Halakha

Halakha, the comprehensive system of Jewish religious law, governs every aspect of daily existence for the Jews of Polotzk as depicted in Mary Antin's memoir. It is not merely a set of dietary rules or ritual observances but a total framework that dictates how to eat, how to bathe, how to work, and how to live. The memoir presents Halakha as the inner wall of religious integrity that the Jews of the Pale of Settlement built in defiance of their oppressors, a fortress that the Czar with all his minions could not shake, the priests with their instruments of torture could not pierce, and the mob with their firebrands could not destroy. This wall within the wall, erected by prisoners in defiance of their jailers, was built from the ruins of their pillaged homes and cemented with the blood of their murdered children. In the study of the Torah, the foundation of Halakha, the Russian Jew found the balm for all his wounds, and the minute observance of traditional rites became the expression of his spiritual cravings. The Law given through Moses was the most honored of all occupations, and those who engaged in its study were the most revered of all men. The authority of Halakha was personified in the Rav of Polotzk, who read all day in the sacred books so that he could tell the people what to do whenever they were in doubt. If Mary's mother cut up a chicken and found something wrong with it, she sent the housemaid with it to the rav, and whatever he decided was right. If he called the chicken "trefah," Mary must not eat of it, not even if she had to starve. The rav knew about everything: about going on a journey, about business, about marrying, about purifying vessels for Passover. Alongside the rav stood the dayyan, who heard people's quarrels and settled them according to the Law, so that they should not have to go to the Gentile courts, which were false, judges and witnesses and all. The dayyan always gave true judgments, and even Nohem Rabinovitch, the richest man in Polotzk, could not win a case against a servant maid unless he were in the right. This legal system provided a complete alternative to the secular and Gentile world, a self-contained universe of obligation and meaning that insulated the community from the hostility surrounding it. The Sabbath, the most sacred institution of Halakha, transformed the entire town. On Friday afternoon the stores and markets closed early, the clatter of business ceased, the dust of worry was laid, and the Sabbath peace flooded the quiet streets. No hovel was so mean but that its casement sent out its consecrated ray, so that a wayfarer passing in the twilight saw the spirit of God brooding over the lowly roof. Care and fear and shrewishness dropped like a mask from every face, and eyes dimmed with weeping kindled with inmost joy. Wherever a head bent over a sacred page, there rested the halo of God's presence. On the Sabbath, the community was intent on renewing its ancient covenant with God, and it mattered not what czar sat on the throne or what evil counsellors whispered in his ear, for they were concerned with revenues and policies and ephemeral trifles while the Jews were intent on fulfilling God's promise to the world. The Sabbath was also a time of physical and sensory pleasure, as Mary recalls with relish the suppers eaten on Sabbath evenings at the end of long walks. She remembers the immortal flavor of the thick cheese cakes they used to have on Saturday night, a pastry whose excellence she attributes not to any recipe but to history itself. To taste such a cake, one must first eat it as a ravenous child in memorable twilights before the lighting of the week-day lamp, then be removed across the oceans to a land where the cherished pastry is unknown even by name, and abstain from the inimitable morsel for a period of years, perhaps fifteen being the magic number, before rubbing the Aladdin's lamp of memory to have the renowned tidbit whisked upon the platter, garnished with a hundred sweet herbs of past association. The flavor of the Polotzk cheese cake, as Mary now knows it, contains the taste of daisies and clover picked on the Vall, the sweetness of Dvina water, the richness of newly turned earth moulded with bare feet and hands, the ripeness of red cherries bought by the dipperful in the market place, and the fragrance of all her childhood's summers. This gustatory memory is inseparable from the rhythm of the Jewish calendar, where the Sabbath meal marks the culmination of the week and the transition from the sacred to the profane. The dietary laws of Halakha, or kashrut, created a sharp and absolute distinction between the Jewish and Gentile worlds, a distinction that Mary internalized from her earliest years. The first time Vanka, the little white-haired boy, threw mud at her, she ran home and complained to her mother, who brushed off her dress and said resignedly, "How can I help you, my poor child? Vanka is a Gentile. The Gentiles do as they like with us Jews." The next time Vanka abused her, she did not cry but ran for shelter, saying to herself, "Vanka is a Gentile." The third time, when Vanka spat on her, she wiped her face and thought nothing at all, accepting ill-usage from the Gentiles as one accepts the weather. The world was made in a certain way, and she had to live in it. This acceptance of the division between Jew and Gentile, enforced by the dietary laws and the broader Halakhic framework, was the first lesson a little girl in Polotzk had to learn. The knowledge that Polotzk and Vitebsk and Vilna and some other places were grouped together as the Pale of Settlement, within which the Czar commanded the Jews to stay, trickled into her consciousness drop by drop, so that by the time she fully understood that she was a prisoner, the shackles had grown familiar to her flesh. The Halakhic laws of daily life were also the source of the deepest dread associated with military service in the Russian Empire. A Jewish recruit was obliged to break the Jewish laws of daily life while in the service: he often had to eat trefah and work on Sabbath, he had to shave his beard and do reverence to Christian things, and he could not attend daily services at the synagogue. His private devotions were disturbed by the jeers and insults of his coarse Gentile comrades, and though he might resort to all sorts of tricks and shams, he was still obliged to violate Jewish law. When he returned home at the end of his term of service, he could not rid himself of the stigma of those enforced sins, for he had led the life of a Gentile for four years. Piety alone was enough to make the Jews dread military service, but there were other burdens as well: most men of twenty-one, the age of conscription, were already married and had children, and during their absence their families suffered and their business often was ruined. At the end of their term they were beggars, sent home from their military post with a free ticket for the return journey and a few kopecks a day for expenses, hurried back into the Pale like escaped prisoners. The Czar was done with them, and if within a limited time they were found outside the Pale, they would be seized and sent home in chains. So terrible was the prospect of four years in the Czar's service that men would submit to operations on their eyes, ears, or limbs, causing themselves horrible sufferings in the hope of being rejected at the physical examination, and many in Polotzk were blind of one eye, or hard of hearing, or lame as a result of these secret practices, but these things were easier to bear than the memory of four years in the Czar's service. The Halakhic obligation to observe the Sabbath and dietary laws thus became a measure of the tyranny of the Russian state, which forced Jews to choose between their faith and their freedom. The memoir also details the economic oppression that accompanied the religious persecution, showing how the Czar's taxes and fines operated alongside the Halakhic system to keep the Jews of the Pale in a state of perpetual insecurity. The Jews owed taxes on their houses, on the rents from the houses, on their business, and on their profits, and there were taxes for public works, though rotten pavements went on rotting year after year. A railroad bridge across the Dvina, while open to the military, could be used by the people only by individual permission. The excise duties on tobacco were explained by Mary's uncle: the tobacco was taxed separately, and the paper, and the mouthpiece, and on the finished product an additional tax was put, though there was no tax on the smoke, which the Czar must have overlooked. Business did not pay when the price of goods was so swollen by taxes that the people could not buy, and the only way to make business pay was to cheat the Government of part of the duties, a dangerous game with so many spies watching the Czar's interests. People who sold cigarettes without the government seal got more gray hairs than bank notes out of their business, and the constant risk, the worry, the dread of a police raid in the night, and the ruinous fines left very little margin of profit or comfort to the dealer in contraband goods. "But what can one do?" the people said, with the shrug of the shoulders that expresses the helplessness of the Pale. "One must live." The Halakhic framework, which governed every aspect of Jewish life, was thus embedded in a larger system of state oppression that made the observance of the Law both a spiritual refuge and a source of constant tension with the secular authorities. The transition to America represented a fundamental challenge to the authority of Halakha. Mary's father, who had left home in search of bread for his hungry family, went blessing the necessity that drove him to America, for the boasted freedom of the New World meant to him far more than the right to reside, travel, and work wherever he pleased. It meant the freedom to speak his thoughts, to throw off the shackles of superstition, and to test his own fate, unhindered by political or religious tyranny. He was only thirty-two when he landed, and most of his life he had been held in leading-strings, hungry for his untasted manhood. Almost his first act on landing on American soil, three years before the family's arrival, had been his application for naturalization, and he had taken the remaining steps in the process with eager promptness, becoming a citizen of the United States at the earliest moment allowed by the law. The father's freethought, his rejection of the Halakhic framework, became a central influence on Mary's own development. In the schoolyard, when her playmates Rachel and Kitty and Maggie, Sadie and Annie and Beckie, made a circle around her and pressed her with questions, mocked her, and threatened her with hell flames and utter extinction, she held her ground against them all obstinately enough, though her argument was exceedingly lame. She glibly repeated phrases she had heard her father use, but she had no real understanding of his atheistic doctrines. She had been surprised into the dispute, and as the number of her opponents grew and she saw how unanimously they condemned her, her indifference turned into a heat of indignation. The actual point at issue was as little as ever to her, but she perceived that a crowd of Free Americans were disputing the right of a Fellow Citizen to have any kind of God she chose. She knew, from her father's teaching, that this persecution was contrary to the Constitution of the United States, and she held her ground as befitted the defender of a cause. "This is a free country," she reminded them in the middle of the argument. The teacher, Miss Bland, waited till the children had filed in before she asked Mary, in a tone encouraging confidence, to give her version of the story, and she made Mary understand, somewhat as Miss Dillingham had done on the occasion of her whispering during prayer, that it was proper American conduct to avoid religious arguments on school territory. Mary felt honored by this private initiation into the doctrine of the separation of Church and State, and she went to her seat with a good deal of dignity, her alarm about the safety of the Constitution allayed by the teacher's calmness. The most dramatic confrontation between the Halakhic dietary laws and the new American freedom came at Miss Dillingham's tea, when a platter was passed with a kind of meat that was strange to Mary. Some mischievous instinct told her that it was ham, forbidden food, and she, the liberal, the free, was afraid to touch it. She had a terrible moment of surprise, mortification, and self-contempt, but she helped herself to a slice of ham nevertheless, and hung her head over her plate to hide her confusion. She was furious with herself for her weakness, that she should be afraid of a pink piece of pig's flesh, she who had defied at least two religions in defence of free thought. She began to reduce her ham to indivisible atoms, determined to eat more of it than anybody at the table, but she learned that to eat in defence of principles was not so easy as to talk. She ate, but only a newly abnegated Jew can understand with what squirming, what protesting of the inner man, what exquisite abhorrence of herself. That Spartan boy who allowed the stolen fox hidden in his bosom to consume his vitals rather than be detected in the theft showed no such miracle of self-control as did she, sitting there at her friend's tea-table, eating unjewish meat. The incident revealed the deep and lasting power of the Halakhic prohibitions, which continued to assert themselves even after she had consciously rejected the religious framework that produced them. The memoir suggests that the dietary laws were not merely external rules but had been internalized so deeply that they had become part of her physical being, a visceral response that no amount of intellectual freethought could immediately overcome. The Halakhic system also shaped the economic life of the Jewish immigrants in America, as seen in the figure of Mr. Rosenblum, the grocer on Harrison Avenue who supplied the Antin family's table. Mr. Rosenblum conducted his business on the same perilous credit system which had driven Mary's father out of Chelsea and Wheeler Street, supplying the family with tea and sugar and strong butter, milk freely splashed from rusty cans, potent yeast, and bananas done to a turn, with everything, in short, that keeps a poor man's family hearty in spite of what they eat, and all this for the consideration of part payment, with the faintest prospect of a future settlement in full. He had an intimate knowledge of the financial situation of every family that traded with him, from the gossip of his customers around his herring barrel, and he knew without asking that Mary's father had no regular employment and that it was risky to give them credit. Nevertheless he gave them credit by the week, by the month, accepted partial payment with thanks, and let the balance stand by the year. He never complained, and he even insisted on Mary's mother taking almonds and raisins for a cake for the holidays. He knew, as well as the landlady Mrs. Hutch, that Mary's father kept a daughter at school who was of age to be put to work, but so far was he from reproaching him for it that he detained the father by the half-hour, inquiring about Mary's progress and discussing her future. When Mary came in to have her kerosene can filled, he did not fall upon her with harsh words of blame but wanted to hear about her latest triumph at school and about the great people who wrote her letters and even came to see her, and he called his wife from the kitchen behind the store to come and hear of these grand doings. Mrs. Rosenblum, who could not sign her name, came out in her faded calico wrapper and stood with her hands folded under her apron, shy and respectful before the embryo scholar, nodding her head sideways in approval, drinking in with envious pleasure her husband's Yiddish version of Mary's tale. If her black-eyed Goldie happened to be playing jackstones on the curb, Mrs. Rosenblum pulled her into the store to hear what distinction Mr. Antin's daughter had won at school, bidding her take example from Mary, if she would also go far in education. The Rosenblums, who observed the Jewish holidays and maintained the communal bonds of the old world, represented a continuity of Jewish values in the new world, even as they supported Mary's American education, which was itself a departure from the traditional Halakhic emphasis on religious study. The memoir thus presents Halakha as a system of law and custom that was both the spiritual foundation of Jewish life in the Pale and the primary obstacle to the full embrace of American freedom. The father's rejection of Halakha, his embrace of freethought and naturalization, and his determination to give his children an American education represented a deliberate break with the religious tradition, while the persistence of the dietary prohibitions in Mary's own body revealed the depth of the tradition's hold. The Rosenblums, who maintained the old ways while supporting the new, offered a model of continuity and adaptation, suggesting that the values of the Jewish community could survive the abandonment of the strict Halakhic framework. The memoir ultimately presents Halakha as a system that was both oppressive and sustaining, a set of laws that confined the Jews of the Pale but also gave them the strength to endure their confinement, and whose power continued to shape the lives of the immigrants even after they had crossed the ocean to a land where the Law no longer held sway.