Jews Under the Hammer and Sickle

The author, Dr. David Goldberg, is a well known writer and lecturer who has just returned from his third visit to Russia in recent years.

The fear that Russian Jewry, even if it should physically survive the attritions of the dictatorship of the proletariat, will drift away from the main stream of Jewish identification, is actually shared today shared today by many Jews, and is articulated somewhat as follows:

“Picture a peasant in ‘svitka’ husbanding the soil, or a worker in overalls manipulating his tools. No phylactery ever touched his forehead and no prayer ever passed his lips. He reveres no literature as sacred and respects none of the national holidays of his people. Supposing that such a man does retain distinctiveness of type; but what will identify him as Jew? Aren’t the Karaites a living illustration and a warning of what may be in store for a body of Jews who cut themselves away from the main stream of Jewish history?”

The reply is that the fate of the Karaites is no criterion for the Russian Jew, because their cases are totally different. The Karaites, who were only a handful of people, relatively speaking, introduced doctrinal schism into Jewish life and deliberately withdrew from the main body, thereby a priori sealing their doom. They couldn’t survive, for if they intermarried with the main body from which they severed themselves, they died of assimilation, and if they did not intermarry, they died from inbreeding.

RUSSIAN JEWS SELF-SUSTAINING

Russian Jews, on the other hand, even if they had deliberately withdrawn from world Jewry, are three million strong, somewhat of a “main body” themselves, and are biologically self-sustaining. But they did not at all “withdraw” from world Jewry, nor did they separate from it on religious or doctrinal grounds. They were caught, instead, in a maelstrom of social-political change, the full effects of which upon the rest of humanity are still hidden in the bosom of time.

The fact should not be over-looked that the Jewries outside the Soviet Union are themselves without guarantee of immunity against the very social-economic changes upon which extinction of the Russian Jews is predicted. Three million Polish Jews are being proletarianized before our very eyes, and even more violently dislodged are the half million German Jews and the quarter million Austrian-Hungarian Jews. And there is the ominous hand-writing on the wall for the Jews of Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Rumania and other countries of the Balkan Peninsula as well.

The plight of these Jewries is even more serious than that of the Russian Jews, by reason of the fact that, though forced to proletarianize, they have no proletarian state in which they could integrate. If, then, we should pry into the mental and ideological process of these millions of Jews who are kicked down the hill into a veritable precipice, what are we expected to find there?

The likelihood is that the mental and ideological processes of the millions of Jews who are read out of existence in the Fascist countries will be more certain to run into the channels of their Russian prototypes than away from them. Those who take the short view of Jewish history imagine that sheer discarding of phylacteries and the dietary laws and similar observances and rituals is enough to drive a permanent wedge between Jews and Jews. Those, however, who take the long view of Jewish history could discern greater historical forces in operation which keep Jews together despite differences of observance and ritual.

PREDICTIONS WRONG

So, then, as did the prediction that the Russian Jews would precipitously abandon their Pale, break up in small units and dissolve, so did the prediction that they would hasten to shed their historical skin simply prove a wrong guess. Far from running away from themselves, Russian Jews have taken very definite steps to insure their historical identity.

Thus, for example, Jewish settlers on land moved in solid homogeneous groups to kolkhozi of their own, and even formed special autonomous districts (Rayoni). Moreover, they sought and obtained recognition for Yiddish as their national tongue, so that where Jews form the majority, Yiddish is the official language of the school and the court. Also, there is a Yiddish State Art Theatre and a Yiddish press; and earnest efforts are on foot to develop a proletarian Yiddish literature. Regardless of how one thinks of the intrinsic values behind the autonomous districts and the national tongue and the proletarian Jewish literature, it is impossible to undervalue their motive. Their motive is: the will of the group to survive as such.

But there are other tokens, besides Yiddish with its great literature and the several hundred years of Jewish culture it epitomizes, whereby we could judge that the Russian Jews aren’t so eager to break away from their past as it is imagined in some quarters. Jewish families in Russia aren’t torn asunder, and around the table there sit in peace the parents who were brought up by the synagogue and the children who were brought up in the communist cadres. Who knows the subtle art of passing the word better than the Jew? For thousands of years he lived by a Torah that was not even written down, but was transmitted from mouth to mouth. When parent and child belong to different worlds but dwell together in peace, it is a sign that their worlds aren’t so terribly different after all.

RECONSTRUCTION AFOOT

When the church hierarchy was liquidated “as an institution,” the synagogue went down in the melee. But the anger of the Revolution has since subsided, because it has accomplished its purpose, and people are now beginning to come out of their hiding places to pick among the debris of their demolished institutions for what could still be salvaged or reconstructed. The Soviets do not molest them in that task, because, in the first place, they do not on principle object to the church functioning insignificantly, that is, merely as a private, but not as a municipal or government institution; in the second place, the Soviets themselves have of late done a good bit of salvaging of values destroyed in the melee.

So more and more people are coming out of their hiding places, and in the autumn of 1933, during the Jewish high holidays, if one happened to pass, for example, by the Great Synagogue, in Moscow, he didn’t for the moment believe he was in Soviet Russia. Not alone the Synagogue proper, but the big court about it as well, was thronged with people, with militia standing at the doors and the gates to prevent blasphemers from entering with cigarette in the mouth or even with uncovered head. I have heard it reported that the Moscow scene was reproduced in Leningrad and in Kiev and in Kharkov, and most other capitals of the Soviet Union.

The great masses of Jews thronging the courts of the synagogue did not come there to pray, true enough. But in the analysis of the Russian-Jewish position it is even more significant that they should have been moved on the day of Yom Kippur by an instinct other than pious. I am one of those who are convinced that theological religion will never again raise its head in Soviet Russia, because it is incompatible with either Communist or Socialist training, hence, I am not looking forward for the old school ever to rise from its ashes again. But so long as there lives in the Jewish masses the instinct to give spontaneous recognition to their historical holidays, it matters little what form it will take. As a learned Communist of the old school, one who was himself reared on the Talmud and Hebrew, remarked to me:

“Why do they rave so much in America about our converting useless synagogue buildings into useful club houses? Don’t they know that one of the legitimate functions of a synagogue at one time was that of ‘Bet-Hakeneses,’ an Assembly House, or ‘Bet-Am,’ a People’s Forum? And don’t they know that the Synagogue was also a “Bet-Hamedrash,’ a House of Learning? Well, we have no use for prayer, but we emphasize instead the two other historical functions of the Synagogue.”

It is a great and vague term, this word Synagogue, and Jews in the past have been known to put into it the particular content which life spelled for them at a given period. No doubt, Russian Jewry may have to put its own content into that ancient term, if it should care to preserve it at all. But for the present this could only be a matter for conjecture. (To Be Continued)