isaac-deutscher-the-prophet-armed-trotsky-1879-1921

6 THE PROPHET ARMED
populated but fertile land towards the end of the eighteenth
century, and the Tsars were anxious to promote colonization.
Here, as so often in the history of colonization, the foreign
immigrant and the outcast were the pioneers. Serbs, Bulgarians,
Greeks, Jews were encouraged to conquer the wilderness. Up
to a point, the Jewish settlers improved their lot. They struck
roots in the country; they enjoyed certain privileges; and they
were relieved of the menace of expulsion and violence which
always hung over the Jewish pale. It had never been quite clear
just how far that pale extended. Alexander I had allowed it to
spread a little. Nicholas I had no sooner ascended the throne
than he ordered the Jews to be driven back. Towards the middle
of the century he expelled them again from Nikolayev, Sebastopol,
Poltava, and the towns around Kiev. Most of those expelled
resettled within the shrunken and congested pale, but a few
went out to the steppe.'
It was probably during one of these expulsions, in the early
1850s, that Leon Bronstein, the father of the new owner of
Yanovka, had left with his family a small Jewish town near
Poltava, on the east side of the Dnieper, and settled in the
Kherson province. His sons and daughters when they grew up
stayed on the land; but only one, David, became prosperous
enough to detach himself from the Jewish colony and set up as
an independent farmer at Yanovka.
As a rule, the colonists came from the lowest orders of the
Jewish population. Jews had been town dwellers for centuries;
and farming was so foreign to their way of life that very few of
those able to eke out a living in town would take to it. The
merchant, the craftsman, the money-lender, the middle-man,
the pious student of the Talmud, all preferred living within the
pale, in an established if miserable Jewish community. They
despised rural life so much that in their idiom Am Haaret;:,,
'the man of the land', also meant the boor and the vulgar who
did not even have a smattering of the Scriptures. Those who
went out into the steppe had had nothing to lose; they were not
afraid of hard and unfamiliar work; and they had few or no ties
with the Synagogue.
The new owner of Yanovka would certainly have been
described by his co-religionists as an Am Haaret;:,: he was
1
S. M. Dubnov, Historyoftht Jews in Russia and Poland, vol. ii, pp. 30-34 and passim.