The Holocaust: The Destruction of European Jewry is an adaptation of an on-campus course that has been co-taught by Murray Baumgarten, Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature (Literature Department), and Peter Kenez, Professor Emeritus (History Department), for over 20 years at UC Santa Cruz. In this course, you will explore the Holocaust from the overlapping perspectives of literature and history—through memoirs, historical documents, poetry, documentary footage, filmic representations, and novels. You will expand your knowledge of the literature of the Holocaust, Eastern and Western European Jewish communities, the origins and development of antisemitism, the establishment of labor and extermination camps, resistance movements, and the Holocaust as a problem for world history. There is more than one way to take this course: You can complete all of the activities (and earn a Verified Certificate) or only the activities that are most interesting to you. Whatever you choose to do, we encourage you to find a havruta (a study partner) in your community or in the Coursera community so that you can experience the course in a more interactive and meaningful way.
2.3.1 Jewry of the Russian Empire
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Do curso por University of California, Santa Cruz
Holocausto: A Destruição dos Judeus Europeus
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Prelude to the Holocaust
In this module Profs. Baumgarten and Kenez discuss the changing demographics and political landscape of early 20th century Eastern Europe, Jewish identity, the Bildungsroman, Silvano Arieti’s The Parnas, Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz, Aharon Appelfeld’s Badenheim 1939, and Elie Wiesel’s Night.
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Murray BaumgartenDistinguished Professor of English & Comparative Literature
Literature
Peter KenezProfessor Emeritus
History
This is the third of my introductory talks.
I will be talking about the Jews of the Russian Empire, and
in some ways, this is perhaps the most relevant for our topics.
I said last time that the great majority of the Jews who were
victims of the Holocaust came from Eastern Europe, where more precisely,
the great majority of the people who were killed, came or
were descendants of Jews of the Russian Empire.
This is where, at the turn of the 19th and 20th century,
the great majority of the Jews lived, something like 80%.
It is important for our purposes to talk about the Russian,
I always want to say Russian Jewry, but that's wrong,
the Jewry of the Russian Empire.
There is a difference here, inasmuch as the Jews,
up to 1917, did not live in what is Russia today.
They lived in the Russian Empire, namely in the Ukraine,
in the Baltic states, in Bessarabia, which
at one point was part of Romania, but not in Russia itself.
And this is relevant, because one cannot talk about age old Russian anti-Semitism,
since Russian peasants came into contact with Jews.
I will return to this when I will talk about
the development of the Russian Jewry.
So, the topic is important for us because
this is Jewish life, I mean, this is Jewish life which was destroyed.
This is the Jewry which Murray was talking about.
And it is important for us because there is, as I will be arguing,
a direct connection between 19th century,
early 20th century antisemitism in the Russian Empire and Nazism.
My outline will be that first I would want to talk
about the origin of the Jewry of the Russian Empire.
Then I will want to talk about the development in the course of the 19th
century.
And then finally I want to talk about the the pogroms
which took place at the time of the Russian civil war,
which was in the modern age the largest number
of Jews killed before the Holocaust.
Well, the origin of the Russian Jewry comes with
the destruction of the police state, with the division
of the police state, which I had an occasion to mention.
Namely, Poland acquired a sizable Jewry in the course of the Middle Ages because
of the degree of tolerance which the Polish state exhibited,
and that state was taken apart in the course of the 18th century.
In the course of the first division in 1873 Russia acquired
a relatively small number, something like 35,000.
But in the course of the second and
in the third division of Poland in 1793 and 1795,
acquired the majority of the Jews who had lived in the medieval kingdom of Poland.
And in addition, in 1812 Russia acquired Bessarabia,
which had been a part of the Turkish state.
And consequently in the first quarter of
the 19th century, around 1825, Russia,
that is the Russian Empire, had about 1 million Jews.
The demography is remarkable inasmuch as in the course
of the 19th century this Jewry grew to be 5 million.
The reason that there was such an enormous growth,
well, there was a great growth in the Russian population, also.
But the Jewish population grew even faster, and the reason for
that is probably because of the biblical commitment of go forth and multiply.
But more significantly, and more immediately,
because of hygiene improved among the Jewish population,
perhaps faster than the population as a whole.
And consequently we have a sizable Jewry in the course of the 19th century.
Indeed, when people in the course of the 19th century talked about antisemitism,
what they had in mind what was going on in the Russian state.
There are very few Russian words in the English language,
and I can think of vodka or troika, but another one is pogrom.
Pogrom, which comes from the Russian word [FOREIGN], break up.
And that, as you know, what it came to mean.
That is, in the course of the 19th century, Russia was regarded
as the country of pogroms, that was the country of antisemitism.
And it was a very different Jewry
than the Jewry of Western Europe,
inasmuch as the economic opportunities which existed in
Western Europe in the course of the early 19th century did not exist in Russia.
And consequently,
the degree of acculturation did not and could not have taken place.
What is remarkable about the Russian Jewry is to what extent it remained distinct.
That is, Russian, Ukrainians, Lithuanians,
Jews, lived not only in the same state but
of course, very close to one another.
And yet, they remained absolutely distinct.
Intermarriage was practically unheard of.
This is very different from what is going on in the rest of Europe.
The two communities did not know one another and disliked one another.
Each looked down on the other.
Russian, that is the Jews regarded their Ukrainian
fellow man as uncouth, unwashed,
beating their wives, drunkards.
And of course the Ukrainians, by contrast,
look down on the Jews as cowardly,
exploiters.
And it's remarkable that how little the two communities knew of one another,
and how distinct the two lives were one another.
That is, the Jews were restricted to the 25 provinces
of the Russian Empire, the Ukrainian provinces, and
the provinces which came to be incorporated from Poland,
and did not have permission to live in the rest of the Empire,
except with special permission.
Later on in the course of the 19th century,
some Jews received permission to move into
the capitals, St. Petersburg and Moscow.
But, by and large, they were restricted to their place of residence.
Now, this is not as unusual as you might think, inasmuch as up to 1861,
all Russians, with the exception of the nobility,
were restricted in their place of residence because of serfdom.
That is, it's not only the Jews who could not move anywhere that they wanted to, but
the great majority of the citizens of the Russian Empire,
in effect, were restricted.
Now I will be talking about antisemitism and miseries of Jewish life.
But by saying that, one has to remember that
the Jews were no more miserable than the majority of the inhabitants of the empire.
Namely, I suppose on balance, it was better to be Jewish than to be a serf.
Each had its appeal, so to speak.
Well, to describe Jewish life in the course of the 19th century,
first of all there were Jewish institutions.
Now these Jewish institutions, they all started out with the Polish Jewry.
Well after all, you see, the Jews didn't move.
The borders moved.
I mean, the Jews did not decide at one point that actually I would prefer to be
a citizen of the Russian Empire.
They just suddenly,
one day, the next they found themselves to be citizens of the Russian Empire.
Now these institutions had a considerable
degree of autonomy, of self-government.
The Qahal is Jewish institutions in which
the Jews decided matters among themselves.
Now the Tsarist State had a rather different attitude to Jewish
self-government, because on the one hand it did not
possess the means of actually governing and administering the empire.
That is, the Tsarist State was oppressive, but
it did not have the means to interfere with everyday life
of the individual citizens, because it did not have those
institutions which would enable the state to do so.
So the state governed the country to the extent it was governed,
mostly through the nobility, which had not only economic but also political tasks.
Now, in the case of the Jews, it was easier for the state to reach the Jews
through the already existing Jewish institutions, self-governing institutions.
Interestingly, this will reemerge when we talk about the Nazis,
that the Nazis found it absolutely essential to have Jewish self-government,
the so-called Judenrat, Jewish councils, because it enabled
the Nazi leadership to give command and
instructions to the Jews through these existing institutions.
So, what I'm trying to do is to describe the character of
Jewish life in the course of the 19th century.
And it changed.
It changed in the course of the 19th century,
in as much as it became more heterogeneous.
First of all in cultural terms.
The great division came as a result of some influences
from the West, in terms of Jewish enlightenment.
The word Haskalah, enlightenment, which split the Jews,
the Jewish leadership in particular, between the Hassids,
and I imagine these are terms which you know.
Hassid simply means bias.
That is, those who were concerned, and were afraid,
of those innovations which came out of the enlightenment, on the one hand.
And on the other, Jews who wanted to lessen the gap
between the surrounding world and Jewish world,
and were impressed by the achievements of the Western European Jewry and
learning from them, mostly from Germans.
Germany was the transmission,
inasmuch as Yiddish speakers found it much easier,
of course, to be acquainted with what was going on,
to the Western European Jewry in particular,
what was going on in Germany.
Now, the other split
was territorial.
That is, Jews living in different parts of this enormous territory.
In the northern part, Yiddish took
words from the surrounding languages,
Lithuanian for example.
In the south, there was a different Yiddish
subculture developed, also much depended
on the local Russian administration.
In some, the governors were, how should I put it,
less antisemitic, and less oppressive to the Jewish
citizens than in other areas, and so opportunities varied.
Vilnius, for example, became an intellectual center.
Odessa, which came under Russian rule relatively late,
became a great commercial center,
inasmuch as the Russian grain, which came to be exported to the West,
went through the Black Sea, and Odessa was the great entry port.
And consequently, in Odessa, the Jews had opportunities
which they did not have in other parts of the Empire, and
it became to be a very special, a very different kind of
Jewry than Jews in the different part of the Russian Empire.
That is, it was a better to be Jewish in Odessa,
than in Minsk, or Mogilev, or wherever,
because there were opportunities.
That is, the transformation, which of course gradually was
taking place in the Russian Empire in the course of the 19th century,
took place in Odessa sooner.
Jews moved into Russia only after 1917, and
then the transformation would be very quick and really extraordinary.
That is, the demography of the Jews of moving to the major cities,
such as Moscow, and later on, to go on to Leningrad and Kiev,
while earlier they did not have the means.
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