The name Marcus Jastrow is well known to any English speaker who has studied the Talmud seriously. 125 years after he completed it, his masterly, erudite Dictionary of Talmudic Hebrew and Aramaic is still the book to use, if you want to look up the English meaning of a Talmudic word or phrase. It is an astonishing work, both because of Jastrow’s encyclopaedic knowledge of centuries of rabbinic literature, and for his command of English, a language he didn’t speak until his late thirties.
Jastrow’s dictionary is so well known that it has eclipsed nearly every other aspect of his life. It is virtually the only thing he is famous for. However, Marcus Jastrow was far more than just a dictionary compiler. A man with two doctorates, he was a rabbi, an historian, a religious reformer, a Prussian who became a Polish patriot and, most unlikely of all, a political activist and revolutionary who was sent to prison for his deeds.
As a young man he was ordained as a rabbi and studied philosophy at university in Berlin. The mood in Jewish circles in Berlin at the time was that the religion had become fossilised, that if it was to capture the hearts of ordinary people it needed to modernise. Jastrow shared this view and in 1858, when he was 29 years old, he moved with his wife and children to Warsaw, to take up the job of rabbi in the city’s Progressive Synagogue.
Life in Warsaw was very different to Berlin. Traditional religion was far stronger than it had been in Berlin, Polish Jews clung far more strongly to the old ways. And the Jews had considerably worse relations with the Poles than Jastrow had experienced with the Germans in Berlin. Shortly before his family arrived in Warsaw, a so-called “Jewish war” had broken out, after a newspaper had published antisemitic diatribes. The “war” was fought in the media rather than on the battlefield but it soured an atmosphere between the Poles and Jews that had been improving for the past 30 years. Jews had fought alongside Poles in the 1830, November Uprising against Russia and did so again in the March Revolution of 1848.
Now however, Jewish – Polish relations were bad. Jastrow recognised that matters could only improve if the Jews were able to attain full civil rights. Almost as soon as he arrived he compiled a report on Jewish rights in Poland. He wrote it in German and published it anonymously in Germany because he feared that the Russian authorities, who occupied Poland, might arrest him if they saw it. He contrasted the situation of Jews in Poland to the much freer atmosphere in his native Prussia, blaming Polish paranoia for their dislike of the Jews: “Poles do not have much of a speculative sense by nature” he wrote, “and due to their failing to look at problems deeply, they are inclined to see Jews and Germans as dangerous competitors, they consider their thriftiness to be an ulcer sucking out the country’s market, that should be extirpated if possible.”
Jastrow was convinced that Jewish life would improve in Poland if the Jews themselves stopped thinking of themselves, first and foremost as Jews, and instead thought of themselves as Poles. This could only happen though if the Poles themselves were freed from Russian occupation – he was convinced that the Poles oppressed the Jews because it was the only way they could overcome their own oppression. The problems of the Jews were bound up with the problems of the Poles; they shared a common enemy in the Russian Tsar and his Polish administration. The only solution he could see was a revolutionary one; the Jews and the Poles would have to stand shoulder to shoulder politically. Marcus Jastrow resolved to lead by example. He became politically active.
In February 1861 an anti-Russian demonstration led to a riot in which five Catholic demonstrators were killed. Jastrow described what had happened:
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