Jewish History - Ashkenazi Jewry (12a of 20 sessions)

good evening welcome uh we are now turning to study the jews of ashkenaz which is actually a family history for many people in uh this audience and watching this video where if you went back 500 600 years the populations were more or less comparable between the jews living in christian europe who are sometimes called ashkenazi jews and the sephardic and misraffi jews living in the ottoman empire north africa you know the stories we told in our last couple classes about the eastern jews the mizrahi jews and the sephardic jews those with roots in spain but the jews living in europe proper who are called ashkenazi jews and we'll talk about why that is were on par with them in terms of population if you went back 600 years ago but today even after the holocaust which killed not only but predominantly ashkenazi jews there are still many more ashkenazi jews in the world than sephardic mizraki jews and certainly for jews in america while there are certainly many varieties of jewish diversity the overwhelming majority of american jews trace their roots back to eastern europe and central europe and this population we call ashkenaz and so we have to beware a trend that has acquired a very uh appropriate name it's called having the approach of being ash normative you might have heard the term heteronormative assuming that everybody is a male and a female partnership and that every family has a mom and a dad and so on well oscar normative is assuming that everybody ate bagel and kugels and had yiddish swear words and experienced jewish culture in an ashkenazi key and even if it is the majority experience it is not the only jewish experience in america or in jewish history but one could be forgiven if one comes from an ashkenazi background merely by the the translation of the word for the language that predominates in this population the language that predominates among ashkenazi jews at least historically if not today is a language called yiddish but in yiddish the word yiddish means jewish so occasionally you might find someone who's very old today or certainly the parents of people who are older today who might have said does he speak jewish do you speak jewish what they meant was do you speak yiddish but the equation of yiddish equals jewish writ large is again an example of that oshko-normative phenomenon that we are heirs to in the american jewish community so we are allowed to study ashkenazi jews for sure but we shouldn't assume that they are the template for everybody not everybody thinks fiddler on the roof is a history lesson spoiler alert it isn't a history lesson even for ashkenazi jews but it isn't the personal history of uh sephardic jews rocky jews ethiopian jews and many other examples now when we look at the history of the jews in europe we understand that it's a story of migration and there's a gradual trend of moving from west to east and so i'm going to show you a couple images that uh highlight this dynamic here's one that describes the waves of expulsions where you have an expulsion from england in 1290 you've got expulsions from uh france that culminated in 1394 you've got the expulsion from spain in 1492 from portugal in 1497 and you see the arrows are predominantly directed to points further east whether it's points in the ottoman empire coming out of spain points to the new world coming out of portugal or occasion to the netherlands and then points further into central and eastern europe uh coming sometimes from germany and sometimes from these other western cultures and one thing to know with the german expulsion as we'll see later it was never total there were always some jews that stayed in german land because germany wasn't a unified state but the predominant center of jewish life is going to migrate from west to east but we start a little bit earlier when jews are still in the west specifically in the rhine valley which is more or less the border between france and germany this is going back to around the year 1 000 of the common era there were jews living in europe into the roman period in fact many of them came north with the roman empire into gaul which is the pre-modern version of france and into the rhineland what becomes ultimately the holy roman empire and germany one of the most famous figures of this period in that turn of the millennium is a man named rashi rashi actually is an acronym it stands for rabbi yitzhaki but you just know it by rabbi you just take the first letters and you get r sh and i he's known as rashi he lived from 1040 to 1105 and he made a living actually as a vintner raising uh grapes and making wine but he became very famous in the world of rabbinic literature for his detailed commentaries on the hebrew bible and also on the talmud itself so much so that later editions of both the bible and the talmud would rarely be printed without rashi's commentary he's seen as simply the authoritative answer to not only how the text is meant to be read but also its implications for rabbinic law and practice you'll even see sometimes in a talmud you'll have the main text with the core text from the mishnah and the gemara the initial rabbinic laws and the later commentaries on it through around the year 600 ce those initial texts are in standard hebrew font and then you have the commentaries written around it in a different more sort of hand script almost cursive kind of font and that font is actually often called rashi's script people sometimes imagine that it's based on rashi's handwriting it's not true it's actually just a different font so you can tell the rashi from the talmud you can keep the commentary separate it makes it easier to read if it's in a different font and so you'll suddenly see that as well in what's called a mikra oats deload a large scriptures which is a bible with the commentary around it and you'll see that rashi commentary written in the rashi script so you actually have to learn two sets of alphabets they're related but not exactly the same to be able to follow that rashi commentary so rashi gains a global jewish reputation coming out of the the town of troy's troyes that really is not the center of the universe but it becomes an important jewish center because of rashi's contributions he has a set of followers in his school of thought they're actually his grandsons not his son because he didn't have any sons he only had daughters and supposedly he taught his daughters some things there's actually a series of historical fiction novels called rashi's daughters it's very fanciful but it's not real history but if you like you know sort of projected back history you can take a look at those but it's the followers of rashi in the grandson level who are called the tosafist which means the adders on who add on to rashi's commentary add an extra explanation to it and occasionally disagree with them on one issue or another it's also in this time period that we get a major split between the sephardic jews living in muslim control and the ashkenazi jews living in europe and that's proclaimed by rabbi gershwin of vorms who which is in germany where he puts in a thousand-year ban on the practice of polygamy living under christian europe the idea of taking more than one wife was anathema to the people around them and so the jews decided that they should adjust their practice to not inflame their neighbors and they decided to take only one wife now jews living in islamic rule could follow the islamic practice of up to four wives which follows the example of muhammad so you did have polygamy in sephardic and mizrahi jewish communities living under islam where you did not have them under jews living among jews living under christendom based on gershwin's thousand-year ban now i will point out that the thousand-year ban was issued in the year 1000 you may notice that it has expired but a decision was taken in the late 90s by the rabbi authorities of the day in the orthodox community that this is what our ancestors and fathers have done we're going to continue that tradition so they did not um all of a sudden create profiles on jdate looking for wife number two or three um in the meantime uh this community of the jews living in uh germany proper take on the name ashkenaz or ashkenazi again based on a similar kind of projection to the jews who wrote about themselves as safaridin remember as i mentioned last time the bible refers to different nations living up north and out west and we don't really know exactly what the bible's referring to so this creates the opportunity for the rabbis to say oh when they set up north they meant ashkenaz which now is what we're going to call germany and when they said out west they meant sephirah which is what we're going to call spain so really it's an application of a term from the bible that the original authors might have meant something different but now it's applied to germany proper and one of the examples of this is a testimony of the haside ashkenazi pious of this territory of ashkenaz some of them wrote interesting letters pious poems but there's also a series of accounts of martyrdom because those first few centuries of the millennium uh 1000 to say 1300 is also a time period of the crusades and when the crusaders were gathering to go reclaim the holy land from the infidel they decided they could practice on the infidels living near them that is if there weren't any muslims around they could find local jews and there were a number of communities where jews were threatened with martyrdom or conversion and many of them chose martyrdom and as i mentioned last time uh the safari deem who chose conversion had to deal with some challenges when they tried to come out of the crypto jewish secret jewish closet and reclaimed their jewish identity since they didn't follow the example of the martyrs of ashkenaz who did submit to martyrdom during the crusades now this is also the period that sees the beginning of the yiddish language now for those who don't know yiddish is mostly middle german so not modern german but an earlier version of german written in hebrew letters and we have the examples of other jewish languages like that ladino or judesmo for example is medieval spanish written in hebrew letters there's a judeo-greek as well these are examples of times where the jews are actually collaborating with the surrounding environment because their daily language becomes the surrounding language but they're writing it in the alphabet they already know and there are certainly some words that are included that come from hebrew so the word for rabbi is rabbi the word for torah is torah the word for shabbat is shabbat accepted because the hard t at the end becomes a soft s in the yiddish pronunciation or sukus would be sukkot or simchas toro you know it gets a little shift in emphasis and the last sound can shift sometimes but by and large it's the hebrew words that are included and sometimes there's even subtleties between the languages so in yiddish you could have a book but there's two words for book in yiddish there's the word buch which comes from german plural is biker which just means ordinary books but if you refer to a book as a safe error well a safe here is a holy book a prayer book a talmud volume a bible that's a safer that's from the hebrew term but it means an elevated a tome a volume you know another a different layer of meaning to it so yiddish is this combined language of middle german some hebrew words and some other words sprinkled in from the jewish historical experience so the jews started in the rhine valley and they were influenced by the echoes of the roman empire so much so they even picked a very latin based word for a core practice of jewish religious life the word for to bless in hebrew i'm sorry in yiddish the word for to bless is bench from the word benediction which is a blessing in latin so that very core ritual practice of to bench to bless well a mention is the infinitive it comes from the latin benediction as opposed to a germanic root but as they moved further east leaving first the rhineland then germany proper they began to add other words to this language as well including words from slavic origins so i'll give you one that many of you may already know what do they call that kerchief that women wear in eastern europe it's called a babushka right comes from baba which means grandmother well if you know baba is grandmother in russian or polish you might surmise that the yiddish term for grandmother bubbi or bubba or boba is of slavic origin and it was just adopted into yiddish it's not the germanic root it's the slavic group so there are some slavic words that find their way in as well so the idiot is a sort of mishmash jargon combined language as some would call it who didn't respect it but it stays with the jews even after they leave when they move into poland when they move into lithuania and even into russia they don't create judeo-polish they keep speaking judeo-german or yiddish in fact they even maintain what one linguistic scholar called an internal bilingualism that is many people have an external bilingualism they speak spanish at home in english on the street or german at home and check in the street if they're living in czechoslovakia many jews spoke german at home but they had czech in public but in eastern europe the jews actually had two private jewish languages they had yiddish for daily life and they had hebrew as the ritual language the prayer language the intellectual language and there was even a gender split in this because the word for yiddish language in yiddish is mamalossa mama means mother lotion means tongue or language actually from the hebrew lashon so your mama lotion was what you what your mom talked to you what you grew up speaking literally your mother tongue but hebrew was what men learned in the synagogue to pray and to study the rabbinic literature so there's even a famous example of a translation of the bible into yiddish called the cena urena the go out and see which includes a lot of commentaries and midrashic interpretations and made-up stories add to added to the biblical narrative but in the process piece to the saint uranu volume it said for women and for men who are like women there wasn't any issue of gender fluidity there what it meant was women could read yiddish if they knew the alphabet and they spoke it and men who couldn't read hebrew and read the original like they should they could read this version that's what they meant by for men who are like women the ones that could only read yiddish still yiddish becomes one of the calling cards of ashkenazi celebration and culture so much so that as jews move from eastern europe to latin america to the united states to canada to australia to south africa even to israel many of them maintained that yiddish language as a sense of their cultural identity and they even found yiddish-speaking schools to train their kids in how to speak yiddish to create new yiddish literature and these new diasporas because they want to further this cultural identity we'll learn more about that when we get to the modern period talking about that migration now life under christian europe was not all you know bread and roses here there were certainly a lot of challenges in particular the challenges of dealing with persecution under christendom i mean i'll give you just one example of this here this is imagery you would commonly see in a church alco or at the entrance to a church you have two images here of two separate women one is ecclesia that represents the church the other is synagogue represents the synagogue now take a moment to look at what they have in their hands what their aspect is are some things we'll open for discussion at this point what are some things that you notice about these two image the ecclesia on one side and the synagogue on the other feel free to meet yourself if you want to jump in go ahead i was gonna say synagogue staff is broken okay and she's blindfolded it looks like yes okay so and there's a she's i'm sorry go ahead yeah um so the staff is broken yeah sign of the loss of sovereignty the structure of the temple expulsion and she's blindfolded what is she blind to christianity right jesus the jews are blind they they refuse to see what else do you notice rene do you see something else uh yeah well uh ecclesia has a crown she's uh looking uh up she's definitely she's wearing a cloak much more powerful the the regalia of royalty and power i also uh i've seen ones with synagogue is blindfolded with a snake kind of uh insinuating blinded by the devil kindness too right right she looks like a slave right in a subordinate position she's looking down and away right so it's not just that her i mean why does she have to look away she's already blindfolded but that shows sort of the willfulness of the not wanting to see what should be evidently true to everybody you notice also she's holding a document it's being tied to the the written law the written word as opposed to being freed by the spirit and by faith you'll notice that the staff that ecclesia is holding is erect and of course is in the shape of a cross and she's also holding a chalice right this is you know thinking of the cup that jesus has as part of the um the communion last supper story a narrative that's re-enacted regularly in the church so again you would see this outside of the town church or the cathedral in the major city a graphic demonstr a demonstration of the attitude of christians toward the jews they're present but they are not uppity remember that discussion of the uppity jew in the islamic world the the status of the demi well jews also had to have a subordinate position in christian europe this goes back to some of the writings of saint augustine i'm sorry saint augustine who uh talked about the jews being preserved as a kind of witness they were there at the time of jesus and so they should be kept around as an example to others of what happens if you reject the truths of the church so they should be kept miserable they should be kept separate from christians to not lead them astray but they're allowed to stay now this is very different from the treatment of pagans in europe you know the the druids were driven underground or wiped out um you know and other you know native uh animist kind of religions among the goths were were wiped out they weren't allowed to be uh to survive under christendom but the jews were allowed in times and places to have their own communities and to live their own religious life and to survive now for jews living under christendom they generally had a temporary right of residence they would sign an agreement with the lord of a particular territory or the uh ruler in charge of a town that they would pay a certain amount of taxes they would have to live in a certain area they'd have certain rights and they'd have certain responsibilities but it was always a collective right remember this is pre-citizenship you know your status comes from your class in society under feudalism or the guild that you're part of if you're working in a particularly prized profession but there's no such thing as individual citizenship with individual rights i mean that that's a much later concept we can't project that back into the feudal era but the jews are able to serve as a kind of economic niche in between the peasantry and the cities for example they're not tied to the land like the peasantry is so they can perhaps serve as the middleman travel between the town and the city the kind of primitive merchant or peddler they're also able because of the understandings of the prohibition on lending an interest they're able to lend money to christians if they have it where christians are not allowed to lend money at interest to christians and jews not allowed to lend money interest to jews because of a particular passage in the torah in the in the which is also of course binding on christians as the hebrew bible they um are able to lend money to christians which doesn't make them a you know honored and valued member of society but it's an important part of society if you want to develop an economy or have functioning marketplaces and one of the problems with this right of residence being collective and temporary is that it could be revoked the ruler could decide to cancel all the debts he owed to the jewish moneylenders um or the religious authorities could decide the jews are getting too uppity need to be put back in the synagogue position and the jews could be forced to leave sometimes they would move to the next town they didn't have to go that far necessarily but they were always in this fear of being the wandering jew and this is the period when that concept of the wandering jew really gets its roots it doesn't make sense in the sephardic position once they've moved to amsterdam once they moved to the ottoman empire they were there for centuries but the jews in europe felt like their role was a little bit more tendentious and they could in fact be required to move certainly the ashkenazi jews in germany proper knew that they they had seen expulsions from other western european countries and that it could happen to them as well in fact this is what happened as the result of persecutions accelerating in the 1200s through the 1500s so here's some examples of the persecutions that took place in this period you have on the left an example of a blood libel this is the accusation that jews would steal or kidnap a christian child and drain his blood to use in satanic rituals and or the making of matzah as a kind of anti-communion wafer like the devil's version of a wafer that would be made out of blood and you'll notice here some interesting details about this picture well you know again i can stop it and open up to you what are some things you notice about this image of the blood libel that's on the left here this is from a nuremberg chronicle in 1493. what are some of the features you notice i noticed they've got the kid up in a kind in the arms out so it probably is to evoke the jesus on the cross or look absolutely another innocent suffering and dying you know one of the wounds too is exactly in the same place that you always see christ's wounds in his chest absolutely there's also what looks like possibly a circumcision or something going on down there that's right they're they're so bloodthirsty and evil that they are attacking the genitals and not just other other places anything else you notice yeah everybody's got long noses okay so the features are somewhat exaggerated certainly in the back on the like the back right you see there's someone with an unusual face where the child has a much smaller pert nose all the men have beards or almost all the men have beards what are they wearing you see the little yellow patch oh oh yeah many of them have a little yellow that was not invented by the nazis this is a pre-existing european tradition of marking the jews by clothing as something different now this is not everywhere at all times but in this part of germany when this is being drawn one of the ways to mark the characters as jewish is to have them wear this yellow patch that they were required to wear also the hat that one of them is wearing in the left the sort of conical hat with a ball on top that was also distinctive of the kind of hat juice had to wear going out now the other ones aren't wearing it because they're inside but he maybe was the kidnapper who came in from outside and so he still has on his hat that was distinctive of jewish practice okay so here's one example of a visual depiction of this blood libel accusation against the jews i mean obviously this never happened you know and if you know anything about jewish law there's actually a horror of including any even animal blood in the food you're supposed to kill the animal by cutting the neck in a way to drain as much blood as possible you salt all the meat to get as rid of as much blood as you can if you're cooking with eggs you break the egg into a bowl separately to make sure there's not a blood spot in the egg otherwise you have to throw out the whole dish so this is again sort of a fantasy but it's also projecting some of the debates that are happening within christian circles over is the blood of christ really what's happening in the communion or is it is it just wine and is it really transubstantiated well the jews are getting real blood uh how guilty are the jews it says in the gospel of matthew his blood be upon us but that was a long time ago are they still to blame well they're to blame for what they're doing every week they're reenacting this and these accusations of blood libel often would come about during easter season because what's happening during easter season you've got the passion story you've got the reenactment of the crucifixion and so in the eternal presence of religious stories the jews not only persecuted jesus then they're doing an equivalent to the innocent christian child even now okay so these accusations come out in periods like this another example of persecution of jews in western europe was the accusation that jews poisoned the wells during the black death they couldn't explain why so many people were dying and so maybe it's the jews who are poisoning the wells some people argue that jews actually were somewhat cleaner than other people because they actually bathed once a week for shabbat and they rinsed their hands before every meal which was way more than anybody else did now they weren't washing with soap right but they were doing something and maybe that had a positive health impact um again you know the ways the way meat was handled back then i wouldn't give the jews you know a hundred percent scores for on high hygienic practice but at least it was better than christian europe who would take one bath a year two bads a year i mean it was you wouldn't want to smell it and one other accusation i wanted to mention is the accusation of desecrating the host now this doesn't mean being a bad house guest when they say the host they're referring to the holy host the communion wafer and the accusation was here that jews would steal the communion wafers which you can see in the first panel here of the cartoon they would then torture those wafers and then in the bottom panels you see the christians breaking in the door to find them and then torturing the jews to confess their sins with the fire under the soles of their feet but you'll notice if you look carefully you'll see the two are the two sort of tablets of the ten commandments there in that upper right image and notice on the right there's a person who's stabbing it with a knife and what's happening to the wafer there's blood coming out of it now what's going on here remember again that argument about transubstantiation does the wine become the blood well what does the wafer become the wafer in christian theology becomes the body of christ and so this isn't a case where they're saying well you know we believe it's the body of christ but the jews don't believe that so you know maybe who knows that's a modern sensibility the catholic perspective at the time was everybody knows this is the body of christ even the jews know this is the body of christ and if they want to get back at christ they're going to steal his body and torture it just like they did the last time the reason why they're not christians because they're stubborn and evil it's not because they just have a different epistemological approach to the universe so these drawings again it never happened why would jews bother stealing the communion waiver to stand with knives i mean this you know from our perspective this is fantasy but it was believed at the time because it was part of this argument over whether this is really happening or not and um trying to reaffirm the doctrines of catholic faith so ironically during the reformation encounter reformation the times jews were caught in the middle martin luther was hoping the jews would join his protestant version because he went back to the original bible without the catholic books the jews didn't have but when they rejected him he rejected them you can read terrible things that martin luther said about what should be done with the jews and for the catholics as they're reaffirming the rituals of blood and the body and the communion which the protestants have rejected they're going to blame the jews or find ways to make the jews witness again to the truth of catholic theology sometimes at the expense of jewish lives and certainly jewish stability so after these expulsions that sent jews away from western europe and you have basically this end result by 1500 where there aren't jews in england and france and spain and provence and the south of france they're primarily in the ottoman empire or in italy in the netherlands which had been a spanish colony which broke away and in the holy roman empire and points further east especially in poland hungary and wallachia which today would be parts of romania so the jews have left left the west and moved to the east they remained in some small numbers in the west as secret jews you know the sephardi living in bordeaux in the south of france or in england or in holland but explicit jews self-identified jews are gone from western europe and these german jews bring their language with them as they go points further east especially into poland now why poland between the 12th and the 16th century poland actually wanted jews to move into their territory sort of like the ottoman empire was happy to get the sephardic jews the polish empire was happy to get not only jews but also greeks and germans and other people willing to develop the polish economy poland was primarily feudal landowners and serfs and they need they knew they needed some kind of middle class in fact during the joint polish lithuanian empire which is founded in the 1500s they explicitly invite jews in because they want the jews to develop their towns and cities and to develop their economy and so the jews are being pushed out of german lands by persecution but they're also being welcomed in and attracted in by polish landowners who see an economic role for them in this territory jews in fact do primarily move into cities or small towns you know if you think of fiddler on the roof again as a documentary which it's not he's actually not living in a shuttle stettle is the yiddish term for a small city is a city like darmstadt you know but stettle means little city it's a small town but it's not a peasant village actually what tevye lives in is a dwarf uh or a dareful a little peasant village but what's the predominant jewish experience was living in towns um partly for safety but partly because it's also where the professions were they generally weren't the milk men or the farmers that was again in a feudal society the serfs living on the land and who wants to be a serf and belong to the land so the jews had this middle ground of being craftsmen in cities or occasionally again going back and forth between the cities and the peasantry and the farmland or between the landowners and the peasantry so one of their economic roles was as what's called a tax farmer the term was arendar what you do if you're a tax farmer is the the lord doesn't want to bother with collecting taxes directly so he gets someone who says i'll pay you a thousand dollars for the right to collect taxes on this town and the lord says great i get my thousand bucks up front and then it's the tax farmer's job to go to the peasantry and collect the taxes from them and he makes a living on the difference between what he can squeeze out of the peasantry with the legal right to tax and what he has to pay to the lord for the lump sum tax paying so it saves the uh the lord the hassle and it makes the enemy the tax farmer who's doing the collecting you know it's good to offload your hostility that the peasantry might feel to you on the middleman who are a convenient uh scapegoat there that's what we call the lawyers though yeah well you always have plausible deniability right um and so they often uh functioned as managers for these estates they had the concessions on bridge tolls sometimes they even ran taverns because again a tavern is a middleman kind of product because you take the raw wheat or potatoes that are grown by the peasantry you process it into liquor and then sell it back to the peasantry so you wouldn't think of jewish bar owners or tavern keepers as a but that was a very common sight in many of these peasant villages and small towns a niche the jews held in addition to being you know shoemakers and tailors and those basic small crafts kind of people but this land of the polish lithuanian empire became a very comfortable home for jews for many centuries um so much so that there was a an international organization they founded called the council of the four lands which was sort of like an upper level uh rabbinical and legal uh entity that represented the jews it lasted from the 1510s to 1764. that's 250 years or so of a relatively stable system of jewish internal self-governance especially with regards to religious matters this is also when the eastern european model of the yeshiva develops where you have a local hater or small school for local boys that taught them how to read and used corporal punishment it was no paradise but if they were really talented students they might get a scholarship to go to a yeshiva where they would live with someone else's family they you know uh would study as much as they could they might eventually become a rabbi and get an appointment in a local community or even go back into the yeshiva system to train the next generation of students but this is a stable system that lasted for a couple hundred years so again you could be forgiven if they were thrown off guard by the russian empire coming in and overthrowing the whole system now this idea of jewish self-governance in eastern europe is really based on a a jewish communal organization called the kahila the hilla means community literally but it's also a self-governing organization part of it is negotiating those collective rights with the town of the lord to be able to stay in one place and it was generally run by two groups there were the rabbinic elite the learned elite and there were the merchant class the ones who had more assets and money um and i call this system of government i mean they had votes but it wasn't really voting i call it democracy which means it was ruled by the mockers if you know yiddish the mover the shaker the people who you know think they know what they're doing and they were the ones who were the parnassim the officers of the kahila of the community they would even appoint a particular person who was called the stadlon the intercessor who would go and talk to the lord to negotiate the terms of the agreement he might be a money lender he might be someone who has european manners who might be able to speak polish or russian and it's that style that intercessor who is able to go to the sort of backdoor communication and negotiate the rights of jewish residents and the terms of jewish agreement and toleration and protection for the jews and so on there's actually a book of jewish history from this period about this period called the lord's jews because that's sometimes how they were referred to they weren't just polish jews they were this particular lord jews because he was the one in charge of them who gave him the right to stay there it was the kahillah that hired rabbis it was the killer that taxed itself to pay for its own services the hater and the teacher there and other services they provided and often because the rich people were in charge they made a regressive tax so they would tax shabbat candles which of course everyone had to buy otherwise if you didn't buy shabbat candles they knew you weren't lighting shabbat candles and you'd be kicked out of the community uh you could get expelled in fact with a heron um but they also would support mutual support uh charities what were called uh today you might have heard of something called the fabricadisha which is the holy society it's the one that helps care for bodies after someone has died to wash the body and make sure someone's sitting with it at all times but there were all sorts of severes that provided dowries to orphaned girls so they could get married that provided basic alms to the poor soup kitchens that kind of support it was a in its own sort of state within a state because the bureaucracy of the polish state was very weak on the ground level jews sort of stepped in in that way to provide the kind of mutual support and services that were needed um but this life was still precarious um in the near the end of this period in the 1640s in 1648 and 49 there was a massive ukrainian peasant uprising because you had polish landowners who were the absentee landowners setting the terms you had the ukrainian peasantry cossacks and others living on the land and forced to work the land and then you had jewish land owners who were the managers of the estates for the polish landlords well when there's a peasant uprising guess who they're going to target they can't get to poland to reach the polish land owners but they can target the jews who are the agents of the polish land owners and the ones who've been oppressing them directly with taxes with exploiting them with liquor and all kinds of other accusations not to mention the usual religious ones that we've already talked about so between 1648 and 1649 this massive revolt under a man named bogdan from elnitsky killed some tens of thousands of jews we don't know exactly how many again the records are limited but it was certainly a massive destruction of jewish life and an interesting side note when the russian army took over the crimean peninsula including taking over a number of ukrainian uh naval vessels one of the naval vessels they took over was the ss kamel nitsuki which i read and i thought wow because i've always heard that name as like hitler i mean this is someone who killed tens of thousands of jews but for the ukrainians he's a national folk hero who fought back against foreign domination so again terrorist freedom fighter you know depends on who's making the call there someone from the south i can point out that that's right the war of northern aggression it's a very different story so here we have this world where jews have lived for centuries they've set down roots they have self-governing communities but their life is still precarious there can still be riots and interventions that destroy established jewish communities that forced jews to move they've kept their language as yiddish but they're still living in some cases as they say like a fiddler on the roof i will point out by the way that that reference is actually not from any of the stories of sholem aleichem it's from the artwork of mark chagall who painted fiddlers floating in the air and fiddlers on the roof and that's where the title for the musical came from not from the original stories of tevye the milkman but this precarious life actually sets the stage for the growth of a kind of radical messianism and even turn to mysticism where you want sort of radical connection to god and radical solutions to things that the pious version of praying for the messiah to eventually come just isn't cutting it anymore in the aftermath of the chemistry destruction and so that's the turn we'll get to next time as we talk about the rise of hostilism a rebirth of jewish mysticism and the aftermath of the dislocation of the kaminsky programs

Channel: IISHJvid

Views: 9,308

Rating: 4.8579884 out of 5

Keywords: Secular Humanistic Judaism, Humanistic Judaism, Jewish History, Ashkenazi Jews, Adam Chalom

Id: istFEai7cDs

Length: 41min 40sec (2500 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 03 2021