Monday, February 11, 2019

Readings in Modern Jewish History

Short on cash this term to take another course at Edinburgh, I decided to enroll in the University of Pennsylvania's extension program and take a grad-level course in Jewish History. Unsurprisingly, it's pretty rigorous so far. It's very reading heavy, as the title would suggest. Plus, as a term paper, it'll be necessary to write a 20- to 25-page historiography on a topic of my choice. I was thinking about taking on the "uniqueness" argument over the Holocaust, which is probably the third biggest debate in the field following the Historikerstreit and intentionalism vs functionalism. I'll report on that matter when the time comes.

In the meantime, the weekly assignment for the course involves a five-minute in-class presentation on a prepared topic. The first such presentation I made on two chapters in David Sorkin's forthcoming book on emancipation. The chapters I worked on involve mass politics in the context of emancipation in the period from 1870 to 1914. Sorkin's basic argument is that emancipation is an ongoing project in Europe and the Ottoman Empire beginning around 1550. He breaks with the earlier east-west paradigm of European Jewish history and instead posits a sort of three-plus-one model of eastern, central, and western European Jewry (the latter including the U.S.), plus the Ottoman Empire.

Later today, discussion will ensue on the below short response to a question on Benjamin Nathans's book Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter With Late Imperial Russia. I'll post my work on Mondays this term. Enjoy

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2) How did the Russian government’s vision of Jewish integration into Russian society differ from that of Jewish intellectuals and communal leaders? And, inasmuch as both of those visions evolved over time, were there periods when they were more or less in sync, or at least capable of being harmonized? If not, what factors prevented it? How does this relate to the references to tension highlighted by Nathans throughout the text?

During the period under discussion, the position of the Russian government vis-à-vis Jewish integration varied from tsar to tsar and sometimes ministry to ministry. In this regard, the position of the government was far more dynamic than that of the intellectual and communal leaders, who favored an incremental approach of selective integration. Nathans writes that this form of integration was "designed to disperse certain 'useful' groups of Jews into Russia’s hierarchy of social estates" (p. 24). Among the key institutions playing a role in this process was the military, which offered the opportunity for the mainstreaming of Jewish men, albeit often at the expense of their identity as Jews, particularly in the earliest periods of Jewish conscription, when it was synonymous with cantonism. Later, after a number of Jewish elites had settled in St. Petersburg, Evzel Gintsburg, as one of the Jewish community's leaders, encouraged Jewish enlistment, including of his own sons. This call by Gintsburg coincided with a more liberal approach to integration adopted under Alexander II and his defense minister Dmitri Miliutin, where the prevailing wisdom called for the dissolution of specifically Jewish estates into the pre-existing social estates of the Russian Empire -- here within the larger context of a full military overhaul that instituted universal service regardless of nationality.

At the same time, it is important to note that the strategy and tactics of the integrationist Jewish elites could be at cross-purposes with the Jewish leadership in the Pale. With the wave of pogroms that descended on the Pale in the 1880s in particular, the two leaderships found themselves at cross purposes, with the Pale leadership arguing for emigration, which was diametrically opposed to integration, even when selective. At this time, the position of the Russian government was far closer to that of the Pale leadership, with the policies of Tsar Alexander III seeking to reverse the gains made under his father. An example here is the institution of quotas on Jewish enrollment at Russian universities. Whereas the quotas, as a "silent pogrom," had the effect on the Petersburg-dwelling elites of undoing some of the gains in this area since the 1860s, from the standpoint of the leadership back in the Pale, the quotas had the positive advantage of preventing a larger number of Jews from becoming fully acculturated by the Russian education system.

Therefore, the positions of the government and the Jewish leadership were most in sync or must conducive to harmonization under Alexander II. The tensions that prevented continued harmonization before and after the height of Jewish-Russian cooperation in selective integration were largely the aforementioned influence of the less integrationist Pale leadership and the reaction among the Russian general population of greater exposure to the Jewish population in the form of the integrated population, which unlike in most of the Pale could and did compete economically against the urban Russian population. This competition, coupled with religious anti-Semitism and a press often willing to stoke resentments, represented a reason for caution by both the government, which largely sought to avoid violence, and a portion of the Jewish population itself.