A. P. Subbotin, an economist and writer who surveyed the economic condition of the Jews in the region in 1887, gives a figure of "up to" 18,000 Jews out of a total city population of 170,000 in 1887, or about 10.5 percent, which is almost identical to the percentage in the 1874 census.24 By 1897, the year of the All-Imperial Russian Census, Kiev's population had risen to just under a quarter of a million, of whom about 13 percent were Jews (32,000).25 This figure was commensurate with their proportion of the population of the entire province (12.2 percent), and an increase of only a few points from the share of Jews in the total population in 1874: Jewish movement into Kiev had slowed from its early breakneck speed and was now keeping pace with total migration to the city.26 However, Jews now formed the city's largest religious minority, with Catholics coming in second with 19,000. The share of Jews who spoke Russian as their mother tongue was not much greater than that in the Jewish population of the empire as a whole: 6 percent, or about 2,000. For comparison, 37 percent of St. Petersburg's Jews and 10.5 percent of Odessa's claimed Russian as their mother tongue, while less than 1 percent (0.83 percent) of the Jews of Kiev province did so.27 In the imperial census of 1897, "mother tongue" probably meant something more like Umgangsprache—the language of everyday use—as even those Jews who spoke Russian at home had probably not been raised with it as children. Thus, while Kiev had a higher concentration of acculturated Jews than the average shtetl, it had fewer such Jews than most of the empire's large cities with significant Jewish populations. Of Yiddish-speakers, half were literate in Russian (a statistic somewhat higher than the 42 percent literacy rate among the total population of the city), and only 5 percent had had any education higher than the primary grades. As was the case among Russian Jewry as a whole, women were less likely than men to be literate in Russian (41 percent versus 61 percent).28
The 1897 census also shows that Kiev was largely a city of relatively young and unattached people: of Yiddish-speakers, fully 60 percent had never been married, the same proportion as for Russian-speakers in the city and indeed for all Jews in the Russian Empire.29 Two-thirds of Kievans had been born outside the city, and almost half of them outside Kiev province.30 Jews certainly had reasons to want to move to Kiev: Subbotin noted that Jewish poverty in Kiev province and the southwest region as a whole was at a higher level than in the northwest: living conditions were worse, it was more difficult to find work, and competition with non-Jews was more intense.31 These circumstances were likely another factor that attracted Jews to Kiev, the one locality in the region one could hope would be an exception to the continually worsening conditions in the surrounding provinces.
The heavily migrant character of the community may also explain the imbalance in the representation of the sexes: for every one hundred Jewish men, there were eighty-nine Jewish women. Lestschinsky points to the legal restrictions on Jewish settlement, theorizing that many of the merchants and artisans who were permitted to live in Kiev were not yet married.32 Married Jews attempting to live in Kiev illegally might have been more likely to leave their families behind; however, some—like Yekhezkel Kotik—may have succeeded in bringing their wives and children with them, despite the difficulties.
After 1881, some Jewish migrants to Kiev were undoubtedly victims of the many expulsions from rural areas brought about by the Temporary Laws of 1882, or had arrived from other towns overburdened with expellees. But where did they come from? Eliezer Friedmann, who arrived in Kiev in 1893, concluded that the city's Jewish community was so diverse—since Jews from different regions differed so greatly in character and outlook—that it was practically unique in the Pale of Settlement. Even prayer houses, which were usually organized around place of origin or occupation, could muster true communal feeling only during prayers, and the prayers themselves were often recited in disparate melodies or musical modes (nushaot) characteristic of different regions within the Pale.33 In attempting to determine the place of origin of Kiev's Jews, we may note that the provinces surrounding Kiev were among those with the densest Jewish population; in Kiev province in the mid-1880s, 20 percent of the Jewish population of 300,000 was crammed into the town of Berdichev, and Kiev—which had had practically no Jews twenty years earlier—was already home to more than 5 percent of the province's Jews. Still, the Jews of the southwest were less urban than those in the Lithuanian, Belorussian, and Polish provinces, where fully 85 percent of the Jewish population was urban (versus about 70 percent in the southwest).34
We do not know if Jews from the same town or region tended to stick together, as did peasant zemliaki (countrymen) in many Russian cities.35 If Jewish immigrants to the U. S. and Europe prayed together with their fellow townspeople from the old country and formed landsmanshaft mutual-aid societies, why would the same not be true for internal migrants within the Russian Empire?36 We have some references relating to synagogues that mention particular places of origin (for example, there were "Lithuanian" and "Polish" shuls), but in general the evidence is too patchy to confirm or deny a zemliak-based Jewish community.37 Thus we have no way of knowing if this was one way that a sense of continuity with shtetl life was preserved after migration to the city, or whether "familiar social bonds" were present that could "foster a sense of security. . . ."38 On the other hand, we do know that Jews might move back and forth between shtetl and city, whether because of family ties, work obligations, or simply because they were registered in their hometown and had to return there to obtain important documents. Many Kiev Jews probably experienced a double identity as both natives of their hometown and residents of Kiev.
By 1910, the Jewish population of Kiev had risen considerably from its proportions at the 1897 census—but to what, exactly, we cannot say. Lestschinsky, without citing specific sources, names a figure of 51,000, or 11 percent of the total population.39 The approximate figure cited by the editors of Die Judenpogrome in Russland is 70,000, or 15.5 percent of a total 450,000, but no year is given. Perhaps this is an estimate of the pre-1905 pogrom population.40 A very high estimate given by rabbi and Hebraist Moshe Rozenblat, who lived in Kiev for years, is 150,000; Rozenblat may have been the correspondent from Kiev who wrote in a 1912 issue of the Russian Jewish newspaper No-vyi voskhod that there might be 150,000 Jews in the city, maybe even more.41 If not, we have two Kievans speculating that the Jewish proportion of the population might actually be about one-third; but this is much more akin to the number in 1926, after the influx of tens of thousands of Jews during the years of war and revolution, and can safely be disregarded.42 Still, with thousands of Jews living in Kiev illegally and thousands more in its suburbs, something on the order of 75,000 or even slightly higher would not be impossible.
An ever-present segment of the Jewish population were students. In 1886, there were 237 Jewish students at St. vladimir's University, making up 12.9 percent of the student body. This was the third-largest Jewish student body in the empire after Moscow and St. Petersburg universities (with 298 and 268 Jewish students, respectively), not surprising given that Kiev's university was the largest after those in the two capitals. It was also the third-largest in terms of proportional representation, after Novorossiiskii University in Odessa (29.8 percent) and Khar’kov University (28.3 percent).43 By 1909, there were more than 900 Jewish students at the university and another 400-odd at the Polytechnical Institute, in each case constituting a significant proportion (about 17 percent) of the total student body.44 Many other young people came to Kiev to study in its many gymnasia and institutes; the archives preserve hundreds of petitions from Jewish teenagers and young adults who asked the authorities for permission to reside in Kiev during the school year or even just for the exam period, if the student was an extern studying independently. This situation continued right up to the end of the imperial period. A late example is that of Iankel’ (Yankel) Kharmats of Rzhishchev, a heavily Jewish town south of Kiev, whose father Shloma (Shlomo) applied in March 1908 for permission for his son to live in Kiev temporarily in order to sit his exams for a gymnasium that required all students to reside in Kiev during the examination period. The mark "OTK" (short for otkazat’), written in blue pencil on the bottom of the petition, tells us that Shlomo's request was denied; whether Iankel’ ever managed to take the exams, we do not know.45 Some students lived in the suburbs rather than apply for residence rights, but it was a difficult commute by coach or horse-drawn cab, and later by streetcar.46 Relatively large numbers of students were
Probably involved in the revolutionary movement in the 1880s.47 Students were also key in the founding of Kiev's first Bundist cell, Frayhayt (Freedom) around 1900, after a split between Zionists and socialists in the Jewish student organization at St. vladimir University; the Frayhayt group officially joined the Bund in 1903 as the Kiev Bund Group.48 This may be the "leftist radical group" to which Nokhem Shtif refers in his autobiography, whose members he describes as "not clearly knowing what we wanted."49
World History
