Other areas, such as formal education, could also accommodate shared spaces where ethnic and religious interaction was possible, though those spaces were frequently accompanied by significant tension and unease.30 Government policies mandating or encouraging segregation, along with outright antisemitism—while simultaneously condemning the "isolation" engendered by the existence of separate Jewish charitable societies—contributed to the ambivalence.31 For example, Jewish and non-Jewish children mixed in Kiev's public schools: Jews made up 11 percent of pupils in the municipal system in 1906, up from 5 percent in 1899 and, with more than 15 percent of all applications submitted by Jews, even more wanted to attend.32 In some schools in neighborhoods with dense Jewish populations, the percentage of Jewish students in public schools was as high as 29 percent. Even the municipal school commission counted two Jews among its twenty-two members.33 Yet quotas led to a concentration of Jewish students in those schools offering unrestricted admission—Jewish schools, of course, but also commercial academies under the auspices of the Ministry of Trade, where Jewish pupils constituted half and even three-quarters of the student body.34 In addition to the official quotas established in official educational institutions with the introduction of the numerus clausus for Jewish males in universities and gymnasia in the mid-1880s, Jews began to be barred from other kinds of facilities on an ad hoc and individual basis.35 Even private schools and academies, which did not fall under the numerus clausus law, began to institute Jewish quotas—especially schools for women, where Jews could often be found in large numbers. For example, the regulations of the Volodkevich Women's Commercial School, established in 1900, maintained that Jews were to constitute no more than 40 percent of the student body.36 That very number reveals the overwhelming presence of Jews in Kiev's educational sector; clearly the school's founders feared that if no limit were set, Jewish applications and admissions would be at least if not more than half of the total. In 1906, one Jewish newspaper announced that the wife of a priest was opening a private girls' gymnasium that would educate pupils in the "true Russian spirit"; Jews would not be admitted.37 Those Jews lucky enough to obtain admission to Kiev's St. Vladimir University were refused support from the local Student Aid Society (Kievskoe obshchestvo posobiia studentam) beginning in 1899.38 And at least one gymnasium forbade its Christian students from being tutored by Jews, thus eliminating another important source of income for Jewish students.39
A passing reference in Sholem Aleichem's epistolary work The Further Adventures of Menachem-Mendl and Sheyne-Sheyndl illustrates the "challenge" that acculturation posed to Christians (and especially to antisemites) who, in earlier times, had been used to being able easily to identify Jews. Arriving in Kiev in 1912 or 1913 to cover the Beilis Affair as a journalist, Menachem-Mendl hails a cab and asks to be taken to Podol. "Hearing the words, 'Podol,' and 'Nizhne Rampart' [one of the neighborhood's main streets], the driver, a goy, turned his head to look me over and decided I must be a Jew, not otherwise, because all the Jews live on the Podol."40 Even Jews whose mother tongue was Yiddish, like the fictional Menachem-Mendl, could be indistinguishable from their fellow Russian subjects in dress, speech, and manner— in the first moments of an encounter, and perhaps even for longer.41
The exclusion practiced by such institutions as the Student Aid Society was by no means a uniform trend, and in many cases a peculiar mixture of interaction and segregation seemed the norm. A relief committee set up after the Dnepr flood of 1895 was composed of both wealthy Jews and Christians and provided for victims of both religions, albeit in separate facilities.42 (As in many cases, the primary motivation for the separation of the groups was likely the need for a separate kitchen to provide kosher food for observant Jews.) The charter of the charitable society established by the Blagoveshchen-skii parish in 1908 stated specifically that the society would assist all the needy of the parish, "not excluding nonbelievers"—even though membership in the society itself was restricted to Christians.43 Another variation on Christian-Jewish interaction within the sphere of civil society was the semisegregation of Jewish interests within a larger, nonsectarian organization, as had been the case in the first decades of Kiev's Jewish Hospital and was now true for the city's largest and most distinguished charitable societies, the Society of Day Shelters for Working-Class Children (Obshchestvo dnevnykh priiutov dlia detei rabochego klassa) and the aforementioned Kiev Literacy
Society. At the behest of Jewish activists, the two institutions set about to establish facilities for Jews in the late 1890s; the former succeeded in founding a Jewish shelter while the latter, despite several years of effort, was unable to obtain permission for its proposed Saturday literacy classes for Jewish adults.44 Despite the integrated presence of Jews in schools and programs established by a number of philanthropic organizations in Kiev, including the Literacy Society—one of the society's Sunday schools had a Jewish enrollment of over 10 percent, while Jewish students made up approximately 6 percent of students at its Kiev Women's Prison School45—both the Literacy Society and Society of Day Shelters were clearly determined to create institutions specifically for Jews. The pertinent documents show that this need was taken for granted by all those involved, perhaps because it was self-evident that most Jewish children would need a day shelter where Yiddish was spoken and kosher food was provided, while the majority of Jewish adults in need of literacy lessons would have a better chance of success if taught in their native tongue (Yiddish). And as far as funding was concerned, segregation seemed to persist even in the integrated schools, with all or most of the expenses for teaching Jewish students shouldered by Jews.46 although the question of whether Jews were expected to contribute to the general fund was left unasked, major Jewish donors often gave for general support as well as for specifically Jewish causes. Despite the fact that some of the most generous donors to the Literacy Society were Jewish (in 1901, at least one-fifth of the largest contributions originated from Jewish homes),47 few or no Jews sat on the society's board. apparently, this was an organization willing to cater to Jewish interests but reluctant or uninterested in having Jews participate in the running of its (non-Jewish) activities, other than by giving money.
The evening classes for adults sponsored by the local Committee for Public Sobriety (Popechitel’stvo o narodnoi trezvosti) provide another angle on Jewish participation in informal education. Ten of the sixteen classes had only one Jewish student or none at all, while an additional three—all in heavily Jewish neighborhoods—were between 80 and 90 percent Jewish. Only the three remaining classes had Jewish student bodies roughly commensurate to the Jewish share in the overall city population.48 While these last three cannot be discounted, there is certainly a marked trend toward segregation, perhaps owing to residence patterns—or perhaps to the undesirability in the eyes of Christians of attending a school perceived as "Jewish."
Separate Jewish welfare institutions, while meant to facilitate integration by firmly establishing Jews in the local institutional setting, often reinforced Jewish apartness. Jewish welfare institutions such as the Kiev Jewish Hospital welcomed the Jewish poor as well as non-Jews, but there is evidence that some Jews chose to frequent the city's non-Jewish hospitals and clinics as well, which by and large did not exclude Jews in the early years.49 But eventually at least one and possibly a number of institutions began to bar Jews, citing the existence of Jewish facilities.50 By contrast, one of the reasons cited for the founding of the new Jewish maternity clinic in 1901 was that some Kiev clinics did not admit Jews, while the Brodsky vocational School (Kievskoe evreiskoe uchilishche imeni S. I. Brodskago) was established to educate Jewish boys, who were barred from Kiev's main trade school.51 Thus, separate Jewish welfare institutions could be both the impetus for anti-Jewish restrictions and a consequence of such restrictions.
Not surprisingly, Jews with a more nationalist bent often argued that shared institutions would never fully satisfy the needs of the Jewish public. Thus, despite the presence of Russian-language Jewish literature in Kiev's general libraries and reading halls, Jews called for an independent Jewish reading hall that would stock literature of all kinds in Hebrew and Yiddish in addition to Russian.52
World History
