Emancipation

How Liberating Europe's Jews from the Ghetto Led to Revolution and Renaissance

Michael Goldfarb

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781439160480
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

The first popular history of the Emancipation of Europe's Jews in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—a transformation that was startling to those who lived through it and continues to affect the world today. Freed from their ghettos, Jews ushered in a second renaissance. Within a century Marx, Freud, and Einstein created revolutions in politics, human science, and physics that continue to shape our world. Proust, Schoenberg, Mahler, and Kafka redefined artistic expression. Emancipation reformed the practice of Judaism, encouraged some to imagine a modern nation of their own, and within decades led to the dream of Zionism.

PART 1

EMANCIPATION

CHAPTER ONE

Everything in the
Universe Is Changing

BEFORE THERE IS REVOLUTION THERE IS TALK. BEFORE THE old regime is overthrown there must be discussion about what is to replace it.

France in the 1780s was overwhelmed with talk. Change had to come, and everybody knew it: the nobles, the peasants, the merchants, even the king himself. The country was bankrupt. Beyond the economy the whole organization of society needed modernizing, the relationship between ordinary people and their king, their church, and their laws needed to be redefined. People did not just talk about reform, they wrote pamphlets about it and formed clubs to discuss solutions. Learned societies organized essay contests to encourage debate and these contests became national forums, the place where those who wanted to step into public life could make a name for themselves.

The Royal Society of Sciences and Arts in Metz, in eastern France, was one of the foremost of these learned societies. Every two years the Metz Royal Society challenged the nation’s thinkers to write on a topic of practical science and one of social philosophy. In 1783, it asked, “What are the means, compatible with good morals, to assure the upkeep of bastards and to get from them greater use for the state?” This was a critical question in a time when contraception was not practiced with the same scientific precision as today, and illegitimate births were common.

The committee choosing the subjects for the Royal Society’s competitions was made up of some of the most important men in Metz. The group spent months discussing current events, trying to find a topic that was worthy of the institution and might also lead to practical solutions for serious social problems. At the end of August 1785, the local paper in Metz, Affiches des Trois-Evêchés et Lorraine, carried an announcement for the society’s new contest. The scientific essay topic related to France’s most important export product: “Is there a way to make a better wine press?” The social question was “Are there means to render the Jews more useful and happy in France?”

The committee of the Metz Royal Society could be certain of a good response to their questions. There was plenty of time for entrants to consider their arguments: the submissions weren’t due until 1787. And the effort would be worth it for the winner: a prize of a gold medallion worth four hundred livres.

By making the Jews and their disposition in France the contest’s subject the committee had put its finger firmly on the nation’s pulse. The Jews—who they were, how to change their relationship with French society, how to “regenerate” them as a people—had become a hot topic of reformist discussion in prerevolutionary France. King Louis XVI himself had begun to take a practical interest. Jews and livestock had had to pay a poll tax when entering a new town, but the previous year the king had ruled that Jews no longer had to pay the humiliating duty.

In France, the interest in Jews was out of all proportion to their numbers. In 1785, Jews were a tiny fraction of 1 percent of the population, a little more than 40,000 out of a population of 26 million. The average French person could go a lifetime without meeting one, knowing them only from what he heard in sermons or market gossip.

In theory, there should have been no Jews at all in France. They had been expelled from the country in 1394 by King Charles VI. But over time, as wars changed France’s borders, small Jewish communities formed or were acquired in four distinct geographical locations. In the 1500s, Jews from Portugal established themselves on France’s Atlantic coast in the trading cities of Bordeaux and Bayonne. At the southern end of the Rhône river around Avignon and Carpentras was an area, the Comtat Venaissin, that was nominally papal land but was considered by the French government to be part of France. There had been Jewish settlements since Roman times in the Comtat and the community continued to exist in the bureaucratic no-man’s-land between the king and the pope.

Then in 1648, through the Treaty of Westphalia, France acquired new lands to the east: Metz, Alsace, and, eventually, Lorraine; and with this territory came a whole new group that doubled the number of Jews living in the kingdom. Finally, inevitably, a small group of Jews, most of them poor, had migrated to Paris from the east, where they tried to avoid the police while making ends meet in their traditional occupations: rag-picking, tinkering, and small-time moneylending.

It was the Jews from the eastern part of the country who occupied the minds of reformers. These Jews were entirely different than their more established brethren in Bordeaux and Avignon in the religious rites they followed: they were Ashkenazic; they were much poorer; and where the Jews of Bordeaux were well integrated into their communities, the Jews of the east were segregated by local law and their own customs.

The Jews of Alsace, Lorraine, and Metz were the source of national anxiety about aliens infecting the French body politic. They were also regarded as a sample group on which to test the new philosophical theories about humanity and society that were part of the age: If all men are created equal, an enlightened thinker might ask, does that mean the Jews, with their strange clothes, odd language, and, frankly, unpleasant personal habits, are our brothers as well?

It took a few months for word of the Metz Royal Society’s essay topic to work its way around France. In February 1786, the Mercure de France, a Paris-based weekly review of arts and ideas—“fleeting pieces in verse and prose,” it said on the cover—carried a long article on the subject. The author noted, “It is an astonishing spectacle, the history of this people, who from before the fall of the Roman Empire, existed in all nations of the earth but are not incorporated in them, who are strangers everywhere … The Jews everywhere are a people apart, a degenerate people, who have no glory, nor honor, nothing to elevate men’s hearts to make them belong.” He then asked, “How can you reform the moral character of this people?” Now was the time to answer that question, the anonymous author noted, because France was on the brink of a new era, an “epoch of great revolutions where everything in the universe is changing … opening the door to a second history for mankind.”

In Paris, a Jew from Poland read the Mercure de France article and decided to enter the contest. In Embermenil, in eastern France, the recently appointed parish priest had already begun working on an essay. Zalkind Hourwitz and Henri Grégoire were men of the same age, from humble backgrounds, and both wanted a voice in national events that those backgrounds normally precluded. Both had already written on the subject of Jewish civil rights and had reached similar conclusions: that somehow emancipating the Jews, releasing this group from the proscriptions that kept them apart, encouraging them to integrate and become French, was a necessary step toward the modern society everyone knew had to replace the rotten ancien regime of France.

As a poor Jew living illegally in Paris, Zalkind Hourwitz’s interest in civil rights was understandable, but his desire to take part in the national debate was unusual and the fact that he could reasonably expect to write a good essay was astonishing. Born in a village near Lublin in eastern Poland, Hourwitz had arrived in Paris a decade earlier, as he would later remember, with rude peasant manners and so uncultured that he thought the statues of the capital were actually alive.

His journey from the east was highly improbable and dangerous in the extreme. Everywhere along his route through Poland, Prussia, and a dozen other German-speaking principalities, Jews were subject to strict laws to keep them segregated from the rest of the population. Forbidden to be on the road after dark, Hourwitz would have been forced to find the local ghetto or Jewish hamlet for his evening’s shelter and food. The one thing that might have eased the passage was the homogeneity of the Jewish world in its enforced isolation. From Lublin to Metz each isolated pocket of Jewry spoke more or less the same language, followed the same rituals, and was organized in the same way, with the ghetto or village’s rabbi and its few people of wealth effectively forming a local government. The majority of the people struggled desperately to earn enough to survive and pay the taxes imposed on them by the state or the local ruling family, and all of life was circumscribed by a legal system based on the religious books, the Torah and Talmud.

Little is known of Hourwitz’s early life beyond the fact that he claimed to be the son of a rabbi. When he left Lublin isn’t certain, nor is his reason for leaving. Perhaps it was a scandal, or perhaps he came from a family that could give him no financial help and he faced a lifetime of poverty, without means to take a wife and have children of his own. Maybe it was a desire to break free of the enclosed world of the ghetto. Life inside the walls was as stifling to Hourwitz’s individual sensibility as the laws and taxes imposed on Jews from outside by the ruling authorities. What is known is that when Hourwitz got to Paris in 1775 he spoke little French, yet within eight years he had mastered the language sufficiently well to leave his tiny room near the Temple and begin hanging around places like the Café Foy, where intellectuals and would-be revolutionaries discussed the France they wanted to create. Hourwitz felt confident enough in his new language to enter the simmering debate about Jews that was taking place in the magazines read by enlightened people.

In 1783 an anonymous letter on the subject of Jewish civil rights appeared in the Courrier de l’Europe, a biweekly Anglo-French magazine that had become the major forum for discussions about the American Revolution and its potential impact on European politics. The author, a gentleman from Warsaw who preferred to remain anonymous, defined what Jews as a group needed to do if they were to be considered for citizenship. First they had to act like the natives of the nations in which they lived.

“One would say to the descendants of Abraham: be French, German or Polish, cease finally to be Arabs,” he wrote. Of course, they had to give up usury as a way of earning a living, and finally Jews had to “renounce those ridiculous pretensions that you are a chosen people and that you must refuse any alliance with those among whom you live in spite of yourself, for you are neither captives as in Babylon nor slaves as in Egypt.”

Identifying himself as a Polish Jew, Hourwitz sent a letter to the Courrier in reply. Yes, he wrote, some of his coreligionists practice usury and can be unpleasant to do business with, but he then asked if one should condemn a whole group for the practices of the few: “The Polish, French, English, Irish and Portuguese, are they all responsible for the massacres and regicides committed by some scoundrels of their nation? Why not permit the same equity towards the Jews?”

Hourwitz concluded, “There is a sweet, easy and infallible means of obliging us to embrace Christianity. End our captivity by giving us all the rights of citizens.”

While Zalkind Hourwitz was learning French, Henri Grégoire was already writing on the subject of Jews and their future in a new France. He was also laying the foundations for a career that would make him a major figure in the French Revolution. Henri Grégoire was born in eastern France in the village of Veho. An only child, young Grégoire possessed the easy brilliance and work ethic that charms teachers and earns someone from a modest background powerful mentors. He was awarded scholarships to various elite church schools and felt a vocation for the priesthood at an early age. The Catholic Church in France was a deeply conservative, tradition-bound institution but it did have a small liberal wing and Grégoire’s career was looked after by those connected to it.

How he came to be interested in the Jewish Question is a matter of speculation. As with Zalkind Hourwitz, the story of Grégoire’s early life is not known in any great detail. His family was poor and it is likely his first contact with a Jew was with the hated figure of the moneylender. In eastern France, where the future priest grew up, Jew hatred was part of the air people breathed and he certainly would have known that easy prejudice. But during his time as a scholarship boy, an old schoolmate later recalled, Grégoire himself endured discrimination from the sons of aristocrats among whom he was educated. This led to a desire to combat social injustice. In his work as a parish priest he sought to improve the situation of his parishioners on earth as well as spiritually. He set up literacy projects and encouraged experiments with modern techniques of farming. He traveled to other parishes preaching toleration for Jews.

Grégoire’s personal ambition beyond the church was profound and he frequently entered literary and essay contests hoping to make his name in the wider world. In 1778 a group in Strasbourg, the Société des Philanthropes, held a contest on the Jewish Question. Grégoire entered and began working out his solution to the problem of integrating this religious and ethnic minority into the mainstream of French society. He reached similar ideas to Zalkind Hourwitz. Jews were the way they were—difficult, isolated, unwilling to step out of their culture—because of the way they were treated. Oppression had deformed them and Christians needed to examine their own behavior toward this people if the Jews were to be brought successfully into the mainstream of society. He did not keep these views to himself, and when the Jews of Lorraine were given permission to build a new synagogue in 1785, they asked Abbé Grégoire to preach a sermon at its dedication. He happily accepted.

So as they sat down to write, the two men had plenty of personal experience to bring to their essays. Beyond that Hourwitz and Grégoire had little in common but this: they were men shaped by ideas that had been developing for more than a century around Europe, ideas about religious freedom, personal liberty, and the equality of all men. These ideas had become an intellectual movement that gave a name to their time, the Age of Enlightenment. To understand the story of Jewish Emancipation, it is necessary to trace its origins in the story of the Enlightenment.

ii.
Enlightenment

In 1670 a book was published, in Latin, called Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, or Treatise on Theology and Politics. The place of publication was given as Hamburg, but in fact it was Amsterdam. The name of the author did not appear anywhere in the book, since he preferred anonymity.

The caution of publisher and author was understandable. The Tractatus was full of well-reasoned but dangerous ideas about religion and politics. The author argued that if society curbed freedom of thought and speech for religious reasons, the peace of the state would be destroyed. He stated clearly that the laws of human nature applied to every one equally and that no one group was elect. Something the author called “intellectus,” meaning our ability to understand or use our reasoning power, is the best part of us, and not, by implication, our souls. Religious rituals exist to bind society together; “they have no intrinsic sanctity.” So the clergy have no special political role to fill in the state, and indeed it is “disastrous to grant religious functionaries any right to concern themselves … with state business.” Moreover, something the author calls “Democracy” is “the most natural form of state,” because it is not based on coercion or fear. “In this way,” the author concludes, “all remain equal …”

The last was a dramatically new concept. The word democracy in this sense had not been used by a modern philosopher. The proofs offered for these political ideas came out of a rigorous analysis of the Hebrew Bible not as revelation but as the political history of a particular group of people, the Israelites, and the man they acknowledged as their leader, Moses. To examine the holy texts using “reason” rather than accepting their inconsistencies as part of their “revealed” quality was as dangerous a thing as an intellectual could do. Miracles and the Devil were concepts with a real hold on people in the seventeenth century; they were facts of everyday life, like sunrise and sunset or the tides coming in and out. To challenge these ideas through science or mathematical logic was akin to waging war on society, and the forces of political faith had weapons with which to fight back.

It was only three and a half decades since Galileo had been shown the instruments of torture by the inquisitors of the Catholic Church and forced to renounce as heresy his proofs that the earth revolved around the sun. In the case of the Tractatus the heresy cut closer to the political bone. The clergy, Catholic and Protestant, sat at the right hand of Europe’s rulers by dint of their unquestioned authority in interpreting scripture. This book challenged their power directly.

It didn’t take long for the name of the Tractatus’s author to become known. The world of philosophy in the Netherlands was small and the ideas included in the book pointed to Baruch Spinoza, a Jew, as the man who wrote it. Baruch or Bento or Benedict—he was known by all three names, meaning “blessed” in Hebrew, Portuguese, and Latin—had been building a reputation as a thinker since he had run afoul of his own religious authorities. In 1656, for reasons that have never been made clear, Spinoza was excommunicated by the leaders of the Jewish community in Amsterdam.

It is hard to convey the meaning of that act of excommunication today. Its power lay less in the eternal curses called down on the head of Spinoza and more in the shunning orders to the Jewish community at large: no Jew was to speak to him or let him into their house or come within “four cubits” of him; and, most painfully, no one was to read his writing.

To be cast out in this way was more than psychologically painful, it was physically dangerous. The modern idea of the individual making his own way in the world did not exist yet. In the seventeenth century, the community was your identity and the source of protection, friendship, and security. This was doubly true for Jews who at best were merely tolerated wherever they were found. In a world where they had no citizenship and no national place of belonging, the community was the only constant in Jewish existence and so when its leaders chose to expel someone it was a sentence of living death. Excommunication was a powerful tool of coercion for maintaining community cohesion and discipline.

Even in famously liberal Amsterdam this was true. Most of the Jews living in seventeenth-century Amsterdam were fairly recent arrivals from Spain via Portugal, and all had had experience of the insecurity of Jewish existence. Their family histories for almost two centuries had been made up of coercion and flight. Forced conversions to Catholicism in Ferdinand and Isabella’s Spain had not been enough to preserve their place; they had been expelled in 1492. Many of these converted Jews moved to Portugal, but eventually Portugal had forced them out as well. When the overwhelmingly Protestant Dutch provinces successfully rebelled against the Catholic Spanish toward the end of the sixteenth century, many Portuguese Jews made their way to the Netherlands. They settled in the large cities and were granted the status of “resident aliens.” They organized their own synagogues, schools, and religious courts. Although they were not forced into ghettos, a kind of self-ghettoization kept the community physically close together because the daily rituals of Jewish life made it convenient for everyone to live close to the synagogue.

Spinoza was twenty-four at the time of his excommunication but he was better placed than most to survive being cast out. He had been born into one of the community’s more prominent families. The Spinoza family had an import-export business ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• PREFACE
• PART 1: EMANCIPATION
• PART 2: REFORMATION
• PART 3: REVOLUTION
• PART 4: CONSOLIDATION
• PART 5: RENAISSANCE
• Epilogue: Every Jew Has His System
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Insert