The current diversified Jewish world emerged out of the ideas of the Haskalah (Enlightenment in Hebrew), which arose about two hundred years ago under the influence of the European Enlightenment. That epoch of great scientific discoveries, of the search for a philosophy of reason, and of struggles for political freedom, civil equality, civil society, and for the separation of religion and state undermined the authority of the church. In this context Judeophobia weakened somewhat and a more tolerant climate prevailed.

The Haskalah became the ideological source of all the central trends of Jewish national thought. It stimulated both the reform movement and neo–orthodoxy in Judaism. Alongside a tendency toward assimilation in the secular sphere, a national-cultural renaissance and political Zionism developed. In other words, the contemporary Jewish world grew out of heated disputes between advocates and opponents of the Haskalah and out of debates within this movement.

The Jewish enlighteners urged people to abandon their national particularity and to accept universal values, to master the language and culture of their countries of residence, and to obtain a secular European education. They strove to break with the perpetual cycle of persecutions, to put an end to the galut (exile), which had lasted for 1800 years, and to settle down and become “like everyone else,” while retaining only their faith. The advocates of the Haskalah called for a reformation of religious education in order to facilitate the Jews’ participation in social and economic life and to transform them into citizens with full rights.

The orthodox rabbis did not try to return the enlighteners to the fold, thinking that they ought to disappear from Jewish life without drawing the nation into complete assimilation that would lead to their disappearance.

Both enlighteners and the orthodox were mistaken. The former believed that once they had mastered the language and culture of their milieu and touched up their religion, they could become Germans, Frenchmen, or Austrians of the “Mosaic faith” or even simply Germans, Frenchmen or Austrians whereas the latter did not properly estimate the strength of the resistance of the new secular environment to their penetration and the power of a new, racial antisemitism.

Having renounced their language and a considerable part of their cultural heritage, having rejected a Jewish mission and the idea of a national revival, the new Jews nevertheless did not become Frenchmen, Germans, or Hungarians. Visually, mentally, and spiritually they remained Jews who differed from the local population. Although the enlighteners succeeded in resolving the “Jewish Question” on the legal plane, the issue arose with new force on the social one. Religious antisemitism, which had been fostered for almost two millennia, was partially replaced by racial antisemitism.

Jews appeared in Russia largely as a result of the expansion of the borders of the Russian Empire. Jews had been living in the eastern part of the Caucasus and on the coast of the Black Sea since the Hellenistic period. In other locations they had resided for several centuries before those territories were annexed to Russia. The largest number of Jews were added to the Russian Empire as a result of the three partitions of Poland from 1772 to 1795 (the annexation of the territories of Belorussia, Lithuania, Poland, the Ukraine, and Kurland) and also of the annexation of Bessarabia and the Polish Kingdom in 1812 and 1815 respectively. This Jewish population of about a million people was culturally homogeneous.

The Jews fared somewhat better in Poland than in other countries. They began to settle there in the thirteenth century at the invitation of the Poles, who needed to restore and develop their economy after their country had been ravaged by the Tatar-Mongol invasion. The Kalisz Statute (1264) granted Jews complete freedom of movement and trade and forbid the persecution of Jewish merchants, the destruction of Jewish cemeteries, or attacks on synagogues.

Despite the Catholic Church’s constant anti-Jewish propaganda, Jewish life proceeded relatively calmly in Poland and the territories under its control until around the sixteenth-seventeenth centuries. At that time the local bourgeoisie, tradesmen, and financiers felt sufficiently strong and began to harass their former teachers, whom they viewed as superfluous rivals. Decrees were enacted that prohibited Jews from living in certain cities and there were outbreaks of pogroms but the authorities did not deprive the Jews of the opportunity to engage in profitable businesses. The Jews also continued to develop their systems of education, courts, and community self-rule. The reserve of national energy that accumulated in these conditions manifested itself in the following centuries in the revolutionary storms and the Zionist movement of the twentieth century.

The year 1881 was a dark one for Russian Jews: on March 1, Tsar Alexander II was murdered. The group of terrorists who planned the murder included one Jewess, Gesia Gel’fman, who played a secondary role: a partner of one of the revolutionaries, she maintained an apartment for the conspirators.

The Minister of the Interior Nikolai Ignat’ev and Konstantin Pobedonostsev, the chief procurator of the Holy Synod, exerted considerable efforts to channel popular anger in the direction of the Jews in order to eliminate the revolutionary fermentation and unite the people and the regime on the basis of common hatred.

Pogroms began on Easter in April 1881 and continued at intervals until 1884, arousing a wave of panic and horror that spread throughout the Pale of Settlement. Although the tsarist government still prohibited Jewish settlement in the inner regions of the empire, it did not object to the Jews’ emigrating to the West. In fact, its very actions encouraged this.

A Jewish exodus began that continued until the start of the First World War. In a little over thirty years about two million Jews immigrated to the United States from Russia; a small number settled in Palestine, Spain, and other western countries.

This exodus dispersed Jewish families around the world but the connection to Russia was not always severed completely. The grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the emigrants would take an active part in the struggle for the freedom of Soviet Jewry. In the 1960s-1990s they created powerful organizations that would stir up western public opinion with their perpetual protest actions. They would lobby parliaments and the governments of their countries in support of Soviet Jews. They would send us books, money, and goods that helped us survive in refusal. They would cross the Iron Curtain in a never-ending stream, and in meetings with refuseniks they would reiterate as if reciting a prayer: “My dears, if our parents had not left then, we, too, would be in your place.”

 

The First Wave of the Zionist Movement in Russia

Practical Zionism arose in Russia before Herzl’s “awakening” in 1894 and relied on Russian Zionist organizations with the financial and organizational support of Baron Edmond Geims de Rothschild. The first wave of aliya to the Land of Israel (1881-1903) was a tiny stream in comparison to the mass immigration to the U.S. and other countries. Nevertheless, the 25,000 people who settled in the Land of Israel were a considerable number in comparison to the Jewish population at the time, which numbered 28,000. The new immigrants, members of the Hovevei Tsion movement, dreamt of establishing agricultural settlements, setting up Jewish productive enterprises, and of making a living by the work of their hands.

The second wave of aliya (1904-1914) brought with it a developed political consciousness and experience in political struggle. These people formed the first political parties that played an important role in the settlement of the Land of Israel. By 1914, 47 agricultural settlements were functioning. Considerable urban development also occurred in Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Jerusalem.

The major political victory of the Zionist movement ─ The Balfour Declaration of November 2, 1917, recognizing the right of Jews to settle in Palestine ─ facilitated the further populating of the Land.

In Russia, in the meantime, two revolutions took place in 1917. The first, the February bourgeois revolution established a democratic republic in place of autocratic Russia. The new regime abolished all national and religious restrictions and granted the Jews all civil, political, and religious rights. (This was much more than under the formula of western liberals: “Everything must be refused to the Jews as a nation; everything must be granted to them as individuals.”)

Russian Jewry was ready for liberation. Jews had participated in political life for decades before the February Revolution but their involvement truly intensified following it. The spectrum of that activity was remarkably broad: Zionist, socialist, and religious parties competed for influence and support.

The October Bolshevik coup put an end to the gains of the February revolution. The Bolsheviks, in fact, did not represent the will of the people. Their leaders had spent a considerable part of their life abroad, had a weak grasp of real life, and were inclined to favor abstract Marxist theories. The Bolsheviks were not opposed to liberating the Jews but (and this “but” would accompany the Jews throughout communist rule) they did so only in accordance with and in the framework of their utopian doctrines that relegated the Jews to complete assimilation.

The dictatorship of the proletariat did not tolerate political competition. Having seized power, the Bolsheviks set out to implement their theoretical postulates in practice: only one party and one ideology ought to remain. All political parties aside from the communist were doomed to elimination.

The communist lexicon defined the Zionist parties as bearers of a bourgeois nationalist ideology. The Zionist socialists sincerely made several efforts to legalize their activity in a state whose goals seemed so close to the ultimate goals of their own movement ─ the building of a just socialist society ─ but these efforts were unsuccessful.

Sometimes the central authorities tried to create the impression, especially abroad, that they would not be so opposed to the Zionists but it was their comrades, the Jewish communists from the Evsektsia [the Jewish section of the Communist Party] who adopted such an uncompromising stand and were bombarding the central organs with resolutions and appeals to ban that reactionary nationalist movement.

The Evsektsia, indeed, was overly zealous but the authorities cleverly instigated them and used them for their own goals, continuing slowly but steadily to crush the vestiges of the organized Zionist movement. In its overseas propaganda the regime explained that regressive movements die a natural death in a progressive socialist society because they cease to enjoy the support of the working masses. The same explanations were offered with regard to the stifling of Jewish culture and the destruction of traditional forms of Jewish life.

In September 1924 several thousand Zionists were arrested during the night. After a closed trial they were all exiled to remote areas of Russia: the Solovetsky Islands,[1] to Kirgizia, and to Siberia. These measures were directed primarily at the underground Zionist movement. The repressions were intensified in 1926. Arrests took place in Moscow, Leningrad, Nezhin, Poltava, Simferopol, the settlements of Kherson oblast’ and in Krivoi Rog. In the same year the authorities began to eliminate Jewish colonies in the Crimea ─ the colonies of Hamishmar and Hehaluts were closed; the process was completed around 1928. Their role had been played out. The Land of Israel was supposed to be supplanted by Birobidzhan, a region that was completely under Soviet control.

The alleged non-proportional involvement of the Jews in the October Revolution is a false myth. The Jewish elite ─ the businessmen, lawyers, journalists, and so forth, who constituted a noticeable segment of the Russian elite (according to some data up to twenty percent), welcomed the bourgeois February revolution but opposed the proletarian one. The October Revolution brought them nothing but misfortunes, the confiscation of property, and the inability to continue with professional activity. The overwhelming majority of this elite emigrated from Russia to the West. The Jewish masses from the Pale of Settlement supported the proletarian revolution after the start in 1919 of a most savage wave of pogroms led by the Ukrainian nationalist leader Symon Petliura. The White forces were also not loath to utilize antisemitism for their own purposes. The military units of the Red Army conducted themselves with greater restraint and often fought against antisemitism.

In 1919 agroup of immigrants from Russia disembarked from Ruslan, the first steamship to land on the coast of the Land of Israel after World War I. This marked the start of the so-called Third Aliya, which continued until 1923 and brought over 35,000 people to Palestine. The Zionists did not, however, succeed in convincing the members of other social movements to abandon their vain illusions and join them in building a national state. The disputes were heated and uncompromising and the faith in ideals was absolute.

The Jews who remained in Russia quickly encountered difficulties. Jewish Zionists were the first ones dispatched to labor camps after the October Revolution as a result of informing by their brethren from the Evsektsia and other parties. Jews from the non-Zionist, socialist Bund and other Jewish parties were the next victims. The members of the Evsektsia eventually followed them along the same path. The sour aftertaste was long-lasting. When the Moloch of the revolution began to consume its former heroes, the Zionists who had immigrated to Israel experienced a bitter feeling of justification. Even many years later, at the end of the 1960s, when the third post-revolutionary generation rose to struggle for repatriation to Israel, some of the veteran Zionists retained a certain coolness: “We spoke to them; we tried to convince them…. They preferred to serve at alien altars and now we have to save their grandchildren!”

 

Assimilation

Regarding religion as an instrument of the old regime used to keep the masses in ignorance and submission, opium for the masses, the communists strove to build a secular, atheist society. Treating religious figures, including Jewish ones, as parasitical elements burdening the laboring class, the new regime waged an active campaign against them from  1929-1930: many rabbis, religious teachers, ritual slaughterers, and mohelim were arrested, exiled, or executed.

The functionaries of the Evsektsia, in their obtuse and fiery fanaticism that reduced everything to the class struggle, determined that Yiddish was the conversational language of the Jewish masses but they termed Hebrew the language of the Jewish bourgeoisie, Zionists, rabbis, and of religious practice. This approach suited the regime, which cut off its citizens from outside influence, including the influence of culture in Hebrew, whose primary center was located in Palestine. A decree of the collegium of the Ministry of Education from July 11, 1919 prohibited teaching in Hebrew or the use of Hebrew in Jewish schools. In the late 1920s to early 1930s many people involved in Jewish culture in Hebrew were either imprisoned or exiled.

A devastating blow to the preservation of Jewish national life was the decline and disintegration of the Jewish shtetl, which had become a battleground during the years from 1914-1923: during the First World War, the Civil War, and the Russo-Polish War. The wars were accompanied by pogroms, looting of the local population, and anti-Jewish measures on the part of the authorities. Everyone who was able left the shtetl. The young people went to the cities or the interior of the country in the hope of finding some source of a livelihood.

The process of proletariatization and the transition to physical labor began and developed quickly in the Jewish milieu. With the start of the First Five Year Plan (1928) industry began more intensively to absorb the unemployed Jewish masses, who quickly accommodated to the new living conditions, to the language of the surrounding milieu, and its customs and concepts.

The country’s rapid industrialization demanded a greater number of skilled personnel. The ranks of the old intelligentsia had thinned considerably in the storms of the civil war and the Bolshevik purges. Many fled abroad. Jews eagerly responded to the Party’s new slogan: from the factory bench to the workers’ schools and the institutions of higher education. Many Jewish children whose parents had undergone the process of proletariatization succeeded in finishing studies at institutions of higher learning and joined the ranks of the Soviet intelligentsia. Some of them attained prominent positions in Soviet science and culture. As part of this process there was a rapid switch, often in the course of one generation, from Yiddish to Russian and the dispersal of the Jewish population around the entire country because the academic graduates were obligated to work at any location in the Soviet Union in accordance with the party or governmental directive.

The 1930s marked the rapid decline of Soviet Jewish culture. Foreign Jewish organizations were prohibited from operating on Soviet territory. In the context of an intensification of the Stalinist terror the publication of books and journals was sharply curtailed and, consequently, literary activity died down. The struggle against antisemitism, which had been conducted energetically from 1927-1932, completely ceased. Many Jewish communists, including former leaders of the Evsektsia, were arrested from 1934 to 1938 and then either shot or sent to labor camps, where the majority perished. It was a terrible time that maimed the souls of our fathers and filled them with fear of the all-powerful and cruel regime, but the greatest tragedy of their and our lifetime had yet to come.

In the course of one post-revolutionary generation the most far-reaching changes had occurred in the life of Soviet Jews. Traditional forms of national life had been destroyed, the Jews had been dispersed around the country, and they were deprived of their native language and culture. They were cut off from their national roots and lost their link with world Jewry. In the national sense this was a catastrophe.

Only a few of the many thousands of Zionists arrested in the 1920s would survive until the end of the 1940s, when the prisons again began to fill up with a new wave of Zionists inspired by the founding of the State of Israel. The different generations would meet in the Gulag prison system. Released after Stalin’s death, the Jews of the new wave continued the struggle for national freedom, thus restoring the link between generations that had been tragically severed and was not to be broken again before the complete liberation of Soviet Jews.