The story goes that my two times great grandfather,
Mordechai Shmuel Yanovsky, entered Yaffa port playing dead in a coffin, his
wife, my two times great grandmother, Taibe Leah, playing the part of the
grieving widow. According to my now 96-year-old 2nd cousin one time removed, who is Israeli through and through, our ancestor came into the Holy
Land in a coffin because the Turks did not allow Jewish males to enter
Palestine. I mentioned this to an Israeli contemporary who scoffed, “Never
heard about such a thing. Many Jewish men openly came to Israel during the 19th
century, while our land was occupied by the Ottoman Turks.
“Either the story is inaccurate - or there must be another
reason for that, which I'm not aware of.”
I was quite ready to just accept what she said and move on.
So many of the stories one or another relative has relayed about our family
have turned out to be embroidered or difficult to verify. When I tell people
about Mordechai Shmuel playing dead to enter Israel, they inevitably laugh,
picturing him like some kind of jack-in-the-box peeking out to see if the coast
was clear. That makes me think the story is probably made up. Because it really
does seem ridiculous. Still, it would be nice to find a grain of truth in there
somewhere—and maybe I did.
In Old
Yishuv: Palestine at the End of the Ottoman Period, historian Margalit
Shilo writes about the preponderance of women, specifically widows, in Palestine at
that time:
Censuses of Jews in Palestine at the end of the Ottoman
period reveal that the majority of the Jewish population was female.
Demographer and statistician Uziel Schmelz summarized the information gleaned
from various nineteenth-century censuses: “Forty-nine percent of all Jewish
[adult] women [in Jerusalem] in 1839 and thirty-six percent in 1866 were
widows. … There was a considerable excess of women over men in the adult
population [of Jerusalem].” According to Schmelz’s calculations, based on a
1905 estimate, the number of Jewish women aged sixty and over was twice that of
the parallel age group in men. Schmelz attributes this to two factors: a.
widowhood, which enabled Jewish women for the first time to decide what to do
with their lives, and b. male mortality, owing to the higher age of husbands
compared with their wives and women’s longer life expectancy. Towards the end
of the nineteenth century there was a decline in the number of widows.
Keeping my great great grandfather’s manner of entry
into the country in mind, I wondered if all those women in the censuses were
really widows. Could it be they were registered as widows, but really all had
secret husbands who had played dead to get into the Land of Israel so the Turks
wouldn’t know? It does seem improbable.
At the same time, the friend I consulted who said my family
story is “inaccurate” seems unaware of the fact that the Turks decided to
oppose Jewish immigration in 1881, with the assassination of the Czar, Alexander
II. In Ottoman
Policy and Restrictions on Jewish Settlement in Palestine: 1881-1908: Part I,
author Neville J. Mandel, writes (emphasis added):
Periodisation in history is arbitrary, but for the Jews of
Imperial Russia, already an unhappy community, the assassination of Tsar
Alexander II in 1881 ushered in a painful new era. The pogroms after his death
were followed by the notorious 'May Laws' of 1882 which stepped up economic discrimination
against the Jews. The stirring among the Jewish community, both physical and
intellectual, was heightened. Many more of them started to leave, mainly for
America, and not a few began to think seriously about Jewish nationalism, with
the result that the 'Lovers of Zion' Movement gained momentum. Some of them,
whether for reasons of sheer physical safety or nationalism or a combination of
both, thought of finding a home in the Ottoman Empire. The Sublime Porte was
well-informed of these trends and of their contagious effects on other Jews,
especially in AustroHungary, from the start. What is more, the Porte decided to oppose Jewish settlement in Palestine in autumn
1881, some months before the increased flow of Jews in that direction got under
way . . .
On examination, the Porte's awareness of trends among the
Jews of Eastern Europe was not as surprising as it may seem at first sight.
Given the aggressive intentions throughout the nineteenth century of Russia and
Austro-Hungary on the Ottoman Empire, the Porte had good reason to try to keep
abreast of events in those rival empires. Thus, inter alia, its diplomatic
representatives in St. Petersburg and Vienna reported regularly on Jewish
affairs, and there is even a file in the catalogues of the Ottoman Foreign
Ministry, listed under Russia, entitled 'Situation [of] the Jews; Question of
their Immigration into Turkey: 1881'.
Moreover, there had been some direct approaches to the
Sublime Porte on this matter. In 1879 Laurence Oliphant, an English writer,
traveller and mystic, had submitted a scheme to settle Jews on the east bank of
the River Jordan. In 1881 a group of English and German businessmen sent a
representative to negotiate with the Government for a concession to build a
railway from Smyrna to Baghdad, along the length of which they proposed to
settle Jews. Their representative saw the Foreign Minister who, according to
Reuter's reports, was in favour of Jewish immigration into the Empire. The
Council of Ministers considered the question and in November 1881 it was
announced that:
[Jewish] immigrants
will be able to settle as scattered groups throughout Turkey, excluding Palestine. They must submit
to all the laws of the Empire and become Ottoman subjects. With growing numbers
of Russian Jews applying to the Ottoman Consul-General at Odessa for visas to
enter Palestine, the following notice was posted outside his office a few
months later, on April 28, 1882:
The Ottoman
Government informs all [Jews] wishing to immigrate into Turkey that they are
not permitted to settle in Palestine. They may immigrate into the other
provinces of [the Empire] and settle as they wish, provided only that they
become Ottoman subjects and accept the obligation to fulfil the laws of the
Empire.
The specific
exclusion of Palestine had not been expected by the Jews. To them it seemed
hard to believe that the Ottoman Government, with its record of hospitality to
the Jews since their expulsion from Spain in the fifteenth century, should now
forbid Jews to settle in Palestine. When the announcement was made in
Odessa, Laurance Oliphant was in Eastern Europe on behalf of the Mansion House
Committee, a British organization concerned with the relief of persecuted Jews
from Russia and Rumania. The Jews whom he met persuaded him to go to
Constantinople in order to find out more about the Porte's policy and also, if
possible, to gain permission for numbers of Jews to settle in Palestine. At the
same time, though independently of Oliphant, the Central Office of one of the
first
'Lovers of Zion' groups was transferred from Odessa to
Constantinople in the hope of obtaining a grant of land in Palestine for three
hundred settlers. Then, at the beginning of June, Jacob Rosenfeld, the editor
of Razsvet (a Jewish paper in St. Petersburg which sympathised with the 'Lovers
of Zion') came to Constantinople to investigate the situation as well.
In Constantinople,
Oliphant found about two hundred Jewish refugees. He also discovered that on
entry to the Empire they were required to adopt Ottoman nationality and declare
not only that they accepted the laws of the Empire without reserve, but also that they would not settle in
Palestine. Oliphant approached the American Minister at the Porte to see if
he would be prepared to try and clarify the position. When General Wallace said
that he could only do so if a request came from the Jews themselves, Oliphant
sent a telegram to Jews he had met in Bucharest and thus another delegation seeking
permission for Jews to settle in Palestine hurried to Constantinople.
General Wallace met this delegation on June 6 and a few days
later he spoke to the Ottoman Foreign Minister who confirmed what was known
already. It all boiled down to the same thing. Immigrant Jews were welcome in the Empire, but not in Palestine;
they could settle in small groups, provided that (a) they relinquished their
foreign nationality and became Ottoman subjects, and (b) they did not seek any
special privileges, but were content to remain bound by the existing laws.
Enter Herzl:
Ottoman policy remained constant throughout the 1880's and
the first half of the 1890s, and it probably was not subjected to any
fundamental review until Theodor Herzl's famous pamphlet, Der Judenstaat, was
published in February 1896. In this pamphlet, Herzl gave more concrete expression
to Jewish national aspirations, arguing (as suggested in the title) that the
'Jewish problem' could only be solved by establishing a Jewish state, possibly
in Palestine but possibly elsewhere, in which persecuted Jews could live in
freedom and dignity. This pamphlet led directly to the formation of the Zionist
Movement in 1897 with Herzl at its head.
It is not generally appreciated that Herzl brought himself
and his ideas to the Porte's attention one year before the first Zionist
Congress was held. He did so by travelling to Constantinople in June 1896 and
making contact not only with several senior officials in person but also with
the Sultan through an intermediary. Displaying impressive ignorance of Ottoman sensitivities,
Herzl's ideas were not calculated to appeal to the Porte. At a time when the
Government's grip over its remaining territories in the Balkans was far from
secure, and when the Sultan was under attack from Young Turks abroad for the
'dismemberment' of the Empire, Herzl
asked that Palestine should be granted to the Jews with official blessing in
the form of what he called a 'Charter'. And at a time when the Government had
had more than enough of heavy European interference in its internal affairs,
including control of its Public Debt since 1881, Herzl hoped that his Jewish
State would enjoy Great Power protection. In exchange for Palestine, he
nebulously offered 'to regulate the whole finances of Turkey' for 'His Majesty
the Sultan'.
'His Majesty the Sultan' was that enigmatic figure, Abdulhamid
II, who came to power in 1876. His presence and personality cannot be ignored because,
although the Council of Ministers dealt with the question of Jewish settlement
in Palestine from 1881, power and politics in the Ottoman Empire were more and
more influenced, and later wholly controlled, by Abdulhamid until the Young
Turk Revolution in 1908. Abdulhamid probably knew of the increased flow of
Jewish immigrants towards Palestine from very early on. In keeping with his
character, his attitude seems to have been one of suspicion and ambivalence. In
1881 he was reported to favour the Anglo-German proposal to settle Jews along the
proposed railway from Smyrna to Baghdad; and he was said to have received the
Rumanian delegation, which came to Constantinople the following summer
(although the evidence for this is weak).
However, in 1891 he told the Military Supervisory Commission
at the Yildiz Palace:
Granting the status
of [Ottoman] subjects to these Jews and settling them is most harmful; and
since it may in the future raise the issue of a Jewish government, it is
imperative not to accept them.
And in 1892 the Ottoman High Commissioner in Egypt told Sir
Evelyn Baring, the British Consul-General, that the Sultan was disturbed by an attempt
to settle Jews on the east coast of the Gulf of Aqaba. But by the following
year Abdulhamid appears to have
considered the possibility of allowing Jews to settle elsewhere, for he told
the Haham Bashi (the Chief Rabbi of the Empire) that he was willing to offer Russian and other oppressed Jews refuge in the
Empire, particularly in Eastern Anatolia, so that they together with Ottoman
Jews might furnish him with a force of 100,000 soldiers, to be attached to
the Fourth Army. This proposal was welcomed by the Haham Bashi and his Rabbinical
Council, but nothing came of it because, according to the Turkish (Jewish)
historian, Abraham Galante, the Council of Ministers considered it ill-advised –
presumably for the reasons outlined above.
In 1896 Theodor Herzl met Philipp Michael de Newlinski, a
Polish aristocrat who had once worked in the Austro-Hungarian Embassy at Constantinople
and was employed by Abdulhamid for special diplomatic missions. In June Herzl
travelled with de Newlinski to Constantinople. On the train there, de Newlinski
introduced Herzl to Tevflk Pasa (the Ottoman Ambassador at Belgrade),
Karatodori Pasa and Ziya Pasa (both described as 'elder statesmen'), who were returning
to Constantinople after the coronation of Tsar Nicholas II. Herzl explained his project to Ziya Pasa,
who agreed that 'the benefits in money and press support which you promise us
are very great'. But, he warned, 'no one is even likely to have pourparlers
with you if you demand an independent Palestine'.
A day after Herzl and de Newlinski arrived in
Constantinople, Abdulhamid told the latter that:
If Mr Herzl is as much your friend as you are mine, then
advise him not to take another step in this matter. I cannot sell even a foot
of land, for it does not belong to me, but to my people. My people have won
this empire by fighting for it with their blood and have fertilized it with
their blood. We will again cover it with our blood before we allow it to be wrested
away from us. The men of two of my regiments from Syria and Palestine let
themselves be killed one by one at Plevna. Not one of them yielded; they all
gave their lives on that battlefield. The Turkish Empire belongs not to me, but
to the Turkish people. I cannot give away any part of it. Let the Jews save their billions. When my Empire is partitioned, they
may get Palestine for nothing. But only our corpse will be divided. I will not
agree to vivisection.
On June 29, 1882, the
first tiny group of 'Lovers of Zion', numbering all of 14 souls, sailed from
Constantinople for Jaffa. On the very same day, the Porte cabled the Mutasarrif
of Jerusalem, ordering him not to let any Russian, Rumanian or Bulgarian Jews
to disembark at Jaffa or Haifa; such Jews were not to set foot in any of the four
so-called 'Holy Cities' of Palestine (Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed and Tiberias)
and were to proceed to some other Ottoman port aboard the ship they came on.
This prohibition was contrary to one of the Capitulations
with Russia which assured her subjects of unrestricted travel throughout the
Ottoman Empire (except Arabia). When the
Mutasarrif sought clarification from Constantinople, he was ordered to expel all
Jews who had settled in the Mutasarriflik within the last four months; only to
permit Jewish pilgrims and businessmen to remain for a brief period; and to
prevent other Jews (i.e. prospective settlers) from landing. Similar
instructions were soon received and enforced in the Vilayet of Sam (embracing
the northern part of Palestine). The
terms of these and subsequent instructions made it clear that the Porte was
primarily concerned to prevent Russian Jews from settling in Palestine. Jews
from other countries were arriving in much smaller numbers, and were of
correspondingly less concern.
Irregularities were not long in arising. Some
Russian Jews applied for visas to Constantinople, where they obtained permits
to travel within the Ottoman Empire. Thus they would arrive at Palestine with
valid papers, but as prospective settlers they were refused entry. This led
to complaints, and at the end of 1882 the Ministry of Police in Constantinople
was ordered by the Council of Ministers to stop issuing internal travel permits
to Russian Jews until the Government took a decision on the matter. The reason
given for this order was that the Jewish immigrants were not fulfilling the
first obligation required of them, i.e. to become Ottoman subjects. In spring 1883 it was reported that a
complete bar was being imposed on the entry of all Jews at Beirut and Haifa.
Against this, it was still possible for Jews from countries other than Russia
and Rumania to disembark at Jaffa. And even in the case of Russian and Rumanian
Jews, pilgrims and businessmen were allowed to land.
But the Mutasarrif of Jerusalem appears to have recognized
that it did not accord with the Porte's real purpose to admit these Jews who
claimed that they came for prayer or business, but in fact came to settle. He therefore
turned to Constantinople for advice. A correspondence ensued; the Ministries of
Internal and Foreign Affairs conferred; the opinions of the Porte's legal
advisers were sought; and the Council of State considered the question in
March, 1884. After a further exchange with Jerusalem, it was decided to close Palestine to all Jewish business men, on
the grounds that the Capitulations, which permitted Europeans to trade freely
within the Ottoman Empire, applied exclusively to areas 'appropriate for
trade'- the Council of State did not consider that Palestine was such an area.
Henceforth, only
Jewish pilgrims could enter Palestine. Their passports were to be properly
visaed by Ottoman Consuls abroad; on arrival they were to hand over a deposit
guaranteeing their departure, and they were to leave after thirty days.
In all this, the role of the Powers was crucial. If the
entry restrictions were to be effective, they had to be accepted by the Powers,
on whose nationals they fell. And, broadly speaking, the Powers did not accept
them, since they were bent on preserving their privileges granted under the Capitulations
(which, as already mentioned, the Porte was trying to curtail).
There were of course certain differences in the positions
taken by the various Powers, depending to some extent on the state of their
relations with the Ottoman Empire. For example, from the 1880's onwards, Germany
was trying to befriend the Ottoman Empire and on occasion seemed inclined to
fall in with the entry restrictions. But in general the Powers refused to
acquiesce in them, and so in 1888, after
adopting a strong stand, they were able to extract a concession from the Porte permitting
Jews to settle in Palestine, provided that they arrived singly, and not en
masse.
There is much more to this fascinating history as set forth
by Mandel, but halfway through his recitation of the facts, I believe I’d found
the answer to my family riddle. Mordechai Shmuel and Taibe Leah left Lithuania,
then part of the Russian Empire, for Palestine. Mordechai Shmuel was merchant
class, which means he was considered well-off. But he was not entering
Palestine as a businessman. The intention of the two, who had arrived with
several children, was to make Aliyah: to permanently settle in Eretz Yisrael.
Had he declared himself to be in Palestine on business,
after 30 days, Mordechai Shmuel Yanovsky, my ancestor, would have been hunted
down and expelled. Arriving in the country for burial, on the other hand, would
probably not be seen as “settlement.” As such, the ploy of playing dead, with
his wife playing the grieving widow, makes sense.
I have not found any record of other Jewish men playing dead
to get into what is today the State of Israel. It does, however, pique my
interest that there were so many widows in the Old Yishuv. Is it possible that the
women may have been hiding the existence of their men in order to prevent them
from being expelled?
Ultimately, my two-times-great-grandparents failed at
Aliyah. Mordechai Shmuel and Taibe Leah stayed with relatives in Jerusalem while
their farmhouse was being built on land in the newish town of Petach Tikva. That town, founded in 1878, was the first modern Jewish agricultural center located
in Ottoman “Southern Syria.”
One day, Mordechai Shmuel set out from Jerusalem to check on
the progress of the building in Petach Tikva. During the journey, my
ancestor was attacked by three Arab ruffians, beaten unconscious, and left for dead. They were disappointed to see he had only a pair of phylacteries and
little cash. My great great grandfather had not seen the need for further
provisions for a simple overnight trip.
When Mordechai Shmuel awoke three days later in a hospital
in Jaffa, he thought to himself, “This is a crazy place. I’m taking the family
back to Lithuania.”
My Israeli cousin relates that his grandfather Nachum Shlomo,
who was known to all the cousins as the “Saba from Jerusalem” refused to return
with the family and his father, hoping to change his mind, threatened to sit
shiva on him. But Shlomo (as he was called) wouldn’t leave, and Mordechai
Shmuel did in fact sit shiva for him. They reconciled and eventually, in their
old age, Mordechai Shmuel and Taibe Leah returned, living with Shlomo’s family so
that they could be buried on the Mount of Olives when they died. And so it was. This time, Mordechai Shmuel stayed dead.
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The graves of my great great grandparents on the Mount of Olives, restored after 1967
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But here I am today, his great great granddaughter, living
in a bustling Jewish State, a grandmother myself now, with deep roots in
Israel. I never had to play dead, hide in a coffin, or resort to subterfuge in order to make
Aliyah. There were no Turks to stop me.
Today, the Ottomans are no more. The Jews, however, are now
firmly ensconced in the Land. This in spite of all the bad people who’d like
to push us into the sea and steal our land. It’s fun to watch them froth at the
mouth when they see they can’t get their way and make Israel Judenrein once more, as it was for all
intents and purposes under the Turks.
In other words, you won’t catch me playing dead in a coffin.
I’m here in Israel out loud and proud.
Mordechai Shmuel and Taibe Leah Yanovsky are no doubt amazed
at my great good luck. One of their blood in Eretz Yisroel, not here to fake death
or to come in my old age to die, but to live and raise more generations in the
Holy Land, now a sovereign Jewish state.
Updated for accuracy July 23, 2023
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Wednesday, February 28, 2024
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