The Politics of Jewish Legibility: Documentation Practices and Reform During the Reign of Nicholas I

But a name, Leyzer-Yankl. Where are you going to get a name?

—Mendele Moykher Sforim,
The Wishing-Ring

In 1804, as part of the first systematic statute on Jews of Russia, the imperial administration required all Jews to adopt surnames. In an effort to minimize the self-sufficiency of the Jewish community and link Jews to the broader polity, the statute attempted to reorganize the place of Jews in Russian society. As in France and Prussia at the end of eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries, the requirement that all Jews adopt surnames signified an unprecedented change of Jews' legal-administrative status in tsarist Russia.¹ As the framers of the 1804 statute noted, the adoption of hereditary surnames facilitated the mediation of civil disputes, the control of property, and the management of Jews in existing social categories.² If surnames helped officials ascribe legal status (sostoianiia) to Jews, then they also played a decisive role in regulating their place in the social domain. The stabilization of the surname—as a legal instrument by which an individual could be objectively distinguished and identified—marked an important turning point in the history of Russian Jewry.³

The adoption of surnames signaled the beginning of a gradual transformation of Russian Jewry into a "legible" people—from an inclusive corporate body to a component of the population that could be governed, categorized, and identified unambiguously through statistical publications and administrative reports.⁴ Surnames ensured that Jewish identities could be made visible to the state by social-scientific technologies such as censuses, passports, and metrical books (more commonly known as parish registers). Although surnames represented an important point of departure in the incorporation of Jews within the broader legal and administrative system, Russian imperial administrators lacked the appropriate technologies to verify the constituencies of the Jewish population in the beginning of the nineteenth century. In other words, as A. I. Paperna wrote in his memoirs, "[T]he government did not know Jews as individuals but [knew] only the Jewish community with its communal responsibilities."⁵

This article tells the story of how the modern Russian state "grasped" its Jewish population: how it attempted to erase the concrete, as well as the more imaginative, boundaries of a corporate community in order to incorporate Jews as subjects of the polity. The first half of the nineteenth century constituted the formative period of government intervention in the corporate autonomy of Jewish as well as other imperial communities. During the reign of Nicholas I (1825– 55), important cultural, linguistic, and institutional reforms began to change the mainstays of Russian policies toward the non-Russian peoples of the empire, however hesitantly at first. Although Nicholas continued to promote the power of the state either by military repression or by forced conversion, the introduction of Russian law in local administration, the abolition of self-government (in the western borderlands), and the founding of educational institutions represented an unprecedented attempt to refashion the institutional and legal autonomy of indigenous communities.⁶

Whatever their failures or successes, the reforms were part of a larger political and social transformation of the civic order that sought to unite a multiconfessional, multicultural, and ethnically diverse empire.⁷ Nicholas implemented institutional reforms in order to break down local allegiances and communal forms of administration. The improvement of the bureaucracy as well as the subordination of a heterogeneous population within the general structure of the absolutist system occupied Nicholas throughout his reign. He instructed his subordinates to perfect Russia and, in the process, control an unruly and diverse population that represented all the major religions of the world and was scattered throughout the vast territories of the empire. To be sure, financial difficulties and an uncoordinated provincial bureaucracy constrained these interventionist measures. However, with the creation of the political police force, known as the Third Section, the codification of Russian laws, and the centralization of administrative chancelleries, the reformist agenda of Nicholas I anticipated the great transformations of the 1860s and 1870s.⁸ Yet from the outset, as we soon...