I have used a wide range of sources in order to reconstruct a profile of Kiev Jewry. The 1874 census of the city, conducted by the South-West Branch of the Imperial Russian Geographical Society, and the 1897 imperial census provide some basic information about language and occupation, though the two censuses often used different measures and are thus difficult to compare.43 While the 1874 census furnished fascinating data on the Jewish population in individual neighborhoods of the city, such information is much harder to find for later decades. Moreover, the official enumerations surely did not count Jews who resided in the city illegally and did not want to be noticed by authorities of any kind. (I have not used the 1917 census because the radical demographic changes that took place during the First World War make any comparison of the 1917 numbers with the prewar censuses meaningless.) In the late 1880s, economist A. P. Subbotin undertook an expedition to the Pale of Settlement, providing a mine of information about the economic and occupational patterns of Russian Jewry (Subbotin was also the author of a report on Russian Jewry for the government's Pahlen Commission, appointed after the pogroms of 1881-82 to review Jewish legislation). The survey of Jewish economic life in the Russian Empire carried out under the auspices of the Jewish Colonization Association in 1897-98 also contains a wealth of information; though the survey did not include data on Kiev, I draw on it for its general conclusions on Jews in the province and region of which Kiev was the capital, as well as for Russian Jewry as a whole. The local press (in Russian) and Jewish newspapers published for the entire empire (in Russian, Hebrew, and Yiddish) provide statistics and anecdotal information, as do archival documents of various kinds, especially governmental memoranda and petitions. I have tried to be particularly cautious when drawing on articles in Kievlianin, which was in certain periods the city's only newspaper, since its editorial perspective was one of russification and often Judeo-phobia.44 Annual reports of philanthropic societies also yield quantitative and qualitative data, and memoir and belletristic literature help to provide details about everyday life. But the picture is far from complete: five wars, three revolutions, and decades of Soviet suppression of Jewish-related documents have done their part to draw a curtain around Jewry in imperial Kiev, since many of the sources that would shed light on all aspects of Jewish life in a West European or american city have been destroyed or are missing without a trace.
World History
