Jüdische Eliten im Russichen Reich (Jewish Elites in the Russian Empire) , and: Crisis, Revolution, and Russian Jews , and: Jews in the Russian Army, 1827-1917: Drafted into Modernity (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Jüdische Eliten im Russichen Reich (Jewish Elites in the Russian Empire), and: Crisis, Revolution, and Russian Jews, and: Jews in the Russian Army, 1827-1917: Drafted into Modernity Brian Horowitz Verena Dohrn , Jüdische Eliten im Russichen Reich (Jewish Elites in the Russian Empire). 482 pp. Cologne: Böhlau, 2008. ISBN-13 978-3412202330. €59.90. Jonathan Frankel , Crisis, Revolution, and Russian Jews. 324 pp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. ISBN-13 978-0521513647. $85.00. Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern , Jews in the Russian Army, 1827-1917: Drafted into Modernity. 307 pp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. ISBN-13 978-1521515733. $95.00. The three books under review draw our attention to a number of approaches to writing the history of the Jews in Russia and Eastern Europe. Jonathan Frankel's features a conception of modern Jewish history that puts "crisis" at the center, while Petrovsky-Shtern and Dohrn seem to imitate the approach pioneered by Michael Stanislawski and John Klier, who showed an infinitely more complicated relationship between Jews and the Russian government than had been recognized before.1 Just as did Stanislawski and Klier, so too Petrovsky-Shtern and Dohrn inevitably interface with the so-called Lachrymose School of history, especially as practiced by Simon Dubnov, who still casts a shadow over the historiography of Jews in the Russian Empire.2 As [End Page 673] is well known, Salo Baron formulated the term to refer to historical studies that emphasize the persecutions endured by East European Jews.3 In Crisis, Revolution, and Russian Jews the highly influential and deeply mourned Professor Jonathan Frankel affirms the centrality of crisis as the motor of human history. That idea formed the basis for Frankel's two masterful monographs, Prophesy and Politics: Socialism, Nationalism, and the Russian Jews, 1862-1917 and The Damascus Affair: "Ritual Murder," Politics, and the Jews in 1840.4 In the book's introduction he reveals the biographical foundation for his lifelong approach: That I emphasize the importance of crises in [Russian-Jewish] history seems to me natural enough given the times and the places that shaped my formative years. Even though I personally came through totally unscathed, it is nevertheless true that I grew to adulthood and maturity during a period when danger and drama were part of the woof and weave of history. As a child I lived through the Second World War in Britain; I reached my thirteenth birthday in July 1948, when the new state of Israel was fighting its war of independence; and since I moved to that country in 1964, it has experienced no less than six major armed conflicts, as well as two prolonged Palestinian uprisings. ... However, it was the June (or Six-Day) War of 1967 that first brought home to me the idea that crises, however short-lived, could actually serve as turning points in the course of history. (9) The essays in this volume, published posthumously by his wife, the esteemed scholar Edith Frankel, embody the "crisis" approach, which emphasizes the play of external factors in history—unexpected events, the actions of the Russian state regarding its Jewish subjects, and suprapersonal ideology (the various ideas of intellectuals about how to improve society).5 This volume opens with Frankel's famous article, "Crisis as a Factor in Modern Jewish Politics," in which he argues that the pogroms of 1881-82 transformed East European Jewry by ushering in awareness of the need for drastic change. In [End Page 674] the decades following the pogroms two million would emigrate to the United States, and a small but highly tenacious group would form the physical and ideological basis for a national home in Palestine. In the volume, Frankel also grapples with tensions that emerge from the "crisis" focus. In a number of articles he deals directly with biography, treating the relationship between the individual and the "crisis period" through which he/she was living. Frankel shows how individuals struggle with external factors, how they try to shape their reality in spite of strong countervailing forces. For example, in the article on the formative Hebrew author Yosef Hayim Brenner, Frankel traces the writer's ideological development from General Zionist to Revolutionary...