Odessa. Jewish Colonies, 1794-1814. Jews in 1815-1861
Odessa Jews in 1861-1914
After the Slavs, the second major component of Odessa's population was the Jews.
The percentages of Odessa's total population made up of Jews since the foundation of the city (1794-1912):
1794 total population - 2,345; Jews - 10,4 %
1827 - 32,995; Jews - 12.8 %
1829 - 51,988; Jews - 15.20 %
1841 - 73,888; Jews - 14.58 %
1843 - 77,778; Jews - 15.43 %
1854 - 90,319; Jews - 18.91 %
1873 - 193,513; Jews - 26.55 %
1880 - 219,300; Jews - 25.22 %
1892 -340,526; Jews - 32.96 %
1897 - 403,815; Jews - 34.41 %
1904 - 511,000; Jews - 31.31 %
1912 - 620,143; Jews - 32.25 %
Most of Odessa's Jews were Russian subjects, although there was a group of foreign Jews as well, chiefly from Austria. Subject to various civil disabilities, the Jews were frequently regarded as foreigners, but in fact they were, as we have seen, among the earliest settlers of the region.
The sixties and seventies of the nineteenth century represented very nearly a golden age for Odessa's Jews. As one visitor remarked: "Judaism held up its head as it never dared to do in Moscow or St. Petersburg." The same commentator further noted the handsome synagogues, the participation of Jews in municipal management, and their contribution toward the social life and the culture of the city. Avram Brodskii, the merchant industrialist, for example, was one of the six men who formed the executive committee heading the city's government in 1873. So satisfied were the Jews with their condition, affirmed the visitor, that few ever converted to Christianity. In 1863, the French consul reported that Jews were free to follow professions, and some became bourgeois notables. They could hold office and, in his words, were liberated from the "moral ghetto" in which they were confined elsewhere in the empire.
From the 1870s, the status of the Jews deteriorated, even as their numbers continued to grow. Crucial in worsening the juridical, and in large measure the social, position of Jews at Odessa were the infamous May, 'Temporary," or Ignat'ev Laws, promulgated in 1882. They were the government's response to the issue of mounting racial tensions. They were designed to appease Russians who might otherwise turn to revolutionary activity against the regime. The laws were supposed to guarantee that Jews would no longer be in a position to exploit non-Jews. Consequently, Jews were severely circumscribed in their mobility; they could no longer reside in villages, even in the Pale. They were forbidden to purchase land outside the towns and hence could not live as landowners in the countryside. They could not work on Sundays or Christian holy days and thus gain a competitive advantage over Christians. While the laws were designed to place economic disabilities on the Jews, the political implications were far more damaging. The policy made it obvious that the government regarded Jews as second-class citizens; they were not accorded full legal protection against acts of extortion, harassment, and persecution perpetrated by gentiles.
Oddly, the poverty as well as the prosperity of Odessa's Jews excited the resentment of others. The image of Odessa as an El Dorado for Jews and gentiles alike had flashed throughout the Pale, and the city was attracting numerous poor immigrants who found no opportunity for work at all. Crowded into Moldavanka, the Jews vied with all the other destitute laborers, artisans, and seasonal workers who were also seeking employment in Odessa. The bourgeoisie of Odessa could identify with their affluent Jewish counterparts, but not with the destitute, whose ranks seemed to be growing with frightening rapidity. The tragedy is that the majority of these poor Jews arrived during bad economic times. Agricultural production and transport had not yet adapted to the new demands of a capitalist economy. Commercial opportunities were shrinking even as the Jewish community was growing.
Numerous authors, Jewish and gentile, describe for us the turmoil that government policies induced in Odessa's Jewish community. An English minister observed in the 1880s that the status of the Jews had diminished in comparison to earlier decades. They were subjected to unprecedented "baiting." For example, a sign in a bath-house proclaimed, "No dogs or Jews allowed to bathe here."
Many Jews concluded that assimilation, or even accommodation, with the larger society was now impossible and chose to emigrate from Odessa and the empire. Others departed for St. Petersburg, where social and intellectual life was allegedly less oppressive. Still others, such as Leon Pinsker, embraced Zionism and called for a Jewish homeland. A prominent physician and a member of the Odessa branch of the Society for the Promotion of Culture among Jews, a leading assimilationist group, Pinsker published (in German) his now famous Auto-Emancipation, a plea for establishing a national homeland for the Jews.
Many Jews belatedly embraced the nationalistic movement, as groups of Bulgarians, Greeks, Ukrainians, Poles, and so forth had done before them; all of them had made Odessa their headquarters. While the Bulgarians and the Greeks sought to free their homelands from Turkish rule, the last two groups saw the imperial Russian government as the enemy. Odessa's Jewish population, which counted in its ranks many wealthy, prominent, and powerful individuals, had strong incentives for supporting a regime that protected their persons and their properties. With the promulgation of the anti-Semitic laws, however, the tsarist government made it clear that it did not fully accept them as Russian citizens.
At the turn of the twentieth century, a Jewish intellectual named Vladimir Zhabotinskii pondered whether or not the Jews of Odessa could be regarded as assimilated. He concluded that they were and they were not: "In Odessa, everybody was an Odessan and everyone who was literate read the same newspapers and thought about the same Russian problems." He then described his situation at the gymnasium when he was a boy in the 1890s. There were thirty in the class, representing eleven nationalities; ten students were Jews and not one was interested in the Zionist movement or even interested in Jewish civil disabilities, although they suffered from them. It had been difficult for them to attend the gymnasium and it would prove more difficult still to attend the university. Some of them studied Hebrew at home simply because their fathers insisted, much as some youngsters reluctantly take piano lessons. When it was possible to study Jewish religious history at school, only three of the ten signed up. The choice of these young Jews was assimilation:
"Yet at the same time, we all lived in rigidly separated national groups, especially we Jews. Without any propaganda, without any ideology, we ten Jews used to sit on one row of benches in class, next to one another. ... In the '90s, even anti-Semitism drowsed—not, Heaven forbid, in the government, but in society. We were quite friendly with our Christian classmates, even intimate with them, but we lived apart and considered it a natural thing that could not be otherwise. . . . The five Poles, I recall, used to sit always in the "Polish corner," like the three Greeks, the three Armenians and the two Moldavians in theirs."
Isaac Babel's experience at the Nicholas I Commercial School at Odessa was similar:
"The school was gay, rowdy, noisy and multilingual. There the sons of foreign merchants, the children of Jewish brokers, Poles from noble families, Old Believers, and many billiard players of advanced years were taught. Between classes we used to go off to the jetty at the port, to Greek coffee houses to play billiards, or to the Moldavanka to drink cheap Bessarabian wine in the taverns."
Leon Trotsky also recalls his childhood in Odessa:
"In my school [run by the Lutheran church] there was no open baiting of nationalities. To some extent the variety of national elements, not only among the boys but among the masters as well, acted as an important check on such policies. One could sense, however, the existence of a suppressed chauvinism which now and again broke through to the surface."
The censuses add to these literary descriptions a statistical picture of Jewish life at Odessa toward the close of the nineteenth century. According to the survey of 1897, the Jews remained chiefly traders and shopkeepers. Of the ten occupations in which most of their numbers were enrolled, four categories involved some kind of trade (in grain and other agricultural products, clothes, and general trade), and a fifth included middlemen or brokers. Jews were not, on the other hand, numerous in industry. Only in the manufacture of metal and wood products were their numbers significant. Over five thousand males (out of thirty-seven thousand) were engaged in the making of clothes. Presumably, these were tailors rather than industrial workers. Another three thousand men were employed as servants and day laborers, and slightly more than fifteen hundred served in the armed forces. Unlike the other ethnic groups we have so far considered, the Jews filled the middle classes of society. For example, in 1880 Jews formed about one-half the membership of the three classes of artisans: masters, journeymen, and apprentices. They also owned many of the grocery stores and small retail shops of all kinds. Among professions, their numbers were also higher than their share in the general population. Many notaries, lawyers, pharmacists and doctors were Jews.
In many respects the Jews seem to have been the most stable component of Odessa's population. The sex ratio among them is nearly normal (ninety-eight men per one hundred women), and the Jewish household appears to have been large and cohesive. Unfortunately, this impression is in part illusory; the divorce rate was extraordinarily high among the Jews. A. A. Skal'kovskii, our indispensable statistician, wrote at length concerning the frequent divorces among Jews, and archival documents confirm his observations. Jews easily divorced but quickly remarried. A few Jews married five times. He remarked on the ease with which divorce among Jews could be obtained. In 1876, for example, he cited 483 marriages among the Jews and 149 divorces; in 1877, 381 marriages and 147 divorces, so that approximately a third of the unions would end in divorce, a curiously modern statistic.
Jews were also the fastest growing major group in the city. In 1873, members of the Jewish faith constituted 26.55 percent of Odessa's population. For 1877, Skal'kovskii noted that among the Christian population births exceeded deaths by 457 per year; the Jews, on the other hand, with a smaller population, registered a natural yearly increment of 473 persons. By 1892, Jews constituted 32.96 percent of the population; and by 1897 their numbers formed 34.41 percent. Concurrently, the Orthodox population at Odessa declined from 64.79 percent in 1873 to 57.46 percent in 1892. It reached a new low of 55.93 percent in 1897. Despite all the efforts of Alexander III to promote Russification and Orthodoxy, Odessa was rapidly becoming a predominantly Jewish city. While this indicates that conditions were still favorable for some Jews in Odessa, it no doubt also contributed to the antagonism of many gentiles toward them.
The growth of Odessa's Jewish community was partially due to continuing immigration, but also to high fertility among Jewish women and comparatively low death rates among their children.
Jewish women of child-bearing age appear in the census with considerably more babies under age one than do the women of any other of the groups surveyed. If we compare the Jewish women with the number of older children, age one to nine, in the census, then the number of Jewish children increases in relation to two groups, the Ukrainians and the Poles, while remaining stable in relation to the Russians. This suggests that child mortality was particularly high among the Poles and Ukrainians, who included, as we have stated, many disadvantaged members of urban society. This high rate of infant survival among Jews was not entirely a function of affluence. Stable family life and the traditional care of Jewish mothers for their children no doubt also contributed. The Jewish family and child benefited from both cultural and material resources.
Mortality rates for Jews had been lower than those for the general population well before 1897. In a survey conducted in the 1860s, the redactors noted that death rates among Jews were distinctly low. The book commemorating the centennial of Odessa specified the advantage in 1895: between the ages of six and fifteen only five Jewish children per thousand died, whereas nine non-Jewish children perished. The authors calculated that the Jewish population in Odessa was growing at the rate of 36.4 per thousand, while the gentile population was increasing at the rate of only 21.4 per thousand. Well before the census of 1897, contemporaries were aware of the remarkable growth of the Jewish community. A study of the census itself revealed that in the southern Ukraine, the population grew between 1881 and 1897 by 37.8 percent, but the Jews increased their numbers by 60.9 percent. This expansion of the community was the combined result of immigration, nearly universal marriage, high fertility, and relatively low mortality.
For a time, economic success went hand in hand with increasing numbers. An American reporter who visited Odessa in the first decade of the twentieth century wrote that "all the wealthy classes are Jews." He gives us this remarkable description of their status:
"There are more than 200,000 Jews in Odessa—exceeding one-third of the entire population—and, as everywhere else, they control the banking, the manufacturing, the export trade, the milling, the wholesale and retail mercantile and commercial enterprises. And naturally, they are hated by the Russians and envied for their success and prosperity. The prejudice against the Jewish population elsewhere as well as here is due to economic rather than religious reasons—simply because they are getting richer and more prosperous, while the Russians are losing ground in all the occupations and professions. They have wasted their capital in bad investments and dissipations and extravagance, and are forced to mortgage their property to the Jews to keep up appearances. In the meantime the Jews have been securing control of all the profitable enterprises and lines of business in Odessa. Their sons show the same earnestness and zeal in the university that they show in the counting-room. Therefore, they make the best doctors and lawyers and engineers, and their services are in demand while the Russian members of the profession are idly waiting for business."
Social turmoil, and then the great pogrom of 1905, poisoned the largely favorable atmosphere in which Odessa's Jews had lived. In the years immediately preceding the First World War, many Jews, fearful for their properties and even their lives, emigrated from Odessa and its hinterland. According to the Jewish Statistical Society, by 1904 the percentage of Jews in Odessa had dropped from 35 to 30.5 percent of the total urban population.96 Shortly after the October pogrom of 1905, nearly fifty thousand Jews left Odessa.
Jews fared well, but also suffered in Odessa. Shortly after World War I, Isaac Babel expressed these ambivalent feelings about Odessa, which both nurtured Jews and rejected them:
"Odessa is an awful place. Everyone knows how they murder the Russian language there. All the same, I think there's a lot to be said for this great city, which has more charm than any other in the Russian Empire."
Patricia Herlihy, "Odessa: A History 1794-1914". Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, Cambridge, Massachusetts
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