Jewish historiography has often regarded the Jews of Eastern Europe as an exception in the European Jewish encounter with modernity. Along with Romania, the Russian Empire was the only European country that had not emancipated its Jews by the time of the First World War. External assimilatory pressures and internal forces for change had also apparently made fewer inroads on the masses. Preserving Yiddish and traditional piety for much longer than did other Jewries, they were seen as more authentically Jewish.1 As Eli Lederhendler has written, however, the experience of East European Jews in the nineteenth century—even lacking emancipation and assimilation—was not a special case that must be viewed separately from that of Jews in Western and Central Europe.2 Benjamin Nathans has shown that Russian Jews did indeed encounter emancipation, albeit in a different form from the classical model offered by the French Revolution or Joseph II's Toleranzpatent.3 The "selective integration" of the tsarist regime was in some ways not very much different from the gradual, quid-pro-quo schemes found in the German states. As for "assimilation," the Russian Empire offered Jews as individuals the possibility of wholesale absorption into Russian society through conversion, as was true elsewhere in Europe. In a fashion less radical than apostasy, Jews became "Russian" in much the same way that other national minorities in the empire did, through gradual acculturation and russification. However, as assimilated or traditionalist individual Jews might have been, all Jewries across Europe maintained some level of corporate identity and consciousness and all experienced some degree of acculturation and Europeanization.4
Recent trends in assimilation theory—which is most often used to understand the social psychology of immigrants and immigrant culture but can be applied more widely to multinational and multiethnic contexts—are useful in understanding Russian Jews and their relationship to the larger society in which they lived. Milton Gordon's straight-line theory of assimilation posits seven dimensions of assimilation, the first of which is behavioral assimilation or acculturation: the adoption of cultural patterns of the host by the minority without social contact and interaction between the two groups.5 Gordon's
Second dimension is "structural assimilation," which includes social contacts of the minority with the dominant group on two levels: primary relations and secondary relations. To some extent, the category of primary relations— contacts within the realms of family and friendship networks and clubs and neighborhoods—is applicable to Jews in fin-de-siecle Kiev, especially when we consider that other social traits such as class and individual characteristics can, in this instance, become more important than ethnicity. However, "secondary relations"—equal access to power and privilege within society's main institutions and elimination of minority status—are unequivocally inapplicable to the case of Kiev's Jews. More recent formulations have attempted to add nuance to this model by stressing the complexity of the acculturation process: for example, the "two-culture matrix" and "multidimensionality" models posit slightly different variations on what is basically a multifaceted process of adaptation in which members of the minority group adopt some aspects and practices of the majority culture but retain characteristics of their native culture "in a flexible and situationally dictated manner."6 Whichever theory we attempt to apply, we must conclude that there was a wide range of acculturation among Kiev's Jews depending on class, educational background, linguistic abilities, and a number of other factors.
It must be remembered that Kiev's Jews were not the only minority in the city, nor was the city unequivocally Russian in language or in culture, despite a veneer of imperial culture that was shallower or deeper depending on the context and circumstances. At times there must surely have been more Ukrainian, Yiddish, and the local combination of Russian and Ukrainian known as surzhik spoken at Kiev's markets than any form of literary Russian. When it came to the city's governmental institutions, official bureaucracy, high commerce, and education, it was not only Kiev's Yiddish-speaking Jews, but also its Ukrainians—as well as Poles and Germans—who had to negotiate a Russian-speaking city.
The case of the Jews of Kiev reinforces the reevaluation of the place of Russian Jewry in the larger historiography of European Jewry. To a surprising degree, Jews became Russian, participated in municipal life, and interacted with their non-Jewish neighbors. At the same time, as occurred in Western and Central Europe, bourgeois Jews became acutely conscious of their distance from an "authentic" Jewish existence and strove to strengthen their Jewish identity by creating new forms of Jewish culture that were seen as genuine because rooted in the quasi-mystical people or Volk (Russian na-rod, Yiddish folk, Hebrew le’om). This phenomenon came about in part because of growing hostility to Jews within Russian society, but paradoxically it was also a measure of how comfortable Jews felt in that society, or at least as carriers of its culture.7 So "Russian" were Jews becoming that one of the central tasks facing the leadership of Russian Jewry was to bring Jews back to their heritage. And in multiethnic cities such as Kiev, it was increasingly acceptable and even stylish to be an adherent of a particular national culture while retaining one's primary allegiance to the Russian state. This was, by its nature, a concern of the middle class alone; the toiling masses were for the most part too busy eking out their daily bread to be overly concerned about the character, quality, and future of Jewish culture.
The sources make it frustratingly difficult to get a firm grasp on the extent of Russian acculturation among Kiev's Jewish masses. It was probably not as clear-cut a process as is portrayed in the classic historiographical literature (and especially in works with a socialist slant), such as the description of the transformation of the family of Grigorii Gol’denberg in a Soviet historian's account. After the Gol’denbergs' move from Berdichev, where "they had been an observant merchant family," to Kiev, where David Gol’denberg "opened up a flourishing hardware store,"
Currents of modern life poured into the Kiev home of the Goldenbergs. And together with these currents there penetrated the progressive ideas of the epoch. . . . Even the parents succumbed to the influence of this new atmosphere. This was shown in the first place by their willingness to give their children a secular education.8
Some families and individuals may indeed have experienced a radical transformation after arriving in the big city, but for most, changes occurred more slowly. The acculturation process is incredibly complex; choices and practices cannot be assigned to any category or class of Jews with any certainty. One university student might not even know Yiddish, yet identify as a Jewish nationalist and observe important aspects of Jewish practice. Another might have Yiddish as a native language and think in both Russian and Yiddish, yet live a completely secular life and endorse the possibility of conversion for those Jews who chose it. Jewish migrants to the city were likely to adhere to traditional religious practices, but might also pick and choose from individual rituals and observances. Economic, occupational, political, and even leisure activities brought Jews and non-Jews together, requiring from Jews a knowledge of spoken Russian, at the very least. Jewish professionals who had attended Russian gymnasia and universities usually spoke Russian in the home, and many had tenuous links, at best, with organized Judaism. Then too, wealthy merchants and industrialists created their own mode of Jewish affiliation, frequently worshiping separately from other Jews and staking out a claim to leadership of the community. Members of the middling and haute bourgeoisie, especially women, came together in "associational Judaism" to create a network of Jewish social service organizations that in some ways built on traditional models of charity while standing in the mainstream of Russian philanthropic culture. As Steven Zipperstein has remarked for Odessa, Jewish acculturation was not an intellectual or ideological stance but simply made economic and practical sense; thus, it was not planned, but developed ad hoc as circumstances dictated.9
Jews settling in Kiev entered a city that was known as the mother of Russian cities, and it was indeed a bastion of Russianness in a sea of Ukrainian villages, Jewish shtetlekh, and even Polish estates. But as their numbers and influence grew, Kiev grew ever more Jewish, as we saw in detail in chapters 1 and 3. Despite the exclusion of Jews from the city's political life after 1890, they played a significant role in local life—its economy, philanthropies, and associations, from the Jewish-dominated commodities exchange to the "Jewish Bazaar" and the neighborhoods of Podol and Lybed, to the dozens of institutions and welfare organizations throughout the city endowed by Kiev's Jewish millionaires. These establishments served as models for other communities. At the same time, the community shaped a new Jewish culture rooted in the traditions and conventions of premodern Jewish society and adopting the urban culture of the Russian Empire and the sensibilities and aesthetics of fin-de-siecle Europe.10
World History
