Tisha B'Av: For Whom Do We Mourn
Comfortable Lives and Cataclysmic Tragedies, Memory and Mourning
I’m reposting some of my work that was previously posted in other forums in order to gather it all in one place. This essay was originally published in the July 2020 issue of Apikorsus! Magazine.
Tisha B’Av is coming up, the day traditionally set aside to mourn the tragedies the Jewish people have suffered throughout history. But what was the nature of our suffering? The version of Jewish history popular in the frum world imagines the past two and a half millennia as an unending orgy of violent persecution at the hands of “the goyim.”
Rav Hutner, the former rosh yeshiva of Yeshivas Chaim Berlin, sums up this view of history when he writes that, "Jews have always been beaten by gentiles… only the means and instruments of torment have varied."[1] It is a view that has deep roots in Jewish tradition. It's the view expressed in the Haggadah, which tells us, “B’chol dor v’dor omdim aleinu l’chaloseinu,” “In each and every generation they rise up against us to destroy us.” And it is the view expressed by the oft-repeated phrase, “Halacha Eisav sonei es Yaakov,” “It is a law that Eisav [non-Jews] hates Yaakov [Jewish people].”[2]
This view of history imagines the Jewish people living under constant siege from evil outside forces that seek to destroy us. There are two lessons that are drawn from this version of history: one, that it is miraculous that the Jewish nation survived, and two, that those outside of our communities are not to be trusted; that no matter how friendly they seem, they want nothing more than to destroy us. I will not be addressing these lessons in this article.
Instead, I want to look at what Jewish history was really like. When on Tisha B’Av we mourn the many disasters of our people’s past, what parts of our history are we leaving out? Salo Baron, the great 20th century Jewish historian, noted[3] that Jewish histories have a tendency to overemphasize suffering and tragedies. It's time to let go of the frum version of history, with its unrelenting violent persecutions, and in Baron’s words, “Adopt a view more in accord with historic truth." Sadly, violent persecutions really did happen often, and pervasive discrimination was a near-constant, but this is only half the story. In most times and most places, Jewish people lived normal, everyday lives; and often, their lives were better than those of their lower-class non- Jewish neighbors.
Antiquity
Jewish people have enjoyed a great deal of religious and political autonomy throughout our history, and this started in antiquity.[4] In many places throughout history, Jews were not considered citizens, and this is often cited as an example of persecution. But this was the result of a trade-off, a consequence of Jewish people belonging to their own Jewish political entities, not a result of anti-Jewish sentiment. Such anti-Jewish sentiment as there was in antiquity appears to have been a result of Jewish people trying to have their cake and eat it too. Riots broke out when in 38 CE the Jewish community of Alexandria asked the city to extend to them the rights of citizenship while also continuing to recognize the Jewish community’s political autonomy. Similar requests in other cities prompted the same reaction. While it in no way excuses the violence of the Alexandrians and others towards Jewish communities, it was resentment of the Jewish desire to have the benefits but not the responsibilities of citizenship that sparked the riots, not innate hatred of Jews or a desire to destroy them.
The one real exception in antiquity to the general indifference towards Jews was the persecution that the Jewish people suffered under Antiochus Epiphanies. Antiochus attempted to compel the Jewish people to abandon their traditional religious practices and assimilate into the Seleucid Empire. Unlike the relatively short-lived riots in Alexandria, Antiochus waged a long-term campaign to stamp out Judaism. Yet even here, it was not as simple as an evil tyrant persecuting us because of an irrational hatred for Jews. Antiochus wanted everybody in his empire, not just the Jewish people, to adopt Hellenistic culture in place of their own. His campaign against the Jewish communities in particular had political, not ideological origins. Acting on a rumor that Antiochus had been killed while campaigning in Egypt, the Jewish province of Judea rebelled against the Seleucid Empire. Just as with the Alexandrians, this does not justify Antiochus’s persecution of the Jewish people, but it does remove it from the mystical category of “Eisav sonei es Yaakov.” It was politically motivated, and any group that rebelled against the empire would have faced similar consequences. That the rebels were Jewish was incidental.
The general public in the Hellenistic and later Roman worlds did not share Antiochus’s antipathy towards the Jewish people. In the last centuries BCE and the early centuries CE “god-fearers” were a widespread phenomenon. These were non-Jews who, though they did not see themselves as Jews, kept many Jewish practices and had close connections with Jewish communities. Far from hating Jewish people, large segments of the non-Jewish population in the classical period actively identified with them.
Nor did the government of Rome go out of its way to persecute Jews. While Jews were generally not citizens of Rome – the trade-off for communal autonomy we mentioned – they were integrated into the larger society. They practiced many professions and were allowed to bear arms.[5] In fact, Jews had special privileges in the Roman Empire not extended to other ethnic groups, including the right not to participate in public civic events that involved worship of the emperor or pagan gods and exemption from military service.[6] Nor were Jews a tiny downtrodden minority. One-tenth of the Roman Empire was Jewish! Many Romans from various parts of the Empire found Jewish monotheism and morality appealing. Many of them converted, and many more became god-fearers.[7]
It’s true that the Romans destroyed the Beis Hamikdash, but even this atrocity was precipitated by pragmatic politics, not hatred of the Jewish people or a particular desire to oppress them. The existence of the Temple encouraged rebellion. A central aspiration of many Jewish sects in the first century CE was to gain control of the Beis Hamikdash and run it according to their understanding of proper worship. As such, it became a focal point for radical groups seeking to wrest control of it from the government, and was a center of revolutionary activity.[8] Its destruction was a tragedy, both because of the prodigious loss of life that accompanied it and because it was a valuable cultural edifice, but it wasn’t because “Eisav sonei es Yaakov” or because the Romans were maliciously seeking to destroy us. That the Jewish people tried to throw off their Roman overlords and gain independence was noble, but given the realities of the time, it was also foolish. The Roman retaliation, while evil, was an impersonal evil. It was a rapacious empire suppressing dissent, not a metaphysical enemy seeking to destroy God’s Chosen People.
Our perception of Rome as evil and as the implacable enemy of the Jewish people comes from the gemara - and its characterization of Rome should be taken with a large grain of salt. For one thing, many Jews were Romans – and many Romans were god-fears. For another, this account of Rome in the Talmud Bavli comes to us from Jews who lived in Sasanian Babylonia, at a time when Rome was the Sassanid Empire’s greatest rival.[9] It’s likely that the gemara’s characterization of Rome was influenced as much or more by its writers’ identity as part of the Sassanid empire as by their identity as Jews.
When Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire in 380 CE, Jewish popularity among non-Jews declined. But even then, Jewish communities retained a great deal of political autonomy. The Theodosian code of 438 CE established Jewish autonomy in matters of religion and internal community policy.[10] In the following centuries there were periodically attempts by emperors, such as Justinian I and some of the Byzantine emperors, to impose severe limits on Jewish religious activity and even to outlaw Judaism, but even then, the Jewish community retained political authority over its members, and the religious edicts were never effectively enforced.[11] I don’t mean to be dismissive towards the suffering these edicts caused; only to point out that such persecution was not the norm, and was limited in scope.
The Medieval World
Life for Jews in Muslim countries in the Middle Ages continued much as it had been under Roman rule. Jews were fully integrated into society. They held many professions, lived where they pleased, and were often equal partners with non-Jews.[12] As they had been doing since antiquity, Jews traded some privileges for others. Jews were subject to a special tax, but were exempt from military service[13] and had religious and some political and legal autonomy.[14]
Jews in Muslim countries were subject to ongoing discrimination and occasional periods of persecution, but many of them also rose to prominence. Jewish people became so important in the Muslim world that when in the 17th century Shabbetai Tzvi fomented unrest in the Jewish communities of the Ottoman Empire, the main concern of the authorities was that his apocalyptic religious views would disrupt the Jewish-controlled trade routes.[15]
Christian Europe in the Early Middle Ages (6th-10th centuries CE) was similar to - or better than - the Roman and Muslim worlds in its treatment of Jewish people. As the Middle Ages progressed, many farmers became serfs. They traded most of their freedoms for the security that the feudal system gave them. Serfs were not allowed to leave the land, which belonged to the local nobleman, and were subject to his whims. In return, the nobles were responsible for protecting the serfs from violent outsiders and from the depredations of famine.
Jews were not bound to the land or to the local nobles. They were instead considered direct subjects of the monarchy. While Jews were subject to high taxes, in return they were granted near-autonomy. Jewish communities were the proverbial "state-within-the-state."[16] This special status bred resentment from the general populace, which, seasoned with the religious accusation that Jews were Christ-killers, occasionally boiled over into anti-Jewish riots. These riots, though, were not the norm, and were short-lived spontaneous outbursts by the lower classes, not organized attempts by those in power to destroy the Jewish people. (There were official instances of persecution, such as an attempt in the 800s CE to seize Jewish children in the Rhineland, but these were rare.) Each of these riots was a tragedy, but they were unconnected incidents that affected local communities, not instances of non-Jews “rising up against us to destroy us.”[17]
Things began to change for the Jews of Christendom in the High Middle Ages (10th - 14th centuries CE). This change was precipitated by the crusades, though it took several centuries for the changes to become widespread. When the pope called for Christians to drive out the heathens from the Holy Land, there were Christians who looked at the Jews in their midst and thought, "Let's drive out the heathens who are right here!"[18] By the 1200s there were anti-Jewish riots and expulsions cropping up all across Europe, and these would continue sporadically for centuries. Unlike in the past, when anti-Jewish sentiment was isolated and driven by local issues, these outrages were ideologically driven. By the late 1500s, Jews had been driven from nearly all of Western Europe. Yet despite the widespread persecution, there were always places where Jews were welcome for the financial expertise they brought. Eastern Europe welcomed the West’s Jews, and Jewish communities in the East continued to enjoy near-autonomy.[19]
It is here, in the Early Modern period (15th - 18th centuries CE), that we first begin to see the sort of widespread persecution that frum histories imagine was the norm everywhere and always. It’s true that five hundred years is a long, long time, but compared to the over three-thousand year history of the Jewish people, it is relatively recent. And even then, when persecution became far more common, it remained limited in scope. For every place that expelled Jewish people, there was another that welcomed us with open arms. Nor did these local cataclysms affect the Jewish people as a whole. They came nowhere near an attempt to “destroy us.” While Jews elsewhere sympathized with those who were suffering, and might even send them material support, it was always something happening “over there,” to the unfortunates who happened to live in the affected area, not something that threatened the Jewish people as a whole.
Recent History
As the Early Modern Period gave way to the Late Modern Period (mid-18th - 20th centuries CE) we begin to see in Eastern Europe the kind of ongoing, state-sanctioned, violent persecution of Jewish people that frum histories imagine was our fate at the hands of non-Jews always and everywhere. I think that it's this recent history, retrojected onto the very real but sporadic history of persecution over the last two and a half millennia, that has created the perception of constant violent persecution of Jewish people by their non-Jewish neighbors.
While typically the cataclysms of Jewish history have been spaced out, the last two centuries have seen one upheaval after another.[20] With modernity in the 19th century came acceptance of Jewish people into wider society, but at the cost of the traditional Jewish way of life. Jews had always traded social acceptance for communal autonomy; they and their non-Jewish neighbors had for millennia understood that Jews could have one or the other, but not both. Where before Jewish people had nearly always chosen autonomy over acceptance, they now had acceptance handed to them, and their autonomy faded away. With the breakdown of the autonomous Jewish communities came a breakdown in the mechanisms that enforced behaviors, with the result that for the first time ever, how and whether to be religious became a personal choice. The Haskalah and the Reform Movement followed, each of which represented a major break with what had been traditional normative Jewish life. The changes to the Jewish way of life did not happen all at once everywhere, but were ongoing from the beginning of the 19th century well into the 20th. Jewish people in the 20th century might be forgiven then for thinking that the seemingly unending series of upheavals experienced by themselves and by their parents and grandparents was the norm for Jews down through the millennia.
Further and perhaps more significantly, the Jewish experience in the Russian Empire in the 19th century colored the frum perception of Jewish history. While the West was developing more liberal attitudes towards Jews in the 19th century, Eastern Europe was different. With the dissolution of Poland in the late 1700s, Russia, which until then hadn't allowed any Jews to settle within its borders, suddenly found itself with half a million Jewish residents. Russia established the Pale of Settlement to which Jews were restricted, and the head of the Russian Orthodox Church declared that Russia should, "Convert a third, kill a third, and drive a third out." This wasn't just rhetoric. The only thing that prevented Russia from fully implementing it as policy was the influence of the more liberal Western nations.[21] A large percentage the stories of persecution in circulation in the frum world are placed in the Russian Empire and its satellites. Those stories create an impression of general persecution of Jews in our great-grandparent's day, while in reality, Russia was the exception to a liberalizing Europe and America.
It is the experience of the Jews of the Russian Empire in the 19th century that is romanticized today in the frum world as the golden age of the shtetle, and it is precisely in this time and place that the constant, violent anti-Jewish persecution popularly imagined to have been common throughout Jewish history took place. It is in 19th century Russia that all of the persecutions Jews had suffered sporadically throughout the ages became incessant. Jews were subject to regular, government-encouraged pogroms, pressured to convert, and drafted into the army for decades as a means of assimilating them into Russian culture. Autonomous Jewish communal structures were dismantled, and Russian schools were opened with the purpose of teaching Jewish children to be Russians instead.[22]
As bad as the persecution of Jews was in Russia, it became even worse when in 1881 Czar Nicholas I was assassinated and a Jewish woman was blamed. The incident sparked pogroms throughout Russia and anti-Jewish punitive laws were passed by the government. Jews were forced to leave their homes and move back into the Pale and were barred from many occupations and from higher education. The two million Eastern-European Jews who immigrated to the United States in the last two decades of the 19th century and the first decade of the 20th brought with them their memories of life under these edicts. Their numbers overwhelmed the quarter-million Jews already living in America.[23] It was their way of being Jewish - and their perception of Jewish history, shaped by their experiences of Russian persecution throughout the 19th century, and even more in that century’s final decades – that became mainstream in what was to become after WWII the largest Jewish community in the world.[24]
European persecution of Jews culminated in the Holocaust. For the first time, the intention of the persecutors really was to “rise up and destroy us.” They came close. Two thirds of Jews living in Europe were murdered by the Nazis. In 1939, just before WWII started, there were about sixteen and a half million Jews in the whole world. More than a third were butchered in Nazi ghettos, concentration camps, and by Nazi death squads. Our population still hasn’t recovered. There are today a million and a half Jews less than there were in 1939. If one takes into account the world’s 400% population growth since then, from two billion in 1939 to almost eight billion now, the gap between how many of us there are and how many there should be is much, much higher. It’s only natural that this unprecedented, unspeakably horrific cataclysm colored the survivors’ perception of other instances of persecution, and created the impression that Jews have always lived with the threat of a Holocaust hanging over our heads.
Today
Much of the frum world today believes that Jewish history was an unending series of violent persecutions at the hands of non-Jewish governments and our non-Jewish neighbors. Their perception of their own non-Jewish neighbors is often colored by this view of history. They believe that, “halacha Eisav sonei es Yaakov,” and that just as, “b’chol dor v’dor omdim aleinu l’chaloseinu,” so too, the non-Jews of our generation would like nothing better than to see us gone.
While this is undoubtedly true of some non-Jews - sadly, antisemitism is alive and well - it is not true of the overwhelming majority of people. The 2006 Faith Matters survey found that people of nearly every religious affiliation in America feel warmly towards Jews.[25]
My own community experienced both sides, hatred and warmth, about a year and a half ago. I live in Pittsburgh, about a mile from the Tree of Life synagogue. On the morning of October 27, 2018, an armed man, spurred on online by fellow antisemites, entered the Tree of Life during Shabbos morning services. He killed eleven people and seriously wounded six others. This incident would seem to corroborate the worst fears of the frum view of history. Even today, in our generation, non-Jews are rising up to try to destroy us. “Halacha Eisav sonei es Yaakov.” But to stop here would be to tell less than half the story.
The shooter was a single person, spurred on by a small group of like-minded people that likely would never have found each other were it not for the community building power of the internet - an often positive thing that here engendered an evil act. In response, the communities of Greater Pittsburgh, nearly a quarter of a million people, rallied behind the Tree of Life and the Pittsburgh Jewish community. A memorial materialized in front of the Tree of Life synagogue, with bouquets of flowers piled three feet high and homemade objects expressing grief and solidarity spread across the sidewalk. A prayer to St. Francis sat side-by side with a silver plaque that said “Chai,” and hand-lettered posters urged, “End Hate.” A Greek Orthodox carpenter from Aurora, Illinois created magen David markers with the victims’ names on them and drove five hundred miles to place them in the memorial.[26] Muslim, Christian, and other groups raised money to pay for repairs to the synagogue and for the funerals of those who had been killed. Signs saying, “Stronger Than Hate” with magen Davids on them went up all over the city. Hundreds of people attended interfaith events where representatives of many different Pittsburgh communities spoke, sharing words meant to help the community heal and expressing their solidarity with their Jewish neighbors. These events were so popular that they overflowed their venues. People stood outside in the parking lot in the rain to participate and show support for the Jewish community.
Yes, there is antisemitism. But there's also the solidarity and support expressed by the overwhelming majority of non-Jews towards their Jewish neighbors. There are individuals who seek to hurt us, but there is no wholesale uprising of non-Jews seeking to destroy us. In fact, the opposite is true: the majority of non-Jews rallied behind us in our time of need. It's just not true that “halacha Eisav sonei es Yaakov.”
Tisha B’Av
What then of Tisha B’Av?
While it's not true that Jewish history was an unending series of violent persecutions, our history has been punctuated by all-too-frequent cataclysms. It's not true that, "Jews have always been beaten by gentiles,” or that, “In each and every generation they rise up against us to destroy us,” but it is true that there have been many, many incidents of antisemitic persecution throughout our history.
I think that Tisha B’Av has value as a Jewish Memorial Day, a day to remember all of the Jewish people who suffered in the cataclysms that punctuate our history. Not because there is something that makes Jewish suffering different then other people's suffering, but because the people who suffered are our people. If we don't remember them, who will? I think that, like all people, they deserve to be remembered.
While traditional observances like fasting don't speak to everyone - personally, I find little value in it - I think that the concept of a day to remember those of our people who have suffered has wider appeal. For those who find it meaningful, Tisha B’Av provides a day set aside to mourn all those who have suffered in the cataclysms of Jewish history, in solidarity with all of our Jewish brethren who find this day meaningful.
This Tisha B’Av, as every year, I will take time to remember and to mourn:
For the Jewish people killed by the Pilishtim.
For the Jewish people killed by the Babylonians.
For the Jewish people killed by the Seleucids.
For the Jewish people killed by the Romans
For the Jewish people of the Rhine valley killed during the Crusades.
For the Jewish people oppressed and expelled by the Christian governments of Europe.
For the Jewish people oppressed by the Caliphate.
For the Jewish people expelled from Spain and who suffered under the Inquisition.
For the Jewish people killed in the pogroms of Central and Eastern Europe.
For my grandmother, who grew up watching the Nazis march past her parents’ Berlin apartment singing Deutschland uber alles, and whose best friend was murdered in Auschwitz when she was a teenager.
For my great-grandfather, whose Iron Cross from WWI lies at the bottom of the North Atlantic, sent there with the rest of his worldly possessions by a German u-boat when it torpedoed the ship on which he was fleeing from the Gestapo.
For my wife’s grandmother, who still has blue numbers on her arm.
For the millions who were not as fortunate as my relatives.
For those persecuted and expelled from Muslim countries in the 1950s.
For the victims of the Tree of Life massacre, and for all those who have suffered in similar incidents.
For all those who have ever suffered because they are Jewish.
For them we mourn.
[1] Hutner, “Holocaust,” 5.
[2] Rashi, Genesis 33:4. The quote Rashi has, from Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai, is slightly different: “Halacha: beyadua she´ Eisav soneh le’Yaakov.” And in context, it is literally talking about the biblical figures Yaakov and Eisav. Nonetheless, in popular usage it is usually quoted as used in the article, and is used to mean that non-Jews always hate the Jewish people.
[3] Baron. S. (1928 ). Ghetto And Emancipation.
[4] Information about Hellenistic Judaism taken from: Cohen, S.J.D. (2006). From The Maccabees To The Mishnah. University Westminster John Knox Press.
[5] Lafayette college (2012, august 30). Prof. Robert Weiner -- A Perfect Storm: What Made The Holocaust Possible, part 1 & part 2. [video file]
[6] Cohen, (2006). P. 38
[7] Armstrong, K. (1994). A History Of God. New York, Ny: Alfred K. Knopf. P.71
[8] Cohen, (2006). P. 102
[9] Visotzky B.L. (2016). Aphrodite And The Rabbis: How The Jews Adapted Roman Culture To Create Judaism As We Know It. St. Martin's Press. P. 18-19
[10] S. Baron, A Social And Religious History Of The Jews, V. 2, pp. 191-195
[11] Baron, v. 3, p. 175, 185
[12] Cole, P., Hoffman, A. (2011). Sacred Trash: The Lost And Found World Of The Cairo Geniza. Schocken . P. 209
[13] S. Baron, v. 3
[14] Cole, Hoffman (2011). P. 210-211
[15] Dunner, P. (2018). Mavericks, Mystics & False Messiahs: Episodes From The Margins Of Jewish History. Koren Publishers Jerusalem. P. 15-16
[16] S. Baron, v. 11, p. 21
[17] Weiner, (2012, August 30).
[18] Weiner, (2012, August 30).
[19] S. Baron, v. 9, pp. 149-150
[20] Heilman, S.C. (2006). Sliding To The Right: The Contest For The Future Of American Jewish Orthodoxy. University Of California Press. P. 127
[21] Weiner, (2012, August 30).
[22] Encyclopaedia Hebraica, Rusiyah, v. 30, pp. 897-899
[23] S.R. Weisman (2019). The Chosen Wars: How Judaism Became An American Religion. Simon & Schuster; Reprint Edition .p. 240
[24] It’s estimated that over half of Jewish people live in the United States.
[25] Faith Matters Survey, Roper Center For Public Opinion Research, Conducted June 29-August 29, 2006, Via Mcgowan, D. (2014). In Faith And In Doubt. New York, Ny: Amacom. P. 48
[26] Eisenberg, L.Z. (May 15, 2020). Remembering a Quiet Friend. Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle, 63(20). P. 12
Thank you for this.
What, then, is the origin and meaning of the "Bchol Dor vDor" in the Haggada? It was not created with a modern lens. Where did the author get the idea that "In each and every generation they rise up against us to destroy us", and was he simply mistaken?