Back to the NJ post-Communist motherlands Reflections of a Jerusalemite historian
Israel Bartal
DOI: 10.30752/nj.86216
Remote celestial stars, celestial stars so close Remote and distant from the watching eye And yet their lights so close to the observer’s heart
‘Remote Celestial Stars’, Jerusalem 1943 (Tchernichovsky 1950: 653), translated by Israel Bartal.
Remote and distant, and yet so close All of them, regardless of date or place, have shared similar sentiments regarding their In his last poem, written in a Greek Orthodox old countries. My thesis is that this was the monastery in Jerusalem in the summer of 1943, case not only for the first generation of East the great Hebrew poet Shaul Tchernichovsky European newcomers; many of those born in (1875–1943) eloquently expounded in some Israel (the ‘second generation’) have continued dozens of lines his life experience. Watching the ambivalent attitude towards their coun- the Mediterranean sky, the Ukrainian-born tries of origin, so beautifully alluded to by the Zionist was reminded of his youth under the Hebrew poet, myself included. skies of Taurida, Crimea and Karelia. His self- Historically speaking, Jewish emigrants examination while watching the Israeli sky from Eastern Europe have been until very brought to his mind views, memories, texts and late in the modern era members of an old ideas from the decades he had lived in Eastern ethno-religious group that lived in a diverse Europe. After some twenty years of separa- multi-ethnic environment in two pre-First tion from his home country, the provinces in World War empires. Several decades of social, imperial Russia still remained intimately close, economic and political upheavals exposed the yet they had turned alien and even frightening. Jewish population to drastic changes (Bartal Tschernichovsky was one out of several thou- 2006: 17–31). These changes led those who left sands of East European Jewish intellectuals, to look back at what had happened as both poets, writers and historians who immigrated involved actors and distant observers. Hence, to the Land of Israel between 1880 and 2019. Israeli historians of East European origin
52 Nordisk judaistik • Scandinavian Jewish Studies | Vol. 31, No. 1 found themselves confronted with a crucial the neighbuorhood’s many Polish immig question: in what way was the past in the rants did their best to speak was German. old country connected (if at all) to the his- When my parents wanted to keep some piece tory of Israel? Or to put it bluntly: how did of information from their children, instead of subjects of the partitioned Polish-Lithuanian Yiddish they spoke Polish – the language they Commonwealth who made up a large ethno- had learned in school in Polish Galicia (now religious body of people end up founding a western Ukraine) in the 1920s and 1930s – with nation-state far away in the Middle East? a thick Yiddish accent. We learned Hebrew at I am a Professor Emeritus at the Hebrew school and spoke it with our peers. Yet Eastern University of Jerusalem. I have studied the his- Europe was ever present in our memories, in tory of Eastern European Jewry for nearly half the Zionist education system’s instruction in a century. My intellectual identity goes beyond Hebrew literature and in the culture of the my academic studies, however. It was formed, youth movements. But at the same time, it first and foremost, by my family background: nevertheless felt rejected, threatening, and the born in a town in western Austro-Hungarian children of my generation, who had been born Galicia, my mother emigrated to Palestine with in Israel, sought to avoid it and everything it her widowed mother as a sixteen-year-old in symbolised. Between 1948 and 1968, elementary 1935. My father hoped to leave the same town school and high-school students continued to to emigrate to Australia in the summer of 1939, study the works of the Haskalah movement, when he boarded a rickety vessel setting out the Jewish Enlightenment, in which Jewish from the Black Sea port of Constanța that May. life in Eastern Europe was depicted as piteous He arrived, penniless, in Eretz Yisrael, losing and disgusting. the pictures of his family members along the The children and grandchildren of the way and leaving me with only one photograph founders of the Yishuv, unlike the early immi- of my grandfather and grandmother. In the grants, were no longer plugged directly into the fall of 1941, most of the town’s Jews were shot shtetl experience. They absorbed the spirit of dead, among them nearly all my paternal and the shtetl from the hostile Hebrew literature maternal relatives. These dry facts make me one that their teachers, born in Eastern Europe, of the hundreds of thousands of Israelis whose crammed into them in their Zionist schools. personal life stories are interwoven with the Accounts of the degeneracy and ugliness of collective biography of the Eastern European Jewish society in the Pale of Settlement by Jews who survived the end of the war. Mendele Moykher Sforim (1836–1917), gar- I was born in the fall of 1946, the height nished with the neo-Romantic tales of I. L. of the struggle waged by the Jewish Yishuv’s Peretz (1852–1915, translated into Hebrew by armed groups against the British, on a day Shimshon Melzer in the 1950s), bequeathed when the British security forces had closed to several generations of Israeli pupils a cast of off the Jewish neighbourhoods of the ‘First characters that was very far from the real world Hebrew City’ (Tel Aviv). I was raised dur- of Russia and Poland. Stereotypes originating ing the earliest years of the State of Israel in in critiques of European Jewish life by expo- a small town east of its largest city, Tel Aviv. nents of the Haskalah movement were thus Yiddish, Polish, Russian, German, Hungarian planted in the soil of the embryonic Israeli cul- and Romanian were the languages I heard ture. Books in Hebrew served young Palestine- on the street. At home my parents spoke born sabras in the Mandate era and Israel’s Yiddish. The language of high culture that first decades as a wide bridge across which
Nordisk judaistik • Scandinavian Jewish Studies | Vol. 31, No. 1 53 knowledge and consciousness that had existed and not only geographically and historically: in Eastern Europe (or had been memorialised throughout much of the twentieth century, as if it had existed there) were brought to the a nearly impenetrable curtain stood between evolving entity in the far-away Middle East. Israel and these countries. The generation of Not until the late 1960s did Israeli schools young Israelis mentioned above, for example, move on from this Eastern European litera- was raised and educated on the products of ture. This was a result, among other things, Soviet culture (literature, children’s books, of the protests of high-schoolers themselves, poetry, film, records and the experience of who formed a movement called ‘Nimrod’ to youth movements in the Land of Israel), and oppose what they considered an archaic and absorbed large portions from its popular cul- ‘exilic’ curriculum. ture, but almost exclusively without any direct Diametrically opposed to this negative engagement with the actual realities of the image affixed to traditional Jewish society was Soviet Union or its satellite states. the one Soviet cultural agents in the Land of I could not have known, while eagerly read- Israel were able to imprint in the consciousness ing the heroic Soviet literature disseminated of my generation: the ideal ‘world of tomor- in Hebrew translation in the 1950s, that it row’, a world many Israeli youngsters – whose was absolute propaganda. I do recall, in 1965, parents had survived genocide in their lands innocently approaching the cultural attaché of of origin – saw taking shape around us. All the Soviet embassy in Ramat Gan to ask for of us (even those in political movements that documentary materials on the Soviet Union in were light-years away from socialism) grew Hebrew for teaching purposes. I have yet to fond of the revolutionary songs made common receive any response. Later I would learn that in the meetings of the youth movements: we only activists in the Israeli Communist Party didn’t know the first thing about the terrible (Maki in its Hebrew acronym) could receive truth behind the magnificent, quasi-Messianic materials from the cultural attaché, since it façade presented by the world’s most sophis- was the only political faction recognised by ticated propaganda machine. Indeed, the two the Soviet régime at the time. Nevertheless, ‘secular Messiahs’ took hold of Israeli culture officers’ course cadets in the IDF at the time and shaped its politics: the national ‘Messiah’ were required to read Panfilov’s Reserve (Bek and the social-radical ‘Messiah’ were connected 1946), a half-fictional depiction of the victory of and became one and the same. Moreover, they a Red Army division in a battle near Moscow would prove difficult to separate from one written by the Soviet author Aleksander Bek. another further along the intellectual path. Unbeknownst to a soul in Israel, by 1948 a The Soviet Union’s part in the defeat of Nazi secret investigation by the Soviet Military Germany was engrained in its favour within Prosecutor had already determined the bulk Israeli collective memory, and remained there of the book’s details on this battle to be com- even after the horrors of Soviet totalitarianism plete journalistic fabrications with no factual were known to the world. basis, not even the names of the participants. It is a shocking historical fact that, though Filled with imaginary memories from places the cultural and political presence of the legacy I had never set foot in and beset by illusions of Eastern Europe was so strong and influen- about a ‘world of tomorrow’ that already did tial in Israel, there was almost no direct con- exist, I made my way to the Hebrew University tact with the former homeland. I grew up in in 1967, only a few weeks after the Six-Day an Israel disconnected from Eastern Europe, War. Jerusalem was then the undisputed
54 Nordisk judaistik • Scandinavian Jewish Studies | Vol. 31, No. 1 academic capital of the to schools of thought young state. The Israeli developed in England historiography I met in and the United States Jerusalem was a prod- only when, after years uct of several migra- in Palestine, they pur- tions – of people, of sued advanced degrees ideas and of memories. at universities in the These were post-crisis West. During the win- migrations: post-rev- ter of 1967, the voices of olutionary, post-war, the pre-eminent histo- post-Holocaust. In rians trained at the best this new place where Central and Eastern they arrived with no European universities intention of returning, could still be heard the immigrants immor- ringing through the talised a memory of lecture halls and semi- Eastern Europe, one nar rooms. These histo- that became further rians, in their teaching and further discon- and research, inculcated nected not only from in their Jerusalemite the destroyed and students much of the annihilated past, but early-twentieth-cen- also from the ongoing tury historiographical events in their lands of tradition that dealt origin. Between the two with the border region world wars, Jewish aca- between the Germans Front cover of the Hebrew translation of demics left their home- A. Bek’s pro-Soviet book and Slavs. lands in large numbers There is no bet- and, while many others were not so lucky, many ter example of the impact of these found- were scattered around the academic world ing fathers on Israeli historiography than between New York, Oxford and Jerusalem. the ‘transplantation’ of research on German A large group of young Jews, graduates of the military orders that settled in Slavic territo- gymnasia of Eastern Europe who had been ries onto the research on the Land of Israel. issued immigration permits by the British Professor Richard Koebner (1885–1958), one Mandate government, began studying at the of the founders of the history department Hebrew University in the late 1930s. at the Hebrew University, after being forced Several of these students, whose lives had to abandon his position at the University of effectively been saved by this move, would Breslau (Wrocław) in 1934 with the Nazi rise become my teachers in the 1960s. Several to power, found a position as professor at the professors who taught at the Jerusalem cam- new campus on Mount Scopus. One of his pus had better Polish or Russian than Hebrew finest students, Joshua Prawer (1917–1990), was or English. Their intellectual world had been born in Będzin, Poland, a graduate of a Polish shaped first and foremost in a Polishgymna - gymnasium who came to Jerusalem as a student sium or Soviet high school. They were exposed with an immigration permit from the Mandate
Nordisk judaistik • Scandinavian Jewish Studies | Vol. 31, No. 1 55 authorities. He is Israel had an enor- regarded today as one mous impact on the of the founding fig- nascent national cul- ures in research on the ture. They brought to 1 Crusades in Israel. the country hundreds Prawer describes in his of thousands of expa- short autobiographical triates from Warsaw, sketch how Professor Vilnius, Odessa and Koebner suggested other towns where the ‘transplanting’ research new Hebrew culture, on the Teutonic cru- the offshoots of which saders who settled in had been replanted Poland onto his study in the Middle East, of the Crusader colo- Hebrew University Mt Scopus campus, before 1948 had taken shape. This nisation of the Holy population of Jews, Land (Prawer 1990). however, was differ- Most of my teachers on Mount Scopus ent, distinct from the generation of David were of Prawer’s generation. In the hallways, Ben-Gurion (1886–1973), Vladimir Jabotinsky behind their backs, they earned the titled ‘the (1880–1940) and Ber Borochov (1881–1917). Polish mafia’. Among the teachers of Jewish The immigrants who streamed from Eastern history were those who persisted in variations Europe to Israel after the end of the Second of the radical-national tradition of research on World War did not resemble, in their demo- Eastern European Jewry that had flourished in graphic makeup and social nature, the mem- Poland and the Baltic countries between the bers of the 1881–1939 migrations that had set two world wars. The lectures and seminars they the New Yishuv in motion. In historical terms, taught in history, literature, Hebrew, Yiddish one may divide post-Second World War immi- and other humanities offered us an intellectual gration to Israel into two cultural and linguistic path into Eastern Europe. At the time, this was stages: the ‘Polish’ stage, mainly 1949–68, and a replacement for the actual historical and geo- the ‘Russian’ stage, starting a few years after graphical journey between the imagined Old the Six-Day War. Between the 1940s and the Country so engrained in the collective con- 1970s, most of those reaching Israel were refu- sciousness of our little Mediterranean land and gees who had been displaced during the war the actual times and places of Eastern Europe and the Holocaust and had lost relatives and before the Holocaust. property, and their social and cultural under- The semi-permeable Iron Curtain pinnings. Nearly all of them, after emerging from the Israeli melting pot, joined political The waves of Jewish emigration from Eastern and cultural systems that their counterparts Europe that swamped the fledgling State of from earlier aliyot had established. Although Polish and Russian were com- 1 Prawer’s major works in the field:Histoire du mon vernaculars in Israeli towns and villages in royaume latin de Jérusalem (1969); The Latin the 1950s and 1960s, the cultural baggage that Kingdom of Jerusalem: European Colonialism the new arrivals had brought received neither in the Middle Ages (1972); The World of the Crusaders (1972); The History of the Jews in prestige nor recognition from the establish- the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem (1988). ment. Many Holocaust refugees in Eastern
56 Nordisk judaistik • Scandinavian Jewish Studies | Vol. 31, No. 1 Europe had returned from the USSR to Poland of immigrants – refugees who had arrived a in the mid-1950s, and nearly all members of few years earlier from the transit camps hous- this group came from areas that the Russian ing the survivors of the Holocaust in Central Empire controlled until after the First World Europe and in Cyprus, from the countries of War – the interwar nation-states that the the Mediterranean basin and from the post- empire, in its Soviet incarnation, re-annexed. Second World War ‘People’s democracies’. The In fledgling Israel, no influential mass move- surviving members of my father’s family, who ments or large political parties came into had found refuge in the Soviet Union during being that preached the preservation of the the war, arrived in Israel in early 1957. The large East European linguistic and cultural legacy Polish- and Hungarian-speaking contingents (in contrast with the large emigration destina- in Israel increased by a significant number. A tions in Western Europe and the Americas). further wave of immigration, smaller in num- Nor did additional political parties emerge ber, came in 1968 with the increasingly anti- that expressed a secular messianic vision in semitic tendencies of the Polish authorities. the spirit of the human engineering that the Immigration from the USSR from the Enlightenment heritage, in its radical East 1970s onwards, meanwhile, brought to Israel European metamorphosis, advocated. Just the nearly a million people who were second-, same, writers and poets in Israel continued to third- or fourth-generation carriers of Russian nurture their culture and language and write culture – an imperial culture in Soviet guise. in Yiddish and Polish without striving to earn The huge numbers of Russophone immigrants official state recognition. In the Tel Aviv of my who adhered to the language and culture, with childhood it was still possible to imagine that which they identified, acted collectively to viti- one was in interwar Warsaw. ate the discourse of the Hebrew-Zionist politi- The image of Eastern Europe that runs cal culture that had enjoyed hegemonic status through my historical research was shaped in Israel’s early years. in large part by encounters with the different Most Israeli academics specialising in the generations of its emigrants. Throughout the study of Eastern Europe – both those deal- history of immigration to the young State of ing with the history of Jews in those regions Israel I spoke of earlier, those who left that and those working on other topics – took it world behind (or their progeny) periodically upon themselves, soon after the founding of encountered those who had stayed behind, and the state, to maintain some connection to the joined a few years later. When the Red Army large Jewish community located behind the repressed the Hungarian uprising in the fall Iron Curtain. As historians who identified of 1956, for example, thousands of Jews fled to some degree with the ideas of the Jewish to Western countries. Many of them came to national movement, our connection with that Israel. A couple of months later, the new Polish community went without saying. I, too, took party secretary, Władysław Gomułka, permit- an active part in this initiative, which operated ted Jews to leave the country if their destina- almost exclusively through secretive channels tion was Israel. Some 35,000 Jews, including until the late 1980s. The opening of the Soviet many from the Soviet Union who were for- Union to selective emigration in the early mer Polish citizens, emigrated. Overnight, this 1970s contributed to projects of collection, added scores of Eastern Europeans to the small documentation, and research on contemporary community in the State of Israel, where more East European Jews. Among these, particularly than half the population was already made up remarkable was a wide-ranging initiative to
Nordisk judaistik • Scandinavian Jewish Studies | Vol. 31, No. 1 57 survey the Soviet print media for information of the Soviet regime, I saw a copy of this Israeli 2 4 regarding Jews. Red Book in the private library of a colleague. In 1988, the first issue of a new scholarly, A few years later, chapters from this Red Book peer-reviewed English-language journal, Jews were required reading in the history classes I in Russia and Eastern Europe, appeared. This taught at Moscow State University. was published by the Hebrew University of For Israelis, a further stage in the loosening Jerusalem until 2008. It enjoyed a respected of the Iron Curtain (at least as far as historical reputation in the field of East European research was concerned) came in the late 1970s. Jewish studies. At the same time, an industry At the time, relatively free scientific meetings of Russian-language publications meant for were permitted between Israeli scholars and underground distribution among millions of their colleagues in Poland and Hungary, lead- Soviet Jews continued to grow. A significant ing to the first initiatives to hold joint scientific quantity of this material consisted of reprints conferences for those on both sides of the Iron of the best historiographical literature from the Curtain. At the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, period predating the Bolshevik Revolution, as a centre for the study of Polish Jewry and its well as translations of the best contemporary culture was founded and worked energetically Israeli historiography. Tens of thousands of to institutionalise these scientific contacts. Two copies of these essays, printed on especially conferences that began what would become a thin paper as pocket-sized books, reached the series of academic meetings that continue to 5 Soviet Union. Especially worth mentioning in this day were held not in Israel or in Eastern 6 this regard is the Russian translation/adapta- Europe, but in the USA and England. In tion of the classic collective essay written by my the spring of 1984, only a few years before the teachers from the Zionist school of historio collapse of the Communist regimes in Eastern 3 graphy (the Jerusalem School). A History Europe, I set foot for the first time behind the of the Jewish People, published in Hebrew in Iron Curtain. A large group of historians and 1969, was being read in the Soviet Union no scholars of Jewish literature and culture from later than 1972 by many people, in the form the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, many of of an 872-page Russian text (Эттингер 1972)! whom had participated in these conferences Students in Jerusalem called this ‘the Red at Oxford and Columbia, organised a journey Book’ not because of the political leanings of to Poland to meet colleagues at the universi- its authors, but rather because of its binding, ties of Warsaw and Krakow. Most members a red not so different from another booklet known by the same name, the collection of 4 His forbidden books had been kept hidden Chairman Mao quotations that millions of for decades behind thick volumes of editions Chinese were memorising at just this time. of the complete works of classic Russian When I arrived in Moscow after the collapse literature. 5 See the recently published comprehensive chronological description and analysis of 2 Jews and Jewish Topics in the Soviet Union the renewal of academic contacts between and Eastern Europe, 1985–92. Israel and Poland in the field of Jewish studies 3 The Jerusalem School emerged simultane- (Polonsky et al. 2018: xi–lvi). ously in Germany and the Russian Empire. 6 Poles and Jews, Myth and Reality in the Its founders moved to Palestine in the 1920s. Historical Context, Columbia University, For critical studies on Zionist historiography March 1983; Polish-Jewish Relations in Palestine/Israel see Shmueli 1986: 147–78; in Modern History, Oxford University, Myers 2009: 389–406. September 1984.
58 Nordisk judaistik • Scandinavian Jewish Studies | Vol. 31, No. 1 of the delegation had been born in Eastern David Green (Ben-Gurion), born in Płońsk, Europe and emigrated to Palestine before Poland, who would become the first prime the Second World War, or had survived the minister of the State of Israel. Now a young horrors of the Holocaust and arrived in the and ambitious leader in Palestine, he had left young State of Israel. They included the great the tsarist empire several years before its fall scholar of Yiddish literature Professor Chone and returned in 1923, as a temporary guest, Shmeruk (1921–97), who escaped a bombed- to a Soviet Union taking its very first steps. out Warsaw in September 1939 and spent the In his diary he described his encounter with war years in the Soviet Union; the scholar of the magnitude of the change undergone by Hebrew literature Professor Shmuel Werses Jewish society across only a few years of war (1915–2010), a native of Vilnius who came to and revolution, his Zionist-socialist point of Jerusalem as a student in the 1930s; and the view serving as a filter, organising, sorting and Holocaust scholar Israel Gutman (1923–2013), interpreting every moment (Ben-Gurion 1971: 7 once a member of Hashomer Hatzair youth 220 ff.). group in Warsaw, where he fought in the Likewise, many men and women left the Ghetto uprising and came to Palestine as a Soviet Union shortly after the Bolshevik ‘pioneer’ and founding member of a kibbutz in Revolution and returned, this time to Moscow, the far north, on the Syrian border. No Polish on diplomatic missions in the late 1940s. In visas were stamped in our Israeli passports, their writings one also finds a convergence which was de rigueur in the dictatorships of of shock at the enormous scale of change in Eastern Europe under the authority of the the regions of their birth, with signs of the Soviet superpower. We were placed under con- intellectual-political layer in which they pack- stant surveillance by unidentified individuals, aged the experience of their visit. The senior and even our hosts’ apprehension was apparent colleagues with whom I travelled to Poland in in their cautious words. 1984 were no different. Meeting directly what When I first set foot on Polish soil, it remained of the great destruction – of people, occurred to me that each generation of Eastern organisations, streets and buildings – laid bare European émigré (whether they were born before me the painful force and full meaning of there or were raised by parents from Poland, the term ‘genocide’. Still more painful was the Ukraine or Belarus) experiences its return to unbearable shape of the memory of millions the uprooted past differently. I myself could of Polish citizens of Jewish descent murdered not actually remember anything from the Old during the war, as transmitted by the political Country of my parents. The landscapes may and cultural discourse fostered by the state. have been familiar to me from fading, yel- Academic cooperation with Polish col- lowed photographs. Everything I touched or leagues and institutions developed quickly. smelled was familiar, again, merely from what A large international conference devoted to I had heard or read. My senior colleagues, who Jewish history was held in the summer of 1986, 8 were born and raised in that world and cut off the first of its kind on Polish territory. Some from it for several decades, were astounded at the gap between what they remembered 7 and what they encountered. As I write this, I For a recent evaluation of Ben Gurion’s 1923 trip to the Soviet Union see Segev 2018: 174–9. recall the writings of those who, long before 8 Jewish Autonomy in Pre-Partition Poland, me, returned from Palestine to the homelands Jagiellonian University, Kraków, September of their childhood, for example the words of 1986.
Nordisk judaistik • Scandinavian Jewish Studies | Vol. 31, No. 1 59 First of May pro-Soviet demonstration in Tel Aviv, 1949 two years later, another international confer- ence was held at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem that attracted many Polish histori- 9 First of May Hebrew broadsheet of the pro-Soviet ans. The direct contact with our colleagues Zionist Labor Party (Mapam) from Poland, which only strengthened over time, aroused tense intellectual discussions and in countries that were under the Soviet scourge led to intense arguments. A young generation until 1989, I had watched the thaw taking place of scholars unfamiliar first hand with the range in the USSR in the 1980s optimistically. The of views and complex relations between Jews Iron Curtain was punctured even in the USSR and other ethnic groups existing in Eastern itself. Everything we had entertained in our Europe gained its first glimpse into a socio- wildest imagination swiftly gained momen- cultural reality of which it had been only tum; overnight we found the entire enormous vaguely conscious. The final conference in this empire open before us. series marked the transition from the pre-1989 situation into a new period beginning with the 1989 – The Great Exodus fall of the Communist regimes. It took place The great exodus from the former Soviet ter- in a free Poland in an atmosphere of euphoria, ritories expedited a historical process that had where representatives from across the world begun in the second half of the nineteenth cen- celebrated freedom of speech and academic 10 tury. In 1959, some 2,300,000 Jews lived in the research. In parallel to what I experienced Soviet Union. Thirty years later, as the Soviet regime began to fall, 1,500,000 remained. In 9 The International Conference on the History 2000, only 500,000 remained. Between 1983 and Culture of Polish Jews, Jerusalem, 31 and 2006, about 1.6 million Jews left the for- January to 5 February 1988. mer Soviet Union. Roughly a million of them 10 Polish Jews in Polish and World Historiography, The Jagiellonian University, reached Israel, 325,000 settled in the United Kraków, September 1990. States and 220,000 relocated to Germany.
60 Nordisk judaistik • Scandinavian Jewish Studies | Vol. 31, No. 1 Nearly all of the hundreds of thousands of and during the eruption of revolutions in 1917 émigrés from the imperial territories, offspring – they had been confiscated in the early days of the largest Jewish collective in the world, of Soviet rule and locked away for generations today reside in Israel, North America and – were also exposed. The fall of the walls that Western Europe. separated the community of historians in the Thus, as had happened a hundred years West from the objects of their research in the earlier, a new Jewish diaspora consisting of East, therefore, made for a true revolution with immigrants from Eastern Europe has formed regards to the availability of source materials. in the West and in Israel. The cultural legacy I will never forget the great excitement that that the masses of post-Soviet émigrés brought gripped my Israeli colleagues, military histo- from Eastern Europe to the new destina- rians, when the Czech military made avail- tion countries has added another tile to the able to them, without any limitations, archival mosaic of Jewish identities at the dawn of the materials from the days of the Israeli War of twenty-first century. It is a diverse multilingual Independence (1948–9). Documents we had and multicultural mosaic. Some of its main not dared to dream of – including detailed roots hearken to centuries of Polish and/or information on what took place behind the Russian-Jewish experience in Vilnius, Krakow, scenes on the Soviet side – landed on our Warsaw, Moscow, St Petersburg, Kiev, Odessa desks in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Matters to and Minsk. Within this mosaic, the Eastern do with the history of political parties, move- European community in the Middle Eastern ments and military organisations that played a nation-state continues to carry the residues of decisive role in the development of the Yishuv the culture of vanished empires. in Palestine came to light, and what had been With the collapse of the Soviet Union, all considered secret and inexplicable became the dams broke at once: within a few years, common topics for theses written by gradu- Israeli historians (myself included) were ate students at Israeli universities. examining archives and libraries throughout Yet far more influential was the revolution Eastern Europe. After seven decades of isola- prompted by the collapse of the Soviet giant tion between Israeli historians and the pri- on the historical perspective from which Israeli mary sources necessary to their research in the historians could now examine twentieth-century archives of Warsaw, Prague, St Petersburg and Jewish history. The fall of this, thesecond totali- Moscow, the new wave of documents was cele tarian regime to nearly destroy the largest com- brated in Jerusalem and in Tel Aviv. This was munity of Jews in the world (the first, of course, a multi-period and multi-disciplinary erup- being the German National Socialist regime), tion: eighteenth-century community minute made painfully visible a further chapter in a books last examined by scholars of Simon centuries-old history. While the Soviet Union Dubnow’s generation were simply placed in stood, there were those who continued believ- front of us, especially as we grew accustomed ing – on the basis of political beliefs regarding to the working methods of archivists who, the ongoing presence of Jews as a distinct ethnic now free from the constraints of a totalitarian group within a multi-national empire – that regime, changed their institutional customs there was a future for the millions of Jews living rather more slowly. in Eastern Europe. What happened in 1989 has Alongside these documents from the dis- seemed, to some historians, a breaking point tant past, the protocols of Jewish political par- marking the end of the Eastern European period ties from the days of the raging storm before in the course of Jewish history.
Nordisk judaistik • Scandinavian Jewish Studies | Vol. 31, No. 1 61 Against the background of the collapse the critical historian who travels through the of the totalitarian regimes came the prospect provinces he is studying is equipped with of reviving the formidable historical research tools that enable him to question the cur- that, in Russia, had wilted with the revolutions rently accepted image(s) of the past. The image and almost disappeared within a decade of of the past, either dictated by the regime or 1917. Where these traditions did survive else- directed by the market, challenges the histo- where in Eastern Europe, they were severely rian’s individual sense of ‘space’ and of ‘time’. damaged during the Second World War and The historian strives to see and understand the survived only in a limited, official and super- different layers of the historical process without vised capacity within the ‘people’s demo allowing those who control the upper layer cracies’. The students of the students of the – the newest one, chronologically speaking – historians from the period before the Second to determine his understanding of what was. World War, who saw themselves as regenerat- Moreover, an ‘outsider’ historian, who knows ing an extinct historiographical project, strove a story of the history of the Jews in Eastern to some degree to come full circle, returning Europe completely different from the one(s) to prewar topics. Israeli and Western scholars being told today in Russia or in Poland, can- more or less identified with the national per- not stand patiently by in the face of the gaps spective on cultural research mobilised in between these stories. pursuit of this idea, which today seems to me Why is the Jewish historian so reluctant somewhat naive and devoid of any connection to buy current images of the past? Surely it to the post-Soviet cultural reality. They were is due to his or her sobering observation that joined by scholars from the leading universities ideology has impacted Jewish history in ways of the former Soviet Union. These scholars no one could foresee. In the early twentieth were the first to initiate a renewal of scientific century, Jews of various political parties strove research, instruction and publication in the to realise a variety of political visions of the Russian language. future. Zionists disagreed with members of Between 1998 and 2003, I took part in edit- the Bund and the Orthodox struggled with ing a scholarly publication in Russian, Vestnik, the liberals. Each prophesied a version of published by the Institute of Jewish Studies the future – but not a single one of the long- at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and forgotten visions of those different camps the State University of Moscow (MGU). I alone can explain the totality of what ended concurrently headed the Judaic Studies pro- up transpiring. Nevertheless, many historians gramme that opened at Moscow. Now located (my Jerusalem professors included), studying in that part of the world from which my par- the overwhelming changes undergone by the ents had been uprooted more than eighty years Jewish community in the twentieth century, ago, researching, instructing and overseeing have often been tempted (and remain so) to academic publications, I followed the post- see in it the realisation of one or another of Soviet demographic, social and cultural trends those past visions. This is because the national impacting the Jewish community closely. ideologies and the political radicalism of the Changing perspectives, new modes aforementioned political strains in fact estab- lished modern historical research into the past Let me share with you some of my thoughts of Eastern European Jewry. regarding the impact of 1989 on the future of The whole range of Jewish political move- Jewish historiography. I have no doubt that ments was formed within the course of a few
62 Nordisk judaistik • Scandinavian Jewish Studies | Vol. 31, No. 1 years, around the turn of the twentieth century, Sober historical examination of what the and promptly attracted thousands of Jews in Jews of Eastern Europe underwent with the the multi-ethnic empires. Such growth was rise and the fall of the political regimes that built in no small part by new historical research, decided their fate throughout the twentieth and at the same time fostered and fed such century relies, in the opinion of a veteran research. On the eve of the First World War Jerusalemite historian like me, upon complete a diverse historiography in German, Russian, separation from teleological narratives. Such Polish, Yiddish and Hebrew was flourishing in a separation was made possible for the first unprecedented scope and quality. Branches of time with the fall of the Soviet Union, which this political-minded historiography reached took place alongside the decline of the ‘grand the coasts of America and the cultural centres narratives’ of Western historiography. of the renewed Yishuv in Palestine. I myself It is not my intention to propose a ‘revolt’ was effectively a member of the third genera- against the Jerusalem historical school, the one tion of the branch of Jewish historiography guided by the Zionist meta-narrative. I hope that spread to Jaffa and to Jerusalem from St rather to advance another interpretation of Petersburg, Moscow, Kiev, Odessa, Warsaw this historiographical tradition. The history and Lviv. of Eastern European Jewry as it is taught and There was a heavy scholarly price to be researched today – thirty years after the fall of paid for the love affair between historiog- the totalitarian regimes – ought to be written raphy and politics that sprouted from the not from the teleological-messianic perspec- Jewish intellectual circles of Eastern Europe: tive of one who purports to predict the future ideology often trumped critical examination but from that of the historian recognising of historical sources. Moreover, several of the that what has transpired has already transpired. ideological assumptions inherent in the writing My understanding is that what transpired in of this new history (whether national, social- Jewish history had very little to do with the all- radical or both national and radical in various knowing versions of the future that messianic combinations) were engaged in a dangerous long-forgotten visionaries had once preached, dialogue with the political tendencies taking and which prophets of doom had once foreseen shape between the Revolution of 1905 and the as a certainty. In other words, the time has formation of the Communist regimes after the come for historical research to moderate, as Second World War. From the mid-nineteenth much as possible, both its eagerness and urge century to 1989, research into the history of towards determinism, and the tyranny of the the Jews in Eastern Europe, beginning with anachronistic. the partitions of Poland in the late eighteenth For me as a veteran Jerusalemite historian century, was bent to adhere to expressly tele- returning to the provinces of his research thirty ological – at times quasi-messianic – political years after the fall of the Soviet Empire, the narratives. To the great detriment of various contemporary reality is the starting point for ethnic groups living in the region, there were my understanding of the historical narrative of those who sought to turn these narratives into Eastern European Jewry. What has transpired facts on the ground: in this way, the political in this part of the continent over the past three messiahs rose up against both their creators decades seems to me to mark the almost com- and their believers, in addition to those who plete end of a nearly nine-hundred-year-old had rejected their visions or challenged them chapter in the history of the Jewish people: a by their very existence. people that had existed as an ethno-religious
Nordisk judaistik • Scandinavian Jewish Studies | Vol. 31, No. 1 63 body for several centuries, well into early twen- Jahrbuch des Simon-Dubnow-Instituts, 5, pp. tieth century, but hardly survived the chal- 17–31. Bek, Aleksander, 1946. Anshey Panfilov [Panfilov’s lenges of modernity in the last hundred years. Reserve] (Merhav’ya, Hakibbutz Hameuchad One of the most obvious conclusions to draw Publishing House). from this interpretation is to recognise that – Ben Gurion, David, 1971. Zikhronot [Memoires], though hundreds of thousands of Jews may vol. 1 (Tel Aviv, Am Oved Publishing House). live in this area – that what was the largest Myers, David N., 2009. ‘Is there still a ‘Jerusalem School?’ Reflections on the state of Jewish and most important Jewish community in the historical scholarship in Israel’, Jewish History, world until 1939 reached its final phase in 1989. 23, pp. 389–406. What remains is but a modest epilogue, not Polonsky, Antony, Hanna Węgrzynek and Andrzej necessarily a continuation, of a magnificent Z. Bikowski (eds.), 2018. ‘Introduction’, in New Directions in the History of Jews in the Polish but settled history. Lands (Boston, MA, American Studies Press), Thirty years after the disintegration of the pp. xi–lvi. USSR, the time has come for a new historio- Prawer, Joshua, 1990. [Deceased Members:] graphic mode. Mass emigration and a dramatic ‘Prof. Joshua Prawer’ [Hebrew] [The Israel depletion of the Jewish population of Eastern Academy of Sciences and Humanities],
Israel Bartal is Johns Hopkins, McGill, University of Professor Emeritus Pennsylvania and Rutgers, as well as at of Jewish History, the Moscow State University, Paideia and the former (Stockholm), and the Central European Dean of the Faculty University in Budapest. He is the author of Humanities of The Jews of Eastern Europe. 1772– at the Hebrew 1881 (University of Pennsylvania Press, University of 2005, 2006; published also in Hebrew, Jerusalem (2006– Russian and German); ‘The Establishment 10). He served as of East European Jewry’, The Cambridge the Chair of the History of Judaism, vol. VII: The Early Modern Historical Society Period (1500–1815), ed. Jonathan Karp and of Israel (2007–15). Since 2016 he has Adam Sutcliffe (Cambridge, 2018, pp. 226– been a member of the Israel Academy of 56), and Tangled Roots: The Emergence of Sciences. Prof. Bartal taught at Harvard, Israeli Culture (Brown University, 2020).
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