Paul Kriwaczek: Yiddish Civilisation

Paul Kriwaczek's Yiddish Civilisation: The Rise and Fall of a Forgotten Nation (2005; paperback, 2006, Vintage Books) is a useful history of Yiddish-speaking Jews in Europe, starting with the migrations of Roman and Greek Jews into central and eastern Europe, ending (more or less) with the Holocaust.

(pp. 16-17):

Perhaps, I thought, the missing millennium was a response to the trauma of the Holocaust. Until Nazi times, the Yiddish speakers of Britain could still have regarded themselves as expatriates and escapees from their eastern European homeland, and many maintained links with their relatives still in the old country -- our rabbi, for example, had studied in the seminaries of pre-war Poland -- just as South Asian Britons still see themselves as part of the Indian, Pakistani or Bangladeshi diaspora and often return to holiday and even marry in their district of origin. But the annihilation of Continental Jewry had left the Yiddish speakers adrift, like lost and orphaned children, with no links to their past, the grotesque horror of the end of the Yiddish heym inducing what psychologists would call a state of denial, pretending that the heym had never existed, as if by wiping out the memory of what had been, the pain of its loss could be eased.

Now I have come to believe that in the 1950s a kind of deep shame at Yiddish-speaking Jewry's terrible fate played an important role in British Jews' self-imposed amnesia. Instead, after 1948, they lifted their eyes to a more distant time horizon, and recognised in the new State of Israel the land that two thousand years of daily prayer had assured them was their true ancestral home.

Needless to add, the Zionists had their own ideological reasons for wiping memory clean of the Yiddish heym -- while not responsible for the Holocaust, it appeared much as the realization of their prophecy, a point they belabored endlessly.

(p. 20):

Fifty years previously, clarinet players like Mezz Mezzrow (Milton Mezirow), Artie Shaw (Arthur Jacob Arshawsky) and Benny Goodman had abandoned klezmer for jazz and swing. Now, in an unexpected reversal of history, young Jewish musicians were returning to the old, previously derided, music. Many Jews who hadn't stepped inside a synagogue since their bar-mitzvah, and even some marrying outside the faith, now wanted a klezmer band to play at their wedding. Even non-Jews could take part. Klezmer ensembles have sprung up in the most unexpected places, even Japan.

(pp. 25-26):

The story of the Yiddish civilisation that I favour rejects a black-and-white clash between gentiles and Jews, between oppression and survival, and embraces a far more nuanced contest conducted within the Yiddish-speaking people themselves: a game of tension and conflict, a tug-of-war-and-peace between East and West, between German speakers and Slav speakers, between intellect and emotion, between orthodoxy and syncretism, between those who identified themselves as "Jews," members of the Jewish people,a nd those who thought of themselves as "Jewish," nations of Jewish faith, a tussle in which first one side celebrated victory over the other, then roles were reversed while former winners lost to erstwhile losers, until finally the contending teams were separated by the umpire of history -- a long struggle which called up a new interpretation of what it means to be a Jew.

The Jews of Rome (pp. 32-33):

These were not all immigrant settlers from Judaea. Contemporary sources make it clear that many, perhaps even most, of the subjects of Rome who followed the Torah were not of pure Hebraic origin. Dio Cassius, a Roman historian of the second century, was clear that "all those who observe the Jewish law may be called Jews, from whatever ethnic group they derive."

The expansion of Judaism to include converts from other nations had already begun in the last two centuries before Christ's birth, when the Hasmonean rulers of Israel had vigorously spread the Jewish religion among the surrounding peoples by the sword -- and by the izmel, the circumcision knife. Ammonites, Moabites, Edomites or Idumaeans, Herod's nation, were progressively incorporated into the Israelite, Jewish, domain. Later conversions, however, were not imposed by force. While today's orthodox rabbis are reluctant to encourage conversion, gentiles throughout the classical world saw Judaism as an attractive and welcoming religion. As the centuries progressed and fewer and fewer intelligent pagans found themselves convinced by the barbaric old gods with their sensual appetites and violent tempers, belief in the prophethood of Moses and reverence for the Torah attracted ever more popular support from the many who, as the historian Suetonius records, "without publicly acknowledging that faith, yet lived as Jews."

The remaking of western Europe (pp. 58-59):

Between the beginning of the fifth century and the end of the sixth, a mere two hundred years, the time of the barbarian remaking of western Europe, the population crashed. From an estimated forty million citizens in the year 400, it halved to not much over twenty million, the greatest population slump known to western history, such was the catastrophic effect of the collapse of Rome's empire, the ruin of its productive and economic systems, the disintegration of its communications networks.

Those who still remembered their ancestral rural origins returned to the countryside, where the Roman great estates, the latifundia, forgot cash-crop production for a market that no longer existed and reverted to self-sufficient subsistence farming, reducing their horizons and shrinking their bounds to become small, self-contained communities, protected from internal crime and external attack by local warlords, who often gave little more than nominal allegiance to a distant royal court, and were fed, clothed and otherwise supported by the estate's produce. Cash money almost ceased to circulate. [ . . . ]

Among the Jews, those who were able, particularly the Greek speakers, trekked to the coast and took ship for the East, as like as not on Jewish-captained vessels, no doubt hoping for a safer voyage than the one survived in the fourth century by Synesius -- then a pagan writer but later a Christian bishop -- who described in a letter to a friend how he feared that all was lost when the captain stopped commanding the vessel in the middle of a storm th say prayers for the onset of the Sabbath. The Jewish population of the lands of the former western empire diminished in even greater proportion than that of the gentiles. Military attack, economic collapse, disease and starvation hit the Hebraic middle and working classes disproportionately hard. The teeming Jewish quarters o the cities of Italy emptied. Many must have fled with their families to the self-sufficient country estates, giving up their freedom, their religion and their Jewish identity to avoid starving to death.

(p. 63):

Indeed, Arians were often accused by Catholics of Judaising, perverting Christianity in a Jewish direction. In addition, Arianism promoted a much more tolerant attitude to religious belief than Roman orthodoxy. An Arian bishop reproved the staunchly Catholic Bishop Gregory of Tours thus: "Blaspheme not a doctrine which is not thine. We on our part, although we do not believe what ye believe, nevertheless do not curse it. For we do not consider it a crime to think either thus or so," an attitude summed up in King Theodoric the Great's definitive statement: "Religionem imperare non possumus, quia nemo cogitur ut credat inuitus." (We cannot command religion, for no man can be compelled to believe anything against his will.)

(p. 107):

To keep the record straight, it must be emphasised that, despite the ever-present risk of attack and irrational outbursts of aggression against them, early medieval Jews were not especially singled out for particularly barbaric treatment. There were plenty of other targets too. If it were not the Jews, it might just as well have been foreigners, lepers, heretics or anyone else who attracted the evil eye of the mob, like the sad and strange old women burned alive as witches in their thousands to popular applause. Thirty-five London-resident Flemish merchants and weavers were, for no particular reason, savagely hacked to pieces by the insurgents of the Peasants' Revolt in 1381 -- by then there were no Jews left in England for popular fury to vent itself on.

Enter Martin Luther (p. 173):

His last sermon, "An Admonition Against the Jews," delivered three days before he died in 1546, was hideously predictive of Nazi policy, prefiguring passages in Goebbels's infamous propaganda film The Eternal Jew. Luther proposed to dispatch all the Yiddish speakers back to the Middle East. "Who prevents the Jews from returning to Judaea? Nobody. We shall provide them with all the supplies for the journey, only in order to get rid of that disgusting vermin. They are for us a heavy burden, the calamity of our being; they are a plague in our midst."

Then there was John Calvin (p. 179):

The Geneva reformer's promotion of Old Testament law, particularly the Ten Commandments, his loathing of images, his acceptance of financial trading, perhaps even his belief in predestination -- which absolves the sinner of total responsibility for the sin -- turned Christianity in a new direction. The consequences have been incalculable. Scholars with persuasive arguments have ascribed much of what we prize about our modern world to Calvin's legacy: the separation of Church and state, the Enlightenment, liberal humanism, religious tolerance, capitalism. We owe the existence of the State of Israel and today's wealthy and influential Atlantic diaspora at least in part to the man who write, "If we compare the Jews with other nations, surely their impiety, ingratitude and rebelliousness exceeds the crimes of all other peoples." The Encyclopaedia Judaica compares Calvin with the biblical soothsayer Balaam, who was called upon by the king of Moab to curse Israel, but who blessed her instead. "The Geneva reformer, too, set out to curse the Jews, but in the end turned out to have blessed them."

The Yiddish renaissance (p. 181):

While the Protestant Reformation was beginning to build up its irresistible head of steam back in the 1530s, the European economy was again careering towards hell in a handcart. Economic historians have argued convincingly that this was not by chance, that the two were closely connected, that if you chart the uprisings, wars, civil disturbances and expulsions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, all usually attributed to religious enthusiasm, you will find that the peaks and troughs coincide with a graph of the value of money and the prices of commodities like food and fuel. Not that the religious divisions played no part, but that those with little or nothing to lose were more likely to risk their all in a dangerous cause.

Across Europe what we today would call stagflation took hold. The contrast between rich and poor became ever more grotesque. Landowners grew fat, while peasants starved. Rising prices persuaded lords to convert their tenants' rents to labour obligations, opening up new lands to the plough and forcing their peasants to work on them unpaid.

Kriwaczek doesn't bring this up, but this was when the Spanish were flooding Europe with gold looted from the Americas, and were bringing slavery back into fashion as a system for dominating labor.

Of fortunes rising and falling in Poland (p. 236):

It was not just nepotism, however, but also the Yiddish entrepreneurs' expertise in management and administration that led to their dominance. In places where Jewish leasing of customs was not allowed, Jews were still in demand as silent and invisible, but executive, partners to nominal Christian leaseholders, foreshadowing the dishonourable practice of the early Nazi years.

The alliance between ruthless Polish nobles and insecure Yiddish frontiersmen proved dangerous and destructive. The Jews now held a position that nothing in their background or religious law had properly prepared them for. They had been placed in authority over another people, of another social order, another culture and another religion, a people whom the magnates, the Jews' masters, regard as racially inferior and fair game for callous exploitation. Tragically, shaking off the restraining influence of wiser counsels of the West, the repeated warnings of the rabbis of metropolitan Cracow, Posen and Lublin, the Yiddish businessmen who flocked to the colony came to regard the peasantry in a similar contemptuous light.

I first ran across the second paragraph above when Tony Karon quoted it in his blog. It raises some echoes for Israel/Palestine. It also sets up the context for the specific form anti-semitism was to take in eastern Europe.

On the Cossack revolt of 1648-49 (pp. 241-242):

In itself the Cossack revolt was nothing new. This was far from the first uprising of the Ukrainian hosts. But the revolt coincided with the peak of the economic disaster that had finally spread to these furthermost reaches of the Polish commonwealth. The Baltic grain trade, on which the Polish nobility's profits depended, had collapsed; customs duties had dwindled away; the wool and textiles business had shrunk to nearly nothing. As their incomes diminished, the Polish magnates put ever more financial pressure on the Jews and the Jews in turn attempted to squeeze ever more from the Ukrainian serfs. This was the final straw to lay on the peasants' backs. They rose in unrestrained fury against their oppressors, into an explosion of savagery that nobody, not even the Polish army, could withstand. In 1648 and 1649 rebel bands spread carnage throughout Poland, as far west from the Ukraine as Posen and as far north as Vilna and Minsk. [ . . . ]

Whatever the real truth, whether the martyrs numbered 50,000, 100,000, or 500,000, Professor Shmuel Ettinger of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem points out that "Jews began to return to their localities in Volhynia at the end of 1648, and a short while later were again living throughout the territory up to the Dnieper. Despite the memory of the holocaust of 1648-49, this region was one of the most densely populated by Jews during the 18th and 19th centuries." The Jews suffered monstrously, but they returned. On their return, however, they lived in very reduced circumstances compared with their previous generations. The Ukrainian massacres signalled the end of Yiddish prosperity in the East. After Chmiel the Wicked, the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth was no longer the goldene medine, the golden land, that it once had seemed.

(pp. 268-269):

The opposition was fierce and at times brutal, beginning in 1772, when the Vilna Kehile closed down the local Chassidic prayer rooms, arrested the Chassidic leaders, publicly burned their books and pronounced their followers excommunicated. A letter was sent out, over the Gaon's name, to other communities exhorting them to campaign against the "godless sect." When the first works of Chassidic literature began to appear, particularly the so-called Testament of the Ba'al Shem Tov, Elijah ben Solomon [the Gaon] chaired a rabbinical council of war, which issued circulars ordering the communities to expel all the pietists, to burn their works, to regard them as being "of another faith" and therefore not to intermarry with them, not to eat their food, nor to bury their dead: "It is the duty of every believing Jew to repudiate and pursue them with all manner of afflictions and subdue them, because they have sin in their hearts and are like a sore on the body of Israel."

The pogroms following the assassination of Russian Czar Alexander II in 1881 (pp. 292-293):

Now a Jewish woman, Gesia Gelfman, was found among those held responsible for the czar's assassination. (She was condemned to death, but being pregnant her sentence was commuted -- she died of peritonitis soon after giving birth to a daughter.)

The naming of a single Jew was enough to break the dam holding back the enmity of so many of the Russians. A tidal wave of pogroms crashed across the Pale of Settlement. Perhaps the government saw anti-Jewish violence as a useful diversion, for where it did not actively promote the outrages, it did nothing to stop them. Jews were assaulted and killed, and their property destroyed, in cities and towns over all the provinces of the empire: Elizavetgrad, Kiev, Konotop, Nizhniy-Novgorod, Nyezhin, Pereyaslav, Odessa, Smyela and Warsaw in 1881, Blata in 1882, Ekaterinoslav and Rostov-on-Don in 1883, Nizhniy-Novgorod again in 1884.

To bring the disturbances under control, the czar established a commission to investigate the cause. This body reported that the disorders had been the result of "Jewish exploitation" and, "now that the government has firmly suppressed the riots and lawlessness in order to protect the Jews, justice demands that it immediately impose severe regulations which will alter the unfair relations between the general inhabitants and the Jews and protect the former from the harmful activity of the latter."

The government responded by enacting the harshly repressive May Laws, restricting Jews' rights of residence yet further, severely limiting their ability to become shareholders, take out leases or sign contracts, and banning them outright from holding office in joint stock companies. The aim of these measures was succinctly put in a statement attributed to the then head of the Russian Orthodox Church: "One-third of the Jews will die, one-third will flee the country, and the last third will be completely assimilated within the Russian people." Russians were making it clear that they were no longer prepared to allow any room at all for the nation with whom the Slavs had shared their land for more than a thousand years.

On the founding of the Bund (p. 295):

In October 1897 a group of workers, artisans and intellectuals met in Vilna, ever since the Gaon's time the centre of Yiddish intellectual life, to establish the General Jewish Workers' Union in Lithuania, Poland and Russia (Algemeyner Yidisher Arbeter Bund in Lite, Poyln un Rusland). The new body grew rapidly, organising strikes and boycotts, and successfully helping to improve the conditions of the Jewish working class. In contrast to Zionism, which they felt to be a petit-bourgeois movement, guilty of abandoning a thousand years of heritage, members of the Bund emphasised the importance of stubborn doykeyt (being here) and saw itself as part of the great international labour movement.

(pp. 295-296):

The last-ditch struggle for the recognition of eastern European Jews as a nation, with Yiddish as their language, now became a war on two fronts: against the imperial authorities of Austria and Russia on the one side, and on the other against the promoters of Zionism, emigration to the Holy Land and the revival of Hebrew -- a movement whose polemics refused to accept the validity of a Yiddish-speaking identity. "Those miserable stunted jargons, those ghetto languages which we now employ, are the stealthy tongues of prisoners," wrote Zionist leader Theodor Herzl dismissively in 1896. "He who knows no Hebrew may be an ignoramus," riposted supporters of the Bund, "but he who knows no Yiddish is a gentile."

(p. 300):

For most the gain was worth the loss. As Professor John Klier of University College London points out in a recent book review, contrary to the common myth it was not just anti-Semitism that emigrants wanted to leave behind -- they had no guarantee that tolerance would be greater elsewhere -- but more the claustrophobia of shtetl existence, its class and clan divisions, its ruthless dominance by reactionary Tsaddikim or ultra-conservative rabbinical oligarchies, its self-imposed limitations on living a full, rich and successful life.

posted 2007-11-02