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Book Reviews 179 Russia's First Modern Jews: The Jews of Shklov, by David E. Fishman. New York: New York University Press, 1995. 195 pp. $40.00. Professor Fishman's book is a valuable contribution to Jewish history in transition from tradition to modernity-the Haskalah or Jewish Enlightenment in Russia. Though focused on the "Shklov Haskalah" in Russia's Mogilev province between 1772 and 1806, Russia's First Modem Jews is not just about the subtitled "Jews of Shklov." By virtue of Shklov's prototypic anticipation ofnineteenth-centurydevelopments, it is also about the origin and nature of the Russian-Jewish Enlightenment. In fact, Fishman offers a new perspective on the Russian Haskalah, which is a welcome departure from the somewhat dated standard works ofJ. Meisl, J. S. Raisin, and the venerable Simon Dubnow. True, significant historiographical advances in the study of the Russian-Jewish encounter with modernity have been made in recent years by A. Orbach, S. Zipperstein, M. Stanislawski, J. Klier, and E. Lederhaendler . But these pay little attention to the early history of the Haskalah or focus primarily on the relationship between RussianJews and tsaristJewish policy. As Fishman notes, the prevailing assumption has been that "the Russian Haskalah did not begin in earnest until the publication ofIsaac Ber Levinsohn's ... Testimony of Israel in 1828." Superficially lumped together under the dubious rubric of "forerunners of the Haskalah," earlier voices of maskilic reform have been discounted as isolated and idiosyncratic phenomena, whose"impact onJewish society was negligible" and thus devoid of historical significance (p. 5). Fishman refutes this conventional view. His work is a multi-layered study which moves back and forth with ease between contextual analysis and descriptive narration. Synthesizing both, the result is a convincing interpretive history of the cultural, SOCial, and political origins and manifestations of pre-nineteenthcentury Haskalah in Russia. The tone for this structured interpretive approach is already set in the beginning of the book. Its introduction and first chapter offer not only customary historiographical comments and background information, but immediately go to the heart of the matter: why "the Jews of Shklov," rather than any other community, were privileged to pioneer the Haskalah in Russia, and why this occurred in a supposedly unreceptive cultural setting dominated by tradition and religious conflict. According to Fishman, two principal reasons explain the uniqueness of Shklov and the apparent paradox of modernity blossoming in a conservative landscape: political changes from without and cultural-religious currents from within Jewish society. The former, initiated by the first Polish partition of 1772, 180 SHOFAR Fall 1996 Vol. 15, No. 1 created the context within which the latter assumed modernizing characteristics that culminated in the first flowering of the Russian-Jewish Enlightenment. More specifically, and convincingly argued by Fishman, Russian rule over eastern Belorussia after 1772 reinvested Jews with broad administrative powers ofregional and local self-government-powers which had been lost under Polish rule in 1764. This new, externally induced strengthening ofJewish corporate autonomy (the kahals) allowed for the suppression of Hasidism in Mogilev province through the application of politicaladministrative means that were sanctioned by Russian law in giving the Mitnagdim "the right to punish the sectarians" (p. 13). Though Hasidism continued to "reign supreme" in neighboring Polotsk province, where Hasidic rabbis controlled communal affairs, Rabbinic Judaism-vigorously upheld by the Mitnagdic disciples of the Vilna Gaon-monopolizedJewish religious life in Mogilev province for the remainder of the eighteenth century-and thus provided an opening for the Haskalah. With Mitnagdism firmly installed due to fortuitous political circumstances , which also transformed Shklov into a burgeoning cultural and commercial center (due to its new strategic location on Russia's western frontier), Shklov was poised to play an important role in the Jewish encounter with modernity. How this encounter took place and gave rise to the Shklov Haskalah is brought out in Fishman's discussion of the rabbinic conservative response to the Berlin Haskalah on the one hand and, on the other, the Shklov Jews' direct exposure to modernist challenges emanating from a vibrant Russian cultural presence in their" midst. Fishman makes a strong case for a much more direct and sustained interaction between the Mendelssohn circle and Russian Jews than has...

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