The Plight of Jews in Russia
Fiddler on the Roof
John Good, 2013
How do you sustain tradition in the face of progress? To what extent are ancient customs compatible, viable, or even desirable within a changing world? It’s a problem the Jews in Russia have been struggling with for over two hundred years.
Until the end of the 18th century virtually the only Jews in the Russian interior had been itinerant merchants or traders. But this was to change radically, almost by default, with the massive westward expansion of the Empire under Catherine the Great in the 1790s. During the Middle Ages, many of the Jews expelled from Western Europe had found a congenial welcome in central Europe, those very lands which now found themselves subsumed by Mother Russia. Within a hundred years, 4% of Russia’s population, some five million souls, were Jewish – the largest concentration of Jewish people in the world.
But while they were numerous, they lacked political clout due to their way of life. The Jewish communities, centred on small villages or shtetls, lived according to halakha, the age-old system of laws and customs handed down from their forefathers, and so they tended to act – and be regarded as – an individual ethnic group.
It was this very separateness which was to guide their fate. Jews were confined, by endemic Christian decree, to the Pale of Settlement, an area which covered most of the modern territories of Poland, Ukraine and Belarus, and stretched as far as Austria and Prussia in the west. Rural life was backward-looking, technology was antique, so, given the social restrictions imposed on the inhabitants, poverty was inevitable. Community spirit and hardy resilience were necessities of life. Welfare was available for those in need, students were offered food and hospitality in individuals’ homes, and orphans were cared for by the community.
But hardship was exacerbated by a poisonous mix of anti-Semitism and social friction, together with the results of the authorities’ invidious attempts to integrate the Jews while denying them the powers to do so.
Catherine the Great’s successor, Nicholas I, had introduced conscription for Jewish youths, intending to instil a more nationalistic feeling among them, but the danger of conversion to Christianity was deeply resented by their families. Similarly, the growth of special schools to teach Russian and secular subjects was welcomed by the progressives as an empowering step forward, but condemned by the traditionalist majority who saw such institutions as yet another attack on their culture.
Alexander II, the ‘Tsar Liberator’, reversed the conscription order and for the first time allowed Jews to travel and live beyond the Pale, but when he was assassinated by revolutionary terrorists in 1881, his son and heir, the hard-line conservative Alexander III, blamed the Jews and proceeded to punish them for it.
Pogroms broke out against settlements in the Ukraine and, although these might not have been directly government-inspired, the tsarist regime certainly turned a blind eye. The following year saw the passing of the much-hated May Laws which, intended as a temporary measure, would remain in place for thirty years. Under these new provisions, Jews were denied the right to buy land in the countryside, their commercial dealings were restricted, and new limitations were imposed on the numbers allowed into educational establishments and leading professions including the Law. Soon Jews were being forcibly evicted from Kiev and Moscow.
Increasing anti-Jewish agitation and disturbances, like the particularly violent Passover Pogrom of 1903 at Kishinev, bolstered the burgeoning Zionist movement. Its adherents, due to their conditions of life, were naturally drawn to socialism, and 1897 had seen the foundation of the General Jewish Labour Bund in Vilnius.
Others responded to unrest at home by emigrating. Between 1881 and 1914, over two million individuals – a third of all Russian Jews – left the country, heading mainly for the United States, South America or Palestine, though the population within the Pale stayed around the same due to the high birth rate. Those who remained behind did so either because they couldn’t afford to get away, or simply because their roots ran too deep.
The revolution of 1905 forced the latest and last tsar, Nicholas II, to grant more constitutional liberty to all his subjects, opening the way for Jews to participate more fully in civic life. The Pale of Settlement itself was finally swept away ten years later when the flood of refugees fleeing before the German army in the First World War trampled its notional borders into the dust. Jews achieved full emancipation on the execution of Tsar Nicholas in 1917, when the new Provisional Government abolished all laws discriminating against any Russian citizen on the basis of religion or nationality.
Yet customs die hard, traditions persist. The Jewish community in Russia – rich in cultural, religious and creative energy – had always been divided against itself along subtle ideological lines. And while such conflicts continue, both within and beyond the borders of the new Russian Federation, the eternal circle has yet to be squared.