Demonizing Judaism In The Soviet Union During The 1920s

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. The Kremlin's efforts to suppress Judaism are well known. During the 1920s the communist regime closed synagogues, frequently transform ing them into workers' clubs; forbade the publication of prayer books and other religious texts; outlawed the teaching of and publishing in He brew; shut the doors of religious schools and rabbinical seminaries; and harassed, hounded, and often arrested rabbis. In addition, the authori ties made it difficult for Jews to observe the Sabbath and other religious holidays, and, to spearhead the campaign against Judaism, they published antireligious works.1 Recent scholarship on the history and culture of Soviet Jewry has ex panded on the work of a previous generation of scholars to provide a fuller picture of the efforts by party and government activists to secularize Soviet Jewish society as a prelude to the building of socialism in the first decade or so of communist rule. Along with coercion and repression, the communist regime also employed "softer" measures such as the printed word and visual imagery to undermine the hold that Judaism had on most of the nearly two and a half million Jews then living under Soviet power. Many people tend to view Soviet Jews of the 1920s as victims of an unre lenting and vicious government program to snuff out their religious life and culture. Yet many Soviet Jews championed the communist cause and ea gerly participated in the campaign against Judaism.2 To use Yuri Slezkine's elegant formulation: "In Soviet Russia, young Jews had, in fact, grabbed the 'rings attached to heaven and earth' and pulled heaven down to earth The author thanks the following friends and colleagues for their valuable comments and insights: (as Babel puts it)."3 For every rabbi such as my grandfather who sought refuge in the United States in 1923, there was another Soviet Jew, such as my grandfather's brother-in-law, who stayed behind and took advantage of the opportunities the Soviet regime offered to nonreligious Jews. Antireligious activists relied on the power of the word to express their message that Judaism served the interests of the Jewish bourgeoisie in tent on exploiting the vast majority of …