The Russian Empire's small but growing civil society, most visible in large cities like Kiev, was one area where people of goodwill from different nationalities could come together to improve society. Within this arena, the public (i. e., informal) education movement has been called "the central locus of philanthropic efforts."20 In this regard, the Kiev Literacy Society (Kievskoe obshchestvo gramotnosti) is an interesting example of Jewish-Christian and Jewish-Ukrainian interaction.21 The society, established in 1882 with an all-Christian board and a church-oriented program including the creation of parish-based village libraries, was by 1898—at the behest of two Jewish members—petitioning the authorities for permission to open a Jewish Saturday adult literacy school in addition to its existing Sunday literacy schools in Kiev. From the moment it opened its doors in 1897, the society's library and reading hall attracted a large proportion of Jews; these numbers ballooned over the next decade, from one-fifth in 1897 to one-third in 1899, to 56 percent in 1904 (this figure represents the over 1,500 Jews who were library subscribers). In 1902, almost 18,000 visits were made by Jews out of a total of 54,000; the overwhelming majority of library users were under the age of twenty.22 The increase in Jewish numbers was due in part to the library's move to the Literacy Society's new Troitskii People's House (Narodnyi dom) in the heavily Jewish Lybed neighborhood, a change about which the 1902 annual report commented positively.23 Construction of the new building was funded wholly by the Jewish sugar baron Lazar’ Brodsky (by means of a gift of 14,000 rubles in memory of his daughter Vera), while his daughter Baroness Klara Gintsburg donated significant sums each year for book acquisition. By 1906, many of Kiev's most recognizable Jewish names were on the membership list.
The extent of Jewish involvement in the Literacy Society is even more interesting when we take into account that the organization's leadership was strongly Ukrainophile, not surprising given the fact that the literacy movement in Ukraine had close ties to the Hromadas and nascent Ukrainian nationalism, especially through the Prosvita Ukrainian enlightenment movement.24 The society's publications commission put out works in "Little Russian" (the official tsarist moniker for Ukrainian) as well as Russian, and the board urged the presentation of Ukrainian dramas alongside plays in Russian at the society's "people's theater" (narodnyi teatr).25 The theater also offered pieces with Jewish themes, such as Jews by E. Chirikov and Uriel Acosta, a play about the Sephardic philosopher, as well as plays by Max Nordau.26 In 1906, the publications commission was reestablished in two separate Ukrainian and Jewish sections devoted to clarifying and disseminating "correct views on the questions of Ukrainian life and on the Jewish question," an initiative likely prompted in part by the previous year's pogrom.27 The overall picture is one of an institution in which Ukrainian interests were the first priority but—whether out of a true concern for other minority groups and the healthy development of their national consciousness, or out of baser financial interests—in which other constituencies found an institutional infrastructure open to their interests as well (at a price, perhaps?). More prosaically but no less significantly, the society's institutions served as "neutral territory" where Kievans of all faiths and nationalities could and did mingle in the pursuit of knowledge and leisure.
It is interesting to note that several other libraries and reading halls throughout Kiev carried Russian Jewish literature—such as the works of Grigorii Bogrov, Lev Levanda, and Simon Frug—in addition to more "mainstream" Russian fare. The fact that one could find the likes of Frug at a reading hall suggests that administrators or librarians were aware of the high proportion of Jews among their readers and did not mind catering to their perceived needs, or perhaps even that Russian Jewish literature was considered important for any "good" library or reading hall.
Another Ukrainophile institution hospitable to Jewish interests was the Russian-language Kievskaiastarina (Kievan Antiquities), a journal of Ukrainian historical and cultural studies established by members of the Ukrainian intelligentsia in 1882. From that year until 1907, when it ceased publication, the journal published dozens of articles devoted to Jewish history in Ukraine, such as "Jewish Cossacks in the Early Seventeenth Century" and "Notes on the History of the 1768 Uman’ Slaughter," the latter by I. V. Galant, a noted historian of Ukrainian Jewry and a resident of Kiev. Galant's article presented a newly discovered Hebrew document, translated into Russian, in order to shed light on the Haidamak rebellion of the eighteenth century.28
Here we may note that one of the few Christian families to support Jewish charitable causes in Kiev was the Ukrainian Tereshchenko family.29 Perhaps this was a consequence of the close working relationship between the Tereshchenkos and the Brodskys in the sugar cartel that the two families helped establish. Or there may have been an unspoken rule that each family donated to the favorite causes of the other. A third possibility, though more remote because of the solidly establishment nature of these wealthy dynasties, is that out of principle they supported the "national" institutions of any oppressed minority within the empire, whether their own or that of another.
World History
