Jewish Rights, National Rites: Nationalism and Autonomy in Late Imperial and Revolutionary Russia

389 Pages·2014·19.575 MB·English

by  Simon Rabinovitch

Jewish Rights, National Rites
Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture
edited by Aron Rodrigue and Steven J. Zipperstein
Jewish Rights,
National Rites
Nationalism and Autonomy in Late
Imperial and Revolutionary Russia
Simon Rabinovitch
stanford university press
stanford, california
Stanford University Press
Stanford, California
© 2014 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior
University. All rights reserved.
Parts of Chapters 6 and 7 have been adapted from “Russian
Jewry Goes to the Polls: An Analysis of Jewish Voting in the All-
Russian Constituent Assembly Elections of 1917,” East European
Jewish Affairs 39.2 (2009): 205–25. Republished with permission.
This book has been published with the assistance of Boston
University’s Elie Wiesel Center for Judaic Studies.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in
any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or
retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford
University Press.
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free,
archival-quality paper
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rabinovitch, Simon, author.
Jewish rights, national rites : nationalism and autonomy in late
imperial and revolutionary Russia / Simon Rabinovitch.
p. cm.—(Stanford studies in Jewish history and culture)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8047-9249-3 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Jewish nationalism—Russia—History—20th
century. 2. Jews—Russia—Politics and government—20th
century. 3. Jews—Civil rights—Russia—History—20th
century. 4. Jews—Legal status, laws, etc.—Russia—History—
20th century. 5. Russia—History—Nicholas II, 1894–1917.
I. Title. II. Series: Stanford studies in Jewish history and
culture.
DS134.84.R33 2014
320.540956940947’09021—dc23
2014011851
ISBN 978-0-8047-9303-2 (electronic)
For Jodi, for everything

Contents
A Note on Transliterations and Dates ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction 1
1 Jewish Autonomy Imagined and Remembered 15
2 Jewish Autonomy and Europe’s Changing Legal Landscape 52
3 Revolution, Nationality Politics, and the Legal Claim
to Jewish Autonomy, 1905–7 79
4 Jewish Culture and Autonomy in Reform
and Retrenchment, 1907–14 120
5 Jewish Refugees, Autonomy, and Transnational Politics
During World War I, 1914–17 167
6 The Jewish Autonomist Movement and the
Revolutions of 1917 205
7 Independent States and Unfulfilled Expectations 248
Conclusion: The Fate of Jewish Autonomism 274
Notes 279
Index 359

A Note on Transliterations and Dates
Transliterations follow the style of the Library of Congress for French,
German, and Russian, the style of the YIVO Institute for Yiddish, and
the Academy of the Hebrew Language 2006 guidelines for Hebrew
(omitting diacritical marks). Most surnames have been transliterated
from Russian, and I have primarily used Russian rather than Yiddish
given names (although, where appropriate, both are indicated). For
proper names that have conventional English spellings (e.g., Chaim
Zhitlowsky, Vladimir Jabotinsky, Semyon An-sky, and Maxim Gorky)
I have used those instead. In the case of Dubnov, as per scholarly con-
vention, I have used his Anglicized/Germanized first name, Simon.
For events that occurred in Russia and works published there, pre-
revolutionary dates are given “old style” (according to the Julian calen-
dar) unless indicated otherwise.