Jewish Disloyalty 1890 Example Klier

Imperial Russia’s Jewish Question, 1855 1881, by John Doyle Klier. 2005

Jews Avoid Farming. Jewish Ambivalence About a Future Restored Poland. Jews Acquire Poles’ Landed Estates After Doomed January 1863 Insurrection. Jewish Elitism Colors Assimilation

This work provides a variety of Russian and Jewish perspectives on the problems involving Jews in Tsarist Russia. The author focuses on what he calls Judeophiles, liberal Judeophobes, conservative Judeophobes, etc. One striking feature is the overlap, of opinions about Jews, between these apparently divergent groups. The main differences between them was their degree of belief that reform and progress could eliminate the problems between Jews and gentiles.

Jewish-gentile relations were no Mickey Mouse game. For instance, one Russian commentator suggested that Jewish exploitation of the peasants was so multi-faceted and unbearable that it was worse than the serfdom of the past. (p. 362).

OBJECTIONABLE JEWISH CONDUCT: CIRCUMSTANCE OR CHOICE?

Discussions about the negative aspects of Jewish conduct tended to dichotomize. One position held that Jews were acting out against the discrimination and socio-economic constraints that they experienced. The other position held that Jews were freely responsible for their conduct.

As an example of the latter, consider the views of V. T. Zotov. Klier writes, (quote) If there was any merit to the argument that the faults of the Jews were the consequence of Christian persecution, it could not hold for Russia where the Jews had been treated “like guests” since the partitions of Poland. The Jews had borne neither serfdom nor lifetime military service. Schools were built for them. Yet the West Russian Talmudists wanted more rights while still retaining the Talmud and looking down on the goyim. Having said this, Zotov professed not to disdain the entire Jewish race, but only its evildoers. (unquote). (p. 58).

The foregoing position enjoyed broad support. For instance, even liberal Russian newspapers rejected the position (or exculpation) that external conditions are solely responsible for the objectionable ways that Jews think and act. (pp. 376-377).

JEWS AND FARMING: THE MYTH OF JEWS FORCED INTO COMMERCE

It has been argued that Jews were stuck in narrow roles, such as the middleman and usurer, because they were forbidden by law to become farmers. This is at best a half-truth. The tsarist government had actually tried to get Jews to do “productive” work by promoting Jewish agricultural colonies since 1804. (p. 301). The government “relentlessly pursued” these schemes (p. 30), but they ended up a failure. (p. 265).

JEWISH SUPPORT, AND NONSUPPORT, FOR POLISH INDEPENDENCE

Author Klier discusses the enthusiastic support that Chief Rabbi Dov Beer Meisels gave the Polish patriotic manifestations that culminated in the January 1863 Insurrection. However, he points out that, even in Warsaw, this was atypical, and the Jewish population as a whole “displayed no great enthusiasm for rapprochement or merger with the Poles.” (p. 147).

The disloyalty of most erstwhile Polish Jews to Poland was not just a Polish opinion. M. Morgulis, a Russian Jewish intellectual, reckoned the Jews to have been loyal to Russia during the Insurrection. (p. 191). Russian “hangman” Muravev [Muraviev], while wreaking ghastly reprisals against Poles, considered Jewish conduct to have been ambiguous enough, during the Insurrection, for the Jews to escape massive repression. (p. 160).

The following statements are revealing. They could easily have come from an Endek publication. Actually, they refer to DEN, an Odessa-based Jewish newspaper. Klier writes, (quote) In article after article DEN asserted that the Jews had steadfastly resisted Polonization. Jews recognized the ultimate futility of Polish aspirations and also displayed a basic loyalty to the Russian state. If the Jews acted in this way when they received no tangible reward, what would be their response if the government adopted a positive program of emancipation to win over the Jews? (unquote). (p. 354).

LANDED ESTATES: JEWISH-RUSSIAN COLLABORATION AGAINST POLES

The author does not specify how Jews acquired the estates of Polish owners who had been deported to Siberia in reprisal for the January 1863 Insurrection (thus being a mirror-image of Poles acquiring post-Jewish property after the Holocaust, as moralized by neo-Stalinist Jan T. Gross). Instead, Klier emphasizes the foundering of Russian efforts to use Jews against Poles because of Russian ambivalence towards Jews. However, he provides some clues related to joint Jewish-Russian actions against Poles.

For a time, Jews were allowed by the tsarist authorities to acquire Polish land. Klier comments, (quote) Thus, the decree of 26 April 1862, which gave the Jews in the Southwestern and Western Regions the right to purchase gentry land, assumed that the Jews were allies of the Russian cause in the Ukraine. (unquote). (p. 185).

A few years later, Jews were forbidden to own land. However, they came to possess land through indirect means. (p. 290). Leaseholding of land by Jews became common. (p. 306). Regardless of the exact details and successes of impending land-possession arrangements, a group of influential Jews did attempt to actively collaborate with the Russian authorities against Polish interests. Klier comments, (quote) Jews were permitted to lease gentry estates, but this was not enough for a group of first and second guild Jewish merchants in the Ukraine, who petitioned the Governor-General, I. I. Vasilchikov, for the right to acquire unsettled estates. Vasilchikov, a firm believer in using the Jews as an anti-Polish force in the region, was the right man to approach. He argued to the Jewish Committee that sale of estates to Jews would have the beneficial effect of taking them out of Polish hands…It was impolitic to tell the Poles what the government really hoped would happen to their land. (unquote). (p. 301).

JEWISH ELITISM, AND SELF-INTERESTED ASSIMILATION

The resistance of many Jews to acculturation and assimilation is usually framed in terms of the consideration that doing so would cause an unacceptable loss of essential Judaic elements (e. g, p. 103), or that a strongly non-pluralistic Christian majoritarian atmosphere made it difficult for Jews to “fit” into gentile society. In addition, Jews must maintain their particularism as an antidote to anti-Semitism and the lack of Jewish legal equality with gentiles. (e. g, p. 106).

However, Jewish attitudes have also been animated by the notion that the GOYIM are unworthy of Jewish assimilation–that is, unless the local Jews decide that their self-interest dictates otherwise, or that the nation in which they live is, or becomes, “good enough”–in Jewish opinion–to merit the Jews’ assimilation. Jewish Germanophilia also became a factor. The foregoing lines of thinking are exemplified by an article in the Jewish newspaper SION, which rejected linguistic acculturation (let alone assimilation). Klier comments, (quote) SION offered its own list of reasons why the Empire’s Jews were slow to speak Russian, none of them very flattering to Russians. On a daily basis, Yiddish served the Jews as the language of a separate caste of tradesmen within the wider society. Where economic necessity required the Jews to acquire another language, such as Ukrainian, they easily did so. Russian culture offered nothing that Jews saw as worthy of imitation, in contrast to German culture. There was even a “German Party” of Jews in Russia, seeking to introduce their fellows to the cultural riches of Germany. (unquote). (p. 106).

In what is perhaps an ironic role-reversal of the minority conforming to the majority, the article in SION specified the economic and cultural terms that could make Russia worthy of Jewish acculturation and assimilation. Klier writes, (quote) Russian participation in the commercial life of the Empire must grow sufficiently to force knowledge of Russian out of economic necessity. The institutional network of Russian culture must expand sufficiently to justify and expedite its adoption by Jews. (unquote). (p. 107).

[Interestingly, the same attitudes later surfaced during the resurrection of the Polish state (1918). Some of Poland’s Jews openly stated that Poles were not morally or culturally worthy of the Jews’ assimilation. Please see: Rejoice O Youth: Rational Approaches to God’s Existence and the Torah’s Divine Origin, and Zmierzch Izraela – Tadeusz Gluzinski ps. Henryk Rolicki.]