Within the pale
RONALD HINGLEY
The Jews in Soviet Russia since 1917 edited by Lionel Kochan (our, 50s) Class Struggle in the Pale: The Formative Years of the Jewish Workers' Movement in Tsarist Russia Ezra Mendelsohn (cut. 50s)
The Soviet Union now has a population of some two and a half million Jews and the continuing story of this scattered com- munity (if it may be loosely regarded as such) has been particularly turbulent. Its modern phase covers the century and a half since the successive Polish Partitions of 1772-1815 completed the encapsulation of over a million Jews in the Russian Empire. Until the late eighteenth century Russia had possessed only a small Jewish population, and virtually no Jewish problem.
Differentiated from Russians by language and religion, the Jews multiplied rapidly, reaching a total of over five million by the end of the Empire: this despite extensive emjgration from the 1880s onwards, yielding a vast increase in the Jewish population of Britain and the us. As their readiness to emigrate indicates. the Jews did not 'flourish under the last Romanov Tsars. Far from it, for they were restricted to a Pale of Settle- ment in the west and south-west of the em- pire (and within that to urban areas). They were admitted to educational institutions on a restrictive quota, terrorised by pogroms and, on one terrible occasion, deported from Moscow en masse to the tune of 20,000 souls.
Though formally freed from all restric- tions after the February Revolution of 1917, the Jews soon suffered new tribulations under Bolshevism. No one suppressed Jewish religion and culture with more gusto, in the early years, than the Jewish Communists. Yet when these were largely suppressed in their turn under emergent Stalinism, the per- secution of Soviet Jews continued. Never, of course, was Soviet terror so selectively focused against the Jews as the Himmlerite holocaust. for Stalin, though anti-semitic in many ways, showed a healthy lack of racial discrimination by extending his massacres to cover the population as a whole. The Nazi invasion of Russia led to the slaughter of some two and a half million Soviet Jewish subjects, but the special nature of Nazi per- secution of the Jewish people has never been acknowledged by Soviet officialdom and the disabilities and inconveniences of being a Soviet Jew continue to the present day.
Officially regarded as a separate nation- ality, Soviet Jews yet lack any national ter- ritory within the ussa, for the dismal promised land assigned to them in Siberian Birobidzhan never became a Soviet Pales- tine. The Soviet Jew is neither permitted to assimilate as a Russian (as many might wish) nor to cultivate his Jewishness. whether of religion or culture, apart from the odd police. supervised folkloristic excursion. Nowadays most Soviet Jews neither practise Judaeism nor speak Yiddish: the two features which characterised them in Tsarist times. A Jew. now, is one who is described in his docu- ments as such.
Just how complex the Jewish situation is in the Soviet Union (for the above is merely the crudest of summaries) the symposium edited by Dr Lionel Kochan shows in rich and fascinating detail. It is brilliantly intro- duced by Professor Leonard Schapiro and assembles contributions by more than a dozen other leading scholars, embracing literary, religious, demographic. ideological and other themes. There is. inevitably. some repetition here. Moreover some (the majority) of the essays are notably better than some of the others. These were, how- ever. disadvantages well worth accepting in order to put together a contribution of prime magnitude on a theme of abiding interest and importance.
As the work of a single individual. Dr Ezra Mendelsohn's short study naturally possesses more unity than the symposium. It too marks a notable contribution to the understanding of Russia's Jews. describing the workers' movements among them up to the year 1905. Though. not specially pro- minent in the earlier phases of the Russian revolutionary movement, Russian Jews later came to dominate the vanguard of under- ground radical politics. Dr Mendelsohn shows in hard detail how intellectual. Rus- sian-speaking, assimilated Jews brought the message of Socialism to their Yiddish-speak- ing working class brethren within the shietls of the Pale. It is a well documented and admirably organised study. sadly underlining the failure of the Russian autocracy to ap- preciate, cater for or utilise a gifted and energetic section of its oopulation. Hence the boost to emigration whereby Minsk's. Pinsk's (and St Petersburg 'Leningra d's) losses have become Manhattan's and Tel Aviv's gains.
That 'Jewish work' could be a synonym for shoddiness in Imperial Russia (as Dr Mendelsohn points out) was news to me. but it does remind one that not every Jew is an Einstein or a Menuhin.
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