A History of Zionism (11 page)

It is not easy to reconcile such views, the unctuous approach and the frequent genuflexions before established religion, with his earlier writings. Only three years before writing
Rome and Jerusalem
he had opposed all religion, explaining it as the symptom of a pathological state of mind; that the history of religions was the history of human error.
*
Did Hess suddenly ‘see the light’? There remain doubts as to how genuine his conversion really was. While preaching the virtues of religious observance to his people, Hess himself did not adhere to his own prescription. Having convinced himself intellectually that religion was for the time being essential to prevent the total disintegration of the Jewish people, he could not in his private life muster sufficient enthusiasm to live up to his new discovery. He had found in himself the feeling of solidarity with his people and a belief in its future, but religious belief could not be reproduced at will. Nor is the religious element in
Rome and Jerusalem
altogether essential to the main theme; its introduction strikes an inharmonious note. Hess was no doubt aware of the dilemma of the post-religious Jew, but he preferred not to dwell on it. And yet, with all its lapses and shortcomings, the book is more than a powerful and moving plea; it is in part a work of prophetic genius. His analysis of the problems facing the Jew in modern European society was incomparably superior to that of any of his contemporaries, including far more sophisticated thinkers than himself. Later Zionist writings, even the most influential among them, such as Pinsker’s
Autoemanzipation
and Herzl’s
Judenstaat
, only gave concise expression to issues that had been discussed for years; their basic ideas had been in the air. Hess on the other hand was a genuine pioneer, breaking fresh ground. When Herzl read Hess for the first time, soon after completing his
Judenstaat
, he noted in his diary: ‘Everything we tried is already there in his book.’
†

Hess was bound to make little impact precisely because he was so far ahead of his time. The
Kulturjuden
, as he called them, bitterly attacked him. Abraham Geiger, the leader of Reform Judaism, referred to him contemptuously as a virtual outsider who ‘after bankruptcy as a Socialist and all kinds of swindles wants to make a hit with nationalism. Along with Czech and Montenegrin nationality, he wants to restore Jewish nationality.’ Most Socialists and liberals knew nothing of the book, while those who read it rejected it as a romantic-reactionary chimera, on the same level as the antisemitic rantings of Bruno Bauer. A very few Jewish writers welcomed it, the most prominent among them being the historian Heinrich Graetz. As for a broader public,
Rome and Jerusalem
was rediscovered only forty years after its publication. While Hess regarded it as essentially philosophical in character, it was of course a political book. But in the 1860s its basic ideas seemed altogether impractical.

Hess continued to take part rather half-heartedly in Jewish activities in Paris. After 1862 he again devoted his main attention to the Socialist movement, as a leader in Lassalle’s new party and a member of the First International. His views on things Jewish did not change, but the problem lost some of its urgency. He was neither a leader nor a prophet, and felt no call to take the initiative. Or perhaps he simply realised that the time was not ripe for his plans? During his last years he returned to the study of natural science, and died, a forgotten man, in Paris in April 1875. A few newspapers published short and incorrect obituaries; no representative of any Jewish organisation spoke at his funeral.

Few east European Jews at the time had heard of
Rome and Jerusalem
, which was translated into Hebrew and Yiddish only many years after the death of its author. Yet by a curious coincidence a little pamphlet in Hebrew, entitled
Drishat Zion
(Seeking Zion) was published in the same year (1862) in a small town in the extreme north-east of Germany. Based on totally different ideological premises, it advocated a doctrine and political solutions remarkably similar to those outlined by Hess. Hirsch Kalischer, its author, was a rabbi in Thorn, a town in the province of Posen. A man in his sixties, he wrote in the classical and somewhat clumsy Hebrew then used by orthodox rabbis; his book opened with statements by several renowned religious scholars certifying that the reverend author, illuminated throughout his life by the study of the holy Torah, could be trusted even when venturing outside his own field of specialisation - that of Talmudic legalism.

On every page of his short pamphlet Kalischer refers to the Bible, the Mishna and the Talmud. But shorn of its ritualistic invocations, and with all its lack of philosophical sophistication, it is a modern, almost existentialist piece of writing, with a message that could not be more outspoken: the Redemption of Israel will not come as a sudden miracle, the Messiah will not be sent from heaven to sound a blast on his great trumpet and cause all people to tremble. Nor will he surround the Holy City with a wall of fire or cause the Holy Temple to descend from heaven. Only stupid people could believe such nonsense; wise men knew that redemption would be achieved only gradually and, above all, would come about only as the result of the Jews’ own efforts. If the Almighty were to work a miracle, what fool would not be willing to go to Palestine? But to renounce home and fortune for the sake of Zion before the days of the Messiah - that was the real test and challenge. Kalischer maintained that from a religious point of view it was highly meritorious to live in Palestine. There were a great many Jews in Europe with political and economic influence; it was up to them to take the necessary first steps towards the resettlement of the Holy Land. Time and circumstance favoured such an endeavour. Kalischer refers to the Italian Risorgimento, the national struggle of the Poles and Hungarians, and asks: why do these people sacrifice their lives for the land of their fathers while we, like men bereft of strength and courage, do nothing? Are we inferior to other peoples who disregard life and fortune when it is a question of their land and nation?

Kalischer was primarily concerned with the principle of the return to Zion. (It should be noted at least in passing that another rabbi, Yehuda Alkalay, writing in Serbia twenty years earlier, had already drawn up a practical programme towards the same end, suggesting the establishment of an association on the lines of a railroad company to ask the sultan to give the Jews their land at an annual rent.
*
) Nor was Kalischer an impractical man. Towards the end of his book he discusses some of the arguments likely to be used against his scheme. Would not the property of the Jews in Palestine be insecure? Would not rapacious Arabs rob the Jewish peasants of their harvest? This is probably the first time the Arab question is mentioned in Zionist literature. But the danger, Kalischer says, is remote, for ‘the present pasha is a just man severely punishing robbery and theft’.

The impact of
Drishat Zion
on east European Jewry was as limited as that of
Rome and Jerusalem
on Jews in the west. The only practical outcome was the establishment of an agricultural school in Mikve Israel, on the outskirts of Jaffa, by the Paris
Alliance Israélite
, largely owing to the untiring efforts of Kalischer. But this remained an isolated initiative. It gave no fresh impetus to immigration into Palestine or to any major political effort. On the contrary, the pious Jews of Jerusalem protested against the profane and dangerous enterprise of teaching young Jews how to earn a living and thus deflecting them from the study of the holy scriptures. The time was clearly not yet ripe for the realisation of the dreams of these early prophets of Zionism.

Eastern European Jewry

Mention has been made so far almost exclusively of the Jews of Germany and western Europe, the challenges and problems facing them, their thinkers and leaders. But the great majority of the Jewish people were to be found in the towns and villages of Lithuania, White Russia, Poland, Galicia and Rumania. More than five million lived in Russia at the end of the nineteenth century, about ten times as many as in Germany. They were concentrated in the western areas of the tsarist empire, which they were not permitted to leave. Only about two hundred thousand of them, well-to-do merchants, university graduates, veterans (with twenty-five years of army service) and some others were permitted to live in places like St Petersburg, Moscow or Kiev, and other towns outside the so-called pale of settlement. Jews accounted for about 16-18 per cent of the inhabitants of the Warsaw, Grodno, and Minsk administrative districts, and 24-8 per cent in the Jassy, Cracow, and Lemberg areas. But since they were not allowed to live in villages, the urban percentage was far larger; cities like Vilna, Brest Litovsk, Bialystok, Zhitomir, Berdichev or Vitebsk were predominantly Jewish. At the turn of the century Warsaw, with 220,000 Jews, had the biggest Jewish community in Europe, followed by Odessa with 140,000. Under a law promulgated in 1858, they were not allowed to live within forty miles of the frontier, and according to other regulations they had no right to reside in several important cities within the pale, such as Kiev, Sevastopol or Yalta - the last perhaps because the tsar did not want to see too many of them from his palace.

Their economic situation was bad and after 1880 continued to deteriorate. True, a few Jewish millionaires such as the Ginzburgs and Poliakovs were prominent in banking and later on in the development of railways. The sugar and textile industries were largely Jewish, as were the grain and timber trades, and, to a lesser extent, the milling, brewing, tobacco and leather industries. There were many artisans in the Jewish ghettoes but they were gradually being squeezed out of business as modern industry spread, just as coachmen were being displaced by the railways. Few Jews lived from the soil; efforts were made to increase the number in agriculture, and this did indeed rise from 80,000 to 180,000 between 1860 and 1897. But the majority in the pale of settlement were men without a definite occupation, living from hand to mouth, ‘Luft-menschen’ without roots and without hope. Each morning they congregated in the market place or in front of the synagogue, waiting for any job, however degrading, however badly paid, to come their way. Many professions were closed to them; they were virtually barred from entering government service, except as physicians, but few had the opportunity to study medicine; there was a
numerus clausus
for Jews in the universities - 10 per cent in the pale, 5 per cent outside it, and 3 per cent in Moscow and St Petersburg.

The government saw to it, however, that they were fully represented in one not very popular field of service: they accounted for 4 per cent of the total population but provided 6 per cent of all army recruits. The heart-rending scenes accompanying the call-up of Jewish boys, often no more than twelve or fourteen years old, were frequently described in contemporary literature:

It was one of the most awful sights I have ever beheld [Alexander Herzen wrote]. The boys of twelve and thirteen might somehow have survived it but infants of eight and ten. … No brush, however black, could portray such horror on canvas. And these sick children, without attention, without a caress, exposed to the icy wind which blows unhindered from the Arctic Ocean, were going to their graves.
*

The state of health in the ghettoes being what it was, they were ill-prepared for the rigours of military life. They could be away from home for up to twenty-five years and they were not, of course, able to observe the commandments and prohibitions of their religion while in the army. In the early 1890s the American government sent two emissaries to Europe to investigate the reasons for the sudden rise in immigration to the United States. Messrs Weber and Kempster were not professional do-gooders but hard-boiled immigration officers; in their report, published in 1892, they declared flatly that they had never seen such incredible conditions of poverty and misery in their lives, nor did they ever hope to witness them again.
†
The majority of Russian Jews lived in conditions even worse than the poorest of Russian peasants and workers. Many families were crammed into one small house, infant mortality was high, and labour productivity low. If the bread-winner fell ill this usually spelt doom for the whole family. Even antisemitic Russian newspapers admitted that the bulk of Russian Jewry was exposed to slow death by starvation.

The tsars and their advisers had no clear idea how to solve the Jewish question, and throughout the nineteenth century often changed course. Many of the laws restricting freedom of movement and choice of profession dated back to the late eighteenth century. Alexander I, on the other hand, pursued a relatively liberal policy: Jewish children were permitted to attend public schools, Jews could buy land and settle on it. Nicholas I entered Jewish history as a second Haman, whereas the reign of Alexander II, who abolished serfdom, was considered the golden age of Russian Jewry. Under his comparatively enlightened rule the restrictive laws were reviewed and some modest efforts made towards the political and social integration of the Jews. Most of the restrictive laws were not in fact abolished, but with the new spirit of toleration hope prevailed that at some future date they would receive full civil rights, at any rate to the extent that such rights were compatible with tsarist autocracy. In a popular song expressing the spirit of the period, Alexander II was apostrophised as an angel of God who found the flower of Judah soiled by dirt and trampled in the dust; the good tsar rescued it, reviving it with live water, and planted it in his garden where it would flourish once more.

With the murder of Alexander II and the accession to the throne of Alexander III, the situation deteriorated rapidly. As a result of the ‘provisional laws’ of May 1882 (most of which remained in force up to the downfall of the tsarist régime) tens of thousands of Jews were expelled from the villages in which they had settled and also from cities outside the pale of settlement. Official chicanery and persecution had disastrous consequences, but there were even more ominous events; beginning with 1881, pogroms became an almost permanent feature of the Russian scene. There had been minor anti-Jewish excesses before, as in Odessa in 1859 and 1871, but no particular significance had been attached to these events at the time since they seemed no different in character from the clashes between other nationalities which had occurred from time to time in the empire of the tsars. But the attacks which occurred in April-June 1881 shortly after the murder of Alexander II were more widespread and far more vicious in character. They took place mainly in southern Russia, in cities such as Elizavetgrad, Kiev and Odessa, where Jews had been slightly better off than in Poland and White Russia. These pogroms (from the Russian verb
pogromit
, to destroy) continued in 1883 and 1884 in Rostov, Yekaterinoslav, Yalta and other cities. In all these places Jews were killed and injured by a fanatical mob and much of their property destroyed. According to rumours which gained wide currency among the illiterate masses, they had killed the good tsar, and his successor had issued an order to plunder the Jewish quarters. The government did little to provide protection. Indeed, in some cases the attackers were abetted by the local administration and the police. These attacks ceased in 1884, but after an interval of about twenty years of relative quiet a fresh wave of pogroms on a much larger scale broke out.