Warsaw Jews and the 1905 Revolution

“Russia’s first revolution”—the revolution of 1905—once occupied a central place in the historiography of imperial Russia. It was a favorite topic of Soviet-era historians, whose accounts gave voice to the discontents of the empire’s working classes and its national minorities.¹ The events of 1905 also fascinated the Western social historians who came of age in the 1960s and 1970s, whose work carefully reconstructed the microdynamics of revolution in workplaces, neighborhoods, and professional communities.² Since the fall of the Soviet Union and the turn away from social history, however, interest in 1905 has flagged considerably. Scott Ury’s excellent Barricades and Banners shows that the revolution still has much to offer historians. Contributing to recent conversations about urban space, ethnic relations within the multinational empire, and civil society, his book should rekindle interest in 1905 as a major turning point in Russian, East European, and Jewish history.

Ury’s central question is why Warsaw Jewry, which was fractured and largely apolitical in the first years of the 20th century, rapidly evolved into a politically conscious and organized collective that went on to play an important role in destabilizing the tsarist regime and in empowering the Zionist movement. This type of problematic is very familiar to social historians, yet Ury does not rely on social analysis to piece together this puzzle. Instead, he emphasizes the role of culture, language, and space in shaping political consciousness.³ He argues that it was the experience of urban modernity—the dangers associated with the rapidly growing city and the precarious and anonymous lives that recent migrants to it led—that drove many Polish Jews to political activism. He also considers how urban public space shaped ideological expression once radical politics began to take root. Focusing on “structures and discourse” rather than the actions of parties or individuals (5), Ury documents the rise of a distinctive political culture among Warsaw Jews. That culture, he shows, transcended partisan, class, and occupational divisions, and it ultimately transformed the city at large.

Although Ury’s primary goal is to trace how Warsaw’s Jews came to identify as a coherent collective around 1905, he notes that this transformation cannot be understood without examining their relations with their Polish and Russian neighbors. The rise of an aggressive and exclusive Polish nationalism promoted by the National Democratic Party and the efforts of tsarist officials to transform Warsaw into a model imperial city both shaped Jewish political styles and possibilities. Drawing on sources in Yiddish, Hebrew, Polish, and Russian, Ury joins a strong cohort of multilingual historians who have examined how cross-cultural interactions shaped politics, culture, and ideas in the Russian Empire.⁴ Barricades and Banners provides a useful reminder that at the very moment when ordinary residents of the Russian Empire were becoming involved in mass politics, they were also learning how to navigate the diversity of their local communities.

Barricades and Banners begins with an examination of the “crisis of modernity” that gripped 20th-century Warsaw, describing how urbanization, industrialization, and mass migration quickly transformed the face of the city. Mining memoirs and correspondence, Ury offers a vivid account of the sense of despair and isolation that plagued many migrants to the city. Warsaw’s burgeoning daily press, which fixated on the dangers and travails of urban life, amplified concerns about grinding poverty, high crime, deficits of social trust, and moral and sexual disorder. Yet, as Ury demonstrates, the public discourse about the “crisis of modernity” also created opportunities for the formation of new kinds of community; urbanites’ very engagement in discussions about the dark sides of urban life created a sense of solidarity and community among one-time strangers.

Ury contends that the “crisis of modernity” was particularly challenging for Jews, who struggled to stake their claims in a city that occupied a central place in the Polish national and Russian imperial imaginations. Suffering from poverty, anomie, and...