Trudy Gold
Foundation Course: The Jews and the Crisis of Modernity, Part 3

Trudy Gold | Foundation Course: The Jews and the Crisis of Modernity, Part 3

- Good afternoon everyone. Can I please have the first map panel? Well, this is part three of a four-part foundation course, which we decided to put together in order to extract for you the main points in modern Jewish history so that perhaps we can come to a better understanding of all the events that are swirling around our heads at the moment, when, again, the destiny of the Jewish people and the destiny of the Jewish state is at the core of everybody’s news. And we are yo-yoing on one level, certainly in Britain, where there is an extraordinary outpouring of antisemitism as I’m sure most of you are feeling it wherever you live. At the same time, Israel is not being treated as a sovereign state, except it’s being treated almost the same way that the commentators on the BBC, for example, will deal with Hezbollah and with Hamas. So again, where is the line? So in order to try and understand is that great line of Howard Jacobson’s, which I’m going to talk about next week when I try and pull everything together for you, is, “They can’t forgive us the Holocaust.” But what I want to do today is to, if you think about it, what we looked at, this strange people who’d existed for 2000 years, well, 1800 years without a land, and then held together by what the rabbis called the portable homeland, dispersed throughout the old Roman world and then further dispersed with the rise of Christianity. They very much become the pariahs in the West. But this literate, international people are useful.

So their destinies right up until the 18th, 19th centuries are from the secular world, utility, from the world of the church, to be scorned as the killers of Christ. Now, that’s a very, very strong statement I’ve just made. But unfortunately, I think it’s one of the reasons behind racial antisemitism. You can’t have this 2000-year history of hate. That doesn’t mean that all times Gentiles hated Jews. Of course they didn’t. But the negative stereotype, and the other point to make, if the Jew is guilty of killing Jesus and Jesus is Messiah, in the Christian world, that means God. And that’s the greatest crime in history, the deicide. Now even in a world that has become more secular as far as Christianity is concerned, the negative stereotype continues. And of course, the other great monotheistic religion, Islam, well, we are witnessing, are we not, a return in Islam in many parts of the world, to what they would consider purism to throw off the taint of the West, to go back to the old values. Never forget that beginning with the rise of Islam, right up until 1683, when the last great Turkish empire was defeated at the gates of Vienna, you had almost a thousand years of war between the two monotheistic proselytising religions, and this tiny people, the Jew, was the one that would cross from one to the other.

And ironically, in the main, it’s a huge sweeping statement here, and of course in Lockdown, we’ve done many, many courses on this, mainly run by Lyn Julius and Norman Stillman and Hilary Pomeroy. In Islam, under Islam, under Islam, when Islam felt itself to be safe, Jews were far safer than under Christianity. And also this restlessness and having to move a lot, is that what eventually is going to give the Jews the edge, that when they plunge into the modern world in Western Europe, for no other reason except the European Enlightenment, they were an anomaly. And then of course, what we looked at last week, all the great, seething ideas of the 19th century, the development of industry, technology, science, chaos for many people, the rise of nationalism led to tribalism. And unfortunately, again, because of a visible success story, let’s be careful here. The majority of Jews in the West did not become rich and famous, but a disproportionate number of them benefited from modernity. They were the outsiders. Never forget what Freud said, “It was because I didn’t belong to the compact majority, I could do what I did.” Now I want to leave Western Europe, Central Europe behind, now. Bearing in mind that by 1878, all the Jews of Western and Central Europe have been emancipated.

It’s a different story in the Muslim world, but by this stage, about 15% of the Jews were living in the Muslim world and more about them next time. Of course, there were important communities in the old Turkish empire, which isn’t going to collapse, remember, until the end of the first World War. But economically, it was in decline, and that meant that many, many Jews were actually leaving the Sephardi world for the world of the West. Now, the map in front of you is a map of Poland. Really beginning in the 1200s, Jews begin to move east, why? Think crusades, think later on the Black Death, various problems, to put it mildly, for Jews living in the German lands, they’re expelled from England in 1290. They’re expelled from France twice in 1306. Then in the 1320s, various of the German lands. And there is a very large kingdom to the east, the kingdom of Poland, which in 1387 unifies, through marriage, with Lithuania and then annexes the Ukraine. Now this vast land whose currency, by the way was salt, it was basically a peasant society with a noble class. They needed people to oil the wheels of the economy. And also the Polish kings quite often were relatively tolerant of the Jews.

They found them useful. So what you see happening by the 15, 1600s, Poland becomes the heartland of the Jewish world. Bearing in mind that Poland also encompasses Lithuania, what you see, White Russia and the Ukraine, my hunch is that the majority of people listening today, their ancestry will be in this part of the world. Now, one of the problems of Jewish history is, the outside world acts, the Jewish world can only react to it. Having gone through a great heyday, when the Jewish community becomes the largest in the world, it becomes the centre of Jewish scholarship, think Vilna, Vilna Gaon, and the great rabbis who followed him. Think also of the development of Hasidism out of the horrors of the Khmelnytsky massacres of 1648 when the cossacks tried to break away from the Polish crown and about 70,000 Jews were mown down. And some of the descriptions of the massacre is so similar to what was perpetrated on October the seventh, that I’m quite convinced that the monsters had read all of these, had read all this literature. But after 1648, it wasn’t just loss of life and property, the destruction of study centres. There were some very strange anomalies like Sabbatai Zevi and Jacob Frank. But in the end, the Baal Shem Tov, the development of Hasidism, which then under Zalman of the Ardi is pulled back a bit. He creates Chabad, chochmah, binah, da'at.

So by the period I’m talking about, about 50% of the Jews of this area are traditional, and the other 50% are Hasids. It spread like wildfire. And there was huge animosity. It’s not until they had to face a greater threat, modernity, that there’s a certain amount of coming together. So, and of course in Poland, they were almost given autonomy, the Council of the Four Lands, where there was always somebody at the courts to represent the Jews. Every area had its elder. Look, it wasn’t a honeymoon. There was poverty, there was fear of the peasantry, there were riots. But on the whole, in this vast land, Jews could build their own cities, could live on the estates of the nobility. They gravitated to the cities and they lived very much a Jewish life. A great friend of mine, Scharf, whose grandfather was actually the rabbi of Oswiecim, Auschwitz, he said to me, “You’ll never really understand. But we walked the same earth and we looked at the same sky, but our worlds hardly touched.” So whereas in Europe, you have the beginnings of the Enlightenment. It’s not really creeping in yet.

But then Poland, at the end of the 30 Years’ War, the wars of religion in Europe was about power and economics and princes is wanting to break away from the Catholic church. Poland is ravaged and it never really recovers. And think about its neighbours. He has the strength of the growing might of Prussia, at that time, one of the most important of the 360 city-states in the German lands. You have the Habsburg Empire and of course the Russian bear. And beginning in 1772, and actually culminating in 1815, Poland-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which encompassed all this area, is wiped off the map, and the bulk of the Jewry, they’re going to become subjects of the czars. About 70,000 of them will go into the German lands and a further hundred thousand into Galicia. And the conditions for them are going to be different because of course, in Prussia, the Enlightenment, in Galicia, by 1878, emancipation, but not the story of the Jews of Russia. So this huge unassimilable people are now part of the Czarist Empire. The Russian Empire was the largest empire in the world. It covered a sixth of the land surface of the globe. It was ruled by an autocrat. The backwardness of the Russian Empire, the serfs of Russia were not freed until 1861, the 57 million serfs of Russia. The Russian Orthodox Church, a very high church, very superstitious church. The Czar is appointed by divine right. The peasantry are his people. You know, Stalin, later when he was commissar for nationalities, he said, “There are over a hundred different nationalities in the Russian Empire.”

And so the Jews are now subjects of the Russians. The Russians don’t want Jews, they want land. And of course, what they do is to confine the Jews to that area, you can see it there, Poland, Lithuania. It is called the Pale of Settlement. Paling is stockading. That’s where the term beyond the pale comes from. It’s a huge area of land, about the size of half of Europe, and that’s where the majority of your ancestors would’ve come from. It’s certainly where many of my family came from, three or four generations back. And the Jews are now going to be the subjects of the various czars. Can we see the first of them please? Next slide, Hannah. This is Catherine the Great. Now, can I make things easy for you? The czars under whom the Jews lived, it spells Canaan. I had a friend who loved wordplay. Catherine did have a son called Paul, but he only reigned for five years. He did nothing. He was insane. And so when she died, it passed to her grandson Alexander, followed by Nicholas I, Alexander II, Alexander III and Nicholas II, sweet Sir Nicholas, one of the greatest monsters in Jewish history. So basically you’ll never forget, now, the czars under whom the Jews lived. Catherine, Alexander, Nicholas, Alexander, Alexander, Nicholas. Now the point about the czars, they were ruling one of the largest empires in the world. Catherine saw herself as an enlightened despot. She had characters like Voltaire.

She was in correspondence with Voltaire. He visited her at her court, but she was an autocrat, a fascinating woman. It’s really worth reading a biography of Catherine the Great. In fact, Simon Sebag has written an excellent one. He’s brilliant on Russian history. She came to Russia as a 15-year-old German princess. She converted to Russian Orthodoxy, married the son and heir to Russia. He was a complete nutter. And she, with the help of the Palace Guard, had him murdered. How much she was involved is another thing. She had many lovers. She was a modern woman in that way. Her favourite was a man called Potemkin. Potemkin is interesting because he was a bear of a man who actually was a great figure of ideas, and he increased her land. Those of you who know geography, Odessa, which had been a Turkish port, is conquered in Catherine’s time. And he had huge estates there, and he actually encouraged Jews to settle on his estates. There was a rabbi called Joshua Zeitlin who became a very close friend of his. He was an interesting character. But when the nobility came to Catherine, because one of the issues the Russians faced was, how do we come to terms with the West? How do we compete with the West? They need traders, they need merchants.

And some of the nobles were saying, well, maybe the Jews could perform the same sort of tasks in Russia that they did in Poland. And she said, I want no profit from the killers of Christ. So basically, the Czar is far away from the Jews. She does allow some Jews to settle around the Odessa region because she needs population there. And Odessa was at the bottom of what became known as the Pale of Settlement. I should have brought you in the map, I apologise. And Odessa finally, eventually is going to become one of the most fabulous cities in the empire. It was 1/3 Jewish. So many of the great thinkers and writers came out of Odessa. And of course, the musicians. It was the freest part of the Russian Empire. And I travelled there many, many times. I’ve taught all over Eastern Europe, but I very much doubt because of the horror of what’s going on now that we will ever have the opportunity to go back. But she had it laid out like a French town. There was a brilliant architect who created these wide boulevards. On one level a figure of the of the Enlightenment, on the other hand, the majority of her population are starving. Basically, you can read and read and read about Catherine, there isn’t that much for her in Jewish history. Alexander, her grandson, let’s see his picture, A very strange man. He became very, very religious.

Was he implicated in the murder of his father? He was fascinated by the esoteric side of life. And he, of course, was the czar that became involved with Napoleon. He went to war with Napoleon, and he is the great defeater of Napoleon, or rather his generals are. And there were one or two events in his reign, he looks at the Jews, the Pale is beginning to be set up. He has this, you know, the usual attitude of the Russian church towards the Jews. And then of course, the throne passes to his brother Nicholas. Let’s see the next one, next. Now, Nicholas I. Nicholas I was known as the barrack master. Now you’ve got to remember they rule from Moscow and St. Petersburg. How do they rule? Through a very, basically through the nobility. There were estates in Russia the size of English counties, there was a very strong secret police, and it’s ruled very, very tightly. There had been a revolt when Nicholas came to the throne. He was a very tough autocrat. He was very unimaginative, he was a military man, and he was very religious, and it was he who actually codified the Pale, that no Jews could lead the Pale. And also that in his reign, as there were in his brothers, there were investigations, is there anything we can do about this unassemblable mass? And the question you have to think, you have to ask yourselves, Jews living in small towns and villages, what were their occupational patterns? Of course, you did have a few important financiers, but the majority of them, they had a much wider range of occupations than they had in the West.

Because in the villages and towns of Poland, Jews could be blacksmiths, Jews could be craftsmen. They fulfilled many different niches. And also they were the innkeepers. And also a lot of them were involved in trade because they had the language to deal with their co-religionists in other parts of the world. The Council of the Four Lands that they’d had under Poland was abolished. But they still really more or less ran their own affairs. And if you think about, what was studied? What was the greatest prize in marriage for the rich man of the village’s daughter? Well, you’ve all seen “Fiddler on the Roof.” It was the rabbi or the rabbi’s son, and basically who was a Jewish hero. It’s fascinating when you think of today and what has just happened in Israel, the Jewish hero of this period was the Pale scholar. It’s almost as though the military side of the Jew have been pushed away because of the terrible defeats at the time of the Bar Kokhba Rebellion. It’s almost as though the rabbis instituted into Talmud Quietism. Yes, we dream of the Messiah, next year in Jerusalem, only the Messiah can lead the people back because this would lead to catastrophe. So that even the notion of hero. You know, even if you think of King David, a great military hero, but what is he really remembered for? He’s the songster. And now you have Nicholas, who is a military czar, and he realises he needs an army to back his dreams. Now, peasants were constricted into the army for 25 years. He decides that one of the things he can do is to Russify the Jews.

Now, one of the ways to break them is to conscript. So the cantonist system where young Jewish boys are taken age 12 into the Russian army where they served 31 years. The first six years was known as Russification. Their first meal was pork. They were taught the Russian Orthodox Church. If they resisted, they were beaten, they were tortured, and sometimes they were killed. And frankly, the decision, the czarist authorities didn’t send a list to every town and village. They told every town and village they had to provide children. Can you imagine what that did to a community? There’s lots of poetry and literature about this. There’s a wonderful poem called “Old Mrs. Rokhova.” She’s the poorest woman in town. She’s a widow. It’s her son who goes, not one of the six sons of the rich. So it led to a great division in Jewish society as well. He tries the stick. And I should tell you that quite a few families, they either maimed their children to stop them having to go. And there were many examples where when the children were taken away, the family sat Kaddish for them. They never expected to see them again. And it’s also the beginnings of some kids actually getting out of Russia. And of course, where are they going? They’re going to the American dream.

This is the beginnings, the floodgates are not opening yet, because despite all the horror, you had the community. The outside world was the outside world. How much did it impinge on you? There was Shabbat. You obviously would go to synagogue, otherwise you’d be ostracised whether you are religious or not. That was the life you lived. You lived the Jewish life just as the peasantry lived the life of the Russian Orthodox Church. Anything else was completely unacceptable in a Russia that has not yet come of the Dark Ages. Nicholas also tried other measures. He thought, look, he didn’t have much time to concentrate on the Jews, but he did set up an inquiry to find out if he could raise the Jews up by setting up crown schools. And he actually called in a great Hasidic Rebbe, a traditional rabbi and a couple of wealthy men to discuss the whole possibility of setting up crown schools. And a young scholar from Germany was brought in. But then there was a letter sent by one rabbi to another rabbi saying that this is all about conversion, and very, very, even though families were promised tax concessions if they sent their children to the crown schools, in the end it fails.

And the scholar, Abraham Geiger, went off to the states. So basically it’s different ways. But in a reign where you’re ruling over a hundred minorities, plus you are fighting the West, because of course Nicholas got involved in the Crimean War, the Jews are an afterthought, but they are a hated afterthought. They were stupid, stupid, stupid kind of regulations. One, the Talmud is good for the Jews, then the Talmud is bad for the Jews. Very ignorant people looking at this massive people who they did not understand who were to the west of their empire. But then we have another czar on the throne. Nicholas dies and his son Alexander II comes to the throne. Can we see the next slide, please Hannah? Now Alexander II, and that is a photograph, Alexander II ruled from 1856 to 1881. He had had a different kind of education. He travelled in the West. He even had a flirtation with Victoria. But of course he was far too grand to marry, to be just her consort. And he realised, why on earth had the largest empire in the world been defeated by the British and the French? But it’s pretty obvious, isn’t it, modern technology, a sound middle class, the development of ideas, whereas Russia is stuck in the stone Age. And also if you look at some great Russian writers, they are beginning now to talk about ideas. Because if you think about it, think about the progress of the West.

Think about the railway networks. Think about the postal services. Russia is backward. He realises, just as Peter the Great realised, he’s going to have to import Western technology into Russia. He needs to create a sound middle class. He needs to send people other than the aristocracy to universities. So he’s going to lift the lid. How on earth do you rule over a hundred different minorities? You hold the the lid down tight. That was Gorbachev’s mistake. It’s fascinating. But what Alexander does in order to create a more modern empire, he’s taking away some of the most harsh restrictions against his minorities, and that included the Jews. For the first time, Jews are going to be allowed out of the Pale of Settlement into the Russian interior, provided they have an educational qualification, a certain amount of money, artistic merit, or a trade in profession that’s going to be useful to the Russian Empire. So as a result, about a hundred thousand Jews are allowed to leave the Pale for the West for the first time. You see communities in Moscow and St. Petersburg. And as industry develops, as banking develops, a disproportionate number of Jews who have the expertise and the contacts, they begin to become important in banking. They begin to become important in the creation of factories. And these are the characters who are allowed to settle in Moscow, St. Petersburg and in Odessa. Families like the Ephrussi family, and I’m sure many of you will know about that incredible art collection.

The Kronenbergs, all sorts of interesting families, the Gunzbergs, the sugar barons, the Wissotzkies, the tea barons, all these characters are now allowed to develop their skills because Russia needs them. And for the first time, perhaps, and he freed the serfs in 1861, the 57 million serfs of Russia are freed. But they’re not given any money to buy their lands. And also you have this massive industrialization, the buildup of the cities with absolutely no poor relief. Whereas in England and in France, and of course in America, you’ve got the beginnings of help for the working classes. In Russia, forget it. This is a backward empire where, I remember when I visited Moscow, when I first taught there, we went to a palace about 20 miles from Moscow. It was a summer palace of a duke. And the whole of the inside had been decorated with seashells that had taken 20,000 serfs six months to create this. And he only stayed there a month of every year. So you had this unbelievable wealth. Think the Amber Room in St. Petersburg, this unbelievable wealth and yet the squalor of the peasantry. And the point when you lift the lid off, what’s going to happen? But as far as the Jews are concerned, in St. Petersburg and in Odessa, you have societies created, Society for the Promotion of Culture Amongst the Jews of Russia.

For the first time, Russian language newspapers appear in the Pale of Settlement. Poetry, a man called Gordon, “Be a man abroad and a Jew in your tent,” very much echoing Moses Mendelssohn, the poetry of the Haskalah, the Enlightenment, the ideas of the Haskalah. But in Russia, in the main, the language they used was Hebrew. So you have these pockets where in St. Petersburg and in Odessa, people are playing around with ideas. Is it possible that Russia will liberalise and Russia will open its arms to the Jews just as it has in the West? In fact, Moses Montefiore, the great Jewish philanthropist from Britain, he visited in the reign of Alexander the Second, and he met modern Jews dressed in modern clothes. He couldn’t believe it. He thought perhaps it would all happen. But then, the inevitable. Revolts break out in the empire. There’s a revolt in Poland. Some Jews helped in the Polish revolt, actually. It’s suppressed ruthlessly. In 1863, the Polish revolt. There’d been one back in 1831, which Chopin was so involved in. The governor of Finland is assassinated. You see also in Alexander II’s reign, you have the growth of a middle class. And some of their children are being educated in Western universities. They’re going to Zurich, they’re going to Berlin, they’re going to Paris. What is happening in these universities? The ideas of nationalism and also other ideas. Think Hegel, think Hegel and the whole creation of nationalism. Should the Poles be ruled by the Russian? Should the Fins? Et cetera, et cetera. And it all culminates in revolt. And towards the end of Alexander’s reign, he pushes the lid right back on. Now in 1881, a group of revolutionaries, the People’s Will Party, they assassinate him. He is blown up.

One of the assassins, in fact, one of the women, Hesia Helfman, who provided a safe house, was in fact Jewish. The mob went on the rampage through the Jewish areas. The Jews killed God, now they’ve killed our Czar. There was a deliberate move on the part of the czarist authorities, or was it a spontaneous uprising? Because what was happening, remember the Pale is to the west of Russia. It’s the most industrialised area, itinerant railway workers, the building up of the great railway networks. His grandson, Nicholas I, is going to complete the Trans-Siberian Railway, this is the growth of modernization, who perpetrated the pogroms, but they went from town to town, village to village, and they lasted. And they were the most appalling outbreak of horror and for the Jews, and the authorities allowed it to happen. And from then on, you’re going to see, pogrom, by the way, is the Russian word for riot, and you’re going to see one after another after another. And if you want to mirror your family’s route out of Eastern Europe, just study a bit of Russian history and you’ll be able to marry it up. When, like for example, at the time of the Kishinev pogrom, there was a huge exodus out of Russia. And Alexander II, who succeeded his father. Can we see Alexander II, please, Hannah?

He was a great bear of a man. His wife was the sister of Alexandra of England, two Danish sisters. He married Dagmar. The Prince of Wales, later Edward III, married Alexandra. So that is why George V and Nicholas II are first cousins. He was a total autocrat. He saw his father come back to the palace completely smashed. His chief officer is a man called Pobedonostsevov, who by the way is probably Karenin in “Anna Karenina.” He was the lay procurator of the Russian Orthodox Church. He believed in autocracy, holding the people down and keeping them as little children. And he was violently antisemitic. So as far as the Jews are concerned, Alexander, as far as Russia’s concerned, he’s trying to hold back the tide of revolts. And he’s this big strong bear of a man. And he loathes the Jews. So does Pobedonostsevov. And the the other thing that happens is, can you suppress ideas? And what is developing in Russia are various forms of protest against this autocratic regime. Marxism is going to creep into Russia in the 1890s through Plekhanov. There’s going to be Jewish socialism, the Bund, 1897 in Vilna, in the back of a blacksmith shop where Jewish workers want help against Jewish bosses. They were not Marxists. They believed in social justice.

They believed in the revolution. But what they wanted was Jewish autonomy in Russia. Post-revolution, Russia was seething with discontent. And as far as the Jews was concerned, let me give you an example. When his brother became governor of Moscow, Grand Duke Sergei, his present was the expulsion of 20,000 Jews from Moscow. They were given 24 hours. These are many of the wealthy pushed back into the Pale. So it’s an explosive situation. Now, he dies young. He’d been involved in an attempt to kill him. It had wasn’t successful, but he dies young without having prepared his son, Nicholas II, for statehood. And let’s have a look at Nicholas, the last of the czars. You know, when Alexandra was taken away at Yekaterinburg, the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” was by her bedside. This ineffective, weak ruler, married to the totally obsessed, religious Alexandra, was totally ill-equipped to run an empire. To give you a few examples, when he was crowned, there was a tradition that the poor of Moscow would be fed. The rumour went around, there wasn’t enough food. 3000 people were mown down. And the czar went on dancing. As though matters couldn’t get any worse, he manages to get involved in a war with Japan in 1904, sending men and equipment and food away from Russia right to Manchuria. There’s a wonderful story as far as the Jews are concerned, there was a man called Jacob Schiff, one of the great American financiers.

And what he did, he was so angry with what was happening in Russia that he actually lent, without them asking, the Japanese government, $200 million to fight the war. Ironically, this notion of Jews and money in power was going to play because during the Second World War, when Japan was allied to Nazi Germany, even though they were pressed to deport their Jews, they never did, because of something called the Fuji Plan. Fuji is a Japanese puffer fish, and if you eat it in the wrong place and kills you, and that is the Fuji plan. That’s what they thought about the Jews. But that’s a little side story of history. What happens under Nicholas is that he goes from disaster to disaster. Exacerbated by the fact that having produced four daughters, his heir suffered from haemophilia. As a result, the religious narrow-minded Alexandra falls under the sway of Rasputin, who came from a very strange Russian belief system called the Khlysty, who believed in salvation through sin. It seems he could stop the bleeding. We’ll never know. But basically he had huge power over Nicholas and Alexandra. And so they not only become isolated from the population, they become isolated from the court.

And during the Russo-Japanese war, when people are starving, there is a march to his palace. He’s away. The cossacks turn on the mob. 3000 peaceful demonstrators are mown down. That led in 1905 to revolution where all sorts of groups came together. But it didn’t last long because soon the army was back. It was still loyal to the Czar, and there was terrible bloodshed and pogrom. Now, another important factor, of course, Marxism becomes very important in Russia. The majority of Jews were not Marxists. How are the majority of Jews dealing? Well, we’re going to see 40% of them are going to get out. But the Hasids, keep the czar away from us, also the traditional Jews. But with the Haskalah, what happened to so many of those young Jews who became alienated from their Jewish roots and yet found Russia impossible, they looked for another dream. And many of the leaders of what becomes the revolutionary parties, both the Bolsheviks, which merely means majority, and the Mensheviks, which means minority, were of Jewish birth, something like 90% of the Mensheviks, 50% of the Bolsheviks. And if you look at the original 11 who take power in Russia, six were born Jewish. So that is going to lead to the notion not only all Jews are capitalists, but all Jews are communists.

And certainly Russia, the level of antisemitism, there was a horrific pogrom in Kishinev, which was a blood libel pogrom. “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” come out of Russia around the turn of the century. They’re first published in Paris and later on they’re going to be such an appalling document. And there is a letter that Nicholas writes to his mother, blaming the Jews for everything. So basically Russia is going to hurtle towards disaster. And as far as the Jewish response is concerned for the Hasidic community in the main, we turn further and further to the almighty of the traditional Orthodox. Many of them are getting out. There was another response. Some of the characters who had founded the Society for the Promotion of Culture, people like Leon Pinsker, I mentioned him last week because he wrote a pamphlet called “Auto-Emancipation.” He had believed in acculturation. He was a doctor, remember? And he was in the Russian army. He said, “The world suffers from Judeophobia.” Remember, he’s a doctor. “It’s a psychic aberration. It’s a 2000-year disease. It is incurable.” Ahad Ha'am, who is going to be the creator of Cultural Zionism. He said the answer for a Jewish people is a homeland which will give light to the diaspora, which will light up this whole world. He believed that the Jewish homeland must be an elitist state morally beyond anything that have ever been created before.

So many of these ideas, Aaron David Gordon, Labour Zionists, he goes off to Palestine. You’re beginning to see from 1881 onwards, young people going from Russia and from Romania to Palestine infused with the idea of the recreation of the Jewish nation. But it’s a tiny minority. It’s very important to remember that. Let’s have a look at some shots of the shtetl. Here you see, these are the traditional market towns. And you can see just how traditional the bulk of Russian Jewry was. I’m only talking about a small minority who became involved in the revolutionary movements. The Bund, though, it has to be said, attracted hundreds of thousands of people. And language is interesting, you know, because the Zionists, it had to be Hebrew. Ben Yehuda recreates our ancient language. Don’t use Yiddish. It’s the language of the diaspora. The diaspora is downgraded. Look what happened to us in the diaspora. We lost our soul. We lost what made us great. Yiddish was their language. So the Bund is fighting with Yiddish. The Zionists are fighting with Hebrew. The Bundists said of the Zionists, no sorry, I beg your pardon, Trotsky said of the Bundists, “They are Zionists who get seasick,” because what the Bund wanted, they worked with the revolution. But after the revolution, they wanted Jewish autonomy, Jewish language, Jewish culture within the Russian Empire, the Russian Empire that had been liberated and socialist. And Bundists had fought with the revolutionaries on the barricades in the 1905 revolution. Hundreds of thousands of people joined the Bund, by the way.

Think Yiddish theatre. Later on, think Yiddish cinema. Think Yiddish schools. Many of them, like the Medem School, transferred to the States. But the pictures I’m showing you is to remember that this is the bulk. This is really the bulk. And then of course, beginning in 1881, they got out. And why, of course, what was the main destination? Let’s have a look. Can we see the next slide, Hannah? There you see the horrible, horrible pictures of pogroms. As I said, those monsters on October the seventh, they had a hell of a long history to draw from, and they used many of the methods. That’s what I’m finding absolutely appalling. And we know that in the tunnels, Israeli soldiers have found copies of “Mein Kampf” and all sorts of other things. Let’s go on. Because there you see a symbol of the Bund, and those of you who go on the Lockdown website, I’ve spent whole sessions talking about the Bund. What I’ve tried to do in these sessions is condense it, because this is the flow of Jewish history. The next one, please. Now these are the immigration figures. You will see that the largest number, this is 1881 to 1930. After the Russian Revolution, it was quite difficult to get out of Russia. But in the early years, many went, but it gradually tightens up. But you will see, and of course the largest number go out between 1881 and 1914. Canada, Argentina. Why Argentina? Because Baron de Hirsch had bought tracts of land there. Baron de Hirsch, known as Turkenhirsch, one of the great philanthropists of the world. Now, why America?

Well, I’m sure you can tell me why America. It was the land of dreams. It was the land of opportunities. There was already young people going there, and the letters come back. And more than that, America has no state religion. It’s the land of immigrants. And it was a Jew, Israel Zangwill, the great Yiddish writer, he wrote in English and he saw himself a man as the people. He actually said in his play, “America is the melting pot.” That was the name of his play, “The Melting Pot.” Brazil, South America, open spaces, Great Britain, a large number came to Britain, Germany, France, Belgium, so from Western and Central Europe. South Africa, 45,000 to South Africa from Eastern Europe, mainly from Lithuania. 90% of South African Jewry are Litvaks. Egypt, Egypt, which was a British colony. Palestine, mainly Zionists. That was a Zionist aliyah. Australia and New Zealand, and also from the Austro-Hungarian. And also in 1920, Poland becomes independent again and chauvinist antisemitism. So you see America was the big destination, followed by Britain. They’re interesting figures, aren’t they? When do things become too bad for you to stay? It was partly, of course, pogrom, but it was also economic horror and internal displacement. It has to get pretty bad for people to leave. And in the main though the Hasids didn’t leave. They were very much under the will of the Rebbe. There were one or two dynasties that got out. And of course you know all about that, I’m sure.

Can we see the next slide, please? And this is where they would’ve come to first when they came to America with so many millions of other people finding a home in the Land of the Free. Can we see the next slide please? The registration desk at Castle Garden. It must have been an extraordinarily difficult experience. They were tested for diseases. There were all sorts of Jewish aid organisations, as they were from other people, but it must have been such a tough thing, three weeks, usually in the hold of a ship. Many of them emerged with scurvy. There’s a very good biography by Arthur Miller’s father of what it was like. He became one of the main garment manufacturers on the East Side. There’s a wonderful book called “Land of Our Fathers” if you buy it in America, or “The Immigrant Jews of New York,” if you buy it in Britain. And it really gives a wonderful picture of the letters that it wasn’t all gorgeous, believe me. It was a hard, tough life. And not only that, there were desertions, there was crime. Abraham Cahan set up The Daily Forward. And of course, YIVO transferred from Vilnius to America. That’s a story. Those of you who are interested in American Jewish history, we spent a whole term on it in Lockdown from different lecturers looking at different perspectives. Can we go on to the next slide, please? There you see, later on, it’s transferred to Ellis Island, coming off the boats from so many different countries, so many.

And I was talking to Hannah before, it’s interesting, her family is Scandinavian. People tended to gravitate to where their people were. You know, a lot of young boys came out on their own, or fathers came out to earn the money to get others. Young boys with a sign in Yiddish round their neck to go to some distant relative. The landsmanshaft were created. There was camaraderie, but there was also horror and crime and desertion and poverty. But in the end, they came out by their bootstraps. And what a world those American Jews created. Let’s go on please, next. There you see also London, ports of London, Liverpool, Cardiff. The family memories of some are that they thought they were in New York, but in fact it was cheaper for the sea captains to drop them off in the English ports, the Scottish ports, the Welsh ports. That was the story of my family. Louis B. Mayer came to London, actually, to earn a bit more to go onto America. Film business might have been different if he’d stayed. Next one, next slide please. The creation of the American Dream. There you see a lovely Yiddish postcard. There you see the young America, young Jews already there. They have become American. There’s some wonderful books about this. Read the literature. Also look at the films. There’s some wonderful films about this particular experience.

Have a look at “Hester Street,” Joan Micklin Silver. It’s wonderful. I love that particular postcard. It’s wonderful, isn’t it? You see young Americans modernised. They have become American. And look at how they’re dealing with the greeners. And let’s have a look at the next, the last slide. I think we’ve got one more, haven’t we? Yes. Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, “Long Live the Land of the Free,” words by Smulowitz. Now don’t forget that the American Dream, how America saw itself, the fantasy of America in the main was created by Jewish songwriters, Jewish movie moguls. They created the image of the American Dream. And we were going to have a session, no doubt, over Christmas on the creation of the Christmas song. I mean, Irving Berlin, “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas.” He lived to be 101. So I will stop there, and next week is going to be a real tough one because what I’m going to try and pull together for you next week are the two most convulsive events in Jewish history for 2000 years, The Shoah and the creation of the state of Israel. Now, let me say very carefully, I can’t tell you why the Shoah happened. I can only tell you how it happened. We’re going to talk about the causation and we’re going to talk about Israel, because up until 1933, Israel was a minority movement in the Jewish world. The majority of Jews in the West were trying to become citizens of the countries in which they lived of the Jewish religion. That was their effort. The same is true of America. We will be American, Irish American, Italian American, Jewish American. But something happened in those intervening years. So let’s have a look at the questions, yes.

Q&A and Comments:

Oh yes, Linda’s telling us there’s a new book out by Bernard-Henri Levy. Yes, he’s always worth reading. It’s called “Israel Alone,” isn’t it?

Shelly, I’m not sure what happened to the University of Wales.

Oh yes, Linda’s also recommending a book by Dennis Prager and Joseph Telushkin entitled, “Why the Jews?”

Q: Paul is saying, “Lockdown’s been a lifesaver. Can you tell us what the next curriculum will be?”

A: Yes, I can. Look, we are doing something very special over Yomim Tovim, obviously, and then we are going to spend quite a lot of time on heroes and villains, which will give us huge scope. That’s not going to be every lecture, but that’s going to be our theme. And then I had a meeting with Wendy this week, and it looks like in January it’s going to be China, okay?

Rita, she wants the forward website. She wants to know, I believe, what hasn’t been written yet.

David points out, “The anti-Jewish stance in European history by the Christian church had a Jewish rabbi renamed as Jesus.” Yes, you see, David, that’s the point but you’re being logical. Antisemitism and Jew-hatred is irrational. That’s where the Enlightenment tragically got it wrong. They believed if you educated everyone to a certain level, you would discover that there were universal truths. Tragically, we are not just creatures of the Enlightenment, are we? We are creatures of all sorts of seething emotions. And when times are tough, we look for the scapegoat. And the tragedy, Isaiah Berlin put it this way, he said, “Everybody at some stage in their history has been persecuted. The problem for the Jews is that at most times they have been persecuted by most people.” But let me tell you this, antisemitism does not exist in the Hindu world, and it doesn’t exist in China. The Chinese might be playing a game at the moment because they always put China first, but antisemitism as an idea does not exist in China. On the contrary, they can’t understand it. I had an absolutely extraordinary meeting with a Chinese ambassador a few years ago, ‘cause I’ve taught in China for 12 years. We ran classes for IRA at Chinese universities. I think I told you, my partner was made an associate professor in China. He said, “I like the Jews. They’ve never hurt China.” He loathed Christianity and missionaries. “You look after the family and you work hard. What’s not to like?” And that’s what he said.

Sheri is making a political comment about Netanyahu. I don’t really want to do politics because I think we need to stay together as a people. We have always been an incredibly divisive people. And yes, there are many who are worried about the regime and what’s going on in Israel. Yes, look, but I must tell you something. You know how we lost our land 2000 years ago? Various factions invited Pompey in. They brought the tiger in.

Q: “Why did my Pollack father disrespect those who came from Galicia?”

A: Oh, Ruth, this is lovely. Different Jews have different Yiddish dialects.

David says, “My Litvak family felt the same way.” I think the Litvaks sort saw themselves as the creme, didn’t they? They were the logical ones and the Galitzianers, the Pollacks thought the Galitzianers were thieves. I mean, come on. These are all the stories. I was just looking at a book, A Treasury of Jewish Folklore. You know, the various groups, we always had our own mishegosses, didn’t we? Yeah, the Litvaks.

Monty’s recommending “The Jewish Century” by Yuri Slezkine. It focuses on the drama of the Russian Jews, including immigrants. Monty, I totally agree with you. It is one of the great books of Jewish history. If you want to understand modern Jewish history, read “The Jewish Century.” Thank you very much, Monty.

Hugh says he’s interested in the Jewish diaspora to the West. Actually, as far as I, yes, of course, Jews were dropped off in the Irish ports. Of course they were.

Q: Didn’t Herzl, wasn’t his father the chief rabbi of Ireland?

A: Yeah, they have a very interesting tradition, the Jews of Ireland. And there’s lots of jokes about how they fared in the Protestant-Catholic problems. “I appreciate the unfairness and cruelty of Russification, but I’m sorry, I think the Jews should not have considered it themselves beyond conscription when everyone was obliged to do so.” No, not everybody was. It was the peasantry. You know, occasionally the aristocracy would go in as generals. It’s the Russification process. That was the point. It wasn’t just conscription into the army of 25 years. Jews had to serve an extra six years. And Herzen, the great Russian writer, he talks about Jews being kidnapped as young as eight because sometimes villages wouldn’t give the children up. And it’s the Russification, you know, to take those young boys who’ve been brought up in Yeshiva and to throw them into the brutality of the Russian army and make them into Russians.

“The serious concern was that the sons would be forced to lose their Jewish identity. I doubt that they were against the principle of conscription. Thousands of Jews served in World War I.” Yes, of course, Marian. Look, in World War I, though it’s fascinating, because a hundred thousand German Jews fought for Germany loyally. Jews fought for Britain, they fought for America. They fought for the Habsburgs, fought in the Turkish army. In Russia, Jews were conscripted. And in fact, the Russians were particularly cruel in the first World War because they thought that the Jews, because they’d been treated so badly, think where the Pale is, to the west of Russia, they believed that the Jews would be disloyal. So they frogmarched 500,000 women, children and old men into Russia in the depth of a Russian winter, 1914 to 15, a hundred thousand of them died.

Marian says, “There was a loophole in the conscription law. If a family had one child, a son, they didn’t have to send them in the army. Childless couples were willing to adopt a Jewish son of a large family. He would not have to be recruited. That’s what happened with the son, my great-grandfather who changed his name and got to the USA.” Interesting because that’s later on. I was talking about the reign of Nicholas I, which had been your great, great, great, great, great. No, it it, it changes, you’re right, thank you Marion. Hugh says, “I live in Ireland where Jews, despite James Joyce’s valorization of Leopold Bloom in 'Ulysses,’ are sadly now diminished in our population, though they can still display a nation.” Thanks for that.

Laura liked the panorama of pre-revolution.

Q: David asked, “Can you please send us the map of Poland’s dissolution by email that you showed at the beginning of the lecture?” Is that possible, Hannah, Hannah?

A: - [Hannah] They would like get a posting of that initial map? I think I can attach it perhaps to this lecture when we publish it on the website.

• Lovely, and also, could we put a map of the Pale on? I’ll speak to you about that.

• Sounds good.

• Thank you, it’s a very good idea, thank you.

“Did you say 90% of Jews are,” I said 90% of South African Jews are Litvaks, because the Union-Castle Line docked there and as a result, they docked in the ports of Lithuania. So consequently that’s where 90% of Jews finished up. 90% of South African Jews are from Lithuania.

Q: “What is the source of migration numbers?”

A: I think I got them from “The Jew in the Modern World.”

Ronnie says, “Jews left Eastern Europe to get away from pogroms, but literature shows they wanted to get away from the power that their rabbis had.” That’s certainly a very interesting story, Ronnie, yes. You’ve got to remember I had to do a broad brush, but that’s why it’s really worth getting into it. Yes, the Rabbonim, you know, in certain parts of Poland between the 15th and 17th centuries, rabbis could even imprison. If you had a dispute, you went to a beth din. The rabbis were the judges, had incredible power.

Shirley, “Our family heading for New York on ship spoke only Yiddish. After three days, they heard a captain shout, ‘New York.’ It was Cork. They disembarked and took a while to realise it wasn’t in America but Ireland. Eventually moved up to Dublin.” New York, oh, I love it, that’s wonderful. Thank you Anna, thank you, thank you.

Q: Can I get access to the recordings of these sessions?

A: Yes, all you have to do is go to Lockdown on the website.

Q: Tamari, “You once mentioned that Alexandra referred to Moses Mendelssohn. Can you tell where his comment could be found?”

A: Don’t want to give you misinformation. I’ll have to check my notes. Thank you, thank you.

Yes, Myrna says the Chinese allowed Jews to live in peace ‘cause they didn’t proselytise. Sure, but what is even more interesting, they all intermarried. There was a huge community in Kaifeng. You know, in the year 1000, Kaifeng was a city of a million people. It was cosmopolitan trading city, and it had a large Jewish population. But Jews assimilate. I remember Jeremy Rosen and I once did a debate, is antisemitism the key to Jewish survival? Now think about it.

Stephen Creed, “I identify as a Canadian Jew, where being a Jew is not secondary, but my primary, after human and male. When Jewish identity is secondary, it’s a problem to our global unity as a people with our own nation and nationality.” You see, it’s a problem anyway, Stephen. In a world of nationalism, look, the word Jew is so controversial. I mean, I think I’m correct in saying that if I said the word Christian, that would automatically mean a belief in Jesus. When I say the word Jew, it can mean religion, it can mean peoplehood, whatever that means, it’s cultural. How many friends do you have who have belief in religion at all and who are not living in Israel nevertheless feel themselves to be Jewish? It’s so complicated. He says, “We should respect the rights and laws. We are the citizens of the country we live in, but our homeland should not be empty words and fulfil hope of 2000 years.” Yes, Stephen, that is very much the view of many people today. But it was not the view in the 20s and 30s. Anglo Jewry, for example, was trying so hard to be British, so much so that the major critics of the Balfour Declaration were Jews.

Q: And Katya, “Where can we see the recording of the two previous classes of this course?”

A: Am I right Hannah? They’re on the website already, or will they will be next week.

• [Hannah] Everything should be up within 36 hours of airing. So I think it should be-

• Wow, wow, wow, that’s impressive. I don’t understand technology, so.

Q: And then, “Any weight to the theory that brothers within the same family took different surnames to avoid conscription since an only son was not taken? My grandfather who served in Harbin.”

A: Now that’s interesting, Naomi, I’d like to know more about that. If you could email Lockdown. That is interesting. Don’t forget that a lot of Jews didn’t have surnames names, religious Jews. Certainly not in the 18th, 19th centuries. Yes, of course, 25,000 Jews were officers in the Austro-Hungarian armies during the First World War, yes, Czech Jews, Hungarian Jews, Jews living in Vienna. Problem with the Habsburg Empire, what on earth was the identity of the Habsburg Empire? The majority of Jews in the Empire turned to German culture, which upset Czech Nationalists and they upset Hungarian nationalists. Don’t forget, Theodor Herzl was born in Budapest.

Monty says, “My son on a business visit to Hong Kong is the first Jew the Chinese colleagues at the meeting he’d ever met. Asked him, 'How many gods do the Jews have?’” How fantastic. No, there’s, there’s about 12 departments of Jewish studies in Chinese universities now.

Mona says, “Jewish atheist is not an oxymoron.”

Anyway, thank you all very much. Thank you Hannah, for keeping me sane, and I’ll see you all next week. Take care, bye.