Abstract
This chapter describes the socio-political background which let the Liberals re-emphasize their Jewish past and develop a new self-consciousness. This found expression in their first activities — in the organization of legal aid provided to Jews and the propagation of Jewish rights — and finally presented them as another interest group beside those already active (the Zionists and the Jewish Socialists, also known as Bundists). However, from the early 1890s until the eve of the First Russian Revolution in 1904, the Liberals pursued a strategy still mainly bound to the old methods of promoting Jewish interests, and can be described as a combination of shtadlanstvo and activities focused on protest and propaganda actions against anti-Semitic measures and acts of the Russian government. Therefore, according to our definition of politics, the first stage was characterized by a mainly non-political approach to the solution of the Jewish question in Russia.
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Notes and References
Inge Blank has shown the extent to which Jewish society was changing in terms of, for instance, an increasing number of Jewish university students. For more detail see Inge Blank, ‘Haskalah und Emanzipation. Die russisch-jüdische Intelligenz und die “jüdische Frage” am Vorabend der Epoche der “Großen Reformen” ‘, in Gotthold Rhode (ed.), Juden in Ostmitteleuropa. Von der Emanzipation bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg (Marburg/Lahn, 1989) pp. 197–231; for a brief summary of the governmental policy towards Russian Jews until 1881,
see Hans Rogger, “The Question of Jewish Emancipation’, in Hans Rogger, Jewish Policies and Right-wing Politics in Imperial Russia (Oxford, 1986)pp.1–24.
While in 1835 eleven Jewish students were matriculated at Russian Universities, the number increased to 129 in 1863. See Blank, op. cit., pp. 211–12; in 1894, the Jewish student body had reached the number of 1,853 students (13.3 per cent of all Russian students). However, due to the introduction of the Numerus Clausus, this high percentage of Jewish students was to drop to 7 per cent in 1902.
See Zvi Halevy, Jewish University Students and Professionals in Tsarist and Soviet Russia (Tel Aviv, 1976) pp. 43f.
For more details about the ‘Haskalah’, see Jacob Raisin, The Haskalah Movement in Russia (Philadelphia, 1913);
Michael Stanislawski, Tsar Nicholas I and the Jews. The Transformation of Jewish Society in Russia, 1825–55 (Philadelphia, 1983).
For more detail concerning ORPE, see I.M. Tcherikover, Istoriia obshchestva dlia rasprostranenie prosveshcheniia mezhdu evreiami v Rossii (St. Petersburg, 1913). This book, however, covers only the early period until the 1880s. For more detail concerning ORT,
see Leon Shapiro, The History of ORT: A Jewish Movement for Social Change (New York, 1980).
See Michael A. Meyer, Jewish Identity in the Modern World (Seattle, 1990) pp. 25–6.
See Gregorii Aronson, ‘Ideological Trends among Russian Jews’, in Jacob Frumkin, Gregorii Aronson and Alexis Goldenweiser (eds), Russian Jewry, 1860–1917 (New York and London, 1966) pp. 145–6;
Stanislawski, op. cit., pp. 187/188.
The Razsvet of 1860–61 had only 640 subscribers. The next newspaper which appeared in Odessa had not many more. See Blank, ‘Haskalah und Emanzipation’, pp. 224–9; Moshe Perlmann, ‘Razsvet 1860–61. The Origins of the Russian Jewish Press’, Jewish Social Studies, no. 29, 3 (1962) pp. 162–82; and
Alexander Orbach, New Voices of Russian Jewry. A Study of the Russian-Jewish Press of Odessa in the Era of the Great Reforms, 1860–1871 (Leiden, 1980) pp. 22–53.
See Eli Lederhendler, The Road to Modern Jewish Politics. Political Tradition and Political Reconstruction in the Jewish Community of Tsarist Russia (Oxford, 1989) pp. 111–53; and also Inge Blank’s article quoted above.
The pogroms of 1881–1882 were mainly interpreted by scholars as a complex of economic and social factors. Thereby, no evidence was found for a conspiracy theory, meaning that the pogroms had been organized by the authorities. See Mina Goldberg, Die Jahre 1881–1882 in der Geschichte der russischen Juden. D.Phil, thesis (Berlin, 1934) pp. 8–23. She explained the pogroms as being the result of the modernization process of the Russian economy after 1861 which witnessed the emergence of the Russian bourgeoisie on the one side, and an increasing impoverishment among the peasants on the other. The Russian bourgeoisie, especially the merchants, developed anti-Jewish sentiments against its Jewish competitors. When Alexander II was murdered this propaganda activity — the Jew as the scapegoat for everything — was spread by the newspapers among the peasants. The Russian revolutionaries at that time, the narodovol’tsy, in turn hoped to succeed with the revolution by diverting the people’s anger against the authorities. For Goldberg, the outcome of the pogroms was more an exploitation of the peasants’ miserable economic condition by the anti-Jewish Russian bourgeois circles which met with a shift by the government towards an anti-Jewish policy;
the role of the narodovol’tsy and their anti-Jewish views are covered by Stephen M. Berk, ‘The Russian Revolutionary Movement and the Pogroms of 1881–1882’, in Soviet Jewish Affairs 7, 2 (1977) pp. 22–39; Michael Aronson underlined Goldberg’s views but he pointed also to the railway workers and individuals coming from the cities where the pogrom wave had started.
See I. Michael Aronson, Troubled Waters. The Origins of the 1881 anti-Jewish Pogroms in Russia (Pittsburgh, 1990).
For more detail regarding the pogroms of 1881–1882, see Stephen M. Berk, Year of Crisis, Year of Hope. Russian Jewry and the pogroms of 1881–1882 (Westport, Connecticut and London, 1986).
See John D. Klier, “The Concept of “Jewish Emancipation” in a Russian Context’, in Olga Crisp, Linda Edmondson (eds), Civil Rights in Imperial Russia (Oxford, 1989) pp. 136–9.
The major points of the May Laws are cited in Paul R. Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz (eds), The Jew in the Modern World: A Documentary History (New York and Oxford, 1980) p. 309; for more information on the meeting of the Council of Ministers drawing the May Laws see Hans Rogger, ‘Russian Ministers and the Jewish Question, 1881–1917’, in Rogger, Jewish Policies, pp. 56–112, especially pp. 57–63.
For more details about the debates in this newspaper, see Jonathan Frankel, ‘The crisis of 1881–82 as a turning-point in modern Jewish history’, in David Berger (ed.), The Legacy of Jewish Migration: 1881 and its Impact (New York, 1983) pp. 9–22.
Ibid., pp. 14–18.
Pinsker’s ‘autoemancipation’ is published in full in Helmut Heil (ed.), Die neuen Propheten. Moses Hess, Leon Pinsker, Theodor Herzl, Achad Haam (Fürth and Erlangen, 1969).
See Ellen S. Cannon, The Political Culture of Russian Jewry during the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century, D.Phil Thesis. (University of Massachussetts, 1974) p. 259; and
Salo W. Baron, The Russian Jew under Tsars and Soviets, 2nd edn. (New York, 1987) p. 146.
For more information on Pinsker, Lilienblum, Smolenskin and so on, see David Vital, The Origins of Zionism (Oxford, 1980) pp. 137–8.
See Shmuel Ettinger, ‘The Growth of the Jewish National Movement and the Burgeoning of Independent Political Activity’, in H.H. Ben-Sasson, A History of the Jewish People (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1976).
Details about the Zionist movement in Russia in David Vital, Zionism. The Formative Years (Oxford, 1982); and for the history of Zionism in general,
see Walter Laqueur, Der Weg zum Staat Israel. Geschichte des Zionismus (Vienna, 1972).
For more information about the ‘engagement’ of Russian Jews in the Narodnaia Volia, see Norman M. Naimark, Terrorists and Social Democrats. The Russian Revolutionary Movement under Alexander III (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, 1983) pp. 92–95, 202–211; and
Nora Levin, While Messiah Tarried. Jewish Socialist Movements 1871–1917 (New York, 1977).
This group consisted of people like Arkadii Kremer, Tsemakh Kopelson, Samuel Gozhanskii, Joseph (John) Mill, Matle Srednitskii, Isaia Izenstat and Yulius Martov. For more detail see Henry Tobias, The Jewish Bund in Russia. From its Origins to 1905 (Stanford, California, 1972) pp. 73–86; and
Yoav Peled, Class and Ethnicity in the Pale. The Political Economy of Jewish Workers’ Nationalism in late Imperial Russia (London, 1989) pp. 31–70. He rather focuses, however, on the evolution of the Bund’s national programme in general than on the Vilna Group in particular. Thus, he illustrates the way in which national ideas spread among the Jewish workers, which in turn forced the Bund leadership to follow the national tendencies at the grassroots.
Dubnov’s essay ‘Autonomism’ and Ahad Ha′am’s ‘Cultural Zionism’ are published in Helmut Heil, Die neuen Propheten. More about Dubnov’s ‘Autonomism’ is contained in Koppel S. Pinson, ‘The National Theories of Simon Dubnov’, in Jewish Social Studies, 10 (1948) pp. 335–58;
Jacob Lestschinsky, ‘Dubnow’s Autonomism and his “Letters on Old and New Judaism”‘, in Aaron Steinberg (ed.), Simon Dubnow. The Man and his Work (Paris, 1963) pp. 73–91, and
Koppel S. Pinson (ed.), Nationalism and History. Essays on old and new Judaism by Simon Dubnow (Philadelphia, 1958). As Pinson pointed out, Dubnov had taken the intermediate position between the ideas of Socialism and Zionism, and promoted the view of a ‘synthesis’ of the Jewish and the non-Jewish environments in the form of ‘autonomism’ (see p. 11); finally, for Dubnov’s disputes with Ahad Ha′am, and a brief description of his political activity,
see Robert Seltzer, Simon Dubnow. A Critical Biography of his Early Years. PhD Columbia University (Ann Arbor and London: Universal Microfilm International, 1977) especially pp. 176–237.
The restrictions began to affect every sphere of Jewish life. For instance, it was forbidden for Jews to trade on Christian holy days, as a result of which the Jewish working week was diminished to five days (if one takes into account the Shabbat). This meant an extreme weakening of social and economic efficiency. Furthermore, in 1890 the Jews lost the right to participate in the elections to the municipal and rural self-government organs. In addition to this arbitrary deportation orders by rural authorities increased tremendously, and so on. See Heinz-Dietrich Löwe, Antisemitismus und reaktionäre Utopie. Russischer Konservatismus im Kampf gegen den Wandel von Staat und Gesellschaft (Hamburg, 1978) pp. 32–9.
See Alexander Orbach, ‘The Jewish People’s Group and Jewish Politics, 1906–1914’, in Modern Judaism, February 1990, vol. X, p. 2.
Budushchnost was oriented towards Zionism while Voskhod continued the earlier tradition of education and enlightenment. Voskhod showed national characteristics but without any party tendencies. See Genrikh B. Sliozberg, Dela minuvshikh dnei. Zapiski russkago evreia, vol. III (Paris, 1933) pp. 110–11.
See Pinson, Nationalism and History, p. 17. This call was published as an essay in Voskhod in 1891 under the title ‘The Study of the History of Russian Jews and the Establishment of a Russian Jewish Historical Society’. This article was the result of Dubnov’s research on the various communal and autonomous Jewish institutions in Eastern Europe, which he had done in various archives at this time; see also S.M. Dubnov, Kniga Zhizni. Vospominaniia i Razmyshlenia, vol. I (Riga, 1934) pp. 265–6
See S. Levenberg, ‘Simon Dubnow. Historian of Russian Jewry’, Soviet Jewish Affairs, vol. 12, no. 1 (1982) p. 5. He mentions Isaiah Trunk’s theory that ‘a similar process took place among the Poles after the 1863 uprising, among the Czechs after the failure of the 1848 Revolution, and among the Ukrainians during the growth of the national movement in the second half of the 19th century’.
See S.V. Pozner, ‘Bor′ba za ravnopravie’, in Paul Milinkov et al. (eds) M.M. Vinaver i russkaia obshchestvennost’ nachala XX veka (Paris, 1937) p. 166.
A more detailed account on the activities of the committee is given in M.M. Vinaver, ‘Kak my zanimalis istoriei’ in Evreiskaia Sfarina, 1909, 1, pp. 41–54. In fact, this was Vinaver’ s speech at the opening of the Jewish Historic-Ethnographic Society on 16 November 1908; a shorter version of the speech was translated,
see Maxim M. Vinaver, ‘When Lawyers studied History’, in Lucy S. Dawidowicz, The Golden Tradition: Jewish Life and Thought in Eastern Europe (New York, Chicago and San Francisco, 1967) pp. 242–8; and is briefly mentioned in Dubnov, Kniga Zhizni, vol. I, p. 265.
See Sliozberg, Dela, p. 111; and Simon Dubnow, Mein Leben, edited by Elias Hurwicz (Berlin, 1937) pp. 118–19; Ben Tsion Kats — who at that time studied at the university in St. Petersburg and later worked as a journalist at the Hebrew newspaper Hazman — participated also in the production of the ‘regesty’ by collecting historical sources at the Imperial Library in St. Petersburg.
See Ben Tsion Kats, ‘Zikhronut fun mein Lebn’, in Der Tag-Morgen Zhurnal (The Day-Jewish Journal), 31 January 1954.
Information on these people is, unfortunately, not complete in the encyclopedias: Vinaver was born in 1863 in a small village near Warsaw, his father was a banker, and he studied in Warsaw; Sliozberg was born in 1863 in the village Miro (Gubernia Minsk), studied in St. Petersburg; Gruzenberg was born in 1866 in Ekaterinoslav, had a non-traditional education, and studied in Kiev; Kulisher’s parents were colonists in the Gubernia of Volynia, he received a non-traditional education, studied in Kiev; Bramson was born in 1869 in Kovno and studied in Moscow; Passover himself was born in 1840 in Uman (Gubernia Kiev), his father was a military doctor, and studied in Moscow. See A. Garkavi and L. Katsenel’son (eds), Evreiskaia Entsiklopediia (St. Petersburg, 1906) [Reprinted an Slavistic Printings and Reprintings, edited by H. van Schooneveld, (The Hague and Paris, 1971) 16 vols]; Vinaver’ s wife mentions in her memoirs further members of the Historic Commission such as Arkadii Gornfeld, Leopold Sev, and Maksim Syrkin.
See Roza G. Vinaver, Vospominaniia Maksima M. Vinavera, unpublished typescript (New York, 1944) pp. 26–7; other members of the Moscow group were M. Pozner and L. Zaidenman who both were to join the political struggle on the nationwide scale with the Revolution of 1905.
See Yulii Brutskus, ‘Leon Bramson — organizator russkago evreistva’, in Evreiskii Mir, sbornik II (New York, 1944) pp. 15–17.
See Pozner, ‘Bor′ba za ravnopravie’, p. 166; and A. Litvak, Geklibene Shriftn (New York, 1945) p. 463. Unfortunately, neither of them mentioned details on Vinaver’s activity in those organizations; Bramson apparently joined ORPE as early as 1892, in the mid-1890s got involved in EKO’s work, and finally, after 1906 became one of the top ORT leaders. See G.A., ‘Zhizn i deiatelnost’ Leontiia Moiseevicha Bramsona’, in Evreiskii Mir, sbornik II, pp. 8–10.
For more information about Gintsburg’s struggle against anti-Jewish restrictions in general, and the May Laws in particular, see G.B. Sliozberg, ‘Baron G.O. Gintsburg i pravovoe polozhenie evreev’, in Perezhitoe, vol. II (St. Petersburg, 1910).
For more information about Moshe Ginzburg’s activity on behalf of Russian Jews see Moshe Ginzburg, Sein Lebn un Tetigkait. Mit ain Forwort fun Henrik Sliosberg (Paris, 1935).
Isaac Shneerson, a relative of the famous Hasidic dynasty of rabbis, but himself state rabbi, mentions in his memoirs that he took the St. Petersburg community as a model to reform and modernize the community of Gorodnie, and later Chernigov. See Isaac Shneerson, Lebn un Kampf fun yidn in Rusland (Paris, 1968) p. 175; Stanislawski called St. Petersburg ‘the capital of Jewish creativity in the Russian language’, and mentions Odessa as the only community which could compete with St. Petersburg until the twentieth century.
See Michael Stanislawski, For whom do I toil? Judah Leib Gordon and the Crisis of Russian Jewry (New York and Oxford, 1988) p. 109.
For more details about the ideology of the Poale Zion see Ber Borochov, Nationalism and the Class Struggle. A Marxian approach to the Jewish problems (Westport, Connecticut, 1937, reprinted 1972);
Matityahu Mintz, ‘Ber Borokhov’, in Studies in Zionism, no. 5 (April 1982) pp. 33–53; and
Zeev Abramovitch, ‘The Poale Zion Movement in Russia, its History and Development’, in Henrik F. Infield (ed.), Essays in Jewish Sociology, Labour and Co-operation. In memory of Dr. Noah Barou 1889–1955 (London and New York, 1961) pp. 63–72.
Paragraph 22 of their program articulated on their congress in Minsk in 1902 stated: ‘The Union of the Zionists and its organs are neither dealing with general nor home or foreign affairs.’ See M.N. Pokrovskii, 1905. Materialy i dokumenty. vol. V. Evreiskoe rabochee dvizhenie, edited by A.D. Kirzhnits (Moscow, 1928) p. 64.
See Dimitry Pospielovskij, Russian Police Trade Unionism. Experiment or Provocation (London, 1971) p. 49.
As Mendelssohn has pointed out, the success of the Poalei Zion was due to the fact that the membership in the Bund had demanded from the Jewish workers to keep a distance from Jewish life and its regulations. See Ezra Mendelssohn, Class Struggle in the Pale. The Formative Years of the Jewish Workers Movement in Tsarist Russia (Cambridge, 1970) p. 208. Thus, an orthodox way of life could not be reconciled with a life of illegality.
For more details regarding the ‘Zubatovshchina’ and the programme of the ‘Independents’ see Jeremiah Schneiderman, Sergei Zubatov and Revolutionary Marxism. The Struggle for the working class in Tsarist Russia (London, 1976) p. 233; and the relation of the Bund to Zubatovshdina,
see the respective chapters in Yoav Peled, Class and Ethnicity in the Pale (London, 1989).
See Shmarya Levin, The Arena (New York, 1932) p. 254.
For more detail about the Uganda crisis and the split see Shmuel Almog, Zionism and History. The Rise of a new Jewish Consciousness (Jerusalem, 1987) pp. 254–304;
Ben Halpern and Jehuda Reinharz, ‘Nationalism and Jewish Socialism: The Early Years’, in Modern Judaism, vol. 8, no. 3 (October 1988) pp. 240/241.
See Jonathan Frankel, Prophecy and Politics. Socialism, Nationalism and the Russian Jews, 1862–1917 (Cambridge, 1981) p. 154.
Peled described this change towards a more nationally-oriented programme as the final breakthrough of nationalist ideas which were to be seen among the Bundist circles with the May Day Speeches of 1892, followed by Arkadii Kremer’s pamphlet ‘On Agitation’ and Shmuel Gozhanskii’s ‘Letter to the Agitators’ and Avrom Gordon’s pamphlet ‘Letter to the Intelligenti’ (all of them written in 1893). See Peled, Class and Ethnicity, pp. 34–49; the importance of the Zionist/Nationalist competitor as the main cause for the Bund’s move towards the inclusion of Jewish national demands in its programme is also stressed in Calvin Goldscheider and Alan S. Zuckerman, The Transformation of the Jews (Chicago and London, 1984) pp. 130–2.
See Leonard Shapiro, ‘The role of the Jews in the Russian Revolutionary Movement’, The Slavonic Review, 40 (1961) p. 158.
Abramovich wrote that the thirty Bundist leaders gathering at the sixth party conference in Zurich were completely surprised by the strike movement in October 1905 due to the split with the RSDRP. Thus, they had to follow the events in the foreign newspapers. See R. Abramovich, In tsvai revolutsies, vol. I (New York, 1944) pp. 224–5.
For more information about Paul Nathan and his activity in the Hilfsverein see Ernst Feder, Paul Nathan. Ein Lebensbild (Berlin, 1929);
Ernst Feder, ‘Paul Nathan and his work for East European and Palestinian Jewry’, in Historia Judaica, 14 (1952) pp. 3–26; and
Zosa Szajkowski, Taul Nathan, Lucien Wolf, Jacob Schiff and the Jewish Revolutionary Movements in Eastern Europe 1903–1917’, Jewish Social Studies, 29 (1967) pp. 3–26.
For more information on the Anglo-Jewish Association see Zosa Szajkowski, ‘Conflicts in the Alliance Israelite Universelle and the founding of the Anglo-Jewish Association, the Vienna Allianz and the Hilfsverein’, Jewish Social Studies, 19 (1957) pp. 29–50.
Information about Russian Jewry in general and the anti-Semitic policy by the Russian government in particular can be found more extensively from 1904 onwards in the Jewish Chronicle. Wolfs ‘engagement’ for the Russian Jews’ cause resulted some years later in the publishing of another information brochure: Lucien Wolf (ed.), The legal sufferings of the Jews in Russia. A survey of their present situation and a summary of laws (London, 1912).
‘He did not allow this new investigation on the authorities’ level as he was afraid it would lead up to the head of the “pogromshchiki”, Pieve.’ See Krol, Stranitsy, pp. 303–4. It has to be pointed out, however, that Krol’s statement mostly reflected the general view at this time — that the government and especially the minister of the interior must have known about the pogrom and, thereby, also been involved in it — and not necessarily reality. Nobody was ever able to prove that the organization of a pogrom had gone beyond the point of a governor. Therefore, there is no evidence yet that Pieve was involved or even ordered the pogrom. See John Klier and Shlomo Lambroza (eds), Pogroms: Anti-Jewish Violence in Modern Russian History (Cambridge and New York, 1992).
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Gassenschmidt, C. (1995). The Emergence of Jewish Liberals in Russia: from Acculturation to Revolution. In: Jewish Liberal Politics in Tsarist Russia, 1900–14. St Antony’s/Macmillan Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23944-3_1
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