Empire Jews: Jewish Nationalism and Acculturation in 19th- and Early 20th-Century Russia

Introduction

Introduction The essays in this book are linked by two main themes: I investigate Jewish intellectuals in tsarist and early Soviet Russia who attempted to fashion a modern, secular, and nationally acute Jewish identity; and I study the contributions to Russian culture by Jews who participated as absolute insiders. Instead of repeating the conventional belief that Jews were marginalized in tsarist Russia, I have discovered that a number of them-many more than one might think-occupied positions in the epicenter of Russia's artistic and intellectual life. Moreover, as Jews became acquainted with Russia's world-class culture, they integrated its elements into Jewish life and into their artistic creations . Jews who joined the Russian elite brought with them a Jewish sensibility that permitted them acute insights into the Russian spirit. In both these cases, one finds an uncanny interpenetration of cultures, minds, and temperaments that was enormously productive for both Russian and Jewish cultures. The hypothesis that Russian and Jewish cultures were mutually beneficial led me to question the simplistic views of earlier scholars who presented Russian Jews in one of four ways: either as backward and specifically Jewish Orthodox-religious, exclusively politically oppressed (victims of pogroms), Communist/Socialist, or Zionist. I examine the ineluctable fact that a large group chose a synthetic identity, Russian-Jewish, that emerged not in conflict, but in concert with modern Russian society. In many cases, one and the same person participated in two distinct circles. Maksim Vinaver, for example, was a leader both of the Russian Constitutional Democratic Party and of the Society for the Promotion of Enlightenment among the Jews of Russia. Shimon An-sky was an expert on Jewish folklore and a member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party. Similarly, in the cultural arena at least three generations of Jewish writers, considering themselves members of the Russian intelligentsia, struggled to create a specifically Jewish literature in Russian. Such names as Lev Levanda, David Aizman, Shimon Yushkevich, and Vasily Grossman come to mind. Most of the essays in this book take up questions rela ted to tensions implicit in modern Russian-Jewish identity. How should one resolve loving Russia as the source of one's personhood and creativity and hating its intolerant government and right-wing ideologies? Moreover, what seems most painful to me is that it might be impossible to untangle the positive and negative dimensions. Could it be that the good and the bad were mutually conditioned and inseparable, that at a fundamental level the amazing cultural blossoming 2 EMPIRE JEWS of Jewish life at the turn of the 20th century was dependent in inexplicable ways on Russia's double-sidedness? Even when Jews were divorcing themselves from Russian society, forming autonomous institutions to provide services the government refused to provide, such as schools and self-help organizations, they were engaged more than ever in a dialogue with it. For example, Russian radicals had a tremendous influence. Many Jews were attracted to the universal goals of a perfect society and moral justice expressed in the ideology of such radical thinkers as Nikolai Chernyshevsky, Nikolai Dobrolyubov, and Dmitry Pisarev. Jews joined the revolutionarr parties in numbers that outpaced their proportion in the overall population. At the same time, Russian dreams of sobornost· (absolute social harmony) and the mir (a pre-industrial collective community of peasants) paradoxically attracted urban Jews who were seeking a solution to economic displacement and social alienation. Such rural fantasies unexpectedly tantalized those who wanted to turn Jewish life backward to its agrarian beginnings and establish Jewish farming colonies in Russia, Argentina, Oregon , and Eretz Israe1.2 Even Jewish liberals were imbued with the idea of productivization -the view that only farming and crafts were morally justifiable occupations. Rare was the Jewish thinker with enough courage to defend capitalism or express the necessity of political stability above all else. The most powerful work by Jews in the Russian elite during the fin de siec1e was arguably in literary criticism and Russian thought. Such figures as Mikhail Gershenzon, Lev Shestov (Shvartsman), and Akim Volynsky (Flekser ), were in the forefront of Russian philosophy. The study of the Russian national poet Aleksandr Pushkin-c1early a demonstration of one's allegiance to the national heritage-was dominated by Jewish scholars, starting with Semyon Vengerov, who converted to Russian Orthodoxy in the 1880s, and Nikolai Lerner, Pavel Kogan, Leonid Grossman, Yury Tynyanov, and Boris Eikhenbaum . As if to serve as a perfect symbol of the place occupied by Jews in the Russian elite...