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[Introduction] The Imperial Context A traveler to Russia rarely encountered Jews prior to the westward expansion of the Russian Empire in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. The conflict over the so-called Judaizing heresy in the late fifteenth century (a controversial episode, mainly involving religious heterodoxy rather than attraction to Judaism) made Russian leaders wary of encouraging settlement in their lands.1 Even Peter the Great (r. 1689–1725), who aspired to transform Russia into a modern European power, welcomed only a few exceptional Jewish converts to his realm. Despite the formal bans issued by his successors, Jewish merchants often found their way to trade fairs in the Ukraine (1728) and Smolensk province (1731) and eventually settled on private estates, evading official expulsion with the cooperation of the local gentry. Recommendations by the powerful Senate to permit the temporary sojourn of Jews in “Little Russia” (Ukraine) and Riga for economic purposes did not impress Empress Elizabeth, who famously declared: “I desire no mercenary profit from the enemies of Christ.”2 For most Russians, the figure of the Jew was merely an abstract idea; Russian Orthodoxy remained “uncontaminated by Poland’s antiJewish stereotypes.”3 The partitions of Poland (1772–95), which brought not only new lands but other peoples into the Russian Empire, changed all this, as will be shown below. Like other minorities, Russian Jews were subject to the ambivalent, evolving aspirations of a modernizing state. In the prereform era (1800–1855), the Russian Empire sought to integrate Jews into the state with the goal of ensuring stability in the new borderlands. As the documents here demonstrate, Jews—even the most traditional—were ineluctably drawn into the vortex of imperial law and administration . They registered their vital information (births, deaths, marriages, and divorces) for the state, paid taxes, and served in the military ; increasingly, from midcentury on they utilized the reformed state courts, attended public schools and universities, and read Russian newspapers and literature; and, in growing numbers, they embraced the promise of selective integration, which allowed Jews in “useful” social categories to leave the Pale of Settlement. Although driven by a bureaucratic impulse to simplify and standardize, St. Petersburg nevertheless sought to maintain the boundary between the center and periphery —for fear that the interior might be overrun with an “excessive presence of Jews.”4 But once the government breached the dam in the mid-nineteenth century, it could hardly contain the floodwaters: the Great Reforms (1860s–70s) unleashed expectations of fundamental change among Jews, as among other segments of the population, and paved the way for a public debate about the so-called Jewish Question. For some, however, selective emancipation —which liberated categories of individuals “from the jurisdiction of the Jewish community” at the expense of the collective— was unacceptable.5 Like other minorities in postreform Russia (1870–1904), Jewish activists increasingly demanded full civic rights and cultural autonomy, aspirations that the regime was less and less disposed to satisfy, but that became central to Jewish life and politics in late Imperial Russia. [2]   introduction Enlightened Absolutism and Its Russian‑Jewish Subjects (1762–1800) After a palace coup brought Catherine the Great (r. 1762–96) to the throne, she embraced both the ideals of the philosophes and the prerogatives of absolute despotism. Her main goal was to transform Russia into what Marc Raeff has called a “well-ordered Polizeistaat”—a state that would ensure good governance and the well-being of its subjects .6 Based on the deliberations of the Legislative Committee, which provided valuable instructions and input, the Catherinean regime embarked on its ambitious plan of state building, economic development, and social and cultural change.7 Even prior to the territorial annexation of Poland in 1772, which brought sizable numbers of Jews into the empire for the first time, Catherine had already begun to consider the question of Jewish immigration and status. Once the issue of Jewish settlement arose in the Senate, the empress wrote—in her usual third person—of a dilemma rooted in the diverging interests of an enlightened ruler (favorably disposed toward the immigration of any group) and anxiety about the complications that this might entail: Every matter in the Senate was carried [out] according to a schedule, with the exception of matters of extreme urgency, and as luck would have it, at this session a project to permit Jews into Russia was first on the agenda. Catherine was in a difficult position if she should give her approval to such a...

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