What if Jerusalem had assented to the 1538 Sanhedrin.
- Thread starter jacob ningen
- Start date
Works on a few different levels, doesn't it?
Anyway, as can be seen from the update (which is on the previous page at post 320), Gratz's life experiences ITTL are changing the trajectory of her life in three ways: she'll publish her writing, which she didn't IOTL although she ran with a literary crowd; she'll be among the founders of American Jewish publishing as well as education; and she will marry. The last of these will cause the biggest stir.
Any glaring errors (or even not-so-glaring ones) in how I've drawn Gratz and early 19th-century Philly? We'll probably next see the US in the 1840 arc, during a very different Second Migration that's sorted as much or more by ideology as country of origin.
ARABIAN DAYS MAY 1811
ARABIAN DAYS
MAY 1811
MAY 1811
The Banu Zaydan emirs had a saying which had been passed down from father to son since Zahir al-Umar: the Jews make good infantry and excellent gunners and sappers, but never put one on horseback. There had always been exceptions, even among Zahir’s earliest companions, but the adage had a good deal of truth to it. The Jews of the Galilee weren’t born to the saddle as Bedouins were, and long before Zahir was born, they’d grown into their own way of fighting which wasn’t how Bedouins fought.
Still, in eighty years, the Zaydani and the Yishuv had learned to fight together, cavalry as hammer and infantry as anvil. They’d practiced in a hundred skirmishes in the Jabal Amil and Chouf mountains, in defense of the Galilee against the wali of Damascus, in the war against Bonaparte. Sometimes they’d won and sometimes they’d lost, but they’d learned, and in learning, they’d come to trust each other.
That learning, and that trust, were welcome today, because the dust of eighteen thousand soldiers of the Emirate of Diriyah was on the horizon, and Abd al-Rahman ibn Muhammad Zahir al-Zaydani was the one who would have to stop them.
He still had the firman that had come to Acre months before: you are commanded to go forth at once against the rebel and apostate Saud bin Abdulaziz al-Saud, and to expel him from the holy cities. The same firman had gone to Nablus and Cairo. By now, the Egyptian and Nabulsi armies would have landed at Yanbu to advance on Medina from the sea; the Zaydani army, by agreement, had marched along the caravan route through Aqaba and Tabuk to guard the approaches from the east. And now, in northern Arabia, his infantry stood anchored on the one side by a wooded oasis and on the other by a bluff that rose to a ruined fort, and his cavalry – he at the center, next to the olive-tree standard of the Bani Zaydan – waited at the opening of a defile.
At twenty-two, when he’d first come to his inheritance, Abd al-Rahman would have considered this a fine adventure. In some ways he still did; his reckless bravery had matured, but it hadn’t altogether gone away. But at thirty-five, he’d learned to look deeper. The Porte certainly had legitimate reasons to fight the Diriyans – their occupation of Mecca was an affront to the Sultan as commander of the faithful, they’d mistreated Hajj pilgrims and merchant caravans, and they’d raided as far as Baghdad and Damascus. But Abd al-Rahman couldn’t help noticing that not a single Turkish soldier was taking part in the expedition. The Sultan was instead sending his troublesome vassals to do the fighting and dying, and his hopes for them were obvious.
Let it be, Abd al-Rahman had decided; he had deeper reasons of his own. A victory in this war would bring the Banu Zaydan closer to Egypt, and the Zaydani state had always been most successful when Egypt was a friend.
A victory will bring us closer, yes. But first, we have to win.
Abd al-Rahman looked to the east, where the dust cloud was getting larger and the noise of soldiers’ shouts and horses’ hooves had grown loud enough to drown out bird-calls and lowing cattle. Then he looked to the west: eleven thousand men in four ranks, their muskets and bayonets new from the gunsmith-works of Umm al Fahm. The Zaydani olive tree and the candelabra of the Galilee fluttered above them in a slight breeze; to their side were the white eagle of the Polish Regiment and the scarab of the Masri Regiment; the mountain of Tzfat and the red hawk of Tulkarm and the standards of twenty more militias.
What a patchwork we are, the emir thought – it was so even before his Bedouin and Shi’ite cavalry were added. But we are strong together.
The sound was deafening; the enemy were clearly visible now, thousands of men with muskets and sabers, calling the names of ibn Saud and ibn Abd al-Wahhab, urging their horses into a gallop under green banners inscribed with the Shahada. Abd al-Rahman waited to give the order to charge, to drive them onto the lines of infantry, but they needed no encouragement; as soon as the Diriyans saw the soldiers at the base of the bluff, they charged straight for them.
“Yahud!” they shouted. “Tadmir al-Yahud!” The part of the line that their leading troop was charging toward was held by Muslim militiamen from Jaffa and Ashdod, but that hardly mattered; to the Diriyans, all Zaydani foot soldiers were yahud.
“What did I tell you, ustaz?” said al-Musawi, one of the Shi’ite clan chiefs from Jabal Amil. “The swine will herd themselves.”
“We’ll still be needed for the slaughter.”
“Yes, my lord.” To the west, behind the infantry, the first cannon opened fire. “Give the order. We will show them as much mercy as they showed us at Karbala.”
And when Abd al-Rahman turned to look at al-Musawi’s face, what he saw was hunger.
_______
At Mount Tabor and Acre, Netanel bin Saleh had fought as a common soldier, but a man who was married to the nagidah couldn’t stand in the ranks. He was a chorbaji in this battle – a title that could mean anything from major to brigadier – and he commanded the Zaydani left, closest to the cliffs. The title hardly mattered; after all, his true rank was haham, and maybe someday posek. But the command did, and not for the first time this day, he was grateful for the experienced officers in the emir’s regiments.
“Present!” they called, and a second later, so did he. He gave the order in French; the ex-prisoners who’d agreed to drill the militia after the peace of Cairo had taught the commands in their own language, and no one had seen any reason to change them. The front rank knelt and raised their muskets to their shoulders; the second rank prepared to fire over their heads.
The Diriyans came on. They were everywhere in front of Netanel, filling the space between the bluff and the oasis; they were within three hundred yards now, charging at the gallop, and the canister from the six-pounders and the riflemen in the ruined fort were hardly slowing them down.
Netanel waited, and he wondered – again not for the first time – how these men had come to be his enemy. He’d read the writings of ibn Abd al-Wahhab, and he’d found much in them to admire. Erasing superstition, studying the scriptures to derive law rather than relying blindly on precedent, searching for a personal understanding of the divine – all those things might have been written by his own Dor Daim movement. But he wasn’t fighting ibn Abd al-Wahhab, who had gone to his fathers. He was fighting ibn Saud, who had turned those teachings into murderous fanaticism, who had visited horror on the Shi’ite holy city of Karbala, and who had made no secret of believing that the Holy Land merited the same fate.
“Ready!” he called. Smoke came from a few of the Diriyans’ muskets, though at this range it did little damage, and Netanel again remembered the day at Mount Tabor when he’d faced what the Diriyan soldiers were about to receive. The men of the Galilee and Nablus had outnumbered the French seven to one that day, so they’d won the battle anyway. The Diriyans didn’t have nearly that advantage.
They came on. Netanel recalled one of the maxims the French drill instructors had given him: when you think they’re on top of you, count to three, and give the order to fire only then. They were on top of him now. He could see fierce faces, flourished sabers, leveled lances. He counted slowly to three.
“Fire!” This time, he gave the order in the same moment that the regimental officers and militia commanders did.
The first two ranks fired; the field was suddenly veiled in sulfur-smelling smoke, and the air was thick with cries of anger and pain and the neighing of terrified horses. Then, as they’d been drilled, they stepped back to reload, and the third and fourth ranks fired a volley of their own.
The Diriyans came on, charging through the smoke; if there were any cowards among the soldiers of ibn Saud, none of them were here. But the first two ranks fired again, and their own dead men and horses blocked their path. They would reach the Zaydani lines a few at a time, not in an irresistible mass.
And now the infantry had fixed their bayonets, and the cavalry was coming.
_______
“Now!” called Abd al-Rahman, making his voice carry. He took only a moment to marvel at the prodigy of a battle going almost entirely to plan, and spurred his horse forward out of the defile.
He galloped toward the Diriyan flank, riding ahead of his troops, challenging them to catch up with him. This felt no different than when he’d been twenty-two: the sheer physical joy of riding a fast horse with thousands of men at his back and calling his name.
All but the Shi’ites. Some of them shouted “ya Hossein,” but most, including al-Musawi, cried out “Karbala!”
And true to their word, they showed no mercy.
_______
It took five days for the Zaydani messenger to find the place where the Egyptian and Nabulsi armies camped and come back with a message from Ibrahim Bey. Muhammad Ali had done much as the Porte had: send his chief rival to Hejaz with the Mamluk emirs of upper Egypt at his back, in the hope that the Diriyans would thin their ranks. So far, they hadn’t.
Netanel was in the emir’s tent with the other officers, sharing ayran and giving his daily report, when the messenger returned. The rider put the message on the rug between the commanders; Abd al-Rahman picked it up, broke the seal with a flourish, and read.
“Ibrahim Bey congratulates us on our victory and wishes us to advance toward Medina,” he said. “But…”
Netanel finished the sentence before the emir could. “But not my men.”
Abd al-Rahman nodded. “He praises them. But there would be riots if your men entered Medina, much less Mecca.” He put the message down, rose to his feet, and walked around to where Netanel sat. “You will stay here – occupy the ruined fort, send out patrols, warn us if ibn Saud sends any more armies to attack from the east. It will be a post of honor for you – I will make sure the Egyptians and Nabulsi know that.”
The emir looked to Netanel’s face and must have seen something there, because he put a hand on his shoulder. “Your family and mine have been together in this for a hundred years, since both of us were nobody,” he said. “Of course I’ll tell them.”
But that wasn’t what Netanel had been thinking about. Part of his mind was considering how to get the Galilee militia’s cannon up to the ruined fort and where to place them. Another part was thinking of the Jews who lived far to the east in al Qatif and Muscat – pearl divers, so the Baghdadis claimed – and whether, if the war moved into the heart of Diriyah after the Hejaz was captured, his patrols might range that far. There were lost things here to be found, scattered people to be contacted, lost learning to be regained.
And something else occurred to him. “What is the name of this place?”
Whatever answer Netanel may have expected from the emir, he didn’t expect laughter, much less the raucous belly laugh that echoed in the tent. “Don’t you know?” Abd al-Rahman said. “This is the oasis of Khaybar. You have returned, my brave scholar. You have returned.”
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Note on the 1811 update: The runup to the Wahhabi War on the Diriyan side was much the same as IOTL: Saud bin Abdulaziz got too big for his britches, seized Mecca and Medina, broke treaties, and raided cities under the Porte’s control until it was too much to ignore. The resources and armies available to the Saudis are also equivalent to OTL. The Ottoman side, OTOH, is stronger, both due to the Levantine vassals’ participation and due to the Mamluk emirs not having been totally crushed. The Mamluks and Muhammad Ali reached a truce ITTL during the British invasion of 1807, and while the upper Egyptian emirs are restive vassals, they obeyed his command to invade the Hejaz in the hope of getting something for themselves. Muhammad Ali’s eagerness to put the Red Sea between him and the Mamluks also helped get the ball rolling a few months sooner than IOTL.
Anyway, with the added strength on the Ottoman side, this is likely to be a shorter war – the army that the Banu Zaydan just stopped, for instance, is similar to the one that crushed the Egyptians at al-Safra IOTL and kept them out of Medina for a year, and without it, the reconquest of the Hejaz will be much easier. Whether it keeps going into the Diriyan heartland will depend on a lot of things as it did IOTL, including whether ibn Saud still thinks treaties are made to be broken, whether Muhammad Ali also thinks so, and whether Ibrahim Bey decides that being a king in Arabia is his new gig.
Oh, and you remember how much cross-fertilization there was between Islamic and Jewish philosophy in medieval times? That could happen again.
Anyway, with the added strength on the Ottoman side, this is likely to be a shorter war – the army that the Banu Zaydan just stopped, for instance, is similar to the one that crushed the Egyptians at al-Safra IOTL and kept them out of Medina for a year, and without it, the reconquest of the Hejaz will be much easier. Whether it keeps going into the Diriyan heartland will depend on a lot of things as it did IOTL, including whether ibn Saud still thinks treaties are made to be broken, whether Muhammad Ali also thinks so, and whether Ibrahim Bey decides that being a king in Arabia is his new gig.
Oh, and you remember how much cross-fertilization there was between Islamic and Jewish philosophy in medieval times? That could happen again.
No notes, one of the best episodes in the series so far. The idea of a renewed Jewish presence in Khaybar is just awesome. I wonder if it has the potential to become permanent.
One quote that particularly caught my interest is this:
One quote that particularly caught my interest is this:
The Zaydani willingness to truly cooperate and band together with Jewish and Shiite populations will most assuredly make them extremely unpopular in the eyes of fundamentalist Sunni movements like the Wahabbis.
`OTOH how strong will these movements be ITTL as Ibn-Saud is weaker. I also like how the fundamentalists are rehashing old wounds at old sites. The past isnt past.
What happens at Khaybar will have a lot to do with how the war ends - if there's a truce (whether permanent or temporary) that leaves the House of Saud in possession of Nejd after being expelled from Hejaz, and if the Porte (or Muhammad Ali, or Ibrahim Bey) decides to set up a chain of border forts, it would be one of the logical places to put a garrison. We may see it, or at least hear about it, again.
The Shi'ites maybe even more than the Jews. And yes, the Levant - where minorities like the Maronites, Druze and Shi'ites, and ITTL (some of) the Jews, have their mountain enclaves and are part of the local alliances and intrigues - is something that most of the Nejd tribes will find incomprehensible and repellent. OTOH, as can be seen, there's some overlap between Wahhabi theology and some of the Yemenite Jewish reformist movements, and while neither party is likely to be too impressed by that, some ideas might travel.
I will not make the Chabad Regiment's battle cry "we want Moshiach now."
I will not make the Chabad Regiment's battle cry "we want Moshiach now."
I will not...
I will not make the Chabad Regiment's battle cry "we want Moshiach now."
I will not...
SHTETL ELEGY DECEMBER 1812
SHTETL ELEGY
DECEMBER 1812
DECEMBER 1812
It had snowed for days, and it felt like the snow would never stop. It felt like none of this would ever stop – the snow falling through the pine and spruce, the hunger that would neither go away nor let itself be ignored, the cold that was as far below freezing as a summer day was above, the partisans that ambushed every foraging party and seemed to lurk behind every tree. This was the way the world had always been, the way it would always be; this was the way the retreating Grand Army was fated to live until, inevitably, it died.
Brigadier General Henri Rottembourg had brought a full brigade into Russia. He had about a battalion’s worth of troops left, and at that, his brigade was one of the fortunate ones. He’d kept them together, kept them disciplined, fought off the partisans, made sure that whatever the foragers brought back was distributed fairly, found what shelter from the storm he could. But still, on a good day, ten more of his men would be dead or missing at every halt; on a bad day, fifty.
The Grand Duchy of Warsaw was, he estimated, eight or ten days’ march away. If he had half a battalion left when he got there, he’d consider it a greater victory than Borodino had been – it would at least be a victory that promised life, rather than death and more death.
Dusk was falling, and a shadow loomed ahead of him in the darkness – a soldier in a greatcoat wrapped against the cold, a scout returning. “There’s a village ahead, sir. A kilometer, maybe a little more.”
“Still standing?” Rottembourg’s voice held a touch of surprise; few of the villages along the line of retreat remained intact. The ones the Russian army hadn’t burned to scorch the earth had been destroyed by the peasants themselves before they fled, or by the factions in the shadowy civil war that was swirling within the main war. If God was smiling on France, there would be some food left, or a few houses intact enough to provide some shelter from the wind. But the scout had said “a village,” not “a ruin,” and that promised something more.
“Most of it, sir. I didn’t go in, but it looked like the houses were still there, and the barns too. And there were lights. Someone had a fire going.”
Someone had a fire going. That could mean Russians, partisans, deserters – it could mean more straggling French soldiers, though Rottembourg had seen no sign of any. Whoever it was would likely be dangerous, and it might be best to skirt the village and find another place to camp. But he’d face mutiny if he did, and the chance of someplace warm and dry to spend the night was worth the chance of having to fight for it.
He raised a closed fist over his head for a halt, and sent the scout running to gather what remained of his officers. “We’ll go in as fast as we can,” he said. “Let them see we’ve got a battalion. Maybe they won’t fight us. But make sure everyone fixes their bayonets, just in case.” It would be sword and bayonet work if it came to a fight – there was no keeping a musket primed in this weather.
They halted again at the edge of the forest, fifty meters from the village. It was intact, or mostly so; a few burned buildings and a fresh-dug ditch surrounding the outer fence gave mute testament that it hadn’t entirely escaped the war, but it was still an inhabited place, not the ghost of one. And there was smoke rising from chimneys through the snow. Someone was there.
An inhabited place was a defended place. “Ware loopholes,” Rottembourg said, and peered through the darkness at the holes that had been cut in the fence at just the right height to fire a musket through. They weren’t sophisticated defenses, and whoever was in the village would no more be firing any muskets tonight than Rottembourg’s troopers, but there was reason to be quick and reason to be wary. “In through there,” he said, pointing to the main gate. “Knock it down. Get into the center as fast as we can and form square, but if anyone attacks from one of the houses, don’t wait. Now!”
He was off at a run, and his men with him. The pioneer troop – what was left of the pioneer troop, got to the gate first, hacking with their axes, and then it was down. The soldiers poured into the village and, seeing a deserted green ahead of them, made for it. In a moment, they had formed a square, bayonets bristling outward in all directions.
So far, no one had attacked. But there were fires – Rottembourg could see the glow through shuttered windows – and surely, by now, whoever was in the houses knew he was there. Were they planning an assault? Or barring their doors and getting ready to ambush anyone who might try to enter?
“Should we try talking to them, sir?” asked Captain Guillou – not an officer from Rottembourg’s original brigade, but one who’d joined them for the long retreat. “I speak some Russian.”
“Me too. I’ll go.” The captain raised a hand in protest, but Rottembourg waved him down – this was something he had to do himself. The square opened ranks at his command, and he walked toward the nearest of the houses; he had no white flag, but he opened his hands and raised them above his head. One of the shutters that faced him was slightly ajar, and he stared into it, hoping to catch some movement and get some sign of who was inside.
What he saw, flashing past the gap in the shutter, was a man’s ear and the sidelock that hung in front of it.
A Jew. There were Jews and Jews in Russia, and many of them weren’t friendly – he’d learned that a lifetime ago, in the earliest days of the invasion – but this didn’t look like the stronghold of one of the Hasidic sects that fought for the Tsar. Those, Rottembourg had found, were more heavily defended, and their territories were patrolled; there had been no signs of such patrols near here, nor were there any of the kabbalistic symbols that they typically put on their houses to avert the evil eye.
He stopped in his tracks and cried out a sentence that was not in Russian: Shema Yisrael, Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai ehad. And then another word: chaverim.
The officers and men in the village square looked at him as if he’d grown wings, but there were suddenly voices within the house as well. The shutter opened slowly, barely more than a crack; a man’s head appeared at the window and looked at him with piercing eyes, taking in his uniform, the sword at his belt, the absence of sidelocks and fringes.
“Zhid?” he said. “You?” He sounded disbelieving, but his next words were in Yiddish. “Soldiers, are you? Napoleon? What do you want?”
Rottembourg’s soldiers recognized the name “Napoleon” and some spoke German, so they could tell that peace had at least begun to be made, and he could almost feel the relaxation of tension, the loosening of their grip on bayoneted muskets. “We want shelter for the night. Food, if you have it – we can pay. We’ll be gone in the morning.”
“If you’re against the bastard Romanov, you’re welcome here,” said the man in the house. “And we’d welcome you for more than a day, if we could feed you that long. What the Tsar’s soldiers haven’t done to us, the rabbis who fight for him do, and for the time you’re here, at least, they won’t.”
“Good enough, then. I am Rottembourg; I speak for my men, and you have my word of honor on behalf of the Emperor.”
“Dovid. And no emperor has honor, but I’ll trust in yours.”
That, it seemed, was enough. The doors opened; men, women and children came out of the houses to stare at the soldiers and to unlock barns and sheds. Officers divided the buildings between the troops; a lucky few found space in the houses themselves, where there were dry floors and fires burning.
“Sentries,” said Rottembourg to Guillou. “Get twenty men up on rooftops, two to a post; twenty more at the fence. But change them every hour.” It would be cruel to leave anyone up there longer than that, and besides, in this cold, a sentry left out too long was liable to fall asleep or worse.
Rottembourg and his staff, such as it was, found places in Dovid’s house. More people lived there than he’d thought: Dovid’s wife Malka, his parents, a widowed sister, and a dozen children who stared at Rottembourg and couldn’t believe he was a Jew. “There are many Jews in France who look like me, and some of them are also officers in the army,” he said, and they believed him even less.
The adults did believe him, and they spoke of the Tsar they hated and the Emperor who’d promised emancipation. “Though we don’t want that either,” Dovid cautioned. “Your Emperor’s Sanhedrin would change things too much.” Rottembourg nodded; unlike the urban Jews who’d supported the invasion and even enlisted in the Grand Army in the early days, these village mitnagdim were deeply traditional. But they still saw, in emancipation, the promise that they might be left alone, and that had been enough for them to hope for a French victory.
“But your Emperor lost, and now all the scores are being settled,” said Malka. And the other men and women told stories of raids and counter-raids; the Chabad Regiment and the other Hasidic militias who fought for the Tsar ambushed the mitnagdim and rival Hasidim as well as French troops, and were willing enough to enact the Tsar’s scorched-earth decree against their own pro-French coreligionists. Thus, Rottembourg gathered, this village’s new-built defenses; thus the burned settlements that he’d seen to the north and east.
“Some of them are gone – to Odessa, to the towns in the south where there’s no fighting,” said Dovid. “One village went to Astrakhan – can you believe it? ‘It’s one of the places allowed to us, and it’s a long way from anywhere,’ they said. We thought about going too, but now it’s too late – not in this weather, not with soldiers all around.”
“Maybe we can leave you some muskets,” said Rottembourg – what was left of his brigade had far more guns than men to carry them, and he’d seen the ancient, rusty weapons that Dovid’s family had. “To see you to the war’s end.”
“If it stops then.” But the food the women had cooked for the troops was ready now – kasha and potatoes and onions and turnips, the food of poverty but filling all the same – and silence fell as they ate. After, the family stretched out to sleep and Rottembourg sat and stared into the fire. The silence continued.
Then it was broken by the shout of a sentry from the rooftop, followed by a gunshot and the sound of running men.
Rottembourg rushed to the shutter and saw them: bearded raiders in snow-covered black coats and fur hats, who’d wrapped their muskets in oilskin to keep the priming dry and who were kicking doors open and firing through the doorways. They must have heard we were here, Rottembourg thought, or maybe, as Malka had said, they were settling scores, but he needed to form his men up now.
He ran into the snow, followed by his startled officers and, to his surprise, by Dovid, shouting for his men to gather on the green as they had before. A musket ball cracked past his head. Sounds of fighting came from a few of the barns, where the partisans had shot their way in and were now struggling with the Frenchmen hand to hand.
He reached the green, surrounded by a protective knot of soldiers and villagers, and took stock. The best he could tell was that there were about a hundred partisans; not nearly enough to overcome a force the size of his now that the surprise had passed. His men were already massing in the square and their sergeants were shouting them into formation; soon enough, they’d root the raiders out of the barns and sheds one at a time. Or…
“Cease fire!” he shouted in Yiddish. “Whoever’s leading you, come and talk. We have a brigade here and you don’t have enough men to fight us. Come and talk before anyone else dies.”
He heard more shouting and gunfire and clashing of steel, and for a moment, he was sure he’d have to root them out after all. But then someone called out an order, the fighting abruptly stopped, and one of the partisans stepped forward on the rutted street.
“I am Yossel,” he said. “You can talk to me.”
“Captain Yossel? Colonel Yossel?”
“Reb Yossel is enough.”
“All right, Reb Yossel,” said Rottembourg. “You have a hundred men here, and you can see that I have many more – enough to handle the men you’ve got with you and the others that you’ve got coming around to attack from the north.” A very badly-hidden look of surprise crossed Yossel’s face; evidently, Rottembourg had guessed right. “I could kill you all, but many of my men would die too, and I’d rather get them home. You have five minutes to give me your oath that you will leave this place and let my brigade go unmolested in the morning. If you do, we will let you leave and not pursue you.” He took a pocket-watch from his greatcoat, the one Napoleon had given him when he’d become the only Jew in the French army to hold general’s rank. “The five minutes starts now.”
Yossel called other men to his side and held a whispered conference in the swirling snowfall. “What about your oath, Tzarfati?” he said. “Do you swear that you and your godless Emperor will quit this country and seduce no more Jews from the path of Ribono Shel Olam?”
“I can’t swear for my Emperor. You know that. But I think you can see that France isn’t likely to pass this way again.”
“But you will leave this land?”
“That’s what I’m trying to do. To leave it in peace.”
Another whispered conference, and Yossel spoke again. “If you can’t give an oath, then neither will I. But you have my word, if you care to trust it. A commander of the Chabad Regiment doesn’t lie.”
Rottembourg’s eyes flashed to Dovid’s face and saw no objection in it; evidently lying, at least, was not among the sins with which the mitnagdim charged the Chabad partisans. “Yes, then. Your word for mine. You will leave now, and I will leave at dawn.”
Yossel gave another order and the partisans flowed out of the village and through the broken gate; one of them went running to warn off the men in the north. Rottembourg looked at his watch; it had been three minutes.
“Find out how many wounded and dead,” he told Guillou; he was already certain that this wouldn’t be one of the good days. “At least we’re in a village; the women will have needles and thread to sew up wounds.”
Dovid nodded. “We’ll do what we can,” he said. “I could wish that you’d also asked for Yossel’s word not to attack this village again, but if you had, he wouldn’t have given it.” He stood in silence for a moment more, and said, “Let us leave with you tomorrow.”
“All of you? Women and children?”
“It won’t be safe here anymore, now that they know we’ve paid host to a battalion of you. Not even with a ditch and loopholes. And we have sixty able-bodied men – you’ll have that many more guns to protect you.”
And that many more mouths to feed, Rottembourg thought. But after the shelter the villagers had given him, he couldn’t honorably refuse.
“How far will you come with us? To Warsaw? Surely not to France.”
“No, not France.” Humor rippled through Dovid’s voice – humor, at least, of a sort. “As I said, we have no desire to become like you. And Warsaw is full, and the people there aren’t kind to us. We’ll get across the border and then think of where to go.”
“Odessa? Astrakhan, like the other village?”
“Maybe. Maybe someplace farther.”
Farther than Astrakhan. Right now even the border seemed farther than Astrakhan, in this endless winter of war. But Rottembourg would know where he was going when he got there. Dovid would know too.
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which IOTL was what was happening before Haskalah unified mitnagdim and chassidim. Due to TTL more active support of the Tzar, that rapproachment is less likely.
Thanks!
Yes, as @jacob ningen has pointed out, raids and fights between rival Hasidic sects, and between Hasidim and mitnagdim, happened IOTL, and it was also common for pro- and anti-Napoleon populations of the same country to end up fighting (for instance, the afrancesados of Iberia or the German Bonapartists). ITTL, both of these factors, plus the Tsarist Hasidim (not just Chabad at this point) being militarily organized, are making the infighting a lot worse. Enough worse, most likely, that even opposition to the Haskalah - which as can be seen, Dovid's village shares - won't heal the wounds entirely. The echoes of this conflict are going to last a long time.
Dovid's village is indeed going where you think, and so will a few others, but it's still a long, uncertain and costly journey. Most of the refugees will end up in Ukraine or the lower Volga provinces that were initially part of the Pale - maybe ITTL those provinces will never be removed from it. And a Jewish community in Astrakhan will be reasonably close to Persia and the Caucasus.
Anyway, my tentative schedule for the final three stories of the Napoleonic arc is: 1813, reforms in the Yishuv and Nablus in the wake of the Wahhabi War; 1814, the Jewish community of Restoration France; and 1815, the Baghdadi Jews - and one family of them in particular - enter the chat. At that point, the foundations of modernity will have been laid.
Several things this just brought to mind ie the Mitnagdim and Chasdim are closer which makes rapproachment harder. In OTL much of the division was ideological, so deciding that those differences are less relevant than anti-Haskalah unity. Here, the differences are more personae and tied to actual bloodshed making rapproachment harder. The second, and Volozhin and math history is what's motivating it is historical personae being viewed as more opposed or less opposed than can be supported in their own texts but because the historians in both camps project their own distance or affinity back we have tales of great rivalries or unified fronts that weren't there at the time.