This book also looks closely at the development of a continued corporate identity among Russian Jews, which in its organized manifestation was called the "community," and at the various groupings that attempted to claim a leadership role within Russian Jewry. First, by mapping the contours of communal leadership and organization in one locale from their very beginnings, the following pages will contribute to our very murky understanding of how Jews ran their communities after the abolition of the official kahal—the governing body of the Jewish community—in 1844.27 Following in the footsteps of Azriel Shohat and Eli Lederhendler, each of whom attempted in his own way to unravel the tangled skein of internal Jewish leadership (both actual and attempted), representation, and political networks, I explore not only how the Jewish community functioned after 1844 but also what it meant to those who were supposed to constitute its membership and to those who supposed themselves worthy of acting as its leadership.
Several works in European Jewish history have recently appeared that attempt to understand Jewish modernization and the formation of a modern hyphenated Jewish identity (French-Jewish, German-Jewish, Austrian-
Jewish, etc.) through the lens of the individual community, and many devote attention to the significance of associational life within the framework of community.28 Indeed, any discussion of community development must, of course, relate to changing conceptualizations of Jewish self-understanding, for a corporate body can only be constituted if its members agree that they share a core element of their individual makeup. In the late Russian Empire, that agreement was absent among a Jewry divided by class, religious observance, political disposition and affiliation, and language. Commonalities that had previously been taken for granted were no longer necessarily so, especially in a metropolis. The pressure that one invariably felt in a small town to affiliate with the official Jewish community was not nearly as strong in the anonymous city. How would Jewish community, or any sort of collective existence, be defined now that even the word community itself was indeterminate? The "communal" tax was paid on kosher meat, but not by everyone—not even those who allocated the proceeds. The "communal" rabbi was elected by prayer house parishioners, but not everyone wanted to or could afford to belong to a prayer house. The community could not be defined by restrictions on Jews to which the elite was not subject (which, as we shall see, was indeed the case in Kiev). Perhaps only during pogroms were all Jews linked by the threat of injury or death common to all, but even this fleeting moment, if it can be considered "communal," was overshadowed by the bitter quarrels that ensued once victims demanded assistance and leaders were charged with deciding who would benefit and who would not. Like many Russian subjects, Jews could now choose to be members of one or more of the hundreds of voluntary societies sprouting up in Kiev and other cities, but in an era of growing interaction between Jews and non-Jews, there was no guarantee that that society would be a Jewish one. At times, the vagaries of Jewish observance, behavior, and affiliation in Kiev made identity almost impossible to pin down.29 As Martha Bohachevsky-Chomiak notes, "Works on imperial Russian society outside the Russian center have rarely focused on community organizations. . . . They often overlook the organic process of local organization and concentrate on political developments."30 This has been true of the historiography of Russian Jews, as well, and this study's microhistorical focus attempts to understand just that organic process that has been so elusive for scholars, if they have tried to find it.
This account's focus on Jewish leadership in Kiev means that it must spend considerable time investigating the lives and works of the Jewish haute bourgeoisie, the "notables" who were so prominent in both Jewish and general life in Kiev, thus contributing to a history of the Russian Jewish merchant elite—a desideratum noted by many historians.31 Far from claiming the mantle of leadership because of their close ties to the existing Jewish community, these merchants were often quite far removed from the mechanisms of Jewish self-rule—both because they often saw themselves occupying a higher social plane than most of their fellow Jews and because at a relatively early stage in Russian rule over Polish Jews, imperial legislation had removed them from formal affiliation with the obshchestvo (Jewish community). So why were they interested in a leadership role at all? Cynics would not be wrong in ascribing the drive toward leadership exhibited by some of these men to the urge for power, but there were surely positive motivations as well, including feelings of responsibility toward their coreligionists; a desire to help their fellow Jews move toward enlightenment and acceptance by the Russian polity and society; and, no doubt, a sense of shared fate (Schicksalgemeinde) in an empire that classified both the richest Jewish merchant and the lowliest Jewish water bearer as evrei above all else. I have been unable to find memoir or epistolary material by these men that would enable me to ascertain such assumptions through their own words. I hope that material will yet be found.
The notables' detractors accused them of taking advantage of their leadership position within Jewry and even of betrayal, but many of them saw themselves as loyal Jews and dedicated leaders, a claim that the historian may interrogate but not contest. Indeed, the findings of this study seem to confirm one scholar's conjecture that "further research. . . is likely to reveal a higher degree of attachment to Jewish society than was implied by contemporary Jewish critics."32 The matter is complicated by the possibility of multiple loyalties, a concept that any discussion of developing national identity must take into account and one that was not foreign to Russian Jews in the late imperial period. It was only with the advent of mobilized Jewish nationalism around the turn of the century that Jews started speaking of exclusive loyalty to the Jewish nation and its historical destiny, and even then significant strands of Jewish political thought continued to insist on the possibility of nationally conscious Jews living within the framework of a federative state (the Bund, to take one obvious example). Many members of the Jewish elite and bourgeoisie committed to liberal politics did not see themselves as "assimilation-ists" but as comfortably maintaining their loyalty to the Russian tsar and empire along with a commitment to some form of Jewish communal, cultural, and/or religious identity. For them, an exclusively Jewish self-definition was unthinkable, let alone totally impractical.33
Nor are they the only actors in this story who were concerned with authority and influence. Much of this story is about power—who wielded it and how, over whom, for what purposes—and about the struggle for power. Power was not always for base purposes: many of those engaged in the struggle sincerely wanted to improve the lot of the Jews in Russia. The Russian state insisted on its sovereignty over its Jews and its ability to do with them as it wished (integration or segregation, depending on the era); those in power at the regional, provincial, and especially the municipal levels also argued for their right to intervene in Jewish affairs. Among the Jews, various individuals and groupings vied for power and leadership based on a number of qualifications: religious authority (rabbis); wealth and influence (notables); insight and education, and connection to wealth and influence (maskilim, Crown rabbis); political awareness (nationalists, socialists, liberals); and, increasingly, "the will of the people" (any of the above).
World History
