Charting the Outer Provinces of Jewry: The Study of East European Jewry's Margins

This chapter is something of an experiment, as it attempts to apply a new and rather untraditional historiographical approach to a group that seem to resist such treatment. The last three decades have seen a huge increase in works on the socially marginal in history: people considered deviant or abnormal, including the physically and mentally disabled, the insane, vagrants and beggars, criminals, and prostitutes.¹ Although most of the members of these groups were poor or destitute and often supported by the community in one way or another, 'the socially marginalized' does not embrace the poor as a class—and certainly not in late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century east European Jewry, of which poor people made up a large proportion.² In eastern Europe, where the large and concentrated Jewish population gave rise to a diverse society that in many ways lived a separate existence, there were many of the same kinds of marginality and deviance that historians have already studied in other European contexts, national and otherwise. As the Yiddish aphorism that Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi used to fondly quote states, 'vi es kristelt zikh, azoy yidlt es zikh'—'as it goes among the Christians, so goes it too among the Jews'. Indeed, it might be argued that any Jewish community would have both centre—or indeed multiple centres—and margins and, further, that a full understanding of the internal dynamics of that community and a history of its mentalités in a given period would necessitate the study of both centre and margins.³ Tracing the historiography of this field, however, may seem like an exercise in futility, given the relatively recent origin of such subfields of social history as Alltagsgeschichte (history of everyday life), microhistory, and disability history. However, the history of the socially marginal has indeed existed within the study of east European Jewry—or, to be more precise, Polish and Russian Jewries—hidden, more often than not, in the interstices between the bibliographical entries rather than in its own section.

This approach requires the investigation of a wide range of subjects: the kahal (for its treatment of vagrants, those who could not afford to pay taxes, and criminals); charity and ḥevrot (for the care of the vulnerable in the community or lack thereof); philanthropy and the new scientific approach to insanity and illness that accompanied the arrival of modernity; the family; the economic foundations of Jewish life; and others. Thus, investigating the ostensibly marginal in Jewish society requires familiarity with the full range of functions and activities of that society. In his blueprint for the establishment of Russian Jewish history, Simon Dubnow called for the study of the 'entire past' of Russian Jews, including a 'detailed portrait of their social circumstances . . . [and] their internal lifeways and customs [domashnii byt]'⁴. While recognizing the importance of such pioneering works as Fuenn's Kiryah ne'emanah and Orshansky's studies of Russian legislation on the Jews, Dubnow argued that Russian Jewish history could not begin and end with local histories focused primarily on great rabbis and scholars or studies of the legal position of the Jews. It would truly have to embrace all of history—a radical approach to any field of history in Dubnow's day, let alone Jewish history, which was barely considered a legitimate area of inquiry. Dubnow went so far as to suggest that sources for Jewish history should include folktales and customs based on historical events, a suggestion that researchers of contemporary Jewish society and culture would soon embrace.⁵ Dubnow was interested not so much in the everyday life of the masses as in their collective movement and psychology as a nation. While the former seems to be the most obvious link to marginal history, we shall see that the latter is also, if less manifestly, tied to the question of the marginalized.⁶

Dubnow's call for a comprehensive exploration of history required the study of all historical groups and actors, including the socially marginal. But it would be more than a century before most...