Russian Jews Research Articles

Between Peretz Smolenskin and Ahad Ha’am: The Forgotten Historiography of the Jewish National Movement Hibbat Zion

Abstract When we study the Jewish-national historiography of the last quarter of the 19th century, there is a tendency to pass directly from Smolenskin’s doctrine to the Zionist-cultural approach of Ahad Ha’am and his students, omitting the works written in between. However, even before the emergence of Ahad Ha’am as a cultural icon in the Jewish national movement, some Hibbat Zion activists engaged in Hebrew cultural activities directed at shaping national Jewish consciousness. The main figures in this trend were Saul Pinchas Rabinowitz and Avraham Shalom Friedberg. Their world view was based on education that advocated proto-nationalism: Jewish solidarity, love of the Hebrew language, promoting Hebrew newspapers, and preserving Jewish tradition. To this they added settlement in Eretz Israel as a solution for the harsh conditions of the Jews in Russia. They edited literary and scientific collections in Hebrew and Jewish historiography and wrote historical monographs and biographies. In this way, they sought to introduce national historical protagonists instead of the Hasskala’s pantheon of historical characters to vividly illuminate periods of historical “golden ages” suited to the national ideology and teach the lesson of historical history—that Hibbat Zion is the solution to the plight of Jews and Judaism.

Structuring Jewish Buenos Aires at the end of the long nineteenth century

ABSTRACT A common Jewish Argentine creation story begins in 1889, with 824 Russian Jews disembarking in Buenos Aires and ushering in three decades of massive Jewish migration to that city. In six key themes, this article expands the parameters of that story chronologically, spatially, culturally, and politically. It focuses on the Jewish gaucho (skilled horseman) as an iconic representation of the intersections of Jewish and non-Jewish Buenos Aires; the meanings of neighborhood; the tragedy of ‘white slavery’; cultural institutions; Sephardic porteños (Buenos Aires residents); and the Jewish anarchists and socialists.

“Beauty and the Beast”: Romance, Reform, and Mystery in the Films of Lon Chaney

“Beauty and the Beast”: Romance, Reform, and Mystery in the Films of Lon Chaney

Between familiarity and strangeness: Russian Jews in Josep Sabah’s letters from the coast of Entre Ríos

ABSTRACT This article analyzes the correspondence exchanged between Josep Sabah, a teacher originally from the Ottoman Empire, and the leaders of the Alliance Israélite Universelle and the Jewish Colonization Association, institutions that had sent him to Argentina to found a network of Jewish schools in several towns in the province of Entre Ríos, from 1894 to 1922. In the first place, we focus on the contradictory ways through which this cultured Jew, educated in French and Sephardic schools, represents the new settlers sent from Russia to Argentina by the Jewish Colonization Association. Second, we focus on the self-rendering of this teacher in his letters, and on the tensions between the expectations of his employers, the demands of the settlers and the gradual disenchantment with the conditions of life in his adopted country.

Hadera: transnational migrations from Eastern Europe to Ottoman Palestine and the glocal origins of the Zionist-Arab conflict

The article explores the interplay between transnational migration, cultural patrimony and political conflict, tying together the former realms of the Russian and Ottoman Empires. It discusses the role played by Russian Jews in the development of the Zionist-Arab conflict in Palestine until 1948. It focuses on the Northern Sharon, where three distinct immigrant groups – Circassians, Bosnians and Russian Jews – settled in the 1870s–1890s. Methodologically, it adopts a new, twofold, approach to the genesis of the conflict, by tracing its roots within the broader setting of Eurasian transnational migrations to Palestine, and the stricter context of ‘locality expressing glocality’, that is, of specific colonies and their development under internal pressures and outside interactions. In 1948, prior actions aimed at achieving ethnic homogeneity through coerced population transfers during the disintegration Eurasian imperial polities served as a blueprint for some of the same Zionist immigrants for achieving plurality in their new Jewish State.

Italian Immigration in the American West: 1870–1940

Italian Immigration in the American West: 1870–1940

From Divided to Diasporic: Re-envisioning Italian American Texts through Transformative Translingual Practices

From Divided to Diasporic: Re-envisioning Italian American Texts through Transformative Translingual Practices

Between familiarity and strangeness: Russian Jews in Josep Sabah’s letters from the coast of Entre Ríos

This article analyzes the correspondence exchanged between Josep Sabah, a teacher originally from the Ottoman Empire, and the leaders of the Alliance Israélite Universelle and the Jewish Colonization Association, institutions that had sent him to Argentina to found a network of Jewish schools in several towns in the province of Entre Ríos, from 1894 to 1922.
 In the first place, we focus on the contradictory ways through which this cultured Jew, educated in French and Sephardic schools, represents the new settlers sent from Russia to Argentina by the Jewish Colonization Association. Second, we focus on the self-rendering of this teacher in his letters, and on the tensions between the expectations of his employers, the demands of the settlers and the gradual disenchantment with the conditions of life in his adopted country.

Syberiada Żydów polskich: Losy uchodźców z Zagłady [The Siberian odyssey of Polish Jews: The fates of the refugees from the Shoah

<i>Syberiada Żydów polskich: Losy uchodźców z Zagłady</i> [The Siberian odyssey of Polish Jews: The fates of the refugees from the Shoah

Impact of the Israeli-Arab conflict on the Jews of Russia in Israel in the Contemporary Hebrew Novel

From the first attempts to establish Israel until the present time, this entity has witnesseda history full of wars and uprisings with the Arabs, produced by its usurper presence itselfon Arab lands in general, and Palestinian lands in particular. This ongoing conflict cast adark shadow on all sectors of Israeli society, including the Jews of Russia, which has hada direct impact on Modern Hebrew literature in general, and the contemporary Hebrewnovel in particular. The importance of the study is due to the fact that it is the first study -as far as I know - to deal with the impact of the Israeli-Arab conflict on the community ofRussian Jews in Israel as this issue is discussed through two models of the contemporaryHebrew novel by two Israeli female literary figures from Russian origin. The two novelsare “Victor and Masha” (2012) by the writer “Alona Kimhi”, which addressed the problemof the political integration of Jews who emigrated from Russia to Israel during the waveof the seventies of the twentieth century, and the novel “The Lost Community” (2014), bythe writer “Ola Groisman”, which She dealt with the political situation of Jewishimmigrants – especially young immigrants – from Russia to Israel in the seventies andnineties of the same century .The study aims to reveal the position of Russian Jews on thepersonality of the Arab in light of the conflict between Israel and the Arabs, in addition torevealing the extent to which the Israeli-Arab conflict affects the Russian Jews' sense ofsecurity and stability within Israel. This study adopts on the critical analytical approach,which includes analysis and interpretation of the two novels to highlight and address theissue of the impact of the Israeli-Arab conflict on Russian Jews in Israel. The study yieldsseveral results, including that the problems surrounding the process of integration into theIsraeli society, in addition to the state of war, insecurity and instability in this society, havecaused severe psychological damages to many Russian Jews. This eventually led to areverse immigration of a large sector of them.

A Story with Characters and Action

A Story with Characters and Action

V. K. Plehve and the Policy toward Jews in Russia at the Turn of the 19th and 20th Centuries

V. K. Plehve and the Policy toward Jews in Russia at the Turn of the 19th and 20th Centuries

From “My Dovecote” to “My Building”: Intertextuality in Jarrar’s “The Story of My Building”

This paper aims at investigating how Arab American writer Randa Jarrar’s short story “The Story of My Building” (2016) appropriates events, themes, tropes and motifs employed by Russian writer Isaac Babel in his short story “The Story of My Dovecote” (1925) to portray the hard conditions and circumstances that Palestinians endure due to recurrent Israeli military attacks on the Gaza Strip. Jarrar’s story alludes to anti-Semitic violence, known as pogroms, that marred the lives of Jews in Russia in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century. Through strategic employment of intertextuality, Jarrar’s story vividly portrays how a child’s dream of building a dovecote has turned into a nightmare due to the demolition of his house by Israeli tanks. Borrowing certain episodes from Babel’s story, Jarrar sets up a link between her story and Babel’s, creating a parallelism between Palestinian people’s aches and anguishes at the hands of Israeli military forces at the start of the twenty-first century and Russian Jews’ sufferings and torments at the hands of pogromists almost a century ago. The connection between the stories is made even stronger as each story is narrated by a smart ten-year-old boy who is traumatized by the pillage and carnage he witnesses and experiences. In Jarrar’s story, Israeli tanks destroy the protagonist’s house and kill civilians; similarly, pogromists loot the protagonist’s house and murder his grandfather. Eventually, the two boys are reunited with their families who have taken refuge at a friend’s house. Yet, while Babel’s protagonist does not lose his house, in Jarrar’s story the protagonist’s family along with several other Palestinian families become homeless and displaced..

Yiddish Revolutionaries in Migration: The Transnational History of the Jewish Labour Bund by Frank Wolff

Reviewed by: Yiddish Revolutionaries in Migration: The Transnational History of the Jewish Labour Bund by Frank Wolff Gennady Estraikh (bio) Yiddish Revolutionaries in Migration: The Transnational History of the Jewish Labour Bund. By Frank Wolff. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2021. xix + 512 pp. The continuing economic development of Imperial Russia and the pre-1880s state policy of "civilizing" Jewish subjects through luring them into general education prepared ever larger numbers of Jews to give up their traditional ways and live a life culturally compatible with that of the urban Christian population. A very small minority even converted to Christianity and thus emancipated themselves from the stifling legal restrictions placed upon adherents of Judaism. However, hundreds of the converts later officially returned to Judaism after realizing that conversion did not alleviate the stigma of their origin. A new stratum of [End Page 220] people, with one leg in traditional society and the other in the non-Jewish world, arose in Russia. Not only state school and university graduates steeped in Russian culture belonged to this stratum. The same or nearby social space was populated by "semi-intelligentsia" (54). This snobby tag described haphazardly educated autodidacts, many of them renegade Talmudic students. Yet secularized "conscious" or "enlightened" workers (soznatel'nye rabochie in Russian, bavustzinike arbeter in Yiddish) formed the most populous group of modernized Russian Jews. They, together with the "semi-intelligentsia," dominated the Jewish civil societal space, sandwiched between the traditional Jewish and the dominant Christian societies. This space—distinct in its lifestyle, social organization, values, and behavior—was an important recruiting ground for diverse political and cultural movements and groupings, including the Jewish Labor Bund established in 1897 by a group of Marxist secular socialists. Characteristically, "workers often tended to retrospectively view joining the workers' movement as an act of conversion." (210) Judging by the level of literacy among Jews arriving in America, people from the modernized groups played a more salient role among the immigrants than among those who stayed in Russia. Not only were they more receptive to radical ideas, but they were also more mobile. Some of them had to leave Russia fleeing persecutions and oppression, though economic reasons for emigration prevailed. The book Yiddish Revolutionaries in Migration, originally published in German in 2014 under the title Neue Welten in der Neuen Welt: Die transnationale Geschichte des Allgemeinen Jüdischen Arbeiterbundes, 1897-1947, focuses on one of the cohorts in the Jewish civil societal space: members of the Bund, which had grown into the largest among the Jewish, and generally one of the most numerous, Marxist parties in imperial Russia. At the same time, Russia is mainly a point of departure, because Frank Wolff is primarily interested in what happened to and around the Bundists who chose or had little choice but to emigrate to the United States and Argentina. Although the émigré Bundists did not create any influential organizations of the Party's members, they "inspired the rise of the powerful Jewish organizations of secondary Bundism" (19). Indeed, such eminent figures in the American labor movement as Baruch Charney Vladeck (1886-1938), Sidney Hillman (1887-1946), and David Dubinsky (1892-1982) were Bundists in their youth. Hillman's brainchild, the Amalgamated Bank, established in 1921, still exists as the largest union-owned bank. Bundists became tone-setters in many American Jewish organizations, including the Workmen's Circle (now The Workers Circle), established in 1900. Journalists with a Bundist pedigree played an important role [End Page 221] in the Forverts (Forward), the biggest Yiddish newspaper. Although not a few Bundists jumped on the communist bandwagon, others remained in the circles of uncompromising anti-communist socialists. Many were central in organizing and running Yiddish afternoon schools. A separate study could be devoted to those Bundists who inherited or built successful business enterprises and acted as generous sponsors of Yiddish cultural and other projects. Among them were Motl Zelmanowicz (1914-2010), the last president of the International Jewish Labor Bund, and Bono Wiener (1920-1995), president of the Jewish Labour Bund in Melbourne. Frank Wolff's excellent, though structurally challenging, book contributes a great deal to our understanding of the social environment created by Yiddish-speaking socialists in North...

Vladimir Jabotinsky's Russian Years, 1900–1925 by Brian Horowitz

Reviewed by: Vladimir Jabotinsky's Russian Years, 1900–1925 by Brian Horowitz Vassili Schedrin Brian Horowitz. Vladimir Jabotinsky's Russian Years, 1900–1925. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020. 271 pp. In recent years, historians of modern Europe have increasingly turned to biography to reclaim overlooked and unknown historical actors and revisit well-known and studied ones. In the introduction to her volume on the role and methodology of biography in modern historiography, Simone Lässig wrote that "the reconstruction of individual life courses helps to discover more about the context."1 However, Lässig argued, the goal of such reconstruction is by no means a recounting of a coherent, purposeful "life," because "every 'life' is in some way fragmented and every person combines several changing roles, and that these roles in turn express themselves in different, mutually competing fields."2 Therefore, Brian Horowitz's assertion that his new book on Vladimir Jabotinsky is "not strictly a biography," but rather "arguments and evidence to explain the arc of Jabotinsky's development" (7), makes perfect sense. As a biographer, Horowitz focuses on Jabotinsky's "development, changing, and becoming" during his "Russian years," that is, in the Russian political, cultural, and literary contexts that shaped his life and thought (1). Jabotinsky's life, in fact, his parallel lives as a cosmopolitan multilingual journalist, Russian writer, and Jewish politician, were intertwined with the context of the Russian Revolution, World War I, shattering empires, and emerging nations. Horowitz argues that this context—Jabotinsky's formative years in Russia—has been largely neglected by scholars. He aims to [End Page 211] show that, paraphrasing Jabotinsky himself, "it was easier to take Jabotinsky out of Russia than Russia out of Jabotinsky" (231). Jabotinsky's political ambitions became evident very early. In the summer of 1903, in his articles reporting from the Sixth Zionist Congress in Basel, Jabotinsky already presented himself, albeit indirectly, as a leader, seeking to take the movement to the next level. Horowitz demonstrates that because Jabotinsky moved with more confidence in Russian political circles rather than in Jewish ones, he became a proponent of Synthetic Zionism, engaging with political life in the Diaspora. Horowitz makes a solid case that the 1905 Russian Revolution was a factor of paramount importance in modern Jewish politics on all sides—liberal, nationalist, socialist, and autonomist. For Jabotinsky, it was a life-changing encounter with Russian politics and an invaluable firsthand experience of making history. Initially, he was optimistic about making an alliance with Russian liberals who supported equal rights for the Jews. Eventually, frustrated by the liberals' opportunism and indifference toward the wave of pogroms that flooded Russia during the revolution, Jabotinsky came to the conclusion that the Russian Revolution was not good for the Jews, but Zionism was. At the same time, the revolution was in his opinion a positive experience as a "school for the new Jewish spirit" (66). According to Horowitz, the fact that Jabotinsky was a member of a disappointed generation of Russian Jews who had put their hopes on the 1905 revolution but were bitterly betrayed, has gone unnoticed by historians (79). Russian liberals, whom Jabotinsky once considered natural political allies, ended up easily switching sides and embracing nationalism, and Jabotinsky came to believe that the only path for Jews was separatism, that is, Zionism. Jabotinsky was also tempted to explore nonliberal political alternatives and became acquainted with leaders, ideologies, and tools of the radical Right. Pride in the ability to defend oneself physically became for Jabotinsky the sine qua non of Jewish national consciousness. However, Horowitz emphasizes that Jabotinsky was the first Zionist to see the army as an essential instrument for achieving national and political goals, not merely a means of protection. Gradually, Jabotinsky's thinking about the actual situation of the Jewish minority in Russia shifted to the imaginary situation of a future Jewish majority in Palestine. Referring to times when Jabotinsky found himself at a crossroads, especially from 1920–1922 when he lived in Mandate Palestine, Horowitz observes that Jabotinsky's "behavior is difficult to parse in terms of timing and intention" (171). To find and explain connections between his subject's various aspects, Horowitz explores Jabotinsky's duality...

Antisemitism in Russia: evaluating its decline and potential resurgence

ABSTRACT The treatment of Jews by the state and society in Russia is an important measure of Russia’s civic and political character. The evidence presented in this paper indicates that Russian Jews now enjoy the greatest freedom from antisemitism in modern Russian history. The explanation for the decline of antisemitism is found in two categories: the political and the societal. At the level of “high politics,” the post-Soviet Russian state has abandoned Soviet policies that promoted or condoned the persecution and discrimination of Jews. This development was preceded and reinforced by the bottom-up growth in Russian society of a more tolerant attitude toward Jews. The first two sections of the paper explain the decline in antisemitism at elite and mass levels in Russia, underscoring mutually supportive institutional, political, and socio-cultural changes. The final part of the paper suggests that public expressions of antisemitism may re-emerge due to the weakening of the factors that have thus far restrained this prejudice.

Creating Archival Access: Benyamin Lukin and Late Soviet Scholar-Activism

Creating Archival Access: Benyamin Lukin and Late Soviet Scholar-Activism Ellie R. Schainker (bio) The rebirth of Eastern European Jewish studies in the postcommunist era, especially from the discipline of history, often leans on a narrative of archival access. Prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union, local archives were closed to western researchers; the fall of the Soviet Union unlocked the archives and overnight the field was resuscitated from its Soviet and Holocaust extinction. It was a narrative that fueled my own passion for the subject and excitement over archival discovery. Some of my greatest joy in mining state records on Jews in Russia and Ukraine came with document delivery, when I signed my name on the paper slip attached to each file—like the library check-out cards of old rendered obsolete by computing. I felt I’d hit the jackpot if I was the first name entered on the archival slip, and often I was only second or third. This western narrative, however, obscures the grassroots efforts made by Soviet Jewish activists of the 1980s who had already then begun to revitalize scholarship on Eastern European Jewry, mining Soviet archives for unpublished sources on the Jewish experience. Many Jewish archival collections that were in secret storage were declassified in the late 1980s and early 1990s due to such interest. A critical personality in this effort and in making former-Soviet archival material accessible to all researchers— including Russian scholars—is Benyamin Lukin. He has worked as head of the Eastern European section of the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People in Israel since the early 1990s. He was trained and worked as an engineer in the Soviet Union, and fell into historical research and Jewish activism through disparate forays into Jewish cemetery [End Page 224] documentation and literary lexicography work. Lukin moved to Israel in 1990, where he became a professional archivist. He has spent the past three decades identifying and collecting historical materials on Russian-Polish Jewry from state archives throughout the former Soviet Union, publishing his own research, and helping several generations of scholars advance the field of Eastern European Jewish studies. His work is central to the spectacular growth of the field in the past thirty years. In the 1980s, Lukin joined a commission documenting local cemeteries in Leningrad. He was responsible for surveying the Preobrazhenskoe, or Jewish cemetery. A local academic, Professor Natal’ia Vasil’evna Yukhniova, asked Lukin to report his findings at an upcoming conference on the ethnography of Leningrad at the Institute for Ethnography. This foray into Jewish studies led to his subsequent participation in expeditions to Jewish towns in Eastern Europe. These expeditions were the brainchild of Ilya Dvorkin, who together with Lukin revived the Jewish Historical Seminar in 1987 and began leading expeditions to Jewish small towns in 1988. There were underground Jewish studies seminars in Leningrad from the 1970s, but Dvorkin and Lukin expanded the theme beyond the Holocaust and Jewish partisans to focus on communal histories. This seminar eventually became the Jewish University in St. Petersburg. In 1988, Lukin and his family joined Dvorkin on an expedition to Medzhibozh, famed town of the Ba’al Shem Tov. For the next two and half decades, Lukin participated in various expeditionary groups, often with art scholar Boris Khaimovich, traveling to hundreds of small towns in the Former Soviet Union (FSU), Poland, Romania, and Bulgaria to explore cemetery and synagogue remains and conduct oral interviews. Alongside this research, Lukin joined a team working on a biographical dictionary of Russian writers organized by the publishers of the Soviet Encyclopedia. Through this research project, Lukin furtively followed his interest in Jewish history via biographies of Jewish writers and Judeophobes and began collecting material in Soviet archives, paying attention to the vast and unknown corpus of archival documents on Jews. By researching Russian writers, he avoided labeling his archival requests as pertaining to “Jews.” As the only Jewish Historical Seminar participant with archival experience, Lukin prepared an overview of Jewish sources in the Leningrad archives, which he published through samizdat in the Leningrad Jewish Almanac. Lukin gained a reputation as a local Jewish history expert and was sought...

"There Are No Cultural Islands like Ceshinsky's": Ceshinsky's Community Bookstore and Intellectual Space in Chicago, 1922–1966

"There Are No Cultural Islands like Ceshinsky's"Ceshinsky's Community Bookstore and Intellectual Space in Chicago, 1922–1966 Erin Faigin (bio) In 1981, a local Chicago television station asked Saul Bellow to lead a walking tour through Humboldt Park, his childhood home. Although Bellow was born in Quebec, he moved with his family to Chicago in 1924 when he was nine years old. The Bellows settled in Humboldt Park, a neighborhood on the northwest side of the city. Originally settled by Germans and Scandinavians, by the 1920s Humboldt Park was home to a diverse mix of European immigrants, among them Italians, Poles, and Russian Jews. The Bellows lived on Cortez Street, just south of the intersection of Division and Damen. Walking west on Division from Damen in the 1920s, one might pass by a meeting of the Zionist Organization of America at Budapest Hall or a staging of a Yiddish play at the Biltmore Theatre.1 At the intersection of Division and Campbell, one could catch a streetcar headed downtown, but for most Humboldt Park residents there was no need. Between California and Damen, they shopped at Jewish-owned bakeries and groceries, were styled in Jewish-owned shoe stores and photo studios, visited Jewish dentists and doctors, called on Jewish exterminators and contractors, and sought counsel from Jewish undertakers in times of grief.2 Yet, for Bellow and his friends, the most important institution on Division Street was Moshe Ceshinsky's bookstore, located just east of California Street. Ceshinsky's Community Bookstore offered more than the opportunity to exchange cash for goods; the space itself facilitated the exchange of ideas. Bellow would later reminisce: [End Page 15] [My] friends and I are trying to locate Ceshinsky's little island of culture. In the days of our youth our neighborhood didn't look very different from similar districts in Manchester or St. Etienne, but it is undoubtedly worse now. There are no cultural islands like Ceshinsky's. He may not have been aware that he was selling inflammatory books—Germinal, The Flowers of Evil, Man's Fate, the works of Marx and Engels—to high-school students. To him all books were precious.3 At Ceshinsky's, fathers smoked cigars and debated politics; landsmanshaftn4 held meetings; Yiddish poets perfected manuscripts; leftists could buy the Communist Daily Worker or the Trotskyist New International; Jews purchased ritual objects imported from Israel. Ceshinsky's Community Bookstore was a cultural island for Jewish immigrants in the sea of change that was their new home, Chicago. Before Ceshinsky opened his own bookstore, he worked as a traveling salesman for Yiddish publishing houses and newspapers.5 He was introduced to America by way of rail, both its dispersion and its connection. Upon settling in Chicago in 1922, he promptly opened his own bookstore, transitioning from itinerant salesman to neighborhood businessman. In opening a storefront on Division Street, Ceshinsky claimed a stake for himself and for Yiddish literature in Humboldt Park. Although his business was vulnerable to the fluctuations of the market, he was no longer subject to the vagaries of being a mobile salesman. Yet, through his business, Ceshinsky continued to use books as mobile manifestations of a Yiddish public sphere disrupted and reconfigured by migration. As Derek Penslar argues, the Jewish press represents a microcosm of the Jewish public sphere, the collectivity of private Jewish individuals engaged in the creation of public discourse.6 Tony Michels describes the emergence of a "Yiddish-speaking, working-class version of Habermas' public sphere" in late nineteenth-century New York and identifies the Yiddish socialist press as its central institution.7 Over the course of the early twentieth century, the Yiddish public sphere described by Michels expanded in geographical and political scope. No longer centered on the Lower East Side, the Yiddish public sphere in which Ceshinsky participated was polycentric, broadly leftist, and economically diverse. When he became a publisher in the 1930s, Ceshinsky took a role in shaping the geographic boundaries and cultural content of that Yiddish public sphere. The publications produced by his publishing house, [End Page 16] Ceshinsky Farlag, described a world where Yiddish was a multigenerational, global, thriving language.8 Ceshinsky Farlag published Zishe...

Докладная записка иркутского чиновника С. А. Шиманского с предложением выселения евреев из России Верховному правителю адмиралу А. В. Колчаку (декабрь 1918 г.)

This archaeographic publication is devoted to the study of the Jewish question during the Civil War in the east of Russia. A memorandum of the Irkutsk official S. A. Shimansky to the Supreme Ruler Admiral A. V. Kolchak with a proposal to deport Jews from Russia is added. The introductory preface to the document, based both on the works of historians on the situation of Jews in Russia and on clerical sources characterizing the personality of the author of the memo, analyzes the conditions that made it possible for an official in White Siberia to create it. The publication is of interest to researchers of the events of the Russian Revolution and the Civil War in Russia, the ethnopolitical history of the Russian state and Siberia.

Древнееврейская история в "еврейской энциклопедии" (1908-1913)

The article analyzes the narrative of ancient Jewish history in the “Jewish Encyclopedia”, published in St. Petersburg in 1909-1913 and edited by famous representatives of the Russian-Jewish intelligentsia and historians. Since the basis for the editors of the encyclopedia was the edition of the “Jewish Enceclopedia” in English in New York in 1901-1906, the author compares the content of the articles of the same name. This task is being implemented in the context of the development of the Wissenschaft des Judentums and demonstrates a certain trend of departure from traditional Jewish historical writing at the beginning of the 20th century. The author comes to the conclusion that significant differences in views on ancient Jewish history among Russian and American publishers of Jewish encyclopedias. The Russian Jewish Encyclopedy is characterized by a broader view of the reality surrounding the Jews and the world historical context. This was expressed in a rather detailed narrative and the desire to give a more complete picture even in a small article, approaching the text of a scientific monograph with an explanation of cause-and-effect relationships. There is a gradual departure from the recognition of the long-established facts of ancient Jewish history, prescribed and recognized by the classics of German Judaism. This is expressed in the appeal to the works of domestic orientalists and historians of the Jews in Russia. On the whole, Russian-Jewish authors never manage to completely get rid of the theological accent in historical writing. However, there is a clear transition from a simple retelling of events according to the Bible to a thoughtful understanding of several controversial scientific versions of certain facts of ancient Jewish history, as well as understanding it in the context of the history of other powers of the ancient East.