Siepposissejä ja vapaa-ampujia

Lauantaina 25. huhtikuuta 2009 noin 125 ihmistä kerääntyi skoonelaisen Göingen pitäjän Skyrupsgrådeniin kuuntelemaan Ruotsin eturivin historioitsijoiden esitelmiä 1600-luvun skoonelaisista talonpoikaississeistä, snapphanareista tai suomeksi siepposisseistä. Lundin yliopiston professori Harald Gustafsson toi Skoonen talonpoikaissotiin laajempaa eurooppalaista perspektiiviä, kun taas dosentti Hanne Sanders muistutti kuulijoita siitä, että uskonnolla oli 1600-luvun ihmisten itseymmärryksessä suurempi osa kuin kansallistunteella. Jens Lerbom painotti lähdekritiikin suurta merkitystä keskusteltaessa siitä, keitä siepposissit olivat ja mikä oli heidän sodankäyntinsä luonne. Keskiajan arkeologi Anders Ödman muisteli sitä, kuinka kaikki hänen nuoruutensa historianopetuksessa näytti liittyvän vain siepposisseihin: ”Kivikauden jälkeen olimme nopeasti siepposisseissä ja sitten tulivatkin jo rautatiet ja ottivat vallan”, Ödman muisteli historianopetuksen rakennetta. Asiallisesti edenneen esitelmäsarjan loppusuoralla yleisön parista alkoi kuulua soraääniä. Tunnettu skoonelainen paikallishistorioitsija Sixten Svensson ryhtyi tivaamaan Harald Gustafssonilta, miksi tämä oli yhdistänyt siepposissien perinteen juhlistamisen äärioikeistoon. Gustafsson vetosi aiempaan väitöstutkimukseen aiheesta, mutta tämä ei vakuuttanut Svenssonia. Sekä esiintyjien lavalta että yleisön joukosta alkoi sinkoilla syytöksiä tahallisista väärinymmärryksistä, kunnes moderoijana toiminut Staffan Örne julisti tilaisuuden päättyneeksi. 

Skyrupsgrådenin yleisötilaisuus kymmenen vuoden takaa osoittaa, kuinka kiistanalainen ja tulenarka aihepiiri 1600-luvun skoonelaiset siepposissit ovat nykypäivän Ruotsissa – ja aivan erityisesti Skoonessa. Tiivistetysti selitettynä siepposissit olivat Tanskan tuolloin hallitseman Etelä-Ruotsin talonpoikia, jotka muodostivat osan Tanskan sotajoukoista neljässä 1600-luvun sodassa: Kalmarin sodassa 1611–1613, Torstenssonin sodassa 1643–1645, Kaarle Kustaan sodassa 1655–1660 ja Skoonen sodassa 1675–1679. Historiantutkimus on pohtinut paljon sitä, olivatko siepposissit talonpoikaista nostoväkeä, vakituisia sotilaita vai jotain muuta – mahdollisesti pelkkiä rosvoja. Tämän keskustelun poleeminen puoli kiteytyy väittelyyn etymologiasta ja sanojen merkityksestä. Sixten Svensson ja monet muut skoonelaiset näkevät sanan snapphana ainoastaan halventavana ja loukkaavana nimityksenä. Tässä tulkinnassa snapphana ymmärretään rosvon synonyymina, ja siten se luo assosiaation siepposissien ja rikollisten välille. Skoonelaiset itse suosivat siepposisseistä nimitystä friskyttar, joka termi kuvastaa talonpoikaississejä kruunun värvääminä ja johtamina sotilaina, eräänlaisina jääkäreinä. 

Ruotsinkielisen termin snapphana alkuperä on saksankielen sanassa Schnaphahne. Historioitsija O. Källström löysi tämän sanan jo myöhäiskeskiajan Saksasta, missä se tarkoitti ryöstelijää tai rosvoritaria. Löysin itse vastaavia assosiaatioita 1500-luvun saksalaisesta painokirjallisuudesta, missä Schnaphahne rinnastettiin myös kasakkaan (Sebastian Henricpetri, 1596). Skandinaviaan rantautuessaan käsitteen merkitys on kuitenkin laajentunut. Källström löysi vuosien 1527 ja 1558 välisistä fiskaalisista asiakirjoista viittauksen erääseen Hans Snaphaneen, joka oli ammatiltaan artesaaniseppä (klensmed) ja jolla ei vaikuttanut olevan mitään yhteyttä maantierosvoihin tai muihin rikollisiin. Källström päätteli, että Hans Snaphanen nimi juonsi juurensa hänen kotipitäjästään Göingestä, joka oli jo 1500-luvulla tunnettu asesepistään ja metsäsisseistään. 

1600-luvulle tultaessa termit snapphana ja Schnaphahne ovatkin liittyneet ensisijaisesti tietynlaisiin aseisiin eli sieppolukolla varustettuihin musketteihin. Sieppolukko oli piilukkomusketin edeltäjä, joka käytti sankkipannussa olevan ruudin sytyttämiseen rikkikiisunpalan happoa tai piikivestä syntynyttä kipinää palavan luntun sijasta. Muskettimalli kehitettiin 1500-luvun lopulla, ja se oli jo sangen yleinen ase 1600-luvun ensimmäisinä vuosikymmeninä. Ruotsissa tämä musketti (tai sen lukkomekanismi) on snapplås, saksassa Schnapschloss. Englanninkielessä asemalli tunnettiin nimellä snaphance, ranskassa siitä käytettiin nimitystä chenapan. Suomenkielen sana sieppolukko on outo eikä ilmeisesti kovinkaan muinainen. Itse en ole kyennyt jäljittämään sanan etymologiaa 1930-lukua ja sotahistorioitsija Arvo Viljantia kauemmaksi. Suomen sieppo liittynee ruotsinkielen snappa–verbiin, joka tarkoittaa sieppaamista. Tuskin sanalla ainakaan on mitään yhteyttä sieppoina tunnettuun varpuslintujen heimoon. 

Aikalaislähteissä sieppolukkomusketti tunnettiin yleisemmin nimityksillä flintgevär (ruotsi), Flintgewehr (saksa) tai firelock (englanti). Saksasta juontava termi Gewehr aiheuttaa helposti sekaannuksia aseiden ja asioiden välillä. Nykyään Gewehr ymmärretään helposti juuri kiväärinä, mutta alun perin se saattoi tarkoittaa mitä asetta tahansa. 1600-luvulla pistoaseista käytettiin yleisesti termejä Untergewehr tai Seitengewehr. Musketti tunnettiin erottavalla termillä Obergewehr; myös pelkkä etuliitteetön Gewehr viittasi yleensä juuri muskettiin. Aikalaislähteissä esiintyy usein myös termi Feuerröhr. Tämä sana, jonka voisi suomentaa tulikepiksi, on kotoisin 1500-luvulta, mutta 1600-luvulla se vaikuttaa viitanneen mihin tahansa muskettiin paitsi lunttumuskettiin. Se on siis saksalainen synonyymi englanninkielen aikalaistermille firelock ja sisällyttää sekä sieppolukkomusketit että rataslukkomusketit. Lunttulukoilla varustetut ampuma-aseet olivat 1600-luvulla niin yleisiä, että niihin viitattiin ihan vain musketteina. Hakapyssyyn viitannut sana arkebuusi puolestaan kapeni merkitykseltään 1600-luvulla, jolloin sitä ryhdyttiin käyttämään lähinnä rataslukoilla varustetuista, verrattain lyhyistä musketeista. 

Snapphanarien vaihtoehdoksi tarjotun termin friskyttare voisi suomentaa vapaa-ampujiksi. Lars Ericson Wolken, Göran Larssonin ja Nils Erik Villstrandin yhdessä kirjoittama kirja Europa i brand (2006) määrittelee vapaa-ampujat sotilaallisesti organisoiduksi joukoksi, joka oli kruunun palkkalistoilla ja jota johtivat kuninkaan asettamat päälliköt. Eräs varhainen esimerkki tällaisesta vapaa-ampujien joukosta olivat Mikkel Gøngen johtamat jyllantilaiset ja skoonelaiset talonpoikaismusketöörit Ruotsin ja Tanskan välisessä seitsenvuotisessa sodassa 1563–1570. Myöhemmin 1600-luvulla skoonelainen Svend Poulsen johti samanlaisia osastoja Kaarle Kustaan ja Skoonen sodissa (1655–1660 ja 1675–1679). Wolken, Larssonin ja Villstrandin esittelemä määritelmä vapaa-ampujista pätee täysin Poulsenin johtamiin talonpoikaississeihin, sillä Poulsen itse oli armeijan komentoketjuun kuulunut upseeri, minkä lisäksi Kööpenhaminan Rigsarkivetissa säilytetyt asiakirjat osoittavat, että Poulsenin sotilaille maksettiin kruunun puolesta palkkaa. Kummallista kyllä, en itse löytänyt tutkimastani Torstenssonin sodasta (1643–1645) yhtä ainoaa suoraa viittausta vapaa-ampujiin. Sana friskyttare ei yksinkertaisesti esiinny missään muodossa yhdessäkään tutkimassani asiakirjassa. Lähin epäsuora viittaus vapaa-ampujien kaltaiseen joukkoon löytyy Tanskan kruununprinssi Christianin kirjeenvaihdosta, jossa prinssi tarjoaa hevosen omistaneille skoonelaisille talonpojille mahdollisuuden ryhtyä kruunun palkkalistoilla sotiviksi rakuunoiksi. 

Jo edesmenneen Alf Åbergin kirja Snapphanarna: Skånsk motsåndsrörelse eller laglösa mördare? (ensimmäinen painos 1951, viimeisin 2014) tiivistää oivallisesti kysymyksen siepposissien luonteesta. Åberg itse nosti esille ne useat tapaukset, joissa skoonelaiset siepposissit kääntyivät omia maanmiehiään vastaan ja operoivat lähinnä rosvoina ja terroristeina. Nämä dokumentoidut tapaukset tosin liittyvät Kaarle Kustaan ja Skoonen sotiin 1600-luvun jälkipuoliskolla, jolloin Skoone oli jo virallisesti siirtynyt Ruotsin haltuun ja sissitoiminta ruotsalaisia vastaan oli lähtökohtaisesti rikollista toimintaa ja maanpetturuutta. Torstenssonin sodan aikana tällainen toiminta esiintyy lähinnä epäsuorina viittauksina tanskalaisissa asiakirjoissa. Myös Saksassa termillä Schnaphahne oli yhä 1640-luvulla huono kaiku. Hampurin kaupunginraadin laatimissa asiakirjoissa viitataan kaupunkiin johtaneita maanteitä vaanineisiin rosvoihin siepposisseinä (”Schnaphanen”). Vuosisadan lopulla, niin sanotun yhdeksänvuotisen sodan aikana (1688–1697) saksalaiset aikalaislähteet kuitenkin käyttivät samaa nimitystä ranskalaisia maahanhyökkääjiä vastaan taistelleista pfalzilaisista sisseistä, jotka olivat siis ihailtavia patriootteja. Samoja tapahtumia kuvanneissa ranskalaislähteissä pfalzilaississeihin viitattiin yksiselitteisesti bandiitteina eli rikollisina. Yhden vapaustaistelija on toisen terroristi. 

Siepposissit ja vapaa-ampujat olisi kenties hyödyllisintä ymmärtää minä tahansa sissisodan harjoittajina. Tällainen sodankäyntihän ei ollut varhaismodernin Euroopan sääty-yhteiskunnassa millään lailla arvostettua tai edes kunniallista, eikä sitä välttämättä ymmärretä tällä tavoin edelleenkään. Kannattaa muistaa, että oman kielemme sana sissi on venäläistä perua ja viittaa sekin rosvoon, vakoilijaan tai kulkuriin (šiš). 1700-luvulla tällaisista epätavanomaisista taistelijoista ryhdyttiin käyttämään nimitystä partisaani, ja seuraava vuosisata lanseerasi omalle ajallemme vakiintuneen yleistermin guerrilla. Se viittaa mihin tahansa ns. pienen sodan harjoittajaan, joka voi olla aivan hyvin myös vakituisen armeijan univormua kantava sotilas (espanjankielinen termi guerrilla tarkoittaa kirjaimellisesti pientä sotaa). Suomenkielen jumittuminen sissiin ei helpota yhä monimuotoisemmaksi käyneen sotatieteen hahmottamista ja käsitteellistämistä, mitä ammattisotilaiden tuskailua Marko Palokangas on kuvannut hyvin väitöskirjassaan (2014).

Skoonelaisten siepposissien ilmiötä ei ole helppo käsittää nykyajan lähtökohdista käsin. He eivät olleet lähtökohtaisesti maantierosvoja tai muita rikollisia, eivätkä myöskään omaa isänmaataan puolustaneita skoonelaisia sotilaita. Siepposissi ei ollutkaan identiteetti tai kategoria vaan sotilaallisen toiminnan muoto. Siepposissit olivat Tanskan asevoimien strateginen etujoukko, joka oli värvättyä ammattiarmeijaa nopeammin ja helpommin mobilisoitavissa. Suurin osa siepposisseistä oli skoonelaista nostoväkeä, jonka sotilaallinen olemassaolo ei näkynyt kruunun palkkalistoissa tai monissa muissakaan tanskalaisen hallinnon tuottamissa asiakirjoissa. Osa siepposisseistä soti värvättyinä rakuunoina ja vapaa-ampujina, jolloin heidät oli helppo mieltää osaksi vakinaista sotaväkeä. Sitten oli myös se marginaalinen ryhmä, joka koostui maantierosvoista ja henkipatoista, jotka harjoittivat omaa rikollista toimintaansa sodan varjossa. Tällaiset yksilöt tai joukkiot tuskin hakeutuivat taistelukosketukseen ruotsalaisten sotilaiden kanssa, mistä syystä heidän toimintaansa ei voi kategorisoida sissi- tai yhtään miksikään muuksi sodankäynniksi. Kenties erilaisissa olosuhteissa nämä rosvojoukot olisivat saattaneet vahvistua siinä määrin, että ne olisivat voineet ottaa itselleen puolisotilaallisen ulkoasun. Tällainen sissisodan ja järjestäytyneen rikollisuuden välinen harmaa vyöhyke on ainakin omalle aikakaudellemme tyypillinen ilmiö.

Kirjallisuutta ja lähteitä:

Olli Bäckström, Snapphanar and Power States: Insurgency and the Transformation of War in Sweden and Denmark 1643–1645 (Joensuu: Itä-Suomen yliopisto, 2018).

Kristianstadsbladet 27.4.2009.

Marko Palokangas, Räjähtävää tyhjyyttä: Sissitoiminta suomalaisessa sotataidossa (Helsinki: Suomen Mies, 2014).

Sixten Svensson, Sanningen om snapphanelögnen (Visby: Books-on-Demand, 2005).

Lars Ericson Wolke, Göran Larsson ja Nils Erik Villstrand, Trettioåriga kriget: Europa i brand 1618–1648 (Tukholma: Historiska Media, 2006).

Alf Åberg, Snapphanarna: Skånsk motsåndsrörelse eller laglösa mördare?(Tukholma: Svenskt Militärhistoriskt Biblioteks Förlag, 2014).

How did the First World War change the identities and attitudes of the American Jewry?

The first aim of this introduction is to explain the essay title above. The ‘identities’ in the title refers to the way in which the American Jews saw themselves; the ‘attitudes’ covers the Jewish view of the outside world, and the outside world’s view of the Jewish-American community. The reason why these two words are used in the plural is that the American Jews of the early twentieth century were a highly heterogeneous group of people, with different mother tongues, different political views, and different religious traditions. The second purpose of this introduction is to offer a layout of the essay plan. The main argument is that the identities and attitudes regarding both ethnic and religious Judaism did in fact change during the Great War, and the essay will cover areas that were the most affected, mainly European nationalism, American patriotism, Zionism and radical socialism. The last section of the essay will deal with the attitudes of the Gentiles towards the Jewish Americans, with particular emphasis on wartime legislation, the Red Scare, and the Jewish reaction to anti-Semitism in the aftermath of the war.
 

Why was European nationalism an important issue for the American Jews? To answer this question we must look back on the origins of the American Jewry. By and large, the majority of those Jews who had emigrated to America over the course of the nineteenth century came from Germany. The large-scale Jewish immigration of the early twentieth century, on the other hand, originated from eastern Europe, especially from Russia. Both Jewish groups had their reasons to support the cause of the Central Powers. Before Hitler, Jews had been relatively safe in Germany. It was there that the Jews prospered in the nineteenth century, especially in the fields of economy and education. The Rothschild family had given a face to the ‘Frankfurt Tradition’ of international banking, and consequently the acquaintance of prosperous Jews became a badge of honour for the ambitious German nobility who flocked to the refined salons of the Berlin Jews.[1] The intellectual tradition of Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment, flourished in Germany as well, where it had contributed to the emancipation of the Jews.[2] The German Haskalah not only produced intellectuals such as the historian Yomtob Zunz, the political journalist and poet Heinrich Heine, and the father of communism Karl Marx, but it also gave birth to the religious tradition of Reform Judaism, which would later prosper in the United States. Therefore Germany had played a very positive part in the Jewish history prior to the outbreak of the war, and those American Jews who traced their family backgrounds to Germany had reason to sympathise with the German war effort. 


In many ways, the experience of the Russian Jews was opposite to that of the Germans. While anti-Semitism had certainly existed in Germany before the First World War, it was not, however, something that had been actively promoted by the German state. This was not the case in Russia. Throughout the nineteenth century, the Russian monarchy had exhibited hostility towards its Jewish subjects, beginning with the ‘official nationality’ of Nicholas I in 1833.[3] This hostility evolved into a systematized discrimination with the May Laws of Alexander III in 1882,[4] and finally erupted into outright violence during the reign of Nicholas II. Large-scale pogroms were carried out by the infamous Interior Ministers: in 1903 by Wenzel von Plehve,[5] and in 1906 by Pyotr Stolypin.[6] New pogroms erupted during the world war, particularly in 1914, as the Russians were driven out of Poland and they vented their anger at the Jewish population in the Pale of Settlement, and in 1918-1919, when Russia descended into a civil war, and the Jews were persecuted by the Russian White armies as well as Polish and Ukrainian nationalists. Perhaps as many as 250,000 Russian and Polish Jews were killed between 1915 and 1921.[7] 


It is understandable, therefore, that those American Jews who had emigrated from Russia had every reason to hate the Romanov Empire and to celebrate its collapse in 1917. This collapse brought about a fundamental change in the attitudes of the Russian Jewish immigrants towards the world war. Russia being one of the Allies, it is unlikely that many Jews would have volunteered to fight alongside their age-old nemesis; with the anti-Semitic Romanov Empire gone, a door was opened for an increased American-Jewish participation in the war effort. The continued existence of the Romanov Empire might have proven to be an obstacle for the American post-war foreign policy as well, as the US government would have found itself in an unfavourable position attempting to maintain amicable relations with a war-time ally, while at the same time trying to recognise the concerns of a sizeable Jewish-American minority. After February 1917 this problem was removed, and Jewish-American Russophobia no longer stood in the way of Jewish-American patriotism.

The abandonment of European nationalism was completed when America entered the war. As we have seen, the collapse of Russia brought the eastern-European Jews closer to the American foreign policy; the increasing anti-Semitism in the Imperial German rhetoric, on the other hand, alienated German Jews from their former home country.[8] By the spring of 1917 the ideological alignment of the opposing coalitions had become clear-cut: the Allied Powers were all democratic nations, while the Central Powers remained autocratic and militaristic - qualities that did not endear them to the American Jews.[9] One particular issue suggested that the American Jews were somewhat divided regarding their American identity. That issue was the draft. In the minds of the Russian Jews, the draft reminded them of the forced conscription in the Tsarist Russia, when Jewish conscripts were often mistreated and forcibly converted to Christianity in the Russian military.[10] Other Jewish Americans, however, saw the draft as a patriotic duty, and as a mean for the Jews to integrate more fully into the American society. The defenders of the draft stressed the difference between the Old World and the New, and believed that it was the duty of the Jewish immigrants to defend the country that had provided them with a safe haven from the rampant anti-Semitism of Europe. It was for this reason that even members of the religious establishment spoke on behalf of the draft. Rabbi Samuel Schulman strongly advocated the draft:

"Do not be sad if the names of your sons are to be drawn…Their privilege it is to be the first to respond to the call of the flag. We should teach our sons to think life cheap when their country demands their honorable service."[11]

The pro-draft position of the rabbinate horrified many Russian Jews. They vividly recalled the role that the vilified kehillot (Jewish community councils) had played in helping the Russian authorities fill their recruitment quota in the Pale of Settlement.[12] The kehillot had favoured the wealthy, who could buy an exemption from military service, and it was mostly the Jewish paupers who ended up in the Tsarist army.[13] The issue of draft therefore divided the Jewish community throughout the war, as it reminded the Russian immigrants of the gaping class differences among the poor and the wealthy in the shtetls (Jewish villages) of eastern Europe. This did not mean that the Russian immigrants were wholeheartedly opposed to the draft. In fact, many Russian immigrants volunteered to serve in the US military, even those who had already experienced the Russian military service at first hand. Such unpleasant memories of Russia may have caused some immigrants to develop an idealistic view of America, and had encouraged them to volunteer to the US military.[14] American-born Jews too responded to the call, motivated on one hand by American patriotism and on the other hand by a strong feeling of Jewish solidarity: by going ‘over there’ they were not only defending the United States, but their oppressed eastern-European Jewish kinsmen as well. This strong Jewish identity had been one reason for Michael Shalinsky to join the Army:

"When my turn to be drafted came, it didn’t bother me at all. As a matter of fact,

if I hadn’t been drafted, I think I would have gone anyway. Both my parents

had been Jewish immigrants from Europe, and this country had been good

to our family."[15]

All in all, the First World War witnessed a major shift in the attitudes of the Jewish Americans towards an all-American identity. For many Jews the goal was to become fully integrated into the American society: military service was seen as a price to be paid for that privilege. Jews did in fact serve in large numbers during the war, and even though Jews only made up 3.3 percent of the American population, in the military they constituted 4.5 percent – in total almost 250,000 servicemen.[16] Avoiding conscription in Russia had made sense, as the Jews had nothing to gain by serving that state. The opposite was true in America: patriotic duty not only made the Jews look respectable in the eyes of the Gentiles, but it also offered an alternative identity to the Jews themselves – not that of a victim of military slavery, but of a citizen soldier, an equal member of a wider society that did not distinguish between Jews and Gentiles.

The First World War also affected the social and religious outlook of the American Jews. The change was not discernible until the end of the 1920s, but it can still be contributed to the increased material well-being that the war brought along. As the increased prosperity of the First World War affected the Jews, they began to move away from the so-called ‘first settlements’, or the inner city ghettoes, to the ‘second settlements’ in the uptown city districts.[17] This movement changed the Jewish-American identity in two different ways: firstly, it exemplified a rapid, almost unparalleled social ascent of the Russian immigrants from a predominantly working-class outlook to the ranks of the growing middle-class; secondly, it mixed the immigrant Russian Jews with the more well-established German Jews who had already made their own social leap over the course of the nineteenth century.[18] 


This social progress not only diminished the existing class barriers between the two Jewish groups, but it also increased the following of a previously neglected religious denomination, Conservative Judaism. This denomination had grown out from the old Orthodoxy of the Russian immigrants. Having reached the ‘second settlement’ previously dominated by the German Jews and their Reform denomination, the Russian immigrants began to look for a way to adapt to their new middle-class surroundings without wholly giving up their Orthodox practices in favour of Reform Judaism. Hence Conservative Judaism, which in many ways preserved the core of the old Orthodox belief, while at the same time making amends to the more secular outlook of German Reform Judaism.[19] 


The changing Jewish-American identity was particularly reflected in the education of the immigrants’ children: with the increasing post-war prosperity, there came opportunities for higher education. While most of the first-generation immigrants had been mere manual workers at the various sweatshops, particularly in the knitting industry, many of their children would go on to higher education and be thereafter employed in the fields of medicine and law.[20] The rabbinate too was affected by these changes in the Jewish-American outlook. In order to cope with the increasing Americanization of the Jewry, and with the sudden growth of secularism that followed the war, the rabbis were forced to alter their own religious education. Synagogues had to institute changes that appealed to the Americanized Jews, such as decorum and singing, and in order to keep up with these new developments the theological seminaries had to incorporate secular subjects in their curricula. The prime example of this trend was the Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary in New York City, which instituted a secular high school program in 1916. That school then evolved into the Yeshiva University in 1927.[21]

Zionism was another ideology that affected the identity of the Jewish Americans during the First World War. In fact, Zionism brought with it a crisis in the Jewish-American identity. The origins of political Zionism were in nineteenth-century Germany, specifically in the booklet Der Judenstaat, written by Theodor Herzl in 1896. The idea put forward by Herzl was a simple one: he proposed the restoration of the Jewish state in Palestine.[22] Before the First World War the effect of Zionism had been mainly cultural-psychological.[23] In Europe it had been discussed in a number of Zionist congresses; in America it had been the intellectual pursuit of a minority group among the Reformist German Jews. All this changed in 1917 with the Balfour Declaration, a somewhat crafty British diplomatic overture that seemed to promise the mandate of Palestine to both Jews and Arabs at the same time.[24] 


By removing the prospect of a Jewish homeland from the sphere of fantasy and firmly placing it into the world of political possibility, the Balfour Declaration presented the American Jews with a very special conundrum: how to reconcile Zionism with the other dominant ideologies of the American Jewry? It seemed that each Jewish sub-group had its own reasons to oppose Zionism. For the Orthodox believers the Zionist attempt to restore the Jewish state was sacrilegious: only the Messiah could do this, and therefore the restoration of Israel could not be brought about by human action.[25] The Jewish socialists opposed Zionism as reactionary nationalism, even as chauvinism. To the socialists the goal was to eradicate the need for a separate Jewish state by instituting true socialism, under which all people would be equal, Gentiles and Jews alike. From their point of view this state formation was already successfully underway in the nascent Soviet Russia. The liberal Jews argued that the real salvation of the Jewish people would be in their assimilation to the American society, and therefore Zionism was only another expression of false nationalism, not unlike the pre-war sympathy some nostalgic German Jews had felt for their former homeland. According to the liberal Reformist Jews, allegiance to the United States took precedence over any other form of Jewish loyalty. Yet Zionism did not only survive the First World War but began to win wider support among Jewish Americans. The membership in Zionist organisations increased from 12,000 in 1914 to 171,000 in 1940.[26] The movement was unified into the Zionist Organisation of America in 1917, and placed under the leadership of Louis Brandeis, an accomplished lawyer who later became a Justice of the Supreme Court.[27] The opposition to Zionism diminished to a degree after the war, but Zionism nevertheless remained a controversial issue for the American Jews, a challenge to the adopted American identity. 


One reason for the increased interest in Zionism was the growing concern over the fate of the European Jewry after the war. This concern was explicitly expressed in the field of Jewish-American philanthropy. As the First World War had left many thousands of eastern-European Jews homeless and destitute, the American Jews felt it as their obligation to come to the aid of their brethren in Europe. The plight of the eastern-European Jews was something that the American Jews could identify with. Had they not immigrated to America, they thought, it could have been they who were huddling in the refugee camps of Polish Galicia. Unlike Zionism, consequently, the issue of philanthropy did not divide the American Jews, but united them. Initially there had been three separate Jewish relief organisations competing for the same funds: the American Jewish Relief Committee, chaired by Louis Marshall, represented the German Reformist Jews; the Central Committee for the Relief of Jews Suffering Through the War was organised by the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations; and the Jewish People’s Relief Committee of America was set up by Jewish socialists and trade unionists.[28] In 1915 all these separate groups put aside their ideological differences and joined forces in the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.[29] Altogether $63 million was collected between 1914 and 1924, and the money was used to provide the eastern-European Jews with food, clothing, sanitation, medical supplies, doctors, nurses and economic experts.[30] According to Jacob Schiff, America’s most prominent German-Jewish philanthropist, this was done by the American Jews in order to ”prove ourselves Jews, prove ourselves their brothers.”[31]

Socialism presented the American Jews with a similar problem as Zionism had. Like Zionism, it too questioned the loyalty of the American Jews. Socialism was a distinctively Jewish ideology as well; possibly the only other immigrants who were even more identified with radical socialism were the Finns.[32] Like Zionism, socialism too had been a mere pipedream before the First World War. The war changed all this, and in the same way as the Balfour Declaration had revived the Zionist movement in 1917, the October Revolution electrified the socialists. The respective effects of Zionism and socialism on the identity of Jewish Americans differed, however. Whereas Zionism presented the Jews with an inner identity crisis, socialism took the form of an outward conflict with the surrounding society. Throughout the world war, and after it, Jewish radicals and trade unionists were constantly defining their identities through conflict; conflict with unscrupulous employers who used strong-arm tactics to break the power of the trade unions; conflict with New York’s Tammany Hall politicians who were determined to keep the city’s immigrant proletariat under the thumb of the Democratic Party, by hook or by crook.[33] The one decisive difference between Eugene Debs’ American Socialist Party and the Russian Bolsheviks was the former party’s insistence on non-violence.[34] This policy was in perfect alignment with the principles of the Jewish Bundists (Russian-Jewish socialists) – the class conflict of the Jewish socialists therefore never evolved into an armed rebellion against the United States government. 


In 1919, with the coming of the Red Scare and the split of the American communists into two separate parties, the possibility of building a socialist state in America began to seem remote.[35] As a result, the Jewish-American socialists began to shift their sympathies towards the Soviet Union, a country that, in the minds of the Jewish socialists, “offered a living proof that the problem of the Jewish people could be solved under socialism.”[36] This brought them into a conflict with the more conservative elements in the Jewish community, and consequently forced the socialists to forge a new, separate Jewish identity for themselves. The radical socialists formed the International Workers Order, an organisation with its own separate landsmanshaftn (Jewish cultural societies) branches, cultural events, insurance programs, and even with its own secular cemeteries.[37] We should not view this division between the radical and the conservative Jews as a result of any long-term cultural development in the Jewish-American community; it was, in fact, a direct result of the First World War and the Russian Revolution. 


We can prove this by looking at another immigrant group, the Finnish Americans. The Finnish radicals had also reacted to the ostracism of other, more conservative Finnish immigrants, particularly after the establishment of an independent Finnish state in 1917, and had subsequently formed a socialist counter-culture of their own. The ‘Finn Halls’ were in many ways identical to the landsmanshaftn of the radical Jews, and whereas the Finn Halls, alongside with political activities, strived to maintain the Finnish language and culture among their members, the landsmanshaftn of the IWO promoted the Yiddish language and Russian-Jewish traditions in a similar way.[38] The main difference between the Finns and the Jews was in their attitudes towards the Soviet Union. The Finnish-American radicals identified themselves with the socialist ideology and the Soviet Union to such a degree that many of them emigrated from America to the Soviet Union in the interwar period.[39] By and large, the Jewish radicals did not follow their example. They seem to have been content to identify themselves as a non-conformist, pro-Soviet minority that still remained part of the mainstream American society. 

Finally we should look at how the attitudes towards the American Jews changed as a result of the First World War. It is an acknowledged fact that there was a turn to the worse in ethnic relations during and immediately after the war. There had been anti-Semitism in America before the war, but what changed after 1917 was the fact that anti-Semitism began to affect the US government’s policies. The wartime legislation proved particularly harmful to the American Jews. The Espionage Act was recognised as an encouragement to ostracize the German Americans; the Sedition Act allowed the authorities to prosecute anyone who supported hostile powers, were they recognised states or not. The latter law in particular was used against socialists and radicals living in the United States, its most infamous application being the prosecution and imprisonment of Eugene Debs, the leader of the American Socialist Party.[40] The problem for the Jews was that they could be identified with both of these two alien groups: the ‘native’ German Jews with the German Americans, and the immigrant Russian Jews with the Bolsheviks. Much anti-German violence took place during the war, and it would seem safe to assume that at least some Jews with German-sounding names suffered from it.[41] 


The issue of socialism, however, concerned the Jews on a much larger scale. It was because of socialism that the rabid anti-Semitism of the dying Russian Empire spilled over into the United States. During the First World War, Americans became acquainted with a document known as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The document was a forgery, cooked up by the Tsarist secret police Okhrana before the war. Its purpose was to demonise the Jews by claiming the existence of an international Jewish cabal that was aspiring for world domination.[42] The Protocols gave birth to another Russian falsification, a report entitled Bolshevism and Judaism, which was publicized by the Overman Committee in February 1919. This report claimed that the overthrow of the Tsarist government was in fact planned by American Jews in New York City, and the report specifically singled out Jacob Schiff as the leader of these international conspirators.[43] The Overman Committee, which had been set up by the Senate to investigate left-wing radicalism in the United States, also heard testimonies from members of the State Department, who testified that Jews from Upper East Side New York were the ones leading the Bolshevik movement in Russia.[44] When the Overman Committee publicized the results of its investigations on 15 June 1919, their report made no specific mention of Jews as leaders of the international Bolshevik movement, but the printed story did emphasise the nature of Bolshevism as an anti-Christian movement. The Committee also referred to ‘the foreign-language press’ in the US as advocates of a Bolshevik revolution.[45] This latter remark was clearly an ill-disguised reference to the American-Jewish press in New York, where many of the newspapers published by Jews were written in Yiddish.[46] 


The direct result of the Overman Committee hearings were the Palmer Raids, the purpose of which was to arrest, prosecute and either to imprison or deport socialist radicals. Once again, it was Jews who were singled out by the authorities, and the first target of the raids was the Union of Russian Workers in New York, an all-Jewish organisation.[47] The most harmful law, however, proved to be the Immigration Act of 1921. This Act had originally been designed to prevent European radicals and anarchists from entering the United States, but the law had a very definite anti-Semitic undertone to it, as it heavily favoured immigrants from Scandinavia and Great Britain, while virtually stopping all immigration from eastern and southern Europe.[48] For the European Jews this law proved catastrophic in the 1930s, as it barred the victims of Hitler’s violent persecution from entering the United States in search of asylum. This hardening in the government’s attitudes towards Jews also affected the thinking of many private individuals. One such individual was the industrialist Henry Ford, who in the 1920s gained notoriety as America’s most prominent anti-Semite, and his own private newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, was taken to reproduce lengthy passages from The Protocols, thus turning one man’s personal anti-Semitism into a public crusade against Judaism. The Ku Klux Klan, resurrected in 1915, also began to direct its violent actions against Jews, after having incorporated anti-Semitic rhetoric into its racist doctrine.[49] 


However, the attitudes of the Jewish-Americans towards blatant anti-Semitism began to change as well. Before the war there had been anti-Semitic discrimination in America, to which Jews had usually responded as private citizens, taking up lawsuits and writing letters of protest.[50] After the sudden growth of anti-Semitism in America between 1917 and 1919, Jewish-Americans assumed a more collective stance towards their detractors. The Jewish newspapers reacted to the anti-Semitic diatribes of the Dearborn Independent in kind, labelling Henry Ford as a liar and a traitor to the United States.[51] In Louis Marshall and Louis Brandeis the Jews had two politically powerful advocates as well. As a friend of President Wilson, and as a future Justice of the Supreme Court, Louis Brandeis in particular had substantial influence in Washington D.C.[52] It was thanks to his and Marshall’s efforts that a number of prominent Americans, including the Presidents Taft, Wilson and Harding, signed a statement in January 1921 denouncing all forms of anti-Semitism as threats to ‘American citizenship and American democracy.’[53] From thereon, organised anti-Semitism virtually disappeared, together with the suddenly defunct Ku Klux Klan and the increasingly infrequently appearing Dearborn Independent.[54]

The conclusion is that the Jewish-American identity shifted towards a more American, and less European identity as a result of the First World War. This can be clearly seen in the disappearance of the old European identities and animosities. By taking part in the war primarily as Americans and not as Jews, the process of assimilation was also hastened. Another incentive for Americanization was the growing prosperity of interwar America, and during this period the identity of the American Jews shifted from a predominantly working-class outlook towards a more middle-class appearance. This Americanization of the Jews was challenged by the two ideologies that had been greatly revived by the First World War: Zionism and socialism. It seems that the American Jews either rejected these ideologies, or adopted a more moderate, American approach to them. In the case of Zionism, this approach took the form of quiet endorsement and international Jewish solidarity. American Zionism was being predominantly expressed as Jewish philanthropy, not as direct action to influence the British overlords of Palestine, nor did it ever evolve into American-Jewish colonisation of Palestine.[55] As far as the American Jews were concerned, the ‘Promised Land’ of the Jews was in America, and in the aftermath of the war they adopted the role of benevolent patrons over their European cousins, not only delivering them relief, but also sending a Jewish-American delegation to the Paris peace conference as representatives of all the world’s Jews.[56] The attitude of the Jewish socialists was similar: they extended their hand to fellow socialists all over the world, but they were at the same time reluctant to get involved in any revolutionary struggle against the American government, or to emigrate to the Soviet Union as socialist colonists like many of the Finnish-Americans did. 


The war and its immediate aftermath saw deterioration in the Gentile attitudes towards Jews, and a rise in American anti-Semitism. However, we should acknowledge the fact that this sudden outburst of anti-Semitism was relatively short-lived, and that it never developed into any serious political movement as happened in continental Europe. The Espionage and the Sedition Acts had more or less intentionally harmed the Jewish minority, and the Immigration Act of 1921 was clearly aimed against Jewish immigrants, but these measures were still a far cry from the Nürnberg Laws of National Socialist Germany. What did change permanently was the Jewish-American attitude towards discrimination, and for the first time all Jewish groups, religious and political, worked together to fight anti-Semitism. This fight occurred at all levels of society, and it was carried out by the trade unions, Jewish press and constitutional watchdogs such as the Anti-Defamation League.[57]  However, even though the Jews adopted a more American identity as a result of the war, they nevertheless remained Jews, members of a non-Christian religion, who could never fully assimilate into a society that maintained a predominantly Anglo-Saxon Protestant identity.

---

[1] Howard M. Sachar, The Course of Modern Jewish History (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1958), pp. 140-141

[2] David Sorkin, The Transformation of German Jewry, 1780-1840 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 176

[3] Osmo Jussila, ’Konservatiivinen imperiumi’, in Heikki Kirkinen, ed., Venäjän historia (Helsinki: Otava, 2006), pp. 221-222

[4] Shlomo Lambroza, ’The Pogroms of 1903-1906’, in John D. Klier and Shlomo Lambroza, eds., Pogroms: Anti-Jewish Violence in Modern Russian History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 241

[5] Shmuel Galai, The Liberation Movement in Russia 1900-1905 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), p. 167

[6] Lambroza, Pogroms, p. 231

[7] Sachar, Modern Jewish History, p. 303

[8] Léon Poliakov, The History of Anti-Semitism, Volume IV: Suicidal Europe, 1870-1933 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 151

[9] Christopher M. Sherba, Good Americans: Italian and Jewish Immigrants During the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 64

[10] John Doyle Klier, Imperial Russia’s Jewish Question, 1855-1881 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995),  p. 3

[11] Samuel Schulman on the draft, quoted in Sherba, Good Americans, p. 67

[12] Ibid., p. 65

[13] Klier,  Jewish Question, pp. 3, 340, 342

[14] Sherba, Good Americans, p. 69

[15] Michael Shalinsky on the draft, quoted in Sherba, Good Americans, p. 70

[16] Jonathan D. Sarna, American Judaism: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), p. 212

[17] Nathan Glazer, American Judaism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1972), p. 81

[18] Ibid., p. 82

[19] Lloyd P. Gartner, ’American Judaism, 1880-1945’, in Dana Evan Kaplan, ed., The Cambridge Companion to American Judaism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 51

[20] Sarna, American Judaism, p. 214

[21] Lawrence Grossman, ’Jewish religious denominations’, in Dana Evan Kaplan, ed., The Cambridge Companion to American Judaism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 87

[22] Theodor Herzl, Der Judenstaat: Versuch einer Modernen Lösung der Judenfrage (Vienna: M. Breitenstein’s Verlags-Buchhandlung, 1896), p. 28

[23] Walter Laqueur, A History of Zionism (New York: Schocken Books, 1976), p. 590

[24] The Balfour Declaration, November 2^nd, 1917, in Modern History Sourcebook, at http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/balfour.html [8/4/2008]

[25] Laqueur, Zionism, p. 407

[26] Joe Stork and Sharon Rose, ‘Zionism and American Jewry’, in Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 3, No. 3(1974),      p. 41

[27] Laqueur, Zionism, p. 159

[28] Sarna, American Judaism, pp. 210-211

[29] Sachar, Modern Jewish History, p. 527

[30] Ibid., p. 527; Sarna, American Judaism, p. 208

[31] Jacob Schiff on the Joint Distribution Committee, quoted in Sarna, American Judaism, p. 208

[32] Nathan Glazer, The Social Basis of American Communism (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1961), p. 132; Gary Marks and Matthew Burbank, ’Immigrant Support for the American Socialist Party, 1912 and 1920, in Social Science History, Vol. 14, No. 2 (Summer, 1990), p. 180

[33] Sachar, Modern Jewish History, p. 324

[34] Ibid., p. 324

[35] Charles Leinenweber, ’Socialism and Ethnicity’, in John H. M. Laslett and Seymour Martin Lipset, eds., Failure of a Dream? Essays in the History of American Socialism (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), p. 264

[36] Kenneth Kann, Joe Rapoport: The Life of a Jewish Radical (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981), p. 75

[37] Ibid., pp. 153-154

[38] Rudolph J. Vecoli, ’Comment’, in John H. M. Laslett and Seymour Martin Lipset, eds., Failure of a Dream? Essays in the History of American Socialism (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), p. 272

[39] Mayme Sevander, They Took My Father: Finnish Americans in Stalin’s Russia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), pp. 22, 24

[40] Debs v. United States, 249 U. S. 211 (1919), in FindLaw For Legal Professionals, at http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?navby=CASE&court=US&vol=249&page=211 [14-4-2008]

[41] Not only the German Jews had such names, as many Russian and Polish Jews had Yiddish names that sounded much like German.

[42] The Protocols of the Meetings of the Learned Elders of Zion, With Preface and Explanatory Notes (Chicago: Patriotic Pub. Co., 1934), p. 33

[43] Poliakov, Anti-Semitism, p. 231

[44] Julian F. Jaffe, Crusade Against Radicalism: New York During the Red Scare, 1914-1924 (Port Washington: Kennikat Press, 1972), p. 173

[45] ’Senators Tell What Bolshevism in America Means’, in The New York Times, June 15, 1919, p. 40

[46] Irving Howe, The Immigrant Jews of New York: 1881 to the Present (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976),        p. 544

[47] Eliot Asinoff, 1919: America’s Loss of Innocence (New York: Donald I. Fine, Inc., 1990), p. 208

[48] Gary Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 103

[49] Sachar, Modern Jewish History, p. 340

[50] Poliakov, Anti-Semitism, pp. 224-225

[51] Ibid., p. 248

[52] Howe, Immigrant Jews, p. 384

[53] ‘Issue a Protest on Anti-Semitism’, in The New York Times, January 17, 1921, p. 10

[54] Poliakov, Anti-Semitism, p. 252

[55] Laqueur, Zionism, p. 398

[56] Sachar, Modern Jewish History, p. 533

[57] Poliakov, Anti-Semitism, p. 225