Jewish Souls, Bureaucratic Minds: Jewish Bureaucracy and Policymaking in Late Imperial Russia, 1850–1917 by Vassili Schedrin (review)

After the fall of communism and the opening of the Russian archives, many books and articles devoted to the Jews of imperial Russia were published. However, the book of Vassili Schedrin brings to light the semiforgotten and little researched topic of the work of the Russian Jewish bureaucrats "known as uchenye evrei (learned Jews or expert Jews)." The monograph is based on rich documentary materials from the Russian archives and incorporates all available scholarship and memoirs.

Schedrin shows that the attitude toward expert Jews in traditional Jewish society was quite negative, because they were perceived as the agents of the government. But, according to the author, expert Jews were motivated by the ideals of Jewish Enlightenment and, like the Russian authorities, believed in the necessity of the modernization of traditional Jewish life. Schedrin writes that the imperial Russian policy toward Jews was "motivated by raison d'état rather than by the personal Judeophobia of the tsar and the bureaucracy." The Russian government was motivated by raison d'état (with some exceptions) at the time of the Great Reforms in Russia (the 1860s–1881). But with assassination of Tsar Alexander II and the establishment of state anti-Semitism under Tsars Alexander III and Nicholas II, the policy toward Jews drastically changed from rapprochement of Jews with the gentile population to their isolation and intensified discrimination.

The position of expert Jew was established in 1850 and functioned until the February 1917 Revolution. Each governor-general was supposed to appoint two or three expert Jews. Expert Jews were appointed to the seventeen Russian provinces of the Pale of Jewish Settlement, the two city administrations of Odessa and Nikolaev, and to the Ministry of Internal Affairs. "Within seven decades, a total forty-eight expert Jews were appointed to these twenty bureaucratic offices."

The expert Jews had "a broad social mission of cultivating loyalty among the Jews and eradicating Jewish fanaticism by applying their moral influence." The Russian authorities considered that the majority of Russian Jewry—Orthodox Jews were religious fanatics and believed that their way of life should be modernized through military service and education.

The major function of expert Jews was implementation of the government policy on Jewish questions. They advised the governors-general on religious affairs and translated Jewish texts, documents, and correspondence from Hebrew and Yiddish to Russian. Expert Jews often were used "to perform a variety of police functions aimed at the prevention of subversive political activity." They worked as translators for interrogation and courts. Sometimes, expert Jews worked also as censors of Jewish books and press. By the order of the Russian authorities, expert Jews also traveled on inspection tours of the various cities and towns of the Pale of Jewish Settlement, and reported about Jewish economic, social, and religious life.

To efficiently perform all these varied functions, Jewish bureaucrats needed special preparation and education. The first generation of Jewish bureaucrats had a traditional Jewish education. But later, expert Jews typically got their education either at the Vilna or Zhitomir rabbinical seminaries or at Russian or foreign universities. The work of Jewish bureaucrats was very well paid. Schedrin writes that "the compensation of expert Jews became comparable to salaries of Russian bureaucrats in the rank of the IX class." They were also often awarded medals, orders, and other signs of honor. Many expert Jews worked at their positions for 20–30 years. They believed that they "toiled both for the sake of the government and for the sake of the Jews."

However, while implementing the policy of the Russian government, expert Jews often undermined and harmed traditional Orthodox Jewish society. For example, when the expert Jew German Barats traveled to the southwestern region of Russia (Kiev, Podolia, and Volhynia provinces) to popularize "the enrollment of Jewish children into government-sponsored Jewish schools" the Hasidic Jews of Kamenets-Podol'sk threw stones at him. The purpose of...