Jewish Rights, National Rites

Nationalism and Autonomy in Late Imperial and Revolutionary Russia

Simon Rabinovitch

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780804793032
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Russian History
• Index: History

In its full-color poster for elections to the All-Russian Jewish Congress in 1917, the Jewish People's Party depicted a variety of Jews in seeking to enlist the support of the broadest possible segment of Russia's Jewish population. It forsook neither traditional religious and economic life like the Jewish socialist parties, nor life in Europe like the Zionists. It embraced Hebrew, Yiddish, and Russian as fulfilling different roles in Jewish life. It sought the democratization of Jewish communal self-government and the creation of new Russian Jewish national-cultural and governmental institutions. Most importantly, the self-named "folkists" believed that Jewish national aspirations could be fulfilled through Jewish autonomy in Russia and Eastern Europe more broadly. Ideologically and organizationally, this party's leadership would profoundly influence the course of Russian Jewish politics.

Jewish Rights, National Rights provides a completely new interpretation of the origins of Jewish nationalism in Russia. It argues that Jewish nationalism, and Jewish politics generally, developed in a changing legal environment where the idea that nations had rights was beginning to take hold, and centered on the demand for Jewish autonomy in Eastern Europe. Drawing on numerous archives and libraries in the United States, Russia, Ukraine, and Israel, Simon Rabinovitch carefully reconstructs the political movement for Jewish autonomy, its personalities, institutions, and cultural projects. He explains how Jewish autonomy was realized following the February Revolution of 1917, and for the first time assesses voting patterns in November 1917 to determine the extent of public support for Jewish nationalism at the height of the Russian revolutionary period.

One

Jewish Autonomy Imagined and Remembered

The Jewish historian Simon Dubnov constructed his theory of autonomism as both a political philosophy and a historical model. In his writings Dubnov argued that Jews historically had used communal institutions to establish and maintain their collective autonomy, thereby preserving Jewish national consciousness through millennia of settlement and migration in the Diaspora. By the early twentieth century, many Russian and Eastern European Jews agreed with Dubnov’s belief that to avoid the supposed “assimilation” accompanying secularization among Western Jewry, Russian Jews needed to reconstruct Jewish communal autonomy.¹ Although Dubnov undoubtedly romanticized medieval Jewish communal structures, he tapped into the concerns all Jews faced in the modern world about how to preserve Jewish community and identity in an age of increasing secularization.

The political, ideological, and philosophical components of Dubnov’s historical work were the subject of considerable discussion in his own day, and recent years have seen a veritable renaissance of scholarly interest in his historiography.² Dubnov was both a historian and a political figure, but his scholarly work was hardly the crude tool of his political ambitions. In fact, while for much of his life Dubnov had faith in the rightness and eventual triumph of his political philosophy, in terms of time and effort spent, his political activities typically came second to his scholarly work. Yet Dubnov himself clearly believed in the unity of his scholarly and political—or, perhaps more accurately, national—work. A particular concept of Jewish history in the Diaspora, and in particular of the emancipation process in Western Europe, underpinned his political ideology. The story that Dubnov tells in his writings is, to use his term, “sociological”: It prioritizes people and institutions over texts. And the historical institutions that Dubnov valued were those that preserved Jewish autonomy, in various forms of self-government, throughout the long history of the Jews in the Diaspora. To Dubnov the structure of Jewish life and society in the Diaspora always reflected a collective will to preserve Jewish national difference, and this is where his politics and historiography most clearly come together. He believed that the modern state’s attack on Jewish communal autonomy was particularly dangerous because by holding out the promise of integration, the state made Jews into eager accomplices in their own denationalization; the possibility of real national integration all the while remained illusory.

This chapter explains how Dubnov’s political and historical theories developed, with attention to his philosophical influences. It also considers what Jewish autonomy meant historically and what actually happened to Jewish autonomy in the Russian Empire in the nineteenth century that led Dubnov and others to conclude it should be revived. To Dubnov the only way to ensure Jewish national continuity in the future was to rebuild the structure of Jewish autonomy along secular national lines, with legal recognition from the state. Thus the final section of this chapter gives a view of how the significant legal and economic changes affecting the Russian state and its inhabitants generally over the course of the nineteenth century altered Jewish society in particular.

Simon Dubnov and the Origins of Jewish Autonomism

Born in 1860 in the shtetl of Mstislavl, in the Mogilev Province of the Pale of Settlement, to a family of established talmudic scholars, Dubnov rejected the traditional religious observance of his family in favor of, first, the Haskala (Jewish Enlightenment) and, later, European philosophy, languages, and literature.³ Although Dubnov’s grandfather was a rabbi and religious pillar of the Mstislavl community, at the age of 13 Dubnov refused to continue his yeshiva education. Unable to enter university—he failed to qualify for a secondary school certificate or to obtain a permit to reside legally in St. Petersburg—in 1890 Dubnov moved with his family to Odessa, where, surrounded by other Jewish intellectual and literary figures, he began his intellectual transformation into a Jewish nationalist.⁴ Whereas between 1882 and 1884 Dubnov had argued that the Jews should be considered a religious group and transformed into a confession along the lines envisioned by the Jewish Reform movement, in Odessa his perspective changed.⁵ There, as he began to delve into historical research, Dubnov came to view the Jewish people not only as a nation but also as one whose history in the Diaspora had caused it to evolve to a higher stage of spiritual development than other nations that could develop a culture within their own geographic territory.⁶ Dubnov’s membership in Odessa’s small yet influential circle of Jewish nationalist intellectuals, especially his friendship and ongoing dialogue with the founder of spiritual Zionism, Ahad Ha‘am (Asher Ginzberg, 1856–1927), helped to shape his view of the Jews as a distinctly “spiritual” nation.⁷ In the last decades of the nineteenth century a number of maskilim, as the adherents of the Haskala were called, in Odessa and elsewhere who had been committed to effecting the reform and acculturation of Russian Jewry through such institutions as the Society for the Spread of Enlightenment Among the Jews of Russia (known most commonly by its Russian acronym OPE) began to shift their energies toward more overtly nationalist enterprises and writings. Dubnov was also a lead protagonist in the so-called Odessa Kulturkampf when a group of intellectuals formed a “national committee” in an attempt to lead the OPE to a program of national education.⁸ Yet while the prominent Hebraists of this group believed that the road to national redemption led to Palestine, Dubnov’s evolution into a professional historian affirmed to him the importance of the Diaspora in both the Jewish past and future. It is through his historical works that Dubnov developed a sociological explanation of Jewish history that would inform all his political writings.⁹

In his political essays, known as the letters, Dubnov outlined his interpretation of diaspora nationalism and called for autonomism to be adopted by all Jewish political groups. On a practical level he discussed emigration and “national education,” and he advocated the reinstitution of the kehila (the historical body of local Jewish communal authority) as a secular organ of Jewish government within the Russian state. Dubnov insisted that neither territory nor the Talmud had preserved the Jewish people; rather, Jewish communal autonomy had maintained national self-consciousness throughout the Jews’ long history in the Diaspora. Applying positivist evolutionary theories to Jewish history, Dubnov argued that the Jews historically had sought to establish spheres of Jewish autonomy to preserve their distinct national cultural and spiritual life, even in adverse conditions. In this way the Jews had survived in the Diaspora by turning the disadvantage inherent in a lack of territory into an evolutionary advantage for national development. Influenced by John Stuart Mill, Auguste Comte, Henry Thomas Buckle, and especially Herbert Spencer, Dubnov explained the history of Jewish society since its dispersion as a succession of changing hegemonic Jewish centers in the Diaspora. Thus Dubnov’s evolutionary view of Jewish history broke dramatically with what was then the dominant understanding—espoused, for example, by the German Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz (1817–1891)—that Judaism was an unchanging religious concept. Although influenced by Hegel, Graetz believed that only Judaism’s external features (i.e., its practices) changed over time, leaving in place the religion’s core ethical values.

In Dubnov’s evolutionary historical conception, Jews did not merely survive as a society; they evolved as a nation. In each diasporic center (e.g., Babylonia, Iberia, and Central and Eastern Europe), Jews used communal institutions to carve out a sphere of Jewish autonomy that preserved and even strengthened the Jewish sense of nationality. As one center declined or suffered pressures from the outside, an alternative center emerged, established its autonomy, and became hegemonic. Dubnov’s historical theory thereby became the basis for his political ideology. If throughout their long history in Europe the Jews had been able to realize their “national life” through communal self-government, then the current challenge must be for the Jews to reassert their “social autonomy”—the ability to arrange their communal self-government according to historical traditions and the community’s internal needs—which he considered to be crucial to keeping a nation spiritually and culturally strong.¹⁰

In addition to blurring the distinction between history and politics, Dubnov’s personal influence on the historical consciousness of educated Russian Jews was significant. When more than 1,000 Jewish students in institutions of higher education in Kiev were surveyed in 1910 about who had most shaped their understanding of Jewish history, 43 percent listed Dubnov alone or among other writers, making his name by far the most popular answer.¹¹ All the respondents may not have agreed with Dubnov’s diaspora-nationalist politics, but the popularity of Dubnov’s historical texts and, accordingly, his autonomist interpretation of Jewish history, served to spread his political philosophy. Dubnov formed his historical and national theories from an eclectic mix of positivism, Herderian philosophy, Russian populism, and the classical liberalism of Mill.¹² The Russian opponents of historical materialism were particularly influential to Dubnov’s conception of nationality, and three in particular left indelible marks on his historical and national theories: Petr Lavrov, who stressed the historically important role of individual intellectuals in the moral development of nations; Konstantin Aksakov, who separated territorial sovereignty from spiritual development; and Vladimir Solov’ev, who differentiated between positive and negative forms of nationalism.¹³ Dubnov, like Solov’ev, argued for the compatibility of nationalism and a “universalist” ethos. Dubnov also further clarified Solov’ev’s distinction between cosmopolitanism, which, according to Dubnov, required abandoning national distinctions and was therefore a negative phenomenon, and universalism, a positive phenomenon that saw each people as a member of the family of nations.¹⁴ In his letters Dubnov engaged the theories of Solov’ev, Lavrov, Ernest Renan, and Johann Gottfried von Herder to demonstrate the philosophical and historical basis of Jewish national self-consciousness in the Diaspora.

In his political and philosophical writings Dubnov argued for the collective pursuit of an ethical and humanistic Jewish national idea. According to him, religious and national ideals were morally and psychologically similar, and therefore the transition from religion to Jewish nationalism occurred as part of a natural process. In his first four letters, the most purely philosophical ones in the series, Dubnov differentiated between national egotism and national individualism, arguing that Jews should opt for the latter. As national individualism did not aim to rob any other nationalities of political freedom or cultural autonomy, its expression did not violate the “ethics of society.”¹⁵ Thus the Jews must seek to use spiritual and ethical Jewish nationalism as a legal foundation for Jewish autonomy. Dubnov considered the foremost challenge to establishing the principles of nonterritorial autonomy to be how to define both the privileges and the legal limits that would govern each nationality’s autonomy so that larger or more powerful nationalities would be prevented from impinging on the autonomy of others.¹⁶ Because Dubnov believed that the Jews historically existed and continued to exist in a state of national individualism, he considered them particularly well suited for such a legally delineated autonomous arrangement. Furthermore, in equating the ethical ideal in Judaism to spiritual nationalism and framing this nationalism as a force of historical preservation in the Diaspora, Dubnov constructed a form of Jewish nationalism that included secular and religious Jews alike: “The ideal of a spiritual nation is in its essence an ethical one, and such is precisely the national ideal of Judaism.”¹⁷

Dubnov was not the first to see the Jews’ history in the Diaspora as having played a role in the spiritual development of Jewish peoplehood. In the 1870s, Perets Smolenskin (1842–85) used his Vienna-based journal Ha-Shahar to steer maskilic thought toward an embrace of Jewish national self-consciousness and peoplehood. Although Smolenskin had made similar arguments before, his influential essay of 1872, “Am olam,” may be his most famous presentation of the idea of the Jews as an “eternal people.”¹⁸ Smolenskin argued that the Jewish religion in the Diaspora preserved the Jews as a “spiritual nationality,” a concept that both Dubnov and Ahad Ha‘am would develop further. Smolenskin was also among the first and most influential thinkers to propose that Jewish religious observance was something different from fraternal spiritual bonds and that these bonds could remain strong even if the observances frayed.¹⁹ And though he still believed in the necessity of preserving religion, by presenting nationalism as a response to the challenges of secularization and advocating the creation of a “national history” to further national self-consciousness and political activism, Smolenskin prefigured not only Dubnov but also arguably all Jewish nationalist movements.²⁰

Some Jews sought to define themselves in solely religious terms, whereas others completely abandoned religious observance and a distinct Jewish identity. In contrast, Dubnov saw the questi...