Ellie Schainker's study aims to change conventional opinion on converted Jews in imperial Russia. The traditional view is embodied in Sholem Aleichem's novel Tevye the Milkman, in which Tevye and his wife Golda sit shiva (mourn) for their daughter, who has converted in order to marry the Ukrainian Fedka. Schainker explains, “By asking how converts functioned in Jewish society, I hope to sidestep the emotional, literary rendering of apostates as dead to their Jewish kin, and account for the overwhelming archival evidence of ongoing social, religious, and economic ties between converts and Jews in imperial Russia. In this vein, my work on converts is as much about a minority of radical boundary crossers as it is about the majority of their former, traditionalist coreligionists who tried to defend cultural and communal boundaries in the face of conversion” (10).
Schainker describes unusual individuals who crossed the religious Rubicon. Using rare materials from archives in Russia and the United States, she depicts converts from among the lower classes and rural population. The focus differs from the kind of converts who were the subject of Saul Ginsburg's famous book, Meshumodim in Russland (Converted Jews in Russia), published in 1946. In contrast to the social elite—medical doctors, government censors, and professors—Schainker depicts minor missionaries who peddled Christianity, marginal Jews who fell in love with a Christian neighbor or a servant, and the poor who saw distinct financial advantage in conversion, such as access to educational institutions or a permit to live in Russia's capital cities. Schainker also includes “simple” Jews who fell in love with the Christian religion. After converting, she notes, many Jews did not move far from their homes, and some resided close to their parents and family.
Here are some of the protagonists of the book: “In 1855 the Jewish teenager Faiba Nakhim from the village of Smorgona in Vilna Province applied for conversion after having begun preparations himself by learning prayers and articles of faith from Christians with whom he had ‘occasional contact.’ Malka Kuks, the daughter of a mill leaseholder, ascribed her 1864 conversion to her exposure to Orthodoxy and her acclimation to Orthodox life in her village. Roshka Shmulovna Stovatitskaia from the village of Svenchino (Lomzha Province, Congress Poland) explained to the Vilna Consistory in 1870 that ‘from a young age, living among a Christian population, I had the opportunity to become acquainted with their faith’” (102–3). These represent only a few examples of individuals whose truncated stories line the book's pages.
Of these people and their native surroundings, Shainker writes, “Though vague and imprecise, these attributions of conversion to exposure and sociability are an acknowledgment of the multiple cultural fluencies bred in the multiconfessional spaces of the Pale of Settlement where, as one woman noted, many different kinds of Christians lived. Far from the image of the shtetl as a place of Jews alone, the villages and towns these neophytes described were meeting grounds that opened up the possibility of exploring other faiths” (103).
The thesis, if true, points to flaws in Russian Jewish historiography, especially in the kind of evidence and interpretation that Jewish historians have provided. With some exceptions, Jewish historians have shared the Jewish community's hostility regarding conversion, and have likely exaggerated Jewish separation, language barriers, and psychological gaps. But perhaps real life was more fluid, interaction more casual and natural.
After finishing the book, I am still weighed down by doubt. The vast array of materials brought to prove an intensive interaction between Jews and Christians seem to this reviewer equally capable of confirming the conventional viewpoint. Greater instances of interaction do not change the fact that converts ceased to be members of the Jewish community and became something else—wards of the state, brothers or sisters in the church, or simply members of a Christian community with new Christian wives or husbands. Because of the fear that a convert might backslide into Jewish practice, the religious authorities were warned to be vigilant.
It is precisely this need for surveillance that epitomizes the situation of the convert in Russia. The absence of a broad civil society armed with the principles of tolerance meant that multiple identities were rare and border-crossing so unforgivingly fatal. The brittle construction of religious difference explains why a “Russian of the Mosaic persuasion” did not appear and why varieties of Judaism that were budding here and there—for example in Jewish Christian sects like Jacob Gordon's New Christians—could not find fertile soil for growth. Similarly, the most problematic cases, such as a convert with a trailing Jewish spouse, were resolved through forcible divorce. Thus, interaction by individuals was probably marked less by personal initiative and rigidly scripted to maintain group separation.
In a sense it does not matter whether you view the evidence as demarcating instances of freedom or coercion; the fact is that there was a great deal more interaction than previously thought. One consequence is that after 1855, when the state ceased to engage, proselytizing to Jews did not stop because society at large and the church adopted the goal. Further, increased interaction did not reduce antisemitism or inhibit pogroms.
This book raises important issues in Jewish social history and adds a theoretical voice to a strong body of knowledge about Jewish converts in Russia in works by, among others, Shaul Ginsburg, Mikhail Agursky, Eugene Avrutin, and Judith Kornblatt. This book will be essential reading for students of Jewish social history and especially for scholars of Christian-Jewish dialogue.
