Though Europe stands as one continent, the extreme variance in the way Jews were treated, lived, and worshipped up to the 1870’s casts a division between the East and the West. Western Jews ultimately were acculturated into society, rising from poverty into the middle class and pursuing more rational thought through the Haskalah, while Eastern Jews remained steadfast in placing the importance on their Jewish identity above all else. However, Jews in Eastern Europe suffered economically and legally to a larger extent, and Ultra-Orthodoxy, as well as mysticism through Hasidism, were integral to their lives.
Western Europe was changing at an ever-increasing rate, and the same could easily be said for the Jews who lived there. A societal pressure began to mount in countries like England, France, and Germany, leading to the question: as Western Europe evolves and modernizes, how will Jewish people fit into that narrative? While non-Jewish Western European society remained tolerant at best and hateful at worst towards Jews, the Jewish community answered this by slowly acculturating and adapting. Jews learned their country’s national language and adopted it into their literature. Soon, Holy texts were translated into local languages that were distributed in place of Hebrew; even sermons in modern day Germany were given in German, replacing the Hebrew that felt at home in the synagogue. Even if they were not accepted in social spheres, like clubs, Jewish people in the West were typically steadfast in their dedication to not only being a Jew, but also being a contemporary citizen of their country. This didn’t stop the scorn Jews received from their non-Jewish neighbors and society; oftentimes, the pride in national identity Jewish people had was perceived as too much. They fit in so well, that they stood out— it was a catch 22.
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Social change in Eastern Europe, however, was at a standstill. Because of this, while the West was cycling through fresh identities and modernizing, Eastern European Jews identified as Jews first and foremost, with much less emphasis placed on fitting their national identity. They spoke Yiddish and what they wrote was in Yiddish as well; to write in Yiddish in Western Europe was considered quite strange. Religion was tied heavily into every aspect of Eastern European Jewish life, from shop hours, to social gatherings, to education, and more. Most Jews lived within shtetls, market towns that tended to be majority Jewish and relatively small to medium sized. They were in close proximity to other Jews, and therefore were entrenched in all community affairs. This didn’t stop Jews from speaking to non-Jews, however, who were frequently met through mercantilism. But instead of striving to adopt the customs of their broader state like Western Europeans did, Jews in Eastern Europe stuck to the traditional forms of Jewish life. Without the change coming from within the government, the society, and the citizens, there was no jumping point for modernization nor any reason to consider it.
A major movement that rocked the boat of Western Jewish life was the Haskalah, or the Jewish Enlightenment. Following in the footsteps of the Enlightenment in Western Europe, with the Haskalah, suddenly there was a “rational” way of viewing Judaism. It had a profound effect on religious life in the West, and eventually denominations began to branch off and form, each with totally new ways to view Judaism. There were three main denominations that were of interest in Western Europe: Reform, Neo-Orthodoxy, and “Positive-Historical” Judaism. The biggest disparity between these was the way they viewed religious text and oral traditions; was it acceptable to view them through a scientific lens, or is it sacrilegious? Reform took the standpoint that any and all religious text was up to historical interpretation; and unless you were particularly excited by the thought of keeping kosher or following other laws and traditions, it was simply unnecessary. Neo-Orthodoxy disagreed, stating all Holy texts were divine, and to interpret them otherwise was simply unacceptable. They were strict in keeping with tradition, but the Neo-Orthodoxy standards were often influenced by ideas from the maskilim. In between these two was “Positive-Historical” Judaism, the older equivalent of the Conservative movement. Positive-Historical Jews held what they considered was a “moderate” take on Judaism. Yes, the written Torah was divine, but the oral law? It could most certainly be influenced by scientific ideas. One thing these all had in common, however, was the fact that each one was a modern form of Judaism. Traditional Judaism died out completely in Western Europe, giving way to more innovation and ways of practice.
While Reform Judaism and Neo-Orthodoxy most certainly had a rift between them, and continue to have one to this day, even they have much more in common than Neo-Orthodoxy does with Eastern European Judaism. Eastern Europe’s practices were conservative and traditional in dress, rituals, and traditions, much like Neo-Orthodoxy, but there remains a major dividing feature. In Eastern Europe, a form of Judaism had been revived—one that stoked the fires of mysticism, referencing the Kabbalah, heavy in superstition and everything the Haskalah sought to disassociate with. Hasidism was the name; each sect revolved around a spiritual leader known as a Rebbe, or Zaddik, who communicated with God for his followers in ways they felt they could not. A core belief is that everything in this world has “sparks of God” in it; to religious Western European Jews, this idea was preposterous. After all, the Haskalah had made its mark all throughout Western European Jewry, and mystical references had been all but removed from their modern view of Judaism. Hasidism didn’t seem reasonable to the Western European Jews, and frankly, the Eastern European Jews mostly found the Haskalah to be disagreeable as well. The Haskalah had been used by maskilim living in Eastern Europe, and many Jews residing there viewed these maskilim as untrustworthy for being so friendly with nobility in the government.
Rulers in Eastern European government were wishy-washy in their opinions on Jews; it was almost as if they were always in a game of go between, and subject to whatever the Tsar decided was best at the time. Tsars held an overwhelming amount of power, and the Russian government had a lengthy, complicated legal code built over a long period of time. So now Russia had a question they struggled to answer for years: where do Jews belong in Russia, and in the code? Unfortunately, the answers given varied from “not here in Russia” and “in the Pale of Settlement”. When Nicholas I rose to power, he was sure to forcibly restrict Jews to portion of Russia’s territories, known as the Pale of Settlement. Leaving was not an option for years. This was not the only dismal change brought into the law involving Jews in Eastern Europe, however. A mandatory army draft was put into place, and it was even more nefarious than expected. This draft would force young people into service that was used to convert Jews by force, through any means necessary, even torture. Conscription poisoned the local Jewish community’s social health, as practices of kidnappings of children to fill the draft order began. Richer and more legally powerful families spared their own little ones in any way they could, resulting in the poorest and most powerless to be drafted instead. In a plea given to the Minister of the Interior, a community in Podolia desperately addressed the core inequality at the heart of the matter, stating, “Those rich people are to blame… our money and our souls are being wiped out. You should know that we’re poor, so we can’t do nothing to stop them.” (O. Margolis, pp. 353-58. Document 94).
In Western Europe, while the government most certainly held a deep-rooted animosity for Jewish people, legally Jews became emancipated much before those in Eastern Europe. They were legal citizens, even if their loyalty to the state was often the subject of skepticism from non-Jews. The governments held the view that Jews had a sort of dual loyalty with Israel, and their ties with other Jews were stronger than they could ever be with their country. While Jews’ rights continued to fall apart in Eastern Europe, Western European Jews’ extensive history of being barely tolerated by the government legally, not socially, was coming to an end. Even though the process of emancipation was arduous and sometimes intense, especially in Germany, it resulted in new forms of Judaism and the ability to choose which pieces of Jewish identity Western Jews would identity with and display.
Economically, the contrast between Western European Jews and those in Eastern Europe was night and day. In Western Europe, Jews were viewed as vital to the economy and the Industrial Revolution benefit Jews massively. By involving themselves in manufacturing and commerce related avenues, such as the textile business and trading, Jews transformed into overwhelmingly middle class and began to live quite comfortably. They began to fit into bourgeois ideals, and followed similar practices, such as marrying at a much later age than Jews in the East wed. Despite popular belief, traditional Jews in the East were far less patriarchal than those in Western Europe were. While women in the West were made into extensively educated homemakers, the Jewish women of the East held jobs just as much as their male counterparts did. When Jews in Western Europe were finally rising in economic status, the exact opposite was taking place in Eastern Europe. Kotik describes in his memoir that a vast majority of Jews in the East were living in intense poverty, with a select few who were abnormally wealthy (Yekhezkel Kotik, pp. 137). Overall, the wealth gap between most Eastern European Jews and the nobility of their states, or even that of their Western European counterparts, continued to grow more and more as time went on.
In both Eastern and Western Europe, Jews had numerous problems to face regarding societal pressure and hatred. However, the types of issues at hand and the way they were handled resulted in dramatically different evolutions of Jewish identity. Through adopting a hyphenated identity for themselves, Western European Jews molded Judaism to better fit the modern culture of the West. The amount of change Eastern European Jews went through was drastically less; this, above all, set them apart from those in the West, and change, or the lack thereof, was the driving force in all difference between Jews across the nation.
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