Soviet Jewry on the Eve of the Holocaust: A Social and Demographic Profile by Mordechai s> Altshuler (review)

Abstract

368 SEER, 8I, 2, 2003 reduced, as had been General Ironside, to the role of gathering information for a policy which had been determined earlier and would not alter, namely an acceptance that Polandwould be defeated without eitherFranceor Britain takingaction againstGermany. Department ofInternational Historg ANITAJ. PRAZMOWSKA London School ofEconomics Altshuler, Mordechai. Sovziet Jewry on theEve of the Holocaust.A Socialand Demographic Profile. The Center for Research of East EuropeanJewry of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Yad Vashem International Center for Holocaust Studies, Jerusalem, I998. xx + 346 pp. Notes. Tables. Appendix. Bibliography.Index. $30.00. NOTlong ago Ezra Mendelsohn, writingin these pages, observed that 'today, with the once mighty Soviet regime lying in ruins and its leaders revealed as tyrannicaldictators,the notion that itsestablishmentwas "good for theJews" seems monstrous'. Mordechai Altshuler'snew book demonstrates that there were copious reasonswhy manyJews in post-I91 7 Russia, contra Mendelsohn, might have reachedpreciselythat conclusion. Altshuler has already published a crucial book on the demography of the Jews of the Soviet Union in the period after I945. In this work he has turned to the earlier period, aided by the greater availability of the figures of the censuses of I926 and I939, as well as the aborted census of I937 (which Altshuler does find to have been flawed). He considers the changing geographical distribution of the Jewish population, in which a number of phenomena are apparent.The firstmight best be described as the disintegration of the old Pale of Settlement, those regions of the Russian Empire where mostJews were obliged to live. The second is the acceleration of the pre-war Jewish trend towardsurbanization.Altshuler'sdata also allow him to explore the phenomena of acculturation and assimilation, viewed from both an economic and social perspective. What Altshuler reveals is a significantJewish success story in the pre-war USSR, the more so when their statusis contrastedwith that ofJews in either the tsaristempire or in any of the Soviet Union's immediate neighbours.The Soviets solved the vexatious 'Jewish Question' as an economic problem by thoroughly integrating the Jews into the growing national economy. The Jews, whose passion for education as a tool for upward mobility had been stifled by tsarist norms, made the most of new professional and economic opportunities. According to Altshuler's figures, on the eve of the Second WorldWar, every fourth Soviet physician, dentist and pharmacistwas aJew, aswas everyfifthSovietjurist (p. i68). Change was not restricted to the top echelons. While the percentage of Jewish labourers in heavy industry (i.6 per cent) was lower than their percentage ofthegeneralpopulation (I.78 percent),itnonethelessrepresented a strikingaccomplishmentof 'productivization'.On the other hand, Altshuler parses the figures that appear to show some success in settlingJews on the land as agriculturistsand demonstrates that they are highly misleading. He REVIEWS 369 suggests that the Soviets were no more successful that the tsars in making farmersout of theJews. Jews also provided the cadresthat the young Soviet stateneeded to survive. The influx of Jews into the Party, the state bureaucracy, the security organs and the army allowed the Bolsheviksto escape the 'boycott' of the servitorsof the Old Regime. In a word, Jews proved excellent raw material for the fashioning of the 'New Soviet Man', and this was reflected in their overrepresentationin the Soviet 'middleclasses'. None of this was accidental, of course.Jews had a centuries-long habit of mobility behind them, markedby both internalmigrationwithin the Russian Empire and emigration abroad. The bizarre decision of the Russian high command in I9I5 to move Jews away from the front constituted the initial dismantling of the Pale of Settlement. The Jews were already a highly urbanized group, although this statement must be qualifiedby the reminder that, in tsaristterminology, a Jewish shtetlwas considered 'urban'whether it was a large village or a medium-sized town. Nonetheless, Soviet economic development transformed the Jews into the USSR's most highly urbanized national minority. While the capitals of Moscow and Leningrad proved particularlywelcoming, Jews became a presence in almost every large Soviet city. Virtuallyevery state requirementfound aJewish solution. Soviet effortsto attractforeign capital elicited a response from foreignJewish groups,like the ready to fundprojectsto settleJews on the land. The need forpolyglot cadres for the multi-lingual state was...