Conclusion

The Revolution of 1905 was not only a revolution for Russian society but for its Jews and Jewish society as well. activists had brought the slogans and ideas of the revolution to the Jewish community, compelling the institutions that lay at the heart of Jewish self-governance to change the way they functioned and ruled. and while the course of Jewish communal affairs in Kiev reveals the politicization of Russian Jewry, at the same time it demonstrates there was not always a straight line leading from political and party ideologies to communal politics, which—as activists slowly learned—demanded compromise and consensus. Like civil society in the empire as a whole, the Jewish civil society that had begun to form in the 1890s now entered a period of maturation. The most fundamental and in some ways most significant aspect of this civil society was at the local level, where individuals came together to make change and take a gamble on staking a claim in society. at that plane, there was little room for strict and unbending party ideology; radicals, moderates, and conservatives would in many cases have to learn how to work together to effect change.

Just as Russian civil society formed in opposition to but also sometimes, out of necessity, in collaboration with the state, so did Jewish civil society also develop in opposition to the Jewish establishment—but found that in the end it had to cooperate with that establishment to make things work in the community and to satisfy a newly demanding constituency that had begun to know its own power. (This last was made explicit in Gurevich's comparison of the participation of Jewish artisans in the governance of the Kiev Jewish community to the participation of workers and peasants in the governing of the empire.) Jewish intellectuals of various political stripes could claim that they alone truly represented the masses of Russian Jewry, and had great plans for the future of those masses, but without the money that only the Jewish elite could provide from its own pockets and the communal coffers, their visions amounted to castles in the air. Even the introduction of elections for the communal governing board had little effect on the hegemony of the haute bourgeoisie. And new leaders who used confrontational methods in order to try to wrest the plutocrats' power away from them might in the end, like Lur’e, find themselves thrown out of the communal arena altogether.

At the same time, the new politics of the revolution and of Jewish nationalism and socialism introduced a populist rhetoric into community affairs that by 1908 was being used, whether sincerely or not, by all players. The notables could no longer point to their experience and influence as automatic qualifications for leadership; even if they had little respect for the democracy that had been instituted in communal institutions and treated communal affairs as "a game," they too now had to be representatives of the masses.203 If in previous eras Jewish progressive institutions had tried to reform and reshape the masses, now people were demanding that the masses shape the institutions. But who was really doing the shaping? In much the same way that post-June 1907 Russia paid lip service to democracy but still functioned as an autocracy, the actions of the self-appointed leaders too often belied their words. We have heard many words from the mouths of the notables and the educated professionals, but little from the masses themselves. Critics of Jewish politics mocked the endless meetings held by activists and communal leaders, at which the only decision taken was often to call yet another meeting.204 Against all odds, a tremendous amount was accomplished in these years to advance the cause of Jewry; whether more could have been done is a question not for the historian, but the philosopher.