Jews and Muslims in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union ed. by Franziska Davies et al. (review)

The purpose of this slim volume is to analyze the possibilities and limits of comparing Jews and Muslims in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. In the past two decades, the so-called new imperial historians have produced a wealth of focused studies of Russia’s religious and ethnic diversity, only a handful of which are explicitly dedicated to comparative analysis. The editors should be congratulated for bringing together an impressive group of scholars who have done so much to shape their respective subfields. The volume as a whole, however, falls short of the editors’ ambitious goal. One of the most puzzling aspects of this collection is that only a handful of the contributors actually engage in comparisons. Nearly half of the chapters (four out of the nine) revert to traditional analysis of either Jews or Muslims and do not offer commentary or evidence, in a systematic or indirect fashion, that might speak to the volume’s larger conceptual lens. This is not so much a critique of the originality or significance of the chapters, many of which are absolute gems, including David Fishman’s contribution on the shifting meaning of Yiddish, but the cohesiveness of the volume. In particular, the introductory essay – most of which summarizes the individual chapters – does little in the way of framing what is a potentially rewarding line of inquiry.

Comparisons of Jewish and Muslim communities are not always apparent or straightforward. In an illuminating essay, Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern discusses the difficulties of comparing Jewish and Muslim communities. Geography and history provide the point of departure. Whereas Russia absorbed the eastern regions of the empire (home to a hodgepodge of Muslim communities) over a 300-year period, it took a little over 20 years to partition Poland-Lithuania and acquire the largest Jewish population in the world. The Russian government not only had different administrative ambitions in the regions but also wound up treating “Jews and Muslims differently because of the internal characteristics of the two groups” (P. 21). Russia’s Jews were sedentary, while most Muslims lived a nomadic existence. Russia’s Jews were targeted by the extreme right, and the regime had little, if any, interest in Judaism or Jewish languages. This mistrust speaks volumes about not only how the regime treated its Jewish subjects but also how far Jews were able to integrate in the social order.

Integration – as policy and process – is a theme explored by several contributors. In an essay devoted to army politics, Franziska Davies suggests that “one reason why the state’s failure in the case of the Jews was greater was simply because its goals had been more ambitious and its policies accordingly more interventionist” (P. 54). Human and physical geography of the Eurasian steppe presented a special administrative challenge. In a suggestive analysis, Michael Khodarkovsky explores how some individuals, possessing intimate knowledge of two distinct realms, struggled to shape their identities. In a nicely structured comparative analysis, Vladimir Levin shows how the most prominent feature of progovernmental parties in the Duma was the readiness to support Muslim conservatives and the refusal to support the religious Orthodox. By the turn of the twentieth century, Adeeb Khalid suggests that the immense diversity of the Muslim communities and the larger internal conflicts over the meaning of Islam itself may have played an important role in the cultural dynamics of reform.

Shifting the focus to cultural production, several authors reconstruct how intellectuals, in two very different time periods, participated in and shaped their respective worlds. Michael Stanislawski offers a tentative comparison of the Jewish and Muslim Enlightenment movements, looking at the ways in which reformers Judah Leib Gordon and Ismail Bey Gasprinskii came to terms with the attractions, challenges, and dilemmas of modern existence. David Shneer’s chapter is a wonderful exploration of how two Jewish...