Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia, by Benjamin Nathans, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. xvii + 424 pp. $26.95.
At a recent genealogy society meeting, someone commented that her ancestor had lived in St. Petersburg before emigrating to the United States. I am embarrassed to admit that I asked if the ancestor “had been rich,” because, as I thought I knew, only rich Jews were allowed to live beyond the Pale in czarist Russia. That is because I had not yet read Benjamin Nathans’ book of that name. I do know, of course, the importance of context when trying to understand our ancestors’ lives. We need as much information as possible about the world in which they lived—not only to know where to look for records of their lives, but also to understand them once they are found. Professor Nathans’ gem of a book is a perfect example of that truism.
This is a not a new book. It won the Koret Prize in Jewish History; the Vucinich Prize in Russian, Eurasian, and East European Studies; the Lincoln Prize in Russian History; and was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award in History in the year of its publication, but I only became aware of the book when I attended the author’s excellent lecture on the subject at the 2009 International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies (IAJGS) conference in Philadelphia. When I saw Nathans’ name on the list of 2010 conference speakers, I decided that I would read the book—as should every Jewish genealogist with ancestral roots in the Imperial Russian Empire.
Nathans focuses primarily on the second half of the 19th and early 20th centuries, and we learn early on that not all our ancestors morphed from life in an insular, backward shtetl (village) into modern, 20th-century Western life. Far more than is generally realized, the process was much more gradual. Nathans, who is among the first scholars of Russian Jewry to benefit from the opening of archives following the collapse of the former Soviet Union, chose to study what he calls “the Jewish encounter with the larger Russian world” in three venues: the Jews of St. Petersburg, Jews as students in the imperial universities, and Jewish lawyers. In his words, Beyond the Pale is about the crossing of visible and invisible boundaries in the Russian Empire during the 19th and early 20th centuries. Its subject is the encounter between Jews and Russians; the dynamics of Jewish integration into Russian society and the various roles played in the process by the individual, social groups, and the imperial state.
Nathans tells us, “The goal of my book is to demonstrate that Jewish integration into Russian society began long before the Revolution of 1917.”
This rich, wonderfully nuanced gem of a book expands, enhances, and corrects much of what we knew (or thought we knew) about 19th-century Russian-Jewish life. Few will find mention of individual ancestors, but all will gain a much more finely tuned understanding about topics we thought we understood. I found myself underlining passages on every page, as if studying for an exam and wanting to remember everything.
In addition to his three main subjects, Nathans offers considerable information about (and references to) life within the Pale as well as beyond, about Jewish conscription and laws pertaining to it, education, family life, record keeping, state rabbis, Jewish given and family names, and a host of other topics. Footnotes especially yield valuable nuggets and sources of additional information (many sources written in English). About names, for example, we learn (from the footnote on page 246) that Jewish names were registered at birth by local rabbis, who were legally responsible for maintaining the metrical books of their communities and who typically insisted on Yiddishized forms of Hebrew names. The names recorded in these books then became the basis for all subsequent official documents. Russian law forbade the changing of surnames, except by permission of the tsar himself, and until the end of the 19th century, such cases were extremely rare.
Nathans gives us references for the perception by certain acculturated Jews that Yiddishized names bore a social stigma, Jewish merchants—or those in St. Petersburg, at any rate—also showed a striking tendency to register their children under Russian first names in official documents. The problem of Jews seeking to change their first given names was widespread and also relevant to issues of taxation, military service, and social control. The tsarist government attempted, on several occasions, to create a standardized system of correspondence among Yiddish (diminutive), Hebrew (biblical) and Russian names, and to tightly enforce regulation of changes from one to another (p. 147). Elsewhere, Nathans casually mentions the widespread falsification of males’ ages in official records, one part of the multifaceted Jewish attempt to keep Jewish sons out of the Russian army.
Under the heading “The Problem of Emancipation under the Old Regime,” Nathans “sets the framework for the book by looking at the attempt to adapt European-style emancipation to a Russian setting and highlights the efforts of Russian-Jewish elites to adopt a policy of selective integration.” Next comes the focus on his three major segments.
“The Jews of St. Petersburg” examines those privileged Jews who took advantage of selective integration and moved to the imperial capital, forming the largest and most influential Jewish community in Russia proper. He examines Jewish settlement patterns, estate membership, employment, family structure, gender roles and language use in order to illuminate the form and extent of Jewish adaptation. Also included is the struggle over formation of Jewish communal institutions, including the first synagogue.
“Jews, Russians, and the Imperial University” traces the experience of Jewish students (women as well as men) who enrolled in Russian institutions of higher education, moving figuratively beyond the Pale, regardless of their place of study. Unlike their counterparts in Central Europe, Jewish students found themselves in a remarkably open, egalitarian student milieu. By the 1880s, the rising number of secularly educated Jews had begun to recast the hierarchy of learning within the Jewish world.
Then Nathans examines “the “genesis of Jewish student quotas and the way they fostered the emergence of separate Jewish student organizations.” In the “Court of the Gentiles,” the newly created legal profession, with its ideal of the rule of law, serves as the final arena in which to observe the Russian-Jewish encounter.
In addition to all the fascinating facts and analyses of an important segment of Russian-Jewish life from the middle of the 19th century to the Russian Revolution, this book provides an incredibly rich bibliography, including numerous little-known doctoral dissertations, many written in English. For those who truly want to understand the Russian estate system and its effects on the Jews, Nathans refers the reader to two books and one article, all written in English. Interested in Jewish soldiers in the Russian Army? Nathans cites a 2001 doctoral dissertation submitted to Brandeis University by Johanan Petrovsky-Shtern. Social integration differences between Russian Poland and the rest of Russia? References are given for this topic. Divorce? See “The Litigious Gerusha: Jewish Women and Divorce in Imperial Russia.”
Although a historian’s scholarly work, this is a delightful book, eminently readable and full of insights. No one who reads it will ever view Jewish life in 19th-century Russia quite the same way again.
Sallyann Amdur Sack-Pikus
