History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume 1 of 3. From the Beginning until the Death of Alexander I (1825)

Avigdor, formerly rabbi of Pinsk and the surrounding district, had been dismissed from office owing to the intrigues of the Hasidic members of the community, who were his opponents. What Avigdor lamented most was the loss of revenue. For a long time the dethroned shepherd had been dragging his flock through the magistracies and law courts. Having failed in his efforts, he decided to wreak vengeance upon the leader of the sect responsible for his ruin. In the beginning of 1800 Avigdor addressed an elaborate petition to Tzar Paul I., in which he described the Hasidic sect as "a pernicious and dangerous organization," which was continuing the work of the former Messianic Sabbatians. By a vast array of distorted quotations from Hasidic literature the informer endeavored to prove that the teachers of the sect enjoined upon their followers to fear only God and not men, in other words, to disregard the authorities, including the Tzar.

The denunciation was allowed to take its course. Early in November of the same year, the Tzaddik Zalman Borukhovich was rearrested in Lozno and dispatched to St. Petersburg under the convoy of two Senatorial couriers. On his arrival in the capital the Tzaddik was incarcerated in the fortress, and after a cross-examination confronted with his accuser Avigdor. Zalman again replied in writing to the indictments against him, which now mounted up to nineteen counts. He repudiated emphatically the charge of not recognizing the authority of the Government, of immorality, of collecting money, and arranging meetings for secret purposes. Towards the end of November Zalman was set at liberty, but was ordered to remain in St. Petersburg pending the examination of his case by the Senate, to which it had now been transferred from the Secret Expedition. While the Senate was preparing to take up the case, the palace revolution of March, 1801, cut short Paul's reign, and placed Alexander I. upon the throne. The political wind veered round, and on March 29, 1801, the new Tzar gave Zalman permission to depart from St. Petersburg.

Having satisfied itself that the religious schism in Judaism was perfectly harmless from the political point of view, the Government was ready to give it its sanction. One of the clauses of the Statute of 1804 permits the sectarians to establish their own synagogues in every community and to elect their own rabbis, with the sole stipulation that the Kahal administration in each city shall remain one and the same for all sections of the community. As a matter of fact, the law merely recognized what had already become the living practice. The religious split had long been an accomplished fact, and the internecine strife of 1796-1801 was merely its final act. As for the communal organization of the Jews, which had already been undermined by the political changes, the schism proved nothing short of disastrous. The Kahals, weakened by inner struggles and demoralized by denunciations and bureaucratic interference, failed to present a united front in the first years of Alexander's reign, when the Government was carrying out its "plan of reform," and invited the Kahal leaders to share in its labors. The communities of the Southwest, which were completely under the ban of Hasidic mysticism, reacted feebly to the social and economic crisis facing them. The Jewish delegates who presented their views in reply to the official inquiries of 1803 and 1807259 were recruited principally from the White Russian and Lithuanian Governments, where the political sense of the Jews had not yet been completely dulled.

3. Rabbinism, Hasidism, and Enlightened "Berlinerdom"

While in Western Europe the old forms of Jewish life were breaking up, the cultural development of the Jewish masses of Eastern Europe remained stationary. The two dominating forces in their spiritual life, Rabbinism and Hasidism, watched with equal zeal over the maintenance of the old order of things. The traditional form of education remained unchanged. The old school, the heder and yeshibah, with its exclusive Talmudic training, supplied its pupils with a vast amount of mental energy, but failed to prepare them for practical life, and the girls and women remained entirely outside the influence of the school. Just as firmly established was the old-fashioned scheme of family life, with its early marriages, between the years of thirteen and sixteen, with the prolonged maintenance of such married children in the paternal home, with its excessive fertility in the midst of habitual poverty, with its reduction of physical wants to the point of exhaustion and degeneration. This patriarchal mass of Jews fought shy of all cultural "novelties," and deprecated the slightest attempt to extend its mental and social horizon. Religious culture had not yet had a chance to cross swords with secular culture. The war between Hasidism and Rabbinism was fought on purely religious soil. Its sole issue was the type of the believer: the old discipline with its emphasis upon the scholastic and ceremonial aspect of Judaism was fighting against the onrush of ecstatic mysticism and the blind "cult of saints."

It cannot be said that benumbed Rabbinism revived under the effect of this vehement contest. At the time we are speaking of no distinct traces of such a revival are to be seen, and all one can discern are the signs of a purely scholastic renaissance. The method of textual analysis introduced by Elijah Gaon into Talmudic research, which took the place of the hair-splitting casuistry formerly in vogue, gained ever wider currency and an ever firmer foothold in the yeshibahs of Lithuania.

In the new center of Talmudic learning, the yeshibah of the Lithuanian townlet of Volozhin,260 established in 1803, this novel method received particular attention at the hands of its founder, Rabbi Hayyim Volozhiner, a pupil of the Gaon. The yeshibah of Volozhin raised a whole generation of scholars and rabbis "in the spirit of the Gaon." In these circles one could even detect a certain amount of toleration towards the anathematized "secular sciences," though this toleration was limited to the realm of mathematics and partly that of natural history. The Gaon, who had himself engaged in mathematical exercises in his spare moments, permitted his pupil Borukh Shklover to publish a Hebrew translation of Euclid's Geometry (1780). Yet the dread of philosophy was as great as theretofore, and the incompatibility of free research with Judaism was looked upon as an inviolable dogma. The Jewish mind continued to move within the narrow range of "the four ells of the Halakha," and was doomed to sterility. In the course of that whole stormy period, extending over a quarter of a century, Rabbinism, aside from the Gaon, had not put forward a single literary figure of any magnitude, not a single writer of large vision. It seemed as if the spirit of originality had fled from it.

Greater productivity was to be found among the Hasidim of the period, although in point of originality it yielded considerably to the preceding era of the Besht and his first apostles. Alongside of triumphant practical Tzaddikism, trading in miracles and thriving on the credulity of the masses, we observe to a certain degree the continued development of the Hasidic doctrine on the lines laid down by Besht. In the North a new Hasidic theory was spreading, which strove to adapt the emotional pietism of Besht to the "intellectualism" of the Lithuanian schoolmen. The originator of this doctrine, Rabbi Shneor Zalman, the hero of the religious struggle depicted in the foregoing chapters, endeavored to rationalize Hasidism, which had manifested a decided leaning toward the principle credo quia absurdum sit. In the hands of the author of Tanyo, the ecstasy of feeling is transformed into ecstasy of thinking. Occasionally he speaks of the knowledge of God in terms worthy of a Maimonides. Needless to say, Rabbi Zalman rejects the Tzaddik cult in the vulgar form of miracle-mongering, which it had assumed in the South.

In the South – to speak more exactly, in the Ukraina – Hasidism persisted in the beaten track. Its two pillars, Levi Itzhok (Isaac) of Berdychev (died 1809) and Nohum (Nahum) of Chernobyl (died 1799), continued to uphold Besht's traditions. The former, the author of Kedushath Levi261 (1798), manifests in his work the genuine fervor of Hasidic faith, without its morbid ecstasy. In his private life this leader of Volhynian Hasidism was the embodiment of lovingkindness, extending alike to Jew and non-Jew. Many popular legends tell of his surpassing affection for the humble and suffering. The Tzaddik Nohum of Chernobyl, who was an itinerant preacher in the Government of Kiev, laid in his sermons special emphasis on the element of the Cabala. Towards the end of his life he was primarily a Tzaddik, of the "practitioner" and "miracle-worker" type, and founded the "Chernobyl Tzaddik dynasty," which is still widely ramified in the Ukraina.

Quite apart from the rest stands the figure of the Podolian Tzaddik and dreamer Nahman of Bratzlav (1772-1810), a great-grandson of Besht. Gifted with a profoundly poetical disposition, he spurned the beaten tracks of the professional "Righteous," and struck out into a path of his own. The goal he aimed at was the return to the childlike simplicity of Besht's teachings. In 1798-1799 Nahman made a pilgrimage to Palestine, just about the time when Bonaparte's army was marching through the Holy Land, and a gust from tempestuous Europe drifted through the slumbering East. But the Podolian youth had an ear only for the whisper from the tombs of the great Cabalist teachers, Rabbi Shimeon ben Yohai and Ari, and for the discourses of the living Tzaddiks who had settled in Tiberias. On his return to Europe, Nahman made his home in Bratzlav, and became the head of a group of Podolian Hasidim. In his intimate circle he was wont to preach, or rather to muse aloud, on the reign of the spirit, on the communion of the Tzaddik with his flock in religious ecstasy. He spoke in epigrams, sometimes clothing his thoughts in the form of folk-tales. He wrote a number of books,262 in which he constantly emphasized the need of blind, unsophisticated faith. Philosophy he regarded as destructive to the soul; Maimonides and the rationalists were hateful to him. The unfamiliar Berlin "enlightenment" filled his heart with mysterious awe. Nahman's life was cut short prematurely. Surrounded by his admirers, he died of consumption, in Uman, at the age of thirty-eight. Down to this day his grave serves as a place of pilgrimage for the "Bratzlav Hasidim."

However, the average Tzaddik of the type which had assumed definite shape in that period was equally removed from the complexity of Rabbi Zalman and the simplicity of Rabbi Nahman. On the whole, the Tzaddiks drifted further and further away from their mission of religious teachers, and became more and more "practitioners." Surrounded by a host of enthusiastic worshipers, these "middlemen between God and mankind" understood the art of turning the blind faith of the masses to good account. They waxed rich on the gifts and offerings of their admirers, lived in palaces, much after the manner of the Polish magnates and Church dignitaries. The "court" of Besht's grandson in Medzhibozh, Borukh Tulchinski (1780-1810), was marked by particular splendor. Borukh even had his court-fool, Herschel Ostropoler, the well-known hero of popular anecdotes.

In the original Polish provinces, afterwards incorporated into the Duchy of Warsaw, the commanders-in-chief of the Hasidic army were two Tzaddiks, Rabbi Israel of Kozhenitz and Rabbi Jacob Itzhok (Isaac) of Lublin. These two pupils of the "apostle" Baer of Mezherich became the pioneers of Hasidism on the banks of the Vistula towards the end of the eighteenth century. At the close of their careers – both died in 1815 – the banner of Hasidism floated over the whole of Poland.

The breezes of Western culture had hardly a chance to penetrate to this realm, protected as it was by the double wall of Rabbinism and Hasidism. And yet here and there one may discern on the surface of social life the foam of the wave from the far-off West. From Germany the free-minded "Berliner," the nickname applied to these "new men," was moving towards the borders of Russia. He arrayed himself in a short German coat, cut off his earlocks, shaved his beard, neglected the religious observances, spoke German or "the language of the land," and swore by the name of Moses Mendelssohn. The culture of which he was the banner-bearer was a rather shallow enlightenment, which affected exterior and form rather than mind and heart. It was "Berlinerdom," the harbinger of the more complicated Haskala of the following period, which was imported into Warsaw during the decade of Prussian dominion (1796-1806). The contact between the capitals of Poland and Prussia yielded its fruits. The Jewish "dandy" of Berlin appeared on the streets of Warsaw, and not infrequently the long robe of the Polish Hasid made way timidly for the German coat, the symbol of "enlightenment."

Alongside of this external assimilation, attempts were also made to copy the literary models of Prussian Jewry. In 1796 a Jewish Mendelssohnian named Jacques Kalmansohn published a French pamphlet in Warsaw, under the title Essai sur l'état actuel des Juifs de Pologne et leur perfectibilité, dedicating it to the Prussian Minister Hoym, who had carried out Jewish reforms in the Polish provinces of Prussia. The pamphlet contains an account of the status of Polish Jewry of his time and a plan for its amelioration. The account is rather superficial, concocted after the approved Western recipe. In the judgment of the author, the misfortune of the Jews lies in their separation from the surrounding nations, and their happiness in merging with them. The scheme of reform proposed by the Jew Kalmansohn differs but slightly from the Polish projects of Butrymovich and Chatzki. It advocates equally the weakening of rabbinical and Kahal authority, the extermination of Hasidism and Tzaddikism, the introduction of German dress, the shaving of beards, the establishment of German schools, and in general the cultivation of "civism."

The mould of Berlin fashion was overlaid with a Parisian veneer when soon afterwards (1807-1812), at the bidding of Napoleon, the Duchy of Warsaw sprang into being. Now a new note was sounded. A group of Parisian "dandies" claim equal rights as a compensation for having changed their dress and their "moral conduct."263 Even respectable representatives of the Warsaw Jewish community designate themselves in their petition to the Senate as "members of the Polish nation of the Mosaic persuasion," copying the latest Parisian fashion, in vogue at the time of the Napoleonic Synhedrion.264 This was the first, though as yet naïve and unsophisticated, attempt to secure the "transfer" from the Jewish nation to the Polish, the germ of the future "Poles of the Old Testament persuasion."

The torch-bearers of Berlin culture from among the followers of David Friedländer encouraged this frame of mind in every possible manner, and in their organ265 constantly appealed in this spirit to their Polish brethren.

How long will you continue – one of these appeals reads – to speak a corrupt German dialect [Yiddish] instead of the language of your country, the Polish? How many misfortunes might have been averted by your forefathers, had they been able to express themselves adequately in the Polish tongue before the magnates and kings! Take a group of a hundred Jews in Germany, and you will find that either all or most of them can speak to the magnates and rulers, but in Poland scarcely five or ten out of a hundred are capable of doing so.

Some stray seeds of Western "enlightenment" were carried as far as the distant Russian North. During Dyerzhavin's tour of inspection through White Russia there flitted across his vision the figure of the physician Frank in Kreslavka, an avowed follower of Mendelssohn, calling for religious and educational reforms.266 In St. Petersburg, in the house of the Maecenas Abraham Peretz, lived his teacher Judah Leib Nyevakhovich, a native of Podolia. In 1803, the same year in which the Jewish deputies sojourned in St. Petersburg, Nyevakhovich published a pamphlet in Russian, under the title, "The Wailing of the Daughter of Judah," with a dedication to Kochubay, the Minister of the Interior and Chairman of the "Jewish Committee." The dedication strikes the keynote of the "Wailing": genuflexion before the greatness of Russia and mortification at the fate of his coreligionists, who are deprived of their share in the "blessings" of the country.

"How greatly," exclaims the author, "doth my soul exult over these matters [the victories and might of the Russian Empire]; how deeply doth it grieve over my coreligionists, who are removed from the hearts of their compatriots." And throughout the whole of the pamphlet the "Daughter of Judah" bewails the fact that neither the eighteenth century, "the age of humanity, toleration, and meekness," nor "the smiling spring of the present century, the beginning of which hath been crowned … by the accession of Alexander the Merciful, has removed the deep-seated Jewish hatred in Russia." "Many minds doom the tribe of Judah to contempt. The name 'Judean' hath become an object of ridicule, contempt, and scorn for children and the feeble-minded." With particular reference to Mendelssohn and Lessing the author exclaims: "You search for the Jew in man. Search for man in the Jew, and you will no doubt find him."

Nyevakhovich's pamphlet concludes with a grievous moan:

While the hearts of all the European nations have drawn nearer to one another, the Jewish people still finds itself despised. I feel the full weight of this torment. I appeal to all who have sympathy and compassion. Why do you sentence my entire people to contempt? Thus waileth sadly the daughter of Judah, wiping her tears, sighing and yet uncomforted.

The author himself, by the way, subsequently managed to obtain comfort. A few years after the publication of the "Wailing," still finding himself "removed from the hearts of his compatriots," he discovered the magic key to these obstreperous hearts. He embraced Christianity, and, transformed into Lev Alexandrovich Nyevakhovich, began to write moralizing Russian plays, which pleased the unsophisticated taste of the Russian public of the day. Nyevakhovich thus carried his "Berlinerdom" to that dramatic dénouement which was in fashion in Berlin itself, where an epidemic of baptism was raging. His example was followed by his patron Abraham Peretz, who had been ruined in the War of 1812 by military contracts. The descendants of both converts occupied important posts in the Russian civil service. One of the Peretz family was a member of the Council of State during the reign of Alexander II.

A faint reflection of the Western literature of enlightenment is visible during this period on the somber horizon of Russia. Mendel Lewin, of Satanov267 (1741-1819), who had been privileged to behold in the flesh the Father of Enlightenment in Berlin, scattered new seeds in his native country. He translated into Hebrew the popular manual of medicine by Tissot, the moral philosophy of Franklin, and the books of travel by Campe. He also made an attempt to render the Book of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes into the vernacular Yiddish.

The last undertaking drew upon Lewin the wrath of another "enlightened" writer, Tobias Feder of Piotrkov and Berdychev (died 1817), who attacked him savagely for "profaning" Holy Writ by turning it into the "language of the street." Feder himself published studies in Hebrew grammar and Biblical exegesis, moralizing treatises, harmless satires, and poetical odes. These publications cannot be said to mark an epoch in the realm of literature, but they undoubtedly symbolize a new departure in cultural life. The secular book, of which the mere appearance was apt to arouse a murmur of discontent among the alarmed Orthodox, takes its place side by side with the religious literature of Rabbinism and Hasidism. These literary attempts were the harbingers of the subsequent secularization of Hebrew literature.

CHAPTER XII

THE LAST YEARS OF ALEXANDER I

1. "The Deputation of the Jewish People"

The great reaction of 1815-1848, which kept the whole of Europe in its throes, assumed peculiar forms in Russia. Tzar Alexander I., one of the triumvirs of the Holy Alliance, which had given birth to this reaction, was eager to atone for the liberal "sins" of his youth, and was cultivating in Russia the principles of "paternal administration" and "Christian government." The last decade of his reign paved the way for the iron-handed absolutism of Nicholas I., which fettered the political and social life of Russia for thirty years, and stood like an ominous specter of medievalism before the eyes of Western Europe.

The destinies of the great monarchy of the East determined those of the greatest Jewish center of the Diaspora. The Vienna Congress of 1815 enlarged the borders of European Russia by including in it almost the entire territory of the former Duchy of Warsaw, which was renamed "Kingdom of Poland."268 About two million Jews were huddled together on the western strip of the Russian monarchy during the period of 1815-1848,269 and this immense, sharply marked population served as the subject of all possible experiments, which assumed the coloring of the general Russian politics of the time. The last years of Alexander I. inaugurate the period of patronage and oppression, which reached its culmination in the following reign.

The attitude of the Russian Government towards the Jews during that period reflects three successive tendencies: first, in the last years of Alexander I.'s reign (1815-1825), a mixed tendency of "benevolent paternalism" and severe restrictions; second, during the first half of Nicholas I.'s reign (1826-1840), a military tendency, that of "correcting" the Jews by subjecting their youth, from the age of childhood, to the austere discipline of conscription and barrack training, accompanied by compulsory religious assimilation and by an unprecedented recrudescence of rightlessness and oppression; and third, during the latter part of Nicholas's reign (1840-1855), the "enlightened" tendency of improving the Jews by establishing "crown schools" and demolishing the autonomous structure of Jewish life, while keeping in force the former cruel disabilities (1840-1855). This endless "correctional" and "educational" experimenting on a whole people, aggravated by the resuscitation of ritual murder trials and wholesale expulsions in approved medieval style, makes the history of Russian Jews during that period an uninterrupted tragedy.

The beginning of the period did not seem to portend evil. Emperor Alexander returned from the Vienna Congress without harboring aggressive plans against the Jews. On the contrary, he remembered the patriotic services rendered by the Jews in 1812 and the promise given by him at Bruchsal "to ameliorate their condition."270 As a matter of fact, several steps were taken which seemed to point in the direction of improvement.

The first manifestations of this tendency were certain administrative changes in the management of Jewish affairs. The ukase of January 18, 1817, ordered the Senate to submit all matters affecting the Jewish communes, with the exception of legal cases, to the General Manager of the Spiritual Affairs of Foreign Denominations, a post occupied by Golitzin, the Tzar's associate in Christian pietism and mystical infatuation. Later in the same year, the combined Ministry of Ecclesiastic Affairs and Public Instruction was organized, under the guidance of Golitzin, symbolizing, as it were, the establishment of public instruction upon the foundations of "Christian piety." The charter of the new organization distinctly provides that all "Jewish matters in charge of the Senate and the Ministers" are to be transmitted to the head of the new Ministry. In this manner the Jewish question was officially connected with the department of ecclesiastic affairs, which at that time occupied a central place in the administration.

The departmental change was followed by a more substantial reform. The Government recognized the necessity of establishing at the Ministry of Ecclesiastic Affairs a permanent advisory council composed of elected Jewish representatives or "deputies of the Jewish communes." The project was suggested by the ephemeral and accidental endeavors in the way of popular Jewish representation on the part of the two purveyors, Sonnenberg and Dillon, who were attached to the headquarters of the Russian army during the campaign of 1812. At the audience at which Alexander I. gave these deputies the assurance that the condition of their coreligionists would be improved,271 they were also told to appear in the capital after the conclusion of the war for the purpose of acquainting the Kahals with the plans of the Government. The deputies accordingly appeared in St. Petersburg, and entered upon their duties as Jewish spokesmen, which they exercised during 1816 and 1817. They realized, however, that they had no right to regard themselves as the accredited representatives of the Jewish communities of Russia, and therefore appealed to the Government – Sonnenberg was particularly active in this direction – to instruct all the Kahals to elect a complete group of deputies in due form. The Government having agreed to the proposal, a clause was included in the instructions to the newly-established Ministry of Ecclesiastic Affairs, to the effect that "the [names of the] deputies of the Jewish communes shall after their election be submitted by the Minister to his Majesty for ratification."