The following chapters trace the evolution of Jewish life in Kiev from its beginnings in a tiny community at a time of expansive optimism; through decades of continued Jewish settlement and communal activity—despite two pogroms and growing hostility toward Jews; to the emergence of a Jewish metropolis and civil society, with a form of elected self-government, a thriving associational culture, and outlets for independent public opinion. The book is divided into two parts that correspond roughly to the "early years" (the first two or three decades of renewed Jewish settlement in Kiev after 1859) and the age of the "Jewish metropolis" (the turn of the century to the outbreak of the First World War). Each part leads off with an economic, demographic, and cultural profile of Kiev Jewry, and then moves on to investigate specific issues of Jewish communal organization and selfunderstanding.
Chapter 1, "Settlement and Growth, 1859-1881," provides the reader with an overview of the history of Kiev and of Jewish settlement in the city from the medieval period. It then sketches in detail the first twenty years of Jewish life in late-imperial Kiev, including migration, residential, and occupational patterns, set within the context of the city's multiethnic population and dynamic urban life as well as the larger context of Russian Jewry as a whole. The chapter closes with the 1881 pogrom. Chapter 2, "The Foundations of Communal Life," traces the development of an organized Jewish community in Kiev during the first decades of Jewish settlement into the 1890s. This chapter ascertains how the established leadership of Russian Jewry at the time—wealthy merchants and maskilim, proponents of the Jewish Enlightenment—understood and reimagined the concept of "Jewish community" in the decades after the government's abolition of the official Jewish community, and the kinds of institutions they sought to establish to bring that community into being. These institutions, to be controlled by the Jewish economic and intellectual elite, would help to modernize Russian Jewry and facilitate its integration into Russian society. The analysis focuses specifically on the official communal governing board, the municipal Jewish hospital, the state rabbinate, and the Choral Synagogue. The chapter also examines the Russian state's attempt to engineer the kind of Jewish community that it viewed as most appropriate for a modern Russian Jewry, often (but not always) in conjunction with Kiev's Jewish establishment, and reveals the government's unrealized plan to reduce the Russian Jewish community to an entity of a purely religious character, stripped of all independence and autonomy.
Part 2 begins with a survey of the Jewish community of Kiev in the last decades of the tsarist regime as it grew rapidly into one of the largest urban Jewish conglomerations in the empire. Chapter 3, "The Consolidation of Jewish Kiev, 1881-1914," explores the emergence of a large Jewish working class and a smaller Jewish bourgeoisie, the diversification of the local Jewish economy, the gendered economic roles of Jewish men and women, changing residential patterns, and the pogrom of 1905, which—together with the revolution of that year—proved to be a caesura in the life of Kiev Jewry, after which things would never be quite the same. Chapters 4 and 5 take a closer look at specific aspects of Jewish life in Kiev around the fin-de-siecle. Chapter 4, titled "Modern Jewish Cultures and Practices," charts a complex transformation in cultural practices and religious observance among Kiev Jews. Challenging the received categorization of Russian Jews into "traditional" and "secular," the analysis here examines new religious trends that included an unexpected laxity of observance even among groups traditionally considered "pious" and the establishment of a modern-style Choral Synagogue by Kiev's Jewish oligarchs. Chapter 5, "Jew as Neighbor, Jew as Other: Interethnic Relations and Antisemitism," analyzes the dynamics of relations between Jews and other ethnic groups in the city, particularly Ukrainians, and reveals that there were a number of contexts—philanthropic societies, social clubs, political groups—in which a surprisingly large number of contacts between Jews and non-Jews could and did take place. The chapter reflects on the role that interethnic relations, both positive and negative, played in the development of a Russian Jewish identity.
Chapters 6 and 7 return to the theme of Jewish communal and institutional life. "Varieties of Jewish Philanthropy" explores a central component of modern Russian Jewish communal existence by examining the wealthy benefactors who were behind many of the city's Jewish charitable initiatives and the types of institutions they chose to establish. In accordance with their vision of the ideal community, health care was their first priority, followed by education; but whatever the field, they often made sure that the institutions they supported broadcast a political message to the authorities and to Russian society in addition to providing for the poor and the sick. The field of welfare also became an arena in which women could take on leadership roles that were denied to them in official communal structures, and where they introduced new forms of welfare provision that were often more efficient than those of the official governing body of the community. The chapter also shows that philanthropy, often overlooked by scholars, became a new vehicle for the maintenance of Jewish identity and the expression of political opinions—and not only for wealthy Jews—at a time when Russian Jewry was becoming more and more fragmented and there were ever more ways of being Jewish. This network of modern Jewish philanthropic institutions also formed the basis for a "Jewish public sphere" that became vital for Kiev's Jews who, because of official restrictions on Jewish activities, expression, and movement in the city, were compelled to channel their political energies into their many welfare, cultural, and self-help societies. Chapter 7, "Revolutions in Communal Life," continues the focus on communal developments by examining the upheaval in Jewish communal life that accompanied the first Russian Revolution of 1905. As Jews began, not in tiny pockets of maskilim and litterateurs, but en masse, to create new ways of expressing their Jewishness (with the emergence of an acculturated hybrid Russian-Jewish identity, the rise of Jewish nationalism and socialism, and the flowering of modern Jewish culture in Hebrew, Yiddish, and Russian), they also began to challenge the communal status quo by finding alternative ways of affiliating Jewishly through voluntary associations and philanthropic societies. This is Jewish politics in its most local—and perhaps rawest—form. The chapter demonstrates how the central tensions in Russian Jewish society, which usually related in some way to the question of self-definition (as in the ubiquitous problem of Jewish languages or the conflict between nationalism and socialism), played out in local politics, as activists demanded communal governance that would be elected, transparent, and accountable to constituents. In the analysis of the fortunes of the newly reorganized Jewish Communal Board of Kiev and the Kiev Branch of the Society for the Dissemination of the Enlightenment Among the Jews of Russia (OPE), we witness the porousness of Jewish politics in its formative years, as ideologies were still taking shape and communal leaders attempted to stake out ideological territory on ever-shifting ground. In this context, charismatic leaders and ideologues in the national and socialist movements had to compromise not only with each other, but also with one of the driving forces of community—men with money—if they wished to stay realistic about achieving their strategic goals. On the plane of ideas, politics could afford to be as idealistic as it wished, but in the realm of action and practice, it could not be anything other than pragmatic. In Kiev, where perhaps more than any other locality in the Russian Empire Jews felt the heavy weight of restrictive legislation and administrative practice, local politics and organizational life provided the sole outlet for the emerging Jewish public sphere, which, though oriented toward the Jewish masses, was heavily middle-class in its makeup and perhaps its goals as well.
World History
