Season 2: Episode 19 - The Ultimate Ism

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The statesman's task, says Otto von Bismarck, is to hear God's footsteps marching through history and try to catch on to his coattails as he marches past. Well, I'm listening close, and it may just be the pitter-patter of little feet, but I'm Rav Mike Feuer, and this is The Jewish Story. Episode 19, The Ultimate Ism Well, the nation-state is coming, the nation-state is coming, and when it finally sweeps the world in the wake of World War I, it will have been a long time on the way. And we've actually seen over the course of the last, I don't know, thousand years, all kinds of states float across the state of Europe. Spain made perhaps the most significant early moves toward what we'd call statehood when Ferdinand and Isabella launched their campaign to consolidate power into central authority and to standardize the law of the land.

not to mention creating a unified system of taxation and tariff that allowed for a fiscal administration severed from their royal household budget and in case you think that's just abstract information don't forget the Jews were deep in the mix of that whole process from their engagement all the way through to their expulsion they were really expelled as the last act in state formation And it's worth noting that this first proto-state developed all the tools of oppression which the totalitarian state will put to such awful use in the 20th, early in 21st centuries. climate of fear, culture of informants, imprisonment without trial or even accusation, exclusion from offices of power and influence, the use of torture to extract confessions whose publication serves as a justification for the excesses of the Inquisition, all in the name of defending society against the unseen enemy.

Sounds like North Korea, right? The Portuguese, the Dutch, and the British all underwent their own parallel processes of consolidation through the Middle Ages and early modernity, each in their own fashion. But, significantly, all under the influence of overseas empires. That's a critical driver for world history, and we're going to have to talk about it going forward. Because by the late 19th century, these empires will become colonialism in its fullest sense. And that's an ism that shapes our political reality down to this very day. But we're not there yet. At this point, what these overseas empires actually add is the idea and practice of liberty. We have a tendency to speak of European Romantic nationalism, and with good reason.

But in all fairness, the model of nationalism as a liberation movement really began amongst the colonies of North and South America. I mean, Simon Bolivar was fighting imperial tyranny well before the Revolution of 1848. and the United States declared the equality of men to be self-evident more than a decade before the French discovered the universal rights of man. But the Jewish story is still largely on the European continent right now. And so early modernity gave us the Spanish, the Dutch, the English, Portuguese, proto-states. Oh, and don't forget Germany. They're just waiting for the time to be right for consolidation. The German states have been a patchwork of duchies and principalities, imperial cities, since that 30-year war of slaughter ended in 1648.

And recall that by separating between religious identity and an identity based on country of residence, the Treaty of Westphalia that ended the Thirty Years' War finally institutionalized multipolar Christianity in the heart of Europe. And that was a critical step in forming a socio-political climate in which the nation-state could emerge, Not to mention the philosophical framework within which a civil state could even be imagined. And then we have France, which of course has an integrity as both a people and a country going back almost to Charlemagne. Now I know some French would like to claim him as their progenitor, but he consolidated the German tribes into the Holy Roman Empire. But they do get Louis XIV of France, the so-called Sun King, who, during his 72 years of reign, broke the back of the aristocracy, centralized power in the monarchy, and to the extent that it's to him, legend attributes the same, l'état c'est moi, the state, I am the state.

Now these are all very impressive, but none of them was a nation-state in the sense as we know it today. And that's the concept that we need to get clear. Because right now, the nation-state is all but the sole legitimate political embodiment of peoplehood that we are willing to accept. And it's unquestionably the standard of membership in the world political community. Hence, the United Nations is our global forum. So if we want to appreciate the evolution of the nation-state, and therefore the world in which we live, and of course for the Jewish story, ultimately Zionism and the state of Israel, we have to understand nationalism. And I'll give you its definition in three basic parts. Number one, nationalism believes humanity is divided into nations.

That these nations, number two, are defined by certain identifiable characteristics, territory, history, and most especially, language. And, last but certainly not least, the only legitimate type of government is national self-government. So now let's just flesh those out a bit. The notion that humanity is divided into nations may strike you as stunningly obvious, But it was not so for the bulk of people living in 19th century Europe. And the definitions of the nation within nationalist ideology, and its non-nationalist critics, basically break into two camps. The intrinsic and the conditional. Intrinsic are those who believe that nation is intrinsic to human life. That seems to be obvious, right? There's within that what they call the naturality theory.

Nationality is as natural to humanity as blood groups or hair colors, and furthermore, it's natural for those who share a nationality to wish to share the same political unit of organization. Birds of a feather fly together. And, furthermore, there's an ideological assertion that this identification between the nation and the nation-state, between the nationality and the political unit of their organization, is a good thing because it's natural, and going with the flow of nature is the key to human progress and happiness. Hence, you have the naturality theory of intrinsic nationalism. Now, you could probably hear what might happen when such a notion intersects with evolutionary theory that emerged in the 19th century.

I mean, think of a continuum of organization from a troop of monkeys to the French National Assembly. And furthermore, what will happen to it when the racial ideologies of the 19th century come online, of which we have yet to speak. But don't forget, Moshe has his dedication to the nation as a unit of measure for human society, and his simultaneous rejection of national or racial chauvinism. In his eyes, a nationalism which seeks to dominate others is a diseased form of nationalism. His utopian vision was one in which all races and nations must be made free, because only then would they be able to live in harmony as equals. there are, however, people in the intrinsic nationalist camp whose perspectives are much more grim and they're lumped under what's called the so-called dark gods theory this is the perspective that has it that nationalism is the expression of an ancient irrational and dangerous passions which have motivated human beings since primordial times be it as individuals or as groups In a sense, within the Dark God's theory, nationalism is an expression of the original sin in the collective scale of human endeavor.

Now, even these critics can see positive values in such an understanding, the importance of belonging, that incredibly powerful nexus of identity and exclusion that we've spoken about so much. But, having seen what a self-consciously pagan Nazi nationalism unleashed on the world, they either take a pessimistic view of human future or identify nationalism as an idea which must be eradicated like idolatry. So that's the intrinsic count. The other side of the coin from the nation is the contingent. So their belief is that while true human beings have always organized themselves into groups with what they call loyalty instilling capacities, that tendency has to be distinguished from their more recent and historically novel desire to identify with the modern constructed nation as embodied in the nation state.

The great theorist Bernard Anderson supplied a critical underpinning of this perspective with his work Imagine Communities, highly recommended, important to understand the modern perspectives on nationalism, in which he outlines a process of nation building driven by print media, international politics, and the rise of capitalist economics. All communities are imagined, he claims. they're constructed through the stories that we share and the very nature of the media which shapes our experience of existence. Now, the idea that our nation is a product of the story which we share shouldn't sound surprising to the Jews. There are more positive perspectives, the idealists who see the rise of the nation and the nation state even though it's contingent as nevertheless a step toward a better world.

To them, the nation is progress in the ability of humanity to express will. And by the way, the reason that language is so often a vehicle for the formation of a nation is that this is exactly how we express collective will. Am I speaking your language? There are others in the contingent camp who hold on to a more cosmopolitan philosophy and see the rise of the nation in the 19th century as basically a case of powerful ideas, some of which are good, just gone wild by finding unfortunate momentum in the particular events of modern history. So that's a basic review of the positions. Whether you follow the intrinsic or the contingent camp, the key element of nationalism is nations. So the second element of the three is that these nations are defined by certain identifiable characteristics, as we said, territory, history, and language.

And language is going to get more attention later in this episode. But for now, just appreciate how deep this notion goes in the Jewish story. I mean, aside from the fact that the Torah begins with God speaking the world into being, we've really traced the story of language since deep in the first season. Go back and revisit the role of Ezra and Nehemiah as wall builders in episode 2 from season 1, or Rav Sajjah's fight for Hebrew as the holy tongue in episode 17. Or just think about the role which linguistic revival has played in our story of the Jewish Enlightenment, of the Haskalah, especially in the tension of whether the Enlightened will master Hebrew as their particular tongue, or become fluent in the language of their broader society.

So there are nations, they can be identified, and they have a new claim to legitimate rule. And it's this last point which made nationalism a force for liberation in the latter half of 19th century, and why it caused so much trouble to the old order of proto-states and multi-ethnic empires which had emerged out of feudalism. The Declaration of the Rights of Man had made the revolutionary potential of nationalism quite clear when it stated the principle of sovereignty resides essentially in the nation. No body of men, no individual, can exercise authority that does not emanate expressly from it. And that is what led the National Assembly to revoke the rights of the French nobility. And now, by the way, when the nobles complained that, hey, they were open to reworking power relationships, but let's do it as a proper negotiation, not by fiat, simply erasing a status that had lasted for almost 2,000 years.

The response of the National Assembly was quite telling. Quote, The incorruptible representatives of the French people, having proclaimed the sacred and inalienable rights of the nations, recognize no other rule than that of justice. Therefore, all previous treaties and conventions, which are the fruit of the error in which kings and their ministers were lost, will no longer have force. Because according to the philosophes and encyclopedias, whose thought really drove the revolution, if the people decide that they no longer wish to continue with the present model of rule? Since sovereignty belongs to them, all they have to do is form a new government and they become a nation unto themselves. And since the ruler against whom they rebelled didn't derive their sovereignty from nation, they were just a usurper to whom no allegiance or mercy is due whatsoever.

You hear the power for revolution in that? And the only question, of course, is who are the people of which you speak that can serve as a basis for legitimate nationality, and how do they organize themselves? Now remember Max Weber's definition of the nation-state. It's the entity which has a monopoly on the legitimate use of force to maintain order. And the question of which secular philosophy or national identity gets to claim legitimacy in this battle to create a nation and embody itself in the nation-state is going to occupy much of the story of the coming century. So we've got a little taste of the sociopolitical context for the rise of the nation-state. And if we're looking for the Jewish people that will embody itself ultimately as a nation and claim legitimacy through the nation-state, those who will really come to speak of themselves as a Jewish nation, then we could do a lot worse than starting our search in the Pale of Settlement, that last part of European Jewry that we haven't spoken of for quite some time.

Now remember, the Pale was first created by Catherine the Great in 1791. she had acquired eastern Poland in the wake of the partition that we spoke of long ago and that meant for the first time in Russian history the empire possessed land with a large population of Jews which might be okay but it wasn't in the eyes of many of the powerful the merchants of Moscow began to protest immediately against an influx of Jewish merchants whom they said were moving in rapidly from the provinces that had been annexed from Poland nearly two decades previous and they wanted none of these Jews well fraud and lies that made competition with them impossible And so the Pale was born Now the term Pale is actually derived from the Latin word palace, meaning stake.

And the meaning is extended to apply to the area enclosed by a fence or boundary, meaning that Catherine drew a line in these new provinces she had acquired, beyond which Jews could have no permanent residency whatsoever, and in certain periods they couldn't even temporarily travel there. And even within the boundaries of the Pale, there were major cities like Kiev in the heart of the Ukraine, or Sevastopol down in the Black Sea, from which the Jews were excluded. Now there were a number of phases in drawing the boundaries of the Pale, and it basically grew and shrank through the century under various rulers. But in general, it included much of present-day Latvia and Lithuania, up in the Baltics, Belarus and Ukraine, down through the center, Moldova, most of Poland, and parts of western Russia.

And the eastern boundary was that pale, the deep line of demarcation, while the western boundary were the kingdoms of Prussia and Austro-Hungary, though the Jews were kept distant from the border as well. And as the 19th century progresses, the pale will come to hold the largest concentration of Jews in its day, eventually almost 5 million, who will represent 40% of the world Jewish population. this is the body of the people and the difficulty of life in the pale has become proverbial political oppression was constant aside from the basic fact of restricted movement poverty was incredibly widespread but history teaches us that oppression and poverty can actually lead to solidarity remember our discussion of the role that Tadaka played amongst Galician Jury in the last episode and don't forget the Alter Rebbe that stood of the Magdib Mezrich the father of Chabad Chassidut, who prayed that the Tsar Alexander would defeat Napoleon in his attempt to conquer Russia at the beginning of the 19th century.

If Bonaparte will be victorious, he said, Jewish wealth will increase, and the prestige of the Jewish people will be raised, but their hearts will disintegrate and be distant from their father in heaven. But if the Tsar Alexander will be victorious, although Israel's poverty will increase, and their prestige will be lowered, their hearts will be joined, bound and unified with their Father in Heaven. Well, like what he had to say or not the truth of the matter is the people are poor but the Torah is thriving in the Pale. First of all, Hasidut is widespread just as much as it is in Galicia and in many ways as we've seen, the policy of socio-political exclusion that the Pale embodies allows the Rebbes and the Hasidim to hold on to their mythic consciousness and even their lifestyle of the Middle Ages longer than anywhere else in Europe.

In a certain sense, the Middle Ages don't go away in the Pala Settlement. And it's not just Hasidut. Orthodoxy, along the model of the Chatham Sofer that we've sketched out so far, is also thriving. Now, I hope you remember that in addition to forbidding anything new, the Chatham Sofer established a new type of yeshiva in Pressburg. You hear the irony? Right after the turn of the 19th century. And the Pressburg Yeshiva drew its students from across Europe, and it also existed separate from the community in which it was located, thus another innovation, because Yeshiva before that had really been an extension of the communities in which they were found. And because of these, as well as the power, the personality of the Chantam Sofer, the Pressburg Yeshiva succeeded in training a generation of leaders who themselves shaped orthodoxy in the model of their Rav, the Hatam Sofer, into the modern era.

And at more or less the same time, a parallel institution arose in the Pale. Rav Chaim Yitzchak Mivolozhin was born in the town of Volozhin in 1749, when it was still part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and not yet beyond the Pale. And he took to the Torah from a young age like a fish to water. his earliest formative teacher was Rav Aryeh Leib Gunzberg who some of you may know as the author of the Shagas Aryeh but by age 25 he had already been drawn to Vilna by the fame of the Vilna Gaon and quickly became one of his most important students and in 1803 Rav Chaim returned to his hometown of Eloshin in order to establish a yeshiva that could educate the Jews of the Pale in the spirit and methodology of the Vilna Gaon and in order to do so he sent letters to the chief rabbis of cities throughout Europe just as the Hatom Sofer had asking them to send him their highest, best students and promising to provide them with financial support, top teachers and a high level standardized curriculum this was the professionalization of the yeshiva world the Eitz Chaim Yeshiva, as it was called or simply the Velozhin Yeshiva as it's really known brought the depths of the Torah to its students for nearly 90 years after its foundation in 1803 until it was closed in 1892 for its refusal to accede to the demands of the Russian government that they teach secular studies along with the Torah.

And it began as just 10 students who gathered around Reb Chaim, whom he supported out of his own pocket. Legend even tells that his wife was forced to sell her jewelry in order to make it through their first winter before the institution took off. But take off it did. And Voloshan is known in Jewish history as the mother of all yeshivot. And it's considered the model for all subsequent Lithuanian, or Litvish or Yeshivish, depending on how you're familiar with it, Lithuanian yeshivot. At its height, there were more than 450 students. Now the depth and power of Reb Chaim's learning really lies beyond the scope of our story, to my great regret. But I highly encourage you to open his major work, Nefesh Haim, the soul of the living, or the soul of life.

and there you will find among many secrets of the world life, prayer and the spirit you'll find the secret to the success of his new learning endeavor because he offers a redefinition of the concept of Torah Lishma literally translated as Torah for its sake now before you can redefine you have to know what the definition was and the classical definition of Torah Lishma of the ideal motivation for learning Torah was basically functional. It referred to learning Torah in order to understand and perform the mitzvot correctly. As the Gemara says, the goal of wisdom is repentance and good deeds. So a man should not study Torah and Mishnahh and then rebel against his father and mother and teacher and those that are greater in wisdom.

As it says, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. A good understanding is gained by all those who do them. Which implies, those that do them lishma and not lo lishma, those who do them for the sake of repentance and good deeds and not for any other reason. But it's V'chaim of Olozhin who transforms the notion of Torah lishma and introduces the idea that it refers to study purely for the sake of the mitzvah of study and nothing else, learning as its own end. this was an innovation on the scale of the Chatham Sofer's insistence that nothing ever changed and its impact on the formation of orthodoxy was just as great now there are scholars who believe that Reb Chaim was simply reacting to the refocusing by Hasidut of religious life around spirituality but no matter what his motivation was it worked this idea of the nobility of studying for its own sake without any reward, without any social manifestation, without even any goal of practice, transformed the Voloshan Yeshiva into the Harvard of the Pale.

And since the Jews were still largely excluded from the secular institutions of higher learning in Russia, even once the Russian Haskalah took off, many of its leaders attended the Voloshan Yeshiva. Voloshan reached its heights of fame under the Rosh Yeshiva Rav Naftali Tzvi Yehuda Berlin, known as the Netzev who took over as Rosh Hashiva the head of the institution in 1854 and served in that capacity until its closure in 1892. But its impact and especially the idea that the highest realization of Jewish life is learning Torah for no other purpose than the act of learning Torah live on in the model of orthodoxy today. If you're familiar with the Yeshivish world you will understand that there in the Pale of Rasha At the beginning of the 19th century, a mold was set which is shaping us even as we speak.

And so the Torah thrived in the pale. The yeshiva system as we know it was basically born at Volosian. And an orthodoxy emerged which was not defined by battles with the reform, as was German orthodoxy. Nor was it really interested or challenged to face the modern world along the lines of Rav Shemsh and Raphael Hirsch over in Germany as well. The cultural, socioeconomic, and intellectual structures of the Middle Ages lived peacefully on in much of the Pale through at least the first half of the 19th century. In many ways, this is because industrialization and capitalism were slow to come to Russia in general, and when they did, the Jews at first were largely excluded. Another way to say this is that the ethnic body of Am Yisrael was solid in the Pale, held together by its enforced concentration and by the poverty and oppression that gave a sense of solidarity to daily life.

Shverzayin ayid, if it's hard to be a Jew, we might as well stick together. But even here, in the heartland of orthodoxy and medieval worldviews, the Enlightenment has begun to flower. And because it's in less direct competition with the general surrounding culture, I mean, the Russian peasant will become an idealized notion in the hands of Tolstoy and some early 20th century Zionist thinkers, but the reality on the ground for the people who actually live with them is not so attractive. Unlike the Salons of Vienna, where everyone wants to be a member of the German-speaking bourgeois. We saw the Berlin Enlightenment, led by Moses Mendelssohn, which passed through a phase of conversion and assimilation before ultimately producing the notion of a reformed universalist Judaism that could fit the citizenship model of Western Europe.

And we touched on the Galician phase of the Enlightenment, albeit briefly, in the person of Joseph Pearl, the anti-Hasidic satirist and social reformer. And that Galician phase seemed to grow directly out of Berlin, and in many ways it really did. But it also added what I think of as a new level of angst for how the enlightened youth engaged the Jewish question. In Western Europe, meaning France and parts of Prussia, the move from downright conversion to a reformation of Judaism into what they call a confessional faith that really smoothed the path for cultural assimilation offered a clear path to enlightened youth. They knew where they were trying to head, be a European, and hold on to some aspect of a mosaic persuasion.

But the further east you go, the less clear that path becomes. And whether that's because the surrounding culture actually becomes less attractive, or because the sense of national solidarity, which is the foundation for Jewish life among these large populations, doesn't allow for easy abandonment of one's people. Or whether the experience of poverty and oppression made the words of Moshe Hess ring more true the further into the pale you headed. As he said, it's the modern Jew who is despicable for disowning his race because the heavy hand of fate oppresses it. But no matter how you analyze the question, the youth of Galitzi and the Pale were surrounded by confusion. Maybe that's why there was a proliferation of books that played on the theme of the Rambam's More Nebuchim, the guide to the perplexed.

Nachman Hakoyen Krochmol, Galician philosopher, theologian, historian, and really leading voice of the Galician, Haskalah, who we didn't talk about, he entitled his major work Moreh Nebuchet Hazman, A Guide for the Perplexed of the Time. And that wasn't just because, like every Mosque since Mendelssohn, he revered the Rambam as the light of rationalism burning in the heart of traditional Judaism. It was because he understood that the way forward for Am Yisrael, for Jews who want to remain Jews, but to do so in the modern world, and especially for those who aren't willing to hold fast to the way in which tradition has been practiced for so long, is actually far from clear. And though Krochmal had impact in his own right, for our story I'm interested in how he influenced young Yitzhak Ber Levinson, Isaac Ber.

Now Levinson was a typical youth of his day, born in 1788 in the Ukraine to a traditional family. And, like so many of the Maskelim, the Reformers, he was recognized as a prodigy from a young age. And in addition to a mass of traditional learning, he showed an aptitude for languages. And like so many other young Russian Jews of his generation, he first turned to Hasidut in order to find guidance and spiritual depth and really comfort from the harsh life around him. But, like so many of his peers, he turned relatively quickly away from Hasidut when he realized that whatever aid it offered came at the price of a retreat from the modern world. Now his intelligence and intensive study brought on a nervous breakdown, and he traveled to Brody and Galicia to seek a cure.

And it was there that Levinson encountered the Hebrew Enlightenment, eventually becoming quite close with the leading scholars, including Joseph Pearl, who we've discussed. And in 1817, Levison also drew close to Nachman Kochmahl, who was recognized as the authority of rabbinic learning and tradition within the Galician Haskalah. Now, there's an important distinction between the Haskalah in the East and the West that we've kind of glossed over to this point. The Wissenschaft der Judentums, that science of Judaism that was pioneered by Leopold Zuns and Edward Gunz and others, the German scholars, was essentially a critical scientific posture from its inception. And the university education of its founders shaped their claim to offer a watershed shift in understanding Judaism and Jewish history through the lens of critical historical study.

But what emerged in Galitia and the Pale was not known as the Visionshaft but as Chochmat Yisrael the wisdom of Am Yisrael In a sense the fact that its name is in Hebrew rather than in German says it all Because as opposed to being products of the university, the leading lights of the Chochmat Yisrael, of the Chaskalah in the Pale and in Eastern Galicia, were mostly autodidacts. They trained themselves. They weren't products of the universities. and they were, unlike many of the Wiesenschaft people, masters of traditional knowledge, which served as a basis of their passion for enlightenment methods and not in conflict with it. And that's why, while the German scholars sought far-reaching religious reforms driven by their historical developmental view of Judaism, the leaders of the Chotmat Yisrael by and large remained committed to the tradition.

and so Isaac B. Levinston caught the fire of the Enlightenment in Galicia and he brought it back to the Pale eventually he would become known as the Russian Mendelssohn and he really deserves the title of the founding father of the Russian Haskalah and now we could go through the details of his life but there's really very little that's groundbreaking or all that different from the story of the Haskalah as we've told it except insofar as it's worth noting that what made Levinston a radical in the Paleo Settlement in the 1820s would have actually labeled him as a conservative in Berlin of the 1790s. But, for our purposes, Levinston's emphasis on the importance of language as a vehicle for enlightenment, which was a pillar in general in the Haskolali, certainly not the first, gives us an opportunity to explore that link between language and nationalism once again.

So, Rabbi Isaac Baer's first work was known as Te'udat B'Yisrael, You could call it a testimony or an affirmation in Israel. Modern Hebrew, a t'udah, is like a report card or a certificate. And it's a polemical work. It's trying to convince the Jews that the study of the Hebrew language is essential, that it was both permissible and necessary to learn Russian, and that the dangers of learning secular subjects like science and history were far outweighed by the advantages. All classic, musculic thought. But the difference between Isaac B. Levinzen and Yosef Pearl, or Leopold Zunz, over to the West, is the way in which he communicated. If you look at the introduction of Tutab the Yisrael, you'll see that Levinzen marshals the Yerushalmi Talmud, he brings the Rambam, he even quotes the Shalach HaKodesh, to argue that Jews must be writing and speaking in Hebrew.

Now, it may be simply because Levinzen was indeed more conservative than his Western contemporaries, Or it could be that the power of the traditionalist in the pale was so absolute that he had to work under the radar. But I think, actually, that we're seeing, once again, an expression of the difference between Chochmat Yisrael and Vishen Shoft. This is a new strand of Jewish enlightenment developing in the pale, one whose attitude is not founded on an admiration of the dominant surrounding society, since, as we said, Russian society is far from enlightened at this point. And it's not only that. We've got to remember that the Romantic movement is pushing ideas like national sentiment to the foreground and somewhat replacing the cold rationality of the Enlightenment that enlightened Moses Mendelssohn.

For all that the scientific approach to Judaism, the Wissenschaft der Judentums, claims to be a source of objective and therefore universal truth, it may just be that the Volksgeist that spirit of the people as the Romantics would call it was actually much more powerful and profoundly alive in the healthy body of the nation located in the pale and that Volksgeist that spirit rejected calls to enlightenment which were based on the worship of any foreign culture but really we can learn the most about Levinson and the task that we have ahead of us from his attack on Yiddish, which is central to Israel. First of all, again, he's not the first to assail Yiddish as the ultimate expression of exile. I mean, it was common for the Maskelim to call Yiddish a low and irredeemable language due to its status as a mutt, as an amalgamation of German, Hebrew, and various other elements.

But now we can understand such criticism in a very different light. And long before Marshall McLuhan taught the world that the medium is the message, the Romantic thinkers of the 18th and 19th century became obsessed with the notion that only a pure language can serve as a true vehicle for the national will. And Johann Gottfried von Herder was perhaps the most important bridge between the German Enlightenment and the Romantic movement, and he's the one that welded language and nation together. His passion for German culture and language knew no bounds. And when he published his treatise on the origin of language in 1772, he not only expressed his own personal interests, he established foundations for comparative philology.

That's a fun word, by the way, which means the study of language in oral and written sources over time. And he welded into those foundations the notion that the nation is defined by its language. Now, there's a complex analysis that can be done in order to understand the depths of the role which language plays in the rise of Romantic nationalism in Europe, and in Zionism, which we will look at it. But, in a sense, at least at this point, Herter said it all when he called on his German people to reject the claims of French cultural superiority and linguistic purity. Spew out the ugly slime of the same, he said. Speak German, O you German. And so, when Isaac B. Levinson rejected Yiddish as hopelessly corrupt, and as a cause of the muddied thought which characterized the Jews of his day, and even their immoral behavior, he was clearly building on Herder's foundation.

Now, Teudah B. Yisrael was mildly popular amongst the Jews of the Pale, not really a competitor with the books of the Hasidic wisdom that were sweeping the market, but it found real favor in the eyes of the Russian government. in 1823 Alexander I was Tsar of Russia and his younger brother Nicholas soon to be Tsar unbeknownst to him became very interested in Levinson's thought now despite the grim picture I've painted of life in the pale Alexander began his reign as more or less a friend of the Jews relatively speaking in 1804 he issued the enactment concerning the Jews that granted them the right to buy and rent land for the first time in the western and southern provinces this actually gave rise to the first Jewish agricultural colonies in all of Russia, a movement that would bear fruit in the early years of Zionism.

He also allowed Jews to enter the elementary and high schools, as well as some universities, albeit with significant quotas. And in recognition of the rising wave of capitalism, he encouraged certain Jews to establish factories in the pale. Now, we don't have to search too hard for the Enlightenment notions that underlay Alexander's actions. He's quoted as remarking, If through my efforts to improve their condition, I should succeed in bringing forth only one Mendelssohn from amongst the Russian Jews, I shall be abundantly rewarded. But the wave of reaction was already on the horizon. In 1818, a revolutionary conspiracy was uncovered amongst the officers of Alexander's Guard, which along with the events across Europe, shook his faith in liberalism.

and as a result, among many other reactionary moves, he abandoned the liberal approach to solving the Jewish problem, revoked many of the privileges he'd granted, and actually added more restrictions. So, when his younger brother Nicholas discovered the wisdom of the Jewish Enlightenment in Levinson's book, he thought he'd found a new solution to the Jewish question, Russification. And in fact, it was Nicholas who helped to fund the publication of Tudab Yisrael. Now just imagine the author's surprise when his royal benefactor became Tsar upon his older brother's death in 1825. Suddenly, he had the ear of the emperor. And the emperor was very concerned with solving the Jewish problem. Now Nicholas I was heavily under the influence of the rising nationalist thought.

And he faced a real challenge in creating a Russian state out of his vast multi-ethnic empire. I mean, don't forget, even the nobility in Russia prided themselves on speaking a foreign language, French, at this point in time. But there were hundreds of thousands of Jews in the pale, and that made them one of the largest minorities in the empire. So, any hope of creating a Russia out of this multi-ethnic empire meant that the Jews were a problem that needed to be solved. In 1827, just a year before the publication of Tudab Yisrael, the minister of public instruction, Prince Levian, submitted to Levinson 34 questions on Jewish religion and history. What's the Talmud? Who was the author? When? Where? What language was written?

Have the Jews other books, etc., etc., and so on. And after learning about the nature of the Jews, Tsar Nicholas' opening move in his attempt to Russify was unquestionably one of the most brutal acts of any Russian leader of the entire 19th century. In 1827, the Tsar declared military service to be compulsory for all Jews in Russia. And he established the age for the draft as between 12 and 25, and the period of conscription for 25 years. And just to make it worse, The same statute also declared that Jewish miners under 18 years of age will be placed in a preparatory training establishment for military training, the so-called Cantonist units. Now, these Cantonist units were originally barracks that had been established for the children of Russian soldiers.

In order to give them basic military training and a rudimentary education, they were legendary for their harsh discipline. The threat of starvation and beating hung over the young Cantonists every day. And at age 18, they all knew that they were ready to be drafted into the regular army units and serve another 25 years. So now, by drafting the Cantonist laws and specifically applying them to the Jews, Nicholas had found a keystone for his project of correcting the Jews of Russia. In other words, for converting large numbers of Jewish children to Christianity by uprooting them from their homes for decades and offering them to make their lives miserable unless they converted. And, as an evil twist, the law actually made the Jewish communal authorities responsible for furnishing a quota of young recruits.

The number demanded, the brutal conditions of service, and the knowledge that the conscript was unlikely ever to return to the Torah after 25 or more years in the Russian army, made that quota nearly impossible to fill. And so therefore, the community leaders, who were held personally responsible for that duty, often took the easiest and ugliest ways out. And they filled the quota from the children of poorest homes. And a situation developed in which every community suddenly had special officers, known in Yiddish as chappers, meaning when you say today I'm going to chapp that, it means you're going to seize it. They were kidnappers whose goal was to seize children, imprison them in the communal buildings, and then ultimately hand them over to the military authorities.

And aside from the horror of the imprint that this left on the consciousness of 19th century Russian Jewry, if you want to appreciate the force of historical momentum that goes into the angst around the struggle between present-day Haredi society and the Israeli government around military service, you have to understand how deep that bitter imprint left by the chappers really was. It's worth it to reflect on that before you judge people in the news. You know, the radical Russian author, Alexander Herzen, actually described his meeting in 1835 with a convoy of these Jewish Cantonists. I quote, They brought the children and formed them into regular ranks. It was one of the most awful sights I have ever seen.

Those poor, poor children. Boys of twelve or thirteen might somehow have survived it, but little fellows of eight and ten? Not even a brush full of black paint could put such horror on canvas. Pale, exhausted, frayed in faces, they stood in thick, clumsy soldiers' overcoats with stand-up collars, helpless, pitiful eyes fixed on the garrison soldiers who were roughly getting them into ranks. The white lips, the blue rings under their eyes, bore witness to fever or chill, and these sick children, without care or kindness, exposed to the icy wind that blows unobstructed from the Arctic Ocean, were going to their graves. That was the work of Yitzhak Ber Levinson's patron, Nicholas I. And in the 1830s, Levinson was asked by the Tsar's government to make broad recommendations on how to reform all of Jewish life.

And in his reply, we find that tension that characterizes so much of musculic thought between Jewish particularism and the desire to assimilate into a larger society. Furthermore, the desire to bring Am Yisrael to the future which it deserved, even if it meant destroying its past. At first, Levinson focused on literature. He proposed closing down any Jewish printing house, not under government supervision, and, like his compatriots in Galicia, tried to stop the printing of all Hasidic literature. Ultimately, though, in 1838, he published a full plan for Jewish Reformation entitled Beit Yehuda. It wasn't just a plan for Reformation. There was a mix of pride there in the unique world of the Jewish spiritual life, which was unknown to most Russians, which he claimed was founded on the principles of highest morality, and an insistence that true Judaism was founded on love for any neighbor, irrespective of their faith.

And once again, Beit Yehuda is filled with classical sources. At the end of the work, Levenson actually offers a comprehensive plan for reorganization of Jewish education in Russia. He urged the founding of rabbinical seminaries, along the lines of those in German institutions, which incorporated religious and secular learning, of opening elementary schools for Jews throughout the pale, and of establishing agricultural and industrial schools. In the long run, Beit Yudna had a powerful influence on the Jews of Russia, unlike his earlier works. really gave the progressive elements of Russian Jewry a plan of action. It even received attention outside of the pale Avram Geiger that founder of the Reform in Germany read several translated chapters of it to his congregation in Breslov Synagogue not long after its publication And Levinson continued to fight for his vision of Jewish Reform and integration for the rest of his life.

Though he refused the government post he was offered, he worked toward his aims until his health failed. And when he passed away in 1860, the Russian Haskalah was a movement instead of a personal dream. and the path of assimilation seemed to be opening before it. At his request, the following was engraved on his tombstone. Out of nothing God called me to life. Alas, earthly life has passed, and I shall sleep again on the bosom of Mother Nature, as this stone testifies. I fought the enemies of God, not with the sharp sword, but with the word. That I fought for truth and justice before the nations, my works Zerubbabel and Ephesdamim will bear witness. So it's time to finally talk about Jewish nationalism.

The term Zionism, like the term anti-Semitism, is actually not quite here yet. It's just over the next ridgeline of our story. And in truth, their birth in the world together, or at least within a decade of one another, is no coincidence. Because we've traced the stages of the Jewish problem along with the solutions that have been proposed since the destruction of the Second Temple back in the year 70 of the Common Era. For the Romans, recall, the Jew was the indigestible element of empire. They saw the Jewish problem as a manifestation of that bizarre spirit of the Maccabees which insists that Am Yisrael must have sovereignty over territory in order to fulfill our theology, meaning that only the Jews can rule in Judea.

And because in the eyes of the Romans, the problem was political, so was the solution. Exile. Get rid of any connection between the Jews and Judea by destroying their sovereignty and erasing Judea from the maps by simply declaring it Palestine. And that led to the next phase of the Jewish problem, the religious one. Now that we were a wandering people, politics weren't our major issue. But in Christian Europe, we were no longer the indigestible element of empire, but rather the obstinate rejecters of salvation. And here, too, the solution was clear. The problem was religious, and the solution was as well. Conversion, or at least periodic expulsion under the threat of conversion in order to remove the Jewish contagion and keep Christian society clean.

But Europe is moving away from Christianity, or at least toward modern secular society, for better or worse, and the Jew poses no real political threat in the 19th century because he has no land to stand on. He's not much of a religious danger because the big heretics are killing God right now, not arguing about whose God is better. The Jew in modern Europe is the alien other. He can give up his Judaism through assimilation or even all the way to conversion as Heinrich Hein did in order to gain entry into European society. But the rise of nationalist politics and the racial theories we have yet to discuss will show assimilation to be an inadequate solution to the Jewish problem. Like Moses Hess said, what the Germans hate is not so much the Jewish religion or Jewish names as the Jewish noses.

So as Europe moves toward a conceptual model of citizenship and is increasingly organized into nation states, the Jew just doesn't fit. He isn't part of the race, the Volk, or the language groups that nationalists will look for as a basis of legitimate peoplehood that can form a nation-state. He isn't even concentrated into one geographic territory. Wherever you look, you'll find the international Jew. And the fact that many of the idealistic Jewish youth are being drawn into the internationalist, cosmopolitan, and revolutionary movements of the 19th century is not exactly a selling point for their acceptance in modern European society. And so, in a sense, it was almost inevitable that someone would hit on a nationalist solution to the Jewish problem.

Remember, once the word Zionism is around, it will become a problem-solving movement. And in all fairness, we saw that Moshe Hess already came to this solution. But for all the pathos that he put into Roman Jerusalem, no one really read it. He would have to wait for a Russian to broach the subject for real. Leon Pinsker was born Yehuda Leib at Pinsker in the Palo Settlement in 1821 he was the successful product of Yitzhak Berlevenson's vision for Jewish reform his father was a teacher and writer in the Hebrew language and the son received from him a strong Jewish identity although according to his own testimony very little traditional practice but he had a commitment to Mother Russia as his true home And Yehudah Leb was actually one of the first Jews to attend Odessa University, where he studied law.

Surprise, surprise. But upon graduation, he realized that the strict quotas on Jewish professionals meant he had no chance of becoming a lawyer. And so he chose the career of a physician. Let's not wonder how he reapplied his training. In the years since the death of Isaac Baer, the program for Russification of the Jews had proceeded admirably. Russian education was spread amongst a significant portion of the population of the Pale, and there were even a number of Russian-language periodicals that were launched by the Jews themselves. Pinsker was part of the founding of such a periodical. It was a weekly paper known as Rasyvets, which I'm sure I said wrong, and the paper took a boldly assimilationist stance.

It broadcast the message that the future of Russian Jews lay in integration with Russian society at large. and for the formative decades of his life it appeared that such a thing was possible. Pinsker certainly favored the assimilation of his path. He believed that the Jewish problem would be solved if Jews attained equal rights in the nations within which they found themselves. And in 1861, Tsar Alexander II freed the serfs of Russia for which he gained the title of liberator and infused the Jews with hope even though they still lived under significant legal and geographic restrictions, the liberal light seemed to have finally dawned in Russia. But only ten years later, the assimilationists of Russia, Pinsker among them, were shocked by an eruption of anti-Semitism in the city of Odessa.

Now in Odessa, the Christian Holy Week was traditionally a time of conflict between the Jews and the Greeks who made up a significant portion of the city. And in 1871, when a rumor circulated that some Jews had vandalized a Greek church, the typical intercommunal violence broke out. Like I said, it was an annual event and usually quickly suppressed. However, this year something was different. It was different because many non-Greek Russians actually joined the riots, which made intervention by the police far more complicated, and so they were slow to act. And soon the situation developed into a full-fledged program. with many Russians giving vent to a depth of anti-Semitism that shocked the Jews of Russia, Pinsker among them.

Because what they heard was the old Christian Jew hatred combined with a new claim that was a key part of the rising concept of anti-Semitism. The Jews offended our Christ, they grow rich and suck our blood. Now many Jewish historians actually see this 1871 pogrom as somewhat of a turning point in Russian Jewish history. or at the very least as a wake-up call to assimilationists like Leon Pinsker. It called into question the feasibility of Jewish integration into Russian-Christian society, and therefore assimilation ceased to be an obvious solution to the Jewish problem. And what began to develop was a turn toward a greater awareness of Jewish national identity. If the Russians weren't going to accept you as anything other than a Jew, you might want to ask what that means.

But though what happened in Odessa in 1871 was a shock, the worst was yet to come. In 1881, Tsar Alexander II was assassinated by a member of the People's Will Movement in Petersburg. It's a little bit beyond the scope of our story, but you should just know at this point, Russia is boiling over between the forces of reaction, trying to hold fast to tradition, the Russian Orthodox Church, the power of the autocratic Tsar, and every kind of internationalist, revolutionary, anarchist, socialist movement that you can imagine. And of course, the Jews were mixed up in it all. So the results of his assassination were devastating. A reactionary wave swept Russia, and the liberal forms that the Tsar had begun were all but forgotten.

Now, his son, Alexander III, who had witnessed the death of his father, in the wake of his assassination passed the oppressive May laws once again limiting Jews to residents in towns and cities and restricting what rights they'd even gained if you want to appreciate what it means to be limited in towns and cities, go watch the movie Fiddler on the Roof because when the Jews are kicked out of Anatevka at the end, it's because in the last several decades there have been attempts to move the Jews out of the countryside into the cities at this point, a tidal wave of pogroms swept Russia and lasted almost without break from 1881 until 1884. It was known as the Storm in the South. And, most importantly for the transformation of Jewish thinkers, it appeared to be state-sponsored, and it was certainly not state-suppressed.

It was all part of a new solution to the Jewish problem, one proposed by Konstantin Pobinonostev, which I'm absolutely certain I said wrong. He was the supervisor of the Russian Orthodox Church, he was an advisor to the young Tsar, and he was a notorious anti-Semite. He'd been a supporter of liberal reform under Alexander II, but as Konstantin saw the fabric of traditional Russian society eroding around him, he turned reactionary, and in particular after the assassination of the Tsar, deciding that the only thing which could save Russia was a deeper spiritual unity around the Tsar as an autocrat and the Russian church. And the Jews were an obstacle to that goal. And his solution was simple. It may be apocryphal, but the quote is attributed to him, one-third will die, one-third will leave the country, and the last third will be completely assimilated within the Russian people.

And this was the environment which forced Leon Pinsker and many other assimilationists to seek a new solution to the Jewish problem. And the result was immediate and dramatic. On January 1, 1882, Pinsker published a German-language pamphlet in which he claimed that assimilation was an impossible dream and urged the Jewish people to strive for independence and national consciousness. He declared that the Jews would never be the social equals of Gentiles so long as they did not have a state of their own, and he called for a meeting of Jewish leaders to consider this problem. I quote, The Jews compromise a distinctive element among nations under which they dwell, and as such can neither assimilate nor be readily digested by any nation.

Hence, the solution lies in finding a means of so readjusting this exclusive element to the family of nations that the basis of the Jewish question will be permanently removed. The solution to the Jewish problem is to create a Jewish nation that can join the family of nations. Furthermore, he links this to anti-Semitism, or Judeophobia, as he calls it in his medical language, which he says is going to be an incurable disease as long as the Jew is a disembodied ghost amongst the nations. To the living, the Jew is a corpse, he says. To the native, a foreigner. To the homesteader, a vagrant. To the proprietor, a beggar. To the poor, an exploiter, a millionaire. To the patriot, he's a man without country.

For all, a hated rival. And in this, Pinsker brings to bear one of the great mysteries of anti-Semitism, which is the ultimately mutable hatred. Notice what he says. If you're a capitalist, the Jew's a communist. If you're a communist, he's a capitalist. If you're rich, he's poor. If you're poor, he's rich. But everybody hates him. Now, Pinsker's personal transformation from assimilationist to nationalist is a pattern which will repeat itself amongst many of the leading lights of early Zionists, as we'll see and we'll have to think about. In his case, the transformation led to more than talk. The Chove Tzion movement, the lovers of Zion, actually coalesced under his leadership and began to take practical steps toward Jewish settlement in the land of Israel, as we'll discuss in an episode specifically on the settlement of the land.

Though in truth, we should note, like many other leaders, obsessed with finding any solution to the problem of Jew hatred, Pinsker wasn't particularly attached to a return to Zion per se. In fact, he saw the Midwest and the United States as a far more viable option for mass Jewish immigration. Can you imagine? But for now, it's the title of Pinsker's pamphlet that we need to take away as the revolutionary shift that he represents in Jewish consciousness. The pamphlet was called Auto-Emancipation, Self-Salvation. For almost 2,000 years, we've been patient. And if we've taken any agency in our redemption, it's been almost exclusively through the adherence to the Torah. Remember, it's because of our sins that we were exiled from our lands, and the logical conclusion means that we'll be redeemed through our good deeds.

But Pinsker is done waiting for the Messiah. Just hear the rallying cry with which he ends auto-emancipation. The lack of national self-respect and self-confidence, of political initiative and of unity are the enemies of our national renaissance. Help yourselves, and God will help you. God help us all. I want to thank a few people. I want to thank all the people who give their hard-earned money to help make this show happen, to keep it free and widely available. I want to invite you to join them. Go right now to rovmike.com, and in the upper right corner, you'll see a button that says, Be a Patron, and you can click through to add a little bit of per-podcast support. I want to thank the Land of Israel Network for creating a platform that allows me to reach so many wonderful people, and I want to invite you to reach out to me, rovmike at thelandofisrael.com.

And I want to thank the Pardes Institute, pardes.org.il, for building an institution that allows me to learn and teach so many wonderful Jews. And finally, I want to thank you for listening. I'm Rav Mike Hoyer, and this is The Jewish Story.