The Dramatic Transformation of Every Aspect of Life

The Throes of Global Capitalism and Mass Migration

Around the world, many Jews, perhaps most, experienced the years 1880 to 1918 as a period of dramatic transformations in every aspect of life. In demographic and economic terms, the great concentrations of world Jewry in Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean world were drawn, painfully, into the main streams of an increasingly global capitalism. In both those regions, a significant minority benefited from new business and professional opportunities while a larger part—particularly in the ever-burgeoning East European Jewish population of some six million to seven million—faced pauperization as its traditional economic niches collapsed. Thus, many chose to join the mass migrations that convulsed both regions. 

By 1914, more than two million Jews had left Eastern Europe—Russian Poland and Ukraine, Austrian Galicia, Romania—for North and South America as well as for Western Europe, South Africa, and Australia; tens of thousands of North African and Ottoman Jews flowed to the New World too, even as others flowed into British-controlled Egypt, making it proportionally as much an immigrant Jewish society as the United States. Fatefully, the migration of some 1.5 million Jews to the United States implanted one of the largest Jewish communities in the world into a functioning democratic republic relatively open to merit—as long as one was deemed white—and particularly in New York, the economic and cultural dynamo of the country’s emergence as a global power. 

On a far smaller scale, yet with profound implications for subsequent Jewish history, some thousands of Jews from Eastern Europe settled in Ottoman Palestine in the service of newly minted Zionist ideas of national revival. And those who remained at home did not necessarily remain in place. Economic forces drove Jews to cities. Even as New York became home to the largest urban Jewish population in history, Jews also flowed en masse into numerous “Old World” cities. By 1914, Jews made up a full third of the population of Baghdad and Warsaw alike, a full 50 percent of Jews in the Russian Empire lived in urban centers with more than one hundred thousand people, the Jewish population of Sigmund Freud’s Vienna had quadrupled in a few decades—and this pattern was repeated around the world.

Turn-of-the-Century Political Developments by Region

Western and Central Europe

Politically, this period also witnessed a profound recasting of Jewish political conditions. In Western and Central Europe, a decades-long emancipation process was now essentially completed and Jewish sociocultural integration seemed irreversible. Yet integration gave birth to new forms of rejection. In Britain, barriers to Jewish social integration even at the highest levels continued to fall, but the once famously open island kingdom precociously closed its doors to East European Jewish immigration at the turn of the century. In Germany and France, Jews enjoyed political and social integration as never before; yet there also took shape—in crosscurrents of racial theory, hostility toward East European Jewish immigrants, and the general pains of social and cultural upheaval—a newly far-reaching secular antisemitism that framed Jews as essentially inimical to society. 

In the Middle East and Mediterranean

In the Middle East and Mediterranean regions, the Jewish political situation was shaped not only by local forces in state and society, but also by the dynamics peculiar to the age of West European imperial power in those zones. In North Africa, where Jewish life had long been closely interwoven with that of Muslims, direct and expanding French rule (and, in Egypt, somewhat less direct British rule) brought actual European citizenship to some Jews and various kinds of extraterritorial European legal status to many others—among the better-off. In the Ottoman-ruled Arab Levant from Syria through Palestine and into Iraq, Jewish horizons were reshaped in crosscurrents of indirect but robust French and British influence, emerging civic movements for social reform and Arab political awakening, and the Ottoman state’s demands for loyalty and greater civic engagement. Like Jews in the Arab world, Ladino-speaking Sephardic Jewish communities in the Turkish and Balkan heart of the Ottoman Empire were also drawn with ever greater force toward French culture as the supposed apex of a proper modernity. But politically, they reacted to newly assertive Ottoman state demands for communal loyalty by casting themselves, more or less successfully, as the empire’s most loyal minority, even as the empire’s Armenian and Greek communities were increasingly subjected to suspicion and brutal violence.

Eastern Europe and the Russian Empire

In Eastern Europe, the Jews of the Russian Empire—far and away the world’s largest Jewish community—faced a threatening turnabout in the policies of the ruling regime. For a century, tsarist policy had been to modernize Jews, using some carrot and much stick. And indeed, between 1880 and 1918 a growing minority of Russian Jews first began to lead their lives primarily in the Russian language. But from 1881 on, the last two tsars and their regimes feverishly reimagined the millions-strong Russian Jewish community as intrinsically untrustworthy, subversive, indeed destructive—somehow the special bearers and perhaps even inventors of dissolving modern political and cultural norms that threatened autocracy and social stability. 

Reactionary policies on the part of the state were compounded by the flourishing of robust anti-Jewish sentiment in both Russian society and in the Polish and Ukrainian ethnic heartlands under Russian and Austrian rule where Jews were concentrated. This cocktail of reactionary politics at the top and disturbingly volatile and mobile popular anti-Jewish sentiment across many populations within the multiethnic Russian Empire grew ever more toxic—and lethal—in the course of the period this volume covers. Indeed, the single worst mass murder of Jews in modern times prior to the Holocaust began to unfold across what had been the Russian western borderlands, particularly in Ukraine, in the very years 1918–1919 with which this volume closes. And this mass murder was the fruit of seeds planted in the 1880s. The year 1881 witnessed a first unprecedented wave of anti-Jewish violence concentrated in some of the very same spaces where far worse would transpire thirty-seven years later. For many Jews, the pogroms of 1881–1882 suggested that the nineteenth-century ideal of political emancipation in exchange for acculturation might be stillborn in Eastern Europe even as it was being called into question in Western Europe and put to an unprecedented test in the United States by mass immigration.

The Jewish Nationalist Impulse

Growing anti-Jewish sentiment in Eastern Europe and the Russian Empire  provoked dramatically new Jewish political responses, which in turn fed long-standing internal conflicts and processes of normative change—and, most importantly for users of the Posen Library, cultural change—within Jewish society. Eastern Europe’s rough road to economic modernization, and the particular stresses to which Jews were subjected as a petite bourgeoisie in a declining economic niche, midwifed proportionally outsized Jewish engagement with various forms of social-radical politics that envisioned the creation of a socialist order in Eastern Europe via revolution (although only a minority of Jews moved in this direction). 

At the same time, the ethnically defined travails of East European Jewry intersected with its still-profound ethnic distinctiveness to open many to new ideals of Jewish nationalism. This rapidly intensifying Jewish nationalist impulse expressed itself most popularly in Zionism, that fractious family of movements bound together by the conviction that Jewish national rebirth had to happen in and through Jewish settlement and society and state-building in what many Jews regarded as the land of Israel and what was, in our period, Ottoman Palestine. The Jewish nationalist impulse, however, spilled out beyond Zionism in any number of ways. It produced political supplements or alternatives to Zionism that envisioned some sort of nonstate communal self-determination in the diaspora (diaspora nationalism, autonomism) or in some new land other than Palestine (territorialism). The idea that Jews were and should continue to be a nation also exerted tremendous impact on the content, intensity, and very character of Jewish cultural creativity in Eastern Europe and wherever East European Jews settled—a point to which we return repeatedly. And although Jewish nationalism flourished primarily in Eastern Europe—where Jews could not evade the categorizing logic of nationalism imposed by both the state and rising nationalist movements—it gave form to a unique “outpost” with tremendous consequences for Jewish life in the decades to come: a loosely organized Jewish national settlement in Ottoman Palestine that would come to call itself the New Yishuv and see itself as the vanguard of a process of Jewish national reconstitution.

At the same time, Jewish engagements with socialism flourished widely in a strangely bifurcated fashion, finding particular resonance in the unevenly developing Russian Empire on the one hand and, on the other, among Jewish immigrants in the world centers of an increasingly global market system like New York, Paris, London, and Manchester. In the former, our era saw massive impoverishment for many Jews, even as others found ways into Eastern Europe’s expanding urban middle classes; the outcome was more a vast Jewish Lumpenproletariat (underclass) than the factory workers mythologized by Marxism, but desperate poverty fed radicalism. In the latter, Jewish immigrants found themselves thrown into a world of industrial garment work that indeed produced a genuine large Jewish proletariat, if only for one generation. Robust Jewish socialist subcultures also took shape in port cities around the world, from Ottoman Salonika (now Thessaloniki) to Buenos Aires.

These new forms of nationalist and socialist politics moved from the margins to the centers of Jewish life in the decades before and after the turn of the twentieth century. But they were hardly unchallenged. Such untraditional movements provoked resistance among many traditional Jewish leaders in Eastern Europe and spurred the growth of full-fledged Orthodox politics mobilized against Jewish political and cultural transformation. Zionist and other Jewish nationalist ideas and idioms found only a limited purchase in Western European, Middle Eastern, and North African Jewries, where they vied with scattered local Orthodoxies in Frankfurt and Tunisia but—more to the point—with powerful state-loyalist and liberal-integrationist commitments.

The New Jewish Politics and the New Jewish Culture: 1880–1918

Naturally, all of these transformations, tensions, and possibilities inscribed themselves in Jewish culture, which we may first approach here in its broadest sense as that which Jewish people thought and expressed in some enduring form. Of course, the history of Jewish culture in our era is not solely one of radical change. Many Jews continued to live more or less as they had previously and to cherish established ideas and identities. In Eastern Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East, long-established forms of religious creativity—homiletic, legal, philosophical, and mystical interpretation of God’s word and will, commentary on the ever-vaster rabbinic canon rooted in the Talmud, ethical and pietistic preachment—continued to find robust expression in a globally shared rabbinic Hebrew and in regional Jewish languages like Yiddish, Ladino, and Judeo-Arabic. On the more mundane level too, many Jews continued to create objects for daily and ritual use in old and well-established ways, sometimes specifically resisting or deflecting rapid innovation to preserve an aura of tradition. And, of course, many Jews continued to be observant of tradition and consumers of its many products and offerings.

Yet that said, within the framework of dramatic and centrifugal economic, social, political, and cultural transformation in Jewish life between 1880 and 1918, several epochal developments profoundly altered what “Jewish culture” could mean and be. While hardly exhaustive, these are the seven dimension of cultural change in this era that, quite varied in character and reach, seem to us to offer essential angles of approach to Jewish culture and creativity in this age of dizzying global transformation. 

Seven Dimensions of Cultural Change: 

1. Secularization as a global phenomenon.
2. The consolidation of a new kind of relationship between nationalism and culture in Eastern Europe, the region where most of the world’s Jews lived.
3. The proliferation of movement-cultures or politically charged countercultures both in the Old World and the New in an age of socialist and nationalist contestation.
4. The apotheosis of Jewish acculturation and integration in Western Europe, albeit amid undercurrents of nationalist and antisemitic discontent.
5. The apex of West European imperial domination over the non-European world, with profound implications for culture and consciousness of, among others, Middle Eastern Jews.
6. The birth of a new global popular mass culture driven by novel consumer desires and new technologies like recording and film, and emanating particularly from the United States.
7. The indistinct but omnipresent impress of a modernist temper and impulse that turned mixed fascination and discontent with modern civilization into a jumble of experiments in art, life, and perception.