ABSTRACT
Every large-scale society is necessarily stratified, and there is a division of labor between the classes of which it is composed. The individuals in these strata must willingly cooperate and their interests must dovetail, if the equilibrium of the total society would not be seriously disturbed. However, a review of history yields numerous situations where a ruling class blatantly disregards the interests of other classes in a society, exploits them, and disregards their human dignity, so that severe disharmony is the result. If nothing is done about it, violent eruptions and even revolutionary upheavals are inevitable. If we look at Jewish history from this vantage point, it is obvious that the Jews nowhere and at no time have been a ruling class or even part of a ruling class throughout the entire history of their dispersion. Yet, frequently, as in Spain, the Jews had to recognize that their interests were necessarily tied with the interests of the ruling class. If this tie had been disregarded, the Jews, being strangers by law and adherents of a strange religion, would not have been granted the right of domicilium. Over and over again, the Jews were granted the twin privilege of protected settlement and communal autonomy because they appeared to be useful agents of a single ruler or a powerful ruling class. They constituted an economically active and revenue-producing middle stratum of a population, interposed between the ruling elite and the laboring classes. Viewed from above, they seemed small and insignificant, that is, the rulers regarded them as an object of political manipulation. Viewed from below, they looked large and even dangerous, because they were the visible representatives of exploitative absentee overlords. Frequently, too, there has been present among the lower classes a subconscious awareness that the upper classes, if hard-pressed, might consider “their” Jews expendable, so that one can vex and kick them 78with impunity while at the same time indulging in the notion that one has confronted a dangerous enemy and performed a heroic deed. Finally, if to a socio-economic and even socio-psychological conflict situation of this kind an ethnic antagonism is added, possibly coupled with religious diversity–in other words: if the ruling class belongs to one nationality and the laboring classes to another–then, one tension is aggravated by another tension and a violent eruption, whereby the wedged-in Jews are likely to be the first victims, is unavoidable. The classic example for such a multiple disaster is the riot of the Ukrainian Cossacks under their hetman (leader) Bogdan Chmielnicki against their Polish overlords in the seventeenth century.
