Question of History

[MrJim]

I only post this in the debate thread to keep it off the main floor.

Our pastor at bible study tonight made a passing remark about antisemitism, then said something about Orthodox church persecuting Jews~don't recall if he mentioned a time period though my wife thinks it was in Russia maybe during/around the bolshevik revolution.

Is there anything to this?

Sorry not here to debate if that's what yer lookin' for, just gathering info ;) Maybe up here it won't attract a lot of attention of the lurkers ('cept maybe TAW folks debate over this?)

Thanks

[buzuxi02]

The bolsheviks persecuted the Russian Church. Of course the majority of bolsheviks were jews. This is not meant to be anti-semitic but if you check, its a historical fact.
On the other hand there was/is an uneasiness amongst many russian Orthodox because of jewish converts to Orthodoxy. Many Orthodox believed especially those outside the cities that it was some sort of conspiracy, the "new" judaisers if you will.

But it was not the case. In fact one of the most remarkable men to come out of the Russian Orthodox Church during this time was the jewish convert and martyr Fr. Alexander Menn.

Heres a summary of his life:
Alexander Men - OrthodoxWiki (http://orthodoxwiki.org/Alexander_Men)

Whatever persecution of jews he meant, it was not in this century thats for sure. In fact Orthodoxy, during WW2 stepped up to the plate alot better than any other christian church.

Here is one account directly from a jewish holocaust website:
CANDLES Holocaust Museum and Education Center - Story of the Bulgarian Jews - The Education Center (http://www.candlesholocaustmuseum.org/index.php?sid=53&pid=49)

The work of the Greek archbisop during WW2:

Archbishop Damaskinos (http://www.raoulwallenberg.net/?en/news/2953/archbishop-damaskinos.2992.htm)

[MrJim]

Thanks for the info, I'll dig into it some more.

[Orthosdoxa]

There definitely were Orthodox who persecuted Jews during the Bolshevik era - the pogroms against the Jews were ordered by the Orthodox Czar.

I'm not going to try to make excuses for it or say, oh the Jews did thus and such first... all I can say is it was wrong, it is outside the teachings of the Church, and Lord have mercy.

[rusmeister]

For consideration by anyone trying to learn history:

an excerpt from

History Versus the Historians

By G.K. Chesterton
From Lunacy and Letters


And the difficulty is that there is no history to teach. This is not a scrap of cynicism - it is a genuine and necessary product of the many points of view and the strong mental separations of our society, for in our age every man has a cosmos of his own, and is therefore horribly alone. There is no history; there are only historians. To tell the tale plainly is now much more difficult than to tell it treacherously. It is unnatural to leave the facts alone; it is instinctive to pervert them. The very words involved in the chronicles - "Pagan", "Puritan", "Catholic", "Republican", "Imperialist" - are words which make us leap out of our armchairs.
No good modern historians are impartial. All modern historians are divided into two classes - those who tell half the truth, like Macaulay and Froude, and those who tell none of the truth, like Hallam and the Impartials. The angry historians see one side of the question. The calm historians see nothing at all, not even the question itself.
But there is another possible attitude towards the records of the past, and I have never been able to understand why it has not been more often adopted. To put it in its curtest form, my proposal is this: That we should not read historians, but history. Let us read the actual text of the times. Let us, for a year, or a month, or a fortnight, refuse to read anything about Oliver Cromwell except what was written while he was alive. There is plenty of material; from my own memory (which is all I have to rely on in the place where I write) I could mention offhand many long and famous efforts of English literature that cover the period. Clarendon's History, Evelyn's Diary, the Life of Colonel Hutchinson. Above all let us read all Cromwell's own letters and speeches, as Carlyle published them. But before we read them let us carefully paste pieces of stamp-paper over every sentence written by Carlyle. Let us blot out in every memoir every critical note and every modern paragraph. For a time let us cease altogether to read the living men on their dead topics. Let us read only the dead men on their living topics.

[Mary of Bethany]

I think it's fair to say that there was plenty of prejudice against Jews in tsarist Russia, as in most Christian lands in centuries past. How much the Church actually promoted that prejudice or tried to fight it, I don't know.

There was a poster on here who converted to Orthodoxy, whose ancestors were Russian Jews. They did not look kindly toward the Orthodox Church because of the pogroms, and the poster said it was hard for her to overcome that family history when she first began to seriously consider the Orthodox Church.

Mary

[Heorhij]

Dear members,

I was born and raised in the former USSR, am fluent in Russian and read quite a bit of history on this subject. Just a few points:

1. The Czar never ordered pogroms.

2. Violence against Jews in the imperial Russia of the late 19-th - early 20th century had a very long and complicated history. By the time of the first pogroms in Bessarabia and Odessa (i.e., by the late 1880's - 1890's), big and powerful criminal gangs existed and controlled, to a large extent, the life of petty tradesmen, seaport workers, etc.; these gangs were both Gentile and Jewish. So, in a way, to understand the violent outbursts of those times, one might recall Martin Scorsese's movie, "Gangs of New York."

3. A peculiar vigilenteism of organizations like "The Union of the Archangel Michael" (a.k.a. "The Black Hundred") played a very big (and mean) role in pogroms, but it had absolutely nothing to do with the legal structures of the empire or with the Orthodox faith.

Best wishes to all,

Heorhij

[nikolayalexandroff]

Dear members,


3. A peculiar vigilenteism of organizations like "The Union of the Archangel Michael" (a.k.a. "The Black Hundred") played a very big (and mean) role in pogroms, but it had absolutely nothing to do with the legal structures of the empire or with the Orthodox faith.


These organizations, in fact, were founded only months after the most terrible pogroms happened (at the end of 1905), whereas the greatest number of pogroms has fallen on the weeks after the October 17 Manifesto was published. And the Russian government sent troops to defend the blocks where Jews lived. See memoirs by Vasily Shulgin "1905" for example.

[Heorhij]

These organizations, in fact, were founded only months after the most terrible pogroms happened (at the end of 1905), whereas the greatest number of pogroms has fallen on the weeks after the October 17 Manifesto was published. And the Russian government sent troops to defend the blocks where Jews lived. See memoirs by Vasily Shulgin "1905" for example.
Right. Thanks for mentioning Shul'gin. I am not an expert in history but I do know that Nicholas II never "ordered" pogroms. Also, he never "ordered" troops to shoot at those who carried Fr. Gapon's petition to the Winter Palace on January 9 1905. He was not even in St. Petersburg physically (he was in Tsarskoe Selo on January 9 and knew nothing about the procession or the outbursts of violence until the next day).

Good to "meet" you! I studied in grad school in Moscow and my major professor there was from Ivanovo. :)

[Latreia]

The bolsheviks persecuted the Russian Church. Of course the majority of bolsheviks were jews. This is not meant to be anti-semitic but if you check, its a historical fact.


Thanks, I checked. It is well worth the short time it takes to read this:


Jews and Bolshevism

A notable number of Bolshevik party members were ethnically Jewish,
especially in the leadership of the party, and the percentage of Jewish party
members among the rival Mensheviks was even higher.
The idea of overthrowing the Tsarist regime was attractive to many members of
the Jewish intelligentsia because of the oppression of non-Russian nations and
non-Orthodox Christians within the Russian Empire.

For much the same reason, many non-Russians, notably Latvians or Poles, were disproportionately represented in the party leadership.

This fact was abused by the Tsarist secret police, the Okhranka, which used
antisemitism and xenophobia as a weapon against the Russian revolutionary
movement and promulgated the fraudulent Protocols of the Elders of Zion (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protocols_of_the_Elders_of_Zion) to
explain Russian revolutions as a part of a powerful world conspiracy.

Because some of the leading Bolsheviks were ethnic Jews, and Bolshevism
supports a policy of promoting international proletarian revolution—most
notably in the case of Leon Trotsky—

many enemies of Bolshevism, as well as
contemporary antisemites, draw a picture of Communism as a political slur at
Jews and accuse Jews of pursuing Bolshevism to benefit Jewish interests,
reflected in the terms "Jewish Bolshevism" or "Judeo-Bolshevism".

In Nazi Germany, the regime of Adolf Hitler used this theory as a rallying cry
to paint a picture of a supposed "Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy". Even today,
many antisemites continue to promote the idea of a link between the Jews and
Communism.

The original atheistic and internationalistic ideology of the Bolsheviks as incompatible with Jewish traditionalism and the later covert tendencies towards Russian nationalism and (especially after World War II) antisemitism in the Soviet regime placed many secular Jews in conflict with the regime.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Russia_and_the_Soviet_Union#Jews_and_Bolshevism