Government Policies and the Tradition of Russian Anti-Semitism, 1772-1917 Startseite Mitglieder Studium / Lehre Forschung Siebenbürgen-Institut Forschungsstelle Deutsche in Russland Publikationen Bibliothek Links Impressum Kontakt ZEGK > Historisches Seminar, Osteuropäische Geschichte > Mitarbeiter > Prof. Dr. Heinz-Dietrich Löwe > Herunterladbare Artikel > Government Policies and the Tradition of Russian Anti-Semitism, 1772-1917 Heinz-Dietrich Löwe I. In pre-revolutionary Russia a close relationship existed between governmental Jewish policy and the rise of anti-Semitism. One of the most important reasons for this was the fact that before 1917 Russia alone among the big nations of Europe had not emancipated her Jewish subjects. Whereas in other European states discriminatory legislation had been dismantled for several decades before modern anti-Semitism developed, anti-Semitism in Russia arose under the continued existence of anti-Jewish legislation. Also in contrast to the "West", the Russian government had, albeit intermittently and half-heartedly, tried to actively change Jewish social structures, religious practices and believes, traditional Jewish education a.o. far beyond the middle of the 19th century. Into the 1870s in only slightly modified ways the old goals of enlightened absolutism were pursued: reconstruction, productivization and integration. When this was more or less given up, the government started, under the impact of the first pogrom wave of 1881, a new policy which now did not attempt to change the Jews, but to keep them away from those areas of the Imperial social, economic and political order that were deemed as the most sensitive for the preservation of the remnants of the old corporatist system and of absolute monarchy. The language of enlightened absolutism, however could still be used to justify the governmental anti-Semitism en vogue since the 1880s and the societal anti-Semitism that was to come to life shortly. Its anti-capitalist bias could easily take recourse to similar patterns of thinking in enlightened absolutism, especially so as the general trend of economic de-regulation that had followed enlightened absolutism in the west hardly took root in Imperial Russia. This and also the fact that governmental preceded societal anti-Semitism may - against the background of insuffi-cient economic and social change - explain why it determined the shape of societal anti-Semitism and why the latter did not develop as part or in strict parallel to nascent Russian nationalism. Government policy set the agenda, the patterns and thus forged the traditions of Russian anti-Semitism. II. Leaving aside the experience of Kievan Rus' it was only with the massive westward expansion under Catherine II the Russian Imperial administrations had to deal seriously with the Jews. The empire inherited from the old Polish Commonwealth a Jewish community which, vastly different from other Jewries, was also more numerous than those in other countries. From the beginning it became clear that the social and occupational structure of the newly acquired group did not easily fit into the Russian social order based on estates and on an estate dominated form of local administration, which had only just been created by Catherine's reforms of 1775 and 1785. There existed as yet no special anti-Jewish legislation - besides that taken over from the old Polish Commonwealth. The double taxation introduced by Catherine was mainly fiscal in origin and did not rest on a special anti-Jewish bias. It could be justified by the fact that Jews were not subject to military service. Even the introduction of the Pale of Settlement seems to have happened more by default than by conscious legislation, as almost all other social groups were subject to similar restrictions. Jewish policy under Catherine II was more than anything else characterized by benign neglect. Religious prejudices played no role in it. III. Through local animosities the mostly unfortunate Polish heritage made its impact on Russian bureaucratic attitudes towards the Jews. Guilds and estates defended tenaciously their old rights to restrict their own numbers and to exclude Jews both from guilds and city self-government. Justified by Christian rhetoric, this camouflaged the main motivation, the desire to retain economic preponderance and influence in the system of town self-government. The fact-finding missions of Senator Derzhavin in the newly acquired western provinces moved the "Jewish question" into the centre of attention in St. Petersburg. Ideas of the Polish reform movement, with its many similarities to Joseph II's and Dohm's ideas, became known among Russian statesmen, though largely in their anti-Jewish variety. Russian and Polish concerns coincided in the desire, now pronounced, to fit the Jews into the Russian estate system. But on the Russian side the main impetus originally lay outside the domain of Jewish policy. In fact, what started Imperial interest in the western provinces was the lamentable situation of the local peasantry. The whole Polish social structure came under scrutiny and the Jews were only one component of this. The social order of the old Commonwealth did not fit into the Russian system and what concerned people like Derzhavin was the high number of free peasants and minor noblemen, as they were seen as a danger to the established Russian order. The structure of Polish "society" therefore was a thorn in the flesh for many Tsarist administrators until Nicholas I finally reordered it in the decades after the first Polish uprising. To that point there had always existed a certain parallelism in the treatment of Jews and Poles, as Jews, pursuing urban occupations but residing in the countryside, similarly did not fit easily into the state-order society of Russia. Anti-Jewish attitudes were re-enforced under Paul I and Alexander I when Polish nobles tried to redirect the Russian desire to reconstruct the Polish social order and to reform the economy of the western provinces towards the Jews, a gamble to shift the blame for real or perceived problems to them. This seemed doubly important to the Polish nobles since they feared that the Russian government in its drive to modernize parts of the economy could deprive them of their most lucrative source of income: the liquor monopoly. During these times the vocabulary of enlightened absolutism, reflected through the Polish prism, entered Russian discourse for good, although over time the real meaning of the proclaimed goals - reconstruction, productivization and integration - changed. The aim of transforming Judaism, to make it a less "fanatical" religion, also had its indigenous Russian model which, however, was never fully applied to the Jews: The treatment of the Tartars of Kazan'. Fortunately the Polozhenie dlia Evreev of 1804 was less interventionist than might have been expected in the international context. Jews were to be drawn into modern education - with the vague threat that, should they fail to oblige, state schools for Jews would be created at their expense. The autonomous local Jewish community (kehilla) was not dissolved and no Supreme Rabbinate established. On the other hand the law did not regulate Jewish participation in town-government, which meant that they remained excluded in many places. But the law was intended to integrate the Jews into the Russian estate system. This measure aimed to "productivize" them and to make them "useful" citizens. To this end the law of 1804 also offered inducements to convince Jews to take up agriculture or a craft and to bring wealthy Jews to set up textile workshops and manufaktury. The latter accorded with an attitude that was to persist right through Alexander II's time: The Jewish plutocracy was supported, favoured and granted special privileges. As merchants, they could easily be made to fit into the estate system. Such Jews, even as traders (as long as it was large-scale trade), were regarded as "productive". Distrust was preserved for the "unproductive" small scale Jewish trader who traded with everything - thus breaking the rules of the estate- and guild-systems. The law projected one extremely harsh measure: the exclusion of the Jews from the countryside. This was seen as bringing Jews fully under the regulations of the Russian soslovie (estate) system, but also as a means to force them out of the liquor trade. Still another motive might have inspired this plan, even though it proved impossible to realize: Since the middle of the 18th century reformers had argued that landlords should run the liquor monopoly themselves and not through lease-holders (arendatory). This was deemed more efficient and profitable. Others, like Derzhavin, felt that the farming out of the nobility's liquor monopoly undermined the estate order in the countryside by creating a wealthy rural stratum that might usurp the landlords' role and in the long run destroy the whole system; it seemed doubly inadmissible to have Jews exercising influence over peasants or even in positions of authority. Religious motives played no part in the phrasing of the law of 1804, although these became more important during Alexander's more "mystical" and reactionary phase. In terms of the policies of enlightened absolutism there was nothing unusual in this program. The only real difference lay in the fact that in Central Europe, where similar panaceas were propagated, the old order crumbled or was even actively dismantled in a general drive at reform and liberalization. There old guild-systems and estates lost their role under the impact of new social and economic developments; a new dynamic order of society and economy made room for Jewish economic and to some degree political integration. Russia was still far removed from such dynamism and the old order and the old social groups nipped in the bud any attempts to force them to receive the Jews. The small number of Jews that managed to enter the guilds is one obvious index among many. IV. Nicholas I did not introduce many new elements into this general framework; he only applied it with heartless and mindless forcefulness. The introduction of military service for the Jews was such a new element, since it demanded what was granted in Central Europe once emancipation had (largely) been achieved. Adding insult to injury the law forced Jews to provide twice the normal number of recruits. Conscription had to serve "productivization" by levying recruit quotas on the poorest - supposedly least "productive" - elements several times higher than on other groups of Jews. Similar regulations applied to Poles. 25 years of harsh military service, combined with the cantonist system, which made young Jews of the age of twelve or less the charge of the army, made this measure look like a system for the physical liquidation of parts of the poorest Jewish population. That providing recruits threatened to destroy the Jewish community from within, was probably not an intended, but also not an entirely unwelcome result of the new regulations. To fight Jewish "clannishness" and "separateness" was, after all, a professed aim - to which many bureaucrats and Russian anti-Semites adhered, at least in words, to the end. Military service should also achieve a degree of acculturation, which the system could not bring about by other means. Beyond this, many local commanders used the opportunity to try to convert Jewish recruits, although the policy-makers in St. Petersburg had even made it more difficult for Jews to adopt Russian Orthodoxy or any other Christian denomination. The local Jewish community now was dissolved by law. But it is indicative of Russian administrative weakness that the government did not feel able to dissolve it completely. In some respects the community had to be preserved, because the regime could not collect the special Jewish taxes or supplant the Jewish welfare system. True to the panaceas of enlightened absolutism, the Jews were now allowed to take part in city self-government, even if their numbers could not exceed one third of the elected town councils dumy. The regime applied itself with new vigour to the education of Jews. Using Jewish money the administration founded special government schools where it set the curriculum. Faintly echoing the policy towards the Tartars, special rabbinical seminaries were created and in future only their graduates should have been appointed rabbis. This foundered on the resistance of the Jewish communities, although it became largely true of the specially created 'crown rabbis'. But the attitudes of local officials to the new schools were deeply contradictory. When resistance from Hasidim and Orthodox became strong, the government or local officials usually backed down, deserting their Jewish supporters, the maskilim, often dubbed "cossacks of enlightenment" because of their rather authoritarian approach in bringing modern schooling to hesitant traditionalists. In fact, the government began to distrust their supporters and the products of their own schools because these seemed all too secular, even though the stated intention had been to make Jews more 'secular' and 'European'. This was the result of the inner contradictions within the policies pursued, namely the intention to develop a degree of secularization among certain elements of its population without subjecting Russian society and the Imperial State to the same process. In spite of the strong resistance to this policy of modern schooling for the Jews, it gave birth to a Jewish intelligentsia. But here another contradiction entered: There was no place for these educated Jews in Russian society. They largely stood outside the corporatist structures; they could find no application for their talents; and an equivalent Russian element into which to integrate or even assimilate was slow in coming. Still, in the long run the newly created Jewish intelligentsia was to become the main element in the "re-nationalisation" of the Jews in Russia - hardly the result desired by Nicholas I's policy makers. The policies of Nicholas I never reached their planned culmination, although the razbor had already been written into the statute books. If ever implemented this measure would have required all Jews to register with one of the estates or guilds. Many Jews would have been forced into agriculture; during the times of Nicholas I the attempts to settle Jews as peasants were pursued more insistently and successfully than ever before. Those who could not or would not register or move into agriculture were to be severely punished and made subject to five times the normal recruit levy. But resistance form local bureaucrats and non-Jewish interests to such measures was so strong that the razbor was never implemented. One can only speculate that meshchanskie uprava - the estate self-administration of the lower orders of the towns - and the guilds protested massively. If - following Reinhard Rürup - emancipation in western Europe, especially in France, can be described as the revolutionary path by which Jews were emancipated in one act, leaving society to work out the rest; if the central European way was to grant emancipation step by step according to the degree to which Jews had fulfilled their part of the emancipation contract, then Russian policies displayed an entirely different character. The reforms in central Europe were at least preceded or paralleled by general reforms that opened the way to a modern civic society and a deregulated economy into which the Jews could at least in principle integrate - and economically, at least, this integration was very successful. In Russia, however, there was neither an attempt to create a new civic society, nor an attempt to free the economy from the fetters of the remains of the old economic order. Rather, Tsarism attempted a massive reconstruction by forcing its own form of corporatism - as established under Catherine II - on the Jews and thereby of changing their social persona. This policy Catherine already used to integrate the Ukrainians into the empire and to destroy the remnants of their already weak autonomy. The same policy was applied by Nicholas I to the Poles of the western provinces to make them less "seditious" and dangerous to the empire. In a similar way the remnants of Jewish autonomy and inner cohesion were to be destroyed. This policy of "corporatist reconstruction and integration" aimed at conserving the old social order and enforcing uniformity on the social and political fabric of all elements of the empire. The vocabulary of enlightened absolutism gave those policies at least some semblance of progressive intent. Tsarist Jewish policy transgressed the boundaries of "corporatist reconstruction" in one major area: in its educational policy. Here, however, the strange situation arose that Tsarism conducted an experiment of modernization on the Jews to which it was loath to subject its other elements. It was 'modernization anticipated' within the context of otherwise largely reactionary policies. The results were looked upon with suspicion - as cosmopolitanism and secularism - by the very regime that had engendered them. V. Alexander II's general policies were those of adaptation to the requirements of modernity. At the same time his administration attempted to circumscribe the changes as much as possible. With respect to the Jews the emphasis was still to change their social and occupational structure, but without force or over repression and the new policies offered at least the prospect of integrating the Jews into the modern parts of society. In the traditional sectors, as in rural society, they were to be restricted because they might hasten change. With respect to integrating the Jews into the modern branches of society and the body politic a strange contradiction developed. Reconstruction and modernization of Russian Jewry could no longer be the work of the government - it had to come from within the Jewish community. It had to be - largely or almost exclusively - effected by the Jews themselves. The society that had developed by the 1860 or 1870s could no longer be directed or controlled by the government - particularly in view of its limited bureaucratic resources. This meant that new forms of genuinely, and more or less exclusively, Jewish forms of politics were necessary - nothing less than a political reconstruction, or maybe even political reconstitution of Russian Jewry. And indeed, those groups - the last generation of maskilim and the first of the Jewish intelligentsia - most interested in reconstruction and religious reform did argue exactly for such a political reconstruction. They advocated an all-Russian Jewish organization reminiscent of the great and powerful Waad and kehillot of the Polish Commonwealth. A modern role model was seen in the "Alliance Israelites" in France which at the time was called upon to help educate a Russian Jewish leadership that could bring this about. Of course, such a development was bound to have a decisive influence on assimilation - it would become much less likely. It is therefore no accident that exactly around this time Jacob Brafman started to publish - in the second half of the 1860s in Vilenskii Vestnik - his "studies" on the kahal (Russian for kehilla) and that it was he who was the driving force behind government plans to do away with all remnants of an institutionalised Jewish community, including its traditional - and all other - educational undertakings, and to centralize worship in the big synagogues - in the interests of fighting the supposed Jewish "clannishness" and "separatism". Ideas like Brafman's were bound to appear at a time when the state was overhauling its complete institutional framework, but Brafman's suggestions were full of anti-Jewish… truncated (33,877 more characters in archive)