Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [882]
SHTETLS UNDER SIEGE
For centuries the Jews of the Russian empire had been channeled, by law and prejudice, into particular spaces and particular functions. Territorially, they had been restricted to the Pale of Settlement, which stretched from the Ukraine on the Black Sea up to Lithuania on the Baltic. Within the Pale Jews had been tied to shtetls—market towns—where they provided services to the surrounding peasantry. Shtetl Jews ran shops and weekly markets; peddled goods to the countryside; administered inns, mills, taverns, and estates; and worked as tailors, cobblers, cabinetmakers, metalworkers, weavers, tanners, watchmakers, and bakers.
Jewish islands in a gentile sea, the shtetls survived through community self-help, disciplined religious devotions, and maintenance of rigid class and gender hierarchies. An elite alliance of learned scholars and the wealthy organized rituals and regulations in the holy language of Hebrew. These leaders looked down on the mass of laborers, denigrating both their trades and their language—a vernacular dialect, just coming to be known as Yiddish, borrowed from German and other European tongues. Lowest in prestige were the women, whose labor made men’s study possible but who were themselves barred from becoming scholars. Wives managed fiscal affairs, worked in markets and shops, peddled, made their own and their children’s clothes, ran the home, performed household religious rituals, and took charge of charity.
The shtetls survived internal strains and external pressures, but imperial liberalization, intended to drag Russia into the Western capitalist world, proved their undoing. Emancipation of the serfs in 1863 undercut Jews who had served as agents of the nobility. Railroads brought the products of urban (particularly German) factories to the Pale, supplanting rough-hewn artisanal output. Trains also brought cheaper grain from faraway markets, debilitating the peasant economy that sustained the shtetls. Citybased commercial and financial enterprises grew, undermining shtetl merchants and moneylenders.
Artisans were hardest hit. Tailors, cobblers, hatmakers—their skills obsolete—found themselves proletarianized. Even with wives and daughters working alongside them, they sank to the status of luftmenschen—men who lived on air—or lower still, to the ranks of the schnorrers (beggars). In some shtetls half the population was dependent on charity. To all this was added an intolerable population squeeze. Where there had been one million Jews in the Pale in 1800, there were a suffocating four million in 1880.
So Jews left the impoverished towns and villages and made their way to industrializing cities like Warsaw, Lodz, Bialystok, and Grodno. Some escapees went farther still, to America, that magical land that apparently respected labor and rejected religious oppression. But very few went to such lengths. The Orthodox rejected it as a trayf (ritually unclean) country, whose Jews had no respect for Orthodox traditions. Russified Jewish radicals preferred to stay and help populists and socialists transform all Russia.
Then came March i, 1881. Czar Alexander’s imperial carriage was rumbling along a St. Petersburg street, flanked by Cossack guards, when a young man threw a bomb among the horses’ legs. Unharmed, Alexander stepped to the street to survey the situation. Now a second man charged him and detonated another bomb, mortally wounding the czar.
The Jewish community of St. Petersburg laid a silver wreath on Alexander’s bier in thanks for his modest lightening of Russia’s oppression of their people. But the assassination touched off