Thus, in the wake of World War I, Jews had found themselves at the center of both the crisis of modern Europe and the most far-reaching attempts to overcome it. Strikingly successful at the pursuits that made up the foundations of modern states—entrepreneurship (especially banking) and the professions (especially law, medicine, journalism, and science)—they were excluded from the modern nations that those states were supposed to embody and represent. In a Europe that draped the economy of capitalism and professional expertise in the legitimacy of nationalism, Jews stood abandoned and unprotected as a ghostly tribe of powerful strangers. In one nation-state, their exclusion would turn into the main article of nationalist faith and a methodical extermination campaign. But exclusion could also become a form of escape and liberation. For most European Jews, this meant three pilgrimages to three ideological destinations. Freudianism became associated with a nonethnic (or multiethnic) liberalism in the United States; Zionism represented a secular Jewish nationalism in Palestine; and Communism stood for the creation of a nation-free world centered in Moscow. The story of twentieth-century Jews is a story of one Hell and three Promised Lands.
Chapter 3
BABEL’S FIRST LOVE: THE JEWS AND THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION
Suddenly I heard a voice beside me saying: “Excuse me, young man, do you think it is proper to stare at strange young ladies in that way?”
—I. S. Turgenev, “First Love”
At the turn of the twentieth century, most of Europe’s Jews (5.2 out of about 8.7 million) lived in the Russian Empire, where they constituted about 4 percent of the total population. Most of Russia’s Jews (about 90 percent) resided in the Pale of Settlement, to which they were legally restricted. Most of the Jews in the Pale of Settlement (all but about 4 percent, who were farmers and factory workers) continued to pursue traditional service occupations as middlemen between the overwhelmingly agricultural Christian population and various urban markets. Most of the Jewish middlemen bought, shipped, and resold local produce; provided credit on the security of standing crops and other items; leased and managed estates and various processing facilities (such as tanneries, distilleries, and sugar mills); kept taverns and inns; supplied manufactured goods (as peddlers, shopkeepers, or wholesale importers); provided professional services (most commonly as doctors and pharmacists), and served as artisans (from rural blacksmiths, tailors, and shoemakers to highly specialized jewelers and watchmakers). The proportion of various pursuits could vary, but the association of Jews with the service sector (including small-scale craftsmanship) remained very strong.1
As traditional Mercurians dependent on external strangeness and internal cohesion, the majority of Russian Jews continued to live in segregated quarters, speak Yiddish, wear distinctive clothing, observe complex dietary taboos, practice endogamy, and follow a variety of other customs that ensured the preservation of collective memory, autonomy, purity, unity, and a hope of redemption. The synagogue, bathhouse, heder, and the home helped structure space as well as social rituals, and numerous self-governing institutions assisted the rabbi and the family in regulating communal life, education, and charity. Both social status and religious virtue depended on wealth and learning; wealth and learning ultimately depended on each other.
The relations between the majority of Pale Jews and their mostly rural customers followed the usual pattern of Mercurian-Apollonian coexistence. Each side saw the other as unclean, opaque, dangerous, contemptible, and ultimately irrelevant to the communal past and future salvation. Social contact was limited to commercial and bureaucratic encounters. Non-Jews almost never spoke Yiddish, and very few Jews spoke the languages of their Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Latvian, Moldovan, or Belorussian neighbors beyond “the minimum of words which were absolutely necessary in order to transact business.”2 Everyone (and most particularly the Jews themselves) assumed that the Jews were nonnative, temporary exiles; that they depended on their customers for survival; and that the country—however conceived—belonged to the local Apollonians. The history of the people of Israel relived by every Jew on every Sabbath had nothing to do with his native shtetl or the city of Kiev; his sea was Red, not Black, and the rivers of his imagination did not include the Dnieper or the Dvina. “[Sholem Aleichem’s] Itzik Meyer of Kasrilevke was told to feel that he himself, with wife and children, had marched out of Egypt, and he did as he was told. He felt that he himself had witnessed the infliction of the ten plagues on the Egyptians, he himself had stood on the farther shore of the Red Sea and seen the walls of water collapse on the pursuers, drowning them all to the last man—with the exception of Pharaoh, who was preserved as an eternal witness for the benefit of the Torquemadas and the Romanovs.”3
The most prominent—and perhaps the only—local Apollonians retained by the Jewish memory were the Cossack looters and murderers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the most frequently invoked of them all (as the modern equivalent of the biblical Haman) was Bohdan Khmelnytsky—the same Bohdan Khmelnytsky whom most Ukrainian-speakers remembered as their deliverer from Catholic captivity and (for a short time) Jewish scheming and spying. Overall, however, the Jews were as marginal to the Eastern European peasant imagination as the Eastern European peasants were to the Jewish one. Apollonians tend to remember battles with other Apollonians, not bargaining with Mercurians (while the Mercurians themselves tend to remember the days when they were Apollonians). The villains of Cossack mythology are mostly Tatars and Poles, with Jews featured episodically as Polish agents (which, in the economic sense, they were—especially as estate leaseholders and liquor-tax farmers).4
Most Jewish and non-Jewish inhabitants of the Pale of Settlement shared the same fundamental view of what separated them. Like all Mercurians and Apollonians, they tended to think of each other as universal and mutually complementary opposites: mind versus body, head versus heart, outsider versus insider, nomadic versus settled. In the words of Mark Zborowski and Elizabeth Herzog (whose account is based on interviews with former shtetl residents),
A series of contrasts is set up in the mind of the shtetl child, who grows up to regard certain behavior as characteristic of Jews, and its opposite, as characteristic of Gentiles. Among Jews he expects to find emphasis on intellect, a sense of moderation, cherishing of spiritual values, cultivation of rational, goal-directed activities, a “beautiful” family life. Among gentiles he looks for the opposite of each item: emphasis on the body, excess, blind instinct, sexual license, and ruthless force. The first list is ticketed in his mind as Jewish, the second as goyish.5
Seen from the other side, the lists looked essentially the same, with the values reversed. Intelligence, moderation, learning, rationalism, and family devotion (along with entrepreneurial success) could be represented as cunning, cowardice, casuistry, unmanliness, clannishness, and greed, whereas the apparent emphasis on the body, excess, instinct, license, and force might be interpreted as earthiness, spontaneity, soulfulness, generosity, and warrior strength (honor). These oppositions were informed by actual differences in economic roles and values; sanctified by communal traditions and prohibitions; reinforced by new quasi-secular mythologies (as Marxists and various nationalists employed them more or less creatively but without substantive revisions); and reenacted daily, ritually, and sometimes consciously in personal encounters as well as in prayers, jokes, and gestures.