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Books: Life on the Periphery
Frank Brown
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by Benjamin Natbans
University of California Press
426pp,;$54.95
A scholar takes an energetic look at the way Jews lived in the late Russian Empire -- and, it turns out, things aren�t so different today
It is quite easy to forget that just 100 years ago there were over 5 million Jews living in the Russian Empire, far more than in all of the rest of Europe combined. Back then, the so-called Jewish Question was a live issue in St. Petersburg and Moscow, discussed by the czar and his ministers, the popular press, the business community and university students.
In today�s Russia, the country�s several hundred thousand Jews are not collectively a force. They are not organized politically, and President Putin attends menorah lightings as a way of maintaining his credentials as a democrat in Western eyes -- not because of any domestic concerns. The Jews don�t even have a significant mafia to call their own.
The most tangible remnant of the empire�s Jews is found today in the Russian language, as it is spoken by the uneducated or careless. References to Jews abound in the form of stereotypes and slurs that have their roots in a time when Jews were still "a small, exotic tribe at the western periphery of the empire, perpetual villains in the sacred drama of Christian theology."
Those are the words of Benjamin Nathans, whose "Beyond the Pale" is a sometimes fascinating look at those Russian Jews who lived, in the waning decades of the Romanov dynasty, outside the Pale of Settlement, the nearly 1,000-mile-long swath of territory (including parts of present-day Ukraine, Belarus, Poland and Lithuania) in which czarist authorities required Jews to reside.
Nathans, an assistant history professor at the University of Pennsylvania, starts with Russia�s annexation, in the late 18th century, of eastern Poland and, inadvertently, a large Jewish population. After a quick overview of life inside the France-sized Pale, with its poverty, hasidic-Lithuanian schism and degree of Jewish self-rule, Nathans slows down and examines in detail how the regime grappled with integrating the largest non-Christian ethnic group into a vast empire with over 100 nationalities.
The idea was to break down Jewish autonomy and separatism without fully liberating the Jews in the Pale, whose talent and ambition, officials feared, would overwhelm the docile, hard-drinking inhabitants of the Russian heartland, if they were allowed to leave. From 1840 to 1863, the Committee for the Determination of Measures for the Fundamental Transformation of the Jews in Russia was the engine for many of the reforms. Gradually, select merchants, artisans and students began moving out of the Pale, most notably to the capital, St. Petersburg.
Partly relying on archives opened after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, Nathans uses czarist police reports, letters, contemporary newspapers and memoirs to examine the nooks and crannies of Jewish life in St. Petersburg. Fortunately, he has a good eye for the illuminating detail, whether it concerns a stuffy rabbi imported from Germany or the aspirations of simple artisans just free from the Pale.
He lays out a nasty system of bribes, quotas and residency requirements that were fueled by the authorities� fear that a tiny minority would somehow take advantage of the overwhelming Russian minority. Eerily, aside from the quotas, the situation today is much the same. Just substitute St. Petersburg Jews with today�s darker-skinned Muscovites from the southern Caucasus region. Nathans�s quote from a Jew newly arrived to St. Petersburg in 1877 could be from a Georgian or Azerbaijani trying to make it in Moscow today.
"It was like being a hunted dog who trembles at the slightest noise. At the sight of a police officer or official you were overcome by panic and fear lest it occur to them to ask about your place of residence and to demand your identity card. We were especially fearful after every terrorist attack." Then, as now, the rights of every Russian citizen were negotiable, with the bargaining position determined far more by surname than by law.
Nathans goes on to catalog how both Russian universities and the legal system opened up to Jews, providing powerful forces for the integration into broader society of what czarist bureaucrats referred to as "useful Jews." The reforms trundled along until the assassination of czar Alexander II in 1881. Nearly three years of pogroms, which Nathans describes as a spontaneous venting of Christians� dislike for Jews, followed in the Pale, and, after that, czarist officials had little appetite for granting more freedom to Jews.
Nathans is at pains to show that the most recent scholarship reverses the longheld belief of Western historians that the regime secretly instigated the pogroms, though it also did not halt them. Just as today there is no state-sponsored anti-Semitism, but neither will government prosecutors use hate-speech laws to stop the Russian Orthodox Church from selling the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in its bookstores.
One of the best things about "Beyond the Pale" is Nathans�s ability to energetically dissect what was essentially a historical dead end: the integration of Jews into Russian society. Rather than integrate, most Jews eventually chose to leave. Taking into account the horrors visited upon Russian Jews -- from the pogroms to the Holocaust to the Doctors Plot under Stalin -- it is understandable that there has been little scholarly interest in the Russian government�s efforts to assimilate Jews and the Jews� hunger to become part of the imperial establishment.
But it is a valuable subject all the same, especially since many of today�s Russian Jews -- no matter how few -- see their future in Russia as Russian citizens.
Frank Brown is The Report�s Moscow correspondent.
May 5, 2003
Books
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