In this paper I examine the economic and political factors that undermined the social class structure in an ethnic community—the Jews of Russia and eastern Europe at the end of the nineteenth century.Footnote ¹ Compared with the documented rise and articulation of working classes in non-Jewish society in that region, Jews were caught in an opposite process, largely owing to discriminatory state policies and social pressures: Among Jews, artisans and petty merchants were increasingly reduced to a single, caste-like status. A Jewish middle class of significant size did not emerge from the petty trade sector and no significant industrial working class emerged from the crafts sector. Historians have largely overlooked the significance of these facts, in part because they have viewed this east European situation as a mere preamble to more sophisticated, modern class formation processes among immigrant Jews in Western societies, particularly in light of the long-term middle-class trajectory of their children. Those historians interested in labor history have mainly shown interest in such continuity as they could infer from the self-narratives of the Jewish labor movement, and have thus overstated the case for a long-standing Jewish “proletarian” tradition. In reassessing the historical record, I wish to put the Jewish social and economic situation in eastern Europe into better perspective by looking at the overall social and economic situation, rather than at incipient worker organizations alone. I also query whether a developing class culture, along the lines suggested by E. P. Thompson, was at all in evidence before Jewish mass emigration. This paper is thus a contribution to the history of labor—rather than organized labor—as well as a discussion of the roots of ethnic economic identity.

In addition, a reexamination of the economic background of the east European Jews who migrated in mass to the West suggests that theories of self-selection among the migrating population, which ostensibly favored those from the light-manufacturing sector, overstate the case for individual agency in the migration process, and the neat “fit” between Old World and New World occupational structures.

Finally, conventional “ethnic” histories of Jews in the United States have largely focused on cultural transmission issues. I hope to reintroduce the economic factor into the discussion. In that sense, this paper argues for a more rigorous comparison between the status of pre-migration east European Jewry and that of post-migration communities in the United States. It forms the first part of a longer work in progress on Jewish immigrant life in America and the processes of economic integration.

*****

Some five million Jews—nearly half of the world total—lived under Russian imperial rule at the end of the nineteenth century. (These included 1.3 million who lived within the Kingdom of Poland.) As of 1910, an additional 850,000 were living in Habsburg Galicia and some 400,000 were spread throughout southeastern Europe (chiefly in the Balkans and Romania), bringing the total Jewish population for all of eastern Europe to 6.25 million. Nearly one-third, or about two million, of these immigrated to the United States over a fifty-year period, beginning in the 1870s and peaking between 1905 and the First World War.Footnote ² This mass outpouring ended in the 1920s when the U. S. government instituted country-of-origin-based immigration quotas weighted against east European countries.

The emigration of one-third of a population in so short a time-span is rare (only the mass out-migrations of the Irish or the Norwegians come to mind as comparable), and it has aroused interest about the conditions that spurred such an exodus. Jewish immigrants comprised about 11 percent of total American immigrants between 1899 and 1914, and 14 percent of those who remained permanently (i.e., net immigration). Jews made up one-quarter of the immigrants from southern, central, and eastern Europe.Footnote ³

Research on the causes and the timing of the Jewish immigration has dwelt upon both the social-political element (persecutions) and on economic elements (socioeconomic deprivation). Mob violence against Jews and Jewish property—“pogroms,” a Russian word coined expressly for this case—broke out in the Pale of Settlement in the spring of 1881, following the assassination of the tsar, Alexander II, and this is often considered to be the spark that touched off the large-scale exodus. The question is far from settled, and is far more complex than it would appear, for several reasons: (a) The migration actually began, albeit on a smaller scale, in the 1870s; (b) scholars have shown that the 1881-era immigrants came initially from centers of Jewish population hardest hit by poverty more than from those areas directly affected by the pogromsFootnote ⁴; (c) the migration was selective—migration was much higher among younger, working-age people, and did not represent a cross-section of the Jewish population—and was responsive to business cycles in the American economy; and (d) although Jews were, like other migrating groups, clearly economically motivated, they did emigrate more than non-Jews. Jews comprised over two-fifths of all Russian emigrants between 1890 and 1915, and they tended to bring more dependent family members with them, thus placing themselves at an initial economic disadvantage in adjusting to their new home. These two idiosyncratic factors—more intensive out-migration and higher family migration—may attest to the added motivating “push” of a particularly harsh political situation for Jews.Footnote ⁵

We can assume, then, that both economic and other historical causes served as “push” factors in the emigration of east European Jews, and that political oppression and economic causes were interrelated. The following discussion is intended to delineate briefly just how that was so.

By Western standards, Russia was a poor, mainly agrarian country. Urbanization did set in at a rapid pace after the 1860s, but by 1897, only 13 to 15 percent of the Russian population was classified as urban. Twenty years later, the figure stood at only 18 percent and the agricultural sector still accounted for over half of the work force. Despite its predominant role, agriculture suffered from low productivity and slow modernization. It was only in the 1880s that agricultural production began to grow appreciably.Footnote ⁶ On the eve of World War I, Russia's per capita national income approached only one-tenth that of the United States, one-third that of Germany, and half that of Italy.Footnote ⁷ Manufacturing and trade were established sectors in the Russian economy alongside agriculture, but as with increases in farm production, true industrial modernization did not strike root until the 1880s and 1890s.Footnote ⁸ Development was most noticeable in heavy industry and railroad building: Coal, iron, and oil were crucial in this regard, though the largest single employment sector among the manufacturing branches was the textiles industry.Footnote ⁹

For our purposes, the relative slowness of modern economic development in Russia and across the region in general is a relevant place to start, but still more crucial was the retarded character of the economy of the so-called “Pale of Settlement,” the region on the western border of the empire where the overwhelming majority of Jews lived. Heavy industries were largely located outside the Pale, and even the textile industry, though relatively well-developed in Poland, was still centered eastward, beyond Moscow. In Russia as a whole, by 1913, the yearly value per person of industrial production averaged thirty rubles; within the Pale of Settlement it averaged only six rubles.Footnote ¹⁰ “The visitor to the late-nineteenth-century towns in the western provinces would have been struck by the deprivation of their predominantly Jewish inhabitants,” concludes one economic historian.Footnote ¹¹

Comparing Jewish and non-Jewish enterprises yields an even starker picture of the relative underdevelopment of the Jewish economy. Jewish enterprises had a lower capital endowment and fewer employees, on average.Footnote ¹² Jews owned 37.8 percent of the factories in the Pale but employed only 27 percent of the workers, while the value of products they manufactured was only 22.5 percent of the total value of manufactured products. These disproportions were largely due to the preponderance in the Jewish sector of small plants and non-mechanized manufacturing.Footnote ¹³ In the textile-manufacturing center of Łódz, Poland, Jews owned nearly 12 percent of the mills in the 1880s, but the value of their products was but 9 percent of the city's textile output.Footnote ¹⁴ In Poland as a whole, Jewish workers comprised nearly 44 percent of all workers in non-mechanized factories but only 19 percent in mechanized ones.Footnote ¹⁵ Figures for Warsaw—a relatively well-developed city with a more established middle class and highly developed industry—show that Jews owned only 21 percent of its larger factories (those employing over twenty-five workers).Footnote ¹⁶

The concentration of Jewish artisans, journeymen, and industrial workers in the smallest workshops, mills and factories, or home workshops had important ramifications, for example in social and legal arenas. Russian labor legislation began in 1882 to institute reforms such as reduction of working hours, control or elimination of child-labor and night-shift hours for female workers, institution of written contracts for laborers, and the establishment of a system of governmental factory inspection. These reforms (which were, in any case, slow to be enforced) only applied to workplaces with over sixteen employees and were, therefore, irrelevant for the bulk of Jewish workers. Even when Jews worked alongside non-Jews in the same factory, a pattern of discrimination left the Jewish workers with low-grade jobs, longer hours, and less pay. Their youngsters stood less chance of obtaining formal vocational training, and Jews as a group could not hope to participate in civic affairs. As one observer has put it, “The Jewish laborer … lived and worked under conditions so [adversely] different from the rest of the working class that they really were a separate, inferior category unto themselves.”Footnote ¹⁷

Jews were concomitantly over-represented among “clerks” in the private sector, among those who provided religious services, and particularly in trade (comprising over three-fourths of that sector). Fully 86 percent of Warsaw's street peddlers were Jews. A sizeable proportion of the Jewish group (15 percent in 1897) were classified as common laborers, domestic servants, or apprentices (i.e., menial workshop assistants), or as having no known occupation.Footnote ¹⁸

Kahan's estimate for a Jewish bourgeoisie, properly speaking, within the Russian Pale came to about 16,850, or about 1 percent of economically active Jews, based on 1897 figures. This category combined those with titled ranks, honorary citizens, guild merchants, and people deriving income from real estate and other forms of investment. If we add their family members, as well as 16,700 members of the legal and medical professions, artists, writers, and scientists, along with those whose trade was in “luxury items” (and their respective family members), we reach an estimate of some 65,000 people. This was just under 1.3 percent of the general Jewish population. Regularly employed artisans numbered some 240,000, while factory workers who could be considered the makings of a modernizing Jewish working “class” likely numbered no more than some 40,000 throughout the Pale of Settlement.Footnote ¹⁹

Among Jewish craftsmen and petty tradespeople an undetermined proportion were engaged in the repair and sale of used goods rather than the production or sale of new commodities, while no more than 10–12 percent of Jewish craftsmen worked in the high-quality or luxury goods market.Footnote ²⁰ Taking all these considerations into account, we can estimate that perhaps as much as 70 percent of the Jewish labor force must be considered the “working poor,” whether they worked at a manual trade or eked out a living in minor and ephemeral “businesses.”

Another aspect to factor in is the higher-than-average natural increase of the Jewish population. From 1825 to 1880 the annual net increase among Jews was over 1.5 percent, their numbers rising from 1.6 to 4 million in those years, and growing to 5 million by 1897. By comparison, the non-Jewish population of Russia experienced an annual net increase of about 1.1 percent. By the end of the century, a quarter of the Jewish population was under ten years of age, and half were under twenty.Footnote ²¹ Given the large number of dependents, the gainfully employed Jewish population was limited to about 30 percent of the total (about 1.5 out of 5 million in 1897). In certain cities, such as Warsaw, the rate of labor force participation among Christians was twice that of the Jews!Footnote ²² (By comparison, U. S. figures for 1900 indicate a participation rate of 50.2 percent.Footnote ²³) Viewed differently, however, the figure of 1.5 million economically active people is statistically equivalent to almost 60 percent of all Jews aged 20–59, plus a quarter of those aged 10–19. We may take these figures on labor force participation as a further indicator of how difficult it was for Jewish breadwinners to support themselves and their families. This despite widespread employment, if uncertain or part-time, and even though they enjoyed certain social advantages: relative freedom to move around, location primarily in towns and cities, and a 65 percent male literacy rate (33 percent for females), comparatively high for Russia at the time.Footnote ²⁴ Historian Heinz-Dietrich Löwe aptly referred to their situation as “urban poverty in an agrarian society,” and explained that their socioeconomic profile (their livelihoods based on commerce, crafts, and limited industry, along with relatively high literacy) cannot be taken to imply that they were a vanguard of modernity in a backward country. “Rather,” as he put it, “industrialization probably hit them harder than any other section of the population […]; at the same time they were excluded from the opportunities it offered.”Footnote ²⁵

The social position of the Jewish population within east European society has been a subject laden with considerable ideological and political freight. Recent scholarship on Polish Jewry, for example, has taken a corrective attitude and has tended to argue that Polish political, social, economic, and cultural history is incomplete without merging the Polish and the Jewish narratives.Footnote ²⁶ Without prejudice to that particular argument, it is not farfetched to say that by the end of the nineteenth century the position of the Jews was quite as anomalous as that of the (formerly enserfed) peasantry, if not more so. Their very existence and character appeared in the eyes of imperial Russian officials as a persistent policy problem, or to use a blunter word, a ‘blight.’ Jews seemed to be a vestige of the old-regime system that a modernizing state was struggling to reconstruct, moving from inconsistent to draconian methods in the transition to the 1880s. These new methods included rural expulsions, wholesale expulsions from Moscow and St. Petersburg, exclusions from civil service positions, quota limitations in secondary and higher education, and repeal of residence licenses outside the Pale.Footnote ²⁷

From 1898 to 1902, the Jewish Colonization Association (JCA)—an important European Jewish philanthropic foundation established by Baron Maurice de Hirsch—compiled a major report on the Jewish economic condition in Russia. The following descriptions and data are among its representative findings:

1. (1) Master tailors in the Polish provinces might expect to earn as much as 6 rubles in a good week, or nearly 300 rubles (about US$154.50) per year, but their average income was likely to dip as low as 100–120 rubles.Footnote ²⁸

2. (2) These, however, were the most fortunate among artisans and employees in light industry. Tailors and shoemakers in the Polish town of Opole (Lublin province), for example, worked sixteen-hour days in squalid and cramped conditions and could not support themselves and their families due to chronic unemployment in the summer season. Similarly, female lace-makers in Opatów, who were employed only intermittently, could expect to earn no more than 45 rubles a year!

3. (3) In Gorkii (Mogilev province, White Russia/Belarus), the average artisan worked only six to eight months out of the year. “All our correspondents affirm,” stated the report, “that the Jewish artisan is … able to find work only for a particular part of the year.” Little wonder, then, that the report also noted that artisans in that province appeared most frequently among the applicants for poverty relief at Passover (a customary, institutionalized alms-giving season), while in the major port city of Odessa, in 1900, a municipal welfare committee recorded 1,427 Jewish artisans living in extreme poverty amidst deplorable conditions.

4. (4) In Vilna, female knitting-loom operators worked fifteen-hour days and earned the incredibly low wage of less than a ruble a week. Out of this miserly sum they also had to “repay” their boss for providing light in the factory during the dark hours and for the oil used in lubrication of the machines.

5. (5) So-called “independent” craftsmen had lost what control they might once have had over their labor and profits. In reality, they worked as subcontractors for larger enterprises, with a status equal to that of any lowly employee working for a basic wage. “What is saddest of all,” the report stated, “is [the artisan's] inability to exert any impact on his state of poverty through his own efforts.”Footnote ²⁹

One must not conclude that in the germinating “industrial revolution” of late tsarist Russia conditions such as these were simply the social cost paid disproportionately by those engaged in outmoded, handicraft labor, to the overall benefit and progress of a modern industrial economy and its laboring classes. Data show that higher output per worker (in terms of product value) among Jews in late nineteenth century industrial plants simply meant that they did more work for less pay.Footnote ³⁰ The miserable wages paid for factory labor went hand in hand with the deterioration of skilled craft workshops and the families that depended upon them.Footnote ³¹ Their case is reminiscent of English textile workers in England earlier in the century, about whom the British labor historian E. P. Thompson wrote: “For the power loom masters it was … a great convenience to have [domestic craft workers as] an auxiliary cheap labour force as a stand-by in good times [for outsourced jobs] and as a means of keeping down the wages of the women and girls who minded the power-looms. Moreover, there was scarcely no ‘transfer to the factory.’”Footnote ³²

It is considerably more difficult to track the changing standard of living among petty tradesmen, peddlers, “brokers,” jobbers, sales agents, and middlemen of all types, who left less of a paper trail than the carefully recorded wage scale in industry and crafts. However, much literary and documentary evidence points to what can already be surmised from the foregoing discussion: In a population of which over a third was pauperized, purchasing power was obviously reduced to a minimum. The small retail tradesman, street hawker, or market-stall keeper could not market his or her wares to any great advantage. In any case, the wholesale trade, dependent on meager sources of credit, and subject to business cycles and grain price fluctuations, could not remain independent of the poor market situation. Some undoubtedly were helped through temporary crises by Jewish free-loan societies and the web of unofficial mutual aid mechanisms that proliferated in the synagogues of that era.Footnote ³³

Kahan, as we have seen, was able to identify a Jewish entrepreneurial bourgeoisie within the Pale of Settlement, but given that it comprised only about 1 percent of the population, situated at its social apex, we can hardly dub it a “middle class,” or even a “class.” Meanwhile, the great majority of people whose occupational status placed them under the common rubric of “commerce” did not rise to the “middle” at all. The status line dividing manual labor from commercial activity was thus rapidly growing thinner, if it was not already meaningless.

Echoes of this ‘declassification’ of the Jewish population left their trace in later memoirs, whose writers recalled parents' desperate and often fruitless compensatory efforts to cling to a last vestige of “dignity” and to uphold a social demarcation that hardly reflected any economic difference of consequence.Footnote ³⁴

Wives and daughters of artisans and petty tradesmen were routinely engaged in breadwinning, mostly in small shops, inns, or market stalls. However, we cannot regard this, as some recent historians have, as a sign of women's “economic independence,” as a marker of their more “worldly” social role, or as “grooming for a career in commerce.”Footnote ³⁵ In reality, it reflected the plight of a petit-bourgeoisie ‘on the skids.’ Women's employment became most widespread in the most economically depressed parts of the Pale. Higher percentages of women in the work force in those areas went hand in hand with correspondingly high proportions of Jews working as draymen and porters, domestic servants and unskilled labor.Footnote ³⁶ Ultimately, hard times for petty tradespeople and craftsmen led to the final resort and the ultimate hardship: emigration.

The prospect of emigration to the New World may have seemed especially daunting to families who were dismayed that the move—and what might await them or their loved ones on the other side—signaled a final surrender to proletarization. In Marcus Ravage's classic immigrant memoir, An American in the Making, he recalls that as a young boy in Vaslui, Romania he had the impression that America was a place for those who had gone into bankruptcy, for deserting soldiers, absconding husbands and the like—“an exile which men fled to only in preference to going to prison.” Ravage's parents relinquished him, albeit reluctantly, because their once middle-class standing had eroded to something resembling genteel poverty. His father still made an effort to send his boy on his way in some kind of self-respecting style, to keep up appearances, though it took the sale of the family cow to do so.Footnote ³⁷

Lest accounts by Ravage and other memoirists be dismissed as suspect late reconstructions, it is instructive to compare very similar accounts reported in real-time proximity to the events by disinterested sources, which tend to corroborate memoiristic accounts. One such example occurs in a 1905 study conducted by Emily Greene Balch, the American ethnographer, who did fieldwork in the Slovakian area of what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Balch noted that the first Jew to emigrate from a town she visited was a Jewish cloth merchant who had gone bankrupt.Footnote ³⁸ Likewise, in a social survey of a shtetl in the Kiev Province (Ukraine), we read of an elderly storekeeper, once quite well off, reduced to a hole-in-the-wall shop, selling goods on consignment for a larger firm. Apart from two spinster daughters who helped out by sewing linens, all this man's children and their families (twenty-five people in all) had left for America within the space of six years. The money they sent kept him going, for his earnings amounted only to some 50 rubles a year. Altogether, nearly 400 (or 68 percent!) of the town's Jewish petty tradesmen and their family members had emigrated overseas in the ten years from 1893 to 1902.Footnote ³⁹

Countless similar cases are routinely recorded in the ethnographic literature on immigrants and their old-world background. One interviewed informant reported that her father was a former melamed (teacher in a traditional schoolroom for young children). In the period before the family's migration, they moved to a town where the father tried his luck at small-scale retailing, “but he wasn't a businessman and made hardly any money.” His older children “used to do [common] labor … carry[ing] stones for new buildings…. [M]other used to stay with father at the market all day and they would come home with about twenty-five kopeks.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Similar circumstances are revealed in letters written by Jews contemplating emigration, which were sent to a Zionist information bureau in Jaffa in what was then Ottoman Palestine.Footnote ⁴¹

Simon Kuznets argued that the Jewish commercial population was underrepresented in the emigration because its human capital—market knowledge, languages spoken, stock, and credit sources—was less transferable than mechanical skills, and thus tradespeople were deterred from taking such an uncertain step. By the same token, he suggests, simpler transferability of skills would explain the overrepresentation of “mechanic” workers of various types, and tailors in particular.Footnote ⁴² It is very likely, however, that the fluid movement between petty trade and other types of work might help explain some of these statistical distortions. Included among those categorized under “commerce” in the 1897 Russian census were a substantial number of people who evidently intended to abandon trade for wage work in America, which led them to declare a skilled or semi-skilled occupation upon arrival.Footnote ⁴³ They either had given up hope of self-employment, or had been advised to do so by those who preceded them across the ocean. In such case, the effect would be to swell the proportion of “mechanics” in the immigrant stream.

Herman Frank, a contemporary observer of the Jewish immigration, stated flatly, “The large majority of [Jewish immigrant] tailors had probably never before held a needle and thread in their lives, but rather had been small shopkeepers, teachers [melamdim], children from middle-class households, or had had no steady job or trade. But they came here to their relatives, who were already earning a living in the [tailoring] trade … and these new immigrants hoped to master the tailoring skills quickly.” He compared data from Russia and Galicia (for 1899 and 1900, respectively) with figures from the United States (1900–1925), and found there had been 162,860 Jewish tailors in the “old country” at the turn of the century, and nearly twice that number in America (306,672)!Footnote ⁴⁴

It has been argued that the underreporting of tradespeople in the immigrant stream meant that, sooner or later, their past experience in trade came to the fore as they readjusted to life in the New World, and that familiarity with an entrepreneurial culture—buying and selling—was part of the human capital brought by Jewish immigrants to America.Footnote ⁴⁵ I would not dispute the point entirely, but rather qualify the issue in two ways. First, even peasants are familiar with buying and selling, yet they are not considered middle class and do not readily form a commercial class. The point is that the experience of the east European Jewish petit bourgeoisie was one that impelled many of its members to seek employment in manual trades, sometimes before migration, and overwhelmingly so after migration. There is therefore little to sustain a “predisposition” argument. Subsequent developments in terms of second-generation mobility patterns must not overshadow these basic facts.

Second, I am making the case for shifting our theoretical focus from “human capital” to include “social capital.” That is, we need to look at the situation not from the perspective of culturally recognized “skills” and “values,” but rather from the aspect of the dynamics of real people's economic relationships in specific socio-economic contexts. The point here is that Jews from eastern Europe emigrated when their social capital was reduced to almost nil, tipping the balance of remaining at home versus migration, toward migration.

*****

The “declassification” of eastern European Jewry (especially in Russia) toward the end of the nineteenth century was the culmination of a process with roots going back at least to the early 1850s: a progressive weakening of economic and social distinctions between petty tradespeople and small artisans, and between artisans and laborers.Footnote ⁴⁶ Simultaneously the gap widened between a very small, favored minority at the top and, below them, a population of five million of the underemployed, underfed, and un-statused. If the last years of the century seem qualitatively different from what had come before, it is because the cumulative result of decades of impoverishment, capped by new governmental restrictions on the Jews' residence rights, occupations, and educational opportunities was the loss of class itself. What is at stake is no less than the recognition that Jews were being removed from what could be considered “normal” economic development (even by eastern European standards), and being reduced to the invidious position of a caste unto themselves.Footnote ⁴⁷

This state of affairs must be clearly distinguished from the relatively loose Jewish social structure and the relative porousness of its internal boundaries, which had prevailed long before the mid-nineteenth century. The social pecking order among Jews in earlier eras was never truly comparable to fixed, ascriptive divisions into hereditary estates.Footnote ⁴⁸ This was largely because Jewry lacked most of the politicized functions of the social classes maintained by other pre-modern societies. The separate feudal estates, generally speaking, were a system of governance that found expression in the fixed arrangement of rights, prerogatives, and mutual obligations attendant upon each superior or subordinate rank, from the landowning aristocracy (who were servitors of king and emperor as well as rulers over their own domains), right down to the enserfed tenant-peasantry (whose obligations always far outweighed their rights). The landowner-tenant paradigm was clearly inapplicable to Jews, who were never enserfed and, by and large, were always barred from land ownership. Jews, moreover, had neither a church with property and income to be managed, nor monastic orders to be housed and governed, nor bishops to be chosen. For that matter, Jews had no established, elevated, or hierarchical class of clergy. They were not integrated into any of these “normative” pre-modern systems of governance, either secular or ecclesiastical.

Nonetheless, Jews did form a contractual part of the feudal system and, as such, were not quite anomalous. As individuals, Jews were often leaseholders of farm revenue from noblemen's estates or were managers of concessions on their properties (mills, timber, inns and taverns, and entire villages). As communities, Jews obtained and lived under the terms of charters or “privileges” granted by the ruler in royal or feudal towns. Continuing well into the nineteenth century (and in Russia, right through the century), Jews as a ‘nation’ were a legally separate sector within the larger polity. Special state laws limited, or at times enabled their residential and occupational rights. Their own judges and courts adjudicated their civil suits and legal documents. They paid a separate, collective, per capita tax, along with other special duties and taxes, such as a candle tax, and a meat tax—korobka—to finance their local self-governing communal administration or kahal.Footnote ⁴⁹ Closely resembling burgher communes, Jews of various economic stations were all subject to the same codes of law, rabbinical courts, and standards of ethics, and could move up and down the social ladder with no formal or arbitrary restrictions.Footnote ⁵⁰

Informal social distinctions, forming impediments to truly free social interaction and mobility, could therefore assume all the more significance—perhaps, as one leading historian suggests, exaggeratedly so.Footnote ⁵¹ Jewry always possessed a social hierarchy composed of men, women, and children (age and gender were “natural” status categories), divided among merchants, artisans and laborers of varying stations and degrees, and supervised by oligarchic communal boards. Social distinctions operated to determine such matters as the selection of marriage partners for one's children, the location of one's seat in the synagogue, the number of guests permitted at a circumcision celebration or wedding, or the right to vote in the communal assembly. This situation remained stable over the course of long eras despite intervening changes of regime or political boundaries. This was partly because Jews were largely dependent for their collective security, and at times their very right of domicile, on the wealthiest members of their group. The latter held extensive leasehold rights and always managed the contractual, legal, and extra-legal relations with the governing authorities. From this advantageous position, they also exercised considerable internal authority and influence.Footnote ⁵²

On the other hand, the system possessed structural flexibility: A fortunate marriage, lucky transaction, or, alternatively, a debilitating or fatal disease, could cause a rapid reversal of fortune. This state of affairs precluded extremes of subservience or permanent privilege, but also meant constant uncertainty and social friction. To read into this pre-industrial social order the presence of actually conscious and contentious “classes” would be as anachronistic as it is naïve to conceive of early modern Jewry in eastern Europe as an undifferentiated folk society.Footnote ⁵³ It is more accurate to posit that Jewish society overall was characterized by relatively greater internal mobility than was Christian society taken as a whole, but not appreciably more so than contemporary Christian burgher communities.

The attenuated extremes of Jewish social-class relations (neither lord nor serf) and their relative fluidity have prompted wide and speculative thinking on the supposedly “inherent,” middle-class mentality among Jews, or contrariwise, the ostensibly long-standing history of internal social antagonism. The thesis of choice has depended more or less on whether the thinker held a middle-class or a Marxian point of view.

Reading Jewish social history “on the left” was once a more developed branch of academic discourse, but since the 1980s relatively little new work of this sort has been written, with a few notable exceptions.Footnote ⁵⁴ This is surely a by-product of the steep decline of traditional socialist parties and the demise of erstwhile communist regimes, and the ascendancy of postmodernism, including its critique of older political, intellectual, and academic schools of discourse. Still, the subject of internal social tension in Jewish society, and how or whether this tension was negotiated or exacerbated toward the end of the nineteenth century, is a necessary component of our analysis here. It bears directly on the question of whether eastern European Jewry was, as I suggest, in the throes of “declassification,” or instead was re-emerging along the contours of modern, class-defined societies.

As for the ostensible Jewish “middle-class mentality” thesis, it has a long and checkered past, ranging from the long-discredited work of Werner SombartFootnote ⁵⁵ to writings that are more reputable. It has played an increasing role, especially since the end of the Second World War, in social-scientific attempts to explain American Jews' exceptional economic performance. As I have explained at length elsewhere, these more recent efforts to identify middle-class “values” in Jewish society that overlap with American values are over-determined and fraught with conceptual issues.Footnote ⁵⁶

Here I can address these issues only partially and briefly. To assess underlying Jewish class structure and economic ideologies, it will be helpful to focus on two topics: The first is the influences of and conflicts generated by the Hasidic movement, the pietistic mystical trend in eastern European Judaism dating from the second half of the eighteenth century that held sway over extensive portions of eastern European Jewry. This sheds some light on the question of Jewish “middle-class” values. The second is the dynamics of artisan-journeyman relations in craft guilds and workingmen's associations.

*****

We have found suggestive analogies between the Jews' experience in the birth pangs of the industrial revolution in Poland and Russia and the earlier travails of England's incipient working class. In light of these, it is worth noting E. P. Thompson's view that Non-conformist or Dissenting Protestantism (in social form, a type of religion not entirely unlike eastern European Hasidism) bore relevance to subsequent social developments:

Hasidism was similarly diffuse in its organizational aspects, with feuding and spontaneously dividing centers of leadership (about seventy Hasidic dynasties proliferated in Poland and Russia),Footnote ⁵⁸ and is likewise difficult to reduce to a single form or character. It was similar, also, in its fellowship-based rituals and participatory enthusiasms. Hasidism, too, was mainly a small-town social phenomenon right to the end of the nineteenth century. Finally, and not least, it resembled the Dissenting tradition in that established elites received it with hostility. Those hostile to the Hasidim from the standpoint of the then-regnant orthodoxy felt quite the same way as did American preacher Ezra Stiles about the evangelical “Great Awakening” in the mid-eighteenth century: “[Their] religion was made to consist in extravigancies [sic] and indecencies, which were not according to the faith once delivered. Multitudes were seriously, soberly, and solemnly out of their wits.”Footnote ⁵⁹

There have been interesting attempts in the past to characterize Hasidism as a quasi-populist, anti-elitist, socio-religious protest against the regnant system of social relations.Footnote ⁶⁰ Later historians have more or less refuted this view. They have found that the founder of the Hasidic movement, Rabbi Israel the “Baal Shem Tov,” was not the unassuming faith-healer-cum-backwoods-charismatic depicted in popular lore, but rather an esteemed local figure financially supported by his community.Footnote ⁶¹ Furthermore, the mixed social composition of the early Hasidic groups and the inclusion of wealthy patrons as the movement developed in the early nineteenth century seem to defy a deterministic identification of the pietists with social protest from “below.”Footnote ⁶²

Although we cannot call Hasidism a “forcing ground” of working class culture in quite the same way as Thompson meant regarding Protestant Dissenters, it did capture or heighten the value of certain non-utilitarian impulses within pre-capitalist Jewish society. Its metaphysical, communitarian ideology meant that members were to ‘check their social assets at the door.’ Among the devotees who periodically flocked to their masters' “courts,” wealthy men were encouraged, even pressured, to extend their stay as long as possible (lengthening into months, rather than days or weeks). These served to attract and maintain many other followers who had scant means or no apparent livelihood and who formed a constant retinue of pilgrims.Footnote ⁶³ In that limited and specific manner, Hasidism offered an alternative, even provocative, egalitarianism.

That said, it would be simplistic to formulate the socio-economic implications of Hasidism as a matter of communitarian ideals alone. Looked at more critically, the controversy over Hasidism in nineteenth-century eastern Europe encapsulated a long-brewing Jewish conflict over political economy. Using this perspective, it becomes possible to see that Jewish society was never simply either proto-bourgeois, ‘endowed,’ as it were, by cultural and social values with middle-class thought habits, or a ‘proto-proletarian,’ plebeian population being drawn inexorably into the class struggle. Rather, while Jewry was indeed stratified vertically, it was also subdivided horizontally, with ramifications for various issues related to class and ideology. The Hasidic variant of Jewish communal patterns was one, widely diffused component of this horizontal differentiation.

The Hasidic movement tended to establish sectarian Gemeinschaft around rites of consumption and mutual dependence.Footnote ⁶⁴ The rebbe's court, as we have seen, assumed the character of a site of pilgrimage and, not coincidentally, was a place where relatively large sums of cash and commodities changed hands.Footnote ⁶⁵ Some noblemen were reportedly eager to attract Hasidic leaders to their domains because “it was good for business.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Yet, as much as the Hasidic outlook was positively disposed toward societal welfare, it generally looked askance at energies invested in securing anything more than a basic livelihood. It assigned greater significance to spiritual activity that might prompt divine intervention in the mundane world, and ostensibly denied any direct or necessary cause-and-effect relationship between human endeavor and economic success.Footnote ⁶⁷

Among Hasidim the object of individual as well as group devotions was to attain genuine, sustained, and not always “planned” moments of spiritual hyper-clarity. These ecstatic states of mind (hislahavus) served as the channel via which they sought dveykus: to “cleave” unto the ultimate or divine realm. The absolute supremacy of religious devotion in Hasidism required what one critical scholar has called a “fundamental restriction” on the “rational use of time … for practical purposes and for the realization of religious values,” extending, at its logical extreme, to “the sanctification of idleness.”Footnote ⁶⁸

In the nominally “regular” orthodox or anti-sectarian (misnagdish) community, where the priority of the spiritual and eternal over the temporal and material was similarly encoded,Footnote ⁶⁹ the behavioral expression of these values possessed a different twist. Societal productivity, not consumption, was crucial to the legitimate order of life. One's property, income, and line of work (trading, handicrafts, or common labor) had a direct bearing on one's communal status. These matters of status, in turn, received religious recognition and reinforcement. Thus, matrimonial preference for bridegrooms with superior religious learning, and for brides from ‘proper’ backgrounds of pious virtue (and handsome dowries), perpetuated a close association between socioeconomic and religious attainments.

Nearly all of this, it is true, could be found within Hasidic society, but with the crucial difference that Hasidism subordinated all these elements to eschatological metaphysics and to charismatic communitarianism. The Hasidic worldview, for example, went beyond the prevailing standards of the eastern European Jewish tradition in its demarcation between the spiritual and the temporal. The binary, essentialist division between these twin poles of existence was easily projected in social form as a distinction between the two genders. Men's psychic life was celebrated as spiritual (though this spiritualism was not of the ascetic variety), while women's corporeality, while undeniably completing the mystical perfection obtainable through the combined spiritual/temporal polarity, could almost never be considered anything but the mirror-opposite of preferred male attributes.Footnote ⁷⁰ The Hasidic congregation was a venue for male bonding, away from the demands of family life, with all of its pragmatic negotiations over time and labor; there was no female counterpart or ‘women's auxiliary.’Footnote ⁷¹

Regular orthodox (misnagdish, or so-called “Lithuanian”) opponents of Hasidic Judaism generally couched their arguments against sectarianism in purely religious terms, but they were clearly aware of the economic theme, and viewed Hasidism with suspicion on these grounds as well. One early anti-Hasidic tract pointed out that young men, “not yet twenty years of age,” were enticed to join the sect by blandishments such as, “You will use the money [pocket money offered to the new recruit] … and you will eat, there will be no thought of fasts and deprivations, you will be only happy and of good cheer.”Footnote ⁷² In such critiques, the offending “consumerism” was compounded by the idea that the impressionable young men in question, unable to exert moral independence, were being seduced and led to abandon accepted Jewish ethics.Footnote ⁷³

As Hasidism's influence spread widely throughout the region, such objections carried less and less weight. But post-traditional maskilim (“Enlighteners,” adherents of Haskalah: Enlightenment), who were similarly appalled by the pietists, often continued to put their case in social and economic terms. In a sense, we can regard them as the secularized, worldly counterparts of established orthodoxy.Footnote ⁷⁴ They viewed Hasidism as a form of fanaticism that was sapping Jewish society's ability to support itself. The ‘scandal’ of Hasidism, as they saw it, lay in its shameless social parasitism and its disingenuous pose of otherworldliness.Footnote ⁷⁵

It is noteworthy in this regard that in their campaign against Hasidism, and traditionalists in general, maskilic writers saw something very much awry in the religious valorization and spiritualization of male consumption (connoting passivity, and inevitably also implying erotic passivity) and the concomitant relegation of women to the comparatively active realms of productivity and corporeality. Part of their views on the need to “productivize” Jewish society entailed a reorientation and rebalancing of gender relations: male productive energy had to be privileged over spiritualized/feminized, passive consumption, and female physical and mental drudgery had to give way to more uplifting, spiritual, and aesthetic (“moral”) activities.Footnote ⁷⁶

Critical Jewish social thought in eastern Europe in the mid-nineteenth century focused on these economically grounded issues. This discourse corresponded to a social reality in which Jewish poverty and general ‘backwardness’ was a perennial concern, but endemic pauperization had not yet set in. Many Jews, if not most, saw economic well-being as theoretically attainable and considered the opportunities of self-enhancement to be open to every member of the community. But they differed over the ideologies associated with the desired state of affairs. What some saw as a question of proprietary or labor relations in Gesellschaft, moored within a system of graded but unfixed status ranks, others viewed as a question of communitas: they downplayed the efficacy of human agency per se, resisted general prescriptions and programmed, innovative interventions, and tended to favor ad hoc and ad hominem solutions to individuals' concerns.

Ostensibly ‘middle-class’ social and economic values were therefore much contested in the culture wars waged between various sectors of Jewish society throughout the period prior to the onset of mass emigration. Thus, when viewed as a traditional society facing modernization under harsh conditions, east European Jewry appears to have been beset by particularly fraught internal relations. Conflicts over notions of communal integrity, economic value, and social capital would be resolved later, in America (for those who emigrated) and Soviet Russia (for those who remained behind).

*****

The second main arena we will examine in tracing the social declassing of east European Jewry and its impact toward the end of the nineteenth century is that of the artisan sector and the work ethic that evolved. Artisans, rather than industrial workers, constituted the main body of Jewish labor and furnished a major part of the emigration to America.Footnote ⁷⁷ Briefly, I will argue that pre-capitalist standards of employment and rewards in the realm of social capital were increasingly eroded, but there was no new reconfiguration in the form of a modern class-structured society.

This thesis runs counter to the narrative promoted by two generations of writers, mainly from the Jewish left, which valorized the rise of a Jewish proletariat in the period from before the 1880s to the First World War. According to this quasi-canonical version, a progressive class consciousness developed “organically” among Jewish workers, moving from sporadic master-journeymen clashes within craft associations to the formation of separate worker associations, radical “circles,” and strike funds, and matured eventually into a full-fledged workers' movement composed of unions and radical socialist parties. Not only was the Jewish labor movement endowed with a coherent historical pedigree, but Jewish workers were also credited with having spearheaded working-class organization in the Russian empire.Footnote ⁷⁸

That reading of Jewish labor history is essentially driven by a labor ‘movement’ perspective rather than by a social-historical analysis of the life world of workers. It tends to transmute the small craft workshop into an embryonic factory and confers upon the strike movement that developed in the Jewish mechanical trades at the end of the nineteenth century a distinction typically reserved in Marxian historiography for a class-conscious workers' revolt. In fact, however, the tensions within the Jewish craft shop were not a ‘class struggle,’ properly understood, for two reasons. First, the employees saw themselves as future self-employed master artisans more than as members of a stable class of wage laborers. Second, the master-artisans who employed them were of the same economic and social class as the journeymen, and were progressively being reduced to the status of workers engaged under contract by stores and larger manufacturers. The attempt to rally employed craftsmen around a spurious ‘class’ consciousness was doomed from the start, and led nowhere. Strikes won short-term gains in terms of shorter working hours and higher wages, but these were soon vitiated. By the turn of the century further strike action was considered counterproductive, and leaders concluded that “it is impossible to conduct an economic struggle” under prevailing conditions. This, more than anything else perhaps, confirms the absence of a truly modern class structure in east European Jewry.Footnote ⁷⁹

The evidence, therefore, suggests that it is an exaggeration (at best) to assert that Jewish workers had become what one writer called “a large and concentrated urban … proletariat.”Footnote ⁸⁰ The real revolution in the lives of Jewish workers lay not in the stalled attempt to foment a “class struggle” where class had all but evaporated, but rather in the secularization of worker culture and the Jewish work ethic.Footnote ⁸¹ Workingmen's societies tended to adopt a new, purely economic organizing principle, replacing their more traditional, religious purposes with instrumental ones. When craft workers no longer felt able to negotiate for social capital within their old craft societies (khevrehs), they broke with their entire worldview, leaving the older groups largely intact and pioneering a new format instead.Footnote ⁸² The point, moreover, is not that individual workers were abandoning religious traditions in their private lives—many did not do so—but rather that working relations, mutual assistance, and the handling of labor grievances were routed into secular, purely instrumental groups that had no sacred function or legitimacy within the older, religious social order. Thus, while khevrehs were all-male institutions (in keeping with their liturgical function), the new “funds” and other union-forerunners, albeit still predominantly male, were open to women.Footnote ⁸³

Nevertheless, it would stretch the point to assert that with the displacement of the religious khevreh Jewish crafts or manufacturing employees readily replaced the former ideology with a new, Marxist one.Footnote ⁸⁴ East European Jewry in the decades before the turn of the century displayed much ideological ferment, but those directly involved constituted a small segment of society: the intelligentsia and limited circles drawn into their orbit. The Jewish public at large knew about these new currents, but was neither thoroughly engaged by them nor yet able to realign its civic life around them.

This conclusion is borne out even by a ‘strong case’ of Jewish political radicalism, namely, that of the “Bund,” the most successful Jewish socialist party of that time. The Bund won its rank-and-file following, not because it developed a clear, autonomous ideology, but precisely because of its adept focus on praxis. Even the Bund's worst enemies, of whom Lenin was one, never minimized the party's vaunted organizational abilities.Footnote ⁸⁵ As a leading historian of modern Jewish politics, Jonathan Frankel, put it, the Bund “saw its role in the [Russian Social Democratic Workers] party as that of mediator, shunning polemics and seeking to reconcile the warring factions.”Footnote ⁸⁶ In the decade between its formative years (1893–1897) and the violent events of the 1905 Russian revolution, the Bund took up “economic struggle” (strikes), which proved popular because it placed workers' material gains ahead of doctrinal purity or the quiet preparation of a revolutionary underground. During 1905–1906, the party participated extensively in large-scale militant demonstrations and strikes and saw to the organizing of Jewish self-defense.Footnote ⁸⁷ Having fought honorably for the sake of workers' and Jewish honor, however, the movement lost momentum in the post-1905 reaction, even as Jewish emigration reached unprecedented levels.

It appears from the foregoing that the Jewish trajectory differed, in the end, from the paradigm described by E. P. Thompson's classic English study. Thompson showed that a working class, considered as a social phenomenon, is a multi-dimensional, social, political, and cultural way of living and thinking. Its members derive their self-awareness, and hence their politics, from their gradual occupation of a fixed place within the governance of state and society. In contrast, east European Jews were denied such a place; theirs was a short-circuited development with no clear political destination. Moreover, the causes for the foreshortened process of class development in the Jewish case had to do not only with the plight of the Jewish artisans and the sparse employment of Jews in larger factories, but also—and crucially—with the insufficient rise of a Jewish bourgeoisie against whose interests a proper working class culture might begin to find focus.

The poverty that formed the backdrop of the mass Jewish migration must therefore be assigned a “negative” legacy (meaning, its “non-” quality): It played an important role in de-sacralizing the Jewish work ethic and workers' culture, and it provoked among most Jews an essentially apolitical response to their social predicament. The diffuse impact of new ideological strategies speaks volumes about the overall blunting of actual class differences within the Jewish population at the time. On the verge of becoming a migrant population, their sociocultural baggage could not be characterized simply as either “proto-capitalist,” or “proto-socialist.”Footnote ⁸⁸

To sum up: While peasants were beginning to be drawn into the emerging manufacturing sector, and while foreign investment fuelled the financial market and major enterprises, Jews were marginalized in their economic pursuits and in their Pale of Settlement. In contrast with their historical functions in earlier eras as links between other actors in a regional economic system, Jews in late-nineteenth-century eastern Europe were forced into the procrustean bed of a truly “ethnic economy,” dependent upon their own dwindling resources for employment and credit opportunities. As a group, their power of social agency was severely attenuated. Despite the individual successes of select Jewish notables, the loopholes that permitted some Jews to exit this closed system were being narrowed rather than widened.Footnote ⁸⁹ All but a tiny percentage were now part of one sub-class—which is tantamount to no class at all—and stood little chance of being integrated within the surrounding political economy.

All that we know about Jewish life in eastern Europe points toward the conclusion that by emigrating to a highly developed industrial and commercial society Jews confronted circumstances of politics and economics so different as to require a wholesale restructuring. Their economic transformation from a marginal caste to members of a modern class society would have huge ramifications in terms of their social ethos. This transformation alone could endow them with the tools they needed to integrate into the new society.