Every empire schooled indigenous intellectuals, using them in the imperial bureaucratic apparatus and agitprop. As a paradoxical by-product, such cultivation usually also created opponents to the regime who would establish and populate various nationalist, anti-imperial movements. The same process took place in tsarist Russia, where Jewish intellectuals were educated at Russian-language schools (including the separate educational system established for Jewish subjects) and became habituated to the environment of imperial culture. Education was one of the few entrance tickets to integration into greater society, which did not have place for real equality, but tolerated loyal and useful Jewish entrepreneurs, professionals, artisans, and farmers.
In a sense, Jewish intellectuals became even more “imperial” than their Ukrainian, Polish, and other counterparts. While indigenous intellectuals of Russia's other peoples had their national territories and capitals (Warsaw, Kiev, and others), St. Petersburg became the surrogate capital of Russian Jews. The Petersburg-centered model of Jewish life evolved after 1859, when Alexander II allowed Jewish merchants of the first guild to settle outside the Pale of Jewish Settlement. As a result, several Westernized families of superrich financiers headed by the Baron Gintsburg dynasty and a circle of capital-based intellectuals formed the crystallization center for “Empire Jews,” as Brian Horowitz describes the protagonists of the fifteen vignettes that make his new book. Although the Yiddish socialist newspaper, launched in London in 1884 by the Lithuanian Jew Morris Winchevsky, still carried the title of Der poylisher yidl (The little Polish Jew), the gravitating power of St. Petersburg, rather than Warsaw, was growing during final decades of the Russian Empire.
To all appearances, the vignettes that form Empire Jews emerged from the material of Professor Horowitz's concurrently published important monograph Jewish Philanthropy and Enlightenment in Late-Tsarist Russia, his articles for the YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe (its Web version is available at http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org), and some previously published research works (e.g., the chapter on Leib Jaffe). Yet readers of this book may find it difficult to define its genre and target reader. One of the first phrases of its introduction can be interpreted to suggest that this collection of articles does not target the professional audience: “Instead of repeating the conventional belief that Jews were marginalized in tsarist Russia, I have discovered that a number of them—many more than one might think—occupied positions in the epicenter of Russia's artistic and intellectual life” (1). In fact, students of Russian Jewish history know that this discovery has already been made many times. For example, as early as 1908, the writer Kornei Chukovskii argued that to a considerable degree, Russian culture existed thanks to Jews.Footnote 1
Specialists will also be surprised to read that “It has often been argued that true Jewish nationalists spoke only Yiddish or Hebrew” (3). Argued by whom? In 1908, Shmuel Niger, the master Jewish literary critic, noted in his diary a characteristic discourse of that time: “Why do you speak Russian?” “I am a Hebraist!”Footnote 2 It is well known that Jewish intellectuals often had problems conducting agitation among Yiddish-speaking masses and had to rely on the so-called “semi-intellectuals,” often former talmudic students, who could write and speak Yiddish.
Some chapters of this text can be used as reading material for undergraduate students, whereas graduate students will benefit from other sources. For example, the chapter on Vladimir Jabotinsky's novel The Five would be appropriate for undergraduate classes, and Barry P. Scherr's article, “An Odessa Odyssey: Vladimir Jabotinsky's The Five”Footnote 3 is useful for graduate classes. Nonetheless, the majority of chapters, notably on such prominent figures as Lev Levanda, Henrik Sliozberg, and Jacob Teitel, will deserve attention of graduate students and, generally, the academic community.
Judging by editions of Levanda's works (also in Yiddish translations) that appeared in Russia and later in independent Poland, this pioneer Russian Jewish writer's attempts to navigate in his prose between the Polish Jewish past and the problems of Jewish life in the Russian Empire, including Poland, in the second half of the nineteenth century, continued to fascinate readers also after the writer's death. It continues to fascinate academics, especially as the transition from the Polish Jewish identity to the Russian Jewish one remains a central issue for historical analysis of East European life in the nineteenth century.
People of the “Gintsburg Circle” (to borrow John Klier's term) played trendsetting roles among “Empire Jews.” Henrik Sliozberg, a central figure in the Circle, was hired by Baron Horace Gintsburg to help him realize his ambitious shtadlanut functions. In the last decades of the imperial regime, Sliozberg was one of the builders of Russian Jewish civil society, especially for philanthropic organizations, which developed into a modern, much more effective alternative to charitable bodies of traditional Jewish communities. In the beginning of the twentieth century, Sliozberg's political sympathies lay with the Constitutional Democratic Party, which attracted a number of liberal Jewish intellectuals.
Jacob Teitel is often mentioned as one who made a remarkable career in the juridical system of the empire, serving as “the sole Jewish judge in whole Russia” at the turn of the twentieth century. At the same time, Teitel was active in Jewish organizations, most notably in the bodies formed by the Gintsburg Circle. His informative autobiography, Iz moei zhizni (From my life), published in Paris in 1925, exists only in Russian and German (Aus meiner Lebensarbeit; 1929 and 1999). Now, thanks to Professor Horowitz, a glimpse into Teitel's life is available also in English.
“Empire Jews” occupied visible, often dominant, positions in all Jewish ideological currents, media, and trade unions, and, generally, were widely represented in political, cultural, and academic circles in Europe and America. As a result, for activists of various Jewish organizations it was not hard to find like-minded people (including old friends) in New York, London, Paris, Warsaw, or Moscow. Cultural and ideological affinity helped them to establish close links with the foreign Jewish intellectuals and community leaders. It is no coincidence that after his emigration to Germany, Jacob Teitel chaired the Union of Russian Jews in Germany, while Henrik Sliozberg headed the Russian Jewish community in Paris.
While Horowitz's book does an excellent job analyzing the literary and political legacy left by a number Russian Jewish intellectuals, it is mainly trees and little or no forest—he focuses on useful details while avoiding general characterization of the Russian-born Jewish graduates of secondary schools and universities who combined cosmopolitan education with profound Jewish interests. Conversely, such “case studies” will certainly help other scholars to continue the quest for understanding the Jewish cultural and political environment in imperial Russia. The volume could leave an impression of a book, rather than a collection of articles, if the copy editor had paid more attention to details, at least making consistent the spelling of names, and the designer had chosen a nicer layout.
