Examining two cases of Jewish communities founded at the beginning of our period affords us the opportunity to follow the evolution of communal structures and governance from their very inception. In both St. Petersburg and Kiev, Jewish notables came to lead the community. This was not surprising given that under the policy of selective integration, first-guild merchants were the earliest to be allowed to settle in localities of restricted Jewish settlement. In the capital, the Jewish communal governing board was elected, if only by a limited group of merchants and graduates of institutions of higher education.47 Because of the complex history and status of Jewish rights and restrictions in Kiev, however, the governing board there was not elected or appointed but rather was self-selected, and came to govern the community by fiat. As far as the law on Jewish settlement in Kiev could be clearly interpreted (and much effort was put into such interpretation over the years), the only Jews who enjoyed full residence privileges there—and were not restricted to the neighborhoods of Ploskaia and Lybed—were first-guild merchants. Thus, they were the natural candidates for members of a communal governing board.
Moreover, it was only logical that a welfare board be selected from the Jewish elite, since the law stipulated that local authorities consult with "prosperous and settled" Jews in managing the korobka. As the governor of Kiev province wrote in 1890, "these individuals, by virtue of their social and property status, represent a sufficient guarantee of reliability."48 The fact that some of these prosperous Jews were members of Kiev's city council made that move all the more natural.49 (It did not, however, seem natural to all observers of Russian Jewry; some antisemites decried the "tyrannical and despotic" Jewish leadership that, in their eyes, kept control over the Jewish masses with an iron fist, inculcating in them hatred toward Russia.)50
Yet it is likely that the authorities had other motives for sanctioning communal governance by the elite in leading communities such as Kiev, St. Petersburg, and Odessa. As we have seen, the Russian government—or at least certain bureaucrats who thought along similar lines—was interested in shaping an acculturated Jewry that would be integrated into Russian society. In their eyes, members of the Jewish elite, who spoke Russian at home, interacted with non-Jews in business and social circles, and practiced a modernized, German style of Judaism, were just the right individuals to be governing communal affairs and deciding priorities. These, then, were the men who eventually constituted the Representation for Jewish Welfare, as the governing board came to be known.
It is not an easy task to reconstruct the history of the Representation for Jewish Welfare, but archival documents, press reports, and several publications of Kiev's Jewish Hospital allow us to trace a sketchy outline of its origins and development. The predecessor of the Representation, the Jewish Welfare
Committee, was originally established to deal exclusively with the affairs of Kiev's Jewish Hospital (in contrast to St. Petersburg, where everything began with a synagogue governing board).51 The hospital was the city's first and most prominent Jewish institution, and was tended to with great care by the Jewish elite. The revenues from the kosher meat tax in Kiev—which was not formally a korobka but a form of reimbursement to the city for the income lost after the abolition of the Jewish hostels where Jews had been required to stay when visiting the city before 1861—originally went entirely toward hospital expenses, and were thus administered by the Hospital Committee. Several later documents referred to a decision of the city council of august 4, 1875, assigning the responsibility for allocating the kosher excise revenues for the entire Jewish community to the Hospital Committee. For example, "The representatives of the Jewish community [assigned] to deal with the korobka should be the members of the Jewish Committee, which was originally confirmed by the City Council on 4 August 1875 for Jewish Hospital affairs"; ". . . General management of all matters of Jewish welfare falls on the local 'Jewish Committee,' confirmed by the Kiev City Council on 4 August, 1875____"52
However, the minutes of the city council show that the committee established was only to deal with hospital affairs; it was not for general communal governance. The fourth point discussed by the council on that day stipulated only "that the administration of the hospital and the management of all hospital affairs be under the authority of the local Jewish merchants, elected by a majority of the city council, and that the revenues assigned from the korobka for the maintenance of the Jewish Hospital be transferred to its control."53 Apparently, because most of the kosher excise went toward the hospital, it was understood that the Hospital Committee, in allocating revenues for the hospital, would also take care of distributing the balance of funds to Kiev's other Jewish institutions.54 Thus, the Hospital Committee came to be known as the "Jewish Welfare Committee" or simply the "Jewish Committee."55
According to Tmol bar Yente's somewhat obsequious account in Kol me-vaser, when balebotim (householders) and gvirim began to settle in Kiev (i. e., in the early 1860s), a committee on communal affairs was formed of the finest well-to-do Jews (di sheynste balebotim).56 This committee, realizing that government recognition would be vital for its work, submitted petitions to the city duma requesting official approval for their committee so that—in Tmol's words—"there should be named in Kiev a Jewish community [es zol heysen in Kiev ayidishe obshchestvo]." The wording here is crucial, as the author employed a Russian word that was usually used to describe a formal association; according to vladimir Dal’'s comprehensive dictionary of the Russian language, compiled in the early 1860s, this was the same word used in the contemporary phrases dvorianskoe obshchestvo (noble corporation), krest’ianske obshchestvo (peasant association; i. e., the commune), or even obshchestvo sapozhnikov (a cobblers' association; i. e., a guild or union).57 A contemporary archival document on the formation of an official Jewish community in Kiev consistently used the same word.58 This account seems to imply a somewhat more self-conscious act of organizing a community than that suggested by the documents related to the Jewish Hospital, but we are not in a position to reach a definitive conclusion about how communal governance emerged in this early period—especially since the very term obshchestvo was used so loosely in the imperial period and to describe so many different concepts.59
In the first few decades of Jewish settlement in Kiev, the Jewish Committee did not attract much attention. We know that in 1876 kosher tax revenues funded the Jewish Hospital as well as prayer houses, the Talmud Torah (school for children of poor families), the bathhouse, and the Crown rabbi's salary; an account from 1880 mentions relatively small sums (up to 2,000 rubles annually) given for the maintenance of Jewish orphans, aid to poor artisans, tuition support for Jewish gymnasium students, and the burial of the dead.60 Press reports, however, focused instead on the munificent endowments of individual members, above all sugar magnate Israel Brodsky and his son Lazar’, to various local institutions, especially the Jewish Hospital: a maternity clinic at the hospital in 1871, a donation of 15,000 rubles in 1875 toward a new building for the hospital, 40,000 rubles for a Jewish trade school in 1880, and in 1884, 50,000 rubles for St. vladimir's University and 40,000 rubles each for the hospital and a building to house a bathhouse and communal kitchen in 1884.61 apparently, Israel Brodsky assisted needy Jews on an individual basis, giving 1,000 rubles a month to alleviate their plight and even more for the more desperate cases.62
Starting around 1880, complaints began to appear in the Hebrew press (notably Ha-melits, published in St. Petersburg) about the organization—or lack thereof—of charity and welfare in Kiev. Critics charged that benefactors, while generous, gave unsystematically to whichever causes appealed to them or when they were asked to give, while important needs went untended because no one took initiative. Prominent institutions such as the hospital received huge sums of money that could, it was suggested, be better spent on assisting the Jewish poor of Kiev; this particular critique would be heard many times over the decades. One detractor asserted that some wealthy Jews became involved in charitable causes for the sole purpose of making a name for themselves.63
Non-Jewish sources were even more critical, seeing in the dominance of the Kiev Jewish plutocracy remnants of the hated kahal; the local newspaper Kievlianin, in particular, was (in John Klier's words) "the vigilant watchdog of the reputation of [Brafman's] Book of the Kahal."64 Its tendentious articles must be examined with great suspicion, yet certain observations are corroborated by other sources: the Jewish Committee was unelected; the funds it managed were not subject to any oversight; and the entire operation lacked accountability—though Kievlianin, of course, attributed that defect to the "kahal structure of the local Jewish community." Interestingly, the newspaper claimed that complaints could be heard from the local Jewish population about their so-called "plenipotentiaries" and the disorderly state of their communal institutions.65 An 1880 account from within the Jewish community seems to confirm this state of affairs: the correspondent wrote that some Kiev Jews grumbled that the Hospital Committee, which ran all Jewish communal affairs in the city, was "usurping various rights and duties."66 (The hostility was mutual: members of the committee complained that the Jewish community did not appreciate the heavy burden the committee had to carry.) An "expose" of the internal workings of the Kiev Jewish community in the Judeophobic Novoe vremia a decade later also referred to widespread corruption—including charges of nepotism related to the allocation of kosher tax revenues—though the grotesque exaggerations made throughout the article diminish the reliability of this source.67 The article also claimed that once a week, the Jewish destitute—"a crowd of Jewish ragamuffins" — waited on line in the cold outside of Lazar’ Brodsky's mansion as he personally gave out alms by the kopeck to each petitioner.
A more trustworthy measure of the Jewish community's resentment of the committee's policies are two petitions, dated 1890, from a group of Jewish artisans led by two men by the names of Gershtein and Khodes complaining about the lack of accountability on the part of the committee and its unfair allocation of the kosher excise. The tax was paid "almost exclusively" by Jewish artisans, they wrote in their first petition, implying that the men who managed the tax did not pay it themselves (which, it is to be presumed, also meant that they did not personally follow the laws of kashruth). When the petitioners had applied to the municipality and other official bodies for information on who, exactly, constituted the Jewish Committee, the authorities refused even to identify them. In an apparent reference to the uncertain legal status of the committee, the writers of the petition remarked that the committee "does not officially exist"; thus, they argued, its members were private individuals—"whether elected by anyone, whether confirmed by the municipality or not, we do not know." Since they could not obtain any information about the committee, the petition continued, they were unable to submit declarations to it about the needs of Kiev's poor artisans. Their request from the Governor-General was to take the committee "under his guardianship," presumably to eliminate its independence and institute official oversight over its activities.68
One of the most revealing and even surprising aspects of this document is its assertion that most ordinary Kiev Jews did not even know who sat on the Jewish Committee that served as the de facto governing board for their community. Apparently, they had so little access to the committee and the wealthy circles from which its members were drawn that they felt they had no choice but to appeal for outside assistance to rectify the situation. Moreover, by noting that the committee members were neither elected nor appointed, the petition's authors skillfully made apparent the committee's quasi-legal and near autonomous status, which could never be tolerated by the all-encompassing bureaucracy of the Russian Empire. The accusation that Jews of the upper ranks were using the korobka tax, which they themselves did not pay, to fund their own priorities within the Jewish community was by no means unique to Kiev; the same phenomenon occurred in St. Petersburg and was likely common in most cities and towns large enough to support an acculturated Jewish elite.69
In the second petition, submitted six months later, the artisans went even further, requesting that one-quarter of the funds from the kosher excise be allocated directly to be used to care for the needs of poor and disabled Jewish artisans of the city.70 Although the petitioners did not say so explicitly, it seems clear that they meant for the funds to be granted without the mediation of the Jewish Welfare Committee. In other words, not only were these artisans opposed to the independence of a committee of unelected plutocrats, but they also wanted to remove themselves from the authority of those plutocrats altogether, setting up an alternate institutional structure through which a different class of Jews would enjoy more equitable welfare assistance. These two petitions are evidence of dissatisfaction with the leadership of the elite and of the wide rift between that elite and at least some of the poorer
Jews of Kiev—so wide, indeed, that the institutional links tying them together no longer seemed relevant to the latter group. These documents also constitute a rare window into the structure and functioning of the community, providing insight lacking in other contemporary records because communal organization in Kiev was so opaque and complex.
In his response, the governor took exception to the artisans' desire to manage their own welfare outside of the already established framework. He saw their request as one for special benefits, and argued in response that artisans had no more right to funds than any other poor Jews in Kiev, nor were Jewish artisans to have any undue advantages over Christian artisans that aid from the kosher tax might render. He also made clear the threat he saw in Kiev's Jewish artisans receiving "special" assistance, a practice that might attract even more Jewish artisans to the city in their hopes of receiving a share; as we have seen, most government bureaucrats worried that Kiev would become flooded with Jews from surrounding provinces. Finally, wrote the governor, the artisans had no organization of their own to manage the distribution of benefits.71 Clearly, the governor did not view with favor the petitioners' proposal of alternate Jewish welfare structures to parallel the existing one.
He may, however, have taken their recommendation to abolish the independence of the Jewish Welfare Committee more seriously than might have been apparent from his initial response, for that step was taken only a few years later. We cannot know, of course, whether the artisans' petition planted a seed in the minds of the responsible officials, articulated an already popular notion, or simply happened to correspond to the very solution eventually devised by the government for the committee. What is clear is that the plutocrats' unquestioned authority was beginning to be questioned both by other Jews and by the government itself, and the doubts regarding that authority on both sides may well have reinforced each other.
As fate would have it, Avraham Kupernik published his History of the Israelites in Kiev just as the debate over the Jewish Welfare Committee was roiling the community. Ostensibly, the book had nothing to do with contemporary events, for its terminus ad quem was 1865 and it dealt primarily with the pre-expulsion Jewish community of Kiev at the turn of the eighteenth century and arguments made for the readmission of Jews to the city. More specifically, Kupernik reprinted the pinkas of the hevra kadisha (burial society), founded in 1794, and mounted a defense of the organization against attacks that were apparently being leveled at it from elements in Kiev society.
Kupernik argued that the pinkas proved that the founders of the society were not alcohol dealers, as was alleged, nor were they corrupt. He stated, more generally, that Jews did not fit the Judeophobe stereotype but were rather charitable and beneficent in their actions. (It is interesting that Kupernik himself started his career in Kiev in 1858 as tax-farmer on alcohol for Kiev province.)72 Jew-haters, Kupernik took pains to point out, were not the worst enemies of the Jews; those could be found within the Jewish community in the form of Jewish slanderers and backbiters.73
Why did Kupernik compose this apologia for the organized Jewish community at this precise moment? As a veteran leader of the Kiev Jewish community, philanthropist, and maskil, he may have chosen this means to respond to what he perceived as an attack on the contemporary communal leadership. although he was clearly concerned about antisemitic aspersions cast on the community, this Hebrew book was meant for internal Jewish consumption—a rebuke to those who would libel altruistic communal leaders with claims of corruption and malfeasance. His reference to the expulsion that followed the attacks made on the hevra kadisha a century earlier may have been a disguised warning to unruly elements in the community: by assailing the leadership, you are endangering your own position in Kiev, and that of the entire community.
World History
