Intro. [Recording date: November 16, 2023.]
Russ Roberts: Today is November 16th, 2023, and my guest is journalist Haviv Rettig Gur. His last name is Gur, G-U-R. Haviv is a senior analyst for the English language newspaper at The Times of Israel. Haviv, welcome to EconTalk.
Haviv Rettig Gur: Hi, thanks for having me. It’s good to be here.
0:57
Russ Roberts: We have two topics for today. The first, we’re going to take an historical look at European Jew-hatred, antisemitism, and the second is the current situation here in Israel as the war in Gaza enters its sixth week. And we’ll see some of the ties between those two events.
Now, the first part of the conversation is based on a column we’ll link to, you did back in April of this year, long before the war. And, it stuck with me. I thought about asking you to do an interview on it even before the war. That piece was called “The forgotten horrors that hide in the Holocaust’s long, dark shadow.”
And you begin by saying the Holocaust is thought of as this terrible, unique catastrophe for the Jews. And of course, that’s true in some sense. But the genocidal uniqueness is a bit misleading. You write, quote:
… the 20th century was already among the bloodiest periods in Jewish history before the start of the genocide, that includes the flight of millions of Jews out of Europe and the way those who remained were delivered into the Nazi embrace by Western immigration quotas. It is a version of the story that begins not in 1939 or 1941, but in 1880.
Explain: Why do we need to go back to 1880?
Haviv Rettig Gur: It’s a good question. There is a European Jewish experience of the 20th century; we’ll call it the long 20th century from roughly 1881.
In 1881, a anarchist group, activist group assassinates the Czar of Russia. They had tried multiple times; they finally succeed. This is Czar Alexander I, a profoundly reformist czar, a czar who had in the 1860s abolished serfdom and a czar who apparently on the morning of his assassination–he was assassinated in the afternoon–on the morning of, he gave the order to draw up some kind of a constitutional document ahead of the establishment of a serious parliament for the Russian Empire. He was a reformist who looked at Western Europe and said, ‘I want Russia to be brought into the modern age.’ But, for these anarchists that wasn’t enough. They viewed these reforms as a way to preserve–with, I think, some justification, a way to preserve the prevailing social classes rather than abolish them and bring equality. And, they killed him. They managed to kill him. It was a clumsy thing, but it was ultimately successful.
Czar Alexander I was replaced by his son, Alexander II. Now, his son was a very different kind of man, a very conservative one, educated on Russian Orthodox religious teachings, uninterested in the reforms–in fact, blamed the reformist impulses of his father for his father’s ultimate death–and began a massive crackdown on everything that he came to view as enemies of the Russian Empire, reversed most of his father’s reforms. He didn’t reinstitute serfdom, but he did reverse many of his father’s reforms.
Part of that was passing, a year later into his reign, of the May Laws. The May Laws were antisemitic laws passed by the czarist regime. It’s a very short–I think on Wikipedia, people can find the 10 sentences or so that make up the May Laws–but essentially it further limited the already very strict limitations on where Jews can live and what employment they could pursue, and education, and essentially narrowed Jewish life.
But, another thing happened in the wake of the assassination of the Czar, and it was something that the Russian Empire didn’t expect and didn’t want. And it had a lot to do with industrialization, and it had a lot to do, especially with railroads and electrification of the empire. And, it mostly occurred in southern Russia–the Southern Russian Empire–and basically what is today Ukraine, cities like Odessa, and that was the beginning of mass popular pogroms. Started bottom-up where Jews and non-Jews lived together; and pogromists would march down the streets of cities in what would today be, I guess, Western Ukraine and attack Jewish homes, catch Jews in the streets, sometimes kill, often beat–really in 1881. And very, very quickly pogroms spread from one city to the next. And, there are these fascinating sociological studies of these early pogroms that they really did follow the rail network, and they were often spread by rail workers.
And so there was–it was an antisemitism that was, in some sense, driven by a lot of the industrializing changes that were happening to Russian society–the Russian Imperial society at the time–which included urbanization and the weakening economically of the peasant class that–you know, serfdom was abolished, but not everybody benefited from it in the same way.
There are all these complex and fascinating historical reasons for this sudden outburst, bottom-up of waves of pogroms that essentially would last at least 40 years. Over the next 40 years they would get steadily worse.
Some of these pogroms became very, very famous: the pogrom in 1903 in Kishinev. Every Jew knows the name Kishinev. Now they don’t know the name Kishinev because they’re familiar with, you know, modestly-sized towns in Moldova. They know the name Kishinev because in 1903, there was this pogrom, roughly 50 people were killed. Jews were killed in this pogrom. But, what caught the Jewish imagination and turned Kishinev into a rallying cry throughout the Jewish world, wasn’t the 50 dead. It was how they died. It was the cruelty of the pogromists. It was the way that women were captured and raped in front of their husbands and fathers and brothers. It was the humiliation, the dehumanization, the emasculation of Jewish men. Hebrew poets like Hayim Nahman Bialik famously wrote about these men who carry the burden of that moment when they were forced to watch the rape and then murder, often, of their loved ones.
And so you had, in Kielce [Poland] and many other places, you had all throughout the Russian Empire, decade after decade, these bottom-up pogroms in many places.
Now, the Jews believed, because it came with the May Laws, because it came with this crackdown and reactionary political impulse of the new Czar, the Jews believed that this was a regime act: in other words that the regime instigated it. But, historians generally agree that that Jewish belief at the time is probably a mistake–a misunderstanding of the internal mechanisms of Russian politics and society around them. And that actually something much worse was happening, which is that it was genuine and authentic and popular and bottom-up. The people around them, around whom they had lived, really wanted them gone and really wanted them tortured and dehumanized until they understood the point.
And, in many places, the Czarist police actually saw the pogroms as a threat to public order and ultimately a threat to Imperial rule.
And so, there were attempts to crack down on these; and they were largely unsuccessful by the regime. In some places like Kishinev, for example, the global outcry, the Jewish outcry, which in places like the United States or Britain where you had influential Jews, that translated also into governmental outcry against Russia.
This caused the Russian Empire real diplomatic damage. And, Kishinev inspired the writing of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion by supporters of the regime–of the Russian Imperial regime–who couldn’t understand why the world cared that Jews had died.
And so they saw this diplomatic blowback, and that really made them start to think in–or they’d already thought in conspiratorial terms of the Jews–but it made them want to explain it and create an anti-Jewish politics that was more explicit. Also to validate the pogroms themselves and to really create an intellectual–right?–level of this.
9:34
Russ Roberts: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion were attributed to the Jews, but were actually not written by the Jews. It was an alleged plan for worldwide domination that was used to incite hatred.
Haviv Rettig Gur: Right. Right. And, one of the justifications given at the time of their first publication–in Russian–was there’s no other explanation for how the world cares about what happened in Kishinev. Right?
And so, these pogroms reshaped the Jewish world. Now they reshaped the Jewish world both mentally. They also reshaped the Jewish world demographically. They led to–oh, just one last point about the cost. These pogroms cost the Russian Empire a very great deal. The Jews began to leave Russian Imperial lands in their millions–probably 3 million over the course of 40 years. Of those 3 million–again, it’s a rough estimate, give or take, a couple of hundred thousand, right? Of those three million, the vast majority, two and a half million, roughly went to America. And that is the demographic bulk of what is today American Jewry.
There had been German-Jewish, American-Jewish community beforehand, but the demographic bulk is actually that flight from Eastern Europe. Although the generation of Jews in New York that Mel Brooks makes fun of in his comedy career–the 2000-Year-Old Man, right?–those are his parents, who are these fleeing Jews.
The pogromist experience–the experience of the pogroms–hurt the Russian Empire because, as these Jews fled, many of them fled westward, but to the closest place they could, which was the Austro-Hungarian or the German Empires. And the Austro-Hungarian and German Empires were absolutely convinced that this was Russia trying to dump its Jewish problem on them.
And they were also fairly antisemitic. There were not the kinds of pogroms you had in Russia, but they didn’t want these Jews. And, the diplomatic tension caused by these fleeing Jews, by these other empires who didn’t want the Jews and were convinced this was a Russian intentional policy, actually led to the Russian Empire–which was in financial straits–losing credit lines with these other empires.
And so, the Jews were fleeing. The Russians were pushing them out. It was both top-down and bottom-up at the same time.
And that is the beginning of 60 years of the steady, not just emptying out of Europe of its Jews, but the conscious, willful, purposeful, systematic making of Europe uninhabitable to Jews. Literally uninhabitable.
And in different parts of Eastern Europe, it happened at different rates. Eventually it gets to Central Europe and then even Western Europe. It happens at different times. It happens in different ways. But, it happened, and it happened systematically.
In the 1920s, the Romanians kicked the Jews out of, or severely limit, Jewish access to higher education.
In 1938–this was one example I used in that essay because the Poles have a story they tell now about how Nazis killed Polish Jews–not Poles. And the truth is, of course, much, much more complex. In 1938, there were no Nazis in control of Poland. But Poland actually stripped Jews who hadn’t lived in Poland–Polish Jews, who hadn’t lived in Poland for the previous five years–passed a law stripping them of citizenship in order to ensure they don’t come back. And, the Nazi Regime was so scared that they would be saddled with many tens of thousands–I’m not clear on exactly the number–of Polish Jews who are no longer Polish citizens, and so, they’re stuck on German soil, that they rounded up 17,000 of these Jews and stuck them on the border with Poland, demanded the Poles take them back. The Poles refused. And, these Jews are actually stuck in a sort of miniature concentration camp in between these two countries with absolutely nowhere to go. No one rescues them. The Polish Deputy Ambassador to London says, if the West doesn’t take them in, then their fate will be persecution until they flee. And, they’re essentially there until they are murdered at the beginning of the war.
14:00
Russ Roberts: I think it’s important: Listeners may not realize that the six million Jews in the Holocaust who were murdered between 1941 to 1945–some before that, but the bulk murder between 1941 and 1945–they weren’t Germans. There weren’t very many Jews in Germany. It’s one of the stranger parts of this tragedy. They were Jews in Poland who weren’t in those 17,000 who had been expelled, but hundreds and hundreds of thousands–I think over a million Jews in Poland–and the Jews in Russia who didn’t leave in the aftermath of pogroms and persecution in the period 1880 to 1940.
You provide a remarkable set of facts that I had never been aware of. As you say, two and a half million of the three million Russian Jews come to America. As did many others. It wasn’t just Jews who struggled with poverty and persecution and tough lives, and were looking for something better.
Obviously in this period of, say, 1880 to 1920, massive immigration into the United States from Ireland, from Italy, from Poland, Hungary, Russia, mostly Jews, but also non-Jews.
And, it’s a shocking thing. You say that between 1908 and 1925, many of these immigrants to America decided they didn’t like America so much. They’re going to go back. 57% of Italians, 40% of Poles, 64% of Hungarians, 67% of Romanians, and 55% of Russians. Among the Jews, the figure was just 5%. And, your conclusion, you say the Jews stuck it out in America through thick and thin, prosperity and recession, other immigrants were seeking a better life. The Jews were running away. There was no better life than America, even when it wasn’t so great compared to what they had left. And, I think that’s really rather remarkable.
Haviv Rettig Gur: Absolutely. It’s an astonishing data point because it tells the story. Right? In 1907, there was a crash. There was the Panic of 1907. That’s why the data begins in 1908, this mass sort of wave of returnees.
The economy takes a dip. There aren’t really jobs for people without good English, without family connections, without higher education. You can’t really move up the social ladder in America in the immediate aftermath of 1907.
And there are these periodic market corrections that are quite painful, and there’s, of course, no modern welfare state at the time, and all of that. And yeah: These immigrants say, ‘This isn’t working. We’re sitting here on the Lower East Side starving, and so we’re going back to Italy where at least we have a village, we have a farm, we have something.’
The non-Jews also came very differently, in a very different way. They sent young men first to establish themselves, find jobs, rent an apartment. Then the families came a year later, five years later, sometimes 10 years later.
And so, it was all done very comfortably. America was expanding and the American economy was expanding, and these people were coming in to help that expansion, and America welcomed them.
The Jews were running away. The Jews came as families. They landed in New York Harbor, by and large. Not every single time, but by and large as whole families. There was no one coming ahead of them. Jewish organizations were set up by the American Jewish community at the time, desperately trying to help these people land. I think the American Jewish community at the time–educated guess, I don’t remember the exact numbers–but it’s something like a quarter million Jews, mostly German speakers, many of them settled in the Midwest.
That’s why to this day, you have a major reformed Jewish rabbinical school called Hebrew Union College. The central reformed rabbinical school in America is in Cincinnati, Ohio. Because in the mid-19th century, the Jewish immigration was part of the German-speaking immigration that settled in the Midwest. And, I think to this day, Germans are the second largest or maybe the third-largest minority in America. They’re so big, they don’t know they exist, is how big they are. Right? But, you have all these Midwestern cities with operas. Right? Milwaukee has an opera. St. Louis has an opera. Cincinnati, Ohio has an opera. That’s this 19th century German immigration. And there was a large Jewish immigration then.
That middle class, formerly German-speaking, well-established, often Midwestern Jewish community is suddenly absorbing a wave of refugees over about 40 years that is five, seven, maybe 10 times its size. And, they’re desperate and they’re poor.
18:51
Russ Roberts: And now we come to the Holocaust. And you point out a much underappreciated or unknown fact–and I think this is true of authoritarian cruelty generally. To oppress a nation, whether it’s Nazi Germany oppressing the Jews or the Soviet Union oppressing its own citizens in the name of protecting the power of the leaders, you need a lot of help. You can’t do it on your own. Countries are large, generally. They have lots of territory to cover. A police state–another way to say it–a police state can’t really thrive by having the police everywhere. They just can’t be everywhere.
That’s true, by the way–very true in China today or other places that have authoritarian impulses. They need help. They rely, crucially, tragically, on incentivizing everyday citizens to be part of the authoritarian state, the police state.
In the case of the Soviet Union, it’s well-known, I recommend that all my listeners read the Gulag Archipelago by Solzhenitsyn or the Gulag by Anne Applebaum, one dramatically longer than the other. But, the Solzhenitsyn book has been abridged. I don’t like abridgements–but the Gulag Archipelago has three volumes in it–but I think it’s very much worth reading.
But, basically, you can’t make a remark about Stalin that’s negative because your neighbor overhearing it will profit. Will report you.
And so, the eyes of the actual police are extended by the bottom-up incentives that thrive in those kind of grotesque, cruel places.
And, the systematic murder of six million people–and others, of course, but the Jews were special in the zeal with which the Nazis sought them out–that required the cooperation of local citizens. At the same time, of course, Germany is prosecuting a world war on two fronts or more–really kind of three; I guess you could even say four. I mean, it’s a World War. They’re in a lot of places other than Asia–the Germans, the Nazis are. And, at the same time, they’re running a massive campaign to systematically exterminate the Jews of Europe. And, they get a lot of help.
Haviv Rettig Gur: Yes. There’s one step we have to make before that step. And that is, of course, the end of the story, at least of European Jewry as it had been before. But, that last step is the quotas. The Jews are fleeing westward. The European nations are systematically closing themselves to the Jews, making their life literally untenable.
And then, in 1921, the United States Congress says–it passes something called the Emergency Quota Act. The Americans have been trying since 1910 to slow this Jewish immigration. But, the pressure on the Jews is only increasing to the point where there’s this kind of intensity in the Russian Civil War in 1918 to 1921. The Mensheviks, the Bolsheviks, right?, the White Russians, the Red Russians, the Ukrainian nationalists–all these different armies, all these different forces in this very chaotic civil war come across Jewish villages, massacre Jews. Estimates are hard to come by. I have read pretty good estimates at 100,000. There are estimates estimating 150,000 and above murdered Jews who were not part of any of these armies.
And so, the intensity of the violence and the brutality is still increasing in the early 1920s.
In 1921 alone, well over 120,000 Jews, just in 1921, land in New York Harbor.
And, Congress decides to act. And it passes the Emergency Quota Act, which it imposes quotas by nationality. The Jews have no nationality in the American definition at the time. They’re either Poles or Russians or something like that. But, it is engineered to make sure that Jews don’t come. And, it works. Three years later when they pass the full Quota Act, the Permanent Quota Act, it’s down from about 120,000 to 140,000 a year, down to 10,000 a year.
And, by 1934, after the 1924 Act really goes into effect and there’s a few more tweaking of the system, just 2,700 make it into America that year. And, the Nazis are already in power, of course, by then.
So, as the urgency for the Jews escalates, the West closes its doors. It’s not just America. It’s Canada. It’s Britain. It’s France. It’s Argentina. It’s Brazil. It’s Australia. Everywhere Jews could go shuts down to them. And that corrals them essentially into the Holocaust.
24:10
Russ Roberts: And we’ll talk, in another episode down the road, about what was happening with Zionism during this period: the desire for a Jewish state, a Jewish homeland. It’s intensified by the Kishinev Pogrom of 1903 that you mentioned earlier, which occurs roughly five years after the beginnings of Zionism as an organized movement. Jews have longed to return to Israel for 2000 years, but in 1897, as the pogroms that you’re talking about start to get fiercer, as European nations become increasingly inhospitable to Jews, and then later as these pogroms become much more murderous, the Jewish population around the world is desperately looking for an asylum, a haven, a place of safety. And, it’s a combination of security desires with a religious yearning that has been there for 2000 years. But, obviously as we know, that doesn’t happen until 1948. [More to come, 25:14]