From Integration to Estrangement —
Themes and causes of change in the Jewish experience between the 1850s and 1890s in Russia and Austria-Hungary.
We divide the history of central and east European Jewry at latter half of the nineteenth century in two: its first quarter characterized by “acculturation” and “integration”; and its second, by “antisemitism” and “pogroms.” This paradigm of a shifting thematic emphasis accurately reflects the historical record of Austria-Hungarian and Russian Jewish experiences, their initial integration based on a confessional, antisemitic paradigm, and abrupt descent toward irredeemable estrangement borne of an ineradicable racial stain.
In the Habsburg political hierarchies of Galicia and Prussian Poland, Jews, allied with nobility — the guarantors of Jewish integration — helped to muzzle grumblings of Czech and Ukrainian nationalism. Satisfying the multinational empire’s imperative to maintain a favorable balance among rival nationalities, integration was in full swing: urbanization, combined with population and economic booms, fostered a Jewish middle class; solidarity faltered as Jewish communal and religious organs splintered; the state required compulsory secular education and established a central consistory. By 1867, Jews had won constitutionally-enshrined emancipation, realizing the neo-absolutist vision.
Although Jews embraced acculturation, even Magyarizing their names, detractors claimed their assimilation was feigned. Policies of Germanization presuming Jews’ affinity for German culture fed perceptions, enunciated in nationalistic rhetoric, of their role — as tavern keepers especially — in perpetuating rural poverty and oppression. As the Jewish population contracted, its economic position gave way to the Polish and Czech; the Jewish community’s traditional position as mediator between German and Polish societies became indefensible, and its survival precarious. An antisemitic consensus formed amidst the burgeoning Christian middle class, alienated by Jews’ disproportionate success in medical and legal fields. Although a prosperous economy mollified hatred temporarily, acquittal of the Jewish defendant in a highly publicized ritual murder case in 1883 spawned its ferocious paroxysm.
In the Russian Empire under Alexander II, too, the nineteenth century’s penultimate quarter embodied integration. Unlike Austria-Hungary, Russia was a corporative state and without conventional social structures. Tsarist integration of Jews, who had comprised a caste their own in Poland prior to partition and annexation, was thus prescriptive rather than descriptive. This transformation began with a memorandum produced by Pavel Kiselev, director of the Tsar’s Jewish committee. Convinced of the ability of state authority to rationalize society, Kiselev advocated abolition of barriers to the Jews’ rapprochement, contingent on moral and religious reorientation: a state rabbinic certification was formed; Russian curricula alone were taught at secular schools; Jewish costume was forbidden; the Kahal, the Jewish autonomous communal government, was abolished; conscription was extended to Jews; and Jews were categorized according to productivity. “Fanaticism,” as Kiselev called Judaism, and separatism were to be obliterated by state fiat, with Jews selectively integrated.
Selective integration successfully normalized policy by rewarding those Jews who embraced acculturation, engaged in commercialized agriculture trade, or entered Russian schools. These policies were not only bitterly resented, but also had limited impact. Kahalim continued to function as de facto governments. Jewish worshippers shunned graduates of the state rabbinate. Many Jews moved to the reaches of the Pale of Settlement to avoid conscription.
Selective integration failed to distribute acculturation’s benefits evenly by concentrating wealth among the few Russified Jews in a position to seize the opportunities afforded. While selective integration offered the government a Jewish elite with which it could negotiate, it became estranged from a fragmenting Jewry. Rather than emancipating Jews from hierarchical constraint, selective integration sought to appropriate Jews into the Russian sociopolitical mosaic. Hampered by inconsistency in both regional application and in its confused conception of Jews as either a socioeconomic class or a confessional estate, the policy failed.
Rapid economic integration, despite the Jews’ legal and confessional inferiority, necessitated a new paradigm. Grumblings against tsarist failures turned antisemitic and challenged the notion that Jews could be transformed, culminating in violence. In response to pogroms, the government enacted the May Laws, curtailing Jewish freedoms. Progress towards emancipation thus devolved into violence and isolation; residency outside the Pale ended; and accusations of ritual murder resumed. Russian Jewry underwent an internal cultural flowering as its intellectual momentum refocused from an untenable proposition — integration — to nationhood.
The transition from a paradigm of integration to one of antisemitism accurately accounts for forces brought to bear either to make instruments of, or to disenfranchise, Jews for purposes of nation building. It was ultimately Jews’ swift success at integration that prompted their detractors to adopt a racial paradigm — baptism cannot wash away the stain of race. These paradigms accurately capture the momentum of enmity as it moved from integration and acculturation to anti-Semitism and pogrom, and ultimately evolved towards its savage termination.
