The House of Twenty Thousand Books

by Sasha Abramsky

  Joseph Dent had begun publishing the Everyman’s Library in London in 1906. By the mid-1930s, when Chimen started buying the books as a teenager, and annotating their margins with densely scribbled comments in Hebrew, and, later, in English, much of the Western political, philosophical, scientific and literary cannon had been made available, at low cost, as a part of the series. There were by then 937 volumes in the catalogue; Chimen owned about fifty of them. It was through these books that Chimen’s political ideas matured. When he read Rousseau’s Social Contract he underlined the sentence, ‘The passage from the state of nature to the civil state produces a very remarkable change in man, by substituting justice for instinct in his conduct, and giving his actions the morality they had formerly lacked’. In Plato’s Republic, which he read in Jerusalem in 1937, he marked a passage on tyranny, which ‘plunders by fraud and force alike the goods of others, sacred and holy things, private and public possessions, and never pettily but always on a grand scale… Men revile injustice, not because they fear to do it, but because they fear to suffer it’. And in his copy of Aristotle’s Politics, bought when he was in his early twenties, Chimen bookmarked several passages with newspaper fragments, and then underlined, in pencil, lines on those pages. ‘Everywhere inequality is a cause of revolution’, the Greek philosopher had written in one of the passages that Chimen marked; ‘And always it is the desire of equality which rises in rebellion’. In another of the underlined sections was the observation that ‘democracy appears to be safer and less liable to revolution than oligarchy’. When, three-quarters of a century later, Chimen’s Everyman collection passed into my hands, the fragments were still there, brown and crumbly with age, the senile brown of the newspaper’s delicate pages leached into the leaves of the book itself.

  Aristotle had not, however, only been concerned with politics. He was a man of extraordinary intellectual versatility: a mathematician, a natural scientist, an ethicist, and a moral philosopher. Among his most important contributions to the world of ideas, he had engaged in a deep philosophical investigation into First Causes – seeking an origin point for the universe, and, if the universe was indeed created by God, an origin point for that divine entity. He concluded that there had to be an Unmoved Mover, a non-corporeal being who had always existed, whose thought processes themselves made the physical universe possible, made human thought possible, made possible time itself. Since God had always existed, so the universe and time itself had always existed. Aristotle’s God thought, therefore everything else was and always had been. For Aristotle, the building blocks of the world had to have always existed.

  Fifteen hundred years later, the great twelfth-century Spanish Jewish philosopher Maimonides amended Aristotle’s ideas about first causes. He accepted that God had always existed, or rather, had never not existed. But, unlike Aristotle, he argued that the physical world itself had a finite starting point; and that, prior to the universe coming into being, time itself could not exist, that time and matter were intimately intertwined. According to Maimonides, God exists outside time. Then, somehow, God stirs and the dimensions of space emerge. Then, and only then, time begins. It was an extraordinary intuitive leap, a hint, perhaps, at the world of relativity that Einstein would eventually reveal. But Maimonides’ project extended further. It was to reconcile the idea of creation, a single starting point for all living things, governed by a moral code, as outlined in the Hebrew Bible, with the philospher’s notion of an eternal world. If the world conjured into being by God will always exist, its structures determined not by man’s actions and choices but by a God whose motives cannot be fathomed, what room did that leave for morality, for freedom of will, for concepts of good and evil?

  What interested the philosopher was how the Jewish ethical principles guiding everyday life could be reconciled with notions of eternity; how the littleness of mankind’s needs and desires could fit into the vastness of the cosmos; how a God that had always existed and would always exist could interact with the hopes and fears of individuals as small and temporary as humans. Here, he made another intuitive leap. It was, he concluded, precisely man’s ability to think rationally about these grand questions that gave him a spiritual presence – and it was that, rather than his corporeal body, that made him an image of God. Even if God did not, in reality, care about individual humans, in humans’ thoughts about God and in the dream that he did intervene in daily lives was rooted the chance of transcendence, the possibility of becoming something more than a brute animal, the code to morality. For Maimonides, religion thus became strangely pragmatic. Admittedly, the stories of miracles and angels might be little more than fairy tales – or, at best, God’s calling cards, reminders which He sent out episodically to let people know He was still present in the world; but by believing that the skein of everyday life could be torn by divine intervention, mankind kept alive the possibility of change. And because of the possibility of change, there was an incentive to behave morally – to behave in ways likely to trigger extraordinary events. It was a way of rendering history bearable, of holding out the opportunity of transformation.

  From his student days, Chimen found Maimonides’ concepts strangely reassuring. But where the medieval scholar – an Arabic-speaking Jew living under Muslim rule in the land that is now Spain – allowed miracles to be seen as reminders of a greater organising principle behind the vagaries of everyday life, for the young Chimen it was revolutions that served that role. It was those spectacular breaks with the ordinary, those occasional violent convulsions that destroyed the rhythms of the generations, which pointed to the underlying patterns, the deep structures of history. In place of Maimonides’ timeless God, Chimen substituted Marx’s dialectic, the rules of history which ultimately explained movement from one epoch to the next. In place of Maimonides’ ethics, Chimen substituted the Marxist idea of class consciousness.

  ***

  Behind the Everyman volumes were still more books: these were cheap paperback political texts, worth little monetarily, but cumulatively providing an understanding of the day-to-day political debates of the first two-thirds of the twentieth century.

  Roaming this world of ideas, especially on the fireplace side of this room, one was increasingly struck by a sense of time warp. This was a story ‘rent out of Eastern Europe and landed in London’, the American historian Steve Zipperstein marvelled, when he visited the house from Oxford, and, later, from his position at Stanford University, in California. It was, he felt, in many ways a Russian saga from the nineteenth century that was playing itself out decades later in English suburbia, a scene, say, from Bialik’s poem about Talmudic scholarship, HaMatmid.

  In this room, the different sides of Chimen’s intellectual personality most visibly warred for influence: the religious scholar versus the Marxist; the polymath interested in art, philosophy, sociology, in all the great ideas of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment versus the ideological dogmatist; the Zionist against the socialist internationalist. It was in this cluttered space that the massed ghosts of the pogroms and then of the Holocaust and of the shattered Jewish communities of Eastern Europe most assertively overlooked everything he did and believed. It was here that ancient Jewish teachings met the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the Romantic movement. It was here that a specifically Jewish take on modernity could be encountered, one that engaged with liberalism, anarchism, socialism and nationalism. There were books on the rise of Zionism, on the quest for a Jewish homeland not just in Palestine, but also via the Soviet attempt to create a Jewish, Yiddish-speaking state in the Siberian region of Birobidzhan, and on abortive plans to carve out part of Uganda for displaced Jewish refugees; there were other books on proposals to earmark large swathes of American territory for a Jewish homeland.

  It was, in sum, the room where the greatest debates within Eastern European Jewry, during the decades in which Chimen’s grandparents, parents, and he himself had come of age, were on display.

  ***

  Corralled into t
he Pale of Settlement, Russian Jews had for hundreds of years largely lived their lives outside of the ebbs and flows of temporal history. The students in great institutions such as the Volozhin yeshiva – which was shuttered by Tsarist decree in February 1892, but which continued to exert a powerful pull on the imagination of young scholars for many decades – learned Talmud; they learned about responsa to Halakhic questions engaged in by more than one hundred generations of rabbis and pre-rabbinic scholars over thousands of years. But they did not specialise in secular history. Theirs was a universe, as is that of the Amish today, at least partially insulated from temporal events, at least partially constructed around timeless codes that could withstand the tumult unleashed by modernity. It was a world that Russian anthropologists and imperial ethnographers were starting to study for its folklore, for glimpses into ancient pasts and into behaviour patterns that had stood the test of time for many centuries.

  Now, with the Haskalah, a bridge to modernity was being built, which would pave the way for a secular Hebrew and Yiddish literature, and for young Jews to enter the full ferment of Russian politics as Tsarism came under increasing attack; it would also create new institutions of authority (political organisations, cultural clubs, publishing houses, newspapers) that could compete with the rabbinate for the loyalty of Russia’s millions of Jews. The Russian-born novelist Yosef Haim Brenner, an early convert to the return-to-Israel cause, and one of the first to adapt modern Hebrew to the requirements of fiction writing, described ‘half-intelligentsia’, young Jews, schooled in Orthodoxy and yeshiva methods, who had rebelled against the strictures of religion and set out on an autodidactic quest for knowledge, imbibing anything and everything written in an attempt to find more satisfying answers to the existential questions than those they found in the Talmud.

  For the Jews in the Pale of Settlement of the decades around the turn of the century, life carried the perpetual risk of instant, violent death – or, at the very least, of the overturning of all things familiar. In 1881, a series of pogroms had been unleashed, probably with government backing, in the wake of Tsar Alexander II’s assassination in St. Petersburg by bomb-throwing members of the anarchist People’s Will party. In the next three years, more than two hundred pogroms occurred in the Russian Empire, some in small villages, but others in large cities such as Warsaw, Odessa and Kiev. If they were to scapegoat Jews as dangerous revolutionaries, the new men of power under Tsar Alexander III believed, they could achieve two goals: they could distract the attention of Russian peasants and workers from their all-too-real grievances; and, at the same time, they could denounce radical, often violent, political movements as somehow being a Jewish conspiracy against the state. In turn, revolutionary Russians during these years came to believe that, far from being spontaneous outbreaks of violence, pogroms were carefully orchestrated, designed to consolidate the power of Russia’s autocratic rulers and to intimidate reformers and revolutionaries into silence. In neither instance did the strategy really succeed – the Tsarist system would totter from crisis to crisis for the remaining few decades of its life – but the price paid in blood and fear was, for the Jews of the Pale, vast.

  Even many of the anarchist groups that sympathised with the bomb-throwers who had targeted Alexander’s carriage opportunistically rode the anti-Semitic wave, seeking to marshal support in the countryside by ‘out-pogroming’ the pogromists. As a result, during the period of Yehezkel’s childhood and early adulthood Jews in the Russian Empire were caught in an increasingly brutal vice, targeted not just by government propaganda and organised nationalist mobs responding to the drumbeat of hate tapped out by groups with names such as the League of the Russian People (of which Tsar Nicholas II was an honorary member) and the Black Hundreds; but also, frequently, by radical anarchists as well.

  In April 1903, a particularly deadly pogrom in the city of Kishinev (now Chisinau, the capital of Moldova) took the lives of at least forty-five Jews and left many hundreds more injured. Hundreds of homes and businesses were looted or burned. The event garnered international attention: a reporter for the New York Times wrote that the Jews were ‘slaughtered like sheep’. The anti-Semitic atmosphere worsened. The text of a purported Jewish conspiracy, global in its aspirations, began circulating in Russian nationalist circles. It would become known as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and its distributors claimed that they were exposing a conspiracy between Zionists, Freemasons and the British foreign office to sow the seeds of anti-Tsarist revolt in Russia. Stories based on the age-old ‘Blood Libel’, the story of Jews killing Christian children, passed from one ear to the next in Kiev and other cities, adding fuel to an already blazing fire. Only years later, after much investigative work, did it emerge that the Protocols had been concocted by the Russian secret service. But by then they had become part of the staple anti-Semitic arsenal, quoted to justify suspicion of Jews, quoted to justify atrocities against Jews.

  Two years after the Kishinev outrage, more than six hundred Jewish communities were subjected to pogroms in a single lethal week at the end of October and beginning of November 1905. In Odessa alone, according to Chimen’s Columbia University historian friend Salo Baron, in his book The Russian Jew under Tsars and Soviets, ‘no less than 300 victims lost their lives, thousands more were wounded and crippled, while 40,000 were economically ruined. In all, this pogrom wave cost the Russian Jews about 1,000 dead, 7,000 to 8,000 wounded (many of them permanently crippled), and property losses of 62,700,000 rubles (ca. $31,000,000)’. Hundreds of thousands of Jews who had escaped the killings left their homes and, uncertain of their welcome, headed west; to England, to South America and to the United States. They left on foot, by wagon, by train, by boat. They left any way they could, often leaving all their worldly possessions behind. Even as some of his siblings – his younger brother and an older sister – and cousins migrated to America during these violence-filled years, and others left for Palestine, Yehezkel, who was just starting out on what promised to be an extraordinary rabbinic odyssey, chose, for the moment at any rate, to stay.

  Russia had been riven by revolution since January 1905, when a workers’ demonstration was fired on by troops guarding the Winter Palace in St Petersburg. The pogroms of November 1905 were a product of the unrest, largely nationalist-led, opposed by leftist revolutionaries, and resisted by armed Jews organised into self-defence units. 1906 saw a last great spasm of ferocity; thereafter, the intensity and frequency of the pogroms started to decline dramatically. The anti-Semitic vice which squeezed Jews from both the left and right of the Russian Empire’s political spectrum started to loosen once Marxist revolutionaries, who opposed the pogroms and also opposed the use of religion and nationalism as a way of dividing one man from the next, began to out-perform their anarchist rivals in attracting the support of workers and peasants.

  In the meantime, however, the twenty-five years of pogroms and reaction in the countryside, of revolution and intellectual ferment in the cities had made it all but impossible for young Jews in Russia who engaged with the secular world to support the status quo. Three responses came to dominate their thinking. Firstly, there was Zionism, either of the literal variety, embracing the idea of migration to Palestine, or in a territorial guise, with supporters advocating setting up some other protected political and territorial space for Jews. The second response was to support organised migration to an assimilationist culture and country, leading to the waves of emigration to the USA and to a lesser extent Britain. The third response was to promote revolution to change Russia from within by sweeping away the old anti-Semitic autocracy and nationalist movements and replacing them by an internationalist-minded revolutionary government. Hence the increasing embrace of Marxism, and of the non-anti-Semitic anarchist groupings, by young Russian secular Jews. It was neither accident nor happenstance; rather, it was a perfectly logical reaction to the events unfolding in Russia. After the Kishinev pogrom, increasing numbers of Jews in Russia armed themselves to fight back against the p
ogromchiki. Others prepared to fight against the Tsarist government which they saw as pulling the strings of the mob. They joined the Bolsheviks and other groups calling for the overthrow of the Tsar and the creation of a workers’ state.

  A religious Jew could believe in Eretz Israel (the Land of Israel), or could seek, as did the young Yehezkel Abramsky, to obliterate the pain and fear of the present by burrowing ever deeper into Talmudic scholarship. Yehezkel – who was discovered as an illui, or prodigy, as a young child; anointed a gaon, or genius, as a young adult; termed a gadol, or great one, as an old man; and posthumously referred to by his biographer Aaron Sorsky as a ‘king’ watched over by angels – would routinely spend more than ten hours a day locked in his yeshiva’s study room, burning candles late into the night as he read ever-more obscure Aramaic and Hebrew commentaries. He wanted nothing to do with the secular world: until the all-consuming fires unleashed by the First World War rendered it impossible, for many years he succeeded in largely shutting out the cacophony around him. He was, after all, a product of the code of discipline that ruled the yeshivas – fines, slaps from the rabbi, even expulsion for such sins as ‘time-wasting’, playing card games for example, or reading trivial, non-religious texts. ‘Students’, wrote Shaul Stampfer, in Lithuanian Yeshivas of the Nineteenth Century, ‘were meant to devote every possible moment to study’. Mostly, their studies were unstructured; they attended a few hours a week of shiurim (expository lectures) from the rabbinic scholars in residence, but the rest of the time they were simply expected to organise their own time. Many, Stampfer found, spent upwards of eighteen hours a day working on their understanding of important texts. They were known, simply, as matmidim, or perpetual students. Yehezkel, with his ability to memorise extraordinary amounts of text, was just such a figure – a young man utterly absorbed in his studies, entirely disinterested in the great events in the broader world beyond the yeshiva walls.