The Russian-Jewish Enlightenment and Today
Earlier this year I wrote about a number of important early figures in the history of Jewish nationalism and Zionism. I checked in with Brian Horowitz, a professor of Jewish History at Tulane who is one of the experts on Russian Jewish history to see if I was on solid ground. He gave me a passing mark and recommended that I read a book that he published a while back, “Jewish Philanthropy and Enlightenment in Late-Tsarist Russia.” Writing books on philanthropy is a safe strategy to keep yourself off of the best seller list. Prof. Horowitz’s book is not so much about philanthropy broadly, but about the OPE (in English: Society for the Promotion of Enlightenment among the Jews of Russia), which concentrated the efforts of the leading Jews of St. Petersburg to improve the lives of the Jews of the Russian empire.
Learning about the role of the OPE in the life of Russian (and Polish) Jewry fills in the role of the culture workers whose role was to execute on ideas rather than originating those ideas. Ahad Ha’am and Hayim Nahman Bialik make a few appearances. Both were members of the Odessa branch. Shimon Dubnov has a more significant impact on the group. He built on the historiographic work of Abraham Harkavy. Harkavy was one of the originators of the OPE in 1863. He called for the collection of documents and records of Russian Jewish life, the project that Dubnov continued until the last moments of his life. Dubnov also became important in the period in which the rise of Jewish nationalisms became an issue within the OPE.
The trajectory of the organization’s work moved through the evolution of Jewish responses to enlightenment and the difficulty of bringing modernity to the traditional Jewish majority in the face of continuous governmental interference and obstruction. The OPE grew out of the philanthropic work of Baron Evsel Gintsburg. He was joined by other Shtadlanim who believed that the way to raise up the Jewish people was by Russifying them and teaching them “productive” trades.
The Shtadlan was an official position in Polish-Lithuanian life. The Shtadlan served as an intercessor between the Jewish community and the national government. In the 19th century, after the end of the history of the Shtadlan as a paid position, the term was applied to those Jews who had become wealthy through trade within the Russian empire. Baron Gintsberg and then his son Horace led the OPE until after the 1905 revolution. Throughout that period most of the governing board of the OPE were drawn from the Shtadlanim in St. Petersburg. Repressive tsarist law prevented most Jews from settling in outside of the pale of settlement (contained within present day Poland and the legitimate current borders of Ukraine. The Jews of St. Petersburg were, by the nature of Tsarist social control, Russified Jews whose own assimilation, both linguistic and social, caused them to see assimilation as the path towards a better life for Russia’s Jews.
I won’t go over all of the details of the vast disappointment for the Jewish people that was Tsarist Russia from 1871 onwards to its violent end in 1917. As the repressive character of the regime stepped up, the response of the Jewish population turned against assimilation, though, at the same time, the traditional character of Russian Jewish society was cracking and letting in elements of modernity. Education is a primary Jewish value. Initially the OPE was interested primarily in scholarly work; in time it was recognized that youth education and teacher training were the central issues that the OPE needed to focus on. However, the St. Petersburg leadership, being far from the centers of traditional Jewish life, couldn’t bring themselves to accept the validity of parental concerns in the pale of settlement. This misalignment led to hostility and suspicion of the OPE and hampered local support and local fundraising for OPE schools.
Some parents opposed any sort of governmental schools because of the secular subjects that they taught and the use of Russian language. They preferred to send their children to the Heders, the small study rooms, usually in their teachers residence, that taught Hebrew grammar, Torah and Talmud study. Others valued the Jewish tradition, but also wanted to try to provide their children with greater economic possibilities. These parents might send their children to Heder and to government schools both. Others just sent their children to the government schools. The OPE tried to support schools that would include both Jewish studies and the type of classes found in the government schools together.
As Tsarist repression towards the Jews ratcheted up it became harder for Jewish students to get into the government schools. Paradoxically, this helped make OPE efforts seem more palatable and helpful.
As things seemed to turn towards the OPE’s way of thinking in the 1890s, the Zionist movement and the Bund began to gain power and influence in the educational world. While the OPE had favored the Russian language, the Zionists favored Hebrew and the Bund favored Yiddish. Dubnov, in this period, favored the use of both Hebrew and Yiddish. The OPE’s greatest success was in their struggles to respond to the massive Jewish refugee flows during the First World War and the continuity of Jewish education that they were able to provide in that enormously chaotic period. The OPE faded and died away in the Soviet Period. They were briefly able to create a Jewish University program, but all of their efforts were ended in 1928 when the Soviet Union banned all non-governmental cultural organizations. While during the war the OPE supported education in Hebrew, Yiddish, Russian and, even in some cases, Polish, the Soviet Yeksektsia (later liquidated) repudiated Hebrew entirely in favor of Yiddish. After the Yevsektsia was closed down, Russian was the only choice for Jews and everyone else.
There are a number of trends in American Jewish life that feel related to this era in Russian Jewish life. However, the starting point that we find ourselves in now is so different from every part of Russian Jewish History during the years of the existence of the OPE that I am not sure what to make of them.
The first is the intransigent resistance within parts of the Haredi world towards the inclusion of even the slightest amount of effective instruction in math, science and English language. This is reminiscent of the defense of the Heder.
The second is the interest in the revival of the Bund in an American context. Throughout the 19th century there was growing criticism of the religious leadership of the Jewish community, both from the cultural angle of the Haskalah and from a political point of view: that its leadership was undemocratic. For young Jews the successful granting of civil rights to other Jewish communities outside of Russia led them to associate with the non-sectarian socialist/ communist movement in Russia. The Bund was created as a socialist party to represent Jewish workers. It was anti-religious and emphasized culture instead. It was Yiddishist as an aspect of its opposition to Zionism, but also because Yiddish was the language that the workers would be most likely to understand. It saw Zionism as escapist. Of all of the Jewish camps in Russia it was the most forward in its gender politics and had the largest share of women members. It was active in the armed Jewish resistance to anti-Jewish violence, and it carried weight in the larger political environment.
The resurgent version of the Bund in the US appears to be an effort to create a home for those who are seeking an environment that is culturally Jewish, vigorously anti-Zionist, leftist and Yiddishist. While I am glad to see support for Yiddish speaking for any reason, it seems to me that an American version of the Bund should prefer English over Yiddish as an organizing language. Anti-Zionism may bring many to the Bundist camp, but this expression focuses too much on Israel and sucks a lot of the air out of the room when it comes to building Jewish culture here in the US. Although the Russian Bund was in open conflict with the middle and upper classes in Russia it felt a strong need to physically defend vulnerable Jews. The American Bund hasn't made a strong effort to involve itself in the class struggle. Classic Marxist approaches to class struggle are certainly worth rethinking, but it is hard not to wonder where the Bund is on this issue. It will be interesting to see if this revival of an essentially dead organization can successfully grapple with the heritage that it has taken on and articulate a program that can be more broadly useful within the American political environment.
The third area of interest goes back to Shtadlanim. While within the Russian context the OPE began as an elitist organization that was dominated by the wealthiest Jews, over time it broadened out the range of leadership to include scholars and intellectuals and drew its funding from a broader base. The American philanthropic world seems to be moving in the opposite direction. The number of Jews who support the various federations around the country has been in steady decline for some time, to the point that the federations have begun to retreat from their role as the central location that determined the agenda for American Jewish philanthropy. The Jewish Community Federation and Endowment Fund in San Francisco now only manages charitable endowments and does not engage in direct funding. The Shtadlanim have completely taken over.
The effects of this change are dramatic. Throughout most of the preceding century the number of donors to Jewish causes represented the majority of those who identified as Jews. Their support could comprise as little as the coins in a JNF Blue Box, but still, charitable giving was a general expectation of the community that was fulfilled. Economic inequality and the high cost of Jewish day schools, synagogue membership, JCC membership, and Kosher food overwhelms the financial resources of most Jews long before the ring of the phone from any federation Super Sunday pledge drive comes. The number of Jews living from pay check to pay check is far higher than it used to be and it is likely to increase. The risk that this presents is that those in the Jewish community with wealth, but particularly those with spectacular wealth, will come to dominate the Jewish philanthropic world in a way that works poorly or in opposition to the actual needs of the American Jewish community. Sheldon Adelson’s role in American Jewish life is an abject lesson.
The question that we have been asking ourselves at Der Nister, from the beginning, has been, “where are we finding our community?” What are their needs and their resources? How can we enrich their lives through Jewish traditions and innovative Jewish experiences to take them beyond a life reduced to the pursuit of their perceived and real needs? The story of the OPE and the larger story of the Russian Jewish experience in the late 19th and early 20th centuries provides an example of how challenging we can expect this to be in the face of rough cross-currents and submerged hazards.