Russian Jewish History

At the end of the eighteenth century, Russia acquired the largest Jewish population in the world with the three partitions of Poland. These policies can be best understood as a product of unresolved tensions between integration, on the one hand, and segregation, on the other, which persisted from the reign of Catherine the Great (1762-1796) to the Revolution of 1917.

• Eugene M. Avrutin, “The Politics of Jewish Legibility: Documentation Practices and Reform during the Reign of Nicholas I,” Jewish Social Studies, vol. 11, no. 2 (2005): 136- 169.
• Sholem Aleichem, “Chava,” in Tevye the Dairyman

After the outbreak of WWI, martial law granted state officials the right to deport civilian subjects from areas under military rule (a territory that covered large sections of the Pale of Settlement). All individuals who were deemed politically unreliable – Germans, Poles, and especially Jews – were subject to mass deportations. The wartime expulsions targeted all Jewish communities. As the mass emigration movement from the Pale of Settlement came to an end, tens of thousands of individuals took advantage of the temporary relaxation on Jewish residency rights and fled east.

• Nathaniel Deutsch, The Jewish Dark Continent (selections).

What would culture be like under socialism? What was revolutionary culture? What was proletarian culture? The October Revolution made these once theoretical questions vitally important to a new order, faced with creating socialist consciousness in its citizens.

• Benjamin Harshav, Marc Chagall and His Times: A Documentary Narrative, selections

The systematic, indiscriminate killing of entire Jewish populations that constitutes the defining feature of the Holocaust began and was carried out in each location at various points in the encounter and according to different scenarios. In late 1945, the Soviet leadership had reservations about emphasizing the special fate of Jews at the hands of the Nazis—testimony to a growing antisemitism from above. Attempts to underscore and document Jewish suffering were regarded as Jewish particularism.

• Vasily Grossman, A Writer at War: A Soviet Journalist with the Red Army, 1941-1945, pp. 247-61
• The Unknown Black Book (begin)

Analysis of ethnic cleansing, renewed antisemitism, and renewed Jewish life in postwar period. Other topics to be discussed include the Jewish anti-Fascist Committee, the making of the Black Book, and the emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union.

• Omer Bartov, Erased: Vanishing Traces of Jewish Life in Present-Day Galicia, pp. 3-41
• The Unknown Black Book (finish)