The two pogroms surveyed in earlier chapters, along with local antiJewish restrictions, day-to-day hostility, and rising nationalist sentiment, would seem to have made impossible the prospect of Jewish integration of any kind into the larger society. However, there were small but significant islands of neighborly interaction, cooperation, and even conviviality; and thus the reality of meaningful interaction between Jews and non-Jews in Kiev cannot be discounted, nor can the extent to which some Jews felt at home in the society and culture of imperial Russia. As this chapter demonstrates, such interaction was not limited to commercial contacts, which had existed for centuries and, as Todd Endelman has written of England, "were generally of an instrumental and formal character" and at times could even hinder contact of a warmer nature when individuals evaluated each other purely on the basis of how they conducted business.1 People coming together in the context of voluntary societies, charities, and educational institutions had something in common other than personal gain, and that sense of common purpose surely made it easier to overcome prejudices and forge working partnerships, acquaintanceships, and even friendships with members of other ethnic and religious groups.
Scholars have recently pointed out the importance of the voluntary sector within late imperial Russia's small but growing civil society. Kiev and other large cities were home to a rapidly growing number of associations, societies, clubs, and charities that provided a middle ground between the state and the individual, offered an outlet for political energies that until 1905 could not be expressed outside the limited municipal sphere, challenged the established social order based on soslovie (estate) and rank, promised the amelioration of many aspects of municipal life (especially in the realms of education and health) as well as individual self-improvement, and encouraged professionalization.2 For Jews, whose opportunities to enter public life were becoming ever fewer as government restrictions blocked or severely narrowed the way to participation in municipal government, higher education,
And the bar, the voluntary sector offered an alternative—and a chance to be active in a nonsectarian quarter of society that was truly "all-imperial."3 But as Joseph Bradley points out, even as associational life fostered a new spirit of obshchestvennost’ in the empire's cities, the associations "also promoted new identities and groupings based on craft, profession, culture, and choice"— and, we may add, nationality.4 Nowhere could this contradiction be seen more clearly than in Kiev, a city of a quarter-million in 1897 where three prominent ethnic groups—Russian, Ukrainian, and Jewish—lived side by side with smaller populations of Poles, Germans, Czechs, and others.5 Even as individuals came together to improve city life for specific socioeconomic, religious, or occupational groups, the pull of national identification remained strong and grew only stronger as the empire, and especially its western borderlands, grew more polarized in the last decades of tsarist rule.6 Kiev's voluntary sector provided common ground where Jews and non-Jews could come together, but ethnic tensions present everywhere in society could not be erased or forgotten even here. Without discounting the significance of the national question, however, the evidence also points to class as a secondary but still important factor in the formation of civil society in Kiev; as Michael F. Hamm writes, "toward the end of the nineteenth century. . . occupation, education, and income came increasingly to determine status and recreational choices."7
This chapter highlights the ambiguities inherent in the partial integration that some Jews, especially educated middle-class Jews, experienced in Kiev. As we shall see, the few decades before 1905—not quite a "golden age" but still relatively peaceful—yield a number of fascinating examples of interethnic contact. However, even after the 1905 pogrom, which shattered the hopes of most Jews for peaceful coexistence with their Christian neighbors in Kiev, we can find Jews and non-Jews coming together in professional and even social contexts. Moreover, these encounters did not necessitate Jews "becoming" Russian or even abandoning their Jewishness, though many of the individuals whom we will have cause to mention were acculturated to some degree. This point is crucial because the field continues to suffer from the impressionistic duality of isolated shtetl Jew versus assimilated, russified, or even deracinated Jewish intelligent8 Kiev—a city seen by many Russian officials and subjects as quintessentially Russian and Orthodox yet home to thousands of Jews, a city legally "beyond the Pale" yet sitting right in the heart of a territory of historic Jewish settlement—is an ideal place to view the encounter between the average urban Jew and the Christian townsperson. In a city where ethnic segregation was the norm, the extent of interaction and cooperation—even when imperfect or restricted in some way—was truly remarkable, and allows us to point to a very limited but no less real Jewish integration even in Kiev.
The nature of relations between Jews and Christians in the Ukrainian lands varied depending on ethnic group and socioeconomic class. Most Russian bureaucrats and merchants moving to Kiev from the inner provinces of the empire had probably met few if any Jews before, and their knowledge of Jews and Judaism was likely limited to the stereotypes that surfaced in official imperial policy, the press, and in the relatively few works of Russian literature that discussed Jews; that is, as exploiters of the peasantry, enemies of Christianity, and individuals detrimental to the economic well-being of the state.9 Poles and Ukrainians, on the other hand, had a long history of interaction with the Jews of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, characterized by both economic interdependence and mutual antagonism. Starting in the late sixteenth century, Polish (and polonized Ukrainian) magnates had begun to invite Jews to settle on their estates and in private towns in the Ukrainian lands in order to provide essential economic services; the Christian burghers in this region, however, often resented Jewish competition.10 Some citizens' groups attempted to attain the de non tolerandis judaeis right for their town, and at times—such as in Kiev in 1619—they succeeded. The relationship between Jews and peasants was also problematic, melding peaceable (or at least uneventful) day-to-day interaction with religious antagonism (including anti-Judaism on the part of Christians and a negative valuation of Christianity on the part of Jews) and peasant resentment of Jews for the supporting role they played in Polish economic hegemony in the region and especially the arenda leaseholding system.11 The two groups often inhabited different sociogeographical terrains, Jews predominating in the market town (or shtetl) and Ukrainian peasants residing in agricultural village settlements. The modern period brought rapid change and upheaval for all these groups, however, and, though individual migrants to the city surely brought with them traditional images of how a typical Jew, Ukrainian, or Russian was supposed to behave, in the context of the late imperial city, economic and social roles could not remain as rigid as in past times or in rural areas.
Kiev (or Kyiv, as it has always been known by Ukrainians) held a special place in the symbolic world of Ukrainians, which began to achieve expression with the emergence of the Hromada (society) movement of Ukrainian national and cultural consciousness in the mid-nineteenth century.12 The attitudes of Ukrainian intelligenty toward Jews ranged from friendly to hostile and, understandably, the question of relations between the two groups often hinged on the perception of the Jewish role in the complex triangulation of national interests in the region. Were Jews shills for the imperial government and its program of russification, or were they another oppressed nation that might be interested in allying with the Ukrainians to throw off the tsarist yoke? Many Ukrainian intellectuals and political leaders were resentful of what they saw as a Jewish alliance with the repressive Russian state.13 (For obvious reasons, acculturating Jews in the late empire chose to learn Russian, not Ukrainian.) A concrete illustration of resentment of Jews by Ukrainians—or perhaps of Russian perceptions of that resentment—is the original design for the statue of Bohdan Khmel’nyts’kyi (Bogdan Khmel’nit-skii, in Russian) in Kiev, showing the Cossack leader's steed crushing a Polish noble and a Jewish arendator.14 Nationalist Ukrainians hoped, of course, that the Jews would see themselves as an oppressed nation that might ally with the Ukrainians to throw off the tsarist yoke, as evidenced quite concretely by advertisements—in Ukrainian—placed in Jewish publications for Ukrainian-language newspapers and journals such as Ukraina and Khata.15 The Revolutionary Ukrainian Party (RUP), founded in 1900, condemned the persecution and official repression of Russian Jewry in strong terms.16 And in response, not only did Jewish socialist parties often ally themselves with Ukrainian and Russian groups, but individual Jews also joined the Kiev Hromada and later the Ukrainian socialist party Spilka (Ukrainian Social Democratic Union).17 Liberal Jewish organizations in Kiev (the Non-Party Jewish Organization [vnepartiinaia evreiskaia organizatsiia] and the Kiev branch of the Union for the Attainment of Equal Rights for the Jewish People in Russia [Soiuz dlia dostizheniia polnopraviia evreiskogo naroda v rossii]) collaborated with the Kadet party and Polish and Ukrainian organizations to mobilize the electorate in preparation for the first Duma elections in 1906.18 according to some reports, many peasants voted for M. R. Chervonenkis, one of the Jewish candidates for Duma deputy in Kiev province. For their part, after the elections two of the non-Jewish deputies—one Ukrainian, the other Polish—pledged to fight for Jewish rights as well for those of their own nationality.19
Interactions between the ethnic groups took place in the realm of ideas—in books, newspapers, and political programs—but also in the sphere of everyday life: in voluntary societies, schools, libraries, mutual-aid societies, and social clubs. While most Jewish participation in associational life was in the context of specifically Jewish societies, many Jews were also active in—or at least took advantage of the benefits offered by—non-Jewish institutions. It is to these more mundane but not less significant arenas for intergroup contact that we now turn.
World History
