Brian Horowitz

Russia's first modern Jews : the Jews of Shklov

Long before there were Jewish communities in the land of the tsars, Jews inhabited a region which they called medinat rusiya, the land of Russia. Prior to its annexation by Russia, the land of Russia was not a center of rabbinic culture. But in 1772, with its annexation by Tsarist Russia, this remote region was severed from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth; its 65,000 Jews were thus cut off from the heartland of Jewish life in Eastern Europe. Forced into independence, these Jews set about forging a community with its own religious leadership and institutions. The three great intellectual currents in East European Jewry--Hasidism, Rabbinic Mitnagdism, and Haskalah--all converged on Eastern Belorussia, where they clashed and competed. In the course of a generation, the community of Shklov--the most prominent of the towns in the area--witnessed an explosion of intellectual and cultural activity. Focusing on the social and intellectual odysseys of merchants, maskilim, and rabbis, and their varied attempts to combine Judaism and European culture, David Fishman here chronicles the remarkable story of these first modern Jews of Russia.

A Portrait of a Russian-Jewish Shtadlan: Jacob Teitel's Social Solution

This article concerns the life and work of Jacob Teitel, a social activist and judge in the czarist Ministry of Justice. From his position in the government in provincial Russia, Teitel was able to aid Jews affected by legal restrictions by interceding with influential individuals. This portrait of Teitel offers a window to view the changes in Jewist life and reflects the complexities of the Jewish experience during the late czarist period.

Unity and Disunity in Landmarks: The Rivalry Between Petr Struve and Mikhail Gershenzon

In this article the most important text of twentieth-century Russian intellectual history, Landmarks (Vekhi) (1909) comes under reexamination. Looking at the rivalry of the volumes two organizers, Mikhail Gershenzon and Petr Struve, Professor Brian Horowitz explains why Landmarks succeeded in offering such a biting critique of radical ideology, while lacking its own internal intellectual unity.

Simon Rabinovitch. Jewish Rights, National Rites: Nationalism and Autonomy in Late Imperial and Revolutionary Russia. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014. 374 pp.

the rabbinate to the community. The institution of the rabbinate itself, he shows very effectively, even its very definition, was in transition in this period, and indeed in crisis; and nowhere more so than in Galicia. Michael Steinlauf has asked, “How do we begin to talk about what made Galician Jews different?” (“Notes onGalician Jews,”Polin 23 [2011]: 421). In the realm of the rabbinate and Halakhah, Haim Gertner has given us an excellent beginning.

The Most Musical Nation: Jews and Culture in the Late Russian Empire (review)

Shofar ♦ An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies men were perceived as threatening the established gender order due to their alleged status as “Zwitterwesen” (hermaphrodites). This observation along with Wildmann’s insights into the gendered dimensions of shame and pride constitute highly innovative and productive interventions into Jewish gender history. Wildmann’s book is carefully researched, well-written, and argued with precision and circumspection, as well as equipped with numerous illustrations, and should be made available to readers beyond the German-speaking world. Benjamin M. Baader University of Manitoba

Gabriella Safran, Wandering Soul: The Dybbuk's Creator, S. An-sky . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. 353 pp.

Semyon Akimych An-sky combined in himself a Jewish folklorist with Gleb Uspensky and Chekhov. In his single person he contained a thousand provincial rabbis, if one reckons by the amount of his advice and consolations, conveyed in the guise of parables, anecdotes, and so on. All that Semyon Akimych needed in life was a place to spend the night and strong tea. People ran after him to hear his stories. The Russian-Jewish folklore of Semyon Akimych flowed out like a thick stream of honey in marvelous unhurried stories. Semyon Akimych was not yet old but he had an aged grandfatherly appearance and was stooped over from the excess of Jewishness and Populism: governors, pogroms, human misfortunes, encounters, the most cunning patterns of public life in the improbable circumstances of the Minsk and Mogilyov satrapies, etched as though with a fine engraving needle. . . . In a house where everyone was knocking against the graven image of Mikhaylovsky and cracking the tough agrarian nut, Semyon Akimych gave the impression of a gentle Psyche afflicted with hemorrhoids.

Jüdische Eliten im Russichen Reich (Jewish Elites in the Russian Empire), and: Crisis, Revolution, and Russian Jews, and: Jews in the Russian Army, 1827-1917: Drafted into Modernity (review)

The three books under review draw our attention to a number of approaches to writing the history of the Jews in Russia and Eastern Europe. Jonathan Frankel’s features a conception of modern Jewish history that puts “crisis” at the center, while Petrovsky-Shtern and Dohrn seem to imitate the approach pioneered by Michael Stanislawski and John Klier, who showed an infinitely more complicated relationship between Jews and the Russian government than had been recognized before.1 Just as did Stanislawski and Klier, so too Petrovsky-Shtern and Dohrn inevitably interface with the so-called Lachrymose School of history, especially as practiced by Simon Dubnov, who still casts a shadow over the historiography of Jews in the Russian Empire.2 As

Mirovoi krizis 1914–1920 godov i sud´ba vostochnoevropeiskogo evreistva [The World Crisis of 1914–20 and the Fate of East European Jewry] (review)

The challenge of any book on Jews in Russia and Eastern Europe during World War I is to confront the traditional view of the Jew as all-round victim. Jews living in areas of military action, as one recalls, were abused by the Russian forces. A glance at Shimon Dubnov’s third volume of his History of the Jews in Russia and Poland constructs the traditional historiography. But this viewpoint has been reinforced by contemporary historians, notably Peter Gatrell. Jews were accused of spying for the Germans, and hostages were taken as a pledge to prevent spying. Ultimately, several hundred thousand were exiled from their homes, often with little more than a 24-hour warning. At times evictions took place during winter, leaving the civilian population exposed to cold; hunger, thirst, and disease accompanied the evacuees during all seasons.