'Building a fragile edifice': A History of Russian Jewish Historical Institutions, 1860–1914

As nation states began to develop in western Europe during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, historical research was encouraged as a means of legitimizing them.¹ Jewish historiography followed a different course. During most of the nineteenth century, European Jews were struggling for integration into their host societies, and educated Jews felt ambivalent about emphasizing Jewish difference. European states established government archives, departments of history in universities, and historical museums in their capital cities; Jews could not found equivalent institutions. European historians became paid professionals; Jewish historians remained amateurs. No Jewish historian in the early nineteenth century attained the celebrity status of a Jules Michelet, a Thomas Macauley, or a Leopold von Ranke. Not until Heinrich Graetz in the second half of the nineteenth century did Jewish society produce a national historian.²

But Jewish historiography was not entirely undeveloped. In the German states and the Russian empire in the 1820s, maskilim began to study Jewish history. However, in eastern Europe it took almost an entire century longer for historiography to free itself from religion. The slow development of Jewish historiography was attributed to the absence of source material. In 1892 Simon Dubnow stated:

[The Jewish historian] does not have any official government chronicles, but has to look for facts in the most usual and unusual places, in religious books, scientific, philosophical, or mystical writings, the authors of which 'unintentionally expunged' historical material; in folktales, legends, prayers, or tombstones, and in the literature of those countries where Jews lived and where a chronicler or memoirist exploited a chance opportunity to speak about them.³

Complaining of his own lack of a reliable source of income, Dubnow observed that Jewish historians in Russia did not receive a state salary and were 'left with only [their] inner strength and work at [their] own risk'.⁴ Dubnow neglected to mention that during the nineteenth century Russia's Jews had established a number of institutions to facilitate the study of east European Jewish history. An investigation of these institutions will illuminate the development of Jewish historiography in tsarist times.

Russian Jewish historiography from 1800 to 1850 lacked academic standards. Often works of Jewish history consisted of nothing more than stories from the Bible infused with religious doctrines, such as God's consideration for his people.⁵ Although some writers engaged with modern ideas, the early Russian maskilim lacked proper conceptual frameworks and understanding of historical evidence.⁶

From the 1840s and especially in the 1860s the tsarist government sought information about the structure and character of Jewish communities in order to pursue more effective policies with regard to the introduction of secular education into schools.⁷ Although some of the studies reveal anti-Jewish attitudes, the authors used evidence in a relatively sophisticated way, presenting statistics about income, education, and family institutions. Most of them appeared in the government-sponsored Zhurnal Ministerstva narodnogo prosveshcheniya. In articles such as 'Jewish Schools' and 'In a Rabbinical Seminary', officials provided a good deal of material on Jewish life.⁸ In fact, much of the work is of high quality because the authors were often converts who were both knowledgeable about Jewish history, having had a yeshiva education, and had studied in Russian schools or univer-sities.⁹

By the 1860s Jewish history writing had begun to expand beyond the religiously informed works of earlier periods. Samuel Joseph Fuenn's Kiryah ne'emanah was published in 1860, and Moses Berlin's Ocherk etnografii evreiskogo narodonaseleniya v Rossii appeared in 1861.¹⁰ These two works mixed examinations of contemporary Jewish life with studies of the past. As is typical of the historical work of this period, political goals were emphasized. Berlin's study was sponsored by the Russian Ethnographic Society (Russkoe etnograficheskoe obshchestvo) and conducted to gain information about the Jewish population, while Fuenn demonstrated that Jews deserved the full privileges of the city of Vilna as they had been there before the Russians had arrived.

Avram Harkavy and Daniel Khvolson can be considered Russia's first professional Jewish historians. In the 1850s the...