THE CHOICES OF "THE CHOSEN" PEOPLE #2

Or The Identificatory Strategies of Bulgarian Jews

The saving of Bulgarian Jews is one of the most important pages in the modern history of both world Jewry and Bulgaria. One of the explanations for the Bulgarian exception to "the rule" is that more than anywhere else, the Jews in Bulgaria construed their identificatory strategies by blurring, rather than accentuating, their differences from the majority.

One of those strategies is the creation of asignificant social fabric of the community, which is integrally interwoven in the structure of society: the Jewish centres are in the Danubian and other large cities in the countries. Being basically small craftsmen, the Jews established financial, trade and economic relations among each other, which facilitated permanent communication, synchronisation of synagogal activity and the "supply" of different cultural models within the community. The stability of this community fabric, which is very typical of Jewish life across the world and whose viability has a distinct economic basis, makes it possible to preserve the collective memory, explains the integrity of communities and cultivates in Jews a sense of belonging to a very large chain - this plays above all a symbolic role in Jewish self-identity. The sense of historicity is a universal identificatory strategy applied by all communities, be they large or small. The psychological explanation for the constant topicalization of this approach is subject to a separate analysis but, either way, this gradient is deeply rooted in ethnic identity. However, it is not the factors of past glory that foster the sense of national identity. Contrary to the Greeks, for whom "the bond with the ancients is a source of a national inferiority complex" (Dimou 1996), Jewish history is also unique for not having the reserve resource of proud memories. From the perspective of the universally acknowledged indicators of national prosperity, the entire history of the Jewish tribes is a history of failures and pogroms. The Jewish sense of historicity is not associated with a glorious past, but with an endless series of defeats. Its exceptional role in the formation of Jewish identity stems from the fact that the Jews, more than anybody else, base their identity on the sacred writings of the historical past, on the Torah through which Moses "took a bunch of people and transformed them into a nation" (Heine).

Symbolic interpretations of historical events are at the core of all Jewish holidays. The Jews call themselves the People of Memory. In every Jewish home every year, the story of the Exodus from Egypt is read and retold on the most significant Jewish family holiday, Pessah (Passover). The head of the family is the person entrusted with the task of transmitting to his descendants the sense of national dignity that prompted Moses to try and erase bondage from the genetic memory of the Jews. In this sense, the Haggada on Pessah is one of the most effective identificatory strategies of the Jewish sense of historicity and continuity.

Another way of upholding the historical continuity is the parallel life in an "own" temporal dimension - the year 2000, when the rest of the world will celebrate the new millennium, is the year 5760 in the Jewish calendar...

The voluntary presence in two symbolic temporal dimensions is psychologically associated with the adaptational capacities of the Jews, a typical trait in the diversity of Jewish identities. These capacities are best manifested in extreme situations of collective endangerment: disasters, aggressions, war. And if the Bulgarian Jews were not as enthusiastic as the Bulgarians in the Russo-Turkish War, since they were a minority to which the Ottoman Empire guaranteed relative stability, their very high proportionate participation in all Balkan and world wars (unlike the Jews from the other European countries) proves the ever greater integration of Bulgarian Jewry into society: "No other [...] minority in Bulgaria had as many active and retired officers, took such intensive part in the war and had such a heavy death toll as the Bulgarian Jews."1

The blurring of the borders with the majority, which could be regarded as a type of assimilative behaviour, is another distinctive feature of the identificatory strategies of Bulgarian Jews: the use of the language of the majority, the Bulgarization of Jewish names (Leviev, Shamliev, Aladjemov), presence in the Bulgarian cultural environment, mastering of the ideological codes of adaptation to contemporary life, etc., are an instrument of neutralising potential conflict situations and often bear the marks of a very conformist behaviour.

At the same time, the Jews create two parallel fields of social interaction, in and beyond the surrounding environment, i.e. a controlled and an uncontrolled space. The former is the sphere of social mimicry and the latter, the self-preservative sphere of primordial networks. The story of the Marranos - Jews who were forced to convert to Christianity in the early 16th century but continued to practise Judaism secretly for centuries - is a case study of this type of dual social behaviour.

"At the start of the 16th century, a large part of the thousands of conversos were still practising Judaism in secret. While openly attending Sunday mass, Friday night they prayed in secret in basements with a sand floor to absorb the sound. They did not emigrate, expecting the edict to be revoked, in an effort to keep their synagogues and cemeteries. Although they did their best to keep their bonds with Judaism and to transmit it to their children, Christian culture eventually assimilated them and distanced them from their traditional religion. It is hard to eat kosher, to keep the fasts, not to work on Saturday and to avoid the influence of church psalms. (...) They had to lead a dual intellectual and religious life. A duality that, for many of them, lasted for a lifetime, for generations on end - some say that it has survived to the present day..." (Attali: 322). Life in the parallel world of the controlled and uncontrolled space is inevitably the result of outside pressure, threat or violence, of explicit or implicit racial or ethnic prejudice. In Bulgaria after 1949, life in the Jewish community practically ground to a halt. Several generations grew up without knowing either Beit-a-Am, the Jewish home, or the synagogue. Nevertheless, the community has recovered at an impressive rate since 1989. Bulgarian Jews must have obviously maintained parallel social spheres for decades under communism, somehow combining this with their ideological orientation.

The problematization of the conflict between communist leanings and Jewish identities has a series of absurd aspects associated with a deliberate change of concepts, political manipulations and ideological deceptions. There were two parallel streams of consciousness among the Jews who were participants in and victims of their own depersonalisation - by sacrificing reflection on their own choices and subsequent deformation, they employed the emotional resource of their ethnic identification as a reserve strategy of internal harmony. For the time being, it is difficult to say to what extent they did this consciously or emulatively. This raises the question of who is the exponent of tradition when the ethnic heritage and culture themselves are ignored or forgotten.

The school as an institution- a vehicle of traditional culture and ethnic identity - has always been one of the main instruments of developing Jewish identificatory strategies. The organisation of this institution of socialisation is a prime concern of the community, parallel with that for the synagogues. By tradition, the central figure in both is the rabbi, and the main book, the Torah. The controversial attitude of Bulgarian Jews to this institution reflects the entire inconsistency of their choices, attesting to a high degree of conformism and insufficient independence (Gelber 1846: 119). The first conference of Jewish schools exposed the dispute between the supporters of Alliance Israelite Universelle and of the schools (meldar or heder) which taught Hebrew not only as a language for religious purposes, but also as a language of national unification.2 The debate on the fate of Jewish schools was won by the advocates of Zionism. Thirty-three years later, in 1945, the Consistory Board issued a binding resolution under which Hebraization was to be abandoned, Jewish history taught in Bulgarian, and the Bible dropped from the curriculum. All children's organisations but the communist Septemvriyche were outlawed at school (Vassileva: 41). The communist regime closed the Jewish schools, assigning the execution of this to the Jews themselves. Predictably, the then censored press claimed that this fact did not have "any negative effect whatsoever on the education level of the Jewish population."3 Obviously the warning given by A-R ben A-R in the Bulgarian Zionist press in 1923 had had no effect: "..the communists [Jews] are assimilators; they are against Jewish religious education, 'since it supposedly lulled the people to sleep'." (A-R ben A-R 1923: 9).

Once the network of Jewish schools was dismantled, the family remained the only exponent of tradition, of ethnic heritage and culture. The family was the most significant nucleus of the preservation of Jewish self- identity. All Jewish holidays were celebrated in the family. This has been both the most accessible and most reliable identificatory strategy of the Jews. In the millennial history of persecution of Jews, the family has always been the last haven, embodying the illusions of possible salvation. Arguably, in the Jewish hierarchy of values the family comes first - not just because it distinctly delimits the relative sustainability of ethnic boundaries, but also because by tradition, it is in the family that the strategies of acceptance or non-acceptance of the "them- environment" are developed, the economic groundwork for interaction with "the others" is laid and the mutually admissible compromises are negotiated.

Without being a matriarchal community, the Jewish family is run and dominated by the mother: the mother is the bearer of the spirit and custodian of morality; she brings up the children, lights the candles on Friday night and spreads the white tablecloth for the feast. It is not accidental that Jewish religion, which discriminates against the woman outside the home, identifies her as the only custodian of tradition within the family. Even today orthodox Jews, who abide by the traditional postulates of Judaism, prioritise the origins, the law of blood: only s/he who is born of a Jewish mother is a Jew. They rule out the possibility of "non-authentic" Jews to identify as such if only the father is a "confirmed" Jew. The modern Jewish concept of this issue has been aptly formulated by Nobel Peace Prizewinner Shimon Peres: "A Jew," says he, "is not he whose parents are Jews, but he whose children will remain Jewish."

Peres's statement is very relevant to the natural process of assimilation of Jews in the Diaspora. By this indicator, Bulgaria is unquestionably first among all countries with a Jewish population. Eighty to ninety per cent of the Bulgarian Jews have presumably married non-Jews or come from mixed marriages since 1949. The extremely fast rates of assimilation in Bulgaria result from the practical obliteration of Jewish community life in the years of communist rule: the authorities closed the Jewish schools, community culture clubs (chitalishte), co-operatives, and synagogues. The Jewish cultural homes were vacated. There were no other centres of social contacts among community members. Mixed marriages, albeit not preferable, were a logical consequence of the new reality. Notably, no matter which spouse is Jewish, most of those mixed households have adopted the Jewish family "model," with the non-Jew in many cases becoming more Jewish than the Jew. This model may be attractive for the sense of stability, which the thus construed community gives each of its members.4 These constants of the Jewish identities have been established and appropriately evaluated in all studies on ethnocultural relations with minorities.

In regard to the Jews, the Bulgarians have positive stereotypes. The Jewish community is ascribed "features typical of the business and intellectual circles in urban culture." The Bulgarians see the Jews as "foremost clever, smart, cultured and open-minded. The supplementary qualifications of 'studious,' 'perspicacious,' and 'ingenious' have also drawn many positive responses" (Tomova 1992: 84). "The critical nuance [is associated] with 'the classical' features ascribed to the Jews - parsimony, cunning and, to a quite lesser extent, greed. The Jews are occasionally said to be power-thirsty and eager 'to interfere in our affairs'" (ibid.). The view of the others is one of the most important perspectives of the topic of identity. "Suffice it for somebody to look at me, and I become what I am," Jean-Paul Sartre writes.

The only unconditional aspect in the multitude of Jewish identities comes precisely from the environment, which places all of them in the same situation of Jews. One of the differences between the identificatory strategies of the Jews and all other national minorities not only in Bulgaria is that the Jews do not interiorize negative external perceptions. They do not develop a "respective identity" (Camilleri 1990: 86-93). They polemicize "haughtily" with the negative stereotypes and stress their "symbolic identity." This demonstration of high self-esteem is manifested in the Jewish sense of humour, whose greatest asset is the unique Jewish capacity for self-irony: to quote Woody Allen, "God might not exist... but we are his chosen people." "The chosen" insist on their role as bearers of the ethic code and of universal human morality, and that is also relevant to another identificatory strategy: being one of the "perpetual" minorities, the Jews formulate the universal principles of protection of minorities in general. This strategic choice, which is part of the contemporary political discourse, was formulated even in 1919. "The Committee of Jewish Delegations at the Peace Conference, made up of representatives of the Jews in [23 states], was constituted in Paris on 25 March 1919. On behalf of the concerned Jewish population, which amounts to 9,000,000 people, the Committee of Delegations moved to the Peace Conference [...] a Memorandum which formulated the exact claims of this population" (Mezan 1931: 8). A principled issue was raised even then: the right of the national groups, of minorities, to a spiritual life of their own, to community autonomy within and under the aegis of the state. "That is how Jewry, in its centuries-long evolution towards the ideas of national autonomy, arrived from l'Exilarcat juif de Babylone to the universal principle of minority rights" (ibid.).

The Jewish experience in the Second World War introduced a new element into the attitude to the Jews. The conceptualisation of the tragedy eventually developed into a sense of guilt among the West Europeans. In the Soviet bloc, this subject itself was tabooed, as though the word "Auschwitz" and the word "Jew" were banned in the public sphere. Notwithstanding the mass participation of the Jews in the anti-fascist resistance, the attitude to them remained ambivalent and even overtly hostile.

In Bulgaria, anti-Semitic implications - in line with the vocabulary of proletarian internationalism, but in a far more perfidious form than elsewhere in "the camp" - started appearing in the orchestrated press especially after 1949. The authorities treated the Jews with covert suspicion, even though most of the Jews who stayed on after the exodus were communists, active participants in the struggle for communist power. Sofia carried out Moscow's instructions in a milder form. For the party press, the word "Zionist" was synonymous with "fascist," and the Evreyski vesti (Jewish News) newspaper became a mouthpiece of consistent anti-Israeli propaganda.

The creation of the State of Israel was an event of exceptional importance for the entire Jewish Diaspora. For centuries, the bonds with the ancient homeland had been articulated at every Jewish table in the moving and almost magic words "A-shana a-ba - be Jerushalaim!" (Next year - in Jerusalem!). The symbolic love for the land from which the Jews had dispersed and which they extol in all their prayers, is in itself the most stable imaginary point of reference for Jewish identities. During communist rule contacts with Israel, where most of Bulgarian Jewry had already resettled, were very difficult. Nevertheless, those who had stayed on in Bulgaria did not break off their ties with their emigrant parents and brothers in the course of four decades. Israel, however, failed to become a definitive factor of Jewish life.

After the Jewish organisations and institutions were eliminated (Vassileva: 144), "the face" of Bulgarian Jewry seemed to be eventually replaced. The Jews themselves became accessories to and victims of the loss of their own collective identity. the Jewish community was atomised and, even though none of the members of the families polled today say that they have ever hidden their origins, the constant supervision over individuals, typical of the communist regime, partly changed the public behaviour of many Jews: Bulgarization of family names, choice of profession with a view to the possible consequences in the event of a change of policy towards Jews, etc. In the asymmetrical relations between the individual and collective identities, the dependencies changed, with the community becoming "dependent" on its members.

The tangle of relations between the individual and the group has a "texture" shaped both by affective bonds and rational choices. The history of Bulgarian Jews shows that both types of dependencies are durable. They have modified since the creation of the State of Israel, but have remained definitive in the choice of individual identificatory strategies.

The emphasis on the Jewish self-identity in Bulgaria since the fall of the Berlin Wall is associated with both the change of the political climate in Europe and with the opportunities for an improved financial status of particular families. The resumed activity of Joint5, which is distributing aid to Jews in the country, is an important factor for the impoverished and elderly Jewish populace. It has a very bad demographic composition and high rate of disability.

According to the latest census (1992), there are 3,461 Jews in Bulgaria. The figures cited by the Organisation of Jews in Bulgaria differ substantially from official statistics: the Organisation claims that close to 6,000 people have identified as Jews, of them 3,500 in Sofia. According to the representative of the Jewish Agency for Bulgaria, however, their number is slightly higher: about 10,000 people are eligible for Israeli citizenship under the State of Israel's Law of Return. There have been two waves of emigration from Bulgaria since 1989: in the first, until 1992, 2,400 people left the country. The second is currently under way: 858 have emigrated since 1997. More than 80% of the emigrants have higher education, Jews from mixed marriages, who say that their motives are foremost associated with the lack of economic prospects in Bulgaria. About 40% of the emigrants are aged under 28, and as many, under 55.

The renaissance of the Jewish community in Bulgaria has been effected mostly by young people. It is arguable whether given the change of sociocultural parameters, the redefining of identity in the case of those people, the new inhabitants of Beit-a-Am, has entirely rational motives. Their identificatory strategy consists of accentuation of differences as a means of self-assertion in an environment dominated by depersonalisation of individualities for years.

Today the choice to be Jewish means different things for the Jews of Europe and of Bulgaria. The Jewish experience - the experience which "precedes cognition " and the experience based on the latter - can offer conventional "models" of "identificatory strategies" in the effort to find the blurred markers of Jewish identities. Yet can this experience identify the future trends in Jewish choices?

The end of the century offers an unprecedented situation for world Jewry: with the creation of the State of Israel, the ancient homeland is no longer an imaginary point of reference for identity; the Holocaust - from a sinister focus of collective identification is eventually becoming (for the young generations, in particular) a page from Jewish history; the fall of the Berlin Wall and subsequent geopolitical changes in Europe have eliminated anti- Semitism of the "Soviet" type, enabling Jews to cross the international borders of the former communist states. An opportunity for reformulating "the Jewish space"(Gruber 1996) in Europe and for building a "new Jewish identity" has been created. Or, as Dr Diana Pinto told me: "The Jews have never had such a variety of existential variants of existence; when I say 'never,' I mean in the millennial Jewish history. Today we can be a nation with all components of our national and etatist identity. If we want to, we can preserve the symbol of the wandering Jew, yet not by force but by free will; we can either be or not be the humanist Jews... the definitions are many. This very voluntary choice is the great asset which the end of the century has brought us." Which means that the choices of "the chosen people" are yet to be made...

Emmy Barouh

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