The Jewish Encounter With Late Imperial Russia - Essay Example

Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter With Late Imperial Russia Benjamin Nathan’s account opens with a of what life was like within the Pale of Settlement—a strip of land starting from Russian-annexed eastern Poland to today’s Lithuania down to Ukraine’s coast along the Black sea. According to the narrative, Russia stood as a strange land to the people in Polotzk (or Polish Russia). To illustrate this, Nathans describes how Pale fathers only traveled to Russia to work, and after the work day finished, must return to Polotzk. This opening narrative is essential to Nathan’s thesis of the nature of Russian-Jewish encounter; the author has to prove that such Russian-Jewish encounter practically started from scratch: both peoples hardly knowing each other and both enmeshed in their own culture and customs. Nathans also tries to prove that at the outset, the Russian Jews remained far from being modernized—a complete contrast to what they were during the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 (that is, Russianized and modernized). Although Nathans does not specify the exact date of that awkward state of relations, one may fairly judge its occurrence to be during the regime of Empress Elizabeth, Catherine the Great, or even Tsar Nicholas I. At such a time, the Russian empire stood completely at a loss as to what to do with the nearly five million Jews absorbed by the annexation of eastern Poland, Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine. The Jewish Question therefore became a large concern for these despots and served as the tsar’s foremost trouble. These despots persisted that there shall be no integration unless the Jews convert to Orthodoxy. This period is certainly prior to the Great Reforms of 1860 and properly sets the stage for Nathan’s thesis that assimilation, acculturation, and integration of Jews to the mainstream of Russian society at the outset remained virtually nonexistent. In contrast to Western Europe, where emancipation had freed the Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews—dousing them with the fluid cultures those societies—the Jews in the Pale of Settlement continued to be alienated from Russian civilization. With Yiddish or Hebrew as their sole language, they possessed their own traditional clothing and their own distinct institutions, aimed at the preservation of the Judaic tradition. And this was, according to Nathans, largely because the tsarist regime refused to dismantle the Pale, and remained adamant in a discrimination of the Jews—refusing to give solution to the Jewish Question. In pursuance of the work’s central thesis, the author asserts that the Russian-Jewish encounter officially began with the Age of the Great Reforms. During this time, the dilemma of how to integrate these people to Russian national mainstream was first conceptualized and acted upon unconditionally. Nathans claims Tsar Alexander II took first took steps to integrate Jews to Russian society and for once the door in and out of the Pale of Settlement was left ajar: allowing merchants, artisans and educated Jews to live freely in St. Petersburg and Odessa. From these Jews who went astray away from the Pale, Nathans coins the apt phrase “beyond the Pale”. And because these Jews had to correlate and even adapt Russian culture such as language, learning, and civilization—and transform themselves into “Russian Jews” through acculturation, integration, and assimilation—Nathans is able to describe to his audience such a process of integration. He thereby develops the means to prove his thesis that Jewish integration and assimilation commenced not after the Russian Revolution of 1917—where Jews were key players of that revolution—but before 1917: during the old tsarist regime when the Great Reforms commenced. Nathans advances the thesis that these dynamic Jewish-Russian encounters that resulted in the metamorphosis of the Pale Jews to “Russian Jews” had profound consequences both for Russia and the Jews themselves; and furthermore, these consequences became apparent long before the Bolsheviks butchered the Tsar, his family, and effectively ended the that regime. Indeed, Russia gained much from the immense talents of the Jews. To prove his argument, Nathans describes the transformative process which began with selective emancipation of Jews, thus beginning the crossing of visible and invisible boundaries as Jews themselves tried to get out of the isolation, poverty, and discrimination that enveloped the Pale. Likewise, Nathans points out that the liberal autocratic government of Tsar Alexander II, while acknowledging ethnic diversity and need for reforms, should be credited for the creation of the “Russian Jew”, who was a force to reckon with in the field of law, business, trading, and arts. It is the establishment of the “Committee for the Determination of Measures for the Fundamental Transformation of the Jews in Russia” and the intense, committed education of gifted Jews to such academe as University of Moscow, St. Petersburg University and the Novorossiiskii University in Odessa (217), which showed the determination of the tsarist regime for the imperial civic integration of the Jews. Nathans dubs this process “selective integration” because only a small minority of Jews were recipients of these reforms. However, limiting the efforts may be, it created a new Jewish elite—an intelligentsia and an aristocracy—despite the tyrannical regime of Alexander III which sought out quotas of Jewish students in Russian universities and the legal profession. But this lockout never completely materialized: the door to integration had already been opened, and consequently many Jews had already entrenched themselves into Russian society as useful, valuable citizens of the regime. Nathans stresses that these contrasting tsarist policies made the Jewish-Russian encounter so complex and made the Jewish integration “awkward”. Nathans also identifies one source of complexity of the Jewish-Russian encounter as coming from the Jews themselves. He emphasizes that there was a deep division among the Jews themselves. In truth, they were a diverse group; Orthodox, conservative Jews refused to accede to the efforts of the Jewish leaders in St. Petersburg to make them cross the line and merge with the Russian society, thus maximizing the process of selective integration. Many of them refused to either learn the Russian language or modify their Jewish traditions. But Nathans shrugs this off as indicative of the extraordinary ferment and vibrancy of that Jewish-Russian encounter (378). The author indeed expresses apprehension for the many people who refused to go “beyond the Pale” as the Pale stood vulnerable to pogrom and police repression alike. Nevertheless, one must note that Nathan’s book is about the men and women who went beyond the Pale—that is, those who sought out acculturation in St. Petersburg and entered the universities and took higher learning. These individuals eagerly entered the legal profession and thus came to wield great influence on the social, economic and political life of the late imperial Russia. Nathans focuses attention in on his thesis involving Jewish integration into Russian society in the vibrant and imperial city of St. Petersburg during the Old Regime. There he illustrates the nuances of the Jewish community, their intramural squabbles and conflicts, the development of Russophiles and Yiddish speakers who used Russian as mere second or third language, and the contrast of the affluent merchants and the impoverished artisans and the grapple for community leadership. As a monument to Jewish advancement and the liberality of the tsarist regime, Nathans mentions the late 19th century construction of the breathtaking synagogue at St. Petersburg. Also, Nathans cites the negative effects of such integration: namely, that such integration was sometimes pushed over the limits, to the effect that some in the Jewish elite professed themselves to be “Russian people and citizens of Russia”. Some even changed their names and surnames to those of traditional Russian ancestry, displaying efforts on the part of a few to completely erase their being Jewish and to forget their ethnic roots. There were efforts to transfer their loyalty to imperial Russia and the perceived material riches therein; and there were even a few Jews who abandoned their faiths and converted to Orthodoxy. If there was a turning point for the integration of Jews into the mainstream of Russian society, it should be the entry of Jews into universities. From the Russian viewpoint, the November 1861 decree granting Jewish university graduates the same rights and privileges as Russian citizens, served as a potent vehicle for the alteration of the Jewish character and outlook (215). From the Jewish students’ viewpoint, the decree represented emancipation from poverty—it meant the prospect of gainful employment and freedom to settle wherever they please. Thus, Jews enthusiastically went in droves. In 1886, one in seven university students in the Russian empire was a Jew (218). Of course, such developments resulted in a backlash—dread on the part of some Russians who felt they were placed at a disadvantage in their own land. Despite the fact that the book is lengthy and Tsar Alexander II was not accorded the proportionate honor and credit for bringing the Russian-Jewish encounter to its maximal stage—for speeding up the creation of the “Russian Jew”, the Nathans’ account is a tour de force. It is difficult to antagonize because it is so very well-researched and the thesis is so convincingly defended by evidences which superbly demonstrate its truth. The author successfully deals with accounts regarding the timeless difficulty of a widespread Jewish integration into a very different cultural and political population. And in doing so, Nathans takes his reader not so much into an aggressive argument for his thesis, but into an examination and a reformation of mankind’s perception of Jewish identity and integration. Works Cited Nathans, Benjamin. Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter With Late Imperial Russia. University of California Press, 2004. Read More