Israel in Europe

by G. F. Abbott

How this readiness to quit hearth and home, in order to seek a new life under unknown skies in the furthest corners of the earth, carries us back across the ages to the flight of Israel from Egypt! To the Russian Jews groaning in servitude the Czar’s Empire is a foreign land; his religion a foreign religion. In leaving Russia they leave a hotbed of idolatry as fierce, as cruel, as Godless as the idolatry of Egypt, Babylon, Syria, or Rome. To them the Russian god who can sanction such persecution is a veritable Moloch. He can claim no kinship with Jehovah. They owe it to themselves to escape from the house of bondage, and to their God to continue bearing witness to His unity. They, therefore, like their remote ancestors, seek freedom of worship by expatriation. Treated as aliens in their native country, they renounce it with as little regret as if they had not been born and bred in it. There are, of course, both in Poland and in Russia proper Jews who would gladly conform in everything except religion. Such Jews deplore the estrangement of the Jew from the Gentile, and believe that the lot of the former can be improved only by the removal of the legal restrictions which perpetuate that estrangement. According to them, if the Jews were allowed to mingle freely with the other inhabitants of the Empire, they would in time lose all those characteristics which mark them off as a people apart, and become patriotic subjects of the Czar. But the Russian Government in its persecution of the race makes no invidious distinctions between these “Assimilators” and their sterner brethren. The Jew who ventures to advise assimilation alienates his friends without conciliating his masters. By its indiscriminate severity the Russian autocracy feeds the old spirit of dogged resistance, sullen resentment, and inflexible arrogance.

It also feeds, as might have been expected, the old dream of Redemption and national rehabilitation. The Russian Ghetto at the present day is the citadel of Hebrew orthodoxy and the recruiting ground for the Zionist movement of which we shall speak in the sequel. It is natural that it should be. The Jew in the Empire of the Czars finds little or no scope for development. As we have seen, he is debarred from holding real property, from pursuing liberal professions, from engaging in many trades. He is a stranger in the land of his birth, an outcast among his fellow-countrymen. Chronic contempt and oppression are only relieved by periodical massacre. Forbidden to be a citizen, he cannot be a patriot. He has no life in the present. He, therefore, lives in the future. He is an uncompromising idealist. The same conditions which deprive him of all inducement to national assimilation also encourage his religious and social separatism. The intolerance of his Christian neighbours reacts on his own bigotry. If politically he lives on hopes, religiously he lives on traditions. Amidst all his calamities, the Jew of the Russian Ghetto is sustained by the expectation that the real history of his race is still to come. He believes that the ruins of the Temple will one day prove the foundations of new greatness. While awaiting the fulfilment of the ancient prophecies, he clings to the tribal distinctions, to the ceremonial laws, and to all those rules of omission and performance which tend to perpetuate his self-isolation. In the West the Jews have, as patriotic citizens of various states, succeeded, by generous concessions quite compatible with true loyalty to their traditions, in the effort to reconcile the old Jewish life with modern political conditions. In Russia the Jews are denied the opportunity. But they still love the land. Therein lies the irony and the hope.

Such is the lot of Israel in Russia. It is hardly better on the western side of the Pruth—in that other European country which within three days’ journey of London continues the Middle Ages.

CHAPTER XXII
IN ROUMANIA

In no part of Europe is mediaeval prejudice against the Hebrew race more fiercely rampant than in Roumania; for in no other part of Europe, save Russia, are mediaeval social conditions and modes of thought and conduct so rife. There is hardly any middle class in Roumania yet. In that country industries are unknown, commerce is scarce and the mechanics are few. Theoretically a modern constitutional state, in reality it is a country peopled by two extreme castes: the small peasant proprietors or labourers, and the nobles. The husbandman drudges in the open country and the nobleman dissipates in the capital. In fact, though not in name, we find in the Roumania of to-day Froissart’s England, less the splendour and the servitude of feudalism. Out of a population of five and a half millions, five millions are peasants, and these, deprived to a large extent of the rights of citizenship and of the opportunities for self-improvement, live in almost as abject misery and as crass ignorance[206] as they did five centuries ago, represented by only thirty members in the Lower House of the national Parliament and by none in the Senate, while the remaining eleven twelfths of the Lower House and the whole of the Senate are elected by the aristocracy of a quarter of a million, which also furnishes all the officials. The one product of the nineteenth century that has found a sincere appreciation in Roumania is Nationalism, and it is under this modern cloak that mediaeval bigotry loves to parade its terrors on the banks of the Danube.

In Moldavia, the northern portion of the kingdom, Jews are first heard of in the fifteenth century, though they do not become conspicuous until the eighteenth. It was in a village of this province that was born, about 1700, Israel Baalshem, the founder of the Hebrew sect of dissenters known, or rather not known, as the “New Chassidim.” Baalshem’s mission, when denuded of those vulgar accessories of the supernatural without which man seems incapable of being lifted to higher things, was a noble one. In the century which preceded his advent Judaism had degenerated into a school of casuistry; simplicity was lost in a maze of sophistical subtlety, conscience was stifled beneath a mountain of formalism, and faith was drowned in the ocean of Rabbinical nonsense.[207] In no part of Europe was the decay more complete than in these regions. The long-ringleted Rabbis of Poland had extended their lethal domination over Moldavia, and with their solemn puerilities had perpetuated the spiritual sterility of those districts. This, at all events, is the impression made on the mind of a modern student, whose rationalism may dull him to the latent spirituality of the Rabbis and reveal to him perhaps all too clearly their sophistry. But, in any case, sophistry can only appeal to a people which has reached an advanced stage of intellectual senility. The Moldavian Jews were still in their intellectual infancy. It was emotion and not logic that their soul craved for. The Rabbis were mere priests, the Jews of Moldavia needed a prophet. Israel Baalshem arrived in time to supply the demand and to tear asunder the net of Talmudism.

An angel announced his birth and foretold to his parents that their son would enlighten Israel. After a virtuous, if somewhat eccentric life, devoted at first to prayer and lamentation in the savage solitude of the Carpathian mountains, then to hysterical rapture and to miracles in the haunts of men, Baalshem bequeathed his doctrine and his enthusiasm to faithful disciples who carried the legacy over Moldavia, Galicia, and the Russian “pale.” The principal dogma of Baalshem’s teaching is the universality of God, His real and living presence in every part of creation, pervading, inspiring, and vivifying all. Every being, every thing, every thought, every action is a manifestation or an image of Divine power and love. All things are holy, or contain in them the germs of holiness. This knowledge is the fruit of faith, not of learning. It is a revelation. The practical results of this ethereal teaching are love, charity, and cheerful optimism. For how can one presume to hate, despise, or condemn anything as evil, foolish, unclean, or ugly, since it is the vehicle of Goodness, of Wisdom, of Purity, and of Beauty? The true lover of the Creator must also be a lover of His creatures. The end and aim of our life is union with God—fusion with the Light of which all things are more or less dim reflections. From this exposition of his doctrine it will be seen that Israel Baalshem was a typical mystic. He belongs to the same family of seers as the Neo-Platonists, as St. Teresa and St. John of the Cross, as John Bunyan and George Fox, as the Mohammedan Sufis, and many other inspired dissenters who, scattered though they are over many countries, many centuries and many creeds, have three cardinal characteristics in common: protest against formalism, thirst for vision or revelation, and intense desire for absorption in the One.

This Gospel of Love first preached “in the wild ravines of Wallachia and the dreary steppes of the Ukraine” found many listeners. The Rabbis—the upholders of book-taught wisdom—denounced the doctrine of direct inspiration. The “Pious” retaliated with denunciations of the Rabbis. The contest resulted in excommunication, in cremation of books and in persecution, which only helped to spread the new teaching further. However, after the death of the founder and the first apostles, there arose internal dissensions which led to a subdivision of the “Pious” into sects. Degeneration, hypocrisy, and corruption followed disintegration, love was forgotten in the pursuit of sectarian and selfish ambitions, and to-day the Chassidim, though numbering in Roumania, Poland, and South-western Russia about half a million of adherents, are scorned by the orthodox as a mob of fanatics, redeemed by genuine faith, but deluded and exploited by leaders who are no longer saints.[208]

The Jews of Moldavia, already numerous in the time of Israel Baalshem, received new additions towards the end of the eighteenth century. Then a large number of Jewish refugees entered the country from Austria, Poland, and Russia, so that at the beginning of the nineteenth century they are found scattered all over the province as village inn-keepers and resident traders, or as itinerant merchants visiting the rural districts and buying or advancing money upon the crops. In the big towns also they established important colonies—as for example in Jassy, where they form more than one third of the population, and in Galatz, where they occupy whole streets with their shops. In all these centres they live by trade or as craftsmen—tinsmiths, glaziers, shoemakers, hatters, tailors, butchers, bakers and the like. The southern province of Wallachia is studded with smaller colonies both of Spanish and of Polish Jews, while there are families, settled chiefly in Bucharest, whose ancestors have been in the country from time immemorial. Like their brethren of Moldavia the Wallachian Jews also are engaged in commerce, handicrafts, and finance, thus forming that industrious and intelligent middle class which the Christian population lacks. These Jews for ages lived on terms of comparative peace with their neighbours; the rich among them educating their children at the schools frequented by the children of the native nobility. But these friendly relations were not destined to endure.

As in many other lands, so in Roumania the religion, the success, and the aloofness of the Jew raised a host of enemies against him among the Christians. Here, as elsewhere, the Jews were often accused of child-murder in the eighteenth century. But, while under Turkish domination, the Christians were obliged to suppress an animosity which they had no power of satisfying. It is not till the beginning of the nineteenth century, when Russia’s interference loosened the Sultan’s grasp on the Danubian provinces and the Nationalist spirit added fuel to the older hatred, that the first symptoms of anti-Judaism appear in Moldavia. In 1804 Prince Mourousi issued a decree forbidding the Jews to hold land, except that attached to inns. The process of restriction, once commenced, advanced with steady and rapid strides, accompanied by periodical assaults on the unpopular race. The fact that the Jews had gathered the threads of commerce in their own hands was alleged as a reason for crushing them. But for this fact no one could be held responsible, unless it were the Roumanians themselves. An essentially agricultural people, the native Christians despise trade, which consequently has always been left to the Jews in Moldavia, just as in Wallachia it is largely monopolised by Greeks and Armenians. In 1840 the opening of the Black Sea to international commerce drew many more Jews to the country, and the ill-feeling against them grew in proportion to the increase in their numbers. In 1867 the Roumanian politician, Bratiano, exploited the widespread prejudice for electioneering purposes, and the active persecution of Israel entered upon its acutest stage. Religious fanaticism in some measure, and racial rivalry in a greater, lent colour to a hostility which arose mainly from economic jealousy. Usury, that plausible phantom of a long-exploded fallacy, was brought forward as an additional excuse for intolerance.