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The tolerance toward Jews in the Grand Duchy of Lithuanian and the broad range of economic opportunities that opened up in the sixteenth and the first half of the seventeenth centuries encouraged them to settle in the duchy’s eastern counties. Jews settled in Rechitsa as well at the turn of the sixteenth century. But in the midseventeenth century, the Jewish community in Rechitsa, as in other towns and mestechkos of eastern Belorussia, became victims of the Khmelnitsky campaigns and the invasion of Muscovite troops. The situation stabilized in the last third of the seventeenth century, and the Jewish communities began to revive, though they were unable to recover economically from this war in the autonomous Lithuanian duchy. The economic decline of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the eighteenth century brought hard times to the Jewish communities. The result , at least in the territory of Rechitsa Uezd, was the continued de-urbanization of the Jewish population. The tax system based on collective responsibility that existed in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and in Poland led to a division of East European Jewry into subethnic groups with distinctive languages, mentalities, and cultures. In particular a community that came to be called “Litvaks” developed within the territory of contemporary Belorussia and the Baltic countries. After the area was absorbed into the Russian Empire, the authorities maintained the former system of community responsibility for payment of taxes for more than half a century. This, as well as the responsibility of providing recruits for the army, encouraged Jewish communities to remain isolated from the remainder of the population. The growth of Hasidism within the territories annexed by Russia undermined the isolation of the Jewish communities and the subethnic groups. Adherence to one or another religious tendency or to Hasidism had become , by the mid-nineteenth century, of greater significance than membership in 308 Conclusion Conclusion 309 a community or a subethnic group. Attachment to one’s own rabbi, particularly within the Hasidic groups, simultaneously both encouraged and discouraged migration, depending on how far away the rabbi lived. The abolition of the kahal system in 1844 weakened the Jews’ link to their community. Modernization of Russian society led to the growth of Jews’ economic migration and contributed to the process of destroying the Jewish communities’ organizations. Parallel with this change ran the process of emancipation. With each decade the number of young people aspiring to study general, nonreligious, subjects and the Russian language grew significantly, although their numbers within the overall Jewish population remained small for a long time. Jewish emancipation as a product of both the modernization of society and the intensification of legal restrictions promoted the growth of national self-consciousness; this, in turn, led to the struggle for social and national reorganization or to immigration to EretsIsrael . At the end of the nineteenth century, this development found expression in the participation by the broad masses of Jews in opposition socialist and Zionist organizations. The Muslims, another non-Russian group within the Russian Empire whose legal rights were infringed, underwent a similar process, although to a lesser extent. The most emancipated among them who, due to a series of historical causes, lived along the Volga River—the Tatar and the Bashkir intelligentsia —created the Jadid movement, which had national and socialist goals similar to those of the Jews. Despite the general improvement in the economic circumstances of Jews immediately after the affiliation of Rechitsa with Russia, many of them were poor. Their situation began to improve in the 1870s, thanks in no small way to the reforms of Alexander II. The reforms he initiated also led to the alleviation of the legal standing of Jews. But this process of alleviation slowed in the final years of his reign and especially when his son Alexander III came to the throne. The weak rule of Nicholas II, combined with his marked anti-Jewish bias, led to a broad wave of pogroms in Russia, a wave that touched Rechitsa in October 1905. For this reason, but also because of considerable population growth in the Pale, Jewish emigration from Rechitsa, and from Russia in general, increased. The Jews who remained in Russia began playing a more active role in opposition movements . This engagement was encouraged by the results of elections to the state dumas,whichshowedthattheauthoritieshadnointentionofofferingequalrights to the Jews, despite their expanded role in the economy at the beginning of the twentieth century. The growth of emigration and politicization among the Jews wasalsoinfluencedbytheincreaseintheJewishpopulationwithinthePaleofSettlement , a result of a lower...

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