A caregully researched study of 100 years of the Russian-Jewish revolutionary history.

Between 1917 and 1921, Jewish intellectuals and writers across the Russian empire pursued a “Jewish renaissance.” Here is a revisionist argument about the nature of cultural nationalism, the relationship between nationalism and socialism, and culture itself—the pivot point for the encounter between Jews and European modernity over the past century.

Over the course of the nineteenth century, some 84,500 Jews in imperial Russia converted to Christianity. Confessions of the Shtetl explores the day-to-day world of these people, including the social, geographic, religious, and economic links among converts, Christians, and Jews. The book narrates converts' tales of love, desperation, and fear, tracing the uneasy contest between religious choice and collective Jewish identity in tsarist Russia. Rather than viewing the shtetl as the foundation myth for modern Jewish nationhood, this work reveals the shtetl's history of conversions and communal engagement with converts, which ultimately yielded a cultural hybridity that both challenged and fueled visions of Jewish separatism. Drawing on extensive research with conversion files in imperial Russian archives, in addition to the mass press, novels, and memoirs, Ellie R. Schainker offers a sociocultural history of religious toleration and Jewish life that sees baptism not as the fundamental departure from Jewishness or the Jewish community, but as a conversion that marked the start of a complicated experiment with new forms of identity and belonging. Ultimately, she argues that the Jewish encounter with imperial Russia did not revolve around coercion and ghettoization but was a genuinely religious drama with a diverse, attractive, and aggressive Christianity.

Based on archival and primary sources in Persian, Hebrew, Judeo-Persian, Arabic, and European languages, Between Foreigners and Shi'is examines the Jews' religious, social, and political status in nineteenth-century Iran. This book, which focuses on Nasir al-Din Shah's reign (1848-1896), is the first comprehensive scholarly attempt to weave all these threads into a single tapestry. This case study of the Jewish minority illuminates broader processes pertaining to other religious minorities and Iranian society in general, and the interaction among intervening foreigners, the Shi'i majority, and local Jews helps us understand Iranian dilemmas that have persisted well beyond the second half of the nineteenth century.

In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries a small but conspicuous fringe of the Jewish population became the world's most resolute, intellectually driven, and philosophical revolutionaries, among them the pre-Marxist Karl Marx. Yet the roots of their alienation from existing society and determination to change it extend back to the very heart of the Enlightenment, when Spinoza and other philosophers living in a rigid, hierarchical society colored by a deeply hostile theology first developed a modern revolutionary consciousness. Leading intellectual historian Jonathan Israel shows how the radical ideas in the early Marx's writings were influenced by this legacy, which, he argues, must be understood as part of the Radical Enlightenment. He traces the rise of a Jewish revolutionary tendency demanding social equality and universal human rights throughout the Western world. Israel considers how these writers understood Jewish marginalization and ghettoization and the edifice of superstition, prejudice, and ignorance that sustained them. He investigates how the quest for Jewish emancipation led these thinkers to formulate sweeping theories of social and legal reform that paved the way for revolutionary actions that helped change the world from 1789 onward--but hardly as they intended.

The Society for the Promotion of Enlightenment among the Jews of Russia (OPE) was a philanthropic organization, the oldest Jewish organization in Russia. Founded by a few wealthy Jews in St. Petersburg who wanted to improve opportunities for Jewish people in Russia by increasing their access to education and modern values, OPE was secular and nonprofit. The group emphasized the importance of the unity of Jewish culture to help Jews integrate themselves into Russian society by opening, supporting, and subsidizing schools throughout the country. While reaching out to Jews across Russia, OPE encountered opposition on all fronts. It was hobbled by the bureaucracy and sometimes outright hostility of the Russian government, which imposed strict regulations on all aspects of Jewish lives. The OPE was also limited by the many disparate voices within the Jewish community itself. Debates about the best type of schools (secular or religious, co-educational or single-sex, traditional or "modern") were constant. Even the choice of language for the schools was hotly debated. Jewish Philanthropy and Enlightenment in Late-Tsarist Russia offers a model of individuals and institutions struggling with the concern so central to contemporary Jews in America and around the world: how to retain a strong Jewish identity, while fully integrating into modern society.

Music from a Speeding Train explores the uniquely Jewish space created by Jewish authors working within the limitations of the Soviet cultural system. It situates Russian- and Yiddish- language authors in the same literary universe—one in which modernism, revolution, socialist realism, violence, and catastrophe join traditional Jewish texts to provide the framework for literary creativity. These writers represented, attacked, reformed, and mourned Jewish life in the pre-revolutionary shtetl as they created new forms of Jewish culture. The book emphasizes the Soviet Jewish response to World War II and the Nazi destruction of the Jews, disputing the claim that Jews in Soviet Russia did not and could not react to the killings of Jews. It reveals a largely unknown body of Jewish literature beginning as early as 1942 that responds to the mass killings. By exploring works through the early twenty-first century, the book reveals a complex, emotionally rich, and intensely vibrant Soviet Jewish culture that persisted beyond Stalinist oppression.

A surprising number of Jews lived, literally and figuratively, 'beyond the Pale' of Jewish Settlement in tsarist Russia during the half-century before the Revolution of 1917. This text reinterprets the history of the Russian-Jewish encounter, using long-closed Russian archives and other sources.

Distinguished scholars of Russian Jewish history reflect on the pogroms in Tsarist and revolutionary Russia.

FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD * SHORTLISTED FOR THE LIONEL GELBER PRIZE “The mass killings of Jews from 1918 to 1921 are a bridge between local pogroms and the extermination of the Holocaust. No history of that Jewish catastrophe comes close to the virtuosity of research, clarity of prose, and power of analysis of this extraordinary book. As the horror of events yields to empathetic understanding, the reader is grateful to Veidlinger for reminding us what history can do.” —Timothy Snyder, author of Bloodlands Between 1918 and 1921, over a hundred thousand Jews were murdered in Ukraine by peasants, townsmen, and soldiers who blamed the Jews for the turmoil of the Russian Revolution. In hundreds of separate incidents, ordinary people robbed their Jewish neighbors with impunity, burned down their houses, ripped apart their Torah scrolls, sexually assaulted them, and killed them. Largely forgotten today, these pogroms—ethnic riots—dominated headlines and international affairs in their time. Aid workers warned that six million Jews were in danger of complete extermination. Twenty years later, these dire predictions would come true. Drawing upon long-neglected archival materials, including thousands of newly discovered witness testimonies, trial records, and official orders, acclaimed historian Jeffrey Veidlinger shows for the first time how this wave of genocidal violence created the conditions for the Holocaust. Through stories of survivors, perpetrators, aid workers, and governmental officials, he explains how so many different groups of people came to the same conclusion: that killing Jews was an acceptable response to their various problems. In riveting prose, In the Midst of Civilized Europe repositions the pogroms as a defining moment of the twentieth century.