The Fiddler On The Roof Town of Odessa Shtetls and Their Lives With Russian Anti-Semites Causing Pogroms

 Nadene Goldfoot                                                 

Members of the Jewish Labour Bund with bodies of their comrades killed in Odessa during the Russian revolution of 1905.  This Bund was "General Federation of Jewish Workers in Lithuania, Poland, and Russia.  They were from the Jewish Socialist Party, founded at a conference in Vilna in 1897, out of the Jewish workers' movement which had existed in Russia from the end of the 1880's.  It served at first as both a trade union and a political party, struggling for better working conditions and for popular education, especially in social problems.  They were outlawed in Czarist Russia and members were severely punished if discovered by the police.  

The 1905 Pogrom of Odessa was the worst anti-Jewish pogrom in Odessa's history. Between 18 and 22 October 1905, ethnic Russians, Ukrainians, and Greeks killed over 400 Jews and damaged or destroyed over 1600 Jewish properties.

The Russian Revolution of 1905, also known as the First Russian Revolution, was a wave of mass political and social unrest that spread through vast areas of the Russian Empire.  The 1905 revolution was primarily spurred by the international humiliation as a result of the Russian defeat in the Russo-Japanese War, which ended in the same year. Late in the night on February 8, 1904, Japan launched a surprise attack against the Russian-held Port Arthur, along the coast of Manchuria, beginning the Russo-Japanese War. Russia faced many defeats as it battled Japan while also fighting a revolution on the home front.

       Nicholas II or Nikolai II Alexandrovich Romanov, known in the Russian Orthodox Church as Saint Nicholas the Passion-Bearer, was the last Emperor of Russia, King of Congress Poland and Grand Duke of Finland, ruling from 1 November 1894 until his abdication on 15 March 1917, end of WWI.  On 1 March 1881, following the assassination of his grandfather, Tsar Alexander II, Nicholas became heir apparent upon his father's accession as Alexander III.                                              

                     Tsar Nicholas II family portrait On 1 March 1881, following the assassination of his grandfather, Tsar Alexander II, Nicholas became heir apparent upon his father's accession as Alexander III.

 The mass unrest was directed against the Tsar alongside the nobility and ruling class.  The Russian Imperial Romanov family (Nicholas II of Russia, his wife Alexandra Feodorovna, and their five children: Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia, and Alexei) were shot and bayoneted to death by Bolshevik revolutionaries under Yakov Yurovsky on the orders of the Ural Regional Soviet in Yekaterinburg on the night of 16–17 July 1918.  Tsar Nicholas II enacted some constitutional reform (namely the October Manifesto). This took the form of establishing the State Duma, the multi-party system, and the Russian Constitution of 1906.                                             

     Women and children in the shtetl of Czortkow, Ukraine. (photo: Alter Kacyzne)

Previous pogroms occurred in 1821, 1859, 1871 and 1881.   These earlier incidents were thought to be a result of "frictions unleashed by modernization according to Jarrod Tanny, historian," rather than by a resurgence of medieval antisemitism, but the 1905 pogrom was definitely caused by anti-Semitism.  I'd say they all had been, and modernization really should have been a determent, and a prevention, not a cause.  Whatever were the Russians thinking that modernization actually meant?  Getting rid of the Jews?  

Jews were under unbelievable penalties for being of another faith in Russia.  About 600 oppressive enactments regarding the Jews were published during the reign of Nicholas I who regard them as an injurious element.  In 1827, military service was brutally imposed on Jews and young teen-age boys were taken into the army, called Cantonists; maybe meaning fodder for the canons?  One of several reasons was to dispel them from their Jewish families.  The frontiers of land called "The Pale of Settlement," land where Jews were allowed to live, was restricted in 1835 and remained effective until 1915.  A censorship was imposed on Jewish books in 1836, and in 1844, the Kahal (Jewish congregation having autonomous rights and responsible for taxation) was abolished; 

Czar Alexander II tried to Russify the Jews by education and gradually relaxed the restrictions, while the judicial law of 1864 contained no further anti-Jewish discrimination than already existed.  At this time, 65,000 Russian Jews were engaged in agriculture.  Jews became prominent in economics, culture, and left-wing politics;  social anti-Semitism now began to replace or reinforce the former religious prejudices. To me, anti-Semitism is that, regardless of original reasoning.  It's abhorrent and inexcusable.                            

                                Family portrait:  

As luck would have it, the well-meaning Alexander II was assassinated  in 1881 and this made the Jews chief victims. On 13 March [1 March, Old Style], 1881, Alexander II, the Emperor of Russia, was assassinated in Saint Petersburg, Russia while returning to the Winter Palace from Mikhailovsky Manège in a closed carriage.                    

 Main assassin organizer Andrei Zhelyabov, former Odessa law student kicked out for membership in student unrests, was hung with his wife and other Kiev student rebels. it was said he had been arrested a few days before the attack but was the accused assassin anyway.  He was not Jewish.    

The assassination was planned by the Executive Committee of Narodnaya Volya, chiefly by Andrei Zhelyabov. He had reigned from 1855 to 1881 and had alleviated some of the anti-Jewish decrees of his father, Nicholas I, and this encouraged emancipatory elements in Russian Jewry.    

      The Mir Shtetl  

Appalling pogroms of the early 1880's were the result, influencing the official view regarding the Jews as a foreign element to be kept apart from the village population which was expressed in the MAY LAWS. As for being foreigners, Jews had been living in Russian land since the 900s if not before.   

Czar Alexander III implemented the May Laws in 1882, which isolated Russian Jews even further. Under these laws, they were not allowed to live anywhere outside of shtetls and nearby towns. They also had to follow some Christian customs, such as closing businesses on Sundays and Christian holidays. This new law resulted in poverty and hunger amongst the Jewish community. Originally, regulations of May 1882 were intended only as temporary measures until a future revision of the laws concerning the Jews but remained in effect for more than thirty years.

Shtetls were isolated from other vibrant towns and cities in Russia, as they were located on the western border of Russia. Russian Jews were ordered to live in these run-down areas by Catherine the Great in 1791 due to business competition and the increase of anti-Semitism. They became the home for Russian Jews and others for over a century. 
                                    

Although shtetl means little town, history shows that hundreds and thousands of people could live in one shtetl together in very crowded conditions. Shtetls usually were made up of wooden houses, synagogues, study houses, a marketplace, and a Jewish cemetery. Because Russia was trying to drive out the Jews, some Christian churches could’ve also been found in shtetls. Shtetls were ran under a kahal, which means “community council." History also shows that Jews were not the only groups of people living in shtetls. Many non-Jews lived in shtetls, too. Because of this, no shtetl was a spitting image to another. Each shtetl was distinct in terms of dialect, politics, etc.
                                   

As the Russians feared that Jews were interfering with the country’s progress, the Jews were even more scared of the Russian government while they lived in shtetls. The Russian government would invade the shtetls and destroy homes and businesses at any time they pleased. These organized riots were known as pogroms, and they were so violent that they often led to injuries and deaths within the Russian Jewish community. Jews were never at ease while living in shtetls because a pogrom by the Russian government could happen at any minute.  

Resource:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1905_Russian_Revolution#:~:text=The%20Russian%20Revolution%20of%201905,the%20nobility%20and%20ruling%20class.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odessa_pogroms#:~:text=The%201905%20Pogrom%20of%20Odessa,destroyed%20over%201600%20Jewish%20properties.

https://www.stnj.org/explore/magazine/article/19-12-09-Fiddler-Russia-Scene-Notes

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Execution_of_the_Romanov_family#:~:text=The%20Russian%20Imperial%20Romanov%20family,Yekaterinburg%20on%20the%20night%20of

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jarrod_Tanny