Ostensibly Simon Rabinovitch assigned himself a modest aim: to describe the institutions, ideas, and personalities behind the movement for Jewish autonomy in Russia from 1890–1929. However, since autonomy became the byword of all but the most conservative Jewish politicians, demands for cultural autonomy and national rights, far from being marginal, took center stage in political discourse. By “national rights” in this context we mean the right to attend Jewish schools where a modern curriculum was taught in Hebrew or Yiddish, and the right to a national parliament of Jewish representatives who would direct the political fate of the entire Jewish people.
The history of the ideological notion of autonomy is particularly knotted because among Russian Jews there were multiple parties with kaleidoscopic memberships. One can count the most important ones: Jewish socialists (the Bund, Po‘alei Ẓion, and the Vozrozhedenie group with Ḥayim Zhitlowski), liberals (Jewish Constitutional Democrats, Maxim Vinaver and Henrik Sliozberg), Jewish Trudoviki (Leontii Bramson), and various other parties, such as the Folks-Partey (Mikhail Kreinin and Simon Dubnov), as well as a number of Zionist parties.
In Simon Rabinovitch's telling, the story begins with the historian Simon Dubnov, who formulated ideas about Jewish national autonomy in the late 1890s. These ideas appeared first in Voskhod, the Jewish newspaper in Russian, to which Dubnov was a frequent contributor, and in a separate book he published in 1907 entitled On Old and New Judaism. Dubnov claimed that Jews constituted a nonterritorial people whose identity was formed through a unique historical experience that all its members felt and shared.
Despite or perhaps because of the Russian government's stringent anti-Jewish legislation, impractical ideas such as demands for Jewish autonomy found fertile soil. Apparently there were few ways to influence the hostile government before the Revolution of 1905. Therefore, the shtadlonim, the grandees of Russian Jewry, managed to hold on to power because only they and their lawyer assistants could curtail the government's worst abuses. In his book Summer Storms, John Klier shows well how Baron Horace Gintsburg, Russia's wealthiest Jew, neutralized some of the poisons that the Minister of the Interior Ignat'ev had prepared in 1882. (But the resulting Laws of the Third of May, though less toxic, were bad enough.) Likewise, Vladimir Jabotinsky lauded the “politics of reality” in his introduction to the 1933 memoirs of Henrik Sliozberg, Baron Gintsburg's lawyer. Jabotinsky indirectly compared the results of Zionist propaganda in the last decades of tsarism with Sliozberg's incremental achievements in the state senate. Sliozberg helped curb anti-Jewish legislation against tavern keepers, alcohol producers, and traders of various kinds. Of course such intervention was “homeopathic,” as Dubnov defined it, and insulting to the nation's pride, but it produced a little light in the dark night of tsarism.
Rabinovitch's story, however, is about big ideas and politics with a capital P. With the outbreak of the 1905 Revolution, Jewish politics became organized around parties. However, individual parties could not garner enough seats to have much of a say and even a coalition of all the Jewish parties was not strong enough to produce legislation. Recall that Jews made up only 4 percent of the population of the Russian Empire. But even if their small power base did not disqualify them entirely from power, disagreements between liberals, socialists, and Zionists wiped out whatever potential power they might have had. Moreover, in those political formations following the short-lived first Duma, Jews were also kept far from influence by various other means, including narrow suffrage rules and an inability to make coalitions with non-Jewish elites. In other words, Poles and Ukrainians did not want power enough to form a coalition with Jews (with few exceptions).
The period from 1907–1914 offered Jewish politics a way to do something concrete. At the same time that the government continued waging war on its Jewish population, Jewish organizations turned to philanthropy. This philanthropy, as Rabinovitch explains, can be viewed as a kind of experiment in cultural autonomy. The government wouldn't help its Jews, but it did not interfere with wealthy Jews helping the disadvantaged. Philanthropy reached its apex during World War I, when, in addition to Jewish individuals in Russia and abroad, the Russian government also gave generously to clothe, feed, house, and educate Jewish refugees.
The last part of the book deals with elections in 1917 to a national parliament that never came into being because of Bolshevik opposition. The Zionist victory in these elections seemed to indicate that Russian Jewry favored autonomy as a political principle; the era of integration appeared over. Yet only a couple of years later, Jews were rushing to advance themselves through integration in Soviet society. That most Jews rejected autonomy in favor of integration reflects a cleft between the Jewish intelligentsia and the masses, according to Rabinovitch. Autonomy did not have wide appeal among the masses, who cared about bread-and-butter issues above all.
A point of contention for me is the high degree of appreciation Rabinovitch expresses for Dubnov's contributions. For many decades now historians have approached Dubnov with genuflection because he helped invent eastern European Jewish history and his writings are part of the historical canon. Nonetheless, we should acknowledge that Dubnov attributed too many achievements to himself and not enough to colleagues. Similarly, we may cut him down to size for his role as a practical politician. His Folks-Partey expressed aspirations that far outweighed its political reach. Moreover, instead of forgiving Dubnov for abandoning his party in order to return to his books and archives, we might more accurately view him as an impractical intellectual who was unable to function in the rough-and-tumble world of political infighting.
These criticisms do not diminish Rabinovitch's achievement. He does not ignore autonomy's basic paradox: it could not prevent anti-Semitic violence or resolve the economic problems for the Jewish masses associated with the rise of capitalism in Russia. I find it hard not to be impressed with the political thinking of the leaders of Russian Jewry between 1900 and 1929, because autonomy offered ideological solutions to problems connected with modernity, secularism, and Jewish distinctiveness. The author has done a wonderful job—thorough, elegant, and vivid. This book is a tribute to the ideals of the era, brought to life by Rabinovitch's careful and judicious treatment.
