24 Ibid., 124.

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Germany in which scholars attributed to Goethe wisdom and philosophies that in some cases appeared after Goethe’s death.25

***

At the same time that he analyzed Pushkin as a pre-Socratic philosopher, Gershenzon was engaged in an examination of the Hebrew Bible and the relationship of the Jewish people to God. From these investigations came his book Key to Faith (1922), as well as his study of modern Jewish nationalism, Fates of the Jewish People (1922). In Key to Faith, Gershenzon wanted to complete two tasks: to analyze the biography of Yaveh, the Jewish God, and to describe the relationship of humanity to God. From the start, he clearly decided that the main goal was to understand oneself: Whoever wants to understand man and himself, should cast a lot in the deepest idea that the human mind has created, the idea of God. It is striking in general like a premonition of the last single world-uniting truth that still even now turgidly bubbles before us; it is difficult to understand the experience that opened to half-savage peoples the secret of things which would seem altogether incomprehensible to sensory perception. But incomprably more puzzling than the idea itself are those formative conceptions of the divinity in which [the idea] was revealed. From where did the Jewish people draw their detailed and precise knowledge presented in the Bible about the creater and ruler of the universe.26

On the question of God’s biography, Gershenzon made several surprising observations. For example, he explains that “the God of the Old Testament is more likely [represented by] the elements than as a substance: a bodiless, faceless, fire-breathing, fiery God.”27 At the same time God has control over inanimate objects, yet his control over humans is imperfect. “Of course confusion arises: God and the human created by him are immeasurably different 25 See Roger H. Stephenson, Goethe’s Wisdom Literature: A Study in Aesthetic Transmutation (New York: Peter Lang, 1983). 26 Mikhail Gershenzon, Kliuch very (Moscow: Epokha, 1921), 7. 27 Gershenzon, Kliuch very, 12.

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so that it seems strange why God’s attention from that point on would be so fully occupied with the behavior of his creation, why its submission or lack of submission immensely bothers him that he ceaselessly follows it, rewards and punishes—monitoring it becomes the sole task of his life.”28 Gershenzon argues that the result of this interaction is that God is dependent on man. Therefore, an opportunity for corruption opens; humanity gets the best treatment when it disobeys and is offered incentives to follow God’s will. However, Gershenzon explains that God’s will must win out. He claims that there are two truths: “Divine truth is right and human truth is false; objective truth is valid for everyone and subjective truth is the personal truth for each person.”29 Mikhail Osipovich concluded that Jewish history reveals an irreconcilable opposition between man and God. The ancient Jews are depicted as disobeying God, preferring their personal freedom to the assigned role in God’s providential plan that Gershenzon associates with cosmic perfection, a central idea in his philosophy. Cosmic perfection includes the idea that the physical world follows ironclad laws that humanity must follow. Any resistance leads to human destruction. In terms of Judaism, Gershenzon admits that a natural yearning for freedom makes it difficult for Jews to follow the providential force, yet he sides with God’s will, which he aligns with the “hidden” will of the nation. At the end of the book Gershenzon returns to his main point: Jewish religion is man-made but also reflects an essential, unchangeable, and universal truth that surpasses human volition and might best be identified with nature.30 For an intellectual historian of today the truth-value of Gershenzon’s assertions is perhaps less important than identifiying a line of development regarding what one can actually know about God from the Bible. The sources for such a study would include new discoveries in archeology, linguistics, and history. It would also be important to regard the works of philosophers, such as Ludwig Feuerbach and Friedrich Nietzsche, who investigate the psychology of humanity in its relationship to God. In terms of revolutionary Russia, we face the question of interpretation: in what way are we supposed to understand these books that depart from 28 Ibid., 21–22. 29 Ibid., 73. 30 Ibid., 124.

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academic scholarship and contain a dose of mysticism, as Sabashnikov noted? What was Key to Faith’s function and what does it say about post-Revolutionary Russia? Lev Shestov criticized Key to Faith, claiming that like Marcion of Sinope, the second century gnostic who tried to make God acceptable for his contemporaries, Gershenzon “hellenized” the Bible in order to draw out lessons for modern life.31 In this way Gershenzon was actually a rationalist: “. . . You feel that hellenistic ‘criteria’ stole into M. O.’s consciousness unnoticed and slowly but surely began the work of destruction. When nothing else was possible, ‘criteria’ even seduced M. O. to produce a mistaken explanation of biblical narration.”32 Shestov insists that Gershenzon submitted to an intellectual paradigm in which individual faith becomes a category of thought rather than the property of a concrete individual. In this way Gershenzon rationalizes faith, examining it in purely intellectual categories. Gershenzon refuted the charge that he had tampered with the Bible. In a letter to Shestov from August 7, 1922, he explains, That you would not like Key to Faith, I knew already of course, but I am surprised, where did you find “contemporary thinking” in it? No, I do not reconcile religion with a contemporary worldview (I get nauseous from that), and in opposition to it I say this: religion is not a special life of the spirit, but its quotidian life, an authentic technique or methodology of quotidian, practical, bodily life. This is not contemporary thought, but it is of course also not your understanding of religion.33

In the same year that Key to Faith appeared, Gershenzon published Fates of the Jewish People, a book that deals with Zionism. Gershenzon attacked Zionism as a doctrine and as a concrete task, arguing that Jews have no need for an independent state. The desire for political and territorial unity, he claims, is nothing other than the ideology of European nationalism, and since nationalism serves as the 31 Marcion of Sinope (85–160) was an important leader in early Christianity who adopted Christ’s father as the true God. 32 Lev Shestov, “O vechnoi knige: Pamiati M. O. Gershenzona,” Sovremennye zapiski 24 (1925): 243. 33 Gershenzon, “Pis’ma k L’vu Shestovu,” 265.

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ideological basis for Jewish oppression, it should be rejected. But diaspora Jewish life is not exclusively negative. Jews actually live in unity, but this unity is internal and spiritual—the antithesis of political or external. Gershenzon writes, “Like a river that is united despite the eternal movement of the waters and each person is united and whole in the constant renewal of his bodily form and spirituality, so too each people is a single organism in history, a single face and single fate.”34 Pointing to the amazing survival of Jews for 5,000 years, he concludes that Jews have been assigned a providential role to live in diaspora. The image of exile is the Jews’ national myth, and it is, with their belief in being God’s chosen people, the ideological basis for their unity. He admits nonetheless that the solution to the Jewish problem might be assimilation, although he does not fear it and does not believe humanity should interfere in the natural evolution of history, which he identifies with God’s providential plan. Gershenzon thought the Zionists misunderstood the Jews’ true mission. Instead of furthering the natural harmony in the universe by concentrating on the perfection of the individual, the Zionists want to disrupt it by trespassing into God’s realm. This is wrong: No, the Jewish people should not follow Zionists. Their purpose is still incomprehensible to the world, but perhaps they have been assigned to illuminate [the world] for centuries with their creativity. Let them live obedient to the secret calling of their spirit and not the tawdry rules of common sense. Really, happiness and even freedom are not the highest values in the world; there are values that are worth more, although not perceptible.35

Gershenzon was aware of the Judennot, the sufferings of Russian Jewry, but he was not convinced that the ingathering was a good idea. According to Walter Laqueur in his 1972 book, A History of Zionism, there are three kinds of anti-Zionist arguments: the assimilationist, the orthodox-religious, and the left-wing revolutionary. Gershenzon’s position does not fit neatly into any category. Laqueur writes, One of the most interesting spokesmen of spiritual anti-Zionism was Mikhail Gershenzon . . . who developed a highly personal, mystical philosophy 34 Mikhail Gershenzon, Sud’by evreiskogo naroda (Moscow, 1922), 19. 35 Ibid., 32.

134 PART II | Russian–Jewish Intelligentsia’s Cultural Vibrancy of history concerning the destiny of the Jewish people. He was not an enemy of Zionism; on the contrary Zionism touched him; it had, he wrote, a great psychological beauty. But it was based on the nation-state as the only normal form of human existence, a false nineteenth-century European concept.36

Laqueur connected Gershenzon with religious Jews, many of whom regarded Zionism as a kind of blasphemy. Laqueur announces again: “He [Gershenzon] did not profess to know the purpose and meaning of the trials to which the Jewish people had to submit; these were well beyond human understanding. Gershenzon’s theory of suffering was nearer to Slavophilism than to Judaism, but in some respects it also resembled the views of the ultra-orthodox Jews who claimed that Israel was being punished by God for its sins.”37 Laqueur, so perceptive in everything, was imprecise in one thing: Gershenzon thought that Jews had a historic mission, but he did not think of the Jews as a messianic people. Rather, he thought that every nation had its own purpose and role to play and that none was more important than any other. In this regard Gershenzon was as close to Johann Gottfried Herder as to the ultra-Orthodox. In Fates of the Jewish People and Key to Faith Gershenzon rejected Jewish messianism. His universalism led him argue that racial difference was merely a carrier of variety. By suppressing Jewish faith, however, Gershenzon reduced Judaism and by valorizing assimilation he condemned the Jewish people to disappearance. Nonetheless, one should note the contradictions in Gershenzon’s view.38 In an article from 1916, “Narod, ispytuemyi ognem” (“The People Tried by Fire”), he takes a different viewpoint, applauding Jewish renewal in Eretz Israel. Similarly, in his introduction to Evreiskaia antologiia: Sbornik molodoi evreiskoi poezii (Jewish Anthology: Collection of Young Jewish Poetry), Gershenzon wrote, “To be a free Jew does not mean to stop being a Jew. On the contrary, only a free Jew is capable of penetrating by means of the Jewish principle the entire depths of the flowering human spirit.”39 36 Walter Laqueur, A History of Zionism (London: Trinity Press, 1970), 401–2. 37 Laqueur, A History of Zionism, 402. 38 Brian Horowitz, Empire Jews: Jewish Nationalism and Acculturation in Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Russia (Bloomington, IN: Slavica, 2009), 164. 39 Mikhail Gershenzon, “Predislovie,” in Evreiskaia antologiia: Sbornik molodoi evreiskoi poezii (Moscow: Safrut, 1918), 8.

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These positive evaluations of Jewish creativity were written before Key To Faith and Fates of the Jewish People. What happened to change his view? Were the riots in Palestine in 1920 or 1921 influential or did starvation and privations in Moscow play a pivotal role? It is difficult to know. But one thing is clear: these reversals display a life-long ambivalence toward Jewish life, Jewish identity, and Jewish history.

***

One can draw some conclusions about Gershenzon’s works in the early 1920s. One obvious point to notice is that Gershenzon’s idea of religion is very distant from Russian Orthodoxy. Nikolai Berdiaev observed this, as did Sergei Bulgakov and Semyon Frank.40 But what about the connection with the Russian intelligentsia? It is interesting to compare Gershenzon’s writings in the early 1920s with his earlier studies. For example, in his studies of idealists of the 1830s and the Slavophiles, Gershenzon spoke of the individual as the single mover of history and yet he lauded those individuals who subordinated themselves to something larger; not to the collective, but to the cosmic unity of the universe, which he identifies with a rejection of ratiocination, i.e., logical thought, and with an acceptance of some kind of condition when thought and action are unified, which means, paradoxically, the natural union between the individual and universal laws. However, there are serious rifts in Gershenzon’s thought. Perhaps the main rift is his portrayal of the individual in the Perepiska iz dvukh uglov (Correspondence from Two Corners) (1921). Gershenzon depicted an opposition between culture and personal liberation. He emphatically defended the individual as something unique and not merely part of a paradigm or category. He described the individual as thirsting for original knowledge like water from a live spring, cold and clear like a winter’s day. In contrast he said the water city dwellers drink comes from a tap, lukewarm, treated by chemicals and sent through a series of pipes. He yearned for personal freedom: Perhaps from original freedom a person needed to pass through a long period of discipline, dogmas and laws in order once again already a different 40 A summary of many views can be found in George Florovsky’s Puti russkogo bogosloviia (Paris: YMCA, 1988), 253.

136 PART II | Russian–Jewish Intelligentsia’s Cultural Vibrancy person arrive at freedom: perhaps that is how it was. But woe to those generations whose lot fell in that middle station—the path of culture. It [culture] falls apart from within—we see this clearly from an exhausted spirit that hangs its rags. Is that how liberation is attained, catastrophe breaks out just as twenty centuries ago, I don’t know and even I of course will not enter the promised land, but my feeling is akin to Mount Nebo from where Moses saw it [the land]. And not I alone shall glimpse it through the curtain of fog.41

This passage not only illuminates Gershenzon’s psychological condition but also represents his personal tragedy. In Correspondence from Two Corners he likens himself to Moses, the great liberator who cannot enter the Promised Land. Like Moses punished because his struggles for liberation also constitute his crimes (the breaking of the vessels is an essential part of the Sinai story), so too can Gershenzon not attain personal liberation because his enemy, culture, is also the object of his most profound love. Gershenzon belongs to the generation of culture—he is shackled by the cultural inheritance that makes up his entire being. Shestov was the first to notice the obvious contradiction in Gershenzon’s conception of the individual in Correspondence from Two Corners and Key To Faith. How could it be, he asked, that Gershenzon, insisting that change and development occur only in the individual, advised the individual to deny his freedom? In 1925, Shestov exclaimed, “And perhaps the future historian of literature, who has to explicate Gershenzon’s worldview, with bitterness or confusion or—if he were hostile to him—with gloating triumph will juxtapose Key to Faith and The Correspondence.”42 The contradiction of the idea of the individual in his works connects Moscow and the Revolution to Gershenzon, who experienced the dream of liberation and the shakles of reality. A new world was being born and it was a question whether the individual would join the play or stubbornly resist. Would he insist on the autonomy of self or would he surrender it for the unity of the whole? Was human volition alive or was the universe organized only as essence

41 Gershenzon and Ivanov, Perepiska iz dvukh uglov, 27. 42 Lev Shestov, “O vechnoi knige,” in Umozrenie i otkrovenie (Paris: YMCA, 1964), 21.

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and relations that forced man to succumb to its will? The issues in Pushkin’s Wisdom or Key to Faith were alive for Gershenzon in post-October Russia. One would like to know: what answers did Gershenzon attain? Did a study of the origins of human society, beliefs, and religion offer a meaningful way to make sense of Russia under Bolshevism, Communism, and state- and non-state-authorized mass murder? The answer is both yes and no. On one level studies of ancient times have little in common with the circumstances of 1914–21 in Moscow. Still, the reversal of society and people to a pre-­ technological world (off the grid as they call it these days)—with men scrounging for wood for fuel, starvation everywhere, and animal skins (fur coats) as the sole means for warmth—connects modern man to War Communism. But there is another connection. One should note that for Gershenzon these writings were not merely musings, but expressions of his innermost being. In this sense his comparisons, Pushkin and Heraclitus and the ancient and the modern Jews, symbolize his dreams and disappointments. He tried to go back deep into the recesses of culture to find answers. It made sense, therefore, that after 1922 he stopped writing entirely, and not just philosophy; he also ceased to write about Russian history, and his journalistic output became sharply reduced. After 1923, Gershenzon took up teaching and administrative work. Nikolai Piksanov describes Gershenzon’s career after the revolution: “After the October Revolution Gershenzon worked in Narkompros, Tsentrarkhiv, taught at the Briusov Higher Literary-Artistic Institute, was full member of the Russian association of the literary sector of the State Academy of Artistic Sciences (GAXN), one of the founders and leaders of the All-Russian Union of Writers.”43 In order to understand Gershenzon’s silence, one might turn to Correspon­ dence from Two Corners, recalling Gershenzon’s vehemence against culture. Could it be that his silence grew out of the premises of his thought? Having castigated culture, does it not follow that one day he would stop contributing to it? In a letter to Vladislav Khodasevich from March 21, 1923, Gershenzon describes his feelings: “I am detached from everything literary so that I have trouble believing that at one time I wrote, published. Perhaps that is why 43 Iu. Piksanov, “M. O. Gershenzon,” in Bol’shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia (Moscow: Sovietskaia entsiklopediia, 1926–31), 16:500.

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I cannot write. But it’s alright, even useful; now I regard the whole world of ideas and system ‘like the souls regard the body discarded by them from above.’”44 With Tiutchev’s metaphor of the soul looking down at the body, Gershenzon underscores the futility of literature. This passage fortifies the view that Gershenzon ceased to write as a result of his philosophical perspective. Marc Raeff, the late historian of Russian culture, offered a convincing view of why Gershenzon stopped writing. He believed that Gershenzon fled from culture as a result of his own insights in the realm of history. Raeff claims that Gershenzon discovered several essential psychological truths about the Russian mind, ones which explain the development of Russian culture during the nineteenth century and the reasons for the 1917 revolutions. Realizing that the revolutions were the natural result of the intelligentsia’s inner evolution, Gershenzon, in Raeff ’s opinion, tried to hide from his knowledge. In an essay on George Florovsky (1990), Raeff declares that, “Gershenzon himself took fright at the implications of his own Fragestellung and yearned to escape from the consequences and limitations of the very history he himself had helped so much to discover and understand.”45 Although Raeff does not explain explicitly what these implications are, he probably means Gershenzon’s demand that the intelligentsia seek a utopian solution to its problems. Although Gershenzon had hoped for an internal transformation, in a sense he had summoned the revolution and was responsible for it, and therefore had every reason to desire to escape his own creation. In the philosophical works of the early 1920s he wanted to understand what had happened, but ultimately only silence could provide the necessary answer.

44 Mikhail Gershenzon, “Pis’ma M. O. Gershenzona k V. F. Khodasevichu,” ed. N. N. Berberova, Novyi zhurnal 60 (1960): 228. 45 Marc Raeff, “Enticements and Rifts: George Florovsky as Historian of the Life of the Mind and the Life of the Church in Russia,” Modern Greek Studies Yearbook 6 (1990): 211.

Chapter Nine Battling for Self-Definition in Soviet Literature: Boris Eikhenbaum’s Jewish Question

In the late 1920s, Boris Eikhenbaum, already in middle age, began to identify himself as a Jew; not by religion certainly, but as a member of a different ethnos than Russians. Despite his foreign-sounding name, until that point there had been few clues that Eikhenbaum had a Jewish background. He made this declaration in Moi vremennik (1929), the part autobiography, part notebook, and part chronicle of his life and times. Although his identification as a Jew was short-lived, still it is surprising. Eikhenbaum was already one of Russia’s leading literary scholars, a central figure with Viktor Shklovsky, Roman Jakobson, and Iurii Tynianov of the Formalist movement at a time when Formalism was coming under intense criticism from the Soviet literary establishment. Moreover, rather than emphasize one’s ethnic difference, the wise thing would have been to try to underscore one’s class identification and proletariat background. Was a discussion about the contributions of his Jewish grandfather and sense of his own “otherness” really necessary? A study of Eikhenbaum’s announcement of his Jewish background in the context of Soviet culture leads one to speculative conclusions. Eikhenbaum seems to have employed his announcement as part of his literary battle with the Soviet literary establishment and he apparently had personal reasons too. However, the subject itself is fascinating: one of Russia’s leading literary scholars expressing Jewish roots in a raucous and transformative time in Soviet life. What does this tell us about the idea of Jewry, the Jewish past and future in Soviet times?

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*** Most people probably think that the Jewish question among the Formalists would perhaps be formulated best by not being formulated at all. Although Eikhenbaum, Tynianov, Shklovsky, and Jakobson each had at least one parent of Jewish origin, it is a fact that the members of OPOIaZ (Obshcestvo izucheniia poeticheskogo iazyka; Society for the Study of Poetic Language) did not view their Jewish backgrounds as significant or in need of an explanation. Moreover, the culture in which they operated did not seem to draw attention to it either; at least not until the ad hominem attacks of the late 1920s and the 1930s. However, that people of Jewish background would be accepted in Russian culture as equals should by no means be taken for granted. Jewish integration in Russian life had been restricted in tsarist times and certain challenges still existed in the early Soviet period. By joining Russian culture as full members without drama, suffering, and anxiety about the Jewish question, the Formalists represented a huge advancement, although, as we all know, new forms of discrimination arose. In the new Bolshevik state, a label such as bourgeois, not sufficiently Marxist, or a rootless cosmopolitan could be lethal. To be sure, full integration came at the cost of membership in the Jewish collective. But the members of OPOIaZ had long before broken with the Jewish world and decided to link their fate to Russian society. In seemingly every case it was the generation preceding that had made the tumultuous break with Jewish life. In the early Soviet period, Formalism, with its emphasis on devoting one’s life to the understanding of literature, or rather “literariness,” represented by default a striving toward assimilation. In fact, Formalism should be viewed in its historical context as part of a general social trend toward the total integration of Jews in all arenas of cosmopolitan European and Russian culture. This history of Jewish assimilation in the Soviet Union has found an eloquent historian in Yury Slezkine, the author of The Jewish Century, who recounts the experience of the elite, although by no means the majority of Soviet Jews.1 In terms of Eikhenbaum’s assimilation it is interesting to compare him to his father, Mikhail, and to his teacher, Semyon Vengerov. His father traveled the difficult road from a distinctly Jewish life to a Russian life, studying medicine  1 Slezkine, The Jewish Century.

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at Moscow University and, having converted to Russian Orthodoxy, marrying Nadezhda Dormidontovna Glotova, the daughter of a Russian admiral. Vengerov similarly left a distinct Jewish world behind in his path to become a scholar of Russian literature. In fact, Vengerov apparently converted to Russian Orthodoxy to get closer to the Russian spirit and to gain the authority he needed to become the leader of Russian literary studies in late tsarist times. In contrast to Eikhenbaum, Vengerov’s conversion deeply wounded his mother, Pauline Wengeroff, the author of memoirs that detail her tragic pain.2 Obviously the success of the Formalist critics rested upon the formation of a social and intellectual environment in which neutrality reigned with regard to the religious and ethnic identity of the writer or critic.3 The story of the Soviet government’s attitude toward nationalities generally and to Jews in particular is complicated.4 The repression of Jewish religious life and the promotion by the Evsektsia of a secular and Communist Yiddish culture and education accompanied by the (at times forced) use of Yiddish, reflects the contradictory processes of official government support for Yiddish and the repression of Jewish religious and national cultural life independent of Bolshevik control.5 In the countryside Jews were often still objects of opprobrium, but in St. Petersburg (where Eikhenbaum lived) and other capital cities Jews had positive connotations in the 1920s. According to Ilya Brauder, a famous lawyer   2 Pauline Wengeroff, Memoirs of a Grandmother: Scenes from the Cultural History of the Jews of Russia in the Nineteenth Century, trans. and ed. Shulamit Magnes, 2 vols. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010). See also Brian Horowitz, “From the Annals of the Literary Life of Russia’s Silver Age: The Tempestuous Relationship of S. A. Vengerov and M. O. Gershenzon,” Wiener Slawistischer Almanach 35 (1995): 77–95. Jewish assimilation even in Soviet Russia was by no means painless. And finally, see Arkady Zeltser, Evrei sovetskoi provintsii: Vitebsk i mestechki, 1917–1941 (Moscow: Rosspen, 2006); Mikhail Beizer, Evrei Leningrada. Natsional’naia zhizn’ i sovetizatsiia: 1917–1939 (Moscow: Mosty kul’tury, 1999); and Zvi Gitelman, Jewish Nationality and Soviet Politics: The Jewish Sections of the CPSU, 1917–1930 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972). Such books as Zelter’s Evrei sovetskoi provintsii and Beizer’s Evrei Leningrada follow Gitelman’s Jewish Nationality to show that acculturation was a difficult and gradual process with periods of regression and renewed discrimination.   3 Jacob Katz, Out of the Ghetto: The Social Background of Jewish Emancipation, 1770–1870 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973). According to Katz, integration depends first and foremost on what one could call a neutral public sphere.  4 Gitelman, Jewish Nationality and Soviet Politics, 3–18. The Evsektsiia stands for the Evreiskaia sektsiia ( Jewish Section) of the Communist Party.  5 Shneer, Yiddish and the Creation of Soviet Jewish Culture.

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from St. Petersburg, “It was prestigious being Jewish then.”6 In his book on Stalin and the Jews, Arkady Vaksberg warns against confusing the treatment of Jews in the late 1930s with that of the earlier time: “And yet we would not be mistaken in calling the period of the twenties and the first half of the thirties one of state protection for Russian Jewry.”7 Recent scholarship on the Jew in Soviet times confirms the idea that “Jew” often had positive connotations.8 Overshadowing traditional portrayals of the shtetl Luftmensch, new images were born in Soviet Russia, including the muscular Jew, the commissar Jew, and the useful technician Jew.9 Many Jews joined the Soviet bureaucracy and found the state provided opportunities for “upward mobility.”10 In fact, many thousands of Jews moved from small towns and villages to the large urban centers of Minsk, Kiev, Odessa, Leningrad, and Moscow.11 For some the ability to find work, even in tough conditions, saved them from starvation in their previous homes. Some of these images had appeared in nineteenth-century literary fiction, but others were new additions.12 Despite russifying at tremendous speed, speaking Russian, and becoming more involved in Soviet-Russian culture, nonetheless Jews were not supposed to draw attention to themselves. One danger was that the term “Jew” was too multivalent; a person risked that he might be misunderstood. It could mean “enemy” in the case of the Jewish religion or national movement. In ethnic terms it was also redolent of separation, a distinct caste, secret relationships

  6 Mark Tolts, email conversation with author, 21 December 2011.   7 Arkady Vaksberg, Stalin against the Jews, trans. Antonina W. Bouis (New York: Knopf, 1994), 59–60.  8 Shneer, Yiddish and the Creation of Soviet Jewish Culture; David Shneer, Idish: Iazyk i kul’tura v Sovetskom Soiuze, eds., Leonid Katsis, M. Kaspin, and David Fishman (Moscow: Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi gumanitarnyi universitet, 2009).  9 Slezkine, The Jewish Century, 105–203. 10 Bemporad, Becoming Soviet Jews, 34. 11 For statistics on internal Jewish migration in the Soviet Union see Mark Tolts, “Population and Migration,” in The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, 2:1436–37. 12 Jeffrey Veidlinger, The Moscow State Yiddish Theater: Jewish Culture on the Soviet Stage (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 155–59. One should not forget that later the image would grow negative. See also Frank Grüner, “‘Russia’s Battle Against the Foreign’: The Anti-Cosmopolitanism Paradigm in Russian and Soviet Ideology,” European Review of History 17, no. 3 (2010): 445–72. Grüner claims that the term “cosmopolitan” always had a negative dimension that got worse as the Soviet state relied on Russian nationalism for its legitimacy.

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that were hidden to the wider public. When the assertion was too forceful, it was likely to signal a conflict with Soviet ideological hegemony.13

***

The image of the Jew in Eikhenbaum’s writings first appears in 1924, when Formalism was being loudly and repeatedly derided by its powerful Marxist opponents in the literary press. Eikhenbaum raised the stakes by making a strategic decision to publish an article on Formalist theory on enemy turf in the Marxist journal Press and Revolution.14 By publishing in a highly visible Marxist publication, he was deliberately calling attention to himself and embracing the role of standard-bearer for Formalism, an approach to literature—the Russian holy of holies—that the regime regarded as intolerable. In the midst of this shouting match on the pages of the press, Eikhenbaum published a book review in Russkii sovremennik discussing his Jewish grandfather in admiring terms.15 The impetus for that act was apparently a chance sighting in a bookstore window of a new book entitled, An Ancient Poem About a Chess Game, purportedly by an unknown Russian author, discovered in manuscript form from the first half of the nineteenth century and now published for the first time.16 Eikhenbaum easily recognized the poem as a Russian translation from the Hebrew original, translated by Osip Rabinovich.17 Eikhenbaum wrote his review to set the record straight, drawing attention to the Hebrew original and that the poem’s “author was my grandfather, [Ya’akov] M. Eichenbaum (1796–1861), a mathematician, chess player and poet.”18 In 1929, Boris Eikhenbaum published a highly 13 It is important to recall that antisemitism was already present at the start of Soviet power. Although the highest officials condemned antisemitism, on the local level Jews were still objects of discrimination and considered embodying a variety of natural and supernatural evils. For some people the upheavals of the war years could only be explained by the nefarious activity of Jews. Others were imbued by ideas of a Jewish conspiracy (in the form of Communism) that was foretold in Protocols of the Elders of Zion (New York: Viking Press, 1937). 14 Boris Eikhenbaum, “Vokrug voprosa o ‘formalistakh,’” Pechat’ i revoliutsiia 5, no. 1 (1924). For more information, see Samuel D. Eisen, “Whose Lenin Is It Anyway? Victor Shklovsky, Boris Eikhenbaum, and the Formalist Marxist Debate in Soviet Cultural Politics (A View from the Twenties),” Russian Review 55, no. 1 ( January 1996): 78. 15 Boris Eikhenbaum, “Drevnaia poema o shakhmat’noi igre,” Russkii sovremennik 4 (1924): 268. 16 Carol Any, Boris Eikhenbaum: Voices of a Russian Formalist (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 8–9. 17 The edition is probably Ha-Krav: Shir (Odessa: M. A. Beilinson, 1874). 18 Eikhenbaum, “Drevnaia poema o shakhmat’noi igre,” 268.

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personalized one-man literary magazine, Moi vremennik, devoting a significant part of it to an autobiographical sketch in which he highlights his Jewish grandfather.19 He even reproduces a long segment of his grandfather’s poem, whose title, Ha-krav (“The Battle”), about a chess game, serves as a leitmotif for the entire work. The basic details of Ya’akov Eichenbaum’s biography can be found in encyclopedias and histories of the Haskalah.20 He was born in 1796, in the town of Kristianpol in Ukraine. The sources agree that Ya’akov was a child prodigy proficient in Hebrew and Talmud while still in childhood. Married at age eleven, he divorced when his father-in-law “suspected him of secular leanings.” 21 By this time he was already reading secular books. He married again in 1815 and moved to Zamość, where he “developed an interest in mathematics and translated Euclid from German into Hebrew.”22 In 1818, when Tsar Alexander I ordered all Jews to change their surnames, Ya’akov switched from Gelber to Eichenbaum apparently to rid himself of an unpleasant-sounding name (such, at least, is the reason biographer James Curtis gives).23 As his biographer in the Russian-language Jewish Encyclopedia of 1913 explains, “Unfavorable conditions of a transitional epoch did not give Eichenbaum opportunities for the normal development of his unique gifts.”24 In 1819, he translated Euclid’s Elements into Hebrew, but could not find 19 Boris Eikhenbaum, Moi vremennik (Leningrad: Izdatel’stvo pisatelei, 1929). See also Lidiia Ginzburg, Chelovek za pis’mennym stolom: Esse, iz vospominanii, chetyre povestvovaniia (Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1989), 353–54. About the unique genre Gintsburg has written, “A year later Boris Mikhailovich published his unique book, Moi vremennik, structured like a literary journal with sections: literature (including an autobiography), science, criticism, mixture.” 20 Getzel Kressel, “Eichenbaum (Gelber), Jacob,” in Encyclopedia Judaica ( Jerusalem: Ktav, 1972), 6:516–17; Jacob Raisin, The Haskalah Movement in Russia (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1913), 318, 321. See also Baron Tarnegol, “Iakov Moiseevich Eikhenbaum: Kanva dlia biografii,” Rassvet 3 ( June 1860): 823; Efim Melamed, “Izvestnyi Eikhenbaum. . . : Istoriia odnoi sud’by,” Evrei v Rossii 3 (1995): 79–90. 21 Judah Leib Lilienblum was also forced to divorce his wife for “free-thinking.” 22 Kressel, “Eichenbaum (Gelber), Jacob,” 516–17. 23 See Dz. Kurtis ( James Curtis), Ego sem’ia, strana i russkaia literatura (Moscow: Akademicheskii proekt, 2004), 291. 24 S. L. Tsinberg, “Iakov Moiseevich Eikhenbaum,” in Evreiskaia entsiklopediia, 16:186.

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enough money to publish it.25 Similarly, he translated Franker’s Course in Mathematics, but it too was not published. Eichenbaum published another long poem, “Ha-Kossem,” in 1860, which was published in the Hebrew newspaper Ha-Melitz. He ultimately became well known in Europe thanks to his debate with Samuel David Luzzato regarding Abraham Ibn-Ezra and also for his dispute with Franker on a math problem in which Eikhenbaum was pronounced the winner.26 Eichenbaum authored Hokhmat ha-Shi’urim (Science of Measurements), “an adaptation of a French arithmetic book in 1857.”27 Although he had originally worked as a private tutor, traveling from place to place, he finally settled in Odessa, where he established a private school in 1835. Appointed director of the Kishinev Jewish school in 1844 by the Russian government, in 1850 he became inspector of the newly established government Rabbinical Seminary in Zhitomir.28 In Moi vremennik Boris Eikhenbaum retells part of Ya’akov’s biography, weaving facts, family legends, and his own imagination. At the same time Boris overtly and covertly evokes the Jewish theme. An example of his overt treatment is the homage to his Jewish grandfather: Ya’akov was endowed generously by nature with unusual gifts and already at his earliest childhood amazed everyone who knew him with his extraordinary development. He already could read Hebrew at age two. Here we believe it is not excessive to mention one fact that in essence is unimportant, but nonetheless startling. As a two-year old little Ya’akov was sick with smallpox and he pointed out to his amazed father the various punctuation signs of Hebrew writing (segol, zereh and so on) in the incidental group of pockmarks. . . . He was already acquainted with the Bible at age four and read the weekly portion each Friday with the proper intonation. At age six he had mastered twenty folios of the Talmud. 29 Israel Zinberg, The Haskalah Movement in Russia ( Jerusalem: Ktav, 1978), 105. Tsinberg, “Iakov Moiseevich Eikhenbaum,” 187. Kressel, “Eichenbaum (Gelber), Jacob, 516–17. For a discussion of state Jewish schools in Russia, see Horowitz, Jewish Philanthropy and Enlightenment, 29–41. 29 Eikhenbaum, Moi vremennik, 28. 25 26 27 28

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This anecdote about Hebrew letters forming out of the pockmarks predicts the boy’s talent as a Hebraist. Eikhenbaum continues about Ya’akov’s adolescence: Since then he began to appear in many synagogues as a cantor. After the [high] holidays, Ya’akov stayed with the parents of his fiancée, who took care of him in shifts at their home or in the close shtetl of Orkhov with the local Talmud scholar, who was extremely strong in Kabbalah and was considered at that time nearly a saint. The young man continued his studies with his teacher and had all kinds of success.30

Eikhenbaum continues, “Here he found the works of modern Hebrew literature on which he threw himself with passion, as a hungry man throws himself on food after a long fast. The new literature made a powerful impression on Ya’akov: from that time he began to write in Hebrew. We see that fate and circumstances led the young man onto the path that his soul was heading.”31 Ya’akov Eichenbaum devoted himself to the study of non-religious literature and this love forced him to break with the religious community. Finishing the discussion of his grandfather’s legacy, Boris describes the book that was passed to him containing his grandfather’s famous poem, “Ha-Krav” (“The Battle”): The family had only one copy of “Ha-Krav” from grandpa. For many years it lay in my father’s writing table, then it passed into my writing table. It was the old Odessa edition with the author’s portrait and the translator’s preface. Now another, new, Moscow copy has joined it, without a portrait, published according to an anonymous manuscript that was found by chance in the archive of the poet Slepuhkin.32

Although the books have become Boris’s material legacy, the story of his grandfather ends in the writer’s present when, finding himself on a train platform in 30 Ibid., 29. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid., 31. On Fyodor Nikiforovich Slepukhin (1783–1848) see the Russian-language version of Wikipedia under Slepukhin.

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Zhitomir, he recalls his progenitor: “Two years ago I had returned from Odessa to Leningrad through Zhitomir. There was a clean, quiet station that had been built recently. I stood on the platform, bought fruit from an old woman and rode on. There was no one to ask about the ‘ancient poem’ and its author.”33 Boris portrays his grandfather’s book as a kind of rare antique, stored in his writing table. He values the patrimonial, keeping two copies of the Russian translation; he cannot read the original written in Hebrew. At the same time the book symbolizes a broken link between his present and the family’s past. The Jewish world of his grandfather is portrayed as a way station, a momentary stop between desired destinations. It is important to note that “Ha-Krav” serves as an example of a narrative poem that reiterates the message of artistic freedom. The poem, and especially the long passages that Boris Eikhenbaum quotes, emphasize (as you might expect) the formal dimension of the poem. He notes that the translation is weak because it does not remain faithful to the “concentrated character, intensity, and wit” of the original. In addition, the translator uses Pushkin-Lermontov clichés “complicated by additions from an Odessan dialect.”34 Nonetheless, Eikhenbaum acknowledges that as a young man he was ignorant of these aspects and concentrated on the story. He particularly enjoyed this stanza: Вперед, вперед, не унывай, Рассказ мой, скромный сын преданий! Развейся смело, не скрывай Подробностей невинной брани. Читай нам повесть старины, Куда кто шел, за кем гонялся; Как жребий кончился войны, Кто пал со славой, кто остался. Не унывай тебя коснется: Тебя лишь слушает знаток, В его душе лишь отзовется Понятный звук твоих речей 33 Ibid., 33. 34 Ibid., 47–48.

148 PART II | Russian–Jewish Intelligentsia’s Cultural Vibrancy И чудный смысл иносказаний; Так лейся ж плавно, как ручей, Рассказ мой, скромный сын преданий!35 Forward, forward, be not downcast O tale of mine, who am but a modest son of tradition, Unfold boldly, hide not The facts of innocent warfare. Tell us a tale of olden times, Who went where, chasing whom, How the destiny of warfare concluded, Who fell with glory, who remained. Be not downcast, you too will be touched, Only the wise man will hearken to you; Only in his soul will resound The familiar sound of your words And let the wondrous meaning of metaphors Pour forth as smoothly as a brook. O tale of mine, a modest son of tradition.

According to one critic, because of its “elegant form” and “vividness of the images,” “Ha-Krav” signaled a new stage in the development of Hebrew poetry in Russia.36 Olga Litvak, however, regards the Russian translation as much more significant than the original, about which she writes that, “in fact, Eichenbaum’s poem is a striking example of studied maskilic medievalism, the conservative tendency to derive justification and precedent for cultural experiments from the philosophic and linguistic achievements of Iberian Judaism. Poems about chess had appeared first in the secular repertoire of Jewish poets of medieval Christian Spain.”37 However, according to Litvak, the translation serves as the first salvo in Osip Rabinovich’s literary attack against the Jews of the North and reflects his quest to invent a Southern Jewish literature: “Embarking on his literary career 35 Ibid., 48–49. 36 Zinberg, The Haskalah Movement in Russia, 105–6. 37 Olga Litvak, Conscription and the Search for Modern Russian Jewry (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 56.

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with a Russian translation of a Hebrew poem about chess [. . .] Rabinovich expressly sought to point acolytes of Jewish enlightenment away from the Lithuanian Jerusalem.”38 Boris Eikhenbaum underscores as something positive the fact that the poem serves no ideological message. Although the chess game between black and white (white wins) symbolizes Europe and Asia—Europe wins—for Boris-the-Formalist it embodies the idea of poetry for its own sake. In that spirit, Eikhenbaum focuses on the poem’s formal aspects, particularly the way in which the poem reflects an attempt in Russian to transmit “Eastern” poetry. Not coincidentally, the poem appeared in 1840, the same year that Lermontov’s “Demon” was published.

***

In addition to the descriptions of his grandfather, Eikhenbaum also expresses Jewish qualities in coded language in which he refers to the Jew through an evocation of the “other.” In depicting his youth in Voronezh, Eikhenbaum underscores his alienation from his surroundings, in particular contrasting the names of bourgeois Vitebsk with his own: Surnames beautify the language of the city with a special local color, create something akin to a dialect. The city of Voronezh’s language sounds like its people’s names: Тюрины, Халютины, Черемисиновы, Черковы, Клочковы, Малинины, Чигаевы, Селивановы, Хрущевы, Федосеевские, Перелешины. To be sure there is the pharmacy Vol’piatn and Miufke, the butchery Gekht, but these aren’t so much surnames as much as titles—like the bakery “Zhan.”

The listing of the Russian names as the authentic Voronezh intensifies Eikhenbaum’s perception of his difference and discomfort. He also alludes to his home as a sign of his outsider status. “We not only had a strange surname, but our life was also strange: no flowers in the windows, no cats, no bottles with liquor, no evenings by the samovar, no guests, no gossip—nothing that is a propos for Voronezh and creates a home.”39 38 Litvak, Conscription and the Search, 56. Profesor Litvak points to an article on this issue: Jacob Shatzky, “Haskalah in Zamosc,” YIVO Bleter 34 (1952): 24–61. 39 Eikhenbaum, Moi vremennik, 35–36.

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Expressing a degree of ambiguity about his ethnic origins, Eikhenbaum describes his identity in Voronezh: My life was full of insanity and stubbornness. I didn’t have an automobile or a prostitute. I was a representative of a particular nationality, not encountered either in China, or in Europe. I am a Russian youth of the beginning of the twentieth century, occupied with the question of why man was made and searching for his purpose. I am a wanderer who was carried by the wind of the pre-revolutionary epoch, the epoch of Russian symbolism, from the Southern steppes to the attic apartments of Petersburg.40

As a statement of identity, the passage oozes with ambiguity. He says that he is a Russian youth, yet the images refer not to a Russian but to something else. It is not only the phrase “representative of a particular nationality” that draws the reader’s attention to a potential Jewish background, but also his confession of not having a prostitute. Jews in the nineteenth century were associated with sexual moderation (and sexual deviation, one may note). In addition, “strannik” is another metonym often used to signify Jews—the wandering Jew. In a passage in proximity to the one above, Eikhenbaum describes being forced to learn the violin, which reminds one of Isaac Babel’s discussion about the Moldovanka, where parents make their progeny play in the hope of discovering another Heifets.41 However, one should be careful about concluding anything from his music lessons. Even his childhood lessons on violin, the instrument of choice for young Jewish prodigies, but which for Boris was an embarrassment—he felt self-conscious and ungainly holding the violin under his chin—came about not through traditional Jewish choices in musical training, but by chance: it was his Russian mother who selected violin for Boris while assigning the piano, which Boris longed to play, to his younger brother, Vsevolod. The Jewish theme nevertheless may also be a coded way of discussing his youth, which was a very difficult time in his life. His mother openly preferred his younger brother, Vsevolod, and was abusive to Boris.42 According 40 Ibid., 44. 41 See Isaac Babel’s “Odessa Stories.” Moldovanka is the neighborhood in Odessa where the city’s poorest Jews live. 42 Incidentally, Vsevolod Eikhenbaum (1884–1945) took the pseudonym Vsevolod Volin and became a famous anarchist who lived a colorful life. See Paul Avrich, “V. M. Eikhenbaum

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to Lidiia Lotman, a close friend and the wife of Eikhenbaum’s student, Eric Naidich, there was a time when Boris even contemplated suicide as a way to escape his situation.43 In any case, he may have identified with his father and his father’s side of the family as a way of distancing himself from traumatic memories. However, while it is tempting to see Eikhenbaum’s otherness as stemming from his Jewish background, we should be careful about advancing such a hypothesis. It is true that he was always keenly aware of his foreign-sounding surname, which in his schoolboy days made him uncomfortably self-conscious. Growing up, however, he seems to have associated his personal sense of difference not with his Jewish father who was responsible for the awkward surname, but with his Russian Orthodox mother. Carol Any explains, “The medicinally sterile ambiance of his childhood home, bare of flowers, samovar, alcoholic libations, and guests was the creation of his Russian physician-mother, not his Jewish physician-father.  Nor can we even characterize the household as a Jewish one: Boris had been baptized and attended Russian Orthodox Church services.”44 In his biography of Boris Eikhenbaum James Curtis argues that Russian culture replaced a Jewish way of life. Although one can certainly generalize this way about the first generation of acculturated Jewish intellectuals, such an explanation is overstated for the second generation. Eikhenbaum never had access to Jewish culture, nor did it play a major role in his life. Therefore, it was not something that he could surrender. At the same time Eikhenbaum’s biography does not lend itself to the productive interpretive strategy of David Roskies about Jews who as youngsters left Jewish life but who “returned” in a later period.45 Unlike Semyon An-sky, about whom one can say that he returned to (Volin): Portrait of a Russian Anarchist,” in Imperial Russia, 1700–1917: State, Society, Opposition. Essays in Honor of Marc Raeff, eds. Ezra Mendelsohn and Marshall S. Shatz, (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1998), 278–89. 43 Lidiia Lotman, Vospominaniia (St. Petersburg: Nestor-Istoriia, 2007), 122–23. Another version of the story can be found in Kurtis, Ego sem’ia, 44–45. 44 Carol Any, personal communication with the author, 13 February 2013; see also Hugh McLean, email message to author, 22 January 2014. According to McLean, Roman Jakobson had also been baptized and considered himself an Orthodox Christian. Professor McLean says that he saw Jakobson cross himself in church when he and some friends went to an Easter service. 45 David G. Roskies, “S. Ansky and the Paradigm of Return,” in The Uses of Tradition: Jewish Continuity in the Modern Era, ed. Jack Wertheimer (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1992), 243–60.

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the Jewish people, Eikhenbaum had different reasons for using the image of the Jew to present his biography as a struggle for individuality and creativity.

***

It seems obvious that Ya’akov Eichenbaum is meaningful to Boris as a symbol for his own life. Apparently the mid-1920s were crucial to Boris Eikhenbaum’s own sense of self and marked a time of self-reflection and charting of the future. His student and the well-known literary scholar Lidiia Gintsburg explains, “In 1926, Eikhenbaum had his fortieth birthday. He experienced it as an event and spoke with us about the need for a biographical break. Biographical here is contrasted with historical. ‘Creativity […] is an act of recognizing oneself in the march of history . . . ’ Eikhenbaum wrote in his article on Nekrasov.”46 Although this passage is filled with details about literary theory, my main point in the context here is that Eikhenbaum became deeply conscious of his own public and private behavior. He looked at other writers and at himself and realized that he needed to consider his own biography and fashion it according to the needs of his own time. Gintsburg writes again, “‘I must solve the problem of behavior,’ Eikhenbaum wrote Shklovsky in 1929. The partial publication of Eikhenbaum’s diaries and letters showed that the problem of behavior as a scientific subject and living problem always remained the most essential thing for him.” She continues, “In the preface to [Moi] Vremennik he wrote, ‘In the XVIII century several writers published such journals, filling it up with their own writings.’ The author counts himself among the writers.”47 Eikhenbaum apparently wanted to write his biography in a new way, to conceive of himself and to portray himself as a writer. This is an important fact because Eikhenbaum began to study literary life and the role of the writer, the behavior of the writer, in relation to society. It is intriguing to consider that Moi vremennik is connected with Eikhenbaum’s personal crisis in the 1920s and especially with his new concern about his own biography and his own place in Soviet society. By declaring Ya’akov Eichenbaum a forerunner of art for art’s sake, Boris features the modernist aspects of the work almost a century after “Ha-Krav” appeared. Moreover, he asserts the right of the Hebrew-language 46 Gintsburg, Chelovek za pis’mennym stolom, 357. 47 Ibid., 353.

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author of the poem to status in the country’s literary tradition. In contrast to a national literature, Eikhenbaum emphasizes his allegiance to a true Soviet culture, one that is open to diverse voices and influences. Although it may have been lawful and even unexceptional to allude to one’s Jewish background in the 1920s, actually he would have a good reason to hide his grandfather on his mother’s side. Dormidont Mikhailovich Glotov was an aristocrat and an admiral in the tsarist navy.48 Moreover, his brother, Vsevolod—a well-known anarchist—was in and out of Soviet prisons in the 1920s. Allusions to these two figures would be more dangerous and, indeed, Eikhenbaum avoids them. Boris describes his grandfather’s coming of age story apparently as a means of explaining his own evolution and literary prowess, emphasizing the link between his grandfather and himself, fortifying the idea that his own literary talent has roots in Jewish genealogy: “The law of inheritance which my parents for some reason didn’t consider (Professor Leftgaft rejected it categorically) led me to the building with the twelve departments—the historical-philological faculty of Petersburg University.”49 This passage reflects ideas of development that Eikhenbam promulgated in his theory of literary evolution. In contrast to Darwinism or evolution in the natural sciences, Eikhenbaum attributes his desire to study literature to his grandfather. Thus, evolution in literature jumps generations (Viktor Shklovsky said the evolutionary path led to uncles or in other words was indirect from one generation to the other).50 At this time at the end of the 1920s, Eikhenbaum turned to the study of byt (literary life), especially the biographies of Mikhail Lermontov and Lev Tolstoy. Eikhenbaum broke from Formalism by acknowledging the need for the inclusion of supra-literary reality—psychology, biography, history—to understand the author.51 Marietta Chudakova explains: The problem of social status and professional self-consciousness was analyzed by Eikhenbaum with great penetration thanks to his experience with countless people who entered literature now, but before the revolution had 48 Boris Maslennikov, Morskaia karta rasskazyvaet (Moscow: Voenizdat’, 1986), 274. 49 Eikhenbaum, Moi vremennik, 50. 50 See Luc Herman, Concepts of Realism (New York: Camden House, 1996), 151. 51 Erlich, Russian Formalism, 159.

154 PART II | Russian–Jewish Intelligentsia’s Cultural Vibrancy been professionally distant from it. A new army was recruited and a generation of already established writers reevaluated their situation. Eikhenbaum began to emphasize that “literature is dependent [on reality] and that its evolution depends on conditions outside itself ” (Literaturnyi byt) and there is no need to explain further—so dramatic was the declaration of the OPOIaZ theorist.52

It is perhaps not by chance that the same problems that Eikhenbaum discovered in his literary subjects he acknowledged in his own life. For example, in Eikhenbaum’s treatment a central characteristic of Lermontov and Tolstoy was their struggle with society; each fought with the literary values of his time and demanded special rights for art. In addition, each belonged to in-between generations—Lermontov between Pushkin and Gogol; Tolstoy was neither part of the Belinsky group nor close to aristocratic writers such as the Slavophiles or Herzen, Nekrasov, and Ogarev. Rather, he felt distant from literary life in the capitals. As a result Tolstoy was attacked for not fulfilling the sotsial’nyi zakaz (social demands) of his time. Not only Boris but also his grandfather, his alter ego Ya’akov, felt at odds with the reigning literary institutions of the day (at least that is how Boris Eikhenbaum depicted him). Ya’akov couldn’t find proper work as a writer (in fact there were no steady newspaper jobs in Hebrew until Ha-Melitz was established in 1860). Ya’akov had to lobby friends in order to acquire the position as head of the government’s rabbinical seminary in Zhitomir. He too is described as disinterested in fulfilling social demand. Valorizing the autonomy of literature, he selected themes that emphasized formal and aesthetic dimensions of texts—such as a chess game. One cannot help feeling that the image of the alienated outsider, the apostate from Communist orthodoxy and the persecuted scholar in Soviet times, is somehow related to the grandfather and his break from Orthodox Jewry. Boris Eikhenbaum is related genetically to Ya’akov Eichenbaum, another Jew of extraordinary literary talent who was in concert with part of his society and in conflict with another part. 52 Marietta Chudakova, “Sotsial’naia praktika, filologicheskaia refleksiia i literatura v nauchnoi biografii Eikhenbauma i Tynianova,” in Tynianovskii sbornik: Vtorye tynianovskie chteniia (Riga: Znanie, 1986), 110.

Battling for Self-Definition in Soviet Literature: Boris Eikhenbaum’s Jewish Questio 155

*** This study of Boris Eikhenbaum tells us some rather surprising things about the image of the Jew in the first two decades of Soviet life. For a start, we see the appearance of children of intermarried Jews who felt either a weak Jewish identity or in many cases no identity at all. Secondly, we see the paradox that an individual in the artistic elite could employ his Jewish background as a banner of artistic independence and at the same time ignore real issues facing Jews in society. In other words, Eikhenbaum could laud his Jewish grandfather, while ignoring the persecution of Jewish religious and national institutions. One can acknowledge that Eikhenbaum’s portrait of his grandfather stands above all for diversity, as opposed to the Party monolith that Soviet culture was about to become in 1929. In this context Ya’akov Eichenbaum stood in for Boris. In his grandfather Boris perceived a creative source for his own talent as an artist and saw an individual who, despite the many compromises necessary for survival, was ultimately accountable to himself alone. The integrity of the artist facing society became the bridge between his Formalist and Structuralist periods—Ya’akov-the-Jew helped reinforce this theme and, having served his purpose, disappeared from Boris’s later writings. Neither attitudes during World War II, the Doctor’s Plot, or the establishment of Israel ignited any deep feeling of Jewish identity. In conclusion, one may return to the tolerance and multi-national, multi-cultural themes that seem inherent in Eikhenbaum’s celebration of his grandfather’s poem. In particular, the publication of grandfather’s poem as an “ancient Russian work” suggests a hidden Jewish identity streaked through Russian culture. You never knew what ideas or behaviors might have an unsuspected Jewish component. But in contrast to a reaction of fear, Eikhenbaum was proud that Russian culture was aligned with a culture as rich and ancient as the Jewish, and that his own biography was linked somehow with such a fine poet as Ya’akov Eichenbaum.

Chapter Ten Vladimir Jabotinsky and the Mystique of 19051

The years 1905–6 cast a huge shadow in Jabotinsky’s writings.2 Although it makes sense that 1905 would matter to Jabotinsky in the years immediately following the revolution, it is striking that 1905 had a powerful impact on him in the 1920s and 1930s, when Jabotinsky had already become the head of Revisionist Zionism, and when the center of Zionist activity had shifted from Europe to Palestine. We may ask: why did Jabotinsky harken back to 1905, why did he often refer to the Helsingfors Conference of 1906 in the two final decades of his life, the heart of his political activity? Why did he publish an autobiography about his Russian years in 1936 and write The Five, a novel about Odessa in the year 1905, at a time when the Nazi threat and the critical situation in Palestine occupied Zionists everywhere? What explains the breadth and depth for Jabotinsky of the so-called First Russian Revolution? The answer lies in the multi-functionality of 1905 for Jabotinsky’s imagemaking. At once he employed the theme of 1905 as a source for the political legitimacy of Tsohar, the Zionist Revisionist party. He proudly linked Revisionism with Synthetic Zionism, the political approach that emerged at the Helsingfors Conference that envisioned full political and national rights for Russia’s ethnic minorities. He also connected 1905 to a defense of himself as a liberal after he came under severe attack in the 1930s as a “fascist dictator” and “militarist.” In his novel Piatero (The Five) and in his autobiography, Sippur yamai (Story of My Life),   1 I dedicate this chapter to the memory of my dear friend and ersatz Doktorvater Ezra Mendelsohn, whose talent inspired me.   2 For the meaning of 1905 in Russian-Jewish consciousness, see Ezra Mendelsohn and Stefani Hoffman, eds., The Revolution of 1905 and Russia’s Jews (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008).

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he described the 1905 Revolution as reflecting his desire for freedom, youth, love, cosmopolitanism, and individuality. Altogether these themes and functions involve complicated and inconsistent attitudes that depart from the conventional evaluation of 1905 as a significant part of the evolution toward 1917.3 In connection with my investigation of the 1905 theme, this chapter offers an original perspective on Jabotinsky and breaks with a number of images presented by other scholars. I reject studies that view Jabotinsky as static, complete, and monological (“he thought x all his life”).4 My interpretation is that he was contradictory. He often changed, was irresponsible with his words, said different things to different audiences, and skillfully used inconsistency to further his political ends. Therefore, the documentary evidence of his statements, writings, and letters has to be carefully examined and cross-examined to discern what they mean. Regarding my methodology, I emulate Michael Stanislawski, who was first to pose doubt about the truth-value of Jabotinsky’s writings and view him as a mythmaker who constructed his life as a kind of literary creation.5 Following that line of reasoning, I adopt Svetlana Natkovich’s approach by regarding Jabotinsky’s fiction and his politics as parts of a single ideological system.6   3 See Abe Ascher, The Revolution of 1905: Russia in Disarray (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1998), 1–2. Ascher has also taken issue with the conventional view of the 1905 Revolution.   4 I include in that category even such informative and helpful works as Joseph Schechtman’s and Samuel Katz’s exhaustive biographies: Joseph B. Schechtman, Rebel and Statesman: The Early Years, vol. 1 of The Life and Times of Vladimir Jabotinsky (Silver Spring, MD: Eshel Books, 1956); Samuel Katz, Lone Wolf: A Biography of Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky (New York: Barricade Books, 1996). Hillel Halkin and Arye Naor, meanwhile, appear unduly naive. Hillel Halkin, Jabotinsky: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014); Vladimir Jabotinsky, Leumiut liberalit, ed. Arye Naor (Tel Aviv: Machon Jabotinsky, 2013). I am also critical of recent attempts to link Jabotinsky too closely with Russian radicalism or with liberalism exclusively; these also represent in my view an absence of critical judgment. See Leonid Katsis and Nataliia Pasenko, “Zhabotinskii i politicheshkie partii,” Moriia 12 (2011): 6–20. On liberalism, see Raphaella Bilski Ben-Hur, Every Individual, a King: The Social and Political Thought of Ze’ev Vladimir Jabotinsky (New York: B’nai B’rith Books, 1993).   5 Michael Stanislawski, Zionism and the Fin de Siècle: Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism from Nordau to Jabotinsky (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). On the relation of Jabotinsky’s autobiography, The Story of My Life, to fiction, see Michael Stanislawski Autobiographical Jews: Essays in Jewish Self-Fashioning (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004), 3.   6 Svetlana Natkovich, Bin inyanei zoher: Yatsirto shel Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky v ha’kesher ha’haverti ( Jerusalem: Magnes, 2015).

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I have organized this chapter into four parts: part one treats events and texts during and just after the 1905 Revolution; part two deals with texts written in the 1920s, while the next section includes a discussion of texts from the 1930s. The last part constitutes a conclusion.

***

The 1905 Revolution has been judged from a variety of points of view in the West and in Russia.7 For Jews, as for their liberal allies, 1905 launched a new political situation that offered opportunities for hands-on involvement in the newly established party process. Bereft of previous experience in running political campaigns, Jews and Russians had to experiment. Such organizations as the Union for the Attainment of Full Right for Jews and the Jewish People’s Group represent attempts to create coalitions among Jews ( Jewish Kadets [Constitutional Democrats], Zionists, Nationalists [Folkspartay], and non-­ Marxist Socialists [Trudoviki]) with the goal of enhancing power. In should be recalled that Jews composed a small minority in Russia that had little chance of influencing Duma legislation on its own. Regarding Zionism in 1905, the movement was reeling from the death in 1904 of Theodor Herzl, its founder and leader, and from his proposal, put forward in 1903, to accept Britain’s offer to construct a Jewish colony in Uganda. The majority of the Russians and especially the members of the Tsionei Tsion fraction that Jabotinsky belonged to, rejected Uganda. Despite their respect and boundless affection for Herzl, they would not compromise on Palestine.8 However, less than a year later this same group would adopt a kind of territorial philosophy of their own, Gegenwartsarbeit, at its conference in Helsingfors.9   7 Scott Ury, Barricades and Banners: The Revolution of 1905 and the Transformation of Warsaw Jewry (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2012); also Kenneth B. Moss, “1905 as a Jewish Cultural Revolution? Revolutionary and Evolutionary Dynamics in the East European Jewish Cultural Sphere, 1900–1914,” in The Revolution of 1905 and Russia’s Jews, eds. Stefani Hoffman and Ezra Mendelsohn (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 185–98.   8 Yossi Goldstein, “Herzl and the Russian Zionists: The Unavoidable Crisis?” Studies in Contemporary Jewry 2 (1986): 216; see also Joseph Klausner, Opozitsyah le-Herzl ( Jerusalem: Ha-Ahiaever, 1960).   9 See Maor, Sionistskoe dvizhenie v Rossii, 222. Jabotinsky and all the members of his circle were especially enthusiastic about the idea of political work in Russia, although the timing is somewhat strange when one recalls that in October 1905 extensive pogroms against Jews broke

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The timing of the Revolution of 1905 was auspicious for Jabotinsky. In 1904, he had moved to St. Petersburg to work as a journalist. A few years earlier he had experienced an ideological shift, abandoning cosmopolitanism and Jewish assimilation and adopting Zionism. He was a tireless advocate for Zionism during the revolutionary period; he wrote five political pamphlets: “Territorialism,” “Critics of Zionism,” “The Bund and Zionism,” “Ten Books, A Conversation,” and “To the Enemies of Zion.” In the immediate post-1905 political environment, Jabotinsky was active in promoting Synthetic Zionism and in furthering Jewish interests in the context of the new Zionist politics. He worked for the success of an alliance between Zionists, nationalists, and liberals, the Union for the Attainment of Full Rights for the Jews of Russia.10 At a meeting of the organization in early 1906, Jabotinsky spoke in favor of bringing to life a Jewish parliament that would govern the internal affairs of Russia’s Jews: As a person with a definite viewpoint, I strongly believe that Jewish people will unanimously acknowledge the ideal of Zionism as their own ideal. The day this acknowledgement is proclaimed will be a great holiday for my colleagues and me. But a new era of Jewish history will not begin that day. The revolutionary moment in the history of the Jews will occur only when for the first time after many centuries—although in Russia alone—a parliament of the Jewish people will gather under the flag of national self-reliance.11 out. In fact, one may also express surprise that Russian Zionists would adopt Gegenwartsarbeit so soon after they had evicted territorialists from the organization in March 1905 at the VII Zionist Congress. However, see also Yossi Goldstein, “Jabotinsky and Jewish Autonomy in the Diaspora,” Studies in Zionism 7, no. 2 (1986): 222. According to Goldstein it was not surprising that Zionists embraced Gegenwartsarbeit since it was something like an antidote to the rejection of Territorialism. Russian Zionists could now show that they were not callous to the Judennot and could do this by fighting for equal rights within Russia. 10 See Christoph Gassenschmidt, Jewish Liberal Politics in Tsarist Russia, 1900–1914: The Modernization of Russian Jewry (New York: New York University Press, 1995), 55–75. Since the Bund and Social Democrats boycotted the First Duma, they were not part of the coalition. 11 Gassenschmidt, Jewish Liberal Politics, 167–68; Viktor Kelner, ed., “Tak govoril Zhabotinskii: Iz protokolov s’’ezda soiuza dlia dostizheniia polnopraviia evreiskogo naroda v Rossii,” Vestnik Evreiskogo Universiteta v Moskve 4 (1993): 167–68. See also Goldstein, “Jabotinsky and Jewish Autonomy,” 225. Goldstein maintains that Jabotinsky’s idea of a Jewish parliament differs from those presented by others. He writes, “This body would have executive and legislative rights only with regard to the community. However, the scope of this man-

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Like many Jews who had placed hopes in the revolution, Jabotinsky experienced disappointment when a Jewish parliament did not come to fruition and Jews did not attain equal rights. However, the Helsingfors Conference of 1906 energized him ideologically and personally. In the history of Russian Zionism the conference had been judged as extremely important because it transformed Zionist ideology.12 Instead of “negating the diaspora,” as Ahad-Ha’am had advised, the delegates at Helsingfors validated the diaspora as capable of revitalizing Jewish life through political activism and cultural activities. Although it might seem paradoxical for Zionists who dream of state-building in Palestine, the new thinking, known as Gegenwartsarbeit, encouraged Zionists to participate in the politics of their host countries and to improve the condition of Jews locally. At the same time, Zionists were called upon to promote Jewish national consciousness by establishing institutions of culture and education, such as schools or theater troops. Part of the motivation for Helsingfors was the realization that every nationality in Russia, Jews included, was entitled to national rights in addition to civil rights. The appeal emerged from the realization that Russia was not a Nationalstaat with a couple of non-Russian minorities, as the government and some spokesmen on the political right claimed. Rather it was a multi-national state with no national majority. In fact, Russians composed less than 50 percent of the population. Therefore, Jews, while not the largest majority—the fifth largest with 4 percent of the population—deserved self-government, special Jewish schools, and cultural institutions paid by the government.13 Helsingfors played an essential role in helping Zionism recover after Herzl’s death by fusing two contradictory dimensions: the diaspora, with its struggle for political representation, and a “national home” in Palestine as the ultimate solution for the Jewish nation. Gegenwartsarbeit, as its inventor Avram Idelson originally conceived it, was based on the idea that one could unite Herzl date would not be insignificant. Recognition and support of Jewish organizations connected with national education, Jewish culture, health, mutual aid (social and economic), the marriage and divorce process, questions touching on the Jewish religion, and the right to impose taxes for national Jewish purposes, would all be within the sphere of its jurisdiction.” 12 Vladimir Jabotinsky, “U kolybeli Gel’singforskoi programmy,” in Sbornik pamiati A. D. Idelsona (Berlin: Lutze & Vogt, 1925), 90. 13 Vladimir Jabotinsky, “O iazykakh i prochem,” in Fel’etony (Berlin: S. D. Zaltsman, 1922), 157. The article originally appeared in Odesskie novosti (25 January 1911): 2.

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and Ahad-Ha’am, political solutions and infiltration, international diplomacy, and day-to-day cultural revitalization.14 Helsingfors promoted a view of Galut as more than merely a human reservoir for Palestine. It said that a weak and defenseless diaspora would have neither the resources nor the strength to build a Jewish center in an underdeveloped part of the Turkish Empire.15 Therefore, Palestine and the diaspora had to develop simultaneously and in tandem. The conference’s pro-diaspora thrust intersected with Jabotinsky’s own needs. Although he was devoted to the Zionist cause, in 1906 Jabotinsky showed no interest in settling in Palestine. Therefore, he supported the innovative policy that gave him tasks in Russia. Additionally, the Helsingfors Conference helped catapult Jabotinsky’s status in the movement. Although Avram Idelson was supposed to head the conference, he was arrested in St. Petersburg and could not attend. Similarly, while Efim Chlenov served officially as the chairman, it was Jabotinsky’s proposals that won over the delegates every time, according to the historian Yossi Goldstein.16 Jabotinsky’s adoption of Synthetic Zionism is visible not only in his political demands at the time but also in his books. In Bund i sionism (The Bund and Zionism) (1906), he rejects the conventional perspective that views the two political movements as antagonists. Instead, Jabotinsky sees them as part of a single whole. Both movements lead members to national consciousness, but one, Zionism, is qualitatively superior: The Bund and Zionism—it is not two plants from a single root: it is a large trunk and a single offshoot. It is not two independent streams evolving in their own paths. Under the Bund’s evolution the ideal of Zionism is objectively developing in the consciousness of the Jewish working masses. [. . .] 14 See Brian Horowitz, “What is Russian in Russian Zionism? Synthetic Zionism and the Fate of Avram Idelson,” in Russian Idea—Jewish Presence: Essays on Russian-Jewish Intellectual Life (Boston: Academic Studies, 2013), 54–71. Avram Idelson was the editor of the Russian language Zionist newspaper Rassvet (Evreiskaia zhizn’). See also L. Cherikover, “Avram Davidovich Idelson,” in Sbornik pamiati A. D. Idelsona (Berlin: Lutze & Vogt, 1925), 23; Yehuda Slutsky, Ha’itonut ha’yihudit-rusit be’mea ha’esrim (1900–1918) (Tel Aviv: Ha’aguda le’haker toldot ha’yihudim, 1978), 205–6. Avram Idelson introduced Jabotinsky to Synthetic Zionism in 1905 and he became Idelson’s protégé, according to one historian, until they had a falling out by the decade’s end. 15 Slutsky, Ha’itonut ha’yihudit-rusit be’mea ha’esrim, 205–6. 16 Goldstein, “Jabotinsky and Jewish Autonomy,” 225.

162 PART II | Russian–Jewish Intelligentsia’s Cultural Vibrancy When the future historian will write the full history of the Zionist movement, in his work, perhaps, one chapter will especially attract the reader. It will certainly follow chapters about Palestinophiles and Ahad-Ha’am’s philosophy; in the beginning the reader will encounter a repetition of [Leo] Pinsker’s ideas and at the end the first proclamations of Poale-Tsion. In this chapter one of Zionism’s episodes will be recounted and it will have the title, “Bund.”17

Jabotinsky could make a claim about the Bund’s organic connection to Zionism precisely because the latter had turned its attention to the wellbeing of Jewish political life in Russia. However, Gegenwartsarbeit put the Bund and Zionism on a crash course. To Jabotinsky it was of little matter that the Bund’s membership vastly outnumbered Zionists. In fact, his book had a polemical aim: to steal Bundist sympathizers. The argument, therefore, was that Bundist nationalism, just as any Jewish diaspora nationalism, represented the first step leading inevitably to Zionism. Immediately following the Helsingfors Conference, Jabotinsky set about realizing the theoretical and practical tasks of Gegenwartsarbeit. In 1906, he worked incessantly on behalf of Zionist candidates to the First Duma. He himself ran for a seat in the Second Duma.18 His bid was not successful. Thus began a period of relative stagnancy for Russian Zionism in terms of concrete activity, but writing and thinking continued apace.19 Jabotinsky responded to the blockage in Russia by traveling to Vienna for a year in order to study the principles of political autonomy and minority rights.20 After that, he went to Constantinople as a representative of the World Zionist Organization. When he returned to Russia in 1909, he devoted himself to writing and lecturing on Zionism and Jewish schools, and to disseminating the Hebrew language.21 He battled antisemitism during the so-called Chirikov Affair and raised support for cooperation among the national minorities of Russia, for example, 17 Vladimir Jabotinsky, Bund i sionizm (St. Petersburg: S. Zal’tsberg, 1906), 48. 18 See his description of the election in Vladimir Jabotinsky, The Story of My Life, eds. Brian Horowitz and Leonid Katsis (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2015), 84–85. 19 Maor, Sionistskoe dvizhenie, 267. The Russian government had put a brake on Zionist political activity already in 1903 by outlawing the organization and by preventing the collection of money for Palestine. 20 Ibid. 21 Shlomo Haramati, “Ze’ev Jabotinsky-yozam beit ha’sefer ha’evrei-liumi be’tefutsot,” in Ish be’saer: Masut ve’mehakerim al Ze’ev Jabotinsky, eds. Avi Bareli and Pinhas Ginossar (Bersheva: Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Press, 2004), 313–20.

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Ukrainians and Jews.22 He rarely referred to 1905. For him, as for everyone else, 1905 had come and gone; it had changed things, but only halfway. Russia had a consultative Duma, but there was still a tsar, secret police, anti-Jewish laws, and an anti-Jewish press. Russia’s Jews continued to emigrate, with the vast majority going to the United States, while numbers in Palestine grew modestly. Silence about 1905 characterized Jabotinsky during World War I; he worked as a journalist for the Moscow newspaper Russkie vedomosti and served in the British army in order to promote his idea of a Jewish Legion. He did not mention Helsingfors when he went to America as a representative of Keren Hayesod in 1920, or when he served as a representative of the Zionist Executive in 1921. Perhaps he would have forgotten 1905 if he had not decided to establish his own political party.

***

The Revisionists held their founding congress in 1925, after which the party ran candidates for elections to political institutions in Palestine and for the World Zionist Congress.23 As he was building his new political party, Jabotinsky turned to Zionism circa 1905 to underscore Revisionism’s moral legitimacy. Diagnosing the political situation of the early 1920s, he looked to Synthetic Zionism as a model for combining the political and practical struggle that was needed today in Palestine. In Rasswjet (1925), an exposition of Revisionist ideas, Jabotinsky alluded to the past: Zionism is and remains a political movement, stands or falls by virtue of its political method. That does not mean that we underestimate the importance of the economic or cultural initiatives. Already in 1903–05 we fought for the principle of “practical work in Palestine” and we remain true to this old teaching. But even economic affairs in a colonization program must have a state character or this [endeavor] is hardly colonization and would not be able to bring about a new national majority.24

22 Vladimir Jabotinsky, “Urok iubileia Shevchenko (1911),” in Fel’etony (Berlin: S. D Zaltsberg, 1922), 190–1. 23 Joseph B. Schechtman and Yehuda Benari, History of the Revisionist Movement, 1925–1930 (Tel Aviv: Hadar, 1970), 43. 24 Vladimir Jabotinsky, ed., Rasswjet: Deutsches Heft (Berlin: J. Span, 1925), 3. The title is an allusion to the Russian-language newspaper of the Revisionist movement, Rassvet.

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In the early 1920s, Jabotinsky charged that the Balfour Declaration obligated Britain to carry out a large-scale colonization effort, including programs to develop land, water use, investment, and immigration. He repeatedly attacked Chaim Weizmann for accepting Britain’s narrow interpretation of its responsibilities. Jabotinsky argued that only demands for maximum support and appeals to the public would rouse an indifferent British government.25 The need for more government support in the early 1920s appeared to Jabotinsky as similar to Herzl’s last years, when international diplomacy and infiltration were engaged in two separate spheres; Jabotinsky wanted the two to work together. Regarding the Arab problem, Jabotinsky hoped to reconcile Palestine’s Arabs to Zionism, and he prepared two tactics, the “Iron Wall” and guarantees of minority rights. As Jabotinsky envisioned it, the two approaches worked together. The second part, minority rights, hailed, he said, from the Helsingfors Conference; it was meant to serve as the policy’s moral justification. He repeated that the Arab minority in a future Israel would acquire full political and cultural rights, although it would remain a minority.26 If Arabs resisted Jewish dominance, he threatened violence. An Iron Wall was his euphemism for a plan to vanquish the Arabs of Palestine militarily so that they would give up forever their hope of constituting a majority. Once Palestine’s Arabs had been deprived of hope, he maintained, they would agree to concessions and cooperate. At that moment the Revisionist program of minority rights would provide the basis for a lasting and just peace. Although his essay “O zheleznoi stene” (“On the Iron Wall”) (1923) is known as the blueprint of revisionist militancy, Jabotinsky promised to respect Arab minority rights. The author of these lines is considered an enemy of Arabs, an advocate of oppression, etc. . . . This is not true. Emotionally, my attitude to Arabs is the same as to any other people: polite indifference. My political attitude is defined by two principles. First, I consider it absolutely wrong in any which way to evict Arabs from Palestine, there will always be two peoples in Palestine. Secondly, I am proud to belong to that group which formulated the Helsingfors Program. We formulated it not only for Jews, but for all 25 See Jabotinsky’s articles in Rassvet in 1923–25. For example, “K ukhodu V. E. Zhabotinskogo iz organizatsii,” Rassvet (29 January 1923): 12–16. 26 Vladimir Jabotinsky, The War and the Jew (New York: The Dial Press, 1942), 212–20.

Vladimir Jabotinsky and the Mystique of 1905 165 peoples; its essence is the equality of nations. Just as anyone else, I am ready to take an oath to you and our own descendants that we will never betray equality and will not dare to evict or oppress.27

Jabotinsky mentions Helsingfors to legitimize his vision of a Jewish-dominated Palestine. In this context Jabotinsky used Helsingfors not only as a defensive shield—that he was not racist or anti-Arab—but also offensively; the Revisionists had a morally superior and more pragmatic solution to the Jewish-Arab conflict than those in control at the present: Weizmann, for instance, with his failed attempts at a negotiated solution, or the leftist leadership in Palestine that dreamed about cooperation through common class interests.28 Jabotinsky harkened back to the pre-war Russian Zionists, who in large part made up the base of Revisionists in the 1920s, in order to assert that politics in Palestine has been mishandled and that a different leadership, his party’s, should be given a chance. While these examples show Jabotinsky as a politician with liberal principles, his conception of nationalism is hardly as ideal as he asserts. One should acknowledge that while he promised minority rights, he also insisted on a Jewish majority and control of society. However, since Arabs constituted the majority at the time, claims of a Jewish majority appeared as a prediction or a threat. Many saw it as a provocation that contributed to Arab violence.29 Since his “Iron Wall” would hardly convince Arabs, to whom was he writing? His addressees probably consisted of rival Zionists and British officials who were forced to respond to Jabotinsky’s “maximalist” proclamations about a Jewish state on both sides of the Jordan River. Yosef Gorny explains that Jabotinsky began to use his political proclamations of “the true nature of Zionism” in order “to exert pressure on the opponent so as to force him, in turn, to clarify his own aims and to be clearly aware of what lay ahead. Such pressure might not change the opinions of opponents nor persuade those who were vacillating, but it would force the Jews to open their eyes to facts and to prepare the instruments for confrontation with reality.”30 27 Vladimir Jabotinsky, “O zheleznoi stene (my i araby),” Rassvet 19, nos. 42–43 (4 November 1923): 2. 28 Yosef Gorny, Zionism and the Arabs, 1882–1948 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 108, 311, and elsewhere. 29 Eliezer Livneh, The Truth about Revisionism (New York: Zionist Socialist Party, 1935), 41. 30 Gorny, Zionism and the Arabs, 162.

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*** In 1936, Jabotinsky published his autobiography, Story of My Life, one of his rare works written originally in Hebrew.31 Jabotinsky described his early childhood years until 1914, recounting the death of his father, his school years, his travels to Italy, and his return to Odessa. He also told about his Zionist work in St. Petersburg, Vienna, Constantinople, and his return to Russia. The book is fascinating because Jabotinsky acknowledges his cosmopolitanism and traces how he became a Zionist. He also features 1905 and especially the Helsingfors Conference as key moments in his life. Although few would consider 1905 as central for Jabotinsky’s biography—many more would assign such a role to the Kishinev pogrom in 1903 or to the Jewish Legion during World War I— Jabotinsky draws attention to 1905: The Helsingfors Conference was the peak Zionist experience of my youth, and I am sure that many of those who took part in it would say the same thing, even those who belong to the generation preceding mine: because youth was not only inside us—it was in the air; the youth of the entire country, the youth of the whole of Europe. Such periods in the history of the world do not occur often—periods when many peoples quiver with hopeful expectancy, like a young boy waiting for his girl. Such was the case for Europe before the year 1848, as it was also at the beginning of the twentieth century, that deceitful century that frustrated so many of our hopes. To say that we were naïve then, without experience, that we believed in easy and cheap progress—like an instantaneous leap from darkness to light— would be incorrect. We had already witnessed murder on the cusp of the holiday, and especially then, precisely that winter, we already knew that all the reactionary elements were shaping their ranks into a huge and mighty, powerful army. […] I, who had just escaped arrest—even I saw no contradiction between that humiliating experience and the bold demands that I would advocate the next day in my speech at the conference: that there 31 Vladimir Jabotinsky, Sippur yamai, in Golah ve-hitbolelut (Tel Aviv: Sh. Zal’tsman, 1936). It was republished in Vladimir Jabotinsky, Avtobiografia ( Jerusalem: Eri Jabotinsky, 1946–47), 9–187. The two versions are somewhat different. For a discussion of the differences, see Brian Horowitz and Leonid Katsis, “A Note on the Text,” in Jabotinsky, The Story of My Life, vii–ix.

Vladimir Jabotinsky and the Mystique of 1905 167 is no dominant nation in Russia, that all her nationalities are nothing but “minorities”—Russians, as well as Poles, Tatars, and ourselves, all have equal status, with all deserving self-government.32

The significance of the 1905 Revolution in Jabotinsky’s biography is amplified in the autobiography. 1905 is compared to 1848, to great hopes of freedom dashed by political reactionaries. Jabotinsky’s retrospective conception of himself in 1936 is of a young man who believed in freedom and happiness and who remains committed to these values. At the same time he gives the impression that nationalism and freedom, thought of as contradictory in the twentieth century, could be united as they once were in the nineteenth century (in Garibaldi’s Italy for example) when they were mutually dependent and mutually attainable. Although the autobiography reads like an objective recounting of events, Jabotinsky carefully organizes Story of My Life with a polemical aim. He offers a different version of the development of Zionism from that of Labor Zionism. In contrast to the Mapai perspective that sees Zionism as catapulted forward in the post-Herzl era—thanks to the political left in general and to the members of the Second Aliyah in particular—Jabotinsky locates another source in Russia in the time of 1905 through the struggle for national identity by his fellow journalists from Rassvet: Avram Idelson, Israel Trivus, Arnold Seidenman, Nikolai Sorin, Julius Brutskus, Isaac Naiditsch, and Vladimir Tiomkin.33 In the same year (1936) Jabotinsky published The Five, a novel-memoir set in Odessa during the Revolution of 1905.34 The title is of course a double entendre; it refers to the five Milgrom children, the book’s protagonists, but also the Revolution of 1905. We have the author’s personal comment about the book’s construction transmitted by his secretary and biographer Joseph Schectman, who writes that, “Jabotinsky simply drew on the precious treasure house of personal memories of the happy ‘Altalena’ years spent in this lively Black Sea harbor city, 32 Jabotinsky, The Story of My Life, 90. 33 For a discussion of the importance of the Second Aliyah in the development of Zionism in Palestine, see Anita Shapira’s many works, for example Berl: The Biography of a Socialist Zionist, Berl Katznelson, 1887–1944 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984). 34 I am using the following edition: Vladimir Jabotinsky, Piatero (Tel Aviv: Biblioteka Aliyah, 1990).

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which he adored, yearned for, and was haunted by all his life.”35 Then he transmits Jabotinsky’s own words: “I feel that I have once again recaptured all the nonsense, all the hopes and the entire ‘swing’ of that period. . . .”36 Although this statement gives the impression that the book has no deeper meaning, one is not certain. The book has bedeviled critics because, although based on autobiography and written in the 1930s, there is no sign of Jabotinsky-the-Zionist-militarist, or of him as the dictator-like leader of the Revisionist movement.37 In The Five the protagonist named Jabotinsky is portrayed as a smart-aleck journalist, a self-conscious young man who is both a pretentious bon vivant and a down-to-earth friend of the Milgroms. Alice Stone-Nachimovsky sees the novel as a Zionist parable: the Milgrom family falls apart, disaster falls on all the children, and therefore the author wants to punish them. What is their crime? Indifference to Zionism.38 I have argued elsewhere that this interpretation is flawed because assimilation as an ideology is not attacked; in fact it is the only perspective that gets a full hearing.39 The problem of perspective begins with the narrator. There are at least two Jabotinskys in the novel, the young man who is depicted in the story and the narrator who bears the same name but who is clearly older and coincides (the reader is likely to consider) with the author. The narrator, like the Milgroms, is an acculturated Jew, a Russified intellectual, and his criticisms of the Milgroms are muted; he loves the entire family, especially Marusya, precisely for her personal flair, dreams and ideals, her abandonment of the easy and conventional path. In fact, the book describes each of the five children as involved in an internal struggle between Jewish identity and universalism, a 35 Altalena was Jabotinsky’s favorite pseudonym. In Italian it means “seesaw.” 36 Joseph B. Schechtman, Fighter and Prophet: The Last Years, vol. 2 of The Life and Times of Vladimir Jabotinsky (Silver Spring, MD: Eschel Books, 1961), 534. 37 The book started to be serialized in Rassvet in 1932. The secondary literature on the novel is large and growing. For a select bibliography see, Barry Scherr, “An Odessa Odyssey: Vladimir Jabotinsky’s The Five,” Slavic Review 70 (2011): 94–115. 38 Alice Stone Nakhimovsky, Russian-Jewish Literature and Identity: Jabotinsky, Babel, Grossman, Galich, Roziner, Markish (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 63. 39 Brian Horowitz, “Hail to Assimilation: Vladimir ‘Ze’ev’ Jabotinsky’s Ambivalence about Odessa’s Fin de Siècle,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 73 (2005): 109–16. I am aware of the distinction between “assimilation” and “acculturation” that Ezra Mendelsohn has clarified, although here I am speaking about the ultimate disappearance of Jews as a separate ethnos. For more on this, see Mendelsohn, On Modern Jewish Politics, 16.

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desire for purpose and pleasure, politics and lofty art. However, they all reject Jewish nationalism; one sides with Communism, another with Nietschean immorality, and another adopts an aesthetic approach to life. To understand the novel, one should acquaint oneself with “polyphony,” the interpretive concept that Mikhail Bakhtin describes in his book Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1929).40 Bakhtin noticed that in Dostoevsky’s novels the author inserted characters whose voices seem independent from the narrator and who contradict the author. Bakhtin maintained that these voices could not be reduced or resolved at the end, but remained distinct and separate worlds within the novel. Clearly polyphony is present in The Five. Here the third-person narrator does not have a final say or resolve all the threads. For Sergei Milgrom, Serezha, the revolution is a kind of plaything; his ménage à trois with a girl and her mother serves as a test case of whether morality exists or if “everything is possible.” Lika Milgrom has her interests: an attraction to conspiracy, to wearing masks, and to gaining power through the obfuscation of her identity. Torik has some interest in Zionism, but it is blunted by an uncertainty about national distinctions and sectarianism. Marko is perhaps the least formed character. His role centers on his accident/suicide when he jumps into a canal to save a woman he thought was drowning. His kindness is mocked by his senseless death. The central figures of the novel are Marusya and the narrator. Marusya, the Milgrom’s eldest, is a redhead, a fiery young woman in her early twenties who represents a unity of beauty, depth of soul, and deep kindness. She has a salon in her home and many friends. And she has two serious suitors, Aleksei Runitsky, a Russian sailor who loves her passionately, and Samoilo Kozodoi, a pharmacist who is boring but who promises to give her Jewish children. Marusya’s mother is worried that Marusya will marry Runitsky and join the Russian nation. In fact, the height of the book is the scene in which Marusya is about to marry Aleksei and even reaches the church, but she runs away at the last moment because she realizes that such a marriage would constitute the destruction of her personality. She ends up marrying Kozodoi and leads a quiet life in seemingly happy domesticity. Several years later she is killed in an accident; a fire in the kitchen alights her clothing but she manages to save her two children. 40 Mikhail Bakhtin, Problemy tvorchestva Dostoevskogo (Leningrad: Priboi, 1929).

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The narrator, whose name is Vladimir Jabotinsky, but who should be identified only partially with the author, questions his own life. In this context, we encounter the theme of Odessa, a city where people enjoyed harmony that was unattainable elsewhere. It was a place, Jabotinsky writes, where “people learned to laugh at themselves and everything in the world, even at their pains and things they love.”41 The amazing achievement of Odessa, we learn, was tolerance: “Gradually one’s customs disappear, one stops taking one’s own sanctuaries seriously, gradually understanding the single most important secret in the world: what is sacred to you is stupidity to your neighbor, and your neighbor is not a thief or vagrant. . . .” 42 We need not be surprised at Jabotinsky’s praise of tolerance. However, he even lauds assimilation. In the context of Odessa 1905, assimilation appears to the narrator as a road leading to a higher level of reality. In a scene near the novel’s end, the narrator muses, “Torik said ‘disintegration.’ Maybe he is right. The lawyer [. . .] spoke about decadence but he added that epochs of decadence are sometimes the most fascinating times. Who knows? Perhaps not only fascinating, but also superior in their own way? Of course I am in the camp that struggles against disintegration, I do not want neighbors, I want all people to live on their own islands. But who knows?” 43 That metaphysical question, “who knows,” indicates Jabotinsky’s examination of his views. Against our expectations, he describes assimilation as the start of something beautiful and ideal. Attracted to the dreams of universal brotherhood, the narrator announces a utopian vision: One thing is already a proven historical truth: one has to pass through disintegration to reach renewal. This means that disintegration is like a fog before the birth of the sun or like a predawn dream. Marusya said that the most wonderful dreams are predawn ones. Whose poem is this? “The prophecy of dawn is still imperceptible, emerald and cornelian, lilac and azure: the unsung words drift into my mind, perhaps, of an unborn poet, the singer of a country still not created by the creator, where invisible visions are silent like music and whose shroud for a moment, the moment before awakening, lift 41 Jabotinsky, Piatero, 228–29. 42 Ibid., 229. 43 Ibid.

Vladimir Jabotinsky and the Mystique of 1905 171 up predawn dreams to us.” I am afraid that these verses are my own. Getting old, I quote myself more and more often. I quote (for the second time) the following: “I am a child of my time, I love all its stains, love its full poison.”44

The last part of his speech—I am a child of my time—is entirely comprehensible, and his confession of love for the poison of his culture also makes sense. But what are we to make of the predawn dreams, the reaching beyond to a better world? What is the higher stage that should emerge from assimilation? Certainly the allusion to dreams, the use of synaesthesia—silent music— and such paradoxical language as “unborn poets” and “a country not yet created by the creator” recalls concepts of Russia’s Silver Age with its emphasis on the intangible, ideal, and spiritual aspects of being. The last quote, a confession of sorts, serves as a perfect example of the complicated and contradictory quality of Jabotinsky’s “emotional essence.”45 For the author, assimilation appears as wonderful, dangerous, ideal, and unattainable. Zionism comes into question especially in discussions with Torik, the youngest Milgrom, whose fate saddens the narrator because he had taken an interest in Jewish nationalism but decides to convert to Lutheranism. Despite the conversion, the author does not depict him as morally bankrupt. His arguments have an impeccable logic that the narrator acknowledges. When the narrator counters with the Bund or Zionism as a possible path, Torik responds: The Bund and Zionism, if you reason clinically, are really the same. The Bund is a preparatory class or, let’s say, a public school, it readies you for Zionism. It seems that Plekhanov said about the Bund that they’re “Zionists who fear sea sickness.” And Zionism is like a high school. But the university, where everyone is unconsciously heading, is called assimilation. Gradually, without desire, joyless, for the majority it will even be disadvantageous, but still it is unavoidable and irreversible, with baptism, mixed marriages and the full liquidation of the race. There is no other way. The Bund clings to Yiddish. They say it’s the most amazing language in the world. I only know a little, but my tutors, unable to get into the university, quote the word 44 Ibid. 45 That expression, “emotional essence,” was from Nakhimovsky, Russian-Jewish Literature and Identity, 67.

172 PART II | Russian–Jewish Intelligentsia’s Cultural Vibrancy “Boychik,” i.e., simple fellow, Whitechapel, and they say it is a tour de force. Elements of three languages in one little word and it sounds natural, it’s an ideal amalgam. But in twenty five years there won’t be any Yiddish. And there won’t be any Zion. Only one thing will remain: the desire ‘to be the same as other nations.’46

The narrator does not reject this viewpoint but gives it voice loud and clear. Through his examination of Odessa, Jabotinsky creates a snapshot of decadence, an attitude that dominated intellectual life in the city. Characters hostile to Zionism are given free space for expression. Admittedly the Milgrom children find tragic ends that correspond to the decadent mood of the novel. Perhaps, as some critics have argued, the fates of the Milgroms imply the author’s condemnation of universalism, but perhaps not. The use of polyphany distorts the projection of the author’s consistent and clear attitude. The only thing that is certain is that, by offering others a chance to contradict Zionism, Jabotinsky creates an intellectual portrait that is fuller and, one might argue, closer to the tenor of the age. It is something of a conundrum that the narrator expresses mixed feelings regarding assimilation and speaks so positively about tolerance, because in the 1930s Jabotinsky was entirely hostile to assimilation; the message that he carried throughout Europe, America, and South Africa was emigration to Palestine. Why write a novel about cosmopolitanism and decadence in Odessa in 1905 at a time when the Jews of Europe were facing terrifying dangers from antisemitism? Although the documents do not provide a single answer, some educated guesses emerge from the study of his oeuvre and the historical context. To explain the novel’s function in the author’s evolution, one might turn to Jabotinsky’s overall self-projection in the late 1930s. He was reeling from the attacks against his party and against himself personally as a result of the murder of Hayim Arlosorov and accusations that Revisionists were guilty.47 That event only stoked fires already burning; earlier his political opponents had accused 46 Jabotinsky, Piatero, 224. 47 Vladimir Jabotinsky, “Delo Stavskogo,” Rassvet 29 (22 October 1933).

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him of sympathy for fascism and had attempted to disparage his reputation by linking Revisionism with street thuggery. Instead of the image of Jabotinsky as struggling to liberate the Jewish people, he was portrayed as a Jewish Nazi.48 Jabotinsky wanted to change his image, and The Five is certainly part of this campaign to reassert Revisionism’s link with liberalism. During the same period Jabotinsky published another text in which he applauded freedom and individualism, while criticizing discipline and blind obedience. In “The Revolt of the Old Men” (1930) he writes, “[I] find the spiritual edifice of the first third of the twentieth century quite disgusting, and I think that we should rise in revolt against it. For such a revolt there is a particularly suitable age group— ‘old men.’”49 He then continues, I mean firstly, those whose minds were formed in the nineteenth century, and secondly, those who are proud of this anachronism. Spiritually speaking, the nineteenth century came to its close around 1905, and my generation was then around 35, 30 or 25 years old; that is, of an age when all the convolutions of the brain and all emotional habits had already become fixed. [. . .] The nineteenth century had a vividly characterized personality. From its beginning to its end, born in Europe and America, and in South Africa too, it really did develop round one main axis. They say that among White Russian émigrés there are some who can be moved to tears by the mere enumeration of the railway stations between Moscow and St. Petersburg; the very names make them remember everything – the landscape, the taste of cabbage pies, the droshky drivers’ baggy coats, the covers of the thick Liberal monthlies, and their first love. In the same way it is enough for my generation, instead of attempting to describe the face of our century, just recite a list of names, in any haphazard order, with no respect for chronology or geography or completeness: Garibaldi, Gladstone, Lincoln, Mickiewicz, 48 See Jabotinsky’s article, “Jews and Fascism,” Jewish Daily Bulletin (11 April 1935); Vladimir Khazan, “Eshche raz o ‘fashizme’ Zhabotinskogo,” in Zhabotinskii i Rossiia: Sbornik trudov Mzhedunarodnoi konferentsii, posviashchennoi 130-letiiu V. E. Zhabotinskogo (Evreiskii universitet v Ierusalime, iiul’ 2010), eds. E. Tolstaya and Leonid Katsis (Palo Alto, Stanford Slavic Studies, 2014), 68. 49 Vladimir Jabotinsky, “Revolt of the Old Men,” in Nation and Society: Selected Articles (Tel Aviv: Shilton Betar, 1961), 57; trans. from the original “Bunt starikov,” Sovremennye Zapiski 63 (1937).

174 PART II | Russian–Jewish Intelligentsia’s Cultural Vibrancy Heine, Hugo, Leopardi, Ibsen, Bjonson, Nietzsche, Walt Whitman, Lasalles and Jaures, and even Marx—as he then seemed to us. One could mention many more such names, all unlike each other, but all the same in one respect—and in that similarity is found the spirit of the nineteenth century. They were all firebrands of ego, liberators and releasers of personality. They all, in different ways, fought to ensure that the dirtiest of tramps stumbling on his own reflection in a mirror should never forget to spring to attention and yell: “Hail, Your majesty!”50

The list of heroes, although extremely diverse, evokes the kind of person Jabotinsky imagines. Despite the differences among them, the old men were united by confidence in their own judgments and by pride in their individuality. These men were therefore inoculated against fascism, mass politics, and collectivism. They believed in the individual, self-respect, freedom, and self-determination, and fought for authority based on morality, not aggression. Jabotinsky implicitly includes himself and his Revisionists among them, “old men” who would cry from the names of the stops on the train from Moscow to St. Petersburg. One cannot ignore an obvious contradiction: Jabotinsky was well known exactly for the qualities that he condemns. Not only his enemies but his friends too maintained that he advanced the cult of leadership in Revisionism, that he looked to Betar volunteers to subordinate their individuality and to march in strict lines in military parades.51 His ideal, he notes in many places, was the Czechoslovakian movement, Sokol—the moderate youth movement that encouraged physical exercise, hiking, and marching, but which had leanings to the right politically and showed allegiance to the leader principle.52 Given Jabotinsky’s outsized role as Revisionism’s figurehead, what are we supposed to make of his veneration of nineteenth-century individualism? Was this a ruse to confuse his rivals and regale his followers, or was he serious that Revisionism and liberalism were one and the same? 50 Jabotinsky, “Revolt of the Old Men,” 57. 51 Livneh, The Truth about Revisionism, 32. 52 See Vladimir Jabotinsky, Die idee des betar: Ein umriss betarischer weltanschauung, trans. I. Goldstein (Lyck: Arthur Kaulbars Verlag, 1935), 15. It is clear that the Sokol movement was one of Jabotinsky’s models for Betar.

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I find it difficult to entirely discount his statements and to accuse him of open deception. It seems that Jabotinsky actually believed that Revisionism was morally justifiable given the sufferings of Jews in history and present-day antisemitism in Europe. His testimony in London before the members of the Royal (Peel) Commission conveys his conviction that moral authority belongs to Zionism.53 At the same time one should also not exclude the possibility that the 1905 theme satisfied in Jabotinsky some kind of psychological need. There is a good deal of evidence to support such a hypothesis. In the second half of the 1930s, at a desperate time for Jews worldwide, Jabotinsky turned to memory. The many texts that he wrote in the 1930s about his youth in and around 1905 reflect nostalgia for a past when hope, rather than despair, filled the Jewish world, and respect for morality was alive rather than thrown to the winds before the power of coercion and violence.

***

It is worthwhile to recall that few Zionists romanticize 1905. In fact, for most Zionists of the 1920s and 30s the Balfour Declaration in November 1917 or the First Zionist Congress in 1897, those are dates to cherish. Similarly many historians recognize 1914 as a key year. Here one may recall Vladimir Lenin who argued that 1905 was only a rehearsal for 1917. 1917 looms large in world history, 1905—much less. Russian liberals, such as Pavel Miliukov and Maxim Vinaver, idealize the 1905 Revolution and especially the First Duma, although they acknowledge them as moments full of unrealized potential.54 Jabotinsky’s interpretation of 1905 nonetheless gives us clues to comprehend his worldview. For Jabotinsky 1905 is central because, more than 1914 or 1917, it gave him a utopian vision that he carried throughout his life. Helsingfors offered a blueprint of a liberal kind: a Jewish nation renewed spiritually and its political vision of sovereignty acknowledged as morally legitimate. 53 Vladimir Jabotinsky, Evidence Submitted to the Palestine Royal Commission on behalf of the New Zionist Organization, House of Lords (Tel Aviv: New Zionist Organization in Palestine, 1937), 8–12. 54 See Brian Horowitz, “Maxim Vinaver and the First Russian State Duma,” in Russian Idea— Jewish Presence: Essays on Russian-Jewish Intellectual Life (Boston: Academic Studies, 2013), 18–36.

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Furthermore, he really seemed to believe that a political solution for Jews and Arabs could be attained on the basis of Helsingfors. Admittedly, he realized that the Arab side did not agree and therefore he advocated the legion principle, advising Jews everywhere to learn to use a gun.55 In 1936 the liberal vision was as far from reality as it was in 1905. The Arabs of Palestine had just begun a revolt that would last almost three years. Britain responded by diminishing immigration quotas to Palestine. Jabotinsky opposed the proposal by the Peel Commission in 1938 to partition Palestine by giving the Yishuv a small area of western Palestine. Although Ben-Gurion accepted the conditions of partition, Jabotinsky did not believe that a viable and defensible Jewish state could be constructed from such truncated borders.56 Similarly, in Europe Jews were under threat from Nazism, local violence, and political, social, and economic exclusion in most of Europe. In 1936 Jabotinsky’s liberal dreams must have seemed valuable only as subjects for autobiography and fiction. However, to his credit, he did not become lost in his dreams, but at this time initiated his Ten Year Plan for the evacuation of eight million European Jews, and not long after called for the immediate evacuation of one million and then ten million.57 Those goals may not have signified a good grasp of reality, but they were certainly not mere figments of the imagination. One way to connect 1905 with these last-ditch efforts to save European Jewry is to say that Jabotinsky was a visionary, a visionary both of the future and of the past.

55 See Vladimir Jabotinsky, “Aufn pripetchek. . .” Haynt (15 October 1931): 9–10. 56 Shmuel Dothan, Pulmus ha-halukah bi-tekufat ha-Mandat ( Jerusalem: Yad Itzhak Ben-Zvi, 1979), 131. 57 Vladimir Jabotinsky, “The Evacuation Problem, ‘Humanitarian Zionism,’” Jewish Herald, no. 2215 (3 November 1938): 2.

Chapter Eleven Vladimir Jabotinsky and Violence

The question of whether Jabotinsky’s relation to violence was instrumentalist or essentialist, whether his motives to use violence were grounded in principle or in expediency, are issues that are treated here. This chapter seeks to ask several questions: how did Jabotinsky defend violence and in which context? Was he successful in legitimizing his extreme form of nationalism? Essentially he portrayed himself as a national liberator, something similar to Giuseppe Garibaldi, who had devoted himself to defense, but at a certain point availed himself of the opportunity to use power. In terms of violence was Jabotinsky like or different from Garibaldi? My interpretation, as laid out in my reading of his life and works, is of a politician who was deeply contradictory and pulled in diverse directions by the events and ideas of his time. Jabotinsky instrumentalized violence but also conceived of it as an essential part of his program. The image of violence and aggression played a central part in the ideology and practice of his movement, Revisionist Zionism, as well as of the two groups that he organized: Tsohar, the Revisionist political party, and Betar, the youth group. In his programmatic statements that accompanied the establishment of the Revisionist Party in 1925, Jabotinsky insisted on the establishment and maintenance of Jewish armed forces. In the 1930s some of his followers adopted the look and rituals of European nationalist paramilitary fighters of the time—brown shirts, martial exercises, marching in formation, and firing weapons. Some of his followers extolled a more radical militarism and called for immediate armed revolt against British rule in Palestine. Others were more realistic and saw the need for trained armed troops to complete a variety of tasks, from defending the Yishuv from Arab marauders to helping facilitate illegal emigration to Palestine.

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However, it is wrong to conflate Jabotinsky’s viewpoint with all of his followers. As we shall see, he tended to weigh the value of violence against diplomatic and moral values, in contrast to many of his followers who conceived of violence as an end in itself. My contention is that Jabotinsky used the rhetoric of the far right, but expressed in his words and actions an ambivalence toward the use of force. The secondary literature shares this view generally, although not uniformly.1 Yaacov Shavit perceives Jabotinsky as an ideological extremist and sees no difference between Jabotinsky and those who came after him who are largely viewed as amoral on the question of the use of political violence. Shavit wrote that, “[t]he fundamental assumptions were shaped during the 1930s, taking concrete form during the 1940s. During the 1950s they stood in the wings of the ideological arena in Israel, waiting for an opportunity to break through to center stage. This opportunity presented itself after June 1967.”2 In contrast to Shavit, I interpret Jabotinsky as anything but messianic. Some of his plans appeared utopian, but his methods and conceptions of politics were grounded in the realities of his time. He had little patience for apocalyptic thinking, and for this reason differs from Abba Achimeir, Yehoshua Yievin and Uri Zvi Greenberg. It is critical to acknowledge that Jabotinsky established his own political movement precisely because he did not find what he wanted among the existing groups. An aggressive military stance was not absent in Palestinian Jewish life, as is evident in the Shomer movement.3 But Jabotinsky had a political vision that went beyond guarding Jewish property and was connected with politics in the larger sense. He rejected the class principle, supported unlimited immigration of Jews to Palestine, and proposed the establishment of a Jewish army. Since Jabotinsky’s attitude and connection with violence was not simple, unambiguous, or uniform, we should not be surprised by contradictory   1 My position, however, does have support in the secondary literature from Colin Shindler and Yechiam Weiss. See Shindler, The Land Beyond Promise: Israel, Likud and the Zionist Dream (New York: I. B. Tauris, 1995), 7–19; also Weiss, Bin Ze’ev Jabotinsky le’Menachem Begin: Kovets meamarim al ha’tenua ha’revizionistit ( Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2012), 15–33.   2 See Yaacov Shavit, Jabotinsky and the Revisionist Movement, 1925–1948 (London: Routledge, 1988), 141.   3 David Ben-Gurion, Chaluzischer Zionismus oder Revisionismus (Berlin: Hechaluz Deutscher Landsverband, 1934).

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statements and actions. In his Revisionist political program he insisted on the “Legion principle,” the idea that Jews were entitled to a self-defense force “that should be legalized, for without legality it cannot be properly trained, led, and equipped.”4 This force, consisting of Jewish fighters and paid for by the Jewish population of Palestine, would have the role of providing security for the Yishuv. The difficulty of categorizing Jabotinsky’s attitude toward violence is not hard merely because he restrained himself in its use. Rather, we face an interpretive question. One view contends that Jabotinsky’s conception of violence was relatively harmless. True, he insisted that young men and women should be trained in the use of firearms, should be dressed in uniform, and should learn to march. But this is similar to other national movements from EastCentral Europe: the Arrow Cross in Hungary, Poland’s Endecja (Narodowa Demokracja), and the Sokol movement in Czechoslovakia.5 Betar, the Revisionist youth movement, recalls Sokol with hiking, paramilitary training, and an emphasis on personal conduct and discipline.6 Another view portrays Jabotinsky as far more dangerous. In the 1930s, Jabotinsky was often criticized as a Jewish fascist. This claim also complicates our understanding since it is undeniable that Revisionist Zionism contained elements of fascism, the leadership principle, the imagined politic as classless and united behind the leader, the struggle against Communism, and the emphasis on organized force as paramount in politics.7 Even to start answering this question, it is vital to remember that fascism was a “normal” political philosophy in the first quarter of the twentieth century.   4 Vladimir Jabotinsky, State Zionism (New York: Zionist Revisionist Organization of America, 1934), 8.  5 Arye Naor, “Jabotinsky’s New Jew: Concept and Models,” Journal of Jewish History  30, no. 2 (2011): 151. Benedetto Croce played a role in Jabotinsky’s thinking. Naor argues that, “Crocean aesthetics as an active and activating factor in history found expression in Jabotinsky’s thinking in the concept of hadar, with which he translated the aesthetic ideal into a central normative rule. The ethos, however, also has a collective dimension and Jabotinsky excitedly described the aesthetics of the collective act in several places: his depiction of the Philistines’ pagan rituals in his novel Samson, his account of the gymnastics of the Sokols in the Czech region of Austria-Hungary, which he lauded in a speech to members of Maccabi, and his description of the aspirations to order, precision and discipline in Betar activity.”   6 Roland Clark, Holy Legionary Youth: Fascist Activism in Interwar Romania (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015), 6.   7 See Robert Paxton, Anatomy of Fascism (New York: Knopf, 2004).

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Zeev Sternhell, for example, has written, “Indeed, to think of fascism as a phenomenon that is inseparable from the mainstream of European history and to consider the fascist ideology as a European ideology that took root and developed not only in Italy and, in a very violent and extreme form, in Germany but also elsewhere can lead to parallels and comparisons that, for many people, are still difficult to accept.”8 It is difficult to accept because for Jews the extreme political right was taboo. In modern times Jews as a minority group in Europe identified primarily with the political left. Jews favored the substitution of conservative elites, greater equality of opportunity, and improvement in the rights of workers, all of which was important for practical and ideological reasons. Thanks to the relative absence among the political left of discrimination based on ethnicity or nationality, Jews were attracted to the political left. However, Jews on the political left were obligated to shed religious and ethnic affiliation with the Jewish community. On the political right there were few options for Jews because most, if not all, the right-wing parties in eastern Europe were characterized by anti-Jewish attitudes. Sometimes these parties also represented certain classes of people, such as the nobility, whose interests differed from those of Jews and other members of the lower classes. Wealthy Jews, the so-called shtadlanim who were intercessors with the government, could have organized a conservative party of their own, but their modus vivendi of back-door negotiations with power structures made it impossible for them to work openly. In a democracy this would have entailed a challenge to their confidants, who were used to secret accommodation.9 In Zionism’s early days under Herzl’s leadership, it was viewed as a movement for the wealthy.10 There was considerable expense involved in purchasing   8 Ze’ev Sternhell, Mario Sznajder, and Maia Asheri, The Birth of Fascist Ideology: From Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), ix–.   9 See B. V. Anan’ich, Bankirskie doma v Rossii, 1860–1914 gg. Ocherki istorii chastnogo predprinimatel’stva (Leningrad: Nauka, 1991), 103–8. David Gintsburg apparently conceived of such a party of Jewish oligarchs, but it was never realized. See also Vladimir Jabotinsky, “G. B. Sliozberg,” in Sliozberg, Dela minuvshikh dnei, 1:ix–xiv. Interestingly, Jabotinsky held Genrikh Sliozberg, the greatest of the intercessors and Baron Horace Gintsburg’s personal assistant, in the highest esteem. 10 Michael Berkowitz, Zionist Culture and West European Jewry before the First World War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 3–9.

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the shekel and the goals of the movement – building up a national home in Palestine  – appeared distant from the day-to-day problems of life in eastern Europe.11 However, Zionist parties soon arose with goals of class equality and of immigration to Palestine.12 Zionism on the right centered around the General Zionists who sought an alliance with wealthy non-Zionists to help finance immigration and facilitate relations with the great powers.13 A Jewish radical right probably might have formed in pre-World War  I eastern Europe (as it did in the 1930s), but this would have contravened the spirit of the times. The right was viewed as an ideological scourge responsible for anti-Jewish violence and persecution and was not therefore seen as a viable alternative. Perhaps the Jewish political right was not entirely invisible. Its presence was felt by a percentage of the masses who followed the adage, “Dina de-malkhuta dina” (“The law of the land is the law”).14 In other words, they were involved in politics at the local level, serving on councils and using business contacts to influence government policy toward Jews to the extent possible in places where democracy was imperfect or entirely absent. The radical right, with its public displays of nationalism and calls for political mobilization, represented something unfamiliar to Jewish politics. However, the link between democracy and the supremacy of the leader was popular in Europe at the time thanks to Carl Schmitt.15 Jews on the left complained about the leadership principle because the association with military style was similar to those groups that employed anti-Jewish violence. At times even Jabotinsky himself expressed discomfort with the idea of the strongman, and he wanted to appear a humanist of the late-nineteenth century.16 As a result of his contradictory rhetoric, Jabotinsky’s conception of violence was unclear. 11 Berkowitz, Zioinist Culture and West European Jewry, 86. 12 Yitzhak Maor, Ha-tenuʻah ha-Tsiyonit be-Rusiyah. Me-reshitah ve-ʻad yamenu ( Jerusalem: Y. L. Magnes, 1986), 303–8. 13 Sachar, A History of Israel, 191–. 14 Eliezer Schweid, “The Attitude toward the State in Modern Jewish Thought before Zionism,” in Kinship and Consent: The Jewish Political Tradition and Its Contemporary Uses, ed. Daniel J. Elazar (London: University Press of America, 1981), 127–47. 15 See Carl Schmitt, Der Wert des Staates und die Bedeutung des Einzelnen (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1914). 16 This is the viewpoint especially of Ben-Hur, Every Individual, a King.

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Some followers had the impression that Jabotinsky shared their view of violence as an end in itself rather than as a means toward an end.17 Regarding the strategy of employing the radical right to advance a form of Zionism, Jabotinsky imitated trends in Europe, especially eastern Europe, and tried to change the habits of his group to better adapt it to the existing European rituals of violence.18 To succeed in making their own state, Jews had to become, to some extent, similar to their persecutors who had nation-states. Thus, Jabotinsky invented the Betar youth movement that placed primary emphasis on strict behavior: cleanliness, politeness, respect for others, and chivalry.19 Betar members were also required to practice marching and to use firearms and violence when needed.

***

Jabotinsky’s personal experience with violence emerged from his earliest days as a Zionist in Odessa around 1903, when he joined an armed Jewish self-defense unit.20 During World War  I he helped to establish the Jewish Legion that fought under the British aegis. In 1920, he organized a Jewish militia in Palestine that fought to protect Jerusalem during the Arab riot of that year.21 In the 1930s, Jabotinsky advised European Jews to learn to use a firearm.22 During the Arab uprising of 1936–39, Jabotinsky was ambivalent toward political terror and more supportive of havlaga (self-restraint).23 It is difficult to generalize from these different contexts. In Odessa the goal was to protect Jews from a drunken mob, although such action was prohibited by the tsarist government. In World War I, the goal was to support the British to aid their victory in the war, which in turn would give Jews an advantageous position in the post-war peace settlement and in the possible creation of a 17 Colin Shindler, The Rise of the Israeli Right: From Odessa to Hebron (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 191. 18 Pierre Bourdieu, La distinction. Critique sociale du jugement (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1979), 22. 19 Jabotinsky, Die idee des betar, 15. 20 Shlomo Gepstein, Ze’ev Z’abotinsky. Ha-yav, milhamto, hesegav, (Tel Aviv: ha’Hanhalah ha’reshit shel Kerel Tel Hai, 1941), 22. 21 Schechtman, Rebel and Statesman, 320–42. 22 Vladimir Jabotinsky, “Aufn pripetchek,” 9–. 23 Dothan, Pulmos ha-halukah bi-tekufat ha-mandat, 131.

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Jewish Palestine. In Palestine the goal was to oppose Arab aggression with a Jewish armed force, which in Jabotinsky’s view would strengthen Zionism’s political position. Jabotinsky’s most significant pronouncements about violence are contained in two articles from 1923, “About an Iron Wall: Arabs and Us” and “The Ethics of an Iron Wall.”24 When “About an Iron Wall” appeared, Jabotinsky was in Paris. He had become well known thanks to a worldwide press campaign that both championed his role during the riots of 1920 and criticized the long prison term to which Britain had sentenced him. Released after three months, Jabotinsky came to America as a representative of Keren ha-Yesod, the Zionist fund. Afterwards he served as a member of the Zionist Executive but left due to disagreements. In 1924 he took control of the resurrected Zionist newspaper in Russian, Rassvet. The political situation in Palestine in the early 1920s can be characterized as a shift of Britain in the direction of the Palestinian Arabs. Now the mandatory power, Great Britain, had promised in the Balfour Declaration of 1917 to work toward the creation of a national home for Jews in Palestine. Subsequently, Britain scaled back its commitment for a variety of reasons. In its first White Paper published in 1922, the British government outlined its plan to limit Jewish immigration. The first high commissioner, Herbert Louis Samuel, attempted to win the support of Arabs locally and in the Middle East generally through plans to affirm in law the Palestinian Arabs’ majority status in the country.25 Jabotinsky wrote his Iron Wall essays in this context. His first and main point was to advocate that Britain should pursue a policy devoted exclusively to Zionist immigration in Palestine. Secondly, Britain must deliver this message in a manner that would compel Arabs to see no other option. Jabotinsky wrote, Thus we conclude that we cannot promise anything to the Arabs of the Land of Israel or the Arab countries. It is out of the question. Hence those who 24 Jabotinsky, “O zheleznoi stene. My i araby,” 1–3; Vladimir Jabotinsky, “Etika zheleznoi steny,” Rassvet 19, no. 44/45 (11 November 1923): 2–4. My quotations come from Vladimir Jabotinsky, O zheleznoi stene. In Rechi, stat’i, vospominaniia (Minsk: GET, 2004). All translations by Brian Horowitz except where explicitly noted. 25 Rory Miller, introduction to Britain, Palestine and Empire: The Mandate Years, ed. Rory Miller (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2010), 4–14.

184 PART II | Russian–Jewish Intelligentsia’s Cultural Vibrancy hold that an agreement with the natives is an essential condition for Zionism can now say ‘no’ and depart from Zionism. Zionist colonization, even the most restricted, must either be terminated or carried out in defiance of the will of the native population. This colonization can, therefore, continue and develop only under the protection of a force independent of the local population—an iron wall which the native population cannot break through.26

Jabotinsky was aware that many people would object to this militaristic version of Zionism. Harmful consequences could ensue if Zionism were viewed as immoral. To the claim that Jabotinsky’s assertions were heartless and unethical, he had a ready answer: Jews had a greater right to Palestine because they were homeless.27 In The Ethics of an Iron Wall he wrote, There are 38 million Arabs. They occupy Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Tripoli, Egypt, Syria, Arabia and Iraq, a space (not counting the deserts) as big as half of Europe. On average there are 16 Arabs for every English square mile on this huge territory. For comparison it is useful to remember that in Sicily there are 352 individuals for every square mile, and in England 669. It is even more useful to remember that Palestine consists of approximately one of two-­ hundredths of this territory. But when homeless Jewry asks for Palestine, it turns out to be “immoral” because the locals find it uncomfortable.28

According to Jabotinsky, it was pointless to argue that the two sides don’t understand each other or that viewpoints have not been clearly presented. In fact, each side was painfully clear about the other’s motives and goals. Contemporary Jewish leaders such as Chaim Weizmann attempted to pursue a path of obfuscation by claiming miscommunication. Jabotinsky asserted that the main issue—open emigration for Jews with the goal of a Jewish majority in Palestine—revealed the absence of any difference between the “carnivores”

26 Jabotinsky, “O zheleznoi stene,” 267. Translation from http://www.marxists.de/middleast/ ironwall/ironwall.htm. Accessed 10 July 2016. 27 Jabotinsky, “Etika zheleznoi steny,” 273. 28 Ibid.

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and “vegetarians,” militarists or pacifists.29 Actually, Weizmann, among others, would have accepted a Jewish minority status. Jabotinsky insisted that he respected Arab intelligence more than his colleagues, claiming that it was useless to lie about Zionist goals since Arabs understood what was at stake. Lying would not work in any case; no native would be fooled. Only honesty was moral because, by giving fair warning of what was to come, Jews could minimize the suffering that would surely occur: We should have answered this question before we took the first shekel. And we did answer it positively. If Zionism is moral, i. e. legitimate, then justice should be fulfilled independent of anyone’s agreement or disagreement. And if A, B or C want to interfere by means of force in justice’s fulfillment because they find it profitable, then we can interfere with them again with force. This is ethics, there is no other ethics to speak of.30

Although the articles concern violence, politics was also a central focus. The articles conveyed to his supporters Jabotinsky’s plans for an expansive Jewish Yishuv that was prosperous, populous, and well defended. The articles were also addressed to Chaim Weizmann, leftist Zionists, the British government, and American Jews. His proposal for an “iron wall” against the Palestinian Arabs was meant first and foremost as a rebuttal of Winston Churchill’s White Paper of 1922 that limited Jewish immigration. Jabotinsky also criticized the British creation of a Hashemite kingdom in Transjordan in 1921, on territory that Jabotinsky had viewed as patrimony for Jewish settlement. Despite irritation with the government, Jabotinsky appealed to the morality of the British people. Although the British government might abandon its commitment temporarily, the British people should remember Jewish suffering that justified an iron wall. The articles mocked Weizmann, the head of the World Zionist Organi­ zation, whom Jabotinsky accused of cowardice and undue caution. Jabotinsky’s provocative declarations attempted to force the articulation of ultimate goals, in contrast to Weizmann who attempted to present Zionism as a peaceful ideol29 Jabotinsky, “O zheleznoi stene,” 267. 30 Ibid., 268. Jabotinsky expressed this same argument in 1937 at his appearance in London before the Royal (so-called) Peel Commission.

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ogy. In writing the articles, Jabotinsky was aware that immigration had stalled. Despite the British acquisition of the Mandate in 1920, fewer Jews had arrived than anticipated. The Jewish population of Palestine in 1923 was 16 or 17 percent, amounting to approximately 160,000. Jabotinsky was confronted with the possibility that either Zionism was not the solution to the Jewish problem or barriers existed to Jewish emigration. Jabotinsky feared that security concerns were scaring off immigrants. A strong statement in support of defense was obligatory in order to neutralize the Arab threat that arose in 1920 and 1921 following the demobilization of the World War I Jewish Legion in 1918. Jabotinsky urged the reconstitution of a Jewish legion with a permanent presence in Palestine. Such an army would consist of members of the Yishuv who would assume the financial burden of defense. He expressed certainty that Jewish armed units would liquidate any physical threat from Palestine’s Arabs. However, the Arabs themselves were not addressed in this statement. They were given a fait accompli. The Iron Wall essays show that Jabotinsky did not conceive of violence as a value for its own sake. It formed part of a larger political strategy as a deterrent against a countervailing force, in this case Arab resistance to Jewish immigration and majority status. According to Jabotinsky, the goal of deterrence worked best with a public display of force, a regular army that was legal, in contrast to an underground militia that was untrained and in danger of arrest.31 The articles also reflect Jabotinsky’s realization of the weakness of the Yishuv, which could succeed only in collaboration with a world power such as England. In his declarations Jabotinsky featured the rhetoric of violence, particularly in claims that Britain should use an iron wall to stop Arab resistance. Critics have noted that Jabotinsky’s pronouncements are largely prescriptive and could even be characterized as unrealistic or utopian.32 However, he intended to gain political popularity by rejecting a gradualist approach and presenting his ultimate vision, that of a majority Jewish Palestine protected by armed force. With regard to the composition of Zionist Revisionism in the 1920s, adherents were primarily Russian émigrés in Europe, Jewish agricultural workers in Palestine (especially from Middle Eastern countries), and young radicals 31 Vladimir Jabotinsky, Was Wollen die Zionisten-Revisionisten (Paris: Polygotte, 1926), 16–18. 32 A good example is Gorny, Zionism and the Arabs, 61.

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in Riga, Vienna, Harbin (China), and elsewhere.33 This ragtag membership was generally subservient to the Revisionist leadership and to Jabotinsky personally. Revisionists employed forms of so-called low-level violence, such as fistfights between agricultural workers with Revisionist sympathies and supporters of the Histadrut, the trade union that was originally founded by BenGurion’s left-Zionist labor party Mapai.34 In 1929, Revisionists blew the shofar at the Western Wall, although the British government had warned against this. In 1929, Abba Achimeir disrupted a lecture at the Hebrew University with a smoke bomb, and later another Revisionist took down the German flag at the German Consulate in Jerusalem.35 Radicalism grew in intensity among some Zionist Revisionists in the late 1920s. When Jabotinsky became the editor of Doar Ha’yom (The Daily Mail) in 1929, he adopted a message closer to the radical right of Europe and supported the view that the Jews needed to build up an underground army to fight the British and the Arabs. The newspaper featured extremist statements by Jabotinsky himself and by younger writers such as Achimeir, Greenberg, and Yievin. These three admired Jabotinsky but rejected much of his political program, such as internationalism, the alliance with Britain, and the appeal to universal morality. Although they agreed with him about the need for the harsh treatment of Arabs, they had a different idea of the leader. They had little respect for democracy and advocated a strong leader, such as Jabotinsky himself. In an article from 1930 entitled “Letter to Zionist Youth,” Achimeir wrote, “Zionism is a goal for which every means is kosher for its attainment [. . .]. It is proper for us to fight with envy and hate. [. . .] Each and every one of us must present the question as one presents the conquest of Israeli advance on both sides of the Jordan River: are you for us or in opposition?”36 In another article he was more explicit about his conception of power: “A creative politics does not wait [for power], but fights. We do not give at the time when we want to give, but fight at the hour when there is the strength to 33 Schechtman and Benari, History of the Revisionist Movement, 1:79–82. 34 Anita Shapira, Ha-maʻavak ha-nikhzav. ʻAvodah ʻivrit, 1929–1939 (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University Press, 1977), 197–98. 35 Yonathan Shapiro, The Road to Power: Herut Party in Israel (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1991), 46. 36 Abba Achimeir, “Michtav le-noar yehudi,” Doar Hayom (21 October 1931): 1.

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take [it]. We have to nurture in our youth the ‘will to power,’ to use Nietzsche’s expression.”37 Jabotinsky was influenced by his young colleagues’ conception of violence as aesthetic, cleansing, and messianic. In contrast to his earlier perspective on military training that emphasized pageantry, marching, and uniforms, Jabotinsky now valorized conspiratorial armed resistance. In his article “On Adventurism” (1932) he writes, The essence of the argument is as follows: isn’t it time to reexamine all of Betar’s methods, and perhaps even Revisionism’s? These methods emerged during the years when we believed in quickly attaining radical changes in the political conditions of the Palestinian building-up through peaceful means. But that faith has disappeared. Herzlian Zionism has been pushed almost entirely underground, and thus the methods have to be different. Now one must concentrate on active political protest; the youth especially should go their way; the former ideas of Betar self-education have lost their meaning and have even become a total waste of time. [. . .] “Sans-culottes” make history; Lenin, Mussolini, and Hitler succeeded thanks to “sans-culottism”; and we should cultivate this spirit ourselves (of course for a different goal).38

Studies of Jabotinsky in the 1930s portray his reacting to changes within the Revisionist camp.39 Jabotinsky was ambivalent about Achimeir and his group, Brit ha-Biryonim, who he feared wanted to assume control. Desiring Achimeir’s support, he also worried about losing full control over Revisionism. In 1933 at the annual conference of Zionist Revisionism in Prague, the executive committee, which consisted of Jabotinsky’s old friends and veterans, tried to remove him as leader. In response Jabotinsky dissolved the executive committee and took over exclusive power in the organization. A few months later he arranged a referendum on this action and gained 90 percent support.40 37 Abba Achimeir, “Betar ba-tfisat olam,” in Ha-Tsiyonut ha-mehapkhanit (Tel Aviv: ha’Vaad le’hotsa‘at kitve Ahime’ir, 1968), 21. 38 Vladimir Jabotinsky, “Smysl avantiurizma” Rassvet 24 ( July 1932): 4. 39 Jan Zouplna, “Vladimir Jabotinsky and the Split within the Revisionist Union: From the Boulogne Agreement to the Katowice Putsch, 1931–33,” Journal of Israeli History 24, no. 1 (2005), 36. 40 Shapiro, The Road to Power, 23.

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It could be argued that this unilateral action was inspired by the aggressive mentality of Brit ha-Biryonim. Much the same could be said of Jabotinsky’s leaving the World Zionist Congress in 1934 and establishing his New Zionist Organization (NZO) in 1935. In his opponents’ eyes Jabotinsky appeared to be without scruples and conscience. His image was hardly improved by the Arlosorov Affair in 1933, in which he defended Abraham Stavsky, the Revisionist convicted of Hayim Arlosorov’s murder. Arlosorov, a rising star in the Labor movement, was murdered in May 1933 on the Mediterranian shores in Jaffo, South Tel Aviv. The British police and much of the public believed that he had been assassinated for political reasons by a Revisionist.41 It should be noted that Jabotinsky assumed Stavsky’s defense with hesitation and only as a last resort. Jabotinsky maintained Stavsky’s innocence on the grounds of weak evidence, and he drew attention to inconsistencies in the British legal case. In support he enlisted the Yishuv’s head rabbi, Rav Kook, and raised additional money for Stavsky’s defense. Furthermore, he rejected the idea that a Zionist would kill another Jew for political gain. Indeed, Jabotinsky felt personal responsibility and wished to counter the accusation of Revisionist collusion in the assassination of fellow Jews. The efforts were crowned with success when Stavsky was released by an appeals court. While Jabotinsky wished to keep his hold on power, there were principles that he considered sacrosanct, such as his opposition to political assassination. Samuel Katz, a close confidant, consulted Jabotinsky about the wisdom of assassinating the Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini. Katz wrote, “Jabotinsky says no. ‘Would you like to see the Arabs bump off Weizmann or Shertok?’ This argument did not impress me. If the Arabs could have assassinated Jewish leaders they would have done so. Jabotinsky was no doubt swayed by his strong opposition to personal terror.”42 Jabotinsky’s principles were challenged during the Arab uprising of 1936–39. Between the early 1930s and 1936, Jabotinsky had played a role in 41 Shabtai Tevet, Retsach Arlosorov ( Jerusalem: Schoken, 1982). 42 Samuel Katz, Days of Fire (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1968), 31. Katz also wrote, “I have similar feelings on the subject, but the Mufti was a glaring exception. Looking back now on the Mufti’s later aid to Hitler in planning the extermination of the Jews of Europe, I am all the more sorry I did not accept the proposal at once instead of asking Jabotinsky.”

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the creation of Etzel, also known as the Irgun, an underground militia that was intended to provide support for Revisionism. However, Etzel’s leaders and rank-and-file soldiers often acted independently of Jabotinsky. Jabotinsky’s relationship to Etzel is characterized by his lack of knowledge of their specific actions in Europe to facilitate illegal immigration to Palestine. Although Jabotinsky made an agreement with the military leadership of Mapai, Eliyahu Golomb, to respect the strategy of havlaga, many of his members rejected this concept and sought revenge for Arab terror.43 Jabotinsky, however, did not support Jewish terror and saw no political value in, as he remarked, the killing of an Arab on a donkey.44 However, his position shifted with the hanging of Shlomo Ben-Yosef by the British. He now acknowledged that British perfidy had created a situation in which Zionist self-defense even against Britain was required. After Shlomo Ben-Yosef ’s hanging, Jabotinsky began to speak about Britain’s return of the Mandate to the League of Nations and its assumption by another power.45 As the actions by Etzel members during the Arab uprising show, Jabotinsky no longer controlled his own movement, although he still was involved in choosing the leaders of Etzel, Betar, and Sohar.46 There were varying approaches to the use of violence among these individuals, yet those who endorsed terror against Arabs claimed to be influenced by Jabotinsky. Ironically, Jabotinsky’s pronouncements on violence inspired radicals, although he himself proclaimed a different code of ethics.47 Jabotinsky’s rocky relationship with his followers is evident in his confrontation with Menachem Begin in 1938 at the Third International Conference of Betar in Warsaw. Jabotinsky dismissed Begin’s appeal for an armed uprising in Palestine, and called Begin “a squeaky door,” i. e., someone who makes noise 43 Eliyahu Golomb, Hotsa’at sefarim ʻAyanot’ (‘Spring’), vol. 2 of Hevyon ʻoz (Tel Aviv: Hotsa’at Mifleget Poʻale Erets-Yiśra’el, 1953), 91; Shmuel Dothan, A Land in the Balance: The Struggle for Palestine, 1919–1948 (New York: Gefen Books, 1996), 263. 44 Ibid. 45 Evidence Submitted to the Palestine Royal Commission, 20. 46 Joseph Heller, “Ze’ev Z’botinski ve she’elat ha-havlaga, 1936–1939. Hashkafat olam be-mivhan ha-matsi’ut,” in Temurot ba-historya ha-yehudit ha-hadasa. Kovets ma’amarim shai li-Shmuel Ettinger, eds., Shmuel Almog et al. (Jerusalem: Merkaz Zalman Shazar, 1987), 283–320, 290–. 47 See Natkovich, Bin inyanei zoher. Natkovich looks at the different images that Jabotinsky used for his self-presentation.

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but produces nothing of consequence.48 Furthermore, with Hitler’s growing power, Jabotinsky felt there was no option apart from siding with Britain, despite Britain’s “betrayal” of Zionism.49 In the years before his death in 1940, Jabotinsky argued that the use of force needed moral grounding. Both in his testimony before the Peel Commission and subsequently in his book The War and the Jews, published posthumously in 1942, Jabotinsky reiterated his desire for collaboration between the Zionist movement and Britain. In the early 1930s he had favored the idea of Palestine as a seventh dominion of the British Empire.50 Yet his love for Britain was not unconditional and, as noted, he maintained that if Britain could not satisfy Zionism’s legitimate demands, the Mandate should be returned to the League of Nations. In addition to his goal for a Jewish state on both sides of the Jordan River, he posed new demands for mass immigration (the so-called Nordau solution): one million Jews should immigrate immediately and ten million altogether over ten years.51 In the light of his moderation toward the end of his life, one might reflect on political conditions in Europe in the late 1920s and early 1930s that caused him to take a more radical direction and then led to his return to a skeptical attitude toward violence. In the interpretation presented here it is essential to consider the political context for Jabotinsky’s change of attitude during this period. He had imagined that the Revisionist Union would take control of the World Zionist Congress in the years after the party was formed. When that did not happen, he gravitated toward certain followers who were articulating a kind of quasi-fascism. These individuals, Abba Achimeir and others, took his bombastic rhetoric literally. Perhaps he assumed at this point that it would be possible to bypass gradualism, as Lenin had done and as Trotsky had predicted, namely that it was possible to achieve the condition of statehood immediately. But Arlosorov’s death had shown that such a historical leap might entail the killing of Jews by Jews and involve large-scale terrorism sansculottes—without scruples. Jabotinsky rejected this possibility and in the face of Jewish terror48 Colin Shindler, The Triumph of Military Zionism: Nationalism and the Origins of the Israeli Right (London: I. B. Tauris, 2005), 208. 49 Jabotinsky, The War and the Jew, 106. 50 Josiah C. Wedgwood, The Seventh Dominion (London: Labour Pub. Co., 1928), ix. 51 Jabotinsky, The War and the Jew, 124.

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ism in the Arab uprising, he reverted to his previous gradualism. In the year after Arlosorov’s death, it came to a series of agreements with Ben-Gurion on mutual tolerance and cooperation. Although the Mapai members did not pass them, the attempt appears to show Jabotinsky’s preference for gradualism and peace among Zionists. His support for havlaga underscores this conclusion.

***

What does this account of Jabotinsky’s attitude toward violence imply about Jewish politics? One might conclude that Zionist Revisionists were engaged more in rhetoric than in effective action, involved more in fantasy than in reality. In comparison with what the Labor Zionists achieved in Palestine, Revisionist Zionists do not have a stellar record of achievement. For example, although Jabotinsky called for a mass exodus, Revisionist Zionists were unable to save the mass of Jews of eastern Europe through immigration (the Nordau Solution).52 In a similar way, Jabotinsky’s radical moments in the 1920s are of interest in showing that he too dreamed of a revolution without regret or scruples, yet he drew back. Jabotinsky’s inability to foresee the impending war led to a misperception of political realities.53 Although aware of British intransigence on immigration, he still hoped for concessions from the British side. Unfortunately, Jabotinsky’s reliance on diplomacy would come to be perceived as ineffectual in the eyes of Menachem Begin, Abraham Tehomi, and other Revisionists. For them it was clear in the aftermath of the Evian Conference that Britain did not assign priority to rescuing the Jewish people.54 Perhaps Jabotinsky’s intolerance arose from the fear that Jews would not become the majority population in Palestine. In contrast to those who justified a Jewish Palestine on religious grounds, Jabotinsky explored historical motivations and political principles that served to justify Palestine as a Jewish homeland. His secular and democratic inclinations led him to insist on the will of the majority. Therefore, he supported any means that could produce a majority—

52 Laurence Weinbaum, A Marriage of Convenience: The New Zionist Organization and the Polish Government, 1936–1939 (Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 1993), 211. 53 Jabotinsky, The War and the Jew, 125. 54 Shindler, The Triumph of Military Zionism, 210.

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especially increased immigration—that could be encouraged by a growth in economic productivity and the containment of Arab violence. One must still reconcile Jabotinsky’s provocative statements of 1923 with his self-definition as a liberal. How is it possible to adhere to a policy of national differences at the Helsingfors Conference of 1906, where Jabotinsky lent support for the equal rights of all nationalities, and subsequently adopt the “iron wall” position? Rather than ask why Jabotinsky abandoned liberalism, one should explore the sources of his subsequent intolerance. What in the political configuration of 1923 gave rise to his idea of the “iron wall,” a conception that entailed unlimited immigration, threats of violence toward Arabs, and claims to the territory of Transjordan?55 In the light of his contradictory pronouncements, it is striking that throughout his life Jabotinsky maintained that his intellectual origins lay in the Helsingfors Conference of 1906, where he articulated the protection of national rights, in particular minority rights, in a multinational, multiethnic, and multi-confessional empire.56 Helsingfors, however, does not explain the evolution of his concept of the “iron wall.” For that one must turn elsewhere, perhaps to his perception of British rule over India or Ireland with their minority of British subjects. The British were well known for their ability to rule other nations by dividing and conquering, by co-opting elites, and by the promotion of selective integration. Ironically, the history of the Russian Empire, which he knew well, should have served as a cautionary tale. Russia ruled over the other nations within its historical borders. The most significant example was Poland, whose complicated history of relations with Russia and rich cultural heritage led to entrenched resistance. Poland also had a large Jewish population. Although Poland and Palestine differ in fundamental ways, there are interesting parallels to be drawn from their experience with imperial rule. 55 Shavit, Jabotinsky and the Revisionist Movement, 158. Shavit writes, “The territorial integrity of Eretz Israel—particularly that of the part west of the Jordan—was one of the central doctrines of the Right, a historical and political a priori demand. The territorial issue became the focal point of the rightist conception, the cement that bound its members and from which it derived its historical strength. Territorial integrity became the absolute precondition of the realization of all other Zionist aspirations, and the fulfillment of any of the national ideals became conditional upon the fulfillment of the territorial goal” (emphasis in original). 56 Brian Horowitz, Ze’ev Jabotinsky ve’iruyi shanat 1905, Zion 80, no. 4 (2015): 503–20.

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Russia and Polish relations during the nineteenth century were characterized by violent clashes, including major insurrections in 1830 and 1863. Russian attempts to co-opt Polish elites had not led to pacification; only the crushing of opposition to Russian rule through brute force imposed a certain pacification.57 The imposition of force included the expropriation of the land of rebellious nobles, the exile of many thousands of Poles to Siberia, the suppression of the Polish language in state schools and government service, and the maintenance of a large garrison in the country. The Poles had no choice but to submit, yet they devised a non-confrontational approach known as “Positivism,” characterized by a rejection of revolution in favor of incremental change and economic development. This policy led to relative quiet until 1905 and bears certain resemblances to the “iron wall” policy. Under the tsarist regime, Jabotinsky had been arrested and imprisoned on minor charges of possessing illegal literature and had spent five weeks in prison.58 He was also aware of the restrictions imposed on Jews in the imperial capital of St. Petersburg and had been arrested for not having a proper residence permit.59 Therefore, it seems ironic that Jabotinsky, a victim of tsarist oppression, was capable of conceiving a severe “iron wall.” Furthermore, he had not been silent about oppression in Russia. He had openly criticized the government in publications and had expressed animosity against liberals and former allies such as Pyotr Struve, who professed equal rights for minorities but who gave voice to Russian national superiority at the time of the Chirikov Affair (1907–9).60 At that time Struve had promoted the priority of Russian culture and implied a lower status for members of Russia’s national minorities.61 Jabotinsky also openly criticized Maxim Vinaver, a Jewish member of the Constitutional Democratic Party, whom he mocked as a “traitor,” and he sympathized with Ukrainian national strivings and might have

57 Stephen D. Corrsin, Warsaw before the First World War: Poles and Jews in the Third City of the Russian Empire, 1880–1914 (Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 1989), 22–24. 58 Jabotinsky, The Story of My Life, 61–. 59 Ibid., 88–. 60 Jabotinsky wrote about Struve and other Russian liberals in his Fel’etony, 117, 120, 130, 156–, 163, and elsewhere. 61 See Pyotr Struve, “Intelligentsiia i natsional’noe litso,” in Patriotica: Politika, kul’tura, religiia, sotsializm (Moscow: Respublika, 1997), 206–8; originally published in Slovo (10 March 1909).

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even have been inclined to Polish independence if he hadn’t witnessed Polish chauvinism and antisemitism.62 But the inherent immorality of the “iron wall” was merely one aspect of the complex puzzle posed by the concept. Practical issues were also involved. History shows that the repression of populations by force alone is problematic.63 Indeed, a polemical article by fellow Revisionist Alexander M. Kulisher offered a strong rebuttal to Jabotinsky’s concept. In Kulisher’s view, the most effective method for colonizing a region is the voluntary assent of the natives. Kulisher explains, “Actually a successful colonization effort is only possible with the agreement and cooperation of a certain part of the local population. The most brilliant example is the colonization of America in the nineteenth century.” Although it should be noted that later the colonists subsequently rebelled against British authority, at the time of the French-Indian War, Britain won because it followed the way of assent. In contrast, the French followed Jabotinsky’s method: “If someone pursued that politics in America, it was the French in Canada. As a result they were defeated in the war with England, i. e. France had extensive military preparations, ʻgarrisons, and ʻcommanders [. . .].”64 Jabotinsky could not have predicted Britain’s painful decolonization after World War II, but he understood the outcome of the Polish scenario, which involved a successful uprising. In 1918, Josef Piłsudsky, Chief of State of the Second Polish Republic, found the appropriate moment to organize forces in pursuit of the country’s freedom. Subsequently, a newly independent Poland attacked Russia in a conflagration that ended in a stalemate at a terrible cost to both countries. These examples, among others, revealed the difficulty inherent in a minority’s attempt to rule over others by force. In addition, the situation of Jews in the Polish-Russian conflict should also have caused concern for Jabotinsky. Each side had pursued Jewish support 62 Struve, “Medved’ iz Berlogi”, in Fel’etony, 117–22, 120. See also Vladimir Jabotinsky, “Pis’ma o natsional’nostiakh i oblastiakh. Evreistvo i ego nastroeniia,” Russkaia mysl’ (1  January 1911): 95–114. See also parts of Israel Kleiner, From Nationalism to Universalism: Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky and the Ukrainian Question (Toronto: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 2000). 63 Alexander Kulisher, “Voennyi Sionizm,” Svershenie 1 (1925): 91–97. For more on Alexander Kulisher, see Mark Tolts and Anatoly Vishnevsky, “Nezamechennyi vklad v teoriiu demograficheskogo perekhoda,” in K 125–letiiu so dnia rozhdeniia Aleksandra Kulishera, Demograficheskoe Obozrenie, vol. 2 (Moscow: Demograficheskoe Obozrenie, 2015), 6–34. 64 Kulisher, “Voennyi Sionizm,” 96.

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and yet neither had fulfilled its promises to the Jewish community. Both sides marginalized Jews who had no claim on the allegiance of the warring parties and who suffered as a result. By analogy, Jabotinsky might have known that Britain, even with an anti-Arab policy, would be unlikely to keep its promises to the Jews. In the light of Jabotinsky’s experiences as a Russian subject, it is difficult to understand his attempt to rule over Palestinians. Indeed, he portrayed the Jewish right to rule in moral terms while giving no legitimacy to Palestinian Arab political claims. Jabotinsky did not conceive of Arabs as noble savages or project onto them a negative, as was the case with Orientalism as defined by Edward Said.65 He thought they were backward by Western standards, but he viewed the Palestinians as having the same political desires as Jews: prosperity, dignity, and political control. Nonetheless, his realization of their humanity did not extend in his view to their right to political sovereignty. He was ready to offer the Palestinians a package of individual and national rights adapted from the Helsingfors Conference. He hoped to persuade Arabs that their fate as a minority in a Jewish state would be better than that of the Jews in eastern Europe, who had been objects of discrimination and victims of pogroms. However, he would appear to have been disingenuous on this score. Although Jabotinsky was an early right-wing politician in the Zionist camp, one cannot portray him as a political innovator. “Iron walls” were appearing in various empires, from South Africa and Ethiopia to India, Iran, and others. Jabotinsky wanted a policy that would attain and preserve Jewish power in Israel. There are, indeed, many walls in Israel, too. The question of whether he was right awaits a conclusive answer.

65 Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Vintage, 2003).

PART III Jewish Heritage in Russian Perception

Chapter Twelve Vladimir Solov’ev and the Jews: A View from Today

The myth of Vladimir Solov’ev—friend of the Jews, popular among scholars of the Jews of Russia—deserves a reexamination to check whether it really stands up against the evidence. One encounters the oft-heard refrain: Solov’ev should be celebrated because of his love for Judaism and his defense of the Jewish people. Dmitryi Belkin, an expert on Solov’ev, sums up the position of a dozen scholars: An absolute attitude of tolerance toward Judaism, a powerful campaign against antisemitism in the Russian press and politics, and most importantly, the conviction of a Christian that Christians and Christianity must think not about “improving” the Jews, but occupy themselves with the search for their own religious, social, and cultural life corresponding to Evangelical principles—these represent that part of Solov’ev’s legacy which one can “transfer” into the twenty-first century without concern about the old-fashioned didacticism of a Russian moralist of the nineteenth century.1

Expressing the conventional attitude toward Solov’ev, Belkin lists all the traits that numerous scholars have repeated: Solov’ev advocates tolerance, defends the Jewish people, and admonishes Christians to perfect themselves before they can think of improving the Jews. 2   1 Dimitry Belkin, “‘Evreiskii vopros’ kak ‘khristianskii vopros’: K interpretatsii odnoi formuly V. S. Solov’eva,” Solov’evskii sbornik (2001): 472–73. All translations are mine, except where noted.   2 In the mountain of scholarship on Solov’ev and the Jews one finds a nearly exclusive view of Solov’ev as a philosemite. See Dimitry Belkin, “Vladimir Solov’ev und das Judentum: Neue

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In addition to a commitment to tolerance based on Christian self-­ perfection, Solov’ev also embodies the view that that the Enlightenment should be rejected because of its emphasis on rationalism. Critics therefore maintain that Solov’ev diverges from old Christian attitudes about Jews and also about enlightenment conceptions. He is unique, therefore, in his attitude toward Jews because he does not despise them for denying Christ’s mission, and he rejects the Enlightenment because it cannot quell humanity’s search for God. As far as the Jews are concerned, if a Jew becomes secular, he contradicts the special role Jews are supposed to play in Solov’ev’s theology. Just as for other millenarians, for Solov’ev Jews have a function to set off the chain of events that will lead to the end of history. If one actually reads Solov’ev’s works, however, one realizes that his imperative regarding Christian self-realization contradicts the goal of tolerance. Solov’ev clearly asserts that, if Christians ever did attain self-perfection the Jews would be obligated to convert to Christianity. He made no secret that he ultimately wished for Jewish conversion, giving this theme a central place in his teaching. In addition, I maintain that his philosophical views especially as reflected in his last work, “Kratkaia povest’ ob Antikhriste” (“A Short Story about the Antichrist”), reveal similar traits both to “old” Christian antisemitism and modern, enlightenment antisemitism. Given the weight of evidence to the contrary, we should ask why Solov’ev has been perceived as a great philosemite? To understand this state of affairs, I describe the place of Jews in his philosophy, looking also at the way Russian Jews of the time related to the philosopher. Finally, I examine Solov’ev in our Fragen zu einem alten Thema,” Judaica: Beitrag zum Vaständnis des jüdischen Schicksals in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart 59, no. 3 (2003): 204–18; Evert Van der Zweerde, “Vladimir Solov’ev and the Russian-Christian Jewish Question,” Journal of Eastern Christian Studies 55, nos. 3–4 (2003): 211–44; Belkin, “‘Evreiskii vopros’ kak ‘khristianskii vopros’,” 467– 74; Judith Deutsch Kornblatt and Gary Rosenshield, “Vladimir Solovyov: Confronting Dostoevsky on the Jewish and Christian Questions,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 68, no. 1 (2000): 69–98; Henrietta Mondry, “Race and Stereotype: Soloviev, Rozanov and Jewish Sexuality,” Jewish Affairs 52, no. 3 (1997): 141–45; B. Dupuy, “Les Juifs, l’histoire et la fin des temps selon Vladimir Soloviev,” Istina 37 (1992): 253–83; Judith Deutsch Kornblatt, “Solov’ev’s Androgynous Sophia and the Jewish Kabbalah,” Slavic Review 50, no. 3 (1991): 487–511; Walter G. Moss, “Vladimir Soloviev and the Jews in Russia,” Russian Review 29 (April 1970): 181–91; G. Podskalsky, “Wladimir Solovyov und die Juden,” Una Sancta 22 (1967): 203–11.

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own day, asking why scholars have supported the myth of Solov’ev-friend of the Jews and steered clear of the conversion theme in Solov’ev’s work.

***

The case of Solov’ev is hardly unique. Other so-called Enlightenment “friends of the Jews,” such as Abbé Gregoire and Wilhelm Dohm, expressed as their ultimate goal the conversion of Jews to Christianity. Johann Caspar Lavater’s request in 1769, that Moses Mendelsohn justify publicly why he would not convert, reflected a general attitude among Christians of the time, although admittedly German “society” feigned reproaching Lavater for making it.3 In some places (for example in England) the enlightenment project was accompanied by demands for Jewish conversion.4 Rational principles upheld the notion that humanity was essentially good and that religious difference (just as any other defect) was society’s fault and therefore should not prevent Jews from joining Christian society or from being accepted by Christians.5 Many leading thinkers in Western Europe of the eighteenth century maintained that punitive methods had not succeeded in bringing Jews into the Christian fold; it was believed that a kinder approach would succeed more effectively.6 While in Western Europe proselytizers used for the most part subtle methods, the Russian government pursued a more aggressive approach. Tsar Alexander I established and helped fund the Society of Israel Christians, while Tsar Nicholas I tried to recruit young Jewish boys into the army as a means to bring a part of the Jewish population into the Christian fold.7 During the reign of Alexander II, state policy changed. No longer meant to spur religious   3 Shmuel Feiner, The Jewish Enlightenment (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 116–19; Allan Arkush, Moses Mendelsohn and the Enlightenment (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 134.   4 Todd M. Endelman, Radical Assimilation in English Jewish History, 1656–1945 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 41–44.  5 Feiner, The Jewish Enlightenment, 58–67.   6 For a good example of this approach, see Abbé Grégoire, “An Essay on the Physical, Moral and Political Reformation of the Jews (1789),” in The Jewish in The Modern World, eds. Paul Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 49–55.   7 Michael Stanislawski, “Jewish Apostasy in Russia: A Tentative Typology,” in Jewish Apostasy in the Modern World, ed. Todd M. Endelman (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1987), 190; Stanislawski, Tsar Nicholas I and the Jews, 13–34. On proselytes in the Russian Empire, see Saul M. Gintsburg, Meshumodim in Tsarishe Russland (New York: Bicher Verlag, 1946).

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conversion, government policies aimed to integrate Jews into the public fabric. New laws even permitted a small number to live outside the Pale of Settlement and to become educated professionals, lawyers, doctors, and engineers.8 These “privileged” Jews were supposed to serve as examples to others of what they should strive to achieve. Paradoxically, although the government provided incentives to integration, it did not interfere with antisemitism in society. Journalists and others vilified Jews as an unredeemable enemy of the Russian state and people. By the early 1880s, antisemitic attitudes in society were codified in government edicts, beginning with the so-called “May Laws” of 1882, which were intended to isolate Jews from rural society and which badly damaged Jewish economic interests. Racial antisemitism, which dominated anti-Jewish discourse in Western Europe in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, was often heard in Russia too, especially in the government-subsidized newspaper Novoe vremia.9 During the last decades of the nineteenth century, the campaign to convert Jews to Christianity was dominated by private individuals, theologians, and religious philosophers, such as Solov’ev.10

***

Vladimir Solov’ev (1853–1900) was born in Moscow, the son of the historian Sergei Solov’ev. Although early in his life Solov’ev had renounced Russian Orthodoxy, turning his energies to the study of philosophy, during his university years he regained his Christian faith. While on a fellowship abroad, he had a mystical experience, seeing the divine Sophia in the reading room of the British Library and in the Sinai desert in Egypt.11 After returning to Russia in the mid1870s, Solov’ev finished his dissertation, and during the next two decades published his major philosophical works, The Meaning of Love (1892–94), The Justification of the Good (1897), Russia and the Universal Church (1911), and The National Question in Russia (1911–13).  8 Nathans, Beyond the Pale, 45–82.   9 For an in-depth discussion of Novoe vremia, see A. E. Kaufman, Druz’ia i vragi evreev: A. S. Suvorin (“Novoe Vremia”), (St. Petersburg: Pravda, 1908). 10 See Eugene M. Avrutin, “Returning to Judaism after the 1905 Law on Religious Freedom in Tsarist Russia,” Slavic Review 65, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 98–100. 11 A. F. Losev, Vladimir Solov’ev: Zhizn’ zamechatel’nykh liudei (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 2000), 47–48.

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What makes Solov’ev unusual is that previously Russian Orthodox Christian leaders tended to align themselves with the political right. Some even identified with the most anti-Jewish elements in society and the state bureaucracy. The writer Fyodor Dostoevsky and the head of the Holy Synod, Konstantin Pobedonotsev, are two examples. Solov’ev, however, would not countenance the use of force; he counseled that the Jews should join the Church only by their own volition. Solov’ev took a strong interest in Judaism as a religious doctrine and in the Jews as members of an ethnic and religious group. He was so inspired that during the 1880s he studied Hebrew with Faivel Getz, a journalist and intellectual from Vilna, in order to read the Tanach and Talmud in the original. He also socialized with the Jewish elite of the capital, attending Passover Seders at Baron Horace Gintsburg’s home and participating in the Society for the Promotion of Enlightenment among the Jews of Russia, an organization established in St. Petersburg to spreading secular knowledge among Russia’s Jews. 12 Solov’ev became recognized as a friend of the Jews, publicly objecting to antisemitic attacks from the government, the press, and society. In 1890, for example, he organized a petition to protest the treatment of Jews in Russia and was able to get Leo Tolstoy to sign it.13 In addition, he helped Faivel Gets write a book about antisemitism in the country, which unfortunately was never distributed because the police confiscated it in 1892.14 It is alleged that on his 12 Jean Halperin, “Vladimir Soloviev Listens to Israel: The Christian Question,” Imanu’el 26–27 (1994): 200. Halperin writes, “My mother had a very clear memory of the fervent enthusiasm with which Soloviev participated in the Passover meal (seder) in the home of her grandfather, Baron Horace de Gunzburg. During the meal, he followed the text of the account of the redemption from slavery in Egypt in the original Hebrew.” For a discussion of the Society for the Promotion of Enlightenment among the Jews of Russia at this time, see Brian Horowitz, “The Society for the Promotion of Enlightenment among the Jews of Russia, and the Evolution of the St. Petersburg Russian-Jewish Intelligentsia, 1893–1905,” in Studies in Contemporary Jewry, ed. Ezra Mendelsohn, vol. 19, Jews and the State: Dangerous Alliances and the Perils of Privilege (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press, 2004), 195–213. 13 It has appeared in several places as “Tekst Protesta protiv antisemiticheskogo dvizheniia v pechati,” in O evreiskom narode, by Vladimir Solov’ev ( Jerusalem: Institute of Russian Jewry, 1987), 96–97. For more on it, see Moss, “Vladimir Soloviev,” 190. 14 Faivel Gets, Slovo podsudimomu! S pis’mami grafa L. N. Tolstogo, B. N. Chicherina, Vladimira Sergeevicha Solov’eva i V. G. Korolenko (St. Petersburg, 1891). See “Pis’ma V. Solov’evu k F. Getsu,” in Pis’ma Vladimira Sergeevicha Solov’eva, ed. E. Radlov (St. Petersburg: Obshchestvennaia pol’za, 1909), 2:163–66. Apparently Gets was able to save one copy for himself.

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deathbed Solov’ev told his wife that he had to pray for the Jews and began praying loudly in Hebrew.15 In fact, meditations on Jews and Judaism occupied a good deal of his philosophical energies. In such writings as “The Jews and the Christian Question” (1884), “New Testament Israel” (1885), “The Talmud and the Newest Polemical Literature about It in Austria and Germany” (1886), “When Did the Prophets Live?” (1896), and “Jews, Their Belief and Teachings” (1891), Solov’ev gave the Jews a central place in his ideas about the world, God’s plan, and Christianity.16 Regarding this intellectual legacy, Judith Deutsch Kornblatt has written, “Solov’ev’s interest in the Jews goes well beyond the ‘Jewish question’ and antisemitism . . . and corresponds to his most central philosophical categories.”17 In contrast to philosemites from the Enlightenment, Solov’ev’s positive attitude toward the Jews emerges not from a vision of reordering society on rational principles, but from a theocratic ideal. Solov’ev hoped to bring about a Christian world, a theocracy that would comprise all individuals, nations, and religions. The realization of a unified Christianity depended on the attainment of Christian ideals in thought and action. To articulate his ideas, Solov’ev made a distinction between Christ’s appearance in the world—the visitation of God’s son as a sign of the ultimate achievement of the Christian ideal—and the achievement of Christianity itself, which had to be completed by humanity. All individuals were asked to emulate Christ and to take upon themselves the task of realizing the divine plan, becoming an instrument of Christian utopia building.18 Although Solov’ev tells us far more about how to accomplish a theocracy than about what it would look like when it was finished, we can deduce from his writings that a state’s institutions and social groups—the government, Church, clergy, farmers, city dwellers, and intellectuals—would be transformed. Their economic and social interactions would be guided by Christian ethics as opposed to secular-oriented laws. Thus, for example, the goal of economic 15 Genrikh B. Sliozberg, Baron Horace de Gunzburg: Sa vie, son oeuvre (Paris: Pascal, 1933), 57. 16 Vladimir Solov’ev, “Talmud i noveishaia polemicheskaia literatura o nem v Avstrii i Germanii,” Russkaia mysl’ 8 (1886). 17 Judith Deutsch Kornblatt, “Vladimir Solov’ev on Spiritual Nationhood, Russian and the Jews,” Russian Review 56, no. 2 (1997): 158. 18 See Mikhail Vainshtein, “Ob izbranicherstve evreiskogo naroda,” in O evreiskom narode, by Vladimir Solov’ev ( Jerusalem: Institute of Russian Jewry, 1987), 3–10.

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relations would be not the accumulation of wealth but the spiritual wellbeing of all. Similarly, egoism, materialism, and aggressiveness would also cease. The Catholic Church would stop serving only Catholics; antagonism between the Russian Orthodox, Protestant, and Catholic Churches would end. The majority of the Jews, the best Jews, Solov’ev insists, would join the Christian world as Christians, leaving only a small minority of hardened “naysayers” outside the fold. But even these few would ultimately return to Christianity, since, as Solov’ev quotes from Paul, “The word of the apostle is firm, all Israel will be saved.”19 Jewish interaction with Christianity over centuries, a cooperation Solov’ev calls a “zamechatel’noe obstoiatel’stvo” (“wonderful circumstance”) is based on the two people’s ideological closeness. In truth, Christ’s emergence in the past serves as a precedent for Jewish conversion. Christ came from the Jews, who were already moving along a theocratic path during the period of Roman rule in Palestine. Christ’s coming was not a break from Jewish development, but rather its culmination. Solov’ev writes, The principle of religious power and useful wisdom, which the Sadducees held and abused, was not rejected by Christ, but received from Him a higher illumination and confirmation (“all power was given to me,” “be wise like snakes,” etc . . .); in the same way the pharisaic principle of law and justice through deeds was fully confirmed in the doctrine of Christ, who came not to destroy the law, but to fulfill it, and demanded real examples of true belief from his disciplines. Therefore, what was true for the Sadducees and Pharisees is similar to the Evangelical way, and what the Essenes announced as the aim of the path—God’s kingdom and His truth—is again the same.20

Christ, in Solov’ev’s view, united in himself the three strands of Jewish thought and therefore incorporated all of Judaism into Christianity. Moreover, the emergence of Christ at that particular historical moment meant that the Jews of that time attained their ideal state of development. It follows that Solov’ev considers how Jews acted in Christ’s time as a model of their future relations 19 Vladimir Solov’ev, “Evreistvo i khristianskii vopros,” in Taina Izraila, ed. V. Boikov (St. Petersburg: Sofiia, 1993), 79. First publication in 1884. 20 Solov’ev, “Talmud i polemicheskaia literatura,” 126.

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with Christendom. Having once converted to Christianity, under the right circumstances, Jews would do so again. Solov’ev explains, The blood-thirsty crowd that collected at Golgotha consisted of Jews; but Jews also made up that three thousand and then five thousand people who became baptized according to Peter’s lead and composed the original Christian Church. Anna and Caiafus were Jews, Joseph and Nikodim were too. Judas, who traitorously gave Jesus to be crucified, belonged to the same nation. And what is more important, He Himself, betrayed and killed by the Jews, the Godman Christ, He Himself, was in flesh and human spirit fully a Jew.21

Christ’s Jewish origins are central for Solov’ev, since these underscore his view of Jews as a theocratic people. As Solov’ev conceives it, Jews have the opportunity to rectify the error of earlier days, when they rejected Christ. Of course, Jews should cross over to Christianity only when Christians realize true Christianity in the world. But were that feat to be accomplished, the Jews would be morally obligated to join the theocratic utopia, just as Christians would be morally obliged to accept them. He writes, “We should be united with the Israelites, not rejecting Christianity and not in spite of Christianity, but in the name of and in the strength of Christianity. We are broken off from the Israelites because we are not fully Christians and they are divided from us because they are not fully Jews. The fullness of Christianity embraces Judaism and the fullness of Judaism is Christianity.”22 In “Judaism and the Christian Question” Solov’ev suggests unifying the churches as a way of strengthening Christianity. In Solov’ev’s view, separate peoples, nations, and churches bring differing, but essential, qualities to a theocracy. The three central functions in a Christian theocracy would be government, clergy, and prophecy. These roles must be balanced. The fall of Byzantium, in Solov’ev’s view, was caused by an imbalance; politics dominated over clergy and 21 Solov’ev, “Evreistvo i khristianskii vopros,” 36. 22 Ibid., 35. See also Kornblatt and Rosenshield, “Vladimir Solov’ev: Confronting Dostoevsky,” 70. Two American scholars, Kornblatt and Rosenshield, view Solov’ev’s appeal to a JewishChristian pact as part of Solov’ev’s polemic with Fyodor Dostoevsky. Dostoevsky held that the Jews represented a material force that threatened the very basis of European civilization and which ultimately would lead to the defeat of Christian Europe and the victory of Judaism.

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prophecy, while the victory of Protestantism was caused by too much prophecy as opposed to the power of the government and clergy. Protestantism emerged due to an unhealthy focus on rationalism, since Protestants rationalize the doctrine, creating multiple interpretations of Christ’s message. Luckily for Europe, the Slavs still retain a deep commitment to theocracy. In particular, Russia will play a major role in leading humanity back onto the right path, since it has preserved the appropriate governing structure, the institution of the tsar, whose power has divine legitimization. From their side, the Latin Church will supply the priests, and the Jews and Protestants will contribute prophecy. About the Jews, Solov’ev writes, “And when Jews will enter the Christian theocracy, they will bring their strengths. In the past the prophets represented the best in Judaism; prophecy offered the first appearance of a free and purposeful individual.”23 The role of the Jews as contributors to prophecy emerges from their experience after the fall of the Second Temple. Although they formed the first clergy, their stateless existence has weakened their ability to create a clergy or to develop modern political institutions. As compensation, the Jews concentrated their energies on interpretation and study of their sacred texts, which resulted in the Talmud. Nevertheless, Solov’ev claims, the Talmud is a flawed venture, since it reflects an attempt “to build a fence around the laws” and has led to the creation of “a real labyrinth in which the Jews themselves find it hard to discover the path of true life.”24 Solov’ev believed there was a reason, albeit still unknown, why at the end of the nineteenth century the majority of the world’s Jews found themselves in the Russian Empire. He declared in his article on the Talmud, “Experiencing the whole of human history from its beginnings to our day, Judaism serves as the axle, as it were, of universal history (one cannot say the same for any other nation).”25 Such mystical views about the Jews are not entirely unique among Russian intellectuals of the time, since we find Boris Chicherin expressing a similar conception. In a letter to Solov’ev he writes, “From the Greeks we received secular education, but the Greeks disappeared, and the Jews, despite unheard-of persecutions and being dispersed throughout the world, have 23 Solov’ev, “Evreistvo i khristianskii vopros,” 79. 24 Ibid., 58. 25 Solov’ev, “Talmud,” 135.

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preserved their inalienable national identity and faith. In this one feels the promise of a great mission.”26

***

The image of Solov’ev, friend of the Jews, emerged in his own day. Among Solov’ev’s Jewish friends, one can point to the richest bankers, such as Baron Horace Gintsburg and his son, David, a scholar of Near Eastern languages who amassed one of the best libraries of Judaica in Europe; the rabbi of St. Petersburg, Abraham Drabkin; the journalist Faivel Gets; and the scholar, Nikolai Bakst.27 Among his admirers were also such early Zionists as Shmaryahu Levin and Nahum Syrkin, and the nationalist historian, Semyon Dubnov. The reception of Solov’ev by the Jews of his time was nearly uniformly positive. In the days after his death, two members of the Society for the Promotion of Enlightenment among the Jews of Russia, a liberal organization devoted to the proliferation of secular knowledge, paid tribute to Solov’ev’s memory in public speeches.28 Nikolai Bakst and Mikhail Kulisher emphasized the philosopher’s moral purity. Describing Solov’ev, Bakst recalled Rabbi Eliezer ben Zakkai, who asked five students to define the quality that best leads a person to righteousness. One student answered, “A kind attitude,” another said, “A good friend,” but the fifth and last, Rabbi Eliezer ben Arach, said a good heart. Rabbi Ben Zakkai noted that the last was the superior answer because a good heart combines all the others. Vladimir Sergeevich Solov’ev possessed “the best guiding light in a man’s life to a superlative degree, and his infinitely good heart could not but make him realize the abyss of evil and pain which people have created and create because of religious intolerance.”29 26 B. Chicherin to V. Solov’ev, quoted in a letter from Solov’ev to F. Gets, around 1891, published in Faivel Gets, Ob otnoshenii Vl. S. Solov’eva k evreiskomu voprosu s prilozheniem (Moscow: I. N. Kusherev, 1902), 35. 27 Otchet Obshchestva dlia rasprostraneniia prosveshcheniia za 1900 (St. Petersburg: Obshchestvo dlia rasprostraneniia prosveshcheniia mezhdu evreiami v Rossii, 1901), 40. At the time of Solov’ev’s death and in his memory, Gintsburg funded four scholarships for Jewish students in Petersburg. See also Dimitry Belkin, “Vladimir Solov’ev und das Judentum,” 217. Belkin has made a diagram of all of Solov’ev’s Jewish acquaintances. 28 Bakst’s speech was republished as N. Bakst, “Pamiati Vl. Solov’eva,” Voskhod, no. 11 (1900): 84–93. 29 N. Bakst, “Pamiati V. S. Solov’eva,” in Otchet Obshchestva dlia rasprostraneniia prosveshcheniia za 1900, 44.

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The journalist Mikhail Kulisher took note of Solov’ev’s love for Christianity, insisting that the philosopher wanted Jews to feel the same toward Judaism. Kulisher interpreted Solov’ev as calling for Jews to renew their commitment to Judaism: “V. S. Solov’ev was our defender not only in our struggle with our external enemies. We found support and direction from him in our struggle with our internal enemy, with indifference and the disappearance of faith in ourselves.”30 When referring to Solov’ev’s philosophical ideas, both men focused on his expression of tolerance, emphasizing Solov’ev’s imperative that Christians needed to transform themselves.31 Faivel Gets expressed a related perspective, showing his appreciation of Solov’ev’s love of Judaism.32 In his book, Gets described how he and Solov’ev together “opened new horizons” with their study of the Tanach: With his characteristic sensitivity and quick penetration, Vl[adimir] S[olov’ev] correctly grasped the central governing ideas of Judea in the last centuries of the pre-Christian era, the religious movements and ideological differences between the Sadducees, Pharisees, and Essenes. He understood the spiritual link of the three sects with the origins of Christianity and the intellectual similarity between Christianity and Judaism.33

Even in the Hebrew-language sources, which clearly address a Jewish reader, Zionist-leaning authors do not treat the issue of Jewish conversion. In his 1895 article on nationalism published in the Hebrew-language daily, Ha-Melitz, Shemaryahu Halevi-Levin lauded Solov’ev’s idea that each nation should treat the other as it would want to be treated.34 Nonetheless, Levin noted that these ideas were already contained in Judaism, in the moral of Hillel.35 In a long article from 1902, Nahum Syrkin looked to Solov’ev as a mystic who concentrated on realizing the inner life rather than changing the external world. Although he was to become the spokesman for a synthesis of Zionism and Socialism, at this 30 M. Kulisher, “Rech’,” in Otchet Obshchestva dlia rasprostraneniia prosveshcheniia za 1900, 52. 31 Kulisher, “Rech’,” 53. 32 Gets, Ob otnoshenii Vl. S. Solov’eva k evreiskomu voprosu, 42. 33 Ibid., 10. 34 Shemaryahu Halevi-Levin, “Me-Olam Ha-sifrut: Ha-leumiot me-ha-hashkafa ha mussarit,” Ha-Melitz 32 (7 Feburary 1895): 5–6. 35 Halevi-Levin, “Me-Olam Ha-sifrut,” 6.

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time Syrkin saw the potential for the spiritual growth of the individual through a religious inward orientation.36 Solov’ev apparently also influenced Dubnov’s formulation of Jewish nationalism.37 Writing in Letters on Old and New Jewry, Dubnov acknowledged his debt: The formula of the Christian humanist Vladimir Solov’ev—“Love all other nations as your own”—I modified this way: respect each person’s national character as your own. In the second half of the “[First] Letter” I evaluated various movements in Jewry from an ethical viewpoint. I took note of the servile attitude of assimilators, excluding from this group only such idealists as [Gabriel] Riesser, [Abraham] Geiger and [Morris] Lazarus.38

In his philosopy of nationalism Dubnov builds on the ideas of Solov’ev, attributing to the Jews the highest category, spiritual nationalism.39 The only exception came from Moses Leib Lilienblum, the maskil and then Zionist, who attacked Solov’ev, connecting him with the hostility of the Christian world generally. Lilienblum noted that, although the Enlightenment gave the appearance that Christians had changed, “the wolves had only changed their skin, but not their nature.”40 In Lilienblum’s view modern Christians were no better than their medieval forefathers, engaging in atavistic acts, such as hunting and violence. The pogroms of 1881–82 left a deep scar on Lilienblum, who concluded that the Christian world had not learned “true civilization.”41 How are we to understand the positive attitudes toward Solov’ev among the Jews of his time? For the Israeli scholar Hamutal Bar-Yosef, the fascination with Solov’ev can be explained by several factors, including the epoch’s general attraction to spiritual experimentation and curiosity about different religious

36 Nahum Syrkin, “V. Solov’ev ve-yihusso lisheelat ha-Yehudim,” Sefer Ha-shana 3 (1902): 71–80. 37 Syrkin, “V. Solov’ev,” 374–79. 38 Dubnov, Kniga zhizni, 228. 39 Semyon Dubnov, “Evreistvo, kak dukhovnaya (kul’turno–istoricheskaya) natsiya sredi politicheskikh natsii,” in Pis’ma o starom i novom evreistve, 1–15. 40 Iggorot M. L. Lilienblum Le Y. L. Gordon ( Jerusalem: Hebrew University Magnes Press, 1968), 200. 41 Iggorot M. L. Lilienblum, 200.

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practices.42 In addition, many Jews were interested in the reevaluation of the biographical Jesus and in the focus on his Jewish dimension that was taking place at this time.43 Finally, as Jews acculturated to Russian society, many encountered Christians and Christianity and inevitably looked for positive elements that they could identify with. Solov’ev’s Jewish friends doubtlessly rejoiced about the philosopher’s public defense of Jewish rights. After all, in Alexander III and Nicholas II’s Russia, government officials often had to show their antisemitic credentials in order to advance their careers.44 In this context the number of philosemites was likely small, the majority of Russians were either indifferent to or supported the many restrictions on Jewish economic and social mobility. At the same time the issue of conversion probably did not give the Jews of St. Petersburg much worry since they understood that a theocratic utopia was far from imminent. In addition, among this group there were Jews who already sympathized with Christianity, and these individuals may even have felt that they would join the Church if Christians really did advocate full tolerance. In any case, in the antisemitic atmosphere that reigned in late tsarist Russia, Jews were likely to applaud anyone who promoted tolerance and equal rights for the national minorities. One should note, however, that the Jews of his time misinterpreted Solov’ev, seeing him solely as a friend and an enlightener, while downplaying his Christian theology. For example, describing Solov’ev, Faivel Gets compared him with other well-known Judeophiles: In general one can infallibly attest to the fact that since Lessing’s death there had not been a Christian scholar and writer who had such honor and charm, such wide popularity and such true love among Jews as Vladimir Solov’ev. One can predict that in the future, among noble Christian defenders of Judaism, together with the names of Lessing, Abbé Gregoire, Mirabeau and 42 Hamutal Bar-Yosef, “The Jewish Reception of Vladimir Solov’ev,” in Vladimir Solov’ev: Reconciler and Polemicist, ed. Wi van den Bercken, Manon de Courten, and Evert van der Zweerde (Paris: Peeters, 2000), 380. 43 For a summary of these issues, see Hugh McLean, “Tolstoy and Jesus,” in Christianity and the Eastern Slavs, ed. Robert P. Hughes and Irina Paperno, vol. 2, Russian Culture in Modern Times (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 103–23. 44 Hans Rogger, Jewish Policies and Right-Wing Politics in Imperial Russia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 56–112.

Vladimir Solov’ev and the Jews: A View from Today 211 Macaulay, the Jewish people will utter with reverence, love and gratitude the glorified name of Vladimir Solov’ev.45

Certainly this list of philosemites is unremarkable—Lessing, Abbé Gregoire, Honore Comte de Mirabeau and Thomas Macauley—and yet it is extremely revealing. Gets connects Solov’ev, a figure from the end of the nineteenth century, to a group of earlier individuals from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, individuals associated primarily with the Enlightenment. However, the comparison is not random. Modern Jews lauded those who advocated Jewish integration and equal rights. Nonetheless, one realizes that Gets was wrong to connect Solov’ev with those “liberal” heroes whom he mentions. Solov’ev was no liberal who rejoiced in national diversity for its own sake, but like many Churchmen before him, he supported Jewish equality as the first step toward their total assimilation.

***

Part of Solov’ev’s characterization of the Jews is connected with the distinct needs of his theocracy, but part comes from an intellectual blindness. For example, he lauds events that occurred before Christ’s appearance, such as the patriarch Abraham’s communication with God, Moses and the exodus from Egypt, David’s strengthening of the kingdom, and Solomon’s aptitude for justice, because they reflect in his mind a preparation for Christ’s appearance. Not surprisingly, Solov’ev neglects those events of Jewish history that occur after Christ’s death. One finds little comment about the diaspora after the fall of the Second Temple, and when Solov’ev does deal with Jewish oppression, he condemns it as an example of Christian deficiency, rather than praising Jews for their fortitude. From the Jewish viewpoint, however, events that occurred after Christ’s death have singular importance for internal Jewish life and need not be viewed in terms of goals outside of Judaism. Jews established communities with their own autonomous political institutions, displayed a commitment to the study of religious texts, and in many cases tenaciously defended their right to religious difference. However, Solov’ev viewed post-Second-Temple Jewish culture as 45 Gets, Ob otnoshenii Vl. S. Solov’eva k evreiskomu voprosu, 8.

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flawed, in particular condemning the Talmud as a flaw caused by an overzealous attachment to legality and absence of revelation.46 It should be noted that Solov’ev’s utopia is absolutely modern, connected with modern ideas of freedom and individuality, despite its Christian character. The modern aspect of Solov’ev’s perspective can be seen in the common elements that he shares with such secular utopian thinkers as Saint Simon, Auguste Comte, and Nikolai Chernyshevsky.47 Like them, Solov’ev emphasized the role of human volition in the “divine process.” In addition, like these thinkers, Solov’ev held that Jews, and other relics of corporate and religious entities, were supposed to disintegrate with the formation of a Christian theocracy. In a word, for Solov’ev, as for these thinkers, there was no Jewish problem at all; the Jews were supposed to disappear as a separate group. Since the realization of Solov’ev’s unity of the churches depended on the essential cooperation of the Jews, it is worthwhile to raise the hypothetical question of how he would react if he discovered that Jews, despite the best and irresistibly compelling reasons in the world, refused to surrender their religion and become Christians. In that case, it is inevitable that Jews would become, what they were before, the naysayers, the enemies of Christ and Christianity, with whom Christians are obligated to struggle. Solov’ev himself did not believe in physical coercion, but predictably some of his followers took a more hostile position vis-à-vis Jews and their intransigence. The negative attitudes of Vasily Rozanov and Pavel Florensky are legendary. One has to conclude that, although Solov’ev rejected most of the elements of enlightened secularism, he adopted at least one aspect of Enlightenment thinking regarding Jews, the emancipation exchange. A central part of the En­lighten­ ment paradigm was the idea of “transformation.” Jews were asked to reject traditional life and to modify their dress, language, forms of education, and religious rituals, and these changes were set as conditions. But this conditional principle brought unintended consequences. By accepting Jews conditionally, modern European society, however, set a dangerous paradigm. Others, not Jews themselves, had the right to judge whether Jews had become transformed 46 It is of course a conventional attitude to condemn the Talmud among individuals one might characterize as antisemitic. 47 This is Andrzej Walicki’s viewpoint in his Legal Philosophies of Russian Liberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 158.

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and were now worthy of emancipation. Just as the answer could be positive, so too, it could be negative, i.e., Jews had not made sufficient strides and could not be given equality.48 This is important concerning Solov’ev. Despite all his love for Jews and Judaism, he ultimately envisioned Jews as transforming themselves into something other than they were and fulfilling a role that he assigned to them.

***

If the Petersburg Jewish elite kept silent about their disagreements with Solov’ev, it seems inexplicable that scholars in our own day should refuse to face the unpleasantness of the conversion problem in Solov’ev. Nonetheless, despite an extensive reading of contemporary scholarship, I have to conclude that scholars in our own day from Russia, Europe, Israel, and the United States have roundly ignored this issue. Moreover, I could locate only one scholar, Michael Hagemeister, an expert on Russian antisemitism, who raises substantial doubts about Solov’ev’s philo-Semitic attitudes.49 In his article “Vladimir Solov’ev and Sergej Nilus: Apocalypticism and Judeophobia,” Michael Hagemeister describes the influence on later antisemitic thinkers of Solov’ev’s last work, “The Short Tale of the Antichrist,” which the philosopher included in his book Three Conversations. Sergei Nilus, who first published the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, was deeply impressed by Solov’ev’s last work.50 “In Nilus’ understanding Solov’ev’s depiction of the Antichrist, who gains world power with the help of the ‘mighty brotherhood of the Freemasons’ and the Comité permanent universel—which in Judeophobic reading would stand for the Alliance israélite universelle—was a visionary revelation of the satanic ‘Judeo-masonic world conspiracy’ and its goals.”51 According 48 Klier, Imperial Russia’s Jewish Question, 46–57. Russian officials in the nineteenth century used such arguments to deny Jews civic rights. 49 Michael Hagemeister, “Apocalypticism and Judeophobia,” in Vladimir Solov’ev: Reconciler and Polemicist, ed. Wi van den Bercken, Manon de Courten, and Evert van der Zweerde (Paris: Peeters, 2000), 286–96. See also A. Besançon, “Vladimir Soloviev et les Juifs,” Rigueur et passion (1994): 198–210. Incidentally, Besançon mentions that he does not consider Solov’ev a philosemite, although he does not explain why he says this. 50 Hagemeister, “Apocalypticism and Judeophobia,” 287. 51 Ibid., 289–90. The Alliance israélite universelle was a target of Russian antisemites and especially of Jacob Brafman, the author of The Book of the Kahal (1867).

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to Hagemeister, these ideas gained full currency in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which were likely written with Nilus’s involvement. Although not directly responsible for Nilus’s treatment, Solov’ev himself is not entirely innocent of anti-Jewish sentiment. Hagemeister judiciously, and I would say, generously, evaluates Solov’ev: In his depiction of the Antichrist as a freemason and one who would complete the erection of a socialist society, he shared the political reactionary fears stirred by Russia’s autocratic government among his contemporaries. [. . .] The question whether Solov’ev—who himself, as should be emphasized, was by no means a Judeophobe—was nonetheless inspired in his depiction of the Antichrist by the anti-Jewish and anti-masonic pamphlets of the likes of Gougenot des Mousseaux, would merit a thorough investigation of its own.52

My goal is not to raise unfounded suspicions about Solov’ev, but rather to show that his attitude toward the Jews is far more complicated than previously thought. Although I am not prepared to treat in depth the question of why scholars in our own day have refrained from treating Solov’ev’s attitude toward Jewish conversion, it may be worth noting that some of the pressures I described as affecting the Jews of St. Petersburg, may be present for contemporary scholars as well, i.e., Jews and Christians feel an obligation to respect each other and keep silent about those aspects that might pain one side.53 I will even go further and say that in our post-Holocaust reality Jews and Christians are blissfully happy to find individuals who can serve as bridges of understanding. This desire may even encourage individuals to overlook blatant contradictions that would actually bring the two religions further apart. In our case, the attempts to make Solov’ev serve as a “friend of the Jews” only clouds the other fact, which is that Solov’ev’s kindness was ultimately based on a conditional relationship in which Jews were asked to sacrifice their religion and identity to build a modern Christian theocracy. 52 Ibid., 294. Henri-Roger Gougenot des Mousseaux was a French writer who propagated the idea of a Jewish conspiracy in France. 53 Amy-Jill Levine, The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus (San Francisco: Harper, 2006), 12–14.

Chapter Thirteen Fear and Stereotyping: Vasily Rozanov and Jewish Menace

The question of Rozanov and the Jews, despite having been treated many times, is still a locked conundrum. There are many who, examining the issue, have arrived at the conclusion that Rozanov was a titanic antisemite. Although the claim seems accurate, the fact that it coexists with the opposite view— that Rozanov was actually a crypto philosemite—offers a challenge: what is the final word on the subject?1 One solution out of the cul-de-sac has been taken by scholars who see Rozanov as characterized by oscillations and duplicities. Heinrich Stammler, Emanuel Glouberman and a recent arrival, Laura Engelstein, are exponents of this view.2 By employing dichotomies as a way of understanding Rozanov’s attitude toward the Jews, these scholars admittedly achieve a good understanding of Rozanov, but they do not explain why the Jews are ubiquitous in Rozanov’s thinking, why Rozanov devoted so much intellectual and emotional energy to them. Although Rozanov is no consistent thinker and was remarkably contradictory, I maintain that beneath the overt confusion there is a relatively clear and consistent attitude toward Jews: the Jews function as the projection of Rozanov’s own desires, apprehensions and fears. This claim does not imply that Rozanov had a single view or perspective concerning the Jews. Indeed, he vacillated; his views changed and came back full circle. But Rozanov showed   1 See A. Selivachev, “Psikhologiia iudofil’stva,” Russkaia mysl’ (February 1917).   2 See Heinrich A. Stammler, “Vasily Rozanov as a Philosopher,” Modern Age 28, nos. 2–3 (1984): 143–51; Emanuel Glouberman, “Vasily Rozanov: The Antisemitism of a Russian Judeophile,” Jewish Social Studies 38, no. 2 (1976): 117–44; Laura Engelstein, “Sex and the Anti-Semite: Vasily Rozanov’s Patriarchal Eroticism,” in The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de-Siècle Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 302– 33.

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one constant feature: through his attitudes toward the Jews, he demonstrates his own preoccupations and ideas. Rozanov gives Jews the role of ideological antithesis to his central concerns: Christianity, Russian history, and his core idea of individuality versus the collective. I propose investigating Rozanov and the Jews from a psychoanalytic perspective. Rozanov’s attitude toward Jews can be viewed as a kind of stereotyping, a projection of first, personal, and, only later, culturally generated myths. Stereotyping “is a universal means of coping with anxieties engendered by our inability to control the world,” explains Sandor Gilman, who compares stereotyping with the original act by the child of differentiating between the “I” and the exterior world, with the ongoing struggle of self-creation by identifying those unlike ourselves.3 Gilman considers that, “When . . . the sense of order and control undergoes stress, when doubt is cast on the self’s ability to control the internalized world that it has created for itself, an anxiety appears. . . . We project that anxiety onto the Other, externalizing our loss of control. The Other is thus stereotyped, labeled with a set of signs paralleling (or mirroring) our loss of control.”4 Rozanov’s image of the Jews originates in his fear of the loss of control. Rozanov projects onto the Jews his anxiety about his control of the world and, in particular, his fear of the consequences of his own ideas.5 By projecting his anxieties onto the Jews, Rozanov can “establish an order—the illusion of order in the world.”6 In addition to his articles and books in which the Jews appear in passing, Rozanov wrote four monographs and many articles devoted exclusively to issues concerning Jews.7 In fact, the large number of books and the even greater   3 Sander L. Gilman, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 12.  4 Gilman, Difference and Pathology, 20.  5 Glouberman, Jewish Social Studies, 121. I cannot agree with the view of Emanuel Glouberman who argues that “it is precisely Rozanov’s familiarity with Jewish life and the Jewish mentality that allows him to enter deep within the confines of Judaism, under the guise of objectivism and sympathy, and only then to plunge the twisting knife into Judaism’s soft underbelly, to attack and spread havoc where Judaism is most vulnerable.” Glouberman contradicts himself later in his article when he accuses Rozanov of exaggerating and misconstruing the essence of Judaism (ibid., 127).  6 Gilman, Difference and Pathology, 21.   7 Among Rozanov’s books and articles about the Jews are: “Mesto khristianstvav istorii” (1899), “Chuvstvo solntsa i dereva u drevnikh evreev,” (1903), “Iudaism” (1903) Bibleiskaia poeziia (1912), Evropa i Evrei (1912), Angel Iegovy u Evreev (1914), Oboniatel’noe i osiazatel’noe otnoshenie evreev k krovi (1914), and V sosedstve Sodoma (istoriki Izrailia) (1914).

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number of articles written throughout his career reveal how important Rozanov considered Jews and the Jewish question. Therefore, Rozanov’s strong interest challenges any critic attempting a comprehensive analysis of his work to treat the theme of the Jews with the same seriousness as did Rozanov himself. In his treatment of the Jews Rozanov uses a contrasting slate of negative and positive images and arguments. When he celebrates the Jews, for example, Rozanov portrays them as a model for other nations. He admires how the Jews understand the link between God and the world, how they have given the body a metaphysical significance. Portraying the Jews in families, as parents, lovers, merchants, and members of the religious congregation, Rozanov shows how the Jews simultaneously serve their God by fulfilling the physical needs of the individual and the group. Jews demonstrate the correct way of living that should be emulated by others. When he becomes critical, Rozanov portrays Jews as a mortal threat in a constellation of interlocking contexts: they are the enemies of Christianity, of Russia and Europe, and of the opponents of the individual. The Jews, Rozanov warns, will rise against their enemies and crush them. Concretely, Rozanov presents the Jews using a limited group of images—the people of history; Easterners, murderers, warriors, and pagans; sexually rapacious, and ethnically chauvinistic. He viewed Jews as sexually aggressive and promiscuous, he described Jewish kosherizing methods as signifying that the Jews have a strong drive for bloodletting, and he reignited the fear of Jewish ritual murder. Rozanov, one recalls, wrote incendiary articles in which he asserted the guilt of a Jew, Menachem Mendel Beilis, of the murder of a Christian child. Similarly, he reiterated a common perception of the Jews as invincibly strong and imputed to them the desire to eliminate all other nations. The interesting aspect of Rozanov’s attitude lies less in the symbols he uses than in the way he weaves the fate of the Jews with his own philosophical concerns. This refractive use of the Jews can be found in Rozanov’s earliest article about the Jews, “Mesto khristianstva v istorii” (“The Place of Christianity in History”) (1899). In this work Rozanov reveals his early antipathy toward the Jews. He claims that the Jews possess inbred traits that enabled them to create and then to reject Jesus Christ. According to Rozanov, Christian civilization emerges from two “tribes,” the Arians and the Semites, who oppose each other in everyway. The Greeks

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(Arians)—later to become the Russians—have objectivity, a concern with the world outside oneself, and are presented as joyful and happy. The Jews (Semites) represent the subjective principle. They are fixated with self and are therefore unhappy. The inward search for national exclusivity, Rozanov considers, is the Jews’ deadly sin and it explains why “the more the Jews love God, the less they like people.”8 Furthermore, Rozanov asserts that the same antagonism of the Jews toward their neighbors that characterizes them in the Bible, lives on in the revolutionary movements of modern Europe. Christianity became the possession of the Arians, since the Jews refused Christ’s message of universal joy. Consequently, the Arians, living by Christ’s idea of tselesoobraznost’ (unity), became transformed into Christian civilization and have presently reached the apex of historical development.9 Rozanov writes, Heavenly happiness which is heard in the Gospels, inclines toward worldly happiness penetrated by Arian life; the heavenly life brightens worldly life and already does not negate it. That quality of objectiveness, that turning not toward the inside but toward the outside, which was always so foreign to the Semites, suddenly appeared on the horizon of Arian history, at the moment when they realized their historical and religious significance.10

According to Rozanov, the evolution of history launched by the Gospels has blessed the Arians as the chosen people and has left the Jews cursed. Although he motivates his negative attitude as a reaction to the Jews’ desire for exclusivity, Rozanov actually stereotypes them. He shows his indifference to the Jews by carefully curtailing their complexities, reducing them to only one trait, internal searching, which defines their whole development. Rozanov is solely interested in explaining how Christ could come from Jews, be repudiated by Jews, and yet become the savior for so many peoples, including the Russians. In truth, his entire effort is aimed to show Christian moral superiority; the Jews are only needed for contrast. Why, then, not leave out the Jews completely? Although it is difficult to say, it is possible that Rozanov especially derided Jews so that no one would   8 Vasily Rozanov, “Mesto khristianstva v istorii,” in Religiia i kul’tura: Sbornik statei (Paris: YMCA, 1979), 8.   9 Rozanov, “Mesto khristianstva v istorii,” 20. 10 Ibid., 13.

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find them attractive and no attention would be drawn away from Christianity. In any case, by creating such an unflattering picture of Jewish qualities, Rozanov informs us more about his view of Christianity than anything else. In light of Rozanov’s later work, what is interesting is that during the 1890s Rozanov had complete confidence that Christianity was associated with “joy,” “objectivity,” and the “exterior world,” and that the primary role in the development of humanity was consecrated to it. Christianity represents the ultimate goal of history. As long as Rozanov viewed Christianity as the embodiment of joy and the world, and Judaism as the religion of morose self-absorption, these values could not change. Rozanov did not remain tied to this dichotomy, but soon reversed them. In his 1903 article devoted to the Jews, “Chuvstvo solntsa i dereva u drevnikh evreev” (“The Ancient Jews’ Feeling of the Sun and the Tree”), Rozanov changed his perspective on the Jews. Attesting that he possesses a confession from the 1840s of a Jewish man who converted to Christianity, Rozanov claims that the Jews have secret rituals unknown to non-Jews. According to this document, the Jews view God and nature as linked and therefore they serve God by performing nature rituals and sacrifices. For example, every month the Jews, “wanting to protect themselves from enemies,” run to the defense of the moon and “before the end of the reading, the whole group at once leaps up from the ground and pronounces: ‘as I am jumping before you (moon), but cannot reach you, so too let my enemies not reach me with their evil intentions.’”11 About this ritual Rozanov comments, “Amazing? To dance in front of the moon! And to whisper with it! There is something nice, very nice: the secret snapping with nature.”12 If this inscrutable ritual of “almost whispering” with the moon were not strange enough, it is superseded by even a stranger one: the Jews commit circumcision on trees! Rozanov explains: “When the Jews come to the land (Canaan or in general a new land) and plant any fruit-bearing tree, you should consider its fruit as uncircumcised. For three years it will be uncircumcised for you, it should not be eaten. In the forth year all its fruit (the whole harvest) must be offered for God’s praise. . . .”13 11 Vasily Rozanov, “Chuvstvo solntsa i dereva u drevnikh evreev,” Mir iskusstva 5–6 (1903): 254. 12 Ibid. 13 Rozanov, “Chuvstvo solntsa,” 256–57.

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Although he presents this story in the form of God’s own imperative, which makes the injunction against eating young fruit appear valid for the present, Rozanov does not contradict it. He actually lauds the Jewish custom of “circumcising trees,” considering it normal and natural. In fact, it is not much different from the Christian ritual of baptism, since the circumcised fruit is “considered uniquely Jewish.”14 By way of comment, Rozanov compares the disbelief of Christians with the strong faith of the Jews: “This is more than the ‘language of the birds’ [‘iazyk ptits’] which appears before us, but in which we do not believe; this is realized faith in ‘the language of flowers and fruit.’”15 Although Rozanov approves of tree “circumcision” and moon prayer, there appears to be a strange contradiction between his description of Jewish ritual and his positive evaluation. Rozanov shows the Jews engaged in bizarre rituals and sacrifices, which are, it appears, irrational, pagan, and primitive. Unexpectedly, instead of criticizing or ridiculing the way Jews ask for protection and health, Rozanov applauds it, seeing in these activities the religious fervor and creativity of a race in which bodily well-being has primary importance. Vaunting the Jewish approach to life so much, Rozanov even goes so far as to withdraw his attack against Jewish exclusivity. Now “enlightened” about Jewish life, Rozanov accepts their separation, since in comparison with the Jews, “the sacrifices of other nations, indeed all other nations—are the poorest, the smallest, in several details clearly unskillful.”16 One can explain the change in Rozanov’s attitude to the Jews as a response to his emerging negative feelings about Christianity. While writing his two-volume, Semeinnyi vopros v Rossii (The Question of the Family in Russia) (1903), in which Rozanov examined marriage, divorce, and childrearing in Russia, he started to view Christian doctrine as antithetical to the world. The conviction that the Church did not have a positive attitude toward the family grew stronger during the Petersburg religious-philosophical gatherings (1901–3) in which Rozanov was disappointed with the answers of the clergy to his concrete questions about sex, love, art, and procreation. He considered the problem of the Church’s attitude toward life so important that he devoted to this issue his major philosophical works: Okolo tserkovnykh sten (By the Church’s Walls) 14 Ibid., 256. 15 Ibid., 256. 16 Ibid., 267.

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(1906), Temnyi lik: Metafizika Khristianstva (The Dark Visage: Christianity’s Metaphysics) (1911), and Liudi lunnogo sveta (People of the Moonlight) (1913). According to Rozanov, since the Church values life here below infinitely less in comparison with the hereafter, Christianity denied to the body what belonged to it exclusively. The result of its negative attitude toward bodily pleasure gave rise to people of the “moonlight” who were sexually anomalous due to their rejection of reproduction. Among the people of the moonlight, Rozanov included ascetics, homosexuals, and genitally malformed individuals. In contrast, healthy life-affirming individuals had no choice but to reject Christianity and choose a different religion, the religion of spring. In Dark Visage Rozanov proclaims, More and more we conclude that there are two religions: norms of youth, innocence, energism, and a religion of “oohs,” and “aahs,” moans and dying, like the weakening and decline of a tree after its fruit has already fallen. The religion of world spring, the religion of world autumn. But, I repeat, as such a “refuge of everything fallen,” Christianity entirely does not have the right to raise its head above the sun and youth, innocence and life. Just as some in humanity can cry, for others in humanity there is no reason not to be happy.17

In contrast to the religion of autumn, i.e., of dissolution and death, the religion of spring better serves as the basis for life, since, among other things, it justifies health, strength, and artistic creation. Rozanov discovered the concrete embodiment of his religion of the spring in the Jews. Characterizing his ideal as the affirmation of human happiness, pleasure, sexuality, and wealth, Rozanov ascribed to the Jews exactly these qualities. He admired their religious attitude founded on the spontaneous appreciation of life and purified of the ascetic aspects of Christianity. In the decade following his first article on the Jews, Rozanov revised his image of them from that of a mere primitive tribe engaged in superstitious rituals to a fully mature race having a life-affirming worldview useful for all men and women. Moreover, 17 Vasily Rozanov, Temnyi lik: Metafizika khristianstva (St. Petersburg: F. Vaisberga i P. Gershunina, 1911); republished (Würzburg: Analecta Slavica, 1975), 103.

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the Jews had become a very powerful weapon in Rozanov’s attack against Christianity. For Rozanov, the crux of the matter lay in the Jewish acceptance of sex and procreation, while Christianity could not share that attitude. Emphasizing the importance of sex in his religious ideal by directly linking sex and God, in Solitaria (Uedinenie) he writes that the connection of sex with God is greater than the connection of mind with God, even than the connection of conscience with God.”18 The undeniable advantage of the Jews is that already for thousands of years they have joined together God and sex. In People of the Moonlight Rozanov claims the issue is . . . between the Old Testament and this here new Testament, between “Reproduce! Multiply!” and “If you begin to reproduce and multiply, you cannot be My disciples” . . . The Gospels do not resemble any other book exactly in that, while being humanist, at the same time it is neither “male” nor “female” (the character of “male” or “female” we can reveal in every line, in every jest, in every tone of a human word or act). Already all the words of the Gospels only go as far as “like the Angels in the Heavens. . . .” “Love” in the Gospels is a special sexless love, heavenly-calm, aiding everyone, both “the good and the bad,” and distant from everyone equally, not uniting itself (marriage) with anyone in particular; and there is a feeling beyond sex, mutual to both sexes, spiritually-physical, but terribly slight physically.19

As this passage shows, the deciding factor in judging which religion is correct hinges on the attitude toward procreation and physical love. Procreation and physical love for Rozanov are not biological issues merely, but associated with personal identity. Repeating Nietzsche in the interpretation given by Semyon Frank, Rozanov holds that Christianity is the religion of “distant love” but not the “love of those close.”20 The Christian way of life is offered to humanity in its 18 Vasily Rozanov, Izbrannoe, ed. Iu. Ivask, (New York: Chekhov, 1956), 219. 19 Vasily Rozanov, Liudi lunnogo sveta: Metafizika khristianstva (St. Petersburg: s.n., 1913); republished in (Moscow: Druzhba narodov, 1990), 188–89. 20 Semyon Frank, “Fr. Nietzsche i etika liubvi k dal’nemu,” in Problemy idealizma: Sbornik pod redaktsiei P. I. Novgorodtseva (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Moskovskogo psikhologicheskogo obshchestva, 1902), 137–95.

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entirety, not to the individual man and woman with his or her gender-specific identity. In contrast, Judaism permits the individual man and woman to stamp their individuality in eternity through the passing of genes to their children. For this reason too, Rozanov sympathizes with Judaism. Despite the similarity between his image of the Jews and his ideal religion of spring, Rozanov was not comfortable with his conclusions. His anger was turned against the Jews especially at the time of the Beilis Affair (1911–13) in which a Jew, Menachem Mendel Beilis, was accused of the murder of a young Christian boy for the use of his blood for the Passover ritual. Incidentally, Rozanov not only believed the Jews capable of ritual murder but even claimed that ritual killing must exist if the Jews are really to continue being Jews!21 During the years of the Beilis case, Rozanov unleashed such a virulent attack against the Jews that he was ejected from the Petersburg Religious Philosophical Society for antisemitism (1912). What is especially interesting about Rozanov’s perspective at this time, however, is the way he denounced the Jews, while employing imagery that earlier he had used to claim Jewish superiority. In Bibleiskaia poeziia (Biblical Poetry), for example, Rozanov claims that what is considered in Christianity as sin and shame, is for Rozanov’s Jews aromatic and holy: “[The Jews] have as if lost the natural, organic smell, repulsive—and ‘have become blessedly transformed’ (speaking in the concepts of the Church) as if into the typical, exclusive smell of aromatic plants. Everywhere there is blood, seed, strongly stinking; for them . . . the same blood—but holy, the same seed—but holy.”22 Although it appears that Rozanov celebrates the Jews as before, the exact opposite is true. Describing them by the way they smell and saying that they turn the smell of the flesh from a repulsive stench to pure perfume, at the same time, Rozanov paradoxically attributes this benefit to a disorder: the Jews “lost their natural smell.” Furthermore, Rozanov admits that his description of the Jews is framed in Christian concepts—“speaking in the terms of the Church”— concepts which in Rozanov’s day did not favor Jews. Thus, Rozanov’s praise of the Jewish reversal of Christian values is actually shadowed by doubt. It is not accidental that the success of Jews occurs in the realm of smell, a sense consid21 See the testimony of A. Shteinberg in the chapter of memoirs entitled, “Napeterburgskom perekrestke. Vstrecha s V. V. Rozanovym,” in Druz’ia moikh rannikh let (1911–1928) (Fontenay-aux-Roses: Syntaxis, 1991), 165–66. 22 Vasily Rozanov, Bibleiskaia poeziia (St. Petersburg: A. S. Suvorina, 1912), 17.

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ered the least rational and one most often associated with animals, such as dogs and pigs. While Rozanov seemingly offers the Jews a positive role as bearers of a religion of the body, in fact he depicts the Jews in negative terms as overactive sexually and as resembling animals. The situation is not changed by the fact that Rozanov himself shares the same views as the Jews. In fact, the opposite is true. Instead of supporting Jews as the embodiment of the religion of the body, Rozanov depicts his Jews as negative. Jews show Rozanov’s fear of what may occur when people follow the religion of the spring and reject Christianity. Were the Russians to do this, they would resemble the smelly and barbaric Jews and, more importantly, they would lose hope of gaining the eternal life that is the exclusive attribute of Christianity. Rozanov’s perspective at this time is best revealed in his definition of what it means to be a Jew. For Rozanov, Jewish identity depends above all on circumcision, that is, on a differentiated phallus. According to Rozanov, circumcision is the primary sign of Jewish identification and it forms the indissoluble link between the Jews and their God. This led him to proclaim that Jewish females have no racial identity until they are penetrated by the male. But for Rozanov circumcision also results in unbeatable Jewish power, threatening all humanity. From circumcision (a symbol of Jewish sexual strength), the Jews are assured to become the sole victors of the world. In his essay “Jehova’s Angel among the Jews” (“Angel Iegovy u Evreev”) (1914) Rozanov writes, ‘“Jews feel great.’ Most importantly, very firm on the land. ‘God created the world for realizing circumcision for God,’ and the only ones circumcised for God are us.’ The conclusion is clear. All else is trash and must disappear. And only we will remain.”23 It is interesting that Rozanov uses the first-person plural to describe his enemies, as if he identified with the Jews. This identification is not accidental. Rozanov himself equated sex and the divinity, he himself sought to reach God through sexual practice, but when he attributed it to Jews it became negative. Circumcision—a symbol in Rozanov’s view for the unity of blood, power and sexual fertility—empowers the Jews with the confidence that, when every nation, including Rozanov’s beloved Russia, disappears, Jews will remain. By imagining a mortal threat to Russia’s existence, it is clear that Rozanov was genuinely fearful. But since Jews in reality were oppressed and had little power, it is very probable that they signify something other than Rozanov insisted they 23 Vasily Rozanov, Angel Iegovy u Evreev (istoki Izrailia) (St. Petersburg: Novoe vremia, 1914), 11.

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do. Perhaps the Jews served as an exteriorization of Rozanov’s fears of history; the unity of sex and religion, which the Russians have rejected, will make the Jews victorious. This outrageous claim has credence when one considers that Rozanov viewed Beilis’s supposed ritual murder as a successful battle in the Jewish war against Christendom.24 I think it is now clear that we are dealing with Rozanov’s own psychology and not with real Jews, since Jews are accused of embodying exactly those traits that Rozanov saw as positive. What differentiates Jews, however, is their supposed evil intention, their nefarious use of Rozanov’s thought. In fact, the Jews of Rozanov’s creation need not and probably do not represent real Jews in the world. Sandor Gilman reminds us that, “the qualities assigned to the Other readily form patterns with little or no relationship to any external reality. . . . Patterns of association are most commonly based, however, on a combination of real-life experience (as filtered through the models of perception), and the world of myth, and the two intertwine to form fabulous images, neither entirely of this world nor of the realm of myth.”25 The Russian critic Judit Kagan in her 1990 article says about Rozanov that he “was not interested in facts at all, but in his own fairytale-like generalizations.”26 Professor Kagan is correct: Rozanov’s Jews are neither of this world nor of the realm of myth and certainly receive their meaning from Rozanov’s own psychological needs rather than from any empirical observation of reality. The claim that Rozanov uses Jews to air his anxiety makes sense, when one recalls Rozanov’s relations to the Russian Orthodox Church. Although Rozanov was ambivalent, he remained a believer in Russian Orthodoxy. So often during the same period when he was criticizing Christianity, Rozanov affirmed his Christian faith. For example, Rozanov describes the “sweetness” of the afterlife versus the “bitterness” of life in Dark Visage: “With the birth of Christ, with the illumination of the Gospels, all the worldly fruits suddenly became bitter. The world is bitter in Christ, and exactly because of his sweetness. As soon as you have tasted the sweetest, unheard of, true-heavenly bread, then you have lost the taste for ordinary bread. Who would grab for a potato after a pineapple.”27 Later in 24 See Leonid Katsis, “V. Zhabotinskii i V. Rozanov: Ob odnoi nezamechennoi polemike (19111913-1918),” in Russkaia eskhatologiia i russkaia literatura (Moscow: OGI, 2000), 65. 25 Gilman, Difference and Pathology, 21. 26 Judit Kagan, “Put’ Rozanova,” Obshchestvennye Nauki 5 (1990): 203. 27 Rozanov, Izbrannoe, 106

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Solitaria, Rozanov describes why Christ is necessary. “Can I return to paganism? If I could recover my health fully and be forever well: I could. Is the source not in that we die and fall ill: that is, is that not why and for what reason Christ was revealed to everyone. So that no one was left without Christ.”28 Although Rozanov felt a deep ambivalence toward Christianity, he never entirely left the Church and still held that Christianity was a “beautiful,” “passionate,” and “necessary” religion. That man suffered, that he died and needed the succor of eternal life, drew Rozanov to waver in his rejection of Christianity. Nevertheless, the clash between his frequent affirmations of the body and his ambivalence about the spirit must have definitely led to feelings of disharmony and anxiety. By depicting Jews in negative terms, Rozanov could project these anxieties on the Other and, in this way, retain inner composure. Furthermore, by spreading hate against Jews, Rozanov could ensure that no Russians would be deceived by his earlier praise. What is striking about his changed attitude toward the Jews in 1912, at the time of the Beilis Affair, is the similarity between the new portrait and the earliest one depicted in 1896. The main guilt of the Jew is again his exclusivity, his desire to remain apart, but now he is given a nefarious motive: the Jew secretly wants to conquer Europe. Just as Rozanov portrayed Jews to show off the deficiencies of his ideal religion of the body, so too Rozanov uses Jews to express ambivalence toward the other ideal that he expressed between 1911–15; his view that perfection lies with the individual detached from nation, time and history. In this case, just as in the one earlier, Rozanov uses the Jews to cast off his fear of losing control over his ideas. Rozanov defined the essence of life as connected with organic being, with the prosaic, intuitive and instinctual aspects of life. His ideal life is associated with the contented individual at home among his family. This short aside from Solitaria epitomizes this vision: Peoples, do you want me to tell you a huge truth not told by any of the prophets. . . . —Well? Well? . . . Ah . . . —It is . . . that personal life is higher than everything. —Ha, ha, ha! . . . Ha, ha, ha! . . . Ha, ha! —Yes, yes! No one else said 28 Ibid., 319.

Fear and Stereotyping: Vasily Rozanov and Jewish Menace 227 it: I am the first. . . . Simply sit at home and if you want pick your nose and watch the sun set. —Ha, ha, ha. . . . —Ya, ya: this is more universal than religion. . . . All religions will pass, but this will remain: simply sit in a chair and gaze into the distance.29

Despite the strange form of this expression, which reveals great self-irony and even mockery, Rozanov did hold as one of his fundamental ideals a vision of life placed outside historical risks, intellectual demands and exterior pressures. Other critics have observed this ideal too. Renato Poggioli, for example, writes in his 1962 monograph on Rozanov that, “Rozanov’s psychological anarchism is not so much a protest against society as against history. Once, after having claimed that he was endowed with religious and historical vision, Rozanov denied the same boast by this avowal: ‘Yet, I am only an ordinary man of the passing day, with all his weaknesses, with all his great anti-historic, I don’t want to. . . . ’”30 Heinrich Stammler similarly maintains that Rozanov was happiest when alone, independent of the influence of others. Stammler writes, “[Rozanov] was one of those persons who, in their deep interior lives where no other creature can enter, are cut off completely from the rest of the world and are ultimately confronted only with themselves.”31 In spite of the fact that, or perhaps because his ideal is characterized by an anarchistic rejection of history, civilization and the collective, Rozanov created a Jewish threat aimed exactly at individual passivity. In contrast to the individual outside of history, the Jews are first and foremost portrayed as a group, which sees its purpose in terms of a historical mission. That mission, Rozanov claims, is nothing other than the control of Jews over Russians. Rozanov’s view of a Jewish political threat is revealed in many places, but to show how pervasive the idea had become in his thinking, see this example from a personal letter to Mikhail Gershenzon from 1909 in which Rozanov writes, “. . . I fear that the Jews will grab the history of Russian literature and Russian criticism still more firmly than the banks: and this really ‘is some such 29 Ibid., 217. 30 Renato Poggioli, Rozanov: Studies in Modern European Literature and Thought (London: Bowes & Bowes, 1962), 70–1. 31 Stammler, Modern Age, 146.

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something . . . ’ from Apocalypse or Isaiah (‘you will be the people of kings’).”32 Rozanov imagined the Jews in Old Testament terms as the chosen people and in New Testament terms as the pagans of the apocalypse, while imputing to them the concrete present-day intentions of political revolutionaries. Rozanov claimed Jews used literary criticism to further their political aims. They were behind the revolutionary movement, were involved in a worldwide conspiracy, and were poised to take power. Rozanov’s portrayal of a Jewish menace is clearly linked to his anti-historical, individualistic vision. He was worried that, were his ideal taken seriously, were every Russian to isolate himself from society, Russia would be left undefended and vulnerable. Rozanov expressed his fear of weakness due to Russian passivity in another letter to Gershenzon from 1912, “. . . my soul cries: where have the Russians gone? They’ve all dispersed to the Parises and Berlins. I cry terribly for the Russians, since I think that the tribe itself is dying and in general everything Russian is being trampled upon.”33 In order for the Jews to have the role Rozanov wants them to have, he had to prove they were as evil as he claims they are. Toward this end, Rozanov attributes to the Jews unqualified contempt for their neighbors, the Europeans and Russians. Furthermore, he diminishes the importance of the material aspects signifying difference, seeing them merely as props revealing Jewish evil intent. The Jewish dietary laws, for example, exist only to demean the European. Rozanov writes in Europe and the Jews (1912), “Here the regulations themselves of life are such: ‘Don’t eat with a European.’” This interdiction on eating non-kosher food, however, is actually only a label for Jewish contempt and feelings of superiority. Rozanov continues, “‘The European is filthy for you,’ and you ought to treat him as a ‘filthy creature,’ that is, you must naturally despise and hate him.”34 The Hebrew language has the same function. Hebrew is a secret language purposely made unintelligible to outsiders. The Jews carefully leave out all the vowels when writing and mutter under their breath when speaking. Hebrew becomes therefore an exclusive code meant especially to show disrespect for other peoples. 32 Vasily Rozanov to Mikhail Gershenzon circa August 1909 in “Perepiska V. V. Rozanova i M. O. Gershenzona 1909–1918,” Novyi mir 3 (1991): 223. 33 Rozanov to Gershenzon circa January 1912, “Perepiska V. V. Rozanova,” 227. 34 Vasily Rozanov, Evropa i evrei (St. Petersburg: Novoe vremia, 1912), 13.

Fear and Stereotyping: Vasily Rozanov and Jewish Menace 229

Also aimed to debase the non-Jew are Jewish marriage customs. Rozanov writes, “A marriage having taken place according to all the rituals with a Christian man or woman is considered as ‘nothing’ by the rabbis; it is not considered a marriage with a person, but cohabitation with a farm animal, and betrayal by the Jewish husband or Jewish wife is not considered the betrayal of a spouse, but a fine deed and holy act.”35 Rozanov here depicts Jewish morality as a form of degeneracy; betrayal is given as an imperative. In these examples Rozanov aims not merely to show Jewish difference, but to expose Jewish evil. He shows the Jews as having created a way of life built solely upon their contempt and dislike for Others. His antisemitic images, then, get their actual meaning from Rozanov’s own purpose in stereotyping. Jewish evil intent is connected with the idea that, while his ideas are good, whenever Jews take them up, they become bad. In this way, Jews, and not Rozanov, are responsible for the negative consequences of his ideas. In response to the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, Rozanov’s attitudes towards the Jews became totally jumbled. In Apokalipsis nashego vremeni (Apocalypse of Our Time) (1917–18), Rozanov both incriminated the Jews and sought reconciliation with them. This contradiction emerged from the changed circumstances of Russia and the situation of his own life. In 1917, impoverished and without any means of support, Rozanov faced the October Revolution with despair. In the revolution he mystically envisioned the apocalypse signifying the end of Russia and Christianity. Although Rozanov blames Russia’s destruction on both Christianity and Russian literature for creating a situation in which Russians were weak and vulnerable, the Jews are also implicated. Rozanov writes (1917–18), “Socialism in general is flat, a board, and it is the immeasurable naivete of the Jews that they accepted it and believe in such a stupid sum of adding machines.”36 In Apocalypse of Our Time Rozanov brings forth the same arguments he had presented earlier. The Jews are revolutionaries, they refuse to join with other nations, preferring “eternally to wear the left shoe on the right foot”; an allusion to the Jewish refusal to unite with the other nations. But simultaneously, 35 Rozanov, Evropa i evrei, 16. 36 Vasily Rozanov, Apokalypsis nashego vremeni (Sergeev Posad: Ivanov, 1917–18); republished in Vasily Rozanov, Izbrannoe, eds. E. Zhiglevich and Heinrich A. Stammler (Munich: A. Neimanis, 1970), 487.

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Rozanov perceives the Jews’ positive qualities. The Jews care more for happiness than for empires, value honesty and morality more than the Russians, and, what is most touching, they love the Russians tenderly. Rozanov writes about the Jews: “. . . among the piggish traits of Russians, there is, really, one dear quality, intimacy and sincerity. It is the same for Jews. And with exactly this trait he joins himself terribly with the Russians.”37 In one Rozanov addresses the Jews directly and makes a reconciliation with them: Live Jews. I bless you in everything, just as was the time of apostasy (the unhappy time of Beilis), when I condemned you for everything. Really in you of course is the “sprout” [“tsimes”] of universal history: i.e., there is the “little seed” of the world which “we alone have preserved.” You live by it. And I believe, “all the nations will be blessed for this.” I do not believe in the hatred of the Jews for all the nations. In the darkness, in the night, we do not know: I have observed the extraordinary, zealous love of Jews for the Russian and the Russian land. Let the Jew be blessed. Let the Russian be blessed.38

In this passage, which reads like a confession, Rozanov seems to repudiate all his vicious denunciations toward the Jews. Under the influence of the war, revolution, and starvation, perhaps Rozanov finally came to see that the Jew is not the enemy, but that he stands with the Russian. On the slightly incongruent grounds that they preserve the original “seed of the world” and remain a friend of Russia, Rozanov blesses the Jews. Although he openly expresses contradictory views of the Jews at the time of the October Revolution, for Rozanov Jews have the same function as always: they are a projection of his inner anxieties. By depicting the Jews as Russia’s friend, Rozanov clears himself of any guilt for the enmity between the Jews and the Russians. And with his simultaneous condemnation of the Jews, he attributes all the crimes of the revolution to Jewish evil. Although this hypothesis 37 Rozanov, Apokalypsis nashego vremeni, 484. 38 Ibid., 510.

Fear and Stereotyping: Vasily Rozanov and Jewish Menace 231

appears farfetched, it is plausible when one considers that Rozanov may have indeed feared that he was responsible for causing the revolution. In Apocalypsis Rozanov appears especially eager to exonerate himself for his own responsibility for the revolution. Rozanov accuses the clergy, the Christian doctrine, Christ, Russian literature, the Jews, and the European revolutionaries, but he fails to mention himself. Yet, if the Jews are responsible, those who incited enmity against Jews are to blame for engendering their wrath; if Russian literature is responsible, those who were among its main practitioners are responsible; if Christianity is implicated, those who weakened it have to share in the guilt of leading Russian society astray. Since Rozanov played a large role in connection with Russian literature, the Church and Jews, he may have felt a psychological burden and could have wanted to exonerate himself exactly of those actions and writings connected with the causes of the revolution. Although he is silent about his role in Russian literature, at this time Rozanov publicly became reconciled with Jews and Christianity. Perhaps Rozanov depicted Jews as Russia’s close friends in order to appear a writer of love and reconciliation and not as one who stirred up hate and violence. Similarly, Rozanov also reconciled himself to the Church, making a full confession and receiving final unction from a Russian Orthodox priest before his death. Clearly, Rozanov felt uncomfortable about his earlier declarations against the Church and wanted to relieve himself of any blame for undermining the faith of Russians in Christianity. In these ways, Rozanov lessened his responsibility for the weakness of the Church in fighting the atheism of the revolution and for inciting Jews against Russians. Also, by blaming the Jews, Rozanov again passes the final guilt onto the Jewish scapegoat, clearing himself of any negative role. Although my argument would be greatly strengthened by a confession from Rozanov that he wanted to relieve his guilt in 1917–18, we do not have such evidence. Nevertheless, a watertight case can be built that Rozanov felt anxiety over his philosophizing, and especially in its relations to the Jews. The evidence is his paradoxical behavior in 1912 and 1917. In 1912, for example, Rozanov wrote provocative articles accusing Mikhail Beilis of ritual murder, while simultaneously defending Beilis with articles that appeared under the pseudonym Vavarin in Russkaia mysl’. Leaving aside the subject of the impact on society of these contradictory messages, it is clear that

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such behavior reveals inner contradictions. Similarly, in 1917 Rozanov was neither capable of exclusively condemning nor approving of the Jews. In this vacillation Rozanov vividly shows his use of the Jews as his emotional and philosophical alter ego. Not coincidentally, the Jews’ attitude toward the Russians, as he portrays it, mimics exactly his own views. The two polar opposites of friendship and anger reflect his ambivalent attitudes about his own responsibility for the revolution. Such philosophical and behavioral inconsistency in 1912 and 1917 unmistakably exposes Rozanov’s anxiety about his ideas and life, an anxiety that led him to stereotype and viciously distort the Jews in his descriptions. Although my claims are admittedly speculative, by applying a psychoanalytic model to Rozanov, one finally understands why the Jews appear in Rozanov’s thinking. In fact, the large space devoted to the Jews in Rozanov’s oeuvre, the centrality of their figure and their function as a mirror point to a role of towering dimensions, and yet no one has been able to explain clearly why the Jews are needed and why Rozanov treats them so disdainfully. My research has shown, however, that the Jews actually give order to Rozanov’s thinking in a way that no other concept or image can. The Jews function as Rozanov’s bad conscience and serve as the voodoo doll into which he placed his pins of worry and anxiety concerning his philosophy. Therefore, Jews mirror anxiety occurring within Rozanov himself, and not the real situation in Russia. By examining Rozanov’s method of stereotyping, then, we gain new insights into his inner mind and, more importantly, into the writings of this troubled and ultimately cruel philosopher.

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Index

A

Achimeir, Abba, 178, 187–188, 191 Adler, Eliyana, 3, 5 Advanced Women’s Courses (Bestuzhev Institute), 31 Ahad-Ha’am, 9, 40, 49, 57, 78, 160-161 Aizman, David, 88, 112, 117–119 Alexander I, Tsar, 144, 200 Alexander II, 41–42, 200 Alexander III, Tsar, 35, 115, 210 al-Husseini, Amin, 189 An-sky, Semyon, 86, 112, 151 Bundists as veritable saviors, 106–108 debates of maskilim, 102 description of, 90 Dybbuk, The, 87 fictional writing, 88–89 The First Crack: A Novella [From the 1870s], 98–100 idealism of Judaism, 102 internal life of Jewish revolutionaries, 104, 108–109 “Istoriia odnogo semeistva” (“A Family History”), 91, 91n14 Jewish exploitation of the peasantry, 92 “Mendl-Turk” (“Mendel Turk”), 92–94 “Na torgakh (rasskaz)” (“At the Auction [A Tale]”), 91–92 Pionery (Pioneers), 98, 101–104 on pogroms of October, 105 political ideas, 91 portrayal of Jewish rituals, 97 Roskies’s essay on, 86 study of Jewish folklore, 109 subject of gender, 103 Sud’by evreiskogo naroda (Fates of the Jewish People), 124

as a tutor, 90 “Tvorcheskoe samosoznanie” (“Creative Self- Consciousness”), 124 “Under a Mask,” 100–101 “V meshchanskoi sem’e” (“In a Bourgeois Family”), 95–97 V novom rusle: Povest’ (In a New Way: A Novella), 105–109 V novom rusle (In a New Way), 89 writings about emigration, 97 antisemitism, 10, 25, 35, 58, 66, 69, 76–77, 83, 92, 115n14, 116, 120, 143n13, 162, 172, 175, 195, 198–199, 201–203, 210, 213, 215, 223, 229 Arlosorov, Hayim, 172 Arlosorov Affair in 1933, 189

B

Babel, Isaac, 120, 122 Bagritskii, Eduard, 122 Bakhrushin, S. V., 57 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 169 analysis of Dostoevsky’s novels, 88–89 Bakst, Nikolai, 207 Balaban, Majer (Meir), 34 Balfour Declaration, 175, 183 Bar-Yosef, Hamutal, 209 Begin, Menachem, 190–191 Beilis, Menachem Mendel, 217, 223, 231 Beilis Affair (1911-13), 35, 223, 226 Belkin, Dmitryi, 198 Bely, Andrey, 125 Ben-Ami (Mark [Mordecai] Rabinovich), 9, 34, 49 Ben-Yosef, Shlomo, 190 Berdiaev, Nikolai, 124 Bershadsky, Sergey, 24

276 Index Bialik, Hayim Nahman, 14, 40, 56–57, 115n15 Bogrov, Grigorii, 94, 112 Zapiski Evreia (Notes of a Jew), 94 Bolsheviks, 18, 109, 122 revolution of 1917, 58, 229 Borovoi, Saul Iakovlevich, 53, 67–69 antisemitism, 66–67 “bourgeois” intellectual history, 62 contribution to studies of Jewish history, 53–54 criticism of Jewish radicals, 59–60 criticization of Jewish Cossacks, 63–64, 69 economic issues, 60–63 economic-legal position of Polish Jewry, 61–62 as faculty at the Commercial Institute in Odessa, 56 family background, 56 Jewish agricultural colonization, 61–62, 69 on the Jews in Ukraine, 67 kandidatskaia (dissertation), 56 link between Jews and non-Jews, 65 monographs, 53, 56 Odessa and, 57–58, 65–67, 66n48 Ukrainian-Jewish alliance, 64 Vospominaniia (Memoirs), 56–57 Bramson, Leon, 3, 28 ideal school, 8 Brauder, Ilya, 141 Brutskus, Boris, 36 Brutskus, Julius, 167 Bundists, 18, 35, 91, 98, 106–108, 161–162 bytopisateli, 88

C

Chaadaev, Pyotr, 124 Chernomorskaia kommuna (Blacksea Commune), 54 Chernov, Viktor, 98 Chernyshevsky, Nikolai, 104, 104, 212 Chto delat’, 102 Chicherin, Boris, 206 Chirikov Affair, 162, 194 Chlenov, Efim, 161 Chudakova, Marietta, 153 Churchill, Winston, 185 Comte, Auguste, 212

Croce, Benedetto, 179n5 Curtis, James, 151

D

Decembrists, 124 Derzhavin, Gavriil, 63 Dinaburg, Ben-Zion (Dinur), 16n43, 57, 30 Dizengoff, Meir, 9, 49 Dohm, Wilhelm, 200 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 88, 102, 110, 129, 169, 202, 205n22 Drabkin, Abraham, 207 Dreyfus trial in 1894, 98 Dubnov, Semyon, 9–10, 17, 29–30, 32–36, 40, 49, 59, 68–69, 105, 207 Achievers, establishment of, 74 Book of Life, 71 books and memoirs, 71, 71n3, 80 chances for spiritual nation’s preservation, 73 concept of autonomy, 73–76 conditions of nationhood, 72 on Council of the Four Lands, 73–75 establishment of schools with instruction in Hebrew, 79 Folkspartay, establishment of, 74–75, 89 history of Hasidism, 81 The History of Hasidism, 80–81 hostile to Zionism, 78 ideas on Jewish nationalism, 70–71 Jewish cultural activities in Palestine, 77–78 Jews in diaspora and assimilation, 71–72 Jews of Palestine, 79 Letters on Old and New Jewry, 209 Letters on Old and New Judaism, 29, 71–73, 82 Reminiscences and Memoirs: Materials for a History of My Time, 71 World History of the Jewish People, 71, 78 on Zionism, 77–78, 82 Dubnov-Erlich, Sophie, 83 Duker, Abraham, 34

E

Eliezer ben Zakkai, Rabbi, 207 Ehrenburg, Ilya, 64 Eikhenbaum, Boris, 140 An Ancient Poem About a Chess Game, 143–149

Index 277 antisemitism, 143n13 assimilation with Jewish life, 140–141 expression of Jewish qualities, 149 Hokhmat ha-Shi’urim (Science of Measurements), 145 image of the Jew, 143 literary battle with the Soviet literary establishment, 139 Moi vremennik, 139, 144–145 statement of identity, 150 study of byt (literary life), 153–154 translation of Euclid’s Elements into Hebrew, 144–145 translation of Franker’s Course in Mathematics, 145 Ya’akov Eichenbaum, portrait of, 143–149, 154–155 Eikhenbaum, Vsevolod, 150, 150n42, 153 Engelstein, Laura, 215 Evreiskaia biblioteka, 24 Evreiskaia mysl’, 55 Evreiskaia shkola, 10 Evreiskaia starina, 33–34, 36, 55 Evreiskii vestnik, 55

F

Fedorov, Boris, 59 Feinberg, David, 31 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 131 Fialkov, Hayim, 3, 14, 16 Formalism, 139–140, 153 Frank, Semyon, 222 Frankel, Jonathan, 106n40 Frug, Semyon, 113–115, 115n13, 117

G

gabai, 13 Galant, Il’ia Vladimirovich, 57, 68 Galpern, Yakov, 10 Ganelin, Rafail, 53 Gegenwartsarbeit, 160, 162 Gershenzon, Mikhail Osipovich, 123–126, 228 associates with cosmic perfection, 131 biograph, 126 books and articles, 126–127 career after the revolution, 137 comparison with Pushkin and Heraclitus, 128–130, 137

connection with the Russian intelligentsia, 134 Correspondence from Two Corners, 136–137 explanation of biblical narration, 130–132 Fates of the Jewish People, 130, 132–135 Gulfstream, 128 Key to Faith, 130–135, 137 Mudrost’ Pushkina (Pushkin’s Wisdom), 124, 127–128, 137 “Narod, ispytuemyi ognem” (“The People Tried by Fire”), 134 relationship of humanity to God, 130–131 Gessen, Yuly, 30, 34–35 Gets, Faivel, 202, 207–208, 210–211 Gilman, Sandor, 216, 225 Ginsburg, Saul, 3, 30, 36-37, 43, 55, 59 Gintsburg, Baron Horace, 115, 202 Gintsburg, David, 30–32, 36–37 Ginzburg, Lidiia, 152 girls education, 5 Glotov, Dormidont Mikhailovich, 153 Glotova, Nadezhda Dormidontovna, 141 Glouberman, Emanuel, 215 Goldstein, Yossi, 3 Gol’fstrem (Gulfstrem), 124 Gordon, Judah Leib, 81 Gorlinskii, Moisei, 64 Gorny, Yosef, 165 Got’e, Yury, 126 Graetz, Heinrich, 25–26, 30 Greenberg, Uri Zvi, 178, 187 Gregoire, Abbé, 200, 211 Grekov, B. D., 57 Grodno Teachers Academy, 16n44 Grossman, Vasily, 64 Gubar, Oleg, 39 Guenzburg, Horace O., Baron, 115n13 Gurovich, Moses, 59

H

Ha-Cohen, Morgekhai Ben, 115n13 Hagemeister, Michael, 213–214 Halevi-Levin, Shemaryahu, 208 Ha-Melitz, 208 Harkavy, Avram, 21–23, 25–27 Harkavy, V. O., 10 Hashilo’ah, 49 Hasidism, 57, 80–81, 89, 92, 94

278 Index Haskalah, 44 Hatot neurim (Sins of My Youth), 45 Hayesod, Keren, 163 Hebrew publishing house, 56 Hebrew’s revival in the Russian empire, 9 ḥeder, 2, 6 alternatives to, 4 amount spent on, 6 curriculum, 6–7 history in Russian empire, 3–4 metukan (improved ḥeder), 13 positive attitudes toward, 9–11, 14–15 positive effects of, 8 prohibition of secular subjects, 7 reasons for survival of, 7 reformed (modern), 11, 15 statistics about, 11–13 Ḥeder Commission, 14 Heilbrenner, Anke, 35 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 134 Herlihy, Patricia, 39 Herzen, Alexander, 124 Herzl, Theodor, 49, 98, 160, 180 Herzl Gymnasium, 79 Historical Ethnographic Commission, 26–29, 33 Hofmeister, Alexis, 49n33 Hovevei Tsion (Lovers of Zion), 48

I

Ibn-Ezra, Abraham, 145 Idelson, Avram, 3, 10, 160–161, 167 Iosifovich, Musia, 64 Ivanov, Viacheslav, 124–125 Izrael’son, Ia., 57

J

Jabotinsky, Vladimir, 57, 82, 115n15 “About an Iron Wall: Arabs and Us,” 183–184 adoption of Synthetic Zionism, 156, 159–161 antisemitism, 162–163 Arab minority rights, 164–165 assimilation, 170–172 Bund i sionism (The Bund and Zionism) (1906), 161–162 experiences as a Russian subject, 196

The Five, 167–173 Helsingfors Conference of 1906, 160–161, 175–176, 193 image of violence and aggression, 177–196 Jewish diaspora nationalism, 162 New Zionist Organization (NZO), 189 “On Adventurism,” 188 “O zheleznoi stene” (“On the Iron Wall”), 164–165, 184, 195 Piatero (The Five), 156 as a politician with liberal vision, 165, 176 Rasswjet, 163 relationship to Etzel, 189–190 respect for Arab intelligence, 185 Revisionism’s link with liberalism, 173–175 significance of the 1905 Revolution, 156–159, 166–167, 175–176 Sippur yamai (Story of My Life), 156 situation of Jews in the Polish-Russian conflict, 195–196 Story of My Life, 166–167 “The Ethics of an Iron Wall,” 183–185 The War and the Jews, 191 Jakobson, Roman, 139–140 Jewish Agricultural Colonization, 62 Jewish Colonialization Association ( JCA), 12 Jewish Committee for the Relief of Victims of War, 15 Jewish culture in Russia, 112 Jewish education in Russia, 2, 10, 18. see also heder amount spent on, 6 language of instruction, 16, 16n44 study of Yiddish as an academic subject, 17 Jewish Encyclopedia, 37 Jewish Ethnographic Expedition, 109 Jewish Historical Ethnographic Society, 33–35 Jewish home schools, 12 Jewish integration in Russian life, 140 Jewish intelligentsia of Odessa, 39–40, 51–52 paradoxical expressions about, 40 portrayal of, 40–41 Jewish National Workers Alliance, 83 Jewish press of Odessa, 43n20 Josephus, Flavius, 23

K

Kadet liberal principle, 123

Index 279 Kantor, E., 16 Katsenelson, Jacob, 3, 6, 10, 37 Katsenelson, Lev, 10, 32 Katz, Samuel, 189 Khin, Rachel, 88, 112, 119 Khodasevich, Vladislav, 126 Khvolson, Daniel, 21–22, 32 King, Charles, 38 Kireevsky, Ivan, 124 Kiryah ne’emanah (Samuel Joseph Fuenn), 21 Klausner, Joseph, 30, 40, 49 Kliuch very (Key to Faith), 124 Konshtam, Avram, 10 Kook, Abraham Isaac, Rav, 189 Korolenko, Vladimir, 98 Kovner, Abram, 58–60 Kozmin, B. P., 57 Kreinin, Miron, 10 Krestovsky, Vsevolod, 91 Krol, Mikhail, 10 Krutikov, Mikhail, 110, 110n50 Kulisher, Mikhail, 207–208 Kulisher, Ruben, 42

L

Landau, Alfred, 24 Laqueur, Walter, 133–134 A History of Zionism, 133–134 Lavater, Johann Caspar, 200 Lavrov, Pyotr, 90, 98 Lebedev, Sergei, 53 Lenin, Vladimir, 175 Lermontov, Mikhail, 153–154 Lerner, Yehuda-Yosef, 58 Lestschinsky, Jacob, 36 Levanda, Lev, 23, 42–43, 112, 120 Levin, Shmaryahu, 207 Lilienblum, Moses Leib, 40, 45–46, 51, 102 view of modern Christians, 209 Lotman, Lidiia, 151 Lur’e, Il’ia, 53 Lur’e, Zalman, 115n13 Luzzato, Samuel David, 145

M

Macauley, Thomas, 211 Magnes, Shulamit, 58 Mandelshtam, Osip, 122

Marek, Pinkhus (Petr), 3, 10–11 Markish, Shimon, 112n6 Markon, I., 31 maskilim, 2, 4 May Laws of 1882, 25, 92, 111, 115, 201 Mendelsohn, Moses, 200 Mezhdu dvkh revoliutsii (Between Two Revolutions), 125 Mikhailovsky, Nikolai, 98, 102, 104 Mikhail, Kulisher, 30, 195 Miliukov, Pavel, 175 Morgulis, Menasheh, 3, 6–7, 22, 43n20, 50 Munk, A., 23

N

Naiditsch, Isaac, 167 “Nasledstvennyi podsvechnik” (The Family’s Candlestick) (1861), 41 Natkovich, Svetlana, 157 Nekrasov, Nikolai, 91 Nicholas I, 41, 200 Nicholas II, 210 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 131 Nilus, Sergei, 213–214 Notkin, Nota, 62 Novoe vremia, 201

O

Ocherk etnografii evreiskogo narodonaseleniia v Rossii (Moses Berlin), 21 October Revolution, 53, 137, 229–230 Odessa myth, 38 reality and fictional treatments, 39 scholarly literature on Odessa, 40n9 of Zionist dominance in Odessa, 48–51 Odessa’s Commercial Institute (Odesskii institute narodnogo khoziaistva), 56 Of Bygone Years, 46–48 Oksman, Iulian, 57 OPE, 4–5, 7, 11 Collection of Articles on Jewish Literature and History, 23 designing curriculum for schools, 16 education programs of 1890s, 8 organization and curriculum of OPE’s modern Jewish school, 8 St. Petersburg, 15, 17, 29 OPE School Commission, 12

280 Index OPOIaZ (Obshcestvo izucheniia poeticheskogo iazyka; Society for the Study of Poetic Language), 140 Orbach, Alexander, 115n13 Orlova, Elizaveta Nikolaevna, 126 Orshansky, Ilya, 23–25, 43n20, 57 Osipovich, Mikhail, 125, 131 Otechestvennaia istoriia (Fatherland History), 53

P

Pale of Settlement, 10, 28, 40, 58, 98, 104, 201 Passover, Abraham, 28, 42 Peel Commission, 175–176, 185n30, 191 Perezhitoe, 59 Petersburg Religious Philosophical Society for antisemitism, 223 Petrun’, Fedor Evstaf ‘evich, 57 Picheta, V. I., 57 Piksanov, Nikolai, 137 Pinsker, Leo, 40, 42, 48, 57 Pisarev, Dmitry, 58–59 Piłsudsky, Josef, 195 Poggioli, Renato, 227 pogrom theme in the Russian language Jewish literature between 1881 and 1914, 119 Konets vykhodtsev (The End of the Emigrants) (1896), 115–117 “Moia golubiatnia” (“My Dovecoat”), 120–121 “Na chuzhbine” (“Abroad”), 117–119 “Ranniaia mogila (iz zapisnoi knizhki)” (“Early Grave [From a Sketchbook]”), 113–115 in Ukraine in 1918-20, 121–122 private schools for Jews, 5–7 ḥeder ‘s curriculum, 6 Pushkin, Alexander, 14, 53, 102, 127–128, 154 deficiency and satiety, 127 holism and deficiency, 127

R

Rabinovich, Osip, 41–44, 51, 57, 143, 148 Raeff, Marc, 138 Rassvet, 41–42, 44, 115 closure of, 43 Jewish life, 42–43

understanding of emancipation, 42 Ravesman, A., 10 Ravnitsky, Yehoshua, 9, 49, 56 Reines, Masha, 98 Revisionist Zionism, 156, 173–175, 177, 179, 186, 188 Romanov, B.A., 57 Roskies, David, 86, 101, 151 Rozanov, Vasily, 215 Apokalipsis nashego vremeni (Apocalypse of Our Time), 229–231 attitude toward the Jews, 215–216, 220, 229–232 Bibleiskaia poeziia (Biblical Poetry), 223 Christian civilization, 217–218 Christian way of life and values, 222–224 circumcision for God, 224 Dark Visage, 221, 225 essence of life, 226–227 feelings about Christianity, 217–222 Jewish dietary laws, 228 monographs and articles, 216–217 necessity of Christ, 226 People of the Moonlight, 222 portrayal of a Jewish menace, 228 portrayal of Jews, 217, 226 reconciliation with Church, 231 rituals and sacrifices, 219–220 Solitaria, 226 tree “circumcision” and moon prayer, 220 view of a Jewish political threat, 227–228 Russian Ethnographic Society, 21 Russian Imperial Free Economic Society, 11 Russian Jewish historical society, 29 Russian Jewish historiography, 19–20, 37 about structure and character of Jewish communities, 20 achievements of the Jewish community, 30 anti-Jewish attitudes, 20–21 anti-Jewish May Laws, 25 antisemitism, 24–25 Berlin’s study, 21 Dubnov’s vision, 30–36 Fuenn’s study, 21 idea of Jewish nationalism, 30 institution of higher Jewish learning, 31–33 Jewish life in the northwest, 24–25

Index 281 Jewish people in general and Russian Jews, 26–27 Jews writing in Russian, 23 OPE sponsorship of historical studies, 23–24 professional Jewish historians, 21–22 Russian, from 1800 to 1850, 20 1840s, 20 1860s, 21 1870s, 24 1890s, 30 sociological conception of history, 30 study of Jewish society, 33–36 successful Jewish ventures, 22 systematic bias in Russian law, 25 Russian-Jewish literature, 87–88 treatments of a pogrom, 112–114, 119. see also pogrom theme in the Russian language Jewish literature Russian schools, 7 Russkie vedomosti, 163

S

Sabashnikov, Mikhail, 125-126 Safran, Gabriella, 98 Saker, Jacob, 50 Scharfstein, Zevi, 3 Schectman, Joseph, 167 Schlör, Joachim, 38–39 School Commission of the Society for the Promotion of Enlightenment, 2 Seidenman, Arnold, 167 Sforim, Mendele Mocher, 40, 46, 48, 56–57 Shatzky, Jacob, 3 Shavit, Yaacov, 178 Shestov, Lev, 124, 132 Shklovsky, Viktor, 139–140 Shomer movement, 178 shraybers, 6 Shrayer, Maxim, 39 shtadlanim, 180 Shteinberg, Aron, 76 shtetl, 16, 41, 45, 48, 51, 58, 142 “Shtrafnoi” (The Punished) (1859), 41 Shumsky, Dimitry, 78 Silver Age culture, 125 Simon, Leon, 46 Simon, Saint, 212 Sion, 23

Slezkine, Yury, 140 Sliozberg, Genrikh, 28 Smolenskin, Peretz, 102 Society for the Promotion of Artisans and Farmers, 115, 207 Society for the Promotion of Enlightenment, 41, 49, 51 Sokolyansky, Mark, 67 Solov’ev, Vladimir, 198 article on the Talmud, 206 attitude toward Jewish conversion, 214 characterization of the Jews, 211–213 Christ, view of, 204–206, 211–212 Christian self-realization, 199 on Christian theocracy, 203–206, 212 depiction of the Antichrist, 213–214 as friend of the Jews, 202, 207–208, 214 interest in Judaism, 202–203, 208, 211–213 The Justification of the Good, 201 “Kratkaia povest’ ob Antikhriste” (“A Short Story about the Antichrist”), 199 The Meaning of Love, 201 The National Question in Russia, 201 Russia and the Universal Church, 201 Sorin, Nikolai, 167 Sosis, Israel, 34, 36, 55 Soviet historical and educational institutions, 1920s, 55 Stammler, Heinrich, 215, 227 Stampfer, Shaul, 3 Stanislawski, Michael, 3, 157 Stankevich, Nikolai, 124 Stanton, Rebecca, 39 Stavsky, Abraham, 189 Sternberg, Lev, 34 Sternhell, Zeev, 180 Strashun, A., 16 Struve, Pyotr, 194 Syrkin, Nahum, 207–208

T

Talmud Torah schools, 7 Tanny, Jarrod, 38 Taratakovskii, Arsenii, 53 Tcherikower, Elias, 30 Tiomkin, Vladimir, 167 Tolstoy, Lev, 153–154, 202 Torah and Talmudic learning, 4

282 Index Trivus, Israel, 167 Trunk, Isaiah, 30 Tsederbaum, Aleksandr, 23 Tynianov, Iurii, 139–140

U

Uspensky, Gleb, 91, 97

V

Va’ad Arba Aratsot (Council of Four Lands), 30 Vaksberg, Arkady, 142 Valk, S. N., 57 Veidlinger, Jeffrey, 35 Vestnik russkikh evreev, 23 Vinaver, Maxim, 27–28, 175, 194 Vinogradov, Pavel, 126 violence against Jews in Russia, 1871 to 1919 casualties in pogroms of 1881-82, 111n1 Elizavetgrad pogrom of 1881, 115n13 Kishinev pogrom, 111 physical violence and legal disabilities, 122 pogrom theme in the Russian language Jewish literature, 112 responsibility for the pogroms, 111n2, 112 Voskhod, 117

Vysshie kursy vostokovedeniia (Higher Courses in Eastern Studies), 31

W

Weizmann, Chaim, 82, 184–185 Wiesel, Elie, 83n49 Wischnitzer, Mark, 34 Wissenschaft des Judentums, 22

Y

Yaroshevsky, Sergei, 112, 115–116 Yievin, Yehoshua, 178, 187 Yushkevich, Semyon, 88

Z

Zagorodskii, Evgenii Aleksandrovich, 57 Zhilkin, I. V., 123 Zhitlowski, Hayim, 90, 98 Zinberg, Israel (Sergey), 30, 34, 55, 59–60, 68 Zionism, 9, 35, 48–49, 51, 55, 57, 77–78, 82, 89, 122, 124, 132–135, 156, 158–165, 167–169, 171–172, 175, 177, 180–188, 191, 208 Zionists, 18, 35 Zipperstein, Steven, 3, 40, 44 Zuta, Chaim, 3