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The Napoleonic Enlightenment, which emancipated the Jews of Western Europe, did not make it to Eastern Europe where most Jews lived in the 18th-19th centuries. The largest concentration of Jews -- or about 5 million -- was then located there; this represented 40% of the Jewish population worldwide. From 1791 until 1915, the Jews living in Eastern Europe were confined by the Czars of Russia -- starting with Catherine the Great -- to an area known as the "Pale of Settlement" (meaning "borders of settlement"). The Pale consisted of 25 provinces that included Ukraine, Lithuania, Belorussia, Crimea, and part of Poland (which had been partitioned between Russia, Prussia, and Austria in 1772). Jews were specifically expelled from Moscow and St. Petersburg and forced into the Pale. Later they were also expelled from rural areas within the Pale and forced to live only in shtetls.
Despite the oppression some amazing things happened in the Pale. For one thing, charity -- tzedakah, which in Hebrew means "justice" -- thrived, as Jews helped each other. The historian Martin Gilbert writes in his Atlas of Jewish History that no province in the Pale had less than 14% of Jews on relief, and Lithuanian and Ukrainian Jews supported as much as 22% of their poor population:
This was an incredibly sophisticated social welfare system. In times of great hardship, no Jew was abandoned. This caring for each other did not escape the notice of non-Jews. In fact, during this period of time the rabbis had to issue a decree against accepting any converts to Judaism from the local Slavic population. Why would Christian Slavs want to convert to Judaism? They realized that no Jew ever starved to death in the street, whereas if you were a Christian peasant you could easily starve to death in the street because no one was going to take care of you. The government wasn't going to do it and the Church wasn't going to do it. So the rabbis didn't want Judaism being flooded by thousands of insincere converts who were trying to save their lives by becoming Jews and benefiting from the Jewish social welfare system. TORAH LEARNING Another amazing thing that happened in the Pale, despite the oppression, was the re-birth of Torah learning. Torah studies (as we saw in Part 52) had fallen by the wayside in the 18th century and had become a preserve of the elite. In 1803, Rabbi Chaim ben Isaac of Volozhin (1749-1821), a student of the Vilna Ga'on, set about to correct this situation. Most yeshivas during this period were small institutions of learning supported by individual towns in which they were based. Rabbi Chaim proposed to found a large institution, open to all, and supported by many communities. He sent letters to the chief rabbis of cities throughout Europe asking them to send to him their best students to study at his yeshiva in Volozhin, Lithuania, where he promised to provide them with financial support, top teachers, and a high-level standardized curriculum. The response to his letter was very positive and a large number of students were sent to the Volozhin Yeshiva, which eventually enrolled 450 students. Unfortunately, the Volozhin Yeshiva didn't last too long as the Czarist government of Russia saw what was going on and tried to force it to adopt a more secular curriculum as part of making it less Jewish. While the Volozhin Yeshiva was willing to tolerate some secular studies, the Russian demand that all faculty members have diplomas from recognized Russian educational institutions in order to teach "Russian language and culture" was not acceptable. And so, the yeshiva was closed in 1892 by Russian inspectors and its students exiled. Although it had been in operation less than 100 years, it had become the model for the modern yeshiva. By the time the Volozhin closed, other yeshivas based on its models were already in operation, many started by the students of the Volozhin. THE MUSSAR MOVEMENT During the same period of time that saw the re-birth of Torah studies there arose in the Pale a new emphasis on what should be the primary focus of those studies. The impetus came from a very important movement within Judaism called the Mussar Movement ("Morality Movement"). Its founder was a most unusual man, Rabbi Israel Lipkin of Salant (1810-1883), better known as Rabbi Israel Salanter. Many stories are told about his goodness. Among the most famous is the story of his disappearance one Yom Kippur from his synagogue. As the congregation fretted for his safety, delaying services until he arrived, one young mother took the opportunity to rush back home to check on her baby, which she had left alone. There she found the rabbi, rocking the cradle. Hearing the baby crying, he had stopped to comfort it, putting the needs of another human being ahead of his personal spiritual fulfillment.
Rabbi Salanter, though the epitome of kindness, could also be confrontational when the question of ethics or morality was at stake. Such was his stance, when he learned that a poor widow's two sons were drafted into the Russian Army, because a rich man had bribed the officials so that his son would not be taken. He confronted the entire community in the synagogue regarding the matter in order to win justice for the widow. Rabbi Salanter was driven to restore the study of morality and ethics to their central place in Torah learning. He felt that a lot of Talmudic study had become very legalistic, intellectual, and devoid of advice on how to develop a personal relationship to God or methods of how to be a better person in relationship to one's fellows. The manual of the Mussar Movement became the 18th century work by the Kabbalist Moshe Chaim Luzatto -- The Path of the Just. At the time that Rabbi Salanter initiated Mussar studies, his system was controversial simply because it was new. Orthodox Jews were worried at first that this might be another type of "reform." But the Mussar Movement overcame their misgivings and its teachings are now central to the curricula of many yeshivas. The most famous of the yeshivas specializing in Mussar studies is the Navaradok Yeshiva, founded by Rabbi Joseph of Navaradok, a disciple of Rabbi Salanter. This is also the yeshiva which gave rise to the Beis Ya'acov system of women's education. Other yeshivas, many of which were founded by the graduates of the Volozhin Yeshiva and which incorporated the teachings of Rabbi Salanter and the Mussar Movement, were:
FORCED SECULARIZATION While Orthodox Jews accepted and embraced the Mussar Movement after an initial hesitation, the non-Orthodox continued to oppose it. Chief among the opponents was a group called the Maskilim ("the Enlightened Ones"), who opposed traditional Judaism in any way, shape or form.
This was the group that aided the Czarist government in the closing of the Volozhin Yeshiva. Why? Because the Maskilim wanted their fellow Jews to drop Judaism and join the Russian culture. They argued: "Let's study Russian culture ... let's speak in Russian and write in Russian ... let's be just like them, and they'll accept us, and we'll be able to integrate more effectively into society and end the horrible poverty so many live under." An important figure among the Maskilim was Dr. Max Lilienthal (1813-1882), a German Jew who came to Russia as director of the "enlightened" Jewish school of Riga. He was eventually appointed by the Russian government (of Czar Nicholas I) as the Minister of Jewish Education and went about attempting to convince the Jews of the Pale of the Czar's "benign intent" in establishing a new educational system for them. This was during the time when the Czar was attempting to "restructure" the Jewish society in Russia with laws forbidding the wearing of traditional clothing, decrees against Talmud study, and division of Jews into "useful" (farmers, artisans, skilled workers) and "useless" (unskilled workers, rabbis, orphans, the sick and unemployed). In this climate, in 1843, a conference was convened on the subject of Jewish education, which pitted Lilienthal against Rabbi Yitzchak of Volozhin and Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneersohn, the Rebbe of Chabad Lubavitch also known as the Tzemach Tzedek. Lilienthal could not stand up to the arguments of these rabbis, who managed to win the right for Jews to retain their traditional school system in competition with Lilienthal's new school system. (See Berel Wein's Triumph of Survival, p. 157.) Within a decade, Lilienthal's schools closed for lack of faculty and students, though Lilienthal's defenders claim that he left because he realized that the Czar's "benign intent" was to convert Jews to Christianity. He migrated to Cincinnati, Ohio, where he headed up a Reform congregation. NEXT: THE CZARS AND THE JEWS
Published: Sunday, December 16,
2001
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It is arguable which of the Russian Czars was the worst to the Jews. We'll start with Czar Nicholas I (who ruled from 1825 to 1855) as one of the prime contenders and work our way down. In 1827, Czar Nicholas I introduced what became known as the Cantonist Decrees. (The name came from the word "canton," meaning "military camp.") These decrees called for the forced conscription of Jewish boys into the Russian Army. These boys were between the ages of 12 and 18 and were forced to serve for 25 years! During their army service, every effort was made to convert them to Christianity. Due to the horrendous conditions under which they were forced to serve, very few of the boys who were conscripted came out alive, and if they did, they no longer identified themselves as Jews. As far as the Jewish community was concerned, either way was a death sentence. Some Jewish parents were so desperate they would actually cut off the right index finger of their sons with a butcher's knife -- without an index finger you couldn't fire a gun and you were exempt from service. Other people would try and bribe their kid's way out. The Cantonist Decrees raise the level of pressure on the Jewish community to new extremes. If that wasn't bad enough, there was the government-sponsored anti-Semitism. PROTOCOLS OF THE ELDERS OF ZION Around the turn of the century, the Russian secret police began to circulate a forgery which became the most famous anti-Semitic "document" in history -- The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. These protocols purported to be the minutes of a secret meeting of world Jewish leaders, which supposedly took place once every hundred years for the purpose of plotting how to manipulate and control the world in the next century. As ridiculous as this might sound to us today, the Protocols were seized upon as "proof" that the world was dominated by Jews who were responsible for all of the world's problems.
Fans and proponents of the Protocols have included such anti-Semites as: Henry Ford, the founder of Ford Motor Company; Adolf Hitler, as might be expected; Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser; and King Faisal of Saudi Arabia, among others. Despite the fact that the Protocols are a proven forgery whose allegations are completely ridiculous, and that they are considered an expression of the worst kind of anti-Semitism, the Protocols continue to sell briskly today and are carried by such huge bookstore chains as Barnes and Noble and amazon.com in the name of freedom of speech. POGROMS We spoke of pogroms -- mob violence against Jews -- in Part 49 when we covered the murderous attacks of the Ukrainian Cossack Bogdan Chmielnicki in 17th century Poland. In Czarist Russia, there were so many pogroms against the Jews that it is simply impossible to even begin to list them all. (In one four year period there was 284 pogroms, for example.) These pogroms were seldom spontaneous, though incitement by Christian clergy around the Christian holidays could drive the masses into a frenzy. However, in Czarist Russia, most of the pogroms were government organized. Why would the Czarist government organize mobs to target Jews? Because Jews were the classic scapegoats for the economic problems of Russia (and many other countries in history).
Of course, the problems of Russia had nothing to do with the Jews. The problems of Russia had to do with a totally backward, feudal, and highly corrupt regime. One of the ways of diverting attention from the corruption was to blame the Jews and to allow the masses to blow off steam by taking it out on the Jews. The problems of Russia got worse after Czar Alexander II (who was one of the more competent Czars and who was relatively benign to the Jews) was assassinated in 1881 by an anarchist who threw a bomb at his carriage. And when the problems of Russia got worse, the problems of the Jews got worse as well. The government of the new Czar, Alexander III (who ruled 1881-1894) organized one pogrom after another to keep the anger of the masses focused on the Jews. In addition to the pogroms, Alexander III promulgated a series of laws against the Jews. These laws were called the May Laws and they included such prohibitions as:
Writes Berel Wein in Triumph of Survival (p. 173) of the reign of Alexander III:
It did not help matters any that during the reign of Alexander III a terrible famine struck Russia in which 400,000 peasants died. Those who survived were bitter and their resentments grew (which would erupt eventually in an aborted revolution in 1905 and the successful Russian Revolution which ushered in Communist rule in 1917.) THE LAST ROMANOV When Alexander III died, he was succeeded by Nicholas II, the last of the Romanovs. The new Czar had to cope with the mess left behind by his father and he did so badly. During his reign one of the most famous pogroms took place -- in Kishinev, on Easter (April 6-7), 1903. The Kishinev pogrom happened when there was a lot of tension in Russia (two years before the first, unsuccessful revolution). Wanting to dispel the tension, the Czarist government once again organized a pogrom against the Jews. Strange as it may sound, the Kishinev pogrom received a lot of international attention. This was because by this time pogroms were something that the "enlightened" Western World no longer found acceptable. (If only they knew what they themselves would do to the Jews 40 years later!) Here is an excerpt from a description of the pogrom printed in the New York Times:
After two days of mayhem, the Czar said, "Okay enough -- mission accomplished. Now it's time to stop it." And it stopped. Until the next time. Between 1903 and 1907, times of great internal unrest in Russia, there were 284 pogroms with over 50,000 casualties. The level of violence was unbelievable.
There was only so much of this kind of thing that people could take. The Jewish community was being devastated and people were looking for a way out. Jews were running out of the shtetls and joining all of the anarchist, communist, socialist, bundist movements that they could find in the hopes that they would be able to change the situation in Russia. Jews have been history's great idealists and during this time they were desperate to find some way of making things better. (We will cover their activism when we discuss the events surrounding World War I.) Another thing that was happening in this time period was emigration. We see mass emigration of Jews out of Russia. Between 1881 and 1914, some 50,000 Jews left every year to a total of 2.5 million Jews. Despite these migrations, the Jewish population of Russia stayed constant -- at about 5 million Jews, due the very high birthrate. Had these Jews not left Russia there would have been 7-8 million Jews there. And it was America which absorbed most of the Jewish immigrants during this period of time. GOLDEN LAND We might recall (from Part 23) when the Jews were exile by the Babylonians, the exile had happened in two stages. First the Babylonians took away 10,000 of the best and the brightest, and that turned out to be a blessing in disguise because when the Jews arrive in Babylon, there is a Jewish infrastructure in place. Yeshivas had been established, synagogues built, there was a kosher butcher and a mikveh. Jewish life could continue and as a result we saw hardly any assimilation during the Babylonian exile. However, when the poor Jews of Russia arrived en masse in America at the end of the 19th century -- passing through the famous Ellis Island -- they found no Jewish infrastructure in place. The Jews who had preceded them in the migration of the 1830s were German Jews (about 280,000 of them). These German Jews -- who resented the poorer Russian Jews -- were either Reform, (and did not believe that the Torah was God-given nor in any specific God-given law that Jews had to keep) or they were secular Jews who totally eschewed Jewish tradition. Thus, the poor Russian Jews stepped into the Golden Land of Assimilation as we shall see in the next installment. NEXT: JEWISH LIFE IN AMERICA |
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When we last left off the Jews of America -- at the beginning of the 19th century -- there were only about 6,000 of them. The idea that there was freedom in America as long as you were not "too Jewish," kept most Jews away. That changed in the 1830s when the Jews of Germany began to arrive. The German Jews were not "too Jewish." They were either Reform Jews who had dropped the basic tenets of traditional Judaism (see Part 54 for details), or they were "enlightened" secular Jews who had dropped Judaism altogether.
By 1850 there were about 17,000 Jews living in America. By 1880 there were about 270,000. Most of these Jews moved to the New York area, which at this time had a Jewish population of 180,000. It would soon grow to 1.8 million. In New York City, the Jewish area was the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The ones who made it quickly moved up to the Upper East Side. And these Jews did remarkably well in the New World. Some famous names of those who made it rich quick were:
These are just a few famous names. There were many others. (For their stories, see Our Crowd by Stephen Birmingham.) AMERICAN REFORM MOVEMENT The German Jews of New York built the largest Reform synagogue in the world, Temple Emanuel on the Upper East Side, and many others. By 1880 there were about 200 synagogues in America, the majority (90%) of them Reform, because these were the Jews who were coming to America. With this migration, the focus of the Reform Movement moved from Germany to the United States. In America, the Reform movement continued in the tradition of its German origins, spelling out its idealogy in the famous "Pittsburgh Platform," which was drawn up and adopted in 1885 at a Pittsburgh convention of its leadership:
This last statement -- which detached the American Reform Movement from the 2,000-year-old Jewish longing to return to the Land of Israel (in imitation of the ideology espoused by the German Reform Movement) -- is the reason why early American Reform Jews did not support the Zionist Movement, or the foundation of the State of Israel, as we shall see in future installments. HEBREW UNION COLLEGE The founding father of the American Reform Movement was Isaac Meyer Wise (1819 to 1900). He was a German Jewish immigrant who was the founder and the first president of Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, Ohio, which opened in 1875. It was the first American rabbinical seminary, and it had unusually liberal standards. Writes Joseph Telushkin in Jewish Literacy (p. 393):
When, in 1883, the first graduating class of Hebrew Union College was ready to receive its diplomas, the seminary threw a lavish banquet.
The more traditional attendees were horrified when course after course presented one traif [non-kosher] dish after another: clams, soft-shell crabs, shrimps, frogs' legs, and ice cream following a meat meal. (For more on this infamous banquet see Critical Documents of Jewish History edited by Ronald H. Isaacs and Kerry M. Olitzky, pp. 60-61.) The so-called "traif banquet" compelled the more traditional Jews -- who thought that the Reform had gone too far but who did not want to be Orthodox -- to find another alternative, and it led to the founding of another movement within Judaism. THE CONSERVATIVE MOVEMENT In 1887, traditional Jews who were offended by the ideology of the Reform Movement founded an alternative to the Hebrew Union College. It was called the Jewish Theological Seminary, and it became the bastion of the new, purely-American, Conservative Movement. The head of the Jewish Theological Seminary, a respected Jewish scholar from Cambridge, England, named Solomon Schechter (1850-1915) helped shape the ideology of the new movement. In his work, "The Catholic Israel," Solomon Schechter spelled it out. (He chose a poor title for his work -- by "catholic" he meant "universal.")
In other words, the ideology of the Conservative Movement would be to uphold the Torah as the revealed word of God, but that the interpretation of that word of God need not uphold the tradition as passed down from Moses. This was a dramatic departure from the traditional attitude toward the interpretation and application of Jewish law. One of the pillars of traditional Jewish belief was (and is) that those rabbis who lived closer to the revelation at Mount Sinai had a clearer understanding of Jewish law and its application, and therefore their decisions could NOT be discarded. New rulings on modern issues must take into account established principles. (See Part 39.) When the Conservative Movement discarded this pillar of traditional Judaism, it opened a door to countless problems. The end result was that, although the founders of the movement felt Reform had gone too far, the behavior of their followers proved virtually indistinguishable from those of Reform Jews. (We will discuss these repercussions further when we take up the subject of assimilation in a future installment.) THE GREAT MIGRATIONS This then was the spiritual state of the majority of American Jewry -- defined chiefly by the German Jews who migrated in the 1830s -- when the great migrations from Eastern Europe began around the turn of the century.
How many Jews came to America in this time period? As noted earlier (see Part 57) between 1881 and 1914, some 50,000 Jews left Eastern Europe every year to a total of 2.5 million Jews, most of whom came to America. These Jews very the poorest of the poor. They had little to lose in coming to America (except perhaps their Judaism). And, alas, this is what happened. The great rabbis did not come among them, and lacking teachers and religious leaders to act against the pressures from the Americanized German Jews, these poor Eastern European Jews assimilated quickly. (We will examine the problem of assimilation in America in future installments.) The pious, yeshiva-educated Jews did not come in the great migrations. For the most part, the rabbis -- fearing that America was the Golden Land of Assimilation disguised as the Golden Land of Economic Opportunity -- preached against immigration. Writer Arthur Hertzberg in The Jews of America (p. 157):
THE TIRED AND THE POOR While the German Jews for the most part succeeded easily in America, life was much harder for the Eastern European Jews who came in the great migrations. We find, for example, at the beginning of the 1900s there were 64,000 families packed into 6,000 tenement houses of the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
These poor, Yiddish-speaking, religious Jews reflected badly on the German Jews that came before them and who by this time had become quite Americanized. Therefore, the German Jews set out to get these Russian Jews to acculturate as quickly as possible and they invested heavily in this cause. Their underlying fear was anti-Semitism. This fear was real, because despite the religious tolerance of America, anti-Semitism was alive and doing well in the New World. There were no pogroms, but there was social isolation and other types of discrimination. For example, in 1843, a dozen young men applied for membership to the Old Fellows Lodge, but were refused membership because they were Jews. (They organized a club of their own -- called the Independent Order of B'ani B'rith.) Another example: in 1869, Joseph Seligman, the well-known banker, was refused hotel accommodations in Saratoga Springs, New York, the summer resort for the well-to-do of his day because he -- no matter how rich and famous -- was a Jew. If those Jew who made it were not good enough to mingle with American non-Jews, one can just imagine how the unwashed immigrant masses were viewed. In 1894, Henry Adams (a descendants of John Quincy Adams) organized the Immigration Restriction League to limit the admission to America of "unhealthy elements" -- Jews being first among these. In his famous book, The Education of Henry Adams, he wrote about those he was trying to keep out of America:
He found many supporters for his cause, but he did not win. Indeed, one might say he lost when in 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt appointed a Jew -- Oscar Straus -- as the first Jew to serve in the U.S. cabinet, and as the secretary of commerce and labor (whose purview of responsibility was immigration). However, the anti-Semites did not give up easily, as we will see next when we examine the factors which led to the baring of the evil face of anti-Semitism in the 20th century. NEXT: THE FACE OF ANTI-SEMITISM
Published: Sunday, December 30,
2001
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In this installment we will briefly examine the anti-Semitism that -- with the coming of the Enlightenment in the 18th century -- hid itself under the veneer of "civil" society, only to bare its face of evil in the Holocaust. (For a more detailed treatment of anti-Semitism in general, click here for the WHY THE JEWS seminar) Of course, in Russia and the Pale of Settlement of Eastern Europe, anti-Semitism never went underground (as we saw in Parts 56 and 57). But in the Western World the situation was different. Some of the worst cases of anti-Semitism before the rise of the Nazis in Germany were instigated by the French, whose country was the birthplace of the Enlightenment. It is shocking to learn, for example, that it was the French consul Ratti-Menton who brought a blood libel against the Jews in 1840, when a Capuchin monk disappeared in Damascus, Syria. In response to his accusations, the Syrian authorities seized more than sixty Jewish children to coerce their parents into confessing. Several Jews were arrested and tortured. Two died under torture and several others were permanently disabled; one "confessed." Pressured by French authorities, the Syrians would have tried these Jews on false charges had not the Jewish world reacted. Jewish organizations instigated a protest by British and American leaders (including President Martin Van Buren) that caused the Syrians to drop the charges. (Notably, the Reform Jews of Germany, who had distanced themselves from identifying with other Jews, as we saw in Part 54, did not participate in the protest.) French anti-Semitism continued however. In 1886, a virulently anti-Semitic book La France Juive became the most-widely read book in France. This was followed in 1892 by the founding of an anti-Semitic daily newspaper La Libre Parole. Writes Berel Wein in Triumph of Survival (p. 233):
THE DREYFUS AFFAIR That anti-Semitic incident -- which became known in France as "L'Affaire" -- was the famous case of Alfred Dreyfus, a captain in the French Army who was falsely accused in 1894 of spying.
The actual spy was not a Jew -- one Colonel Esterhazy -- but even though this fact was quickly discovered, the French army would not back away from its accusations for anti-Semitic reasons. "Secret" documents were produced and Dreyfus was tried and convicted of treason in a closed courtroom before a military tribunal. He was stripped of his rank and sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil's Island. On January 3, 1895, he was paraded through the streets of Paris while a mob jeered: "Death to the Jews." (One of those covering this fiasco was a Jewish journalist from Austria, Theodor Herzl, who was shocked to the core that Jew-hatred was so ingrained in the "civilized" French. It was then and there that Herzl, who was secular and quite assimilated, realized that the only safe place for the Jews was a land of their own -- the Land of Israel. This led Herzl to convene the First Zionist Congress in Basle, Switzerland, in 1897, at which the World Zionist Organization was established. We will discuss Zionism in greater detail in a future installment.) Meanwhile, the travesty of the Dreyfus trial created a controversy. France's greatest writer, Emile Zola, published a stunning newspaper article entitled J'Accuse ("I Accuse"), charging the government with a miscarriage of justice. For this, Zola (who was not a Jew) was convicted of libel and had to flee to England. Eventually, after another travesty of a trial in which Dreyfus was again convicted, he was finally pardoned and and restored to his former military rank. (He was not fully exonerated until 1906!) WORLD WAR I On June 28, 1914, Archduke Francis Ferdinand, heir apparent to the Austro-Hungarian throne, was assassinated at Sarajevo by a Serbian nationalist. One month later, after its humiliating demands were refused, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. Other declarations of war followed quickly, and soon every major power in Europe was in the war. On one side were the Allies -- chiefly France, Britain, Russia, and the U.S.; on the other were the Central Powers -- Austria-Hungary, Germany and Turkey (i.e. Ottoman Empire). World War I, which lasted four years, was an incredibly destructive war in which 10 million people died and another 20 million were wounded. This was largely because by the time World War I broke out, lethal weapons capable of killing huge numbers of people had been perfected. Soldiers no longer needed to stand close to each other to kill. Machine guns and heavy artillery did the job for them. And the end result was quite devastating. As for the Jews, 1.5 million fought in World War I. Jews fought in the Austrian army, in the German army, in the Russian army, in the French army. Jews (aligned with their host nations) fought against other Jews in this conflict, and 140,000 Jews died. Interestingly, World War I -- which without a doubt set the stage for the Holocaust -- began on August 1, 1914, corresponding to the 9th of the Hebrew month of Av (Tisha B'Av) the worst date in Jewish history. This was the same day on which the first and second Temples were destroyed, as well as many other terrible things that happened to the Jewish people as we have already seen.
In fact, World War I triggered a chain reaction that proved catastrophic to the Jews. The two major links in the chain reaction were the Russian Revolution and the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany. Hitler would never have come to power were it not for Germany's defeat in World War I. As a result of that defeat, the punishing Versailles Treaty which brought Germany to its knees, and the world-wide depression following the war, Germany was thrown into economic chaos. But who was blamed for that economic plight by the "enlightened" Germans? The Jew, of course. World War II, which followed World War I by only 21 years, was in many ways a continuation of the same conflict, as we will learn. RUSSIAN REVOLUTION Initially, the Czarist government did well in World War I. But as the war continued, the death toll and military setbacks proved more than Russia could handle. The many years of corruption by the Czarist government had previously led in Russia to one aborted revolution in 1905. In 1917, the revolution was finally successful (though the actual fighting went on until 1921). The Czar was deposed and a Communist government came into power where it would stay until 1990. Of course, the Jews -- who were among the most oppressed people in Russia, and who always gravitated to movements that professed to "change the world" -- were involved in a major way in the Russian Revolution. (We saw earlier that the founder of the Communist ideology was Karl Marx, a Jew who converted to Christianity and then abandoned all religion.) The motto of the Communist Party -- "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" -- fit perfectly with Jewish teachings of social responsibility and social justice. The Jews who joined the Communist party were not religious Jews, but the drive toward tikun olam ("repairing of the world") had not died. Indeed, in absence of religious expression, this drive (toward what is identified as a Messianic utopia in Judaism) dominated their Jewish souls. Of course, just because secular Jews were involved in the Russian Revolution does not mean that the religious Jews of the shtetls were spared in the conflict. In fact, during the Russian Revolution huge numbers of Jews were killed.
Still, we must give credit where credit is due. The leader of the Russian Revolution, Nikolai Lenin (1870-1924) did try to root out anti-Semitism. He made a strong stand against it, because it was such an intrinsic policy of the Czarist government. Furthermore, Lenin was well aware that there would probably not have been a Russian Revolution without the Jews. Unfortunately, these Jewish Communists were following the Marxist dictum that "religion is the opiate of the masses," and they did they level best to eradicate Judaism as a religion out of Russia. Here is an excerpt from a propaganda piece by Yevsektsiya (the special department of the Soviet government set up to deal with Jews ) entitled "The Liquidation of Bourgeois Institutions" published in October 1918:
So the Communist government of Russia, like the Czarist government of Russia Communism, embarked on a policy of forced secularization of Jews. (To be fair, they also did it to the Russian Orthodox Church.) Thus the Jews of Russia were deliberately starved of their heritage, resulting in a huge Jewish population that is incredibly ignorant of Judaism. This, by the way, is a unique event in human history -- the deliberate secularization of a community to such a large extent for such a long period of time. (It was unique to the Soviet Union and later duplicated by other Communist regimes, particularly in China.) STALIN AND TROTSKY When Lenin died in 1924, Joseph Stalin (1879-1953) seized power. In 1935, he initiated a series of purges which devastated Russia. These purges made Stalin the second biggest mass murderer of the 20th century (after Mao Tze-tung), if we consider the sheer number of people he ordered killed and others whom he consigned to death in a vast network of labor camps. It is estimated that Stalin is responsible for the deaths of about 25 million people (twice as many as Hitler, though half as many as Mao). An anti-Semite of the first order, even after the Holocaust, he was planning to deport 2-3 million Jews to Siberia where they would have been killed. However, he died under mysterious circumstances before he could put his plan into action.
However, he did succeed in purging all the Jews out of the Communist government of Russia. The most famous of these was Leon Trotsky (1879-1940). The most important Jew in the Russian Revolution, Trotsky -- whose real name was Lev Davidovich Bronstein -- was a leading organizer of the Red Army. He engineered the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917 along with Lenin. When Lenin died he and Stalin were rivals for succession. Stalin won and first ousted Trotsky as commissar of war, then expelled him from the party, and finally deported him from Russia -- that happened in 1929. Trotsky survived in exile for more than 10 years; he was murdered in Mexico City in 1940 on Stalin's orders. AMERICAN ANTI-SEMITISM Thus far, we have covered the open murderous anti-Semitism of the Russians and the insidious "intellectual" anti-Semitism of the French. But what about the land of tolerance -- America? In 1913, in Atlanta, Georgia, a Jew named Leo Frank was falsely accused of the murder of a 13-year-old Christian girl. So strong was the anti-Semitism in the American South that the testimony of a black man -- a unique event in this racist region -- was permitted against a white man. But, of course, the white man was a Jew. Ironically, the black "witness" was the murderer -- a fact that he had confessed to his own attorney, but this was kept secret. There had also been a real witness but he did not come forward until many years later. Frank was convicted and sentenced to death, but the governor of Georgia, John Slaton, convinced that Frank was innocent, commuted his sentence. Then a horrible thing happened.
A Georgia mob kidnapped Frank from prison and lynched him. The lynching was photographed and made into postcards which sold briskly. Not until 1986 -- 73 years later! -- was Frank awarded posthumous pardon by the state of Georgia. The Frank case led to the founding of the Anti-Defamation League by the B'nai B'rith. It became the leading Jewish group fighting anti-Semitism in America, and it had a lot of work on its hands, especially after 1918, the end of World War I, and in 1929 when the stock market crashed, and things heated up for the Jews in America. As we mentioned in our discussion of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (see Part 57), one of the big promulgators of anti-Semitism in America was Henry Ford, who spent a lot of his own money to get the Protocols translated into English and distributed in America as widely as possible. The Protocols became the second biggest selling book in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s (after the Bible). The Ford Motor Company's plant in Dearborn, Michigan, had a sign posted in its parking lot:
Henry Ford was not the only one. There were others. There were several conservative Christian political parties which were strongly anti-Semitic for example, William Pelley's "Silver Shirts." An anti-Semitic newspaper, Gerald B. Winrod's The Defender had 110,000 subscribers. These American anti-Semites were fledgling fascists. Under the guise of patriotism, they championed the idea that Jews were the underlying cause of the economic woes of America -- such as the stock market crash of 1929 -- because it was the Jews who controlled business and banking. This kind of anti-Semitism rivaled that of Europe in the same period, but unlike Europe never took hold with the same fatal consequences. But all this Jew-hatred did set the stage for the appeasement of Hitler when he took hold of power in Germany. It also was one of the primary reasons why America did not do more to save the Jews once they began to flee the Holocaust, as we shall see next. NEXT: THE HOLOCAUST
Published: Sunday, January 06,
2002
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As we begin to discuss this most painful of subjects to the Jewish people, please keep in mind that this is a vast subject. At the moment there are some 1,200 books in print examining why it happened, how it happened, and all the details in between. Some of the classics that give insight into the Holocaust are:
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Lessons 1 - 5 Lessons 6 - 10 Lessons 11 -15 Lessons 16 -20 Lessons 21 -25 Lessons 26 -30 Lessons 31 -35 Lessons 36 -40 Lessons 41-45 Lessons 46-50 Lessons 51 -55 Lessons 56 - 60 Lessons 61 - 65 |
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