A History of the Jews in Russia

The idea of publishing a complete History of the Jews in Russia¹ scarcely calls for extensive explanations or justifications. Russian Jewry, which quantitatively represents the most significant segment of our people and the one that has most preserved its nationally distinctive features, has yet to find its own historian to sketch out a general and integral picture of its past in all its diversity of phenomena of life and daily living. The proposed edition has as its goal filling this substantial gap.

If the rise in interest in the study of our past that has become increasingly prominent in Jewish society makes the effort we are undertaking timely, then its execution becomes possible only thanks to those significant, albeit partial, successes that in the past few decades have been made by Jewish historiography in Russia. Numerous historical materials, archival data, and manuscript chronicles (pinkasim) of communities and various institutions have been published; quite a few memoirs and individual recollections have been published; a collection has been started of folk songs and tales of a historical nature, epitaphs, and so on. Research and monographs have appeared that touch on various aspects and major events of the past, the fates of individual communities, the lives of outstanding figures, and so on; periodicals and compilations have appeared that are especially devoted to the history of the Jews in Russia.² The extensive and diverse material that has enriched our historical literature up to the present can serve as the foundation for constructing an integral history of the Jews in Russia—integral in the sense not only of its internal framework of exposition but of the very subject itself.

For many reasons, our historical literature, beginning with Orshanski, has with rare exceptions devoted its principal attention to the study of the legal status of Russian Jews in the past, considered in full, or in individual moments. With this understanding of the goal of research, the history of the Jews in Russia has become the history of the Jewish question and Russian legislation on the Jews; all other aspects of the life of the Jews have found a place here only inasmuch as they have shed light on the legal status of the Jewish population. It is scarcely necessary to prove in detail the one-sidedness of this means of presenting the subject. The legal point, for all the importance of its role in the fates of Jews in Russia, does not, of course, exhaust the entire content of their life and should not overshadow all the diversity of its manifestations and all the complexity of the factors that define it. Serious scholarly requirements can be satisfied only by a historical exposition that considers all the more important conditions and circumstances that in their totality affect the people’s life and that sets aside an appropriate place for each of them. The task of a history of the Jews in Russia is to clarify and illuminate the evolution of their cultural life and their public, legal, and economic existence—and it is precisely this understanding of the subject that we have laid at the base of our edition.

In setting ourselves this task, we are not hiding from ourselves its inherent difficulty, which, however, we think can to a significant degree be eliminated by the collective nature of the work we are undertaking and by bringing into it a great many specialists, each of whom will help develop the issues most kindred to him. At the same time, of course, some divergence of viewpoints is possible at times in the assessment and illumination of given events and phenomena; nonetheless, the fact should not be lost sight of that given the present condition of sources and the diversity of questions included in the circle of research, compiling an integral history of the Jews in Russia cannot be the work of a single individual. The possible completeness of the collective edition we are undertaking is guaranteed by the fact that, in addition to already published reports, the proposed work will make broad use of the many archival and other as yet unpublished materials at our disposal.

In view of the continuity between the history of the Jews in the Polish-Lithuanian state and in Russia, the first volume of the present work is wholly devoted to the past of the Jews in Poland and Lithuania. Comprising a general sketch of the history of the Jews in said countries and an exposition of the course of development of their legal, social, economic, and cultural existence, the present volume serves as a natural introduction to the history of the Jews in Russia and clarifies those phenomena and issues of the Polish-Lithuanian period of Jewish history familiarity with which is essential for a correct understanding of Jews’ fates in Russia.