Jewish Public Culture in the Late Russian Empire

9 Public History: Imagining Russian Jews

a 9 b Public History: Imagining Russian Jews The historians associated with the JHES regarded history as a tool for advancing their vision of the present and disseminating research about the past. Although they preferred to think of themselves as contributors to a professional field that relied on scientific values, they were equally concerned with creating a utilitarian conception of Jewish history that would advance their vision of a secular, liberal national identity . Jewish Antiquities sought to teach its readers how best to function as a semi-autonomous Jewish community within the structure of the modern state and how to articulate and assert a distinct public culture. Most nineteenth-century Russian Jewish historians sought to prove the antiquity of the Jewish presence in Russia in order to justify the extension of legal rights to Russian Jews. For instance, Avraham Harkavy hoped to advance the goal of emancipation by arguing that Russian Jews were the descendants of ancient Jewish colonies in the Black Sea and the Caucasus that predated the Russian state rather than immigrants from Germany in the thirteenth century. By concentrating on the earliest Jewish settlements on the Eurasian land mass, many of the historians of Harkavy’s day downplayed the impact of Russian rule and Russian state borders on the history of Russian Jewry.1 Instead, many of those who polemicized on the topic sought to demonstrate the interconnectedness of Jews and Slavs. They hoped that by publicizing evidence linking the past of the two nations, they would provide justification for granting equal rights to Jews in the present. For later generations of Russian Jewish historians, who were more concerned with defining Russian Jewish identity than with proving the antiquity of Jewish settlements, the issue of the genesis of East European Jewry was also central, albeit for different reasons. For them, the prehistory of Jewish settlement in Russia constituted the origin myth of their people, defining their ethnicity and consequently their very nationhood. Thus, for the first historians of Russian Jewry, the important questions of the origins of their community were debated largely on ideological grounds. Those who sought to distance Russian Jewry from the rest of European Jewry argued that the forefathers of Russian Jews had converted 262 Jewish Public Culture in the Late Russian Empire during the Middle Ages. The specific version of who converted, why, and when varied among these historians, but the version spread most widely was that of Sergei Bershadskii, who suggested that most Russian Jews were ethnic Slavs who fell under Khazar rule and converted to Judaism along with the Khazars. Harkavy contended that the first Jews in the Russian Empire were Caucasian Jews who arrived in the Caucasus from the ancient kingdoms of Judea and Israel during the persecutions of Nebuchadnezzar and Sargun. Others believed they were Persian Jews who had fled the Babylonian and Persian empires in the seventh century. German Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz believed that the first settlers were Byzantine Jews who arrived during the eighth and ninth centuries. Still others contended they were Greek Jews who migrated to the Bosporus Peninsula in the first century. Despite their differences, all these theories shared the assumption that Jews first arrived in the lands of Russia before the Russian state was formed. Twentieth-century scholarship has concluded that in fact the majority of Russian Jews are descendants from Jewish immigrants who fled the Rhineland during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, motivated to come east by the push of anti-Jewish discrimination in German lands and the pull of generous privileges granted by Polish and Lithuanian monarchs. The Jewish immigration also corresponded with a general German migration eastward into the lands of what would become the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. By the early twentieth century, most scholars accepted this theory, including those based in Galicia, but specialists in Russia itself were generally slower to accept it. The Jews in a Multinational Empire Russian Jewish historians regarded the spoken language of medieval East European Jewry as important evidence of the ethnic origins of the first Jewish settlers in Russian imperial lands. It is little surprise, therefore , that the first article published in Jewish Antiquities, Dubnow’s “The Spoken Language of Polish-Lithuanian Jewry,” directly addressed ongoing debates about the origins of the Jewish community in Poland and its relationship with the host community. In this work, Dubnow set himself apart from the deans of East European Jewish history, Harkavy and Bershadskii, both of whom believed that Jews during the Golden Age of the...