At a 1993 workshop entitled Revisioning Imperial Russia, a number of leading historians of the Russian Empire discussed how a new history of the empire might appear. Among topics to be included in that history were "multiple searches for national identity, as well as the much-neglected subject of the prevalent and ordinary intermingling of ethnic cultures."34 Among the suggestions was a reevaluation of imperial culture—in the context of the expanding empire—as an amalgam of the various ethnicities and other groups that made up that empire. And just as the identities of the other nationalities of the empire were developing in the late imperial period, so too was a Russian national self-definition—far from being an idee fixe—also taking shape, often in response to those others.35 Quite distinct from that identity was "Russianness itself,'" as Michael Stanislawski put it, which dominated the empire in very subtle ways, and with which so many non-Russian groups wanted to be affiliated.36 But ethnic identity—or any other externally imposed classification—must not be the only category used to understand imperial Russia; probing questions must also be asked about, as Nancy Kollman argued, the "self-definition of individuals and groups, and their interaction with the state"—and, we might add, with other individuals and groups as
Well. This leads to the next desideratum, voiced by Richard Stites: a more intimate history of individual experience, including "emotions, human expressiveness, personal relations."37 Such a history can promote a new emphasis on agency, whether of the individual or the group, thus moving away from the traditional historiographical treatment of peasants and many other groups as "faceless, inert, acted-upon."38 The sources themselves, of course, can either hamper or facilitate the new cultural history, and they must be mined carefully for personal narratives and interactions as well as for expressions of collective self-definition. Indeed, Reginald Zelnik suggested "that the investigation of social identity and the 'subjective parameters of experience' could provide the basis for a new imperial history."39
These ideas correspond felicitously to many of the aims of this book, which is very much part of the "new history" of the Russian Empire that has been emerging over the past several decades, focusing on culture and society from the bottom up as well as on the empire's non-Russian nationalities or peripheral regions.40 In particular, the book joins the ranks of those recent works that attempt to balance analyses of the "internal" society and culture of a particular ethnic group with the "external" view that takes in imperial policies and contexts.41 My analysis of the Jewish experience in imperial Russia is informed by an understanding of identity as fluid and dynamic, always interacting with other individual and corporate identities and changing in response to those interactions—for Jews, and all subjects of the tsar, defined themselves just as much as they were defined by his government. Nor is identity limited to ethnic or religious group, but it encompasses a wide range of descriptors and categories: occupation, socioeconomic class, familial status, linguistic abilities and choices, and political consciousness or affiliation. It is more accurate, then, to speak of Jewish communities made up of many elements and many different kinds of collective self-understanding, rather than an elusive singular community to which all belonged and which spoke with one voice. Indeed, some Jews rejected formal or informal membership in any kind of Jewish community, and we must consider them as well. Thus the account that follows pays close attention not only to institutions and organizations—representational bodies, communal welfare institutions, rabbinates, voluntary organizations, political groupings—but also to the noninstitutional spheres of communal life: commerce and industry, the street, the world of leisure, popular religion, and family life. And at the center of all these are the individuals and families that constituted them, and their personal experiences as real people living in this specific place and time. The book also "asks questions about the meaning of institutions in daily life" — the significance of Russian and especially Jewish institutions for the daily life of Jews.42
World History
