Jews and the Imperial State: Identification Politics in Tsarist Russia by Eugene M. Avrutin (review)

As the midwife of modernity, the Great War also brought about the “Collapse of the Imperial Ghetto,” as Eugene Avrutin subtitled his epilogue to Jews and the Imperial State. The “ghetto,” better known as the Jewish Pale of Settlement, disintegrated with the forced evacuation of hundreds of thousands of Jews to the Russian interior in 1915. Although perceived by contemporaries as a ghetto-like entity, the Pale was not created for the purpose of keeping Jews and Gentiles apart. As correctly noted by the author, it was “to restrict Jews from migrating into the interior of the empire” (186–87). Yet, the Pale of Settlement had hardly been created by Catherine II when she granted Jewish notables permission to reside in St. Petersburg in the capacity of merchants and financiers. Thus, from its inception, the Pale was not an insurmountable barrier for Jews to migrate to the Russian heartland.

The story told by Avrutin is not a tale of the imperial state’s unceasing oppression of Russian Jews. His principal aim is to show how within the larger setting of Russian government policies aimed at ruling its multi-ethnic population, tsarist officials faced the challenges of determining “who was Jewish and where Jews were” and how Russian Jews for their part responded to these policies in the context of what were often “contradictory and highly restrictive laws and institutions” (3–4). In this vein, he addresses chapter by chapter the difficulties the imperial state encountered in identifying individual Jews through the application of modern statistical techniques. How this played itself out is a fascinating narrative where documentary records assumed a pivotal role not only in shaping the lives and identities of Jews, but also in the “eventual unraveling of the empire” (3).

Avrutin’s work is solidly rooted in contemporary sources generated by Russian officialdom and petitions by Jews seeking to ameliorate their conditions. In this, he moves beyond the lachrymose historiography of earlier generations of scholars and, instead, builds on the pioneering research of the likes of Michael Stanislawski, John Klier, Benjamin Nathans, and Chae-Ran Freeze. With respect to the latter two, he frames his own objectives in terms of how ordinary Jews participated to their own advantage in a legal-administrative system which, at first sight, appeared to discriminate against them. This signifies a distinct shift from conventional negative perspectives of tsarist Jewish policies to “what the law made possible” for Jews (13–14). Avrutin’s research demonstrates how the procedures by which successive imperial Russian governments sought to identify and document their Jewish subjects via passports, service and metric records, and other markers of identification, actually involved Jews in the public sphere and willy nilly forced them to participate in a process that defined their place in society.

“Making Jews Legible,” as the first chapter is titled, sets the tone of the book. It introduces the reader to the difficulties encountered by the imperial bureaucracy in counting its Jewish subjects, initially for the purpose of taxation and later military recruitment. Foreshadowing subsequent themes in the following chapters, Avrutin deals with the first comprehensive attempt under Nicholas I (1825–55) to compile more accurate population statistics through the application of modern metrical techniques. But, as Avrutin explains, applied to Jews, metrical data entry and consequently its use was compromised essentially for two reasons. First, the task of data entry and maintaining the books was delegated to crown rabbis who in many cases were either incompetent or negligent, if not corrupt in taking bribes for falsifying vital data. Secondly, their task was complicated by Jewish religious and cultural customs which in many cases precluded concise information regarding the registration of births, deaths, marriages, and divorces. Avrutin credits Nicholas’ reign with laying the foundation for subsequent developments in the second half of the nineteenth century when metrical records facilitated the movement and integration of Jews within the empire.

The Great Reforms of Nicholas’ successor Alexander II (1855–1881...