In 1922 on his deathbed in Soviet Kiev, according to his friend Nokhum Shtif, German Barats pleaded to his friends, “Remember me in the Jewish way, and please make sure the Jews do not forget my name” (209). Barats had been an “expert Jew” in the tsarist imperial bureaucracy, a much-maligned figure of the Russian Jewish imagination. As Vassili Schedrin writes in Jewish Souls, Bureaucratic Minds: “In the popular imagination, expert Jews were government spies, ruthless informers and ultimately traitors to their people” (203).

Schedrin mined archives and rare-published sources to humanize our understanding of the “expert Jew.” We learn detailed biographical information about the several dozen people who held the title uchenyi evrei (“expert Jew,” an official designation in the imperial bureaucratic structure), their trials and tribulations in government service, and their passions and visions for a Russian Jewish future. This is rare material and for this alone, the book is worth reading.

And yet, if Schedrin's goal was to overturn or at least complicate the mythic picture that remains in the popular imagination, the archival and published evidence seems to confirm that expert Jews were in fact spies on secret missions, informers reporting to the state, and perhaps even “traitors” to their people.

The book opens in the early 1800s as the tsarist state aimed to manage and modernize its newly acquired Jewish population after the Polish partitions. The octopus-like Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD), founded in 1802, modelled its vision of modernizing the Jewish population on the successful French model of the consistoire, in which French Jewish leadership, customs, and laws would be brought into the French social and legal order. The problem with using France as a model was that imperial Russia looked nothing like post-Napoleonic France, in which Jews were citizens with legal subjectivity. In the Russian empire, Jews were forever and always objects of administrative fiat.

In 1850, after the 1844 abolition of the kahal, the local Jewish administrative body, the MVD created the office of the “expert Jew,” a position appointed by local governors-general to help shape imperial policy. This serves as the preamble for Schedrin's main story: describing the expert Jew over the three generations of their existence as a state institution until 1917. Schedrin uses the biography of Moisei Berlin (1821–1888) to describe the first generation (roughly 1850 to the early 1860s). Born in Shklov, a center of the Russian haskalah, Berlin was rooted firmly in the maskilic tradition of modernizing Jews and Judaism and fighting “fanaticism” in the form of Hasidism. He, like most first generation expert Jews, collected “basic information about the religion, history, and traditional lifestyle of Russian Jews” (98) and then published this information in a series of government-funded publications: A History of Hasidism (1854) and the Ethnography of the Jewish Population in Russia (1861), the latter undertaken on behalf of the Imperial Russian Geographic Society.

The second generation of expert Jews—trained in the government-sponsored rabbinic seminaries in Vilna and Zhitomir (both lasting from 1847–1873)—undertook proactive institution-building as part of the Great Reforms. Schedrin uses the biography of Barats (1835–1922) as a representative for this generation. This is the moment when expert Jews had the most influence on government policy and when Alexander II paid a personal visit to the Vilna Rabbinic Seminary.

The third generation, which Schedrin dates from the late 1870s to the end of the Old Regime, “was made up of professional bureaucrats, for the most part motivated by pure career goals and a conservative ethos, conforming to the general conservative politics of the late imperial MVD” (108). Here, he turns to the life story of Moisei Kreps (1866–1942), who was mired in the minutiae of bureaucratic and legal procedures concerning Russian Jewry as well as rooting out sedition among Jews.

Schedrin's book is a rich descriptive history of three generations of expert Jews serving the Russian empire, about whom I personally knew very little. And yet, his book fails to explain what their service meant not just to them as individuals but to Russian Jewish society as a whole. Here, an approach informed by postcolonial theory might have revealed the ways the state managed its multiethnic empire. Schedrin seems to unwittingly show that the state created a category of people resembling native elites in other imperial contexts, who were trapped between the metropole and its colonial (in his case, Jewish) subjects. Ultimately, the expert Jew's role in the late imperial period came to resemble the very caricature that Schedrin had hoped to humanize.