Abstract
Russia acquired a substantial Jewish population in the wake of the three partitions of Poland during the reign of Catherine the Great (1762–96), the partitions of Polish territory between Russia, Prussia and Austria after which independent Poland ceased to exist. In Russia at that time, belonging to an estate determined the legal status of a person. Catherine assigned Jews the status of meshchane (townspeople), considering their prevalence in cities and in city-based occupations. Catherine’s court legislated that Jews had to reside in their previous areas of residence because Russian merchants feared commercial competition from their Jewish peers, who had considerably more experience in international trade. None of this was considered discriminatory at the time.1 Being attached to a certain estate and a certain place was a normal situation for the population in Russia. Socially mobile Jews could, however, move into the merchant estate and, if their merchant category (and therefore their taxes) were high enough, could expect flexibility in residency permits. The issue of wealth as the ticket to legal rights applied to the entire non-noble, free population in Russia.
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Notes
Michael Stanislawski, Tsar Nicholas I and the Jews: The Transformation of Jewish Society in Russia 1825–1855 (Philadelphia, PA, 1983), p. 185.
For a classic work on the events described here up to and including the rule of Alexander II, see John Doyle Klier, Russia Gathers her Jews: The Origins of the ‘Jewish Question’ in Russia, 1772–1825 (Northern Illinois University Press, DeKalb, IL, 2011).
Arthur Liebman, Jews and the Left (New York, 1979), p. 78.
Arcadius Kahan, Essays in Jewish Social and Economic History (Chicago, IL, 1986), pp. 4–5.
See Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton, NJ, 2006) for this process of young Jews leaving the shtetl and its impact.
Oleg Budnitskii (ed.), Evrei i Russkaia Revoliutsiia: Materialy i Issledovaniia (Moscow, 1999).
Moshe Mishkinsky, ‘Regional Factors in the Formation of the Jewish Labor Movement’, Yivo Annual of Jewish Social Science, 14 (1969), pp. 27–52.
While the literature on the 1905 Revolution is immense, Abraham Ascher, The Revolution of 1905, 2 vols (Stanford, CA, 1988) is still a classic general work on the topic.
While before the revolution a working-class identity was fairly uncommon among Jewish workers, with the revolution many defined themselves as such. See I. A. Kleinman, ‘Pol’skii gorod v 1905 I 1906 godakh’, Evreiskaya Letopis’, 1 (1923), pp. 123–36.
Pierre Bourdieu claims that the best way to employ culture in order to enhance one’s social status is to adopt the accepted values and behaviours (habitus), but with a distinctive difference. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Harvard, MA, 1984).
Ivanov, Evreiskoe studenchestvo, pp. 122–3, claims that in different cities between 22 and 38 per cent of Jewish university students did not know Yiddish and among the rest only between 33 to 62.3 per cent of the students knew it well; but as mentioned, university students came from a very different social background than the people whom I describe here. Still, as noted by Natan M. Meir, Kiev, Jewish Metropolis: A History, 1859–1914 (Bloomington, IN, 2010), pp. 152–3, the fact that Jewish gymnasia and university students habitually spoke Russian at home, had to affect the status of the language even among the poor.
See Zimmerman, Poles, Jews, and the Politics of Nationality; and Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, The Anti-Imperial Choice: The Making of the Ukrainian Jew (Yale, CT, 2009).
Rose Glickman, Russian Factory Women, Workplace and Society 1880–1914 (Berkeley, CA, 1984) p. 190, emphasizes the importance of the circles in providing working women with skills and confidence to become political activists, although she also pointed out that the Russian workers tended to exclude women of their class from their organizations, see ibid., pp. 199–201 and 207–8. In contrast, Hogan, Forging Revolution, p. 20, claims that the reason for the essentially male character of the circles was due to the lack of the availability of urbanized working-women. Among Jews, working-class women were prevalent within the circles and the revolutionary organizations at large.
Daniel Blatman, ‘Ha-Bund: Mitos ha-Mahapekha ve-Avodat ha-Iomiom’, in Israel Bartal and Israel Gutman (eds), Kium va-Shever (Jerusalem, 2001), pp. 504–6.
M. Rafes, Ocherki po istorii Bunda (Moscow, 1923), p. 21.
The Bundist, Vladimir Medem, tells in his memoirs about going out and using a walking stick in Minsk on the Sabbath and encountering condemnation, in Samuel A. Portnoy (trans. and ed.), Vladimir Medem: The Life and Soul of a Legendary Jewish Socialist (New York, 1979).
There was some justification to the suspicion, since after children were born to revolutionary couples, the women tended to leave politics and concentrate on taking care of their family. For the Bund, see M. Levin, ‘Ha-Mishpaha be-Hevra Yehudit Mahapkhanit: Normot ve-Khalikhot be-Kerev Khavrei ha-Bund’, Ma’asaf: Mehkarim be-Toldot Tnu’at ha-Po’alim ha-Yehudit, 13–14 (1982–83 and 1984), pp. 109–26 and 157–71.
For Russian female revolutionaries of the previous generation, see Barbara Alpern Engel, Mothers and Daughters: Women of the Intelligentsia in Nineteenth- Century Russia (Cambridge, 1983). In the case of the Jews, almost all those submitting an autobiography in the 1920s had young children. Assuming that they were teenagers during 1905 that indicates a late marriage. A considerable number of the women, although not of the men, were both unmarried and childless.
Michael Hickey, ‘Demographic Aspects of the Jewish Population in the Smolensk Province, 1870s–1914’, Acta Slavica Japonica, 19 (2002), pp. 84–116, talks about a tendency to stay single among contemporary Jewish women.
See Steven J. Zipperstein, The Jews of Odessa: A Cultural History, 1794–1881 (Stanford, CA, 1986).
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© 2014 Inna Shtakser
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Shtakser, I. (2014). The Road to a Revolutionary Identity. In: The Making of Jewish Revolutionaries in the Pale of Settlement. Palgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137430236_2
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