In his pioneering work on Jewish political structures in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Russian Empire, Eli Lederhendler showed that among those who benefited from the breakdown of traditional structures and institutions—brought about mostly by state intervention into Jewish affairs during the reign of Nicholas I—were precisely the Jewish "notables" who stepped in to fill the power vacuum, both as internal leaders and as representatives of the Jewish community.2 While ostensibly similar to the elders of the kahal, the often oligarchic governing board of the autonomous Jewish community, the new Russian Jewish aristocracy—consisting primarily of liquor-tax farmers who then branched out into trade and industry—was actually a different phenomenon altogether.3 Where the kahal elders had been elected, at least on a pro forma basis, and often governed with the active support of rabbinical authorities, the notables had no formal ties to the organized Jewish community, and in a certain sense were not even members of it.4 Their authority emanated from their wealth—which provided them with "economic independence from Jewish communal authorities"—and their contacts with and (often exaggerated) influence in high circles of the Russian governmental bureaucracy.5 Fairly soon after the Russian conquest of the western borderlands, Jewish merchants were differentiated from Jewish members of other estates, not least in their freedom from payment of community taxes, the taxes that the Jewish/meshchanstvo community was required to pay the government, as distinct from taxes that Jews paid to support their own communal and welfare institutions. Instead, they were required to pay a portion of their capital to the treasury.6 Thus, as early as the early nineteenth century, a divide emerged and sharpened between the economic elite of the Jewish community and those below them on the rungs of the financial ladder. Of course this kind of rift had existed in the oligarchic community structure under the Rzeczpospolita, but now the state sanctioned a formal distinction between the two classes. In 1831, new legislation required the merchants to contribute toward the taxes of the Jewish meshchane in certain cases, but their unwillingness to comply with this law only brought into sharper focus their sense of disconnectedness from the townspeople estate, to which the vast majority of Russian Jews belonged.7
The abolition of the kahal in 1844 was part of the government's attempt to encourage rapprochement (sblizhenie) between the Jews of Russia and the surrounding population. As the government saw it, the elimination of Jewish self-government, as well as the newly introduced Jewish state schools and official rabbinate, would ultimately lead to the transformation of the Jews, as they abandoned their medieval isolation from society and "merged into the Russian social order."8 This merging was to be particularly encouraged by the transfer of the kahal's functions to the organs of municipal government. However, the crucial matter of taxation was not wholly given over to the local authorities; rather, Jews would elect "collectors" (sborshchiki) to be directly subordinate to the local governing bodies, who would collect and administer the korobka, the kosher meat excise also introduced in 1844 that served as "the basic internal tax of the Jewish community."9 Writing on the abolition of the kahal, Isaac Levitats maintained that "its administrative functions were turned over to the police, while its fiscal responsibilities were allocated to the municipalities."10 This formulation, however, is probably too strong, and Simon Dubnow's slightly more nuanced description is more accurate. Dubnow argued that the process of "municipalization," which had begun as early as the reign of Catherine II, "managed to destroy the self-government of the Kahal and yet preserve its rudimentary function as an autonomous fiscal agency which was to be continued under the auspices of the municipality."11
Gessen agreed: "The Jewish commune [evreiskoe obshchestvo], as a financial-administrative unit, continued to exist, and. . . sborshchiki and starosty [elders responsible for finding recruits] replaced the earlier kahal elders."12 according to this version, Russian Jews did hold onto some shred of autonomy under the new system, a supposition substantiated by Russian legislation's use of the term evreiskoe obshchestvo (Jewish community or commune). But who was in charge now that the governing board of the community was, at least in theory, no longer in existence?
Clearly, someone had to be in charge because legislation on the korobka compelled the Jewish obshchestvo to provide for the enlightenment of the masses, welfare or "communal care" (obshchestvennoe prizrenie), and charity (blagotvoritel’nost’), and these matters required organization and oversight.13 In many communities, the sborshchik and his assistants were in fact simply kahal officers by another name, and in his encyclopedic investigation of the post-abolition kahal, Azriel Shohat demonstrates that the Jewish obshchestvo retained—at least for a time—some of its earlier authority, such as the right to grant passports.14 Another new figure of authority was the deputat, also called the upolnomochennyi (representative), an elected position probably connected to conscription and the allocation of tax revenues for the needs of the poor, but this post was apparently not obligatory upon the community and thus did not appear in all localities. In a few places, the local burial society took over the functions of the kahal, while in many others, "prosperous and settled" (zazhitochnye i osedlye) members of the community whom the law allowed the local authorities to invite (or coopt) to assist in administering the korobka—in other words, the wealthiest members of the community—came to be de facto communal officers.15 (This phenomenon was fairly standard practice for the Russian Empire, as the administrators of the already overstretched imperial bureaucracy well understood that the western borderlands could only be efficiently governed by allowing the elites of their relatively "advanced" cultures to retain a certain amount of power).16 We also hear of the governing body of the main synagogue in a particular locality acting as a communal board.17 The reality is that we simply do not know—and may never know—exactly how the organized Jewish community carried on its functions.18
By the 1860s and early 1870s, the sborshchiki and deputaty began to lose their relevance. This was due to the easing of the harsh conscription regime for Jews in 1856, the abolition of the poll tax in 1863, and the new conscription law of 1874.19 (This shift was part of the larger transformation of the meshchanstvo as a result of these legislative changes.)20 Within the Jewish community, the changes may have opened the way for "prosperous and settled" Jews, or, as they were often called in Hebrew and Yiddish, the notables (gvirim), to take on an even more prominent role in Jewish communal life.
The reforms of the Jewish community undertaken by the Russian state must be understood not only in the context of similar measures taken to diminish Jewish separatism by Austria-Hungary and various German states, but also in light of the Russian government's policies in the western borderlands after the Polish Uprising of 1830. These policies first restricted and then abolished remnants of local autonomy that had survived from the era of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. As Michael Stanislawski has shown, one of the most important lasting effects of the 1844 abolition of the kahal was not in the functioning of the community, but rather in the perception on the part of Russian Jews that the kahal's authority had been substantially diminished.21 Indeed, the goal of the government's plan—if haphazard legislation over the course of decades can be considered a plan—was to reduce the Jewish community to an entity of a purely religious character, consisting of the synagogues and prayer houses in a given locality and the Crown rabbi that they elected. In terms of the day-to-day functioning of Jewish communal institutions, it was the notables coopted by individual municipalities—and the municipalities themselves—who truly held power.22 Of course, bound up in this question was the issue of competing spheres of influence within the urban body politic: municipalities, especially with the new powers granted them by the Municipal Statute of 1870; soslovie (estate) institutions, such as the townspeople's and artisan boards (upravy); and religious communities, such as the Jews, with historic privileges confirmed by the government in various acts of legislation.23
This was especially true of cities outside of the Pale of Settlement, as Benjamin Nathans has demonstrated in the case of St. Petersburg, where the authorities sharply restricted the areas in which the governing board could function, barring it from operating a burial society or philanthropic institu-tions.24 However, the policy later came to be applied to cities within the Pale, such as Odessa. In 1883, minister of internal affairs Tol’stoi wrote that because the Jewish community had previously been defined as relating only to religious ritual, there could be no separate Jewish communal governing board in Odessa, other than a body to administer the korobka.25 Since Jews were members of the municipal body politic and Jewish autonomy was no longer tolerated, Jewish communal affairs had to be governed by the municipality. Ultimately, the government's goal was to atomize the Jewish community, transforming it from a self-contained, independent entity with a variety of functions into a mere collection of synagogues.26 authority over fiscal matters was to be transferred to local government; formerly autonomous and unregimented charitable societies were to be carefully supervised by the authorities; and synagogues would be restricted to electing their own boards to govern financial, not communal, matters.27 As had been the case for decades, the only communal leader recognized by the state was its own: the state, or Crown, rabbi.28
While the state's policies did have an impact on the functioning of the Jewish community, the evolution of Russian Jewish leadership from the 1840s through the 1870s did not conform to the government's blueprint. Crown rabbis were mostly rejected by the communities to which they were sent, while traditional rabbis began to take on both local and national political roles, as did the new maskilim (proponents of Enlightenment) and the notables. These last two groups became linked to the state in various ways, whether through official sponsorship of the enlightenment project, as proponents and beneficiaries of a plan for "selective integration" of the Jews, or as local communal leaders, elected or self-appointed with the approval of the authorities.29
As in many cities of the Russian Empire, an informal alliance developed in Kiev between the maskilim and the acculturated elite. Both groups saw the good of Russian Jewry linked closely with the state. As Lederhendler makes clear in The Road to Modern Jewish Politics, maskilim solidified their connection to the state in the governmental positions that were bestowed upon Jews who had received some secular education: Crown rabbis, "expert Jews" (uchenye evrei; i. e., government advisers on Jewish affairs), and official censors.30 For their part, Jewish merchants and industrialists—who had first proposed the selective integration scheme to the government—were awarded official titles such as commercial counselor. Members of both groups were permitted to settle outside the Pale of Settlement. While the maskilim strove to act as intercessors on behalf of Russian Jewry, in reality it was often Jewish millionaires such as Lazar’ Brodsky and Baron Gintsburg, men with influence and connections with officials high in the tsarist bureaucracy, who were the true shtadlonim (the traditional Hebrew/Yiddish term for intercessors).
The Jewish case was highly typical of a broader pattern within the Russian Empire in which the central government coopted the elites of the empire's national and religious minorities in order to gain access to the peoples who acknowledged these elites as their leaders.31 Significantly, though, in many cases these elites were not long-established leadership groups with traditional claims to leadership but new factions or familiar factions with new claims. In the Muslim case, as Robert Crews writes,
State backing confirmed some customary prerogatives, but many of the "traditional" rights for which clerics sought support were, in fact, novel. . . . The authority of these new elites rested less on clerical or lay consensus than on police power.32
In the case of the Jews, such new groups as the maskilim and the "notables" were only too happy to take on the mantle of leadership that the state offered them in exchange for loyalty to the regime and a pledge to help carry out the state's intentions with regard to the reform and enlightenment of the Jews.
World History
