In English, we speak of the hostages in Gaza. In Hebrew, Israelis have three different words for them. One, b’nei-arubah, is the standard Hebrew term for “hostages.” A literal translation of it might be “warrantables,” that is, persons imprisoned by a side to a dispute as warranties that the other side will tread carefully or honor its commitments. It is a shortened form of the biblical b’nei-ta’aruvot, which has regularly been rendered as “hostages” from the days of the King James Version. (See, for instance, 2Kings 14:14).

A second Hebrew word used for those abducted to Gaza is shvuyim. A shavuy—the word is biblical, too—is a prisoner taken in war or by some other act of violence, especially for the purpose of being held for ransom. The supreme importance placed by Jewish law and custom on pidyon shvuyim, the redemption or ransoming of such victims, who would also be called “hostages” in English, has been cited endlessly since last October 7.

But the term most frequently used by Israelis for the Gaza hostages is neither of these. It is rather ḥatufim, or more commonly, when accompanied by the definite article, ha-ḥatufim. The literal meaning of ḥatuf, a noun derived from the verb ḥataf, to grab or to snatch, is “a snatched one [or thing],” and while the word can denote anything thus obtained, it has the specific sense when referring to a person of someone kidnapped or abducted. Used in this way, it also has a specific historical background—and while I haven’t seen or heard this background discussed in regard to the Gaza hostages, it is perhaps not unrelated to their plight.

In 1827, the government of Tsar Nicholas I, who had ascended to the throne two years earlier, promulgated a military conscription law that repealed the exemption from military service granted until then to several of Russia’s population groups, including Jews. The new law imposed a quota system that required each kahal or recognized Jewish community to provide fixed numbers of recruits, with rabbis, yeshiva students, and married men with families continuing to be exempt. Since 19th-century Russian Jews tended to marry and have children at a young age, this left the kahals with a dearth of eligible draftees, to make up for which they were permitted to fill their quota with juveniles as young as twelve, and in some cases, even eight. Sent to special military schools until they turned eighteen, after which they served the regulation 25 years exacted from a Russian conscript, such youngsters were known as kantonisti in Russia and kantonisten in Yiddish—a word going back to the 18th-century Prussian Kantonsystem, which was based on a national grid of cantons or districts taxed with sending recruits to the army.

Twenty-five years is a horrifically long time for a recruit to have to spend in an army, let alone in an army in which conditions were as harsh as tsarist Russia’s, much less for a Jew conscripted as a child, bullied by his Christian fellow soldiers, and denied (as the cantonists were) kosher food, the right publicly to practice Jewish rituals, and even permission to speak Yiddish or to correspond in it with one’s family. (Although the cantonists were not generally forced to convert to Christianity, there was much pressure on them to do so and their conditions improved when they did.) Not surprisingly, young Jews and their families did all they could to avoid such a fate. Wealthier Jews bribed communal and government officials to keep their children off the recruiting lists. Poorer ones tried hiding them, concealing their identities, or marrying them off when underage.

The result of this was that, even with juvenile conscription, kahals had difficulty meeting their quotas. This in turn led to widespread impressment—that is, to the kidnapping of poor Jewish children and their delivery to army recruitment centers from which, once they were formally inducted into the military, there was no way for their families to get them back. The kidnappers were usually local Jews, acting in cahoots with, and paid a bounty by, communal leaders seeking to protect their own children and to avoid government punishment for unfulfilled quotas. In Yiddish, such kidnappers were colloquially known as khapers, “grabbers” or “snatchers.” In Hebrew, the written language of Yiddish-speaking Russian Jewry, this was translated as ḥotfim or ḥatfanim, and a youngster thus kidnapped for the army was a ḥatuf.

In his memoirs, the Hebrew author Yehezkel Kotik, born in Kamenetsk-Litovsk in Lithuania in 1847, eight years before the 1827 law was revoked following Tsar Nicholas’s death, has a chapter called Ha-Ḥatfanim. In it he speaks of three khapers in his native town, Aharon-Leibele, Hatskel, and Moshke, who, when he was a small heder pupil, set out to “snatch” a classmate of his named Yosele, the son of a penniless widow who—unlike the other boys, who came from well-to-do families—was in the heder on a scholarship awarded him for his abilities.

“The town’s [Jewish] dignitaries,” Kotik wrote, “gave the ‘snatchers’ orders to apprehend only Yosele; they had no permission to take anyone else in his place.” After several failed attempts to abduct the fatherless boy, Kotik’s family decided to hide him in their house. Yet after a while, “He so missed his mother that he ran home on his own, and Moshke spotted him and grabbed him. . . . For two weeks he was locked up in a small room in which new conscripts were kept before being sent to the recruitment center in Brisk. He sat there crying desperately for his mother, who stood all day outside the window, sobbing and half-dead with anguish.

“Eventually, soldiers came for the boy in a wagon. When Yosele fought as hard as he could not to leave the room, they tied him up and beat him savagely. His mother kept passing out and reviving. Her greatest fear was that her son would be made to convert. Even if they burned or roasted him alive, she wept, even if they tore off his flesh with hot pincers, he must stay strong and bear up under his suffering until his holy soul returned to its heavenly home.”

Many cantonists never saw their families again. Yosele, wrote Kotik, encountered his mother once more when his regiment passed through Kamanetsk-Litovsk a year after his abduction but was too traumatized even to talk to her. One has to multiply his story by tens of thousands to get an idea of the collective terror that Russian Jewry lived through between 1827 and 1855. (The number of cantonists in these years has been estimated at between 30,000 and 70,000, roughly a third of whom are thought to have become Christians.) Today, the cantonists have largely been forgotten, in large measure because the episode was a shameful one in Jewish history that few Jews care to remember. Although there were rabbis and communal leaders who fought against the khaper system, sometimes heroically, the bulk of the Jewish establishment of the day accepted it, and even encouraged it and paid for it. It was regarded as a necessary evil as long as someone else’s child and not one’s own was a ḥatuf.

Readers can draw whatever parallels with today’s ḥatufim they may or may not find in the cantonists’ story. One suspects, however, that these times, too, will not be ones Jews will be proud to look back on.