Emancipation and Enlightenment
EMANCIPATION may be defined as the removal of the civil disabilities from the Jews, following the acceptance of liberal principles by the European governments. The process was a gradual one. In 1791 the French Assembly passed the vote for the complete emancipation of the Jews, which procedure was ratified and firmly established by the Napoleonic regime. Belgium (1830), England (1846), Sweden (1848), Denmark and Greece (1849), Prussia (1850), Austria (1867), Spain (1868), Italy (1870), and Switzerland (1874) followed the lead of France. The Balkan States in the treaty of Berlin (1878), upon pressure from Disraeli, agreed to the emancipation of the Jews as one of the conditions for securing their own freedom; Roumania has been notoriously delinquent, however, in adhering to the terms nominated in the bond.[9] The removal of civil disabilities brought the Jew into a wide contact with the Christian. This resulted for the Jews in liberalization of outlook and liberation of capacities and talents, in an abandonment of the "jargon" for the national tongues, in a precipitation into the Haskalah movement (to be described in the next paragraph), and in a restatement of their leading religious doctrines, which amounted to a surrender in theory of their nationality and their destiny as a Chosen People to be restored to Palestine. For the Christians the removal of Jewish disabilities resulted in the necessity of either accepting or rejecting the Jew's claim to be an equal and a fellow-countryman.
The Enlightenment, or Haskalah movement, broadly speaking, comprises the Jewish absorption of secular learning, particularly in literature and science, the abandonment of the study of the Talmud for modern subjects, and the adoption of farm and craft life.[10] Moses Mendelssohn in Germany and Lilienthal in Russia were the first great protagonists of these radical departures; and the movement, which in part led to the demand for Emancipation and in part resulted from it, further removed the differences between Jew and non-Jew, at least from the standpoint of the former, and further removed him from his religious and historical past, perceptibly weakening and in many cases practically destroying the medieval sense of solidarity. Each Jew adopted the culture of his native country, and so one Jew became virtually a foreigner to another. Haskalah, in a word, is a looking outward on the part of the Jew; for all its virtues this movement had the consequence of blunting racial consciousness and blurring racial identity.
Nationalism and Anti-Semitism
ALL might have been well but for the presence of a third and conflicting element. While the Jew became infected with the universalism of the Revolutionary spirit, the majority of Europeans were absorbing and developing the particularistic implications of '89. Nationalism is the self-consciousness of a people, and it found its European expression in the creation of the modern States of Germany, Italy, Hungary, Greece, and the small Balkans. It is a race's recognition of itself, a looking inward, and it leads to the pursuit of racial ideals and development of racial qualities—an inward expansion which, indifferent to the charge of chauvinism, can only be secured by an outward discrimination. The Jew and the Christian had changed places since medieval times: the Jew now stood for a universal society and a universal church, and the Christian for exclusion and separation upon racial bases. Emancipation thus brought the conflict directly to the attention of the strong majority, namely, the Christians, and anti-Semitism was their answer.
In its restricted sense, anti-Semitism is a scientific stick used to beat the Jewish dog with. After impartial, impersonal scientific investigation, French and German scholars[11] demonstrated the racial inferiority of the Semite to the Aryan, enumerated the inherent Semitic qualities as greed, special aptitude for money-making, aversion to hard work, clannishness, obstrusiveness, lack of social tact and of patriotism, the tendency to exploit and not to be overly honest. Ernest Renan adequately sums up the anti-Semite position when he claims for the Aryans all the great military, political, and intellectual movements of history.[12] The Semites never had a comprehension of civilization in the sense in which the Aryan understands the word; they were at no time public-spirited.[13] In fact, intolerance was the natural consequence of Semitic monotheism.[14]
In the wider sense,[15] anti-Semitism is the modern word for the old and apparently ineradicable hatred of the Jew, partly dependent, as G. F. Abbott well shows,[16] not only upon Christian faith, but upon the Christian frame of mind and feeling—a hatred to which the Nationalism of the nineteenth century furnished a reasonable fuel, which found a social expression in ostracism and rioting[17] and a political expression in the formation of the Christian Socialist Party in Germany (1878), and similar parties in Austria and Hungary (1882-99), seeking the suppression of equal rights for Jews, the Dreyfus affair in France (1895), and the open, violent persecutions in Roumania—all aimed at annulling the privileges granted by the Emancipation. Clerical, economic, and social opposition to the Jews combined to support the nationalistic contention summed up in the words of Heinrich von Treitschke (Professor of History, University of Berlin): "Die Juden sind unser Unglück."[18] This essay is not concerned with the truth of the contention; suffice that it is advanced, supported, and acted upon.
The Jewish Situation in the Four Zones
A REVIEW of the Jewish situation is now possible. But before presenting this review, a definition of two words which will be frequently used may not be irrelevant. The Jewish problem is taken to mean an immediate concrete maladjustment where life and property are imperiled, much as we speak of the Mexican problem. The Jewish position, on the other hand, is taken to mean a social, cultural, or spiritual disharmony or repression, much as we speak of the position of the Poles in Galicia and Russia.
The Jewish situation falls naturally into four geographical zones. The first, which contains the problem in its most serious aspect, is Eastern Europe, including Russia, Poland, and Roumania, where are settled six of the twelve million Jews of the world.[19] In this zone, the Jews are for the most part maintaining medieval solidarity and separation, are suffering from medieval repression and persecution; but on the other hand, (and this appears to be the determining factor in the gravity of the problem), the Russian Jew is by no means a necessity to the Russian in any way similar to that in which the medieval Jew was a necessity to the medieval Christian. The eastern Jew is beginning to expand with the leaven of the Haskalah, and is simultaneously strangling for lack of the release and exercise of his powers afforded by Emancipation. The Russian and Roumanian, in what they believe to be the preservation of Nationalism, are determined on crippling or destroying the inimical and unassimilative factor in their population; and although the Russian is politically medieval, he is economically modern and considers himself restrained by no need of Jewish money.[20] The outcome for the Jews is economic impoverishment, social persecution, political enslavement, and spiritual degeneration.[21]