The Downtown Jews: Portraits of an Immigrant Generation

By Ronald Sanders

The Downtown Jews focuses generally on the political culture of the Lower East Side around the turn of the century and more specifically on the thoughts, life, and writings of Abraham Cahan, the editor of the Jewish Daily Forward.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dzanc Books
• Release date: Apr 8, 2015
• ISBN: 9781936873975

Ronald Sanders

Ronald Sanders was an American journalist and writer--publishing 10 works of non-fiction to high regard. From 1966-1975 he was on the staff of Midstream magazine, and from 1973-1975 was its editor-in-chief. He was the first recipient of the B'Nai B'Rith Book Award for his The Downtown Jews.

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Preface to the Dover Edition

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This book is a story of people in a place.

The people were Jewish immigrants who came to the United States from Eastern Europe, mainly between 1880 and the mid-nineteen-twenties. The place was the Lower East Side of New York City, where the great majority of them settled, at least for part of their lives. Within this period there came into being not merely a typical ethnic enclave, with its own language, food, institutions, and forms of entertainment and worship, but a virtual civilization in itself. For many years, extending well beyond the era of immigration, the Lower East Side was one of the capitals—at times the foremost capital—of the worldwide culture of Yiddish-speaking Jews.

The legacy of this culture has made its way into the American mainstream in many forms, although the old geographical source has been largely, though not entirely, abandoned. Signs of that tradition of popular vitality remain all over the neighborhood—not only in continuing Jewish manifestations, but also in the bustling presence of more recently arrived ethnic and cultural groups.

What are the geographical outlines of the Lower East Side? By the broadest definition, it is an area bounded on the north by East Fourteenth Street, on the west by the southward-running line consisting of Third Avenue, the Bowery, and St. James Place, and on the south and east by the East River. If we are focusing here on a Jewish enclave, however, then we must make some geographical modifications. Certain sectors along the East River waterfront were always mainly Irish, as much more of the Lower East Side had been prior to the large Jewish influx. Another group predominant in the area before this influx, the Germans, established a stronghold north of Houston Street, which retained its identity as Dutchtown until the First World War. Only in the nineteen-twenties, when Second Avenue supplanted the Bowery as the main artery of Yiddish theater and nightlife, did the sector north of Houston up to East Fourteenth Street become primarily identified as part of the Jewish Lower East Side.

Walking southward along Second Avenue from East Fourteenth Street, one can readily perceive that this, the last sector to become part of the Jewish Lower East Side, has been the first to lose that identity almost entirely. Apart from a large delicatessen (established in a later era) and a few other scattered manifestations, the outward signs of the old Jewish Rialto have either disappeared altogether or taken on new guises.

Yet, except for the decay in its southernmost stretches, Second Avenue retains an enormous vitality, the legacy of its Jewish and German past. Today its chief bearers of the tradition of ethnicity are the Ukrainians, whose restaurants, cafes, shops, banks, fraternal societies, and other institutions, many of them fronting upon establishments that once had been Jewish, are proclaimed in Cyrillic letters all along the avenue. But the principal nonethnic culture of Second Avenue today—the punk scene and its affiliates, whose main center is the block on St. Mark’s Place that stretches westward to Third Avenue—also occupies some of the significant sites of its ethnic predecessors. Particularly interesting in this respect are the typical structures of the Dutchtown era on East Fourth Street west of Second Avenue that now are owned by the La Mama Experimental Theatre, in one of which there took place, in 1882, the first performance of a Yiddish play ever given on American soil.

On Houston Street, as one walks eastward from Second Avenue, the old Jewish character of the neighborhood begins to reveal itself in the present. On the south side of the street, one encounters a succession of food establishments, some of which are among the most venerable and famous of the area’s institutions. Then, turning down Orchard Street, one virtually enters another era—not quite the classic Lower East Side era of pushcarts (which are no longer allowed), but, at any rate, that of street-vending. Stretching southward on both sides of the street, for block after block, are open stalls filled with wares ranging from toys and knickknacks of every conceivable variety to dresses and suits. The owners of the stalls and of the stores behind them, unlike the pushcart vendors of old, do not live in the neighborhood, and many of them—embodying one of the newer types of Jewish immigration to New York from Israel—are more likely to speak Hebrew than Yiddish; but the lively atmosphere of open-air buying, selling, and attempted bargaining is redolent of the spirit of earlier times.

Although most of the residents of this sector today are Hispanic, some of the streets that intersect with Orchard also retain, in a few of their institutions and business establishments, the Jewish character of old. This is especially true of Rivington Street, where you can see, just east of Orchard, the still-thriving synagogue that once housed the first Rumanian-Jewish congregation in America, and was the starting point of the careers of two great cantors who went on to become opera stars—Jan Peerce and his brother-in-law Richard Tucker. Farther east on Rivington are two long-standing producers of foods that are primarily, though by no means exclusively, associated with the Passover table: Streit’s Matzos and Schapiro’s Kosher Wines.

On the other hand, Delancey Street—the broad boulevard one block south of Rivington that was once a main artery of the Lower East Side—has all but completely lost any visible Jewish character. Ratner’s, the celebrated dairy restaurant, is still there, but other sites, as on Second Avenue, have assumed new guises: the former synagogue at the corner of Forsyth Street now houses a Spanish Adventist congregation; the anonymous commercial building at the Allen Street corner was once the Bank of the United States—which catered primarily to Jewish immigrants and failed in 1932—and subsequently the headquarters of the Hebrew Publishing Company. The major monument of earlier times on Delancey is that great eastward extension of the street called the Williamsburg Bridge, which vitally connected the older Jewish settlement on the Lower East Side with the later ones just across the East River in Brooklyn.

Turning southward again on Essex Street, two blocks east of Orchard, one now begins to penetrate to the oldest centers of the East European Jewish settlement in New York. Significantly, more than any other part of the Lower East Side, this sector retains an intensely Jewish character down to the present day. The east side of Essex down to Straus Square is dominated by relatively recent, middle-class housing developments in which a sizable Jewish population still resides. On the west side, one first passes Seward Park High School—itself an embodiment of the area’s history, with its largely Jewish past and its multi-ethnic present—then crosses Grand Street, which is, as ever, a busy artery of clothing and fabric stores, to arrive at a two-block stretch of ancient storefronts covered everywhere with signs in Hebrew and Yiddish, some bespeaking a highly religious presence.

At the bottom of Essex, where it meets Canal Street and East Broadway at Straus (formerly Rutgers) Square, one has reached the point where it all began—the cluster of streets into which most of the sudden, large influx of Jews from Russia in the 1880s gathered and which these immigrants made their home. There were slum tenements and sweatshops here; but there also was hope, and an eventual progress that shows its signs all around. On the northeast corner is William H. Seward Park (after which the high school was named), created in 1900 on the site of two blocks of demolished tenements. Beyond it can be seen the Seward Park branch of the New York Public Library on one side of East Broadway, and the Educational Alliance on the other—two buildings in which the immigrants and their children, often tired at the end of long work days, sought education and self-improvement. And, dominating the entire scene, facing Seward Park from the south side of East Broadway, is the ten-story building that was erected by The Jewish Daily Forward between 1910 and 1912 and was its home for more than sixty years.

This Yiddish newspaper, which by 1920 had achieved a circulation of nearly a quarter of a million—-one of the highest among American dailies in general and by far the highest for any Yiddish newspaper in the world—was in a sense the central organ of the life of the Jewish Lower East Side at its peak. The Forward was hated as well as loved; but even those who vehemently opposed it—the rival Yiddish newspapers above all—drew their main strength from the energy of that opposition.

The Forward, which now comes out once a week, has moved to smaller quarters uptown, and its old building is occupied by a group of Chinese institutions and organizations. This bespeaks the lively presence of what is now the largest ethnic minority in this part of the city. To the east of the Forward Building, there are still many Jewish establishments, but to its west, East Broadway is entirely Chinese—including the restaurant on the Straus Square corner that once was the Garden Cafeteria, where Forward writers gathered daily over their coffee and blintzes. High on the façade of the Forward Building, the newspaper’s name is permanently inscribed in Yiddish, while down its western side, facing the direction from which the new ancient civilization is coming, is an enormous sign in Chinese. It is fitting that this historic structure should be the point at which the two cultures meet, summing up the ethnic vitality of the Lower East Side’s past, present, and future.

Much as the Forward Building is the focal point of the Lower East Side to this day, so also is The Jewish Daily Forward—its history and its prehistory—the focus of the story on the following pages. Far from attempting to be an encyclopedic survey of the life of the Jewish Lower East Side in its heyday, this book seeks only to reflect that life as significantly and richly as possible through the histories of a few individuals. Most of them were connected with the Forward or its predecessors, at least for a time; some went on to become its foremost opponents. Others were connected with that other major institution of the epoch, the Yiddish theater. They, too, are seen on these pages mainly in terms of their often stormy relationship with the Forward. If these personalities can hardly be called typical, they are in another sense the fullest possible embodiments of the life of the Lower East Side from the standpoint of historical narrative. Like everyone around them, they too were immigrants struggling to make it in the New World; but their struggles, triumphs, and failures all were larger than life—even as the content of their work, their writings and dramas, were large-scale projections of the struggles, aspirations, and fantasies of the entire community.

In a sense, then, this book is a novel of the Lower East Side—a novel that is purely factual; for all its details, including the dialogues, are from documentary sources. It is a dramatic narrative that reverberates with a larger history. And, like a novel, it has among its cast of characters one who is more central than all the others. This is Abraham Cahan, the founding editor of the Forward and its ruling spirit for almost half a century, who also had a career writing in English and was the author of the definitive American novel of a Jewish immigrant, The Rise of David Levinsky. Cahan’s life and work can be said to sum up the history of the Jewish Lower East Side more significantly than those of any other individual.

And, along with its main protagonist, this narrative begins its life in Russia.

CHAPTER 1

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Russia, 1881

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Then Verochka found herself in the city; she saw a cellar where young girls were shut up. She touched the lock, the lock fell; she said to the young girls: Go out! and they went out. She saw then a room where young girls lay paralyzed. She said to them: Arise! They arose, and all ran into the country, light-hearted and laughing. Verochka followed them, and in her happiness cried out:

How pleasant it is to be with them! How sad it was to be alone! How pleasant it is to be with the free young girls who run in the fields, so lithe and joyous!

—N. G. Chernyshevsky, What Is to Be Done?

O my sweet Marianna! believe me, I am not laughing at you; and my words are the simple truth. You now, all of you, Russian women, are more capable, and loftier too, than we men.

—Ivan Turgenev, Virgin Soil

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The Russian revolutionary movement of the nineteenth century was distinguished by the presence within its ranks of a large number of courageous young women. One of the most outstanding of these was Sophia Perovskaya, a daughter of a prominent aristocratic family, who had run away from home at the age of seventeen and joined a group which sent young men and women into factories to preach socialism to the workers. That had been in the time of the Narodniki, a peaceful era of going to the people, which ended in 1873 and 1874 with a vast wave of arrests by the Tsarist police. Perovskaya was among those arrested, and she spent four years in prison, until she was finally acquitted in a mass trial which was meant to break the back of the radical movement, but which inspired it with renewed moral strength instead.

The growing police persecution finally caused the revolutionaries to retaliate with a policy of violence. This new turn was signaled by the act of another young woman, Vera Zasulich, a typesetter for the underground newspaper Land and Liberty, who, on January 24, 1878, shot General Trepov, the St. Petersburg chief of police, in protest against his severe maltreatment of a political prisoner. Although Trepov was gravely wounded, he did not die, and the trial of his would-be assassin in March was turned by her defense lawyer into a vigorous indictment of police brutality. To the surprise of everyone, Zasulich was acquitted. The Tsar immediately issued an order that she be arrested again, but an enthusiastic crowd which had formed around her in the street after her release spirited her away from the oncoming police. She left the country and settled in Geneva, amidst worldwide acclaim for her heroism.

Her act soon became a source of inspiration for others. Only a few weeks after her acquittal, the Kiev chief of police was assassinated by a revolutionary, and in August General Mezentzev, another high officer of the St. Petersburg police, was stabbed to death in broad daylight by Sergey Kravchinsky, the editor of Land and Liberty, who managed to get away and escape into exile. Inevitably, the growing mood of violence began to be focused upon the person of Tsar Alexander II himself. That summer, a Jewish engineering student named Solomon Wittenberg was caught trying to lay a mine where the Tsar’s excursion yacht was due to land in Odessa harbor; he was quickly sentenced and executed. The following April, Alexander Solovyov, a revolutionary already wanted by the police, fired upon the Tsar in a public square in St. Petersburg. He missed, but he was dealt with summarily nonetheless and was executed in a few weeks’ time. The pace of executions and assassinations continued to grow, and by the summer of 1879 the government and the extremist wing of the revolutionary movement were in a state of violent warfare with one another.

The movement itself soon split over the issue of terrorism, and two new parties came into being. One of them, known as Chornyi Peredel (Black Repartition, i.e., repartition of the soil), continued the old policy of peaceful preachment of socialism among the masses; the other, called Narodnaya Volya (People’s Will), adopted a policy of terrorism. Ironically, Vera Zasulich repudiated terrorism from her exile in Geneva and gave her support to Chornyi Peredel. Sophia Perovskaya, on the other hand, joined Narodnaya Volya and became a member of its Executive Committee.

At a meeting held in August, 1879, the Executive Committee of Narodnaya Volya sentenced Alexander II to death. The members decided to blow up the Imperial train that November when it carried the Tsar back to Petersburg from his summer residence in the Crimea. To make sure they would not miss, they divided themselves into two forces. One was led by Andrey Zhelyabov, a powerfully built young man who had been born a serf and had studied law at the University of Odessa on a scholarship. One day at the beginning of October he made an appearance in the small town of Alexandrovsk, which was on the Imperial train route, and gave out that he was a merchant setting himself up in business there. With his wife and two assistants, he established a tannery by day and mined the railroad track at night. Meanwhile, farther along the Imperial route, in a suburb of Moscow, a similar dual enterprise was under way. A merchant named Sukhorukov and his wife had bought a house near the railroad tracks, and had engaged some laborers to dig an ice cellar in their kitchen floor. In reality, this couple were Leo Hartmann, a young revolutionary of German extraction, and Sophia Perovskaya; the ice cellar was the entrance to a tunnel being dug all the way to the tracks, where an explosive charge was to be laid. Throughout the two months that it took to dig the tunnel, some bottles of nitroglycerine were kept in the house; should the police ever come to arrest the conspirators, Perovskaya was to fire on the bottles, killing them all.

The Tsar’s train passed through Alexandrovsk on the morning of November 18, but when Zhelyabov tried to explode the mine that he and his associates had so carefully laid, it did not go off. The reason for this failure was never discovered. The task of carrying out the planned assassination now devolved upon Hartmann, Perovskaya, and their associates. At about nine o’clock on the evening of the nineteenth, Perovskaya, the group’s lookout, watched a train approach; this, according to information she and Hartmann possessed, was the Imperial retinue train, sent in advance of the Tsar’s own train to test the safety of the route. She let it go by. When the second train arrived nearly an hour and a half later, she gave a signal; there was a loud explosion. The cars were smashed and derailed, but the damage was not so severe as had been expected. No one aboard was seriously injured, but this made no difference anyway as it turned out, for the Tsar was not even there. He had taken the first train after all.

This failure only increased the determination of the Executive Committee to carry out its aim, and a rapid succession of attempts upon the life of the Tsar was staged during the course of the following year. In February an enormous charge of dynamite was set off under the dining room of the Winter Palace; it had been placed there by a young revolutionary who had obtained a job the preceding autumn as a palace carpenter. But though the casualties this time were quite severe—eleven persons were killed and over fifty wounded, most of them members of the palace guard—the result was essentially the same as before: the dining room was only slightly damaged, and besides, the Tsar had not yet even come in for dinner when the explosion occurred. Subsequent attempts to kill the Emperor by setting up charges in the street, along routes frequented by him, also came to nought.

By this time the lives of the conspirators were completely absorbed in their one overriding purpose, and though they managed to welcome the arrival of 1881 with a New Year’s Eve party that was notable for its merriment, they were in an apocalyptic mood, and seemed fully prepared to face the prospect that they might not survive the year. Zhelyabov and Perovskaya now were lovers, and were the acknowledged leaders of the movement. To their colleagues, they seemed to find no time for thoughts of personal happiness.

Even before the end of the year, the work was under way for the most ambitious assassination plot of all, the one that would not fail. At the beginning of December, a basement storefront had been purchased in St. Petersburg on Malaya Sadovaya Street, a thoroughfare frequently traveled by the Tsar in his stately processions to and from the Winter Palace. Here two conspirators disguised as a married couple established a cheese store, which served as a cover for a tunnel that was dug under the street. A charge was to be placed in this tunnel and set off at some moment to be determined. But the conspirators had decided not to rely on this plan alone; in addition, four men were selected and trained as bomb-throwers, who would be prepared to deal with the Tsar face to face if necessary. Furthermore, if the Tsar should somehow escape even them, Zhelyabov was prepared to attack him with dagger and pistol.

The conspiracy received a great blow on February 27, when Zhelyabov was discovered and arrested; but Perovskaya took over the command alone and proceeded with the plan to assassinate the Tsar on March 1, the day of a military parade. The tunnel under Malaya Sadovaya Street was mined and, on the appointed morning, the four bomb-throwers went to various locations along the Emperor’s route, each carrying his bomb wrapped in a newspaper or handkerchief. Perovskaya was stationed at the parade site. The Tsar arrived at the parade that afternoon by a route other than the one along Malaya Sadovaya Street, and when Perovskaya saw that he was going back to the palace the same way, she signaled to two of the bomb-throwers, stationed at the parade with her, to proceed to another predetermined site, along the Yekaterininsky Canal. They arrived there on foot ahead of the Imperial carriage, which had stopped en route to enable the Tsar to pay a brief visit to his cousin, the Grand Duchess Catherine. When the carriage finally appeared, one of the bomb-throwers—a nineteen-year-old student named Rysakov—ran up to it and threw his parcel among the horses’ legs. The bomb went off. One of the Tsar’s Cossack guards and a butcher’s delivery boy who had been passing by were mortally wounded by the explosion. The Imperial carriage was partly damaged, but the Emperor himself received only mild cuts and bruises, and was otherwise unharmed. Rysakov was caught and held by some bystanders. The Emperor was helped down from the carriage and, against the protests of his guardsmen, insisted upon surveying the scene. As he did so, a man in the gathering crowd made a sudden movement toward him, and there was a second explosion.

This time, when the smoke cleared, the Tsar lay mortally wounded in a pool of blood, his clothing in tatters. Next to him lay his assassin, Ignaty Grinevitsky, unconscious and also dying. Other wounded bystanders lay about. After a few moments some of the Tsar’s men gained control of themselves sufficiently to lift the semiconscious Alexander onto a sleigh and start back to the palace. The sleigh left a trail of blood in the street. A few hours later both the Tsar and his assassin were dead.

The police moved swiftly against the conspirators. By the next evening young Rysakov had broken down and begun to inform; the following night the police raided the apartment that had served as headquarters for the plot. The apartment had been rented by another fake married couple, a man named Sablin and a Jewish girl named Hessia Helfman. When the police arrived Sablin fired several shots at them and then killed himself. Helfman was taken prisoner. The next morning Timofey Mikhailov, one of the two remaining bomb-throwers, was found and arrested. The cheese store on Malaya Sadovaya Street was raided but found unoccupied. Sophia Perovskaya remained at large several days more, concerned all the while with schemes for helping Zhelyabov to escape; for this reason she imprudently remained in Petersburg. On March 10 she was spotted on the Nevsky Prospekt and was arrested. Rysakov, deluded by promises of clemency, identified her and described the role she had played in the conspiracy. A few days later, Nikolay Kibal-chich, who had constructed the bombs and served as the scientific technician of the conspiracy, was arrested and also identified by Rysakov.

On March 26 the trial began of the six conspirators who were in custody: Zhelyabov, the two bomb-throwers Mikhailov and Rysakov, Kibalchich, Hessia Helfman, and Sophia Perovskaya. Zhelyabov conducted his own defense; the others had legal counsel. Rysakov faced the death penalty despite the promises of clemency he had been given for his informing. All but Mikhailov and Helfman pleaded guilty of participation in the slaying of the Emperor. Three days after the trial began, all the defendants were found guilty and sentenced to be hanged. The following day Hessia Helfman informed the authorities that she was pregnant—she had been the mistress of Nikolay Kolotke-vich, another member of the Executive Committee, who had been arrested in February—and her sentence was thereupon postponed until after the birth of her child. Later her sentence was commuted, but she and her infant daughter both died in prison. The five others were hanged in a public square on April 3. Kibalchich and Zhelyabov were very calm, wrote a correspondent of the Könische Zeitung, Timofey Mikhailov was pale but firm, Rysakov was liver-colored. Sophia Perovskaya displayed extraordinary moral strength. Her cheeks even preserved their rosy color, while her face, always serious, without the slightest trace of parade, was full of true courage and endless abnegation. Her look was calm and peaceful; not the slightest sign of ostentation could be observed in it. Her last known utterance had been a letter written from prison consoling her mother.

Their minds and hearts filled with these scenes of martyrdom, the surviving members of Narodnaya Volya throughout the Empire now awaited the mass uprising of the peasantry that they believed would follow the assassination. But except for a few scattered and minor disturbances, nothing happened until the middle of April, when a wave of anti-Jewish pogroms broke out in southern Russia. In Elizabethgrad, Smela, and Kiev, and subsequently in scores of other communities, angry mobs ransacked Jewish homes and stores, injuring and killing many. It was a new chapter in the old history of constant and sometimes volatile hatred of the Jews by the Ukrainian peasantry. After a while, it began to dawn upon observers that there also might be some connection between these outbursts and the atmosphere of revolutionary crisis in the land. The revolutionaries were the first to formulate a theory linking the two phenomena: the pogroms, some of them said, were the first rumblings of a genuine revolution. The Jews of the Ukraine, they observed, had long functioned as middlemen between the Ukrainian peasantry and their oppressors—Jews, for example, had usually served as rent collectors for absentee landlords. The peasants, then, were taking the first step in a general revolt against their oppressors. A succession of issues of the underground journal of Narodnaya Volya carried discussions and proclamations on this question. Some members of the Executive Committee were even enthusiastic about the pogroms; others were more cautious in their attitude, but still were inclined to accept the theory of the pogroms as a prelude to revolution. Even many Jewish members of the organization accepted this view, although there were heavy hearts among them.

No peasant uprising followed, however. In time there came the realization that the pogroms, far from opening a path toward revolution, had really worked as a diversion of potentially revolutionary energies. None but the forces of reaction had profited from them. Indeed, it had become evident after a while that not only were the police doing little to put down the riots, but were at times actually making efforts to turn the rioters upon the Jews. Although it was not likely that the authorities had instigated the pogroms to begin with, they clearly had made use of them, recognizing anti-Jewish sentiments as a trait common to the government and the peasantry, and the pogroms as an exercise harmless to everyone but Jews.

The assassination produced other results as well: In the ensuing months, both Narodnaya Volya and the moderate Chornyi Peredel headed rapidly toward extinction, and the Russian revolutionary movement faltered for almost a decade. But the foremost outcome of the event was one that could never have been anticipated—a major turning point in the history of the Jews of Russia. For the pogroms of 1881 had a galvanizing effect upon them. Many Jewish intellectuals hitherto associated with the Russian radical movement now began seeking new formulations for their revolutionary outlook that would accommodate the fact, hitherto ignored by them as much as possible, that they were Jews. A Lovers of Zion movement—the precursor of political Zionism—came into being and sent its first group of young settlers to Palestine the year after the pogroms. Most of the Jewish revolutionaries, however, resisted Zionism as a Utopian and hence bourgeois ideal, preferring to seek some kind of distillation of socialism and Jewish identity on Russian soil. The formula for such a distillation was slower to evolve than the Zionist one was; but a socialist and diasporic Jewish nationalism did eventually emerge in Russia in the following decade.

But these stirrings were the responses of merely a small revolutionary elite; it was above all the Jewish masses who were affected by the pogroms of 1881, and their response was the most momentous of all. By the middle of the following year, it became evident that a mass Jewish exodus had begun, mainly from the areas in southern Russia where the pogroms had taken place, and mainly in the direction of America. Charitable organizations of middle-class western European Jews, most notably the formidable Alliance Israélite Universelle, fearing a large and embarrassing influx of impoverished Russian Jews into their own countries, quickly established a series of way stations throughout Austria and Germany that facilitated the migrants’ journeys to Hamburg and other North Sea ports, and provided them with steamship tickets to America. In 1882, more than 13,000 Jewish immigrants reached the ports of New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, as compared with less than 6,000 in the previous year. This was only the beginning; the number was to go on multiplying in the years to come.

A Russian crisis had thus proven itself to be a matter of Jewish destiny. This was an ironic outcome, for though the great majority of Russian Jewry had been physically a part of the Empire since the Polish partitions at the end of the eighteenth century, they scarcely felt any cultural or spiritual identification with it. By 1881, only a small intelligentsia had achieved any such identification; but the masses had by then, if anything, come to feel more alienated from their surroundings than ever, reinforced in their sense of Jewish separateness by a special history of persecution that the Tsars had imposed upon them. There is a national element in all of Jewish history, but this is generally rather abstract; the Jews of Russia, on the other hand, living in a contiguous territory called the Pale of Settlement that Tsarist law had imposed, and speaking a common Judeo-German, or Yiddish, language, were suddenly discovering their own concrete national identity in the midst of a crisis that began the breaking up of their community.

By origin, the civilization of the Jews of Russia was a disengaged fragment of Central Europe. Spurred on by the pogroms that accompanied the Crusades and later by the mania that fixed upon them the blame for the Black Plague of 1348, groups of Jews from the Rhineland and other parts of Germany had migrated eastward and obtained asylum under the Polish kings, who were eager to have a talented mercantile class established within their domains. The Jewish settlers were grateful for this reception, but not so much so that they were willing to renounce their Germanic culture for the less developed one of their new Slavic environment. In general, an eastward movement of German settlers into the underdeveloped Slavic regions was going on at this time, and the Rhineland Jews who had migrated to Poland undoubtedly saw themselves as a part of it in spite of everything. Even in their new home, they continued to identify themselves as Ashkenazim (Germans, in Medieval Hebrew), and to speak the same Judeo-German dialect—which is to say, a pure Medieval German dialect with Hebrew accretions—as that spoken by their cousins to the west.

Indeed, it is most likely that the Ashkenazic Jews of Germany and of Poland (both of these are only vague geographical designations when one is speaking of the Middle Ages) went on thinking of themselves as a single community, and ceased to do so only with the outbreak of the German religious wars of the sixteenth century. This was a moment of tremendous upheaval in Central and Eastern Europe, and for its Jews in particular. More than a century of turmoil which benighted Germany until 1648 left the region in such spiritual disarray that it did not recover and reenter the mainstream of Western culture for another hundred years. This was also the case with its Jews. During that same period of turmoil until 1648, the Polish branch of Ashkenazic Jewry rose to become the spiritual center of world Judaism. But its very brilliance at this time eventually became a source of cultural retardation; for while Jewish life in Germany had been so shaken up that a path into modern Western culture was opened, Polish Jewry had come under the grip of a rabbinical establishment which outside cultural influences would not easily penetrate.

This barrier to Western cultural influence that surrounded Polish Jewry was further shored up by a disaster which struck in 1648, the year in which Germany and its Jews reached the end of their travail. A Cossack revolt broke out in the Ukraine—which was then still ruled by the Poles—under the leadership of the Hetmán Bogdan Chmelnitzky. This uprising eventually transformed the political structure and subsequent history of Eastern Europe, by removing the Ukraine from Polish hands and bringing it into the Russian Empire. It also brought devastation to the Jews of the region, for Chmelnitzky’s Cossacks, like their peasant successors in the Ukraine in 1881, vented their wrath at absentee Polish landlords upon the Jews who collected the rent—and upon all other Jewish men, women, and children in their path. The scenes of rape, torture, and slaughter that took place remained a horrifying memory to East European Jews for generations to come. In an instant, the greater part of Polish Jewry was reduced to poverty and spiritual darkness.

The divergence that had now taken place in the cultural paths of the two main branches of Ashkenazic Jewry became dramatically evident during the course of the eighteenth century. In Germany, the humanism and passion for German culture represented by the Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn helped illumine the way for reconciliation between Jewish traditions and the civilization of Enlightenment Europe. Mendelssohn conceived Judaism to be as rational a faith as a philosopher of his day could desire. Gratefully accepting this view, an emerging German-Jewish bourgeoisie stepped forth from its ghettoes and embraced, once again, the old dream of a Judeo-German culture; revived in Hochdeutsch after an eclipse of several centuries, that dream would now seem brighter than ever.

The Jews of Eastern Europe, on the other hand, were at this very moment moving further away from that dream, into a deepening preoccupation with purely religious concerns. Almost immediately after the Chmelnitzky pogroms, the moral vacuum left by that disaster had been filled by an onrush of Jewish chiliasm from the Middle East. In the sixteen-sixties, the appearance of the false messiah Sabbatai Zevi of Izmir had a shaking impact upon Jewish communities throughout the world, but nowhere so much as in Eastern Europe. It was in the ensuing atmosphere of spiritual anxiety that the Hasidic movement was founded in the eighteenth century by a Galician Jew of extraordinary charismatic powers named Israel ben Eliezer, known to his followers as the Baal Shem Tov (Master of the Good Name—that is, of the sacred name of the Lord). Although there was considerable resistance to this movement within the rabbinical establishment, there was scarcely a corner of East European Jewry that did not feel the influence of its mystical and lyrical religiosity, which blessed the condition of the abject and the poor. Hasidism was ultimately to inspire numerous revolutionary currents among East European Jews, including the thrust toward socialism on the part of many of them, but one of its first effects after an initial wave of spiritual inspiration had passed was a reinforcement, albeit in fresher terms, of the prevailing atmosphere of religious obscurantism.

Hasidism was the contemporary of the Mendelssohnian Enlightenment in Germany, and was also the final gesture of Polish Jewry as a single historical entity. In 1772 the partitioning of Poland was begun, and by the end of the century, while a large portion of Polish-Galician Jewry found itself under Austrian domination, most of the Jews of Eastern Europe were now subjects of the Russian Empire. This completed the three-centuries-old history of divergence between East European and German Jewry. At the same time, the first glimmers of an effort at a reconciliation between the cultures of the two communities made their appearance. For by the end of the eighteenth century, in the next wave after the first onrush of Hasidism, the mood of the German-Jewish Enlightenment had started to gain entry into Eastern Europe. One strain of Enlightenment arose in Galicia, the old heartland of the Hasidic movement and now, under Austrian rule, a conduit of High German culture into Eastern Europe. Another strain appeared in Lithuania, traditionally an outpost of rabbinical rationalism against the more pietistic spiritual currents from the south, and readily susceptible to the winds of Enlightenment from nearby Kocnigs berg—Kant’s home—and other northern cities. Among the Jews of Russia, this latter strain was the more important one, since Lithuania was also now part of the Empire. These two areas became the centers, then, of a new movement, an East European Jewish version of the German-Jewish Enlightenment, to which its adherents gave the Hebrew name Haskalah.

The broader aims of the Haskalah were the same as those of the movement which had inspired it: to reconcile Jewish traditions to Western culture and educate the Jewish masses in that culture. But there was one major difference. Whereas Moses Mendelssohn considered the German language to be the proper vehicle—indeed, virtually the chosen vehicle—for such a reconciliation, the maskilim (men of the Haskalah) accorded this status to Hebrew. In both cases, the decisive factor involved was a somewhat contemptuous attitude toward the Judeo-German dialect, which no one yet considered to be a language. The Enlightenment culture of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Europe was essentially Brahmin in outlook, and dominated by the notion of a single standard of high culture to which all men should aspire. There was in this none of the fondness for folk utterance that was later to characterize the Romantic movement. Moses Mendelssohn could see in the Judeo-German dialect of his coreligionists nothing but the wretched gropings of an oppressed and ill-educated people toward the language of Lessing and Goethe; he would guide them along the path to full articulateness. As for Mendelssohn’s East European counterparts, the maskilim, they were witnesses to an even more alienated condition. The dialect spoken by the Jews around them had almost nothing whatsoever to do with the languages of the other peoples amidst whom they lived. Many of the more European-minded among the Jews of Russia and Galicia were already reaching the conclusion Mendelssohn had reached, that what their tongues naturally yearned to articulate was good Hochdeutsch, and they were at first more likely to have their children learn this than either Russian or Polish, for these two languages had not yet, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, quite proclaimed their legitimacy to the civilized world. But the maskilim were, for all their secularist tendencies, enough the products of Polish rabbinical traditions and Hasidic influence to look upon the Jews of Eastern Europe less as exiles from Germany than as exiles from the Land of Israel, and to note that the Hebrew component of the dialect they spoke was perhaps as important as the German. As the Haskalah saw it then, Hebrew was what the Judeo-German dialect—written, after all, in Hebrew letters—was really aspiring to become. The East European Jewish version of the Mendelssohnian Enlightenment thus also became, quite uniquely, a Hebrew literary renaissance.

Of course, there was an innate contradiction in the effort to write for a people in a language other than the one they spoke. Haskalah won adherents from one generation to the next, but these remained a small elite whose ability to read the Hebrew writings of the maskilim—something that only the most highly educated could do—was, ironically, the outcome of their training in the rabbinical academies against which they were rebelling. The typical maskil was merely a genteel protester against an elite background that continued to shape his life and to shield him from overexposure to the world around him. Reluctant to speak the crude tongue of his own masses—he usually preferred to converse in German—he must indeed have often wished that his home environment were that Mendelssohnian Central Europe in which the universe of Germanism provided a continuum of cultural advancement from the meanest ghetto dialect to the phrases and thoughts of a Goethe. This state of cultural alienation from the folk whom they wished to uplift remained an insoluble problem for the Hebraists until the late nineteenth century, when the energies of Zionism—not thought of by the early maskilim—helped to create a Hebrew-speaking Jewish people in Palestine. But even then, the Hebrew-speaking folk had come out of the linguistic revival and not the other way around; for the Hebrew revival—which was, in a sense, one of many such national cultural awakenings going on in Central and Eastern Europe at the time—was the only one among its contemporaries which never had a village to which to go and discover its own ancient and spontaneous rhythms.

Meanwhile, the fact remained that there was a folk language being spoken by the Jews of Eastern Europe; its only failing seemed to be its incapacity, until the latter half of the nineteenth century, to persuade many members of the educated classes that it deserved any attention at all. It did not even have a name of its own—the term Yiddish (which is, after all, simply the word in that language for Jewish) did not come into wide use until the eighteen-nineties—and it was quite frequently called, simply and contemptuously, zhargon. Seduced by Germanism in spite of themselves, the maskilim thought of this dialect only as a debased German, and those among them who first began writing in it so as to reach a larger audience often loaded their prose with Hochdeutsch. This was done in part, perhaps, out of nostalgia for a higher medium of expression, but it was mainly for the purpose of trying to wean the Russian-Jewish masses to good German. The foremost exponent of this technique was also the man who was the first to write prose more or less regularly in zhargon (continuing also to write in Hebrew all the while), Isaac Meir Dick of Vilna. A teacher and a maskil, Dick discovered in the eighteen-thirties the uses of the Russian-Jewish dialect for a kind of moral fable (even when writing fiction, the maskilim were relentlessly didactic) built around scenes from the common folk life. These tales became immensely popular, and Dick undoubtedly grew aware of the literary legitimacy of the language he used in them. Zhargon had, after all, become something quite different even from the Medieval Judeo-German in which it had originated; full of Slavic accretions and of a flavor all its own, it could not but awaken responses in a sensitive literary ear. But Dick was not able to rid himself entirely of the loftiness of Haskalah attitudes, and his language remained full of inappro priate Germanisms, giving off the air of Tevya the Dairyman trapped uncomfortably in a starched collar.

Despite the touch of condescension in Dick’s efforts, there even existed a literary tradition for Judeo-German, but it had lapsed long before he began writing. The didactic uses of the language had been discovered with brilliant results around 1600 by a Polish rabbi named Jacob ben Isaac Ashkenazi, who published at that time a long, explanatory paraphrase of the Pentateuch in Judeo-German. The reason for such a literary work was indicated by its title, Tzeyna u’Reyna, which simply means Go Forth and See in Hebrew, but which is grammatically in—Hebraic exoticism!—the feminine plural imperative. This book, in other words, was written expressly for ladies, who received no education in Hebrew but were nonetheless entitled, as Rabbi Jacob ben Isaac well understood, to some acquaintance with the sacred literature. Yet it is clear that the author did not proceed on the strength of condescension alone, for the book he wrote is fresh and vivid, and though its diction is somewhat more German than was the dialect that had evolved among Russian Jews by the early part of the nineteenth century, it was still capable at that time of serving as a model for good writing. Its homely literary virtues had in fact enabled it to survive those two hundred years as a major classic, for no pious Jewish woman to that day would be without her Teitsh-Khumesh, as it was popularly called (Teitsh, showing clearly its kinship with Deutsch, remained a widely used term for the Judeo-German dialect; Khumesh is the Yiddish—and Hebrew-word for Pentateuch). And though they would scarcely have admitted it, many men not blessed with a good Hebrew education read the book as well.

This, then, was the traditional status of written Judeo-German: a mere women’s language that men also read, but on the sly. This deprecation of the language was a reflection of the general attitude of the traditional East European Jewish culture toward women and the less educated. In the two centuries following the work of Rabbi Jacob ben Isaac, only Hasidism had made an organized attempt to challenge this state of mind—although it must be said that Hasidism treated women better in fancy than in fact. Otherwise, nothing broke that centuries-long rule of lofty and austere cultural masculinity, the equivalent of which in Western Christian Europe had been dislodged by the Renaissance. Yet the relics of the history of Judeo-German culture show signs that it, too, but for the special circumstances of its history, might have yielded to the general Renaissance trend of vernacular languages toward serving as vehicles for a lighter literature—ostensibly directed at ladies, but increasingly capable of capturing even scholars with its charms—than any for which the ancient tongues were reserved.

This is suggested by the career of the earliest known Judeo-German writer, Elijah Bochur—known in Christian Europe as Elia Levita—whose approach to the relative uses of his own classical and vernacular linguistic heritage was quite similar to that of many of the humanists of that Renaissance Italy in which he spent most of his adult life (he was born in Bavaria in 1469, and he died in Venice in 1549). Like Petrarch writing austere works in Latin and then turning to Italian in his lyrical moods, Elijah Bochur produced several large and important works of Hebrew grammar and also wrote poems in Judeo-German. Among these latter works, there has come down to us a tale of chivalry written in terza rima about a knight named Bova, and hence known as the Bova-Book. It was based on an Italian romance published in 1497 called Buovo d’Antona, which was itself an adaptation of the fourteenth-century English tale Bevys of Hamptoun. In his preface the author makes it quite clear that the work is aimed at women. This was implicitly recognized by subsequent East European Jewish tradition, for the term Bova-Mayse (Bova story), which came to be used for any similarly fantastic tale, eventually mingled with the word for grandmother—bobba—to become bobba-mayse, a somewhat condescending term meaning old wives’ tale.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, the climate for writing again in zhargon had greatly improved even over the time when Isaac Meir Dick had first begun to write in it. Liberalism, and the ardent concern over women’s rights that came with it into educated Russian circles, helped improve the attitude toward Judeo-German, as did Romanticism, with its passion for the folk tongues of Europe. But the old opprobrium attaching to the language was nevertheless not easily overcome. The first true master of Yiddish prose—indeed, the term "Yiddish prose can first be properly used only for his works—Sholom Abramovich, who wrote under the pen name of Men-dele Moicher S’forim (Mendele the Book-Seller"), never fully overcame an attitude of profound ambivalence toward the language in which he made his fame