History of the Jews in Russia and Poland Volume II Part 18

In the following period, beginning with the eighties, his literary creations exhibit greater artistic harmony in their content. As far as their linguistic garb is concerned, they combine the Yiddish vernacular with the Hebrew national tongue, which are employed side by side by our author as the vehicles of his thought, and reach at his hands an equally high state of perfection.

6. THE HARBINGER OF JEWISH NATIONALISM (PEREZ SMOLENSKIN)

The artistic portrayer of life was, however, a rare exception in the literature of the Haskalah. Riven by social and cultural strife, the period of enlightenment called rather for theories than for art, and the novelist no less than the publicist was called upon to supply the want.

This theoretic element was paramount in the novels of Perez Smolenskin.

(1842-1885), the editor of the popular Hebrew magazine _ha-Shahar_. [1]

The pupil of a White Russian yeshibah, he afterwards drifted into frivolous Odessa and still later to Vienna, suffering painfully from the shock of the contrast. Personally he had emerged unscathed from this conflict of ideas. But round about him he witnessed "the dead bodies of enlightenment, which are just as numerous as the victims of ignorance."

He saw the Jewish youth fleeing from its people and forgetting its national language. He saw Reform Judaism of Western Europe which had retained nothing of Jewish culture except the modernized superficialities of the synagogue. Repelled by this spectacle, Smolenskin decided from the very beginning to fight on two fronts: against the fanatics of orthodoxy in the name of European progress, and against the champions of a.s.similation in the name of national Jewish culture, and more particularly of the Hebrew language. "You say,"

Smolenskin exclaims, addressing himself to the a.s.similators, "let us be like the other nations. Well and good. Let us, indeed, be like the other nations: cultured men and women, free from superst.i.tion, loyal citizens of the country. But let us also remember, as the other nations do, that we have no right to be ashamed of our origin, that it is our duty to hold dear our national language and our national dignity."

[Footnote 1: See above, p. 218.]

In his first great novel "A Rover on Life's Paths" (_Ha-to-'eh bedarke ha-hayyim_, 1869-1876), Smolenskin carries his hero through all the stages of cultural development, leading from an obscure White Russian hamlet to the centers of European civilization in London and Paris. But at the end of his "rovings" the hero ultimately attains to a synthesis of Jewish nationalism and European progress, and ends by sacrificing his life while defending his brethren during the Odessa pogrom of 1871. The other _Tendenz_-novels of Smolenskin reflect the same double-fronted struggle: against the stagnation of the orthodox, particularly the Hasidim, and against the disloyalty of the "enlightened."

Smolenskin's theory of Judaism is formulated in two publicistic works: "The Eternal People" (_'Am 'olam_, [1] 1872) and "There is a Time to Plant" (_'Et la-ta'at_ [2], 1875-1877). As a counterbalance to the artificial religious reforms of the West, he sets up the far-reaching principle of Jewish evolution, of a gradual amalgamation of the national and humanitarian element within Judaism. The Messianic dogma, which the Jews of the West had completely abandoned because of its alleged incompatibility with Jewish citizenship in the Diaspora, is warmly defended by Smolenskin as one of the symbols of national unity. In the very center of his system stands the cult of Hebrew as a national language, "without which there is no Judaism." In order the more successfully to demolish the idea of a.s.similation, Smolenskin bombards its substructure, the theory of enlightenment as formulated by Moses Mendelssohn, with its definition of the Jews as a religious community, and not as a nation, though in his polemical ardor he often goes too far, and does occasional violence to historic truth.

[Footnote 1: From Isa. 44. 7.]

[Footnote 2: From Eccles. 3. 2.]

In both works one may discern, though in vague outlines only, the theory of a "spiritual nation." [1] However, Smolenskin did not succeed in developing and consolidating his theory. The pogroms of 1881 and the beginning of the Jewish exodus from Russia upset his equilibrium once more. He laid aside the question of the national development of Jewry in the Diaspora, and became an enthusiastic preacher of the restoration of the Jewish people in Palestine. In the midst of this propaganda the life of the talented publicist was cut short by a premature death.

[Footnote 1: The conception of a "spiritual nation" as applied to Judaism has been formulated and expounded by the author of the present volume in a number of works. See his "Jewish History" (Jewish Publication Society, 1903) p. 29 et seq., and the translator's essay "Dubnow's Theory of Jewish Nationalism" (reprinted from the Maccabaean, 1905). More about this theory will be found in Vol. III.]

The same conviction was finally reached, after a prolonged inner struggle, by Moses Leib Lilienblum (1843-1910), who might well be called a "martyr of enlightenment." However, during the period under consideration he moved entirely within the boundaries of the Haskalah, of which he was a most radical exponent. Persecuted for his harmless liberalism by the fanatics of his native town of Vilkomir, [1]

Lilienblum began to ponder over the question of Jewish religious reforms. In advocating the reform of Judaism, he was not actuated, as were so many in Western Europe, by the desire of adapting Judaism to the non-Jewish environment, but rather by the profound and painful conviction that dominant Rabbinism in its medieval phase did not represent the true essence of Judaism. Reform of Judaism, as interpreted by Lilienblum, does not mean a revolution, but an evolution of Judaism.

Just as the Talmud had once reformed Judaism in accordance with the requirements of its time, so must Judaism be reformed by us in accordance with the demands of our own times. When the youthful writer embodied these views in a series of articles, published in the _ha-Melitz_ under the t.i.tle _Orhot ha-Talmud_ ("The Ways of the Talmud,"

1868-1869), his orthodox townsmen were so thoroughly aroused that his further stay in Vilkomir was not free from danger, and he was compelled to remove to Odessa. Here he published in 1870 his rhymed satire _Kehal refa'im_, [2] in which the dark shadows of a Jewish town, the Kahal elders, the rabbis, the Tzaddiks, and other worthies, move weirdly about in the gloom of the nether-world.

[Footnote 1: In the government of Kovno.]

[Footnote 2: "The Congregation of the Dead," with allusion to Prov.

21.16.]

In Odessa Lilienblum joined the ranks of the Russified college youth, and became imbued with the radical ideas of Chernyshevski and Pisaryev, gaining the reputation of a "nihilist." His theory of Jewish reform, superannuated by his new materialistic world view, was thrown aside, and a gaping void opened in the soul of the writer. This frame of mind is reflected in Lilienblum's self-revelation, "The Sins of Youth" (_Hattot ne'urim_, 1876), this agonizing cry of one of the many victims of the mental cataclysm of the sixties. The book made a tremendous impression, for the mental tortures depicted in it were typical of the whole age of transition. However, the final note of the confession, the shriek of a wasted soul, which, having overthrown the old idols, has failed to find a new G.o.d, did not express the general trend of that period, which was far from despair.

As for our author, his tempestuous soul was soon set at rest. The events which filled the minds of progressive Jewry with agitation, the horrors of the pogroms and the political oppression of the beginning of the eighties, brought peace to the aching heart of Lilienblum. He found the solution of the Jewish problems in the "Love of Zion," of which he became the philosophic exponent. At a later stage he became an ardent champion of political Zionism.

7. JEWISH LITERATURE IN THE RUSSIAN LANGUAGE

The left wing of "enlightenment" was represented during this period by Jewish literature in the Russian language, which had several noteworthy exponents. It is interesting to observe that, whereas all the prominent writers in Hebrew were children of profoundly nationalistic Lithuania, those that wrote in Russian, with the sole exception of Levanda, were natives of South Russia, where the two extremes, stagnant Hasidism and radical Russification, fought for supremacy. The founder of this branch of Jewish literature was Osip (Joseph) Rabinovich (1817-1869), a Southerner, a native of Poltava and a resident of Odessa. [1] Alongside of journalistic articles he wrote protracted novels. His touching "Pictures of the Past," his stories "The Penal Recruit" and "The Inherited Candlestick" (1859-1860) called up before the generation living at the dawn of the new era of reforms the shadows of the pa.s.sing night: the tortures of Nicholas' conscription and the degrading forms of Jewish rightlessness.

[Footnote 1: See above, p, 219.]

The fight against this rightlessness was the goal of his journalistic activity which, prior to the publication of the _Razswyet_, he had carried on in the columns of the liberal Russian press. The problems of inner Jewish life had but little attraction for him. Like Riesser, he looked upon civil emanc.i.p.ation as a panacea for all Jewish ailments. He was s.n.a.t.c.hed away by death before he could be cured of this illusion.

Rabinovich's work was continued by a talented youth, the journalist Ilya (Elias) Orshanski of Yekaterinoslav (1846-1875), who was the main contributor to the _Dyen_ of Odessa and to the _Yevreyskaya Bibliotyeka_. [1] To fight for Jewish rights, not to offer humble apologies, to demand emanc.i.p.ation, not to beg for it, this att.i.tude lends a charm of its own to Orshanski's writings. His brilliant a.n.a.lysis of "Russian Legislation concerning the Jews" [2] offers a complete anatomy of Jewish disfranchis.e.m.e.nt in Russia, beginning with Catherine II. and ending with Alexander II.

[Footnote 1: Compare above, p. 220 et seq.]

[Footnote 2: The t.i.tle of his work on the same subject which appeared in St. Petersburg in 1877.]

Nevertheless, being a child of his age, he preached its formula. While a pa.s.sionate Jew at heart, he championed the cause of Russification, though not in the extreme form of spiritual self-effacement. The Odessa pogrom of 1871 staggered his impressionable soul. He was tossing about restlessly, seeking an outlet for his resentment, but everywhere he knocked his head against the barriers of censorship and police. Had he been granted longer life, he might, like Smolenskin, have chosen the road of a nationalistic-progressive synthesis, but the white plague carried him off in his twenty-ninth year.

The literary work of Lev (Leon) Levanda (1835-1888) was of a more complicated character. A graduate of one of the official rabbinical schools, he was first active as teacher in a Jewish Crown school in Minsk, and afterwards occupied the post of a "learned Jew" [1] under Muravyov, the governor-general of Vilna. He thus moved in the hot-bed of "official enlightenment" and in the headquarters of the policy of Russification as represented by Muravyov, a circ.u.mstance which left its impress upon all the products of his pen. In his first novel, "The Grocery Store" (1860), of little merit from the artistic point of view, he still appears as the naive bard of that shallow "enlightenment," the champion of which is sufficiently characterized by wearing a European costume, calling himself by a well-sounding German or Russian name (in the novel under discussion the hero goes by the name of Arnold), cultivating friendly relations with n.o.ble-minded Christians and making a love match una.s.sisted by the marriage-broker.

[Footnote 1: In Russian, _Uchony Yevrey_, an expert in Jewish matters, attached, according to the Russian law of 1844, to the superintendents of school districts and to the governors-general within the Pale.]

During this stage of his career, Levanda was convinced that "no educated Jew could help being a cosmopolitan." But a little later his cosmopolitanism displayed a distinct propensity toward Russification. In his novel "A Hot Time" (1871-1872), Levanda renounces his former Polish sympathies, and, through the mouth of his hero Sarin, preaches the gospel of the approaching cultural fusion between the Jews and the Russians which is to mark a new epoch in the history of the Jewish people. Old-fashioned Jewish life is cleverly ridiculed in his "Sketches of the Past" ("The Earlocks of my Mellammed," "Schoolophobia," etc., 1870-1875). His peace of mind was not even disturbed by the manifestation, towards the end of the sixties, of the anti-Semitic reaction in those very official circles in which the "learned Jew" moved and in which Brafman was looked up to as an authority in matters appertaining to Judaism. [1] But the catastrophe of 1881 dealt a staggering blow to Levanda's soul, and forced him to overthrow his former idol of a.s.similation. With his mind not yet fully settled on the new theory of nationalism, he joined the Palestine movement towards the end of his life, and went down to his grave with a clouded soul.

[Footnote 1: Levanda sat side by side with this renegade and informer in the Commission on the Jewish Question which had been appointed by the governor-general of Vilna. (See p. 189.)]

One who stuck fast in his denial of Judaism was Grigory Bogrov (1825-1885). The descendant of a family of rabbis in Poltava, he pa.s.sed "from darkness to light" by way of the curious educational inst.i.tution of Nicholas' brand, the office of an excise farmer in which he was employed for a number of years. The enlightened _Aktziznik_ [1] became conscious of his literary talent late in life. His protracted "Memoirs of a Jew," largely made up of autobiographic material, were published in a Russian magazine as late as 1871-1873. [2] They contain an acrimonious description of Jewish life in the time of Nicholas I. No Jewish artist had ever yet dipped his brush in colors so dismal and had displayed so ferocious a hatred as did Bogrov in painting the old Jewish mode of life within the Pale, with its poverty and darkness, its hunters and victims, its demoralized Kahal rule of the days of conscription. Bogrov's account of his childhood and youth is not relieved by a single cheerful reminiscence, except that of a young _Russian_ girl. The whole patriarchal life of a Jewish townlet of that period is transformed into a sort of inferno teeming with criminals or idiots.

[Footnote 1: See p. 186, n. 1.]

[Footnote 2: Shortly afterwards the "Memoirs" were supplemented by another autobiographic novel, "The Captured Recruit."]

To the mind of Bogrov, only two ways promised an escape from this h.e.l.l: the way of cosmopolitanism and rationalism, opening up into humanity at large, or the way leading into the midst of the Russian nation. Bogrov himself stood irresolute on this fateful border-line. In 1878 he wrote to Levanda that as "an emanc.i.p.ated cosmopolitan he would long ago have crossed over to the opposite sh.o.r.e," where "other sympathies and ideals smiled upon him," were he not kept within the Jewish fold "by four million people innocently suffering from systematic persecutions."

Bogrov's hatred of the persecutors of the Jewish people was poured forth in his historic novel "A Jewish Ma.n.u.script" (1876), the plot of which is based on events of the time of Khmelnitzki. [1] But even here, while describing, as he himself puts it, the history of the struggle between the spider and the fly, he finds in the life of the fly nothing worthy of sympathy except its sufferings. In 1879 Bogrov began a new novel, "The Sc.u.m of the Age," picturing the life of the modern Jewish youth who were engulfed in the Russian revolutionary propaganda. But the hand which knew how to portray the horrors of the old conscription was powerless to reproduce, except in very crude outlines, the world of political pa.s.sions which was foreign to the author, and the novel remained unfinished.

[Footnote 1: See on that period Vol. I, p. 144 et seq.]

The reaction of the eighties produced no change in Bogrov's att.i.tude. He breathed his last in a distant Russian village, and was buried in a Russian cemetery, having embraced Christianity shortly before his death, as a result of a sad concatenation of family circ.u.mstances.

Before the young generation which entered upon active life in the eighties lay the broken tablets of Russian Jewish literature. New tablets were needed, partly to restore the commandments of the preceding period of enlightenment, partly to correct its mistakes.

CHAPTER XXI

THE ACCESSION OF ALEXANDER III. AND THE INAUGURATION OF POGROMS

1. THE TRIUMPH OF AUTOCRACY

On March 1, 1881, Alexander II. met his death on one of the princ.i.p.al thoroughfares of St. Petersburg, smitten by dynamite bombs hurled at him by a group of terrorists. The Tzar, who had freed the Russian peasantry from personal slavery, paid with his life for refusing to free the Russian people from political slavery and police tyranny. The red terrorism of the revolutionaries was the counterpart of the white terrorism of the Russian authorities, who for many years had suppressed the faintest striving for liberty, and had sent to gaol and prison, or deported to Siberia, the champions of a const.i.tutional form of government and the spokesmen of social reforms. Forced by the persecutions of the police to hide beneath the surface, the revolutionary societies of underground Russia found themselves compelled to resort to methods of terrorism. This terrorism found its expression during the last years of Alexander II. in various attempts on the life of that ruler, and culminated in the catastrophe of March 1.

Among the members of these revolutionary societies were also some representatives from among the young Jewish _intelligenzia._ They were in large part college students, who had been carried away by the ideals of their Russian comrades. But few of them were counted among the active terrorists. The group which prepared the murder of the Tzar comprised but one Jewish member, a woman by the name of Hesia Helfman, who, moreover, played but a secondary role in the conspiracy, by keeping a secret residence for toe revolutionaries. Nevertheless, in the official circles, which were anxious to justify their oppression of the Jews, it became customary to refer to the "important role" played by the Jews in the Russian revolution.

It was with preconceived notions of this kind that Alexander III.

ascended the throne of Russia, a sovereign with unlimited power but with a very limited political horizon. Being a Russian of the old-fashioned type and a zealous champion of the Greek-Orthodox Church, he shared the anti-Jewish prejudices of his environment. Already as crown prince he ordered that a monetary reward be given to the notorious Lutostanski, who had presented him with his libellous pamphlet "Concerning the Use of Christian Blood by the Jews." [1] During the Russo-Turkish war of 1877, when as heir-apparent he was in command of one of the Balkan armies, he allowed himself to be persuaded that the abuses in the Russian commissariat were due to the "Jewish" purveyors who supplied the army.

[2] This was all that was known about Judaism in the circles from which the ruler of five million Jews derived his information.

[Footnote 1: See p. 203.]