Khapped!

One Friday in 1854, as Chaim Merimzon was getting ready to celebrate his eleventh birthday, his father sent him to the store to buy drinks while his mother was making the honey cake. As he walked through Vilkovishki, a town in the Russian Empire’s Pale of Settlement, two men pulled up next to him in a carriage and asked for directions to the local inn. Eager to help, Merimzon explained that he was headed in that direction, and they offered to give him a ride. But when they got to the inn, they just kept driving. By the time Chaim realized what had happened, it was already too late: “These were the kidnappers, khappers, who seize people for conscription. I started crying and shouting. I tried to escape, but . . . [they] restrained me hard.”

Nearly sixty years later, when he published his story in a Russian Jewish journal, Merimzon recalled that the men brought him to a home where he found another Jewish boy. Distraught, this child cried: “Don’t you understand why they caught us and where they’re going to send us? They’ll take us . . . and hand us over to Christians who’ll feed us pork and baptize us.” Merimzon and the other boy were turned over to Russian military officials and conscripted as cantonists.

They were two of the approximately sixty thousand Jewish boys who, between 1827 and 1856, were taken from their homes, sent to Russian military schools for minors (the word “cantonist” was derived from the French “cantonnement,” meaning military camp), and then inducted into the imperial army for decades-long terms of service. There, unlike cantonists from other backgrounds, they were pressured to abandon their faith and convert to Christianity.

More than a century after Merimzon was kidnapped, Josef Mendelevich was arrested at a Leningrad airport. He had been part of a plot to hijack an airplane and fly it to the West, so that he and his refusenik coconspirators could get to Israel. Mendelevich was sentenced to fifteen years in Soviet prison camps. After his early release a decade later, Mendelevich finally made it to the Jewish state. He studied at a yeshiva, was eventually ordained, and then pursued a degree in Jewish history. Though Mendelevich lived a century and worlds apart from Merimzon and the cantonists, he, too, had struggled to maintain his Jewishness in the face of brutal coercion by a Russian empire. “In addition to the history of the cantonists,” he writes, “this is the author’s story.”

In The Cantonists (which was originally published in Hebrew in 2010), Mendelevich weighs in on important historical questions, including the Russian government’s motivations for conscripting Jewish boys, the cantonist system’s effect on Jewish society, and the nature of the authorities’ missionizing efforts. But his book is at its most gripping when it takes readers through the cantonist experience on the ground.

When the Russian Imperial administration decreed in 1827 that Jews were now to be drafted into the army, it was only stipulating that they shoulder an obligation shared by “all those liable for enlistment.” But the draft was also part of a plan to fundamentally transform Russian Jewry. As Michael Stanislawski made clear in his classic 1983 study Tsar Nicholas I and the Jews, this was radically different from the conscription of Jews in Western Europe, which was typically a byproduct of Jewish emancipation and came with the other rights and duties of citizenship. In Russia, by contrast, Jews were conscripted as part of an effort to integrate them into Russian society without granting them corresponding rights. Along with the army, the state used public Jewish schools, a state-managed rabbinate, and other institutions to mitigate the supposedly pernicious economic and political influence of Jews and encourage conversion to Christianity.

The conscription decree charged a community’s kahal, the Jewish community lay leadership, with selecting recruits to meet strict quotas. Faced with this cruel task, kahal officials usually chose to send children to cantonist schools, which prepared them for army service, rather than adults who would be inducted straight into the army. Jewish leaders calculated that the loss of children (especially poor children) was less economically and socially damaging than sending adult men who had families to support. They were also sometimes guided by more petty motives, selecting people they viewed as undesirable. When they had trouble filling their quotas, they turned to disreputable Jews to khap Jewish boys.

The official decree, as quoted by Mendelevich, permitted Jewish recruits to “observe all the customs of his religion during free time from active military service,” including attending local synagogues off base. The letter of this law was not always realized, however, and there was a system of both formal and informal carrots and sticks to get Jewish soldiers to convert to Christianity. These efforts only grew more intense over time as high-level officials prodded their subordinates in the field to increase conversion rates.

In one directive, the tsar urged that missionizing “be done with great care, restraint, and without any attempt to exert pressure,” so that boys would convert of their own volition. But Jewish cantonists were required to attend Christian prayer and classes. Meanwhile, some priests focused their missionary efforts on individual boys they thought might be susceptible. An archbishop suggested direct subsidies: “A monetary grant should be given to a converted cantonist. Although it is not so ethical . . . such a step should be allowed.”

As authorities pressed for higher rates of conversion, missionizers also did not hesitate to use violence. On his first day at the cantonist school, Merimzon wrote of the commanders:

They took us to the outskirts of the village, stood us in rows, and placed heaps of birch rods in front of us. The battalion officer announced: “Whoever wants to convert to Christianity, take one step forward!” There were many children who took that step. . . . From then on, they began to make us suffer, but I will not go into details.

Several testified that their heads were held under water until they agreed to be baptized. Another was force-fed salted fish and denied water until he gave in. Under these pressures, how did so many Jewish boys manage to retain their Jewishness?

In the military schools, boys who had already abandoned Judaism could be cruel to the younger cantonists who had not. But the Jewish boys also united under the pressure, drawing strength from one another. Merimzon recalled that officials treated him especially harshly because other boys looked up to him, saying that “they would do ‘whatever Merimzon was willing to do.’”

In addition to solidarity within the ranks, connections to Jews in the outside world gave the cantonists moral and religious support. In 1828, for instance, the Jewish community of Mogilev requested that authorities “approve the transfer of special products [matza] for the cantonist boys serving in the town of Smolensk.” Their request was denied, but boys in Kronshtadt were more fortunate as authorities there “agreed to allow the distribution of dry bread, called matza, to the Jewish recruits.”

Priests often complained that the cantonists’ contact with other Jews was a major obstacle to conversion. Mendelevich cites Russian reports explaining that the boys’ attendance at local synagogues and “contact [with Jews] undoubtedly strengthens the cantonists’ spirit of resistance . . . as it greatly weakens the influence of the Christian instructors.” Though measures were taken to curtail synagogue attendance in 1845, many boys still managed to stay in contact with nearby Jews.

Even in regions without Jewish communities, boys found encouragement in letters from home. Merimzon, for instance, recalled that the monthly letters from his parents gave him strength. These letters ceased when his parents heard a rumor that he had converted. Heartbreakingly, they addressed their final letter to “Chaim, our son of the past; now Ivan or who knows what.” But by then he was in no danger of converting.

In Mendelevich’s assessment, the cantonists were most vulnerable to missionary efforts in their first six months, while they were disoriented and isolated. If they managed to resist the pressure in this early period, they bought time to connect with older cantonists who had not converted as well as local Jews and their families back home.

Merimzon recalled an incident later in his term of service when a priest tried to convert him, arguing:

God chose you as His chosen people, but because the Jewish nation did not go in God’s path, He was furious with them and scattered them to the four corners of the earth. . . . Your people does not have any safe shelter in the world. Therefore, I would like to recommend that you deny your connection to your people and choose our Christian faith. Cling to it wholeheartedly, and you will merit joy and wealth in this world, and in the next world you will merit Paradise.

The classic Augustinian message to Merimzon was clear: You suffer because you’re Jewish, so convert and spare yourself.

The boy, who had by now adapted to cantonist life and established himself within a Jewish community, responded with confidence:

Why are you selling me your religion like any storekeeper in the market, promising me joy and wealth in this world? You should be persuading me with spirituality, not materialism.

The priest was taken aback by the boy’s polemical chutzpah and departed. This occurred in front of Merimzon’s peers, and, he recalled, they “began to respect me and stopped trying to persuade me to convert.”

Do such stories suggest that priests were sincerely concerned about the validity of coerced conversions? Mendelevich acknowledges that, to some extent, this may have been the case, but he places Merimzon’s resolve to remain Jewish at the center of his encounter with the priest. In the end, approximately three-quarters of the cantonists maintained their Jewishness by drawing support from each other, nearby Jewish communities, and their families back home.

One of the parallels between Mendelevich’s experience in the Soviet Union and that of the cantonists a century earlier was in their determination to celebrate Passover and the Jewish community’s determination to help them. As he described in his 2012 memoir, Unbroken Spirit, the prison sometimes held up Mendelevich’s matza packages until after Passover, but by petitioning officials and threatening hunger strikes, he was often able to get them in time for the holiday.

When he explores the effect that letters from home had on the boys, Mendelevich is also drawing on his own experiences. During his term in prison camps, letters were his “only connection to home, to friends, to the Jewish people, and to the outside world.” Like the matza, letters, in particular from his father and from Israel, kept him connected to his family and to Judaism.

But perhaps the most important source of encouragement for Mendelevich was his relationship with fellow Jewish prisoners. During his decade in the Soviet prison system, Mendelevich spent time in several camps, and each time he was transferred to a new one, he quickly found and established connections with other Jews, including, at one point, Natan Sharansky. Together they studied Hebrew, discussed Jewish history, and observed the holidays. Mendelevich says that thanks to these relationships, he and the other Jews “perceived events in the camp as ephemeral; only our studies held lasting value.” In this he sees himself and his fellow refuseniks as heirs to resolute cantonists of the nineteenth century like Merimzon.

Mendelevich’s reflections on his time in prison, his scholarship on the cantonist experience, and his perspective as a rabbi lead him to remind readers of something at the core of Judaism. Although it is not a deeply concealed secret, it is helpful to be reminded, as rifts within the Jewish world seem to be growing wider, that “the remarkable strength of our people has always rested not on individualism but on unity.”