Simon Dubnow

“ The fate of universal Jewry ought not to be bound up with one single center. We should take into account the historic fact of a multiplicity of centers of which those that have the largest numbers and can boast of the most genuine development of a national Jewish life are entitled to the hegemony of the Jewish people. In those lands in which civil emancipation has been achieved the fight must go on for national emancipation, the recognition of the Jews as a nation which is entitled to a comprehensive communal and cultural autonomy. ”

“ The Homel pogrom did not attain to the dimensions of the Kishinev massacre, nor was it as painful to the moral consciousness of the Jews. For in Homel the Jews did not allow themselves to be beaten and slaughtered like sheep, but put up a valiant defence. Had the troops not turned against the self-defence, the pogrom would not have taken place, and the cowardly rabble would have taken to flight before the gallant defenders of their national honor. ”

“ Observing this uninterrupted maltreatment of the Jews on the part of the Russian legislation and administration, which treated the Jews as if they were criminals, witnessing the expulsions inflicted upon the "illegally residing" Jews and the raids engineered against them, watching the constant mockery at the Jewish children who were driven from the doors of the educational institutions, and seeing the endless multitude of other humiliating disabilities, the unenlightened Russian populace necessarily gained the conviction that the extermination of Jewry was a noble and patriotic duty. ”

“ But the Russian Government was, properly speaking, not a Government. It was a caste of officials who had degraded the administration of the country to the systematic endeavor of saving their own personal careers and class interests, both of which were indissolubly bound up with unlimited autocracy. The Russian bureaucracy regarded the revolution as a personal threat, as a menace to its existence, and looked upon the Jewish participants in the revolution as their own individual enemies whose deeds were to be avenged upon the whole Jewish people. ”

“ No sooner had the Zionist Congress, at which the heated discussions concerning the salvation of Judaism were intermingled with sobs bemoaning the martyrs of Kishinev, concluded its sessions than a new catastrophe broke out in the dominions of the Tzar—the pogrom at Homel, in the Government of Moghilev. In this lively White-Russian town, in which the twenty thousand Jews formed fully one-half of the population, public Jewish life was marked by great vigor. ”

“ Neither the pogroms at the beginning of the eighties, nor the Moscow atrocities at the beginning of the nineties can compare, in their soul-stirring effect upon Russian Jewry, with the massacre of Kishinev. It awakened the burning feeling of martyrdom, but with it also the feeling of heroism. All were seized by one and the same impulse—the organization [Pg 80] of self-defence, as if to say: "Since the Government fails to defend our life and honor, then we ourselves are bound to defend it." ”

“ The Jewish national idea, secularized to a certain degree, is based on the assumption that all sections of the Jewish people, though divided in their political allegiance, form one spiritual or historico-cultural nation, which, like all national minority groups in countries with a mixed population, are in duty bound to fight in their several lands at one and the same time not only for their civil equality, but also for their national rights—the autonomy of the Jewish community, school, and language. ”

“ The Black Hundred had a right to feel that it was their day. They knew that the League of the Russian People formed, to use the phrase then frequently applied to it in the press, a "Second Government," which wielded greater power than the official quasi-constitutional Government of Stolypin. The dregs of the Russian populace gave full vent to their base instincts. In Odessa, hordes of League members made it a regular practice to assault the Jews upon the streets with rubber sticks, and, in case of resistance, to fire at them with pistols. ”

“ It was easily to be foreseen that the Russian revolutionary movement would make a strong appeal to the Russian Jewish youth. Had any other cultured nation been tormented and humiliated as cruelly and as systematically as were the Jews in Russia it would surely have given birth to an immense host of desperate terrorists. True, the Jews supplied the revolutionary army with a larger number of fighters than was warranted by their numerical proportion to the rest of the Russian population. ”

“ Wholesale expulsions of Jews from the cities situated outside the Pale of Settlement and from the villages within the Pale assumed the character of an epidemic. In the spring of 1910 the Government decided on sacrificing to the Moloch of Jew-hatred a whole hecatomb by expelling twelve hundred Jewish families from Kiev—a measure which aroused a cry of indignation beyond the confines of Russia. The acts of the Government were marked by a refinement of cruelty, for even little children, invalids, and aged people were pitilessly evicted. ”

“ The theory of Autonomism takes as its point of departure the historic fact that at all times, with the exception of a few brief and partial deflections, the Jewish Diaspora, taken as a whole, represented a national organism, in which the absence of political or territorial unity was made up by the stronger cohesion of its spiritual and cultural ties and the greater intensity of its social and autonomous life. ”

“ The Jewish historians of the nineteenth century in Western Europe, who were swayed by assimilationist ideas, viewed Jewish history primarily from the theological or spiritualistic point of view. The scholarly endeavors of Russian Jewry constitute an attempt to understand the social development of the Diaspora as a peculiar, internally-autonomous nation which, at all times, has sought to preserve not only its religious treasures, but also the genuine complexion of its diversified national life. ”

“ Disfranchised, battered by pogroms, victimized by tyrannous Tzardom, the Jews of Russia never thought of degrading themselves to the point of begging equal rights "in instalments." They demanded their rights in full, and demanded them not merely as "the Jewish population," but as the Jewish people, as an autonomous nation among other nations with a culture of its own. The doctrine of "National-Cultural Autonomism" [50] was crystallized in definite slogans. ”

“ Though the Government was compelled to relax for a while its oppression of the Jews, social Judæophobia, fanned by the chauvinism incident to war time, broke out with greater violence than ever. Irritated by the rapid failures of the Russian arms and by the unexpected military superiority of the Japanese, the reactionary press, headed by the Novoye Vremya, began to circulate preposterous rumors to the effect that the Jews were secretly helping the Japanese, their "kinsmen by race," in order to wreak their vengeance upon Russia for having perpetrated the Kishinev massacres. ”

“ In many places of the empire, the whimsicality of the local authorities in construing the law of residence was of a nature to suggest that they had no other end in view except that of making sport of the Jews. The administration of Siberia, for instance, invented the following regulation: a Jewish merchant or artisan who is registered in one of the Siberian cities shall have the right only to live in the particular city of his registration, and in no other. Since very many Jews resided outside the localities of their accidental registration, a transmigration of Siberian Jewry was the result. ”

“ This progress of inner Jewish life in Russia is truly remarkable. In spite of the catastrophes which have descended upon Russian Jewry during the first decade of the twentieth century, the productivity of the Jewish national spirit has gone on unchecked, and the national-Jewish culture has struck out in all directions. The assimilationist positions, which have been generally abandoned, are only held by a few loyal devotees of a past age. ”

“ The leaders of Russian Jewry knew full well that the wind which was blowing from the heights of the Russian throne was unfavorable to them, and their initial hopefulness gave way speedily to a feeling of depression. A memorandum drafted at that time by prominent Jews of St. Petersburg, with the intention of submitting it to one of the highest functionaries at the Russian court, mirrors this pessimistic frame of mind:
The Russian Jews are deprived of that powerful lever for intellectual and moral advancement which is designated as the hope for a better future. ”

“ Large as is the number of religious apostates who have deserted Judaism under the effect of external pressure, and of moral renegades who have abandoned the national ethical ideals of Judaism in favor of a new-fangled decadent æstheticism, it is negligible when compared with the compact mass of Russian Jewry and with the army of intellectuals whose national self-consciousness has been deepened by suffering. As in all previous critical moments in the history of the Jews, the spirit of the nation, defying its new tormentors, has grown stronger in the worn-out body. ”

“ Born of the reaction against anti-Semitism, and endeavoring to soothe the pain of the wounded Jewish heart, it was marked by all the merits and demerits of a theory which was substantially Messianic in character and was entirely dependent on subjective forces, on faith and will-power. "If you only will it, then it is no fairy tale" [19] —in these words the ultimate goal of political Zionism is indicated by its founder, who firmly believed that an extraordinary exertion of the national will would transform the fairy tale of a "Jewish state" into reality. ”

“ A memorandum couched in more resolute terms was sent by twenty-six Jewish communities—Moscow, Odessa, and others—and by the radical groups of the communities which had signed the first petition.
We declare—the memorandum states—that we look upon the attempt to satisfy and appease the Jewish population by any partial measures of improvement as doomed to failure. We expect equal rights, as human beings in whom the feeling of human dignity is alive, as conscious citizens in a modern body politic. ”

“ Over the bleeding body of the Jewish people Polish and Russian anti-Semitism joined hands. Horrors upon horrors were perpetrated before which the ancient annals of Jewish martyrdom fade into insignificance.
Nearly twenty centuries have passed since the ancient Judæo-Hellenic Diaspora sent forth a handful of men who established a Jewish colony upon the northern Scythian, now Russian, shores of the Black Sea. More than a thousand years ago the Jews of Byzantium from one direction, and those of the Arabian Caliphate from another, went forth to colonize the land of the Scythians. ”

“ This transitional state of affairs lasted throughout the eighties and during the first half of the nineties. But by and by, out of the chaos of these nebulous social tendencies, there emerged more and more clearly the outlines of definite politico-national doctrines and organizations, and new paths were blazed which, leading in different directions, converged toward one goal—that of the regeneration of the Jewish people from within, both in its national and social life. ”

“ When, in 1898, the Council of the Jewish Colonization Association in Paris sent a delegation to St. Petersburg to apply to the Government for permission to settle Russian Jews as agricultural farmers in Russia itself, Pobyedonostzev replied: "Nos cadres ne sont pas prêts pour vous recevoir," [5] and he went out of his way to explain to the delegates that the Jews were a very clever people, intellectually and culturally superior to the Russians, and, therefore, dangerous to them: "The Jews are displacing us, and this does not suit us." ”

“ But on the whole, the revolutionary activity of the Jews was limited to the frequent political demonstrations arranged by the "Bund," and to the organizing endeavors of a certain section of the Jewish intellectuals who had joined the ranks of both Russian Socialistic parties.
Had the Russian Government been guided by a genuine interest in the body politic, the spread of the revolutionary movement among the Jews, which was the child of its own system of oppression, would have inevitably induced it to mitigate a system which was bound to turn millions of people into desperadoes. ”

“ In this hotbed of dismal Polish clericalism, the goal of thousands of Catholic pilgrims, who arrive there to worship the Holy Virgin on the "Bright Mountain," a street brawl between a Jewish tradesman and a Polish woman grew, owing to the instigations of Catholic priests, into a monstrous assault upon Jewish houses and stores by a crowd of fifteen thousand Poles. Here, too, the customary shouts were heard: "Beat the Jews! Nothing will happen to us." But the Chenstokhov rioters made a grievous error in their calculation. ”

“ The youth who, in a fit of righteous indignation, had given vent to the outraged feelings of his martyred nation, was put in chains and sent into the midst of murderers and thieves, while the venal instigator, whose hands were stained with the blood of numerous victims, escaped unscathed, and assisted by public funds, continued his criminal activity of fanning the hatred of the populace against the Jews. ”

“ Russian Jews who, in the course of the last few decades, had been chiefly instrumental in the economic advancement of those two centers. The cloak beneath which this agitation was carried on was purely that of Polish nationalism: the Russian Jews were alleged, on the one hand, "to Russify Poland," and, accused, on the other hand, of an opposite tendency, of asserting themselves as the members of a separate Jewish nationality, with a press and a social organization of their own, which refuses to be merged in the Polish people. ”

“ Thousands of Jewish families were thus deprived of an opportunity to rest in God's free nature during the summer months, and to breathe the fresh air of the fields and forests, for no other reason than that they were Jews—a new variety of territorially affixed city serfs. ”

“ The elections resulted in a Duma with an anomalous complexion. The two extreme wings, the Socialists and Black Hundred, had gained in strength, whereas the Constitutional Democratic center had been weakened. The Jews had managed to elect only three deputies, apart from one Jewish Social-Democrat who ran on the ticket of his party. They were men of little renown, whereas of the deputies of the first Duma who were prosecuted for signing the Vyborg Manifesto not one was elected.
The entire energy of the new Parliament spent itself in the struggle between its left and right wing. ”

“ Let us endeavor, as far as it is in our power, to forget also the recent expulsion from Port Arthur, [42] the pogroms of Kishinev and Homel, and many, many other things.... Let the Jewish parents not think of the bitter fate of their children who had been thrown overboard [by being barred from the educational establishments] . The Jews will go forth into battle as plain soldiers, without any hope of attaining an officer's rank, or shoulder-straps, or distinctions—the blood of our sons will flow as freely as that of the Russians. ”

“ For many centuries the entire culture of Judaism assumed a religious coloring and its communal autonomy was centered in the synagogue—which circumstance gave the modern champions of assimilation reason for thinking that the Jews were only a religious group scattered among various nations. It was a fatal error on the part of the Parisian Synhedrion convoked by Napoleon when, in its declaration of 1807, it proclaimed that "Jewry to-day does not constitute a nation," an error which during the nineteenth century became an article of faith with the Jews of Western Europe. ”