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WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
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Israel
Index
Temple Mount in Jerusalem with the Dome of the Rock, a
Muslim holy place, as seen from Mount Scopus
Courtesy Les Vogel
The major event that led to the growth of the Zionist movement
was the emancipation of Jews in France (1791), followed shortly
thereafter by their emancipation in the rest of continental and
Central Europe. After having lived for centuries in the confines of
Jewish ghettos, Jews living in Western and Central Europe now had
a powerful incentive to enter mainstream European society. Jews,
who had previously been confined to petty trade and to banking,
rapidly rose in academia, medicine, the arts, journalism, and other
professions. The accelerated assimilation of Jews into European
society radically altered the nature of relations between Jews and
non-Jews. On the one hand, Jews had to reconcile traditional
Judaism, which for nearly 2,000 years prior to emancipation had
developed structures designed to maintain the integrity and
separateness of Jewish community life, with a powerful secular
culture in which they were now able to participate. On the other
hand, many non-Jews, who prior to the emancipation had had little
or no contact with Jews, increasingly saw the Jew as an economic
threat. The rapid success of many Jews fueled this resentment.
The rise of ethnically based nationalism in the mid-nineteenth
century gave birth to yet another form of anti-Semitism. Before the
mid-nineteenth century, European anti-Semitism was based mainly on
Christian antipathies toward Jews because of their refusal to
convert to Christianity. As a result, an individual Jew could
usually avoid persecution by converting, as many did over the
centuries. The emergence of ethnically based nationalism, however,
radically changed the status of the Jew in European society. The
majority gentile population saw Jews as a separate people who could
never be full participants in the nation's history.
The vast majority of Jews in Western and Central Europe
responded by seeking even deeper assimilation into European culture
and a secularization of Judaism. A minority, who believed that
greater assimilation would not alter the hostility of non-Jews,
adopted Zionism. According to this view, the Jew would remain an
outsider in European society regardless of the liberalism of the
age because Jews lacked a state of their own. Jewish statelessness,
then, was the root cause of anti-Semitism. The Zionists sought to
solve the Jewish problem by creating a Jewish entity outside Europe
but modeled after the European nation-state. After more then half
a century of emancipation, West European Jewry had become distanced
from both the ritual and culture of traditional Judaism. Thus,
Zionism in its West European Jewish context envisioned a purely
political solution to the Jewish problem: a state of Jews rather
than a Jewish state.
For the bulk of European Jewry, however, who resided in Eastern
Europe's
Pale of Settlement (see Glossary)
--on the western fringe
of the Russian Empire, between the Baltic and the Black seas--there
was no emancipation. East European Jewry had lived for centuries in
kehilot (sing., kehilah), semiautonomous Jewish
municipal corporations that were supported by wealthy Jews. Life in
the kehilot was governed by a powerful caste of learned
religious scholars who strictly enforced adherence to the Jewish
legal code. Many Jews found the parochial conformity enforced by
the kehilot leadership onerous. As a result, liberal
stirring unleashed by the emancipation in the West had an
unsettling effect upon the kehilot in the East.
By the early nineteenth century, not only was kehilot
life resented but the tsarist regimes were becoming increasingly
absolute. In 1825 Tsar Nicholas I, attempting to centralize control
of the empire and Russify its peoples, enacted oppressive measures
against the Jews; he drafted a large number of under-age Jews for
military service, forced Jews out of their traditional occupations,
such as the liquor trade, and generally repressed the
kehilot. Facing severe economic hardship and social
upheaval, tens of thousands of Jews migrated to the cities,
especially Odessa on the Russian coast. In their new urban
environments, the restless and highly literate Jews clamored for
the liberalization of tsarist rule.
In 1855 the prospects for Russian Jewry appeared to improve
significantly when the relatively liberal-minded Tsar Alexander II
ascended the throne. Alexander II ended the practice of drafting
Jewish youth into the military and granted Jews access, albeit
limited, to Russian education institutions and various professions
previously closed to them. Consequently, a thriving class of Jewish
intellectuals, the maskalim (enlightened), emerged in cities
like Odessa, just as they had in Western Europe and Central Europe
after emancipation. The maskalim believed that Tsar
Alexander II was ushering in a new age of Russian liberalism which,
as in the West, would eventually lead to the emancipation of
Russian Jewry.
The hopes of the maskalim and of Russian Jewry in
general, however, were misplaced. Alexander II was assassinated in
1881, and a severe pogrom ensued that devastated Jewish communities
throughout the Pale of Settlement. The new Tsar, Alexander III,
enacted oppressive policies against the Jews and denied police
protection to those Jews who remained in the countryside. As a
result, a floodtide of impoverished Jews entered the cities where
they joined various movements that sought to overthrow the tsar.
The openly anti-Semitic policies pursued by the new tsar and
the popularity of these policies among large segments of the nonJewish population posed serious political, economic, and spiritual
dilemmas for Russian Jewry. On the economic level, the tsar's antiSemitic policies severely limited Jewish economic opportunities and
undermined the livelihood of the Jewish masses. Many impoverished
East European Jews, therefore, emigrated from the Russian Empire.
Between 1881 and 1914, an estimated 2.5 million Jews left the
empire, 2 million of whom settled in the United States.
For many Jews, especially the maskalim, however, the
pogroms and the anti-Semitism of the new tsar not only meant
economic hardship and physical suffering but also a deep spiritual
malaise. Before 1881, they had been abandoning the strict confines
of the kehilot en masse and rebelling against religious
orthodoxy, anxiously waiting for the expected emancipation to reach
Russia. The 1881 pogroms and their aftermath shattered not only the
faith of the maskalim in the inevitable liberalization of
tsarist Russia but also their belief that the non-Jewish Russian
intellectual would take an active role in opposing anti-Semitism.
Most of the Russian intelligentsia were either silent during the
pogroms or actually supported them. Having lost their faith in God
and in the inevitable spread of liberalism, large numbers of
Russian Jews were forced to seek new solutions. Many flocked to the
revolutionary socialist and communist movements opposing the tsar,
while others became involved with the
Bund (see Glossary), a
cultural society that sought to establish a
Yiddish (see Glossary)
cultural renaissance within Russia.
A smaller but growing number of Jews were attracted to the
ancient but newly formulated notion of reconstituting a Jewish
nation-state in Palestine. Zionism as it evolved in Eastern Europe,
unlike Zionism in the West, dealt not only with the plight of Jews
but with the crisis of Judaism. Thus, despite its secularism, East
European Zionism remained attached to the Jewish biblical home in
Palestine. It also was imbued with the radical socialist fervor
challenging the tsarist regime.
Zionism's reformulation of traditional Judaism was deeply
resented by Orthodox Jews, especially the
Hasidim (sing., Hasid-- see Glossary).
Most East European Jews rejected the notion of a
return to the promised land before the appearance of the messiah.
They viewed Zionism as a secular European creation that aspired to
change the focus of Judaism from devotion to Jewish law and
religious ritual to the establishment of a Jewish nation-state.
Data as of December 1988
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