Moshko Blank, Lenin’s great grandfather, is an interesting character in and of himself, but I wanted to address a particular allegation made by Robert Service that Moshko was ‘anti-Semitic’.
Service writes that:
‘Moshko Blank was not a practising Jew. His parents had not brought him up to observe the Jewish faith, and he had not sent his own children to the local Jewish school. By tradition they ought to have gone to the Starokonstantinov heder to learn Hebrew and study the Torah. Instead Moshko entered them for the new district state school where they would be taught in Russian. When Moshko’s wife died he broke the remaining connections with the faith of his ancestors. He approached the local priest and was baptised as an Orthodox Christian.
Yet few apostates behaved quite as aggressively to their former co-religionists as Moshko Blank, who wrote to the Ministry of the Interior suggesting additional constraints upon Jews. He proposed to ban the Jews from selling non-Kosher food (which they could not eat themselves) and from employing Christians on the Jewish Sabbath (when Jews perform no work). He particularly urged that the Hasidim, the fervent and mystical Jewish sect, should be prohibited from holding meetings. Moshko’s militancy was extraordinary. He called upon the Ministry of the Interior to prevent Jews in general from praying for the coming of the Messiah and to oblige them to pray instead for the health of the Emperor and his family. In short, Moshko Blank was an anti-Semite. This point deserves emphasis.’ (1)
Now in the first instance if we use the colloquial not the academic definition of ‘anti-Semite’; then yes Moshko Blank was an anti-Semite, but did he actually hate, or profess to hate, jews as a nation or just Judaism.
The evidence suggests that Moshko had a very distant relationship with both the jewish community and Judaism, while his first wife was jewish. It was not until she died – as with Karl Marx’s maternal grandparent – that he converted to the Christian faith.
The fact that Moshko sent his children to the new state school not the local heder (‘school room’) suggests not, as Service would have it, that he was an ‘anti-Semite’, but more that he wanted to give his children Abel (later Dmitri) and Srul (later Alexander; Lenin’s grandfather) the best possible education and not have them stuck learning the Oral Torah by rote, which would prepare them for nothing but a religious career in which competition was incredibly high.
This kind of attitude was increasing common at the time since the Haskalah (‘Enlightenment’) movement was arising and espousing a liberal reformed Judaism, which is the intellectual ancestor of modern Reform Judaism. One of the goals of the Haskalah movement was to break the stranglehold of the heder and stop purely teaching religious ideas and texts, which entailed going to secular schools, learning Russian and looking to secular careers.
Moshko was clearly doing precisely this since he behaved as he did at the height of the Haskalah movement, but also because of his immediate move after his conversion to denounce and propose additional restrictions on the Hasidim. The Hasidim just so happened to be the principle opponents of the Haskalah movement with their ideology of making jewish society even more religious and insular not less.
Thus it is no surprise that after his conversion to Christianity that Moshko denounced the avowed enemies of Haskalah to the Ministry of the Interior and specifically recommended that they be banned from praying for the arrival of the Messiah – a common Hasidic practice then and now – which stripped of the fancy terminology and justifications means to pray for the Messiah to turn up and lead the jews in the slaughter of those non-jews who will not immediately agree to be their slaves.
It is therefore hardly surprising that Moshko would have denounced this, the sale of non-Kosher slaughtered animals (i.e. where the shechita and inspection process which forms the central plank of Kashruth had either gone badly or discovered a blemish/defect) which provided a significant income for the Hasidim as well as non-jews working for jews on the Shabbos (Friday sundown to Saturday sundown), which enabled the jews to carry on their businesses etc.
In essence all Moshko is doing – other than ingratiating himself with the government of the day like any new jewish convert to Christianity would and has done – is attacking the enemies of Haskalah like any proponent of that ideology did.
With this context Service’s suggestion that Moshko Blank was ‘anti-Semitic’ simply falls flat on its face for are we to seriously consider all the jews who adopted and advocated the principles of the Haskalah movement to be ‘anti-Semites’?
References
(1) Robert Service, 2000, ‘Lenin: A Biography’, 1st Edition, MacMillan: Basingstoke, pp. 17-18