Kiev, Jewish Metropolis: A History, 1859--1914

1. Settlement and Growth, 1859–1881

1 Settlement and Growth, 1859–1881 T he first two decades of Jewish settlement in Kiev were years of rapid growth and adaptation, as ever larger numbers of Jews took up residence in the city and quickly became acclimated to their new home. Christian Kievans, too, had to become accustomed to the sight of Jews in a city that had been (officially, at least) off-­ limits to Jewish settlement for several decades. This chapter attempts to understand the people and groups that began to constitute “Kiev Jewry”: which Jews migrated to Kiev, where they came from, how they made their livelihoods, and where they stood in relation to one another in terms of economic and social class. We begin with a brief survey of Jewish settlement in Kiev prior to the modern period. Jews in Kiev prior to 1861 Jewish settlement in Kiev goes back to the first years of the city, when it was the capital of Kievan Rus’ and an important stop on the trading route between Europe and Central Asia. Although the sources are few, from the ninth century there were probably both Rabbanite and Karaite Jews in Kiev, whose communities were branches of Byzantine Jewry, in addition to Kha­ zars, members of a Turkic clan whose ruling class had converted to Judaism in the eighth century. Medieval Kiev was at the height of its power in the eleventh century, and about a century later there were references to a “Jewish gate” in the city walls as well as to a Talmudic scholar named Moses of Kiev. After the Principality of Lithuania conquered the region from the Mongols in the fifteenth century, a short-­ lived expulsion of local Jews was followed by the reestablishment of the Jewish community and a century of peaceful existence. In 1619, however, Christian merchants successfully petitioned for the status of de non tolerandis judaeis, putting an end to permanent Jewish settlement and allowing Jewish merchants to enter the city only for limited periods of time. After the Armistice of Andrusovo in 1667 and the cession to Muscovy of Left-­ Bank Ukraine, Kiev was relinquished to the tsar. New Jewish settlement began in 1781 after the first partition of Poland 24 THE EARLY YEARS and the annexation of Belorussia to the Russian Empire, and intensified after the city was reunited with its hinterland with the second partition in 1793, when Right-­ Bank Ukraine—with its hundreds of thousands of Jews—was annexed to the empire. The establishment of the Pale of Permanent Jewish Settlement, with the inclusion of Kiev province, legalized Jewish residence in Kiev, which picked up pace with the removal of the Contract Fair, the largest trading fair in the region, from Dubno to Kiev in 1797.1 In 1795 there were about one hundred Jews in the city, a number that grew in just six years to almost seven hundred. As evidenced by surviving pinkasim, a Jewish community with a cemetery, burial society, and several other institutions was established in these years.2 Kiev’s Christian merchants, however, were unhappy with the competition from Jewish traders, and petitioned the government several times in the early nineteenth century for the restoration of Kiev’s hoary right to exclude Jews from its precincts.3 In 1827, their request was granted by Nicholas I, but explanations for the expulsion vary.4 Contemporaries accused the Jews of trying to dominate and exploit the local Christian population, and thus the official edict of expulsion wrote that the Jews’ “presence in [Kiev] is injurious to the industry of the city and to the treasury itself, and is moreover in opposition to the rights and privileges granted at various times to the city of Kiev. . . .”5 However, historian and ethnographer Mikhail Kulisher, writing in the early twentieth century, contended that it was the goal of Nicholas, ever the soldier-­ king, to transform Kiev into a “fortress city,” as opposed to a trading center, that led to the expulsion of its Jews. Presumably, Jews were not seen as loyal enough to be tolerated in an important military center, which explains the simultaneous expulsion of Jews from the garrison towns of Nikolaev and Sevastopol’.6 After a number of delays—during which local Jews requested in vain that a special Jewish settlement be created just inside or outside the city limits—the expulsion was finally carried out in 1835, at which time Kiev was officially excluded from the Pale of Settlement.7 From then on, Jewish merchants were permitted...