Jews and Christians could also meet in the framework of trade-based organizations, often mutual-aid societies.60 Government registries reveal that there were at least a few such societies with mixed memberships (though some of them may have come into existence to circumvent the law banning mutual-aid societies with majority-Jewish memberships).61 Significantly, these were organizations of proprietors who evidently hoped to strengthen their position vis-a-vis their employees by allying with one another. Charters of professional societies registered with the provincial authorities include a Society of Proprietors of Ladies' Apparel, founded in 1906 by Shmuilo lomtefovich Gutmanovich, Avrum Ruvinov Veiner, Gersh Itskovich Katsenelenbogen, Khaim Mikhelevich Polevik (all Jewish names), Tikhon Mikhailovich Bondarenko, and Semen Lavrenteevich Martinenko (Ukrainian or possibly Russian names). The primary goal of the society was "the raising of the material well-being and amelioration of the living and working conditions of Society Members," while objectives included "the elucidation and coordination of economic interests of members" as well as the seeking out of peaceful means of settling labor disputes between the proprietors and the artisans in their workshops (either by mediation or third-party arbitration). The society would also provide support to members whose workshops were shut down by strikes, as well as access to production materials at reduced costs. A Society of Hairdresser-Proprietors, established in 1906 or 1907 by four Jews and a peasant living in the same neighborhood, aimed to unite all businessmen in their metier to defend their professional interests as well as to provide assistance to members.62 Evidently, ties of class and economic interest were strong enough to cross the divide of religion and ethnicity, especially in an era of frequent strikes and worker protests. It is striking that these associations were founded in the year or two after 1905 — perhaps serving as evidence that not all opportunities for interethnic contact were wiped out by the pogrom.
Whether workers of different nationalities—such as the dressmakers and hairdressers who might have labored in the shops owned by the members of these two organizations—came together in similarly formal societies is unclear. Certainly some and perhaps most artels (traditional workmen's cooperative associations), such as the First Kiev Laborers' Artel of Floor-Polishers, required members to be Christians.63
Even if they did not work together, Jewish and Christian workers may have socialized with each other in the context of Kiev's many social clubs. In 1909, a workers' club was established to enable laborers of all nationalities and religions to come together for educational activities and classes in Russian and other subjects, and by early 1910 membership had reached 350. Judging by the names—Berman, Metushchenko, Smirnov, Gal’perin,
Svirskii—the governing board included both Jews and Christians.64 An announcement for an upcoming masquerade ball for members of the Kiev Podol Society Club (Kievskii podol’skii obshchestvennyi klub) could be found in the "Workers' Chronicle" column of the Yiddish newspaper Kiever vort, suggesting that, like the Workers' Club, the membership was largely proletarian. Archival documents reveal that the club's founders were non-Jews, while the membership was mostly Jewish with a smattering of non-Jews; that a Yiddish paper advertised the club's events further complicates the picture, suggesting that even unacculturated Jews whose primary language was Yiddish might mingle socially with non-Jews of the same socioeconomic status.65
In addition to the workers' clubs, the more bourgeois Kiev Social Assembly (Kievskoe obschestvennoe sobranie), dedicated "to the development of community spirit" (obshchestvennost’), was open to members of all religions.66 The club provided meeting space for community organizations such as the Society for Literature and the Press (Obshchestvo deiatelei literatury i pechati), the Religio-Philosophical Society (Religiozno-filosofskoe obshchestvo), the Jewish Literary Society (Evreiskoe literaturnoe obshchestvo), the Society of Lovers of the Hebrew Language (Obshchestvo liubitelei drevno-evreiskago iazyka), and the Society for the Protection of Women. The Kiev Community Library (Kievskaia obshchestvennaia biblioteka), purchased by the club after its closure by the authorities in 1910, included books in Russian as well as Ukrainian, Yiddish, and Hebrew, while periodicals subscribed to included the Ukrainian Rada, Yiddish Der fraynd, and Russian Jewish Razsvet and Ev-reiskii mir in addition to a variety of mainstream Russian dailies and weeklies.67 An unscientific survey of the names of members listed in the 1915 annual report suggests that a majority were Jews with a significant number of non-Jews as well.68 Thus, even if this ostensibly nondenominational organization was known to most middle-class Kievans as a "Jewish" institution, it nonetheless counted non-Jews among its members and interacted regularly with the non-Jewish public sphere of the city.
In his memoirs of fin-de-siecle Kiev, E. E. Friedmann remembered that Jews attended Russian clubs, and that "equality reigned at the green table" on which card games were played; since everyone played cards in Kiev, they served as an equalizing force that brought together people of all walks of life.69 We have evidence that an organization calling itself the "Russian Society Club" (Kievskii russkii obshchestvennyi klub), which existed in 1912 but may have been founded earlier, was open, at least in theory, to members of all faiths and nationalities.70 Such a club would surely have consciously juxtaposed itself over and against nationalist organizations such as the "Club of Russian Nationalists" (Klub russkikh natsionalistov) which explicitly excluded Jews; indeed, with the rise in antisemitism, recalled Friedmann, Jews eventually founded their own club which they called, perhaps not without some irony, the "Concordia Club" (Obshchestvennoe sobranie "Konkordiia"). As this case and that of the Society for the Protection of Women demonstrates, in the last years of tsarist rule Jews responded to rising hostility by turning inward and, in many cases, creating Jewish institutions that were replicas of those in which they no longer felt comfortable or were unwelcome.
Whether hated or grudgingly tolerated, however, Jews were too important an element in the city to be ignored. That Jews were an integral part of the fabric of municipal life as early as 1865 is demonstrated by the casual inclusion by a local newspaper surveying Kiev's entertainment scene of a "benefit performance in aid of poor Jewish students" among other leisure opportunities available to the public.71 The trading house of the Brothers Lepeiko (a Ukrainian name) advertised its ready-mades in the Yiddish newspaper Kiever vort; the advertisement itself was in Yiddish, though the paper did also carry Russian-language notices.72 Jewish shop-owners such as Isaak (Yitshak) Shvartsman and the Rozental Brothers placed prominent advertisements, worded in Ukrainian, in the daily Ukrainian-language Rada.'73 The semi-weekly Kievskoe slovo often carried articles of Jewish interest, including a feuilleton piece by Sholem Aleichem entitled "Confusion" featuring a character by the name of Tevel’, better known to his Yiddish - and English-language readers as Tevye.74 Footnotes explained the meaning of unfamiliar Yiddish words such as shadkhen (matchmaker). Yiddish words that had entered Russian were used widely in Kiev; the city's balaguly were Jewish carters known in Yiddish as balagoles, while a Russian slang word for pickpocket, marvikher, was clearly derived from a related Yiddish word meaning profit or gain.75 On the other end of the socioeconomic spectrum, Kiev's Jewish millionaires were recruited for the boards of all the city's major institutions; Lazar’ Brodsky sat together with N. Pikhno, the conservative and nationalist owner of the Judeophobic newspaper Kievlianin, on the boards of the Kiev Literacy Society and the Bacteriological Institute.76 As Thomas Owen points out, sugar magnates of all ethnic backgrounds worked together to promote their product: individuals of Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, and Jewish extractions were members of both the Society of Russian Sugar Producers and the
Kiev Exchange Committee.77 These men, and their wives, may even have mingled socially. and in the eyes of ordinary Kievans, Jewish plutocrats were just as much a part of the city's firmament of wealthy constellations as their Christian counterparts, as evidenced by the composition of the multiethnic crowd that came to the Brodsky Synagogue in 1898 to gawk at the wedding of Klara Brodskaia and Baron vladimir Gintsburg. although of a particularly Jewish nature, the event clearly had overtones of civic pride as well.78
World History
