Jews and the Imperial State: Identification Politics in Tsarist Russia 9781501726729

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Note on Transliteration
Abbreviations
Introduction
1. Making Jews Legible
2. Power of Documentation
3. Movement and Residence
4. Invisible Jews
5. The Jewish Name
Epilogue: Collapse of the Imperial Ghetto
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Jews and the Imperial State

Jews and the Imperial State IDENTIFICATION POLITICS IN TSARIST RUSSIA

Eugene M. Avrutin

Cornell University Press ITHACA AND LONDON

Cornell University Press acknowledges that support for this project has been provided by the Cahnman Publication Subvention grant, awarded by the Association for Jewish Studies. Copyright © 2010 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 2010 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Avrutin, Eugene M. Jews and the imperial state :identification politics in tsarist Russia I Eugene M. Avrutin. p.cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8014-4862-1 (cloth: alk. paper) 1. Jews-Russia-History-19th century. 2. Jews-Legal status, laws, etc.-Russia-History-19th century. 3. Jews, RussianEthnic identity-History-19th century. 4. Identification-RussiaHistory-19th century. I. Title. DS134.84.A97 2010 305.892'404709034-dc22 2010010711 Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of non wood fibers. For further information, visit our website at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu. Cloth printing

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To Michael and Tatyana Avrutin

Contents

Acknowledgments Note on Transliteration Abbreviations

IX X Ill XV

1. Making Jews Legible

1 21

2. Power of Documentation

53

3. Movement and Residence 4. Invisible Jews Epilogue: Collapse of the Imperial Ghetto

86 116 147 180

Bibliography Index

189 207

Introduction

5. The Jewish Name

Acknowledgments

I thank the individuals and institutions that facilitated the writing and research of this book. My undergraduate teachers at the University of Texas at Austin (Leslie O'Bell, Joan Neuberger, and Sidney Monas) deserve special mention, for without their encouragement and support, I would never have chosen to pursue graduate school. At the University of Michigan, Bill Rosenberg, Todd Endelman, Valerie Kivelson, and Zvi Gitelman provided expert guidance. Since my first semester in Ann Arbor, Bill Rosenberg has improved my work with astute and judicious criticism in more ways than I could ever express. Todd Endelman trained me as a Jewish historian and has been a wonderful critic of my work. Valerie Kivelson deserves special mention as well for introducing me to the history of early modern Europe and for her meticulous readings of my chapters. Zvi Gitelman saved me from a number of embarrassing errors, and his remarks made me rethink some of my initial conclusions. I also thank the other individuals who read and critiqued my work, shared their research with me, and broadened my horizons as a historian. These include Paul Werth, Benjamin Nathans, Shaul Stampfer, Jim Loeffler, Olga Litvak, and the late John Klier. During my time in Jerusalem as a graduate student, the late Jonathan Frankel and Scott Ury were generous with their time, and Michael Silber sparked my interest in Jewish names and naming practices. The staff at RGIA allowed me to work in the archive when it was officially closed to the public. At Colby College, Rob Weisbrot, Paul Josephson, Elizabeth Leonard, Jim Webb, and the tireless interlibrary loan staff made my two academic years in central Maine enjoyable and productive.

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Acknowledgments

The bulk of the book was written at the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. My thanks to Blair A. Ruble, William E. Pomeranz, and the amazing library staff for making my five months in Washington, D.C. so productive. At Cornell University Press, John Ackerman believed in this project from the very beginning. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Kenneth Moss for reading the entire manuscript, offering numerous constructive suggestions, and sharing with me his vast knowledge of Jewish history. My thanks also go to the second outside reader for bringing me back to reality by asking all the right questions. I am especially grateful to Bob Greene for critiquing the entire manuscript in record time. Since our very first days of graduate school, Bob has been a wonderful friend and a discerning critic and has read more of my drafts and listened to more of my presentations than he probably cares to remember. At the University of Illinois, I am fortunate to have wonderful friends and colleagues. Mark Steinberg, John Randolph, Diane Koenker, and Antoinette Burton answered all my questions. Fred Jaher and Max Edelson (who is now at the University of Virginia) were exceptionally generous with their time. Michael Shapiro, Dale Bauer, and Matti Bunzl, the past and present directors of the Program in Jewish Culture and Society, offered financial assistance for overseas travel and have made the Jewish Studies program truly unique. In particular, I would like to say a special thank you to Harriet Murav and Bruce Rosenstock for their companionship and intellectual support over the past three years. I am grateful to the following institutions for their financial assistance: the Fulbright liE Program; the International Research and Exchanges Board; the Social Science Research Council; the University of Michigan, including the Department of History, the Center for Russian and East European Studies, the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies, and the Rackham Graduate School; Colby College; the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture; the University of Illinois, including the Program in Jewish Culture and Society, the Department of History, and the Research Board; and the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. A Cahnman Publication Subvention grant awarded by the Association for Jewish Studies helped offset publication costs. Parts of this book have appeared in print elsewhere. An earlier version of chapter 1 was published as "The Politics of Jewish Legibility: Documentation Practices and Reform During the Reign of Nicholas I," Jewish Social Studies 11, no. 2 (2005): 136-69. A portion of chapter 2 was first published as "The Power of Documentation: Vital Statistics and Jewish Accommodation in Tsarist Russia," Ab Imperio 4 (2003 ): 2 71-300. A small portion of chapter 4 appeared in Slavic Review 65, no. 1 (2006): 90-110, and is

Acknowledgments

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reprinted here with the permission of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies. Finally and most important, without the assistance and understanding of my family, I would never have finished the book. Yingying Guo has shown remarkable support for this project and my long absences from home. I'm sure she's glad that it's finally done. Our daughter, Abi, was born one week after I sent the initial draft for review, and she has made it all worthwhile ever since. My parents, Michael and Tatyana Avrutin, have provided encouragement in all sorts of ways over the years, and that is why I dedicate this book to them.

Note on Transliteration

All geographic names are spelled as they appear in their original historical context. I have generally followed the Library of Congress system for transliterating Russian and Hebrew words and the YIVO one for Yiddish. The vast majority of the names that appear in this book have been transliterated according to these rules, with a few notable exceptions. Well-known names such as Iankel and Tolstoi, for example, appear as Yankel and Tolstoy.

Abbreviations

DAKO

Derzhavnyi arkhiv Kylvskoi' oblasti

GARF

Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi federatsii

PSZRI

Polnoe sobranie zakonov Rossiiskoi imperii

RAN-SPb

St. Peterburgskii filial arkhiva Rossiiskoi akademii nauk, St. Petersburg

RG

Record group

RGIA

Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv

TsDIAK

Tsentral'nyi derzhavnyi istorychnyi arkhiv Ukrai'ny, Kiev

TsGIA-SPb

Tsentral'nyi gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv, St. Petersburg

YIVO

YIVO Institute for Jewish Research

AUSTRIA-HUNGARY

OTI'OMAN EMPIRE

BLACK SEA

Figure A. Pale of Settlement. Map drawn by Merrily Shaw of the Russian, East European, and Eurasian Center at the UtJiversity of Illinois.

Introduction "I explained to her why I had no papers. The archives of the town in which I was born were destroyed by fire during the war. If I wanted my birth certificate, I'd have to travel to that town and get witnesses to prove that I came from there. To get a passport, I also needed a copy of my father's birth certificate, or something that was called an 'extract from the permanent record.' All this required both time and money." -IsAAC BASHEVIS SINGER,

The Certificate

I

On February 4, 1910, a Jew who was known by the literary pseudonym S. An-skii arrived in Zhitomir (Volynia Province) on the evening train. Shortly after his arrival, An-skii went to drop off his things at the home of an acquaintance, Vladenburg, who resided in house number 12 on Bazarnaia Street. Wasting little time, An-skii then set off to read a lecture entitled "On the Origins and Characteristics of Contemporary Jewish Literature" at a public gathering of the local branch of the Jewish Literary Society. The lecture drew a large audience, including several police officials who reported that the "orator did not read or say anything other than what was listed on the program and concluded his lecture at midnight." Early the next morning An-skii departed for Berdichev (Kiev Province), where he boarded an overnight train to Lutsk (Volynia Province). As soon as Anskii arrived in Lutsk, a dentist by the name of Bromberg escorted him to the Hotel Bristol. After dropping off his bags at the hotel, An-skii lectured for almost two hours on the same topic to another capacity audience. That night An-skii and four other men gathered at Bromberg's apartment, where they ate and talked until four in the morning. An-skii managed to sleep only a few hours before he appeared at the photography studio Rafael, where he, Bromberg, and nine other Jews posed for a group portrait. After leaving the studio, Bromberg and An-skii set off for the train station. Bromberg purchased a 1:15 ticket to Polonnoe (Volynia Province), while An-skii bought a second-class ticket to Grodno (Grodno Province). An-skii waited at the

2

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Jews and the Imperial State

station until his friend departed and then spent the remaining time alone in his hotel room, making only a brief sojourn, for no more than fifteen or twenty minutes, to the photography studio. An-skii departed as scheduled on the 3:30 afternoon train to Grodno, under the close supervision of an undercover plainclothes detective. In a memo to the Department of Police, Captain Budnitskii reported that the man who had stayed the night at the Hotel Bristol was none other than the forty-five-year-old Vitebsk townsman Shlioma Rappoport, a member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, a talented orator, and the author of numerous illegal writings. On September 4, 1907, the department issued circular number 150038115 to all police officials instructing them to closely supervise a man who was deemed politically dangerous, easily able to avoid detection, and perhaps even subversive. To plainclothes detectives, Rappoport was known by the nickname "Chital'nyi" (the bookish one) or "Sedoi" (the gray-haired one) and not by his literary pseudonym "An-skii," which he had adopted in the year 1892, after arriving in St. Petersburg with the hopes of making a name for himself in the Russian literary world. Although Rappoport's internal passport officially listed his permanent place of residence as Vitebsk (Vitebsk Province), authorities had a hard time locating exactly where the Jew lived, since "the gray-haired one" was constantly traveling from town to town throughout the western territories of the empire, reading lectures on diverse literary topics. To the secret agent shadowing Rappoport, it thus came as no surprise that the gray-haired one stayed in Grodno only long enough to read his lecture on contemporary Jewish literature. At exactly one in the morning, only a few hours after finishing his lecture, Rappoport boarded a train to Belostok (Grodno Province). But even before the first stop on the route, he somehow managed to change directions-presumably in an effort to escape the watchful eye of the detective-and hopped on an oncoming train headed to Vil'na. Upon receipt of a comprehensive intelligence report, the chief of the Kiev gendarmes division asked the Department of Police to determine Shlioma Rappoport's place of permanent residence while continuing to monitor his precise movement and behavior. 1 The case of S. An-skii illustrates many of the administrative challenges of documenting individual Jewish identities. Much like their western and central European counterparts, imperial Russian administrators, journalists,

1. TsDIAK, f. 275, op. 1, d. 1747, II. 8-8b, 10, 15, 23, 25, 26-27 (1910). On the adoption of the nom de plume, see Gabriella Safran, "An-sky in 1892: The Jew and the St. Petersburg Myth," in The Worlds of S. An-sky: A Russian Jewish Intellectual at the Turn of the Century, ed. Gabriella Safran and Steven J. Zipperstein (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 53-82.

Introduction

3

and police officials expressed concerns about the problem of knowing exactly who was Jewish. In the Russian Empire, however, these discussions centered not only on the dilemma of recognizing Jews visually, as they usually did in the West, but also on the more widespread imperial anxieties of identifying Jews by documentary records. 2 The practice of identifying Jews by passports, vital statistics records, censuses, and other documentary records was tied to the growth and development of government institutions, the creation of elaborate record-keeping procedures, the preservation of these documents in accessible archives, and the challenge of identifying every person in the empire. At a time when the imperial Russian state placed increasing trust in the power of paper to govern its vast territories and communities, Jews appeared invisible in the public eye by continually defying conventional criteria of administrative classification. 3 This book explores one of the fundamental arenas of imperial statecraftthe techniques by which the Russian government ruled its populations. A central argument of the pages that follow is that documentary records played a crucial, if often overlooked, role in the construction, manipulation, and eventual unraveling of the empire. The challenges of determining who was Jewish and where Jews were provide a window onto the broader process by which the tsarist regime attempted to fashion a sufficiently unified social order capable of accommodating imperial diversity and the actual, everyday practices of administration. In particular, Jews and the Imperial State provides a case study of how one imperial population, the Jews, shaped the

2. See, for example, Mary Gluck, "The Budapest Flaneur: Urban Modernity, Popular Culture, and the 'Jewish Question' in Fin-de-Siecle Hungary," Jewish Social Studies 10 (2004): 3-7; Shulamit Volkov, Germans, Jews, and Antisemites: Trials in Emancipation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 170-223; Steven Beller, Vienna and the Jews, 1867-1938: A Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 165-206; and Marion Kaplan, "As Germans and as Jews in Imperial Germany," in Jewish Daily Life in Germany, 1618-1945, ed. Marion Kaplan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 264-69. 3. On documentation practices, see, for example, Jane Caplan and John Torpey, eds., Documenting Individual Identity: The Development of State Practices in the Modern World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); John Torpey, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship, and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Andreas Fahrmeir, Olivier Faron, and Patrick Wei!, eds., Migration Control in the North Atlantic World: The Evolution of State Practices in Europe and the United States from the French Revolution to the Inter-War Period (New York: Berghahn Books, 2003); Adam M. McKeown, Melancholy Order: Asian Migration and the Globalization of Borders (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008); Peter Holquist, '"Information Is the Alpha and Omega of Our Work': Bolshevik Surveillance in Its Pan-European Context," Journal of Modern History 69 (1997): 415-50; and Gerard Noire!, The French Melting Pot: Immigration, Citizenship, and National Identity, trans. Geoffroy de Laforcade (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). For the early modern context, see Valentin Groebner, Who Are You? Identification, Deception, and Surveillance in Early Modern Europe, trans. Mark Kyburz and John Peck (New York: Zone Books, 2007).

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Jews and the Imperial State

world in which they lived by negotiating with what were often perceived as contradictory and highly restrictive laws and institutions. In the Russian Empire, the preoccupation with techniques of government based on the power of numbers emerged as part of an administrative effort to manage societies, refashion populations, and create a transparent social order. 4 Beginning with the reign of Nicholas I, the imperial state began to gradually shift its administrative focus from ruling territories and communities to managing populations. The administrative, fiscal, and linguistic demands of governing an ethnically diverse and territorially expansive empire, however, impeded the state from making a successful transition to a national model. As one of the most undergoverned states in all of Europe, Russia ruled its populations through the mediation of religious personnel and institutions, even as it attempted to establish universal administrative practices common to all civil statuses and religious groups. In this system of government, which simultaneously relied on the more direct techniques of population management as well as the indirect practices of social control, Jews were subject to an astonishing number of laws regulating their precise movement, residence, and career paths. II

In 1772, 1793, and 1795, the imperial Russian state acquired a large constellation of territories (around 463,200 kilometers), peoples (estimated at 7.5 million subjects including Ukrainians, Belorussians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Poles, and Jews), and religious denominations (Roman Catholicism, Calvinism, Lutheranism, Russian Orthodoxy, and Judaism). 1 In the Russian Empire, most Jews continued to live in small market towns in the western borderlands, where they often constituted a large proportion of the population, at times even forming the absolute majority. As soon as Russia acquired the largest Jewish population in the world, Catherine the Great (1762-96) contained the movement and residence of Jews in the regions of the empire that had been their historic home for well over three hundred years. Although during Catherine's reign prominent merchants received permission to travel and trade in the interior provinces on a temporary basis, tsarist administrators continued to bar Jews from taking up permanent residence in the imperial core. The formal delineation of the Pale of 4. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improue the Human Condi· tion Haue Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); and Michel Foucault, "Governmentality," in Power: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984, ed. James D. Faubion (New York: New Press, 2000), 201-22. 5. On the expansion of the western borderlands, see Edward C. Thaden, Russia's Western Borderlands, 1710-1870 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984).

Introduction

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5

Settlement, however, was a gradual process, which grew out of the imperial state's population policies of containment and isolation. 6 In 1790, almost two decades after the first Polish partition, a group of Russian merchants pleaded with authorities to forbid Jews the right to travel and engage in business in the interior provinces of the empire, arguing that the Jewish competitors had undersold their prices, smuggled contraband, and "only brought great harm" to the Russian community. The Russian merchants complained that a large number of Jews had appeared in Moscow, disguised their national origin by pretending to be Prussians and Belorussians, and ·engaged in shady business practices such as selling goods at bargain prices, importing illegal merchandise, tax evasion, and various forms of corruption. Furthermore, they requested that no Jews be allowed to enroll in the Moscow merchant guilds or trade goods outside the borders of Belorussia. In response to the complaints, the Jewish merchants submitted a counterpetition, requesting to be included in the Smolensk and Moscow merchant guilds. The State Council, however, rejected the request and ordered the Jews to sell their immovable property and leave the interior provinces within eight months. 7 This decree led to the highly controversial law of December 23, 1791, that delineated Belorussia (Vitebsk and Mogilev provinces) and parts of New Russia (Ekaterinoslav and Taurida provinces) as the only territories where Jews could reside, travel, and conduct business. 8 Forty-four years later, the 1835 statute designated these territories as well as the provinces of Grodno, Kovno, Vil'na, Volynia, Minsk, Podolia, Poltava, Bessarabia, Kherson, Kiev, and Chernigov as the Pale of Settlement. 9 For the next eighty years, the vast majority of Jews continued to reside, engage in commercial affairs, and acquire property only within the western borderland regions where they had lived prior to Russia's annexation of Poland. 10 6. "Zhitel'stvo i peredvizhenie evreev po russkomu zakonodatel'stvu," in Evreiskaia entsiklopediia: Svod znanii o evreistve i ego kul'ture v proshlom i nastoiashchem, 16 vols. (Moscow: Terra, 1991), 7: 590-93. 7. See the discussion in Dmitrii Zakharovich Fel'dman, Stranitsy istorii evreev Rossii xviii-xix vekov: Opyt arkhivnogo issledovaniia (Moscow: Drevlekhranilishche, 2005), 168-170, 185-88. 8. PSZRI, series 1, vol. 23, no. 17006 (December 23, 1791); Richard Pipes, "Catherine II and the Jews: The Origins of the Pale of Settlement," Soviet Jewish Affairs 5 (1975): 14; and Fel'dman, Stranitsy istorii evreev Rossii, 187. 9. A separate legal code regulated the legal status of Jews who lived in the ten provinces that comprised the Kingdom of Poland. Until 1868, the Russian law code isolated the Pale of Settlement from the Kingdom of Poland by prohibiting Jews from moving back and forth between these two territories. "Zhitel'stvo i peredvizhenie evreev po russkomu zakonodatel'stvu," 592. 10. In fact at the end of the eighteenth century, Catherine the Great expanded the territories where Jews could reside to include parts of the Black Sea regions (New Russia). These agricultural territories eventually became part of the Pale of Settlement, as it was constituted

6 I Jews and the Imperial State Until the middle of the nineteenth century Jewish collective identity continued to remain stable, even if Russian Jewry constituted a diverse population divided along religious, linguistic, and culturallinesY Travelers, police officials, and journalists who visited the western borderlands spoke of the distinct "Jewish" look of the hundreds of small market towns. According to a member of the Russian Geographical Society, for example, it was difficult to encounter another "tribe" (plemia) in the empire that possessed the degree of solidarity and isolation that characterized the Jews: "The Jews represent a nation within a nation; they are an isolated tribe, with its own language, its own religion, its own economic base, and its own community. " 12 A traveler passing through the western borderlands described Jewish women as well proportioned and attractive: "Their large eyes are overshadowed with thick, black eyebrows; the nose is Asiatic; the cheeks are fresh and bright; a pale neck covered with large necklaces; a magnificent bust." 13 Yet contemporary observers also felt that Jews could be distinguished not only by these traits but also by an exceptional and barely imperceptible "imprint" permeating their entire soul. This imprint could be found among the educated and uneducated, among the wealthy and the poor in all the countries Jews inhabited. 14 While Jews could be easily identified visually as a collective group or defined in legal terms (by law, anyone who converted from Judaism to Christianity ceased to be a Jew), authorities found it much more challenging to document Jews as individuals. 15 In the second half of the nineteenth century, the challenges of identification grew more problematic. Not only were Jewish population statistics notoriously unreliable, but more important, the categories used by government administrators failed to capture unambiguously who was Jewish. Should Jews be defined as a social estate, a religious

in 1835. On the historical construction of the pale, see Obshchaia zapiska vysshei kommisii dlia peresmotra deistvuiushchikh o evreiakh v imperii zakonov, 1883-1888 (St. Petersburg: [n.p.], 1888), cxxiii. 11. Eli Lederhendler, "Did Russian Jewry Exist Prior to 1917?" in Jews and Jewish Life in Russia and the Soviet Union, ed. Yaacov Ro'i (Portland: Frank Cass, 1995), 18-19; and Steven J. Zipperstein, The Jews of Odessa: A Cultural History, 1794-18 81 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985), 14. 12. P. P. Chubinskii, ed., Trudy etnografichesko-statisticheskoi ekspeditsii v zapadnorusskii krai, vol. 7 (St. Petersburg: K. B. Trubnikov, 1872), 3. See also Robert Johnston, Travels through Part of the Russian Empire (1816; repr., New York: Arno, 1970), 331. 13. A. Glagolev, Zapiski russkogo puteshestvennika s 1823 po 1827 (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia Imperatorskoi rossiiskoi akademii, 1837), pt. 1:129. 14. Narody Rossii: Etnograficheskie ocherki, 2 vols. (St. Petersburg: Obshchestvennaia pol'za, 1878), 1:390. 15. For a discussion of the bureaucratic dilemmas of identifying Jews, see Darius Staliunas, Making Russians: Meaning and Practice of Russification in Lithuania and Belarus after 1863 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), 121-27.

Introduction

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community, a distinctive race, or perhaps an ethnic corporation? Did the individuals who had converted to Russian Orthodoxy, Catholicism, or Protestantism lose their Jewishness, as the law instructed? How could administrators keep track of an individual whose passport read Russian Orthodox but whose ethnoreligious origin (proiskhozhdenie) was marked Jewish? The answers to these and many similar questions grew more ambiguous as the Russian government began to restructure the social and economic order of the empire. The modernization projects of the Great Reform era created new professional and entrepreneurial classes, laying the foundations for the technologies that made travel accessible and affordable. The construction of the railroad played an important role in the development of commerce and industry in cities such as Moscow, Warsaw, Odessa, Kiev, St. Petersburg, and Ekaterinoslav, all of which attracted sizable Jewish migrant populations. The expansion of travel and the emergence of consumerism fostered the cross-fertilization of tastes, fashions, behaviors, and forms of conduct and appearances. 16 Jews flocked to these and many other cities in search of higher forms of secular education, professional opportunities, and social experiences. By around 1900, as an unprecedented number of Jews traveled throughout the empire by way of a vast network of paved and unpaved roads and railroad lines, in the process adapting to the new tastes and fashions of the day, it became increasingly difficult to know who was Jewish and where Jews were. A central premise of this book is that three particular factors-all of which were linked to the state's efforts to fashion a more direct relationship with the population-created difficulties in identifying individual Jews: the construction of a legal-administrative order capable of accommodating the empire's remarkable juridical distinctions and confessional diversity, the ordering of clear and distinct cultural boundaries between Jews and non-Jews, and the containment of Jews in their permanent places of residence. First, over the course of the nineteenth century, imperial Russian reformers and government administrators relied on social-scientific technologies of intervention to eliminate mediating collective bodies between the state and the population. By introducing passport laws, compulsory vital statistics registration, and the income tax, the state attempted to break down corporate self-government and isolationY Despite these efforts, a direct and unmediated relationship with its population proved challenging to 16. On the development of the fashion industry in the Russian Empire, see Christine Ruane, The Emperor's New Clothes: A History of the Russian Fashion Industry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). 17. Yanni Kotsonis, "'No Place to Go': Taxation and State Transformation in Late Imperial and Early Soviet Russia," Journal of Modern History 76 (2004 ): 531-77; Paul W. Werth, "In the State's Embrace? Civil Acts in an Imperial Order," Kritika: Explorations in Russian and

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jews and the Imperial State

construct. Until the collapse of the old regime, the Russian government continued to depend on collective categories and communal institutions to govern the empire. Marked by an astonishing religious, territorial, and legalistic diversity, the imperial Russian state relied on "difference" not only to define and allocate rights but also to shape population policies. 18 All the particularistic customs, laws, and statutes that comprised imperial law-and were further differentiated by such categories as religion, social estate, sex, occupation, and territory-created tensions in the legaladministrative interactions between the state and its subjects. While this culture of governance based on difference and particularity survived until the fall of the old regime, the imperial population and the provincial administrators, police officials, and civil servants found it challenging to grasp the laws, statutes, and special edicts regulating all facets of everyday life. Second, Jews illustrate many of the tensions, uncertainties, and dilemmas that made religious uniformity and communal solidarity increasingly difficult to preserve in the multiconfessional empire. In the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Jews and their Christian neighbors had lived and interacted with one another for over three hundred years. During the early modern period, religion and language served as the two primary cultural markers, which clearly delineated the ethnoreligious boundaries and social spaces between communities. Jewish law (Halakhah) as expressed in the legal texts of the Talmud and Shulhan Arukh regulated daily life. Jews spoke a different language (Yiddish), perceived time differently (observing the Sabbath on Saturday rather than on Sunday), abided by different dietary restrictions, and usually dressed differently by wearing dark and modest clothing. This does not mean that the boundaries between Jews and non-Jews were always fixed, respected, and observed. Nor does this mean that church authorities and government administrators were always able to know who was who. But even as Jews and their neighbors intermingled with each other in marketplaces, neighborhoods, houses, and streets the bonds of family, communal structures, and religious institutions preserved the distinctiveness of Jewish life. By perpetuating these deep-rooted differences, Jews maintained their collective identity, and the

Eurasian History 7 (2006): 433-58; and V. G. Chernukha, Pasport v Rossii, 1719-1917 (St. Petersburg: Liki Rossii, 2007). 18. Jane Burbank, "An Imperial Rights Regime: Law and Citizenship in the Russian Empire," Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 7 (2006): 397-431. See also Burbank, "Thinking Like an Empire: Estate, Law, and Rights in the Early Twentieth Century," in Russian Empire: Space, People, Power, 1700-1930, ed. Jane Burbank, Mark von Hagen, and Anatoly Remnev (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 196-217.

Introduction

9

boundaries between Jews and their neighbors were, on the whole, neither elusive nor problematic. 19 While most Jews continued to reside in small market towns in the western borderlands of the empire, hundreds of thousands of individuals settled in many of the larger cities in and beyond the pale during the second half of the nineteenth century. As the Jewish encounter with modernity stretched the limits of what it meant to be a Jew, the formerly fixed categories of collective identity proved highly malleable and elastic. The forced modernization of the economy and advances in modes of public transportation offered all subjects of the empire, including Jews, unprecedented economic, professional, and educational opportunities. A significant number of people began to acquire linguistic knowledge of Polish or Russian, change their style of clothing in favor of more fashionable or, in some cases, less distinctive dress, and participate in the institutional frameworks of the civic order. While such changes were experienced most profoundly in the great industrial centers such as Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kiev, Warsaw, and Odessa, the more remote parts of the empire were also affected. The flux in movement due to seasonal and regional migrations meant that the Jews who resided in the western borderlands engaged in the transmission and dissemination of popular cultures, material conditions, and worldviews. 20 At the turn of the

19. As recent studies have shown, Jewish men (mostly elites) not only participated in a wide spectrum of economic activity but also were influenced by, and shared in, Polish culture. However, unlike those in early modern Italy, England, and Spain, Jewish identities and boundaries in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth did not shift, nor were they redefined. By contrast with other early modern contexts, Polish Jews did not face expulsions, and conversions were relatively rare. See, for example, Moshe Rosman, "Innovative Tradition: Jewish Culture in the Polish-Lithuania Commonwealth," in Cultures of the jews: A New History, ed. David Biale (New York: Schocken, 2002), 519-70; David Frick, "Jews and Others in Seventeenth-Century Wilno: Life in the Neighborhood," jewish Studies Quarterly 12 (2005): 8-42; Frick, "Jews in Public Places: Further Chapters in the Jewish-Christian Encounter in Seventeenth-Century Vilna," Polin 22 (2010): 215-48; and Magda Tetter, "'There Should Be No Love between Us and Them': Social Life and the Bounds of Jewish and Canon Law in Early Modern Poland," Polin 22 (2010): 249-70. For a slightly different interpretation, see Adam Teller, "The Shtetl as an Arena for Polish-Jewish Integration in the Eighteenth Century," Polin 17 (2004): 25-40. For the broader early modern European Jewish context, see Stefanie B. Siegmund, The Medici State and the Ghetto of Florence: The Construction of an Early Modern jewish Community (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006); and Miriam Bodian, Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation: Conversos and Community in Early Modern Amsterdam (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999). 20. On cultural change, reformation of religious practices, and the emergence of new Jewish communities, see, for example, Zipperstein, The Jews of Odessa; Benjamin Nathans, Beyond the Pale: The jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); and Natan Meir, "From Pork to Kapores: Transformations in Religious Practice among the Jews of Late Imperial Kiev," Jewish Quarterly Review 97 (2007): 616-45. See also Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, jews in the Russian Army, 1827-1917: Drafted into Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

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Jews and the Imperial State

twentieth century, as Jews transcended the fixed and commonly accepted notions of Jewishness, the expressions and symbols of Jewish identity underwent enormous change, and the cultural boundaries between Jews and their many neighbors gradually lost their distinctiveness. The destabilization of Jewishness had parallels with the broader reformation of religious practices, beliefs, and customs in the Russian Empire. Sectarianism, apostasy, and increased secularization challenged the purity of Russian Orthodoxy in many of the same ways that cosmopolitanism, syncretism, and pragmatic conversions divided Jewish communal and religious cohesiveness. Christian sectarians such as Old Believers, Khlysty, and Skoptsy, who had broken away from Russian Orthodoxy, denied the official religious legitimacy of the church and its spiritual and theological teachings. Groups such as the Dukhobors, Molokans, and Subbotniks also opposed the Russian Orthodox Church as an institution and rejected the secular authority of the tsar. Moreover, those individuals who converted from Judaism to Christianity in order to bypass legal disabilities and residential restrictions compromised the purity of both religious groups. All these developments helped destabilize the discrete boundaries governing religious identities and what it meant to be a heretic, a Russian, and a Jew. 21 Government censuses, passports, and vital statistics records relied on religious affiliation to document individuals as part of a larger collective group. Like the category of social estate (soslovie) that was used to delineate collective rights and ascribe social obligations, religious categories, institutions, and personnel were used by the tsarist regime to regulate morality and administer local organs of government, welfare, and education in the empire. While the state continued to rest on confessional foundations until the last years of the old regime, by the second half of the nineteenth century it became increasingly apparent that the category of religious affiliation could no longer function as the sole criterion by which difference was marked. 22 21. See, for example, Vera Shevzov, Russian Orthodoxy on the Eve of Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Laura Engelstein, Castration and the Heavenly Kingdom: A Russian Folktale (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999); Nicholas B. Breyfogle, Heretics and Colonizers: Forging Russia's Empire in the South Caucasus (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005); Gregory Freeze, "Policing Piety: The Church and Popular Religion in Russia, 17501850," in Imperial Russia: New Histories for the Empire, ed. Jane Burbank and David L. Ransel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 210-49; and Mark D. Steinberg and Heather J. Coleman, eds., Sacred Stories: Religion and Spirituality in Modern Russia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007). 22. On the significance of religious categories in tsarist Russia, see Robert Crews, "Empire and the Confessional State: Islam and Religious Politics in Nineteenth-Century Russia," American Historical Review 108 (2003): 50-83. On the social estate, see Gregory Freeze, "The Soslovie (Estate) Paradigm and Russian Social History," American Historical Review 91 (1986): 11-36; and Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter, Social Identity in Imperial Russia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1997).

Introduction

11

Bureaucrats, police officials, statisticians, ethnographers, and demographers began to rely more often on ethnicity (narodnost' or natsional'nost') to define difference through a combination of factors such as language, cultural practices, and religion. At a time when traditional symbols could no longer locate and order social boundaries and everyday relationships, government officials and police officers employed ethnicity-as both a descriptive and an administrative category-to mark distinctions between individuals, collectivities, and social groups. 23 And finally, for imperial authorities, the mass movement of populations caused profound administrative anxiety. Long before the experiences of the Great War and the subsequent revolutions challenged the state's governing powers by displacing millions of people across the territories of eastern Europe, European Russia, Siberia, and Eurasia, the modernization projects of the 1860s and 1870s weakened the bureaucracy's ability to regulate effectively internal boundaries and international borders. 24 Even as Russian society became more mobile and less constrained by the fixity of land, community, and family, travel within the empire remained heavily regulated as a result of the large and diverse number of individual laws comprising the general statute on passports. When traveling outside their permanent places of residence, all subjects of the empire were required to carry a document that stated their personal identity, outlining the route of their journey, the purpose, and the eventual destination. As an unprecedented number of individuals traveled across wide geographic terrains, government officials faced the dilemma of identifying them on the basis of documents such as internal passports and metrical records (birth, marriage, and death certificates), which were often unreliable, easily manipulated, and poorly managed. Errors, omissions, and various kinds of irregularities hindered the population's ability to participate in civic life and challenged the state's ability to regulate mobility, manage its territorial borders, and contain individuals in their permanent places of residence. Jews presented numerous difficulties for regulating internal migration, even if a host of laws, edicts, and statutes determined where they could 23. On ethnicity in Russia, see Charles Steinwedel, "To Make a Difference: The Category of Ethnicity in Late Imperial Russian Politics, 1861-1917," in Russian Modernity: Politics, Knowledge, Practices, ed. David L. Hoffmann and Yanni Kotsonis (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), 67-86; Eric Lohr, Nationalizing the Russian Empire: The Campaign against Enemy Aliens during World War I (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003); and Juliette Cadiot, "Searching for Nationality: Statistics and National Categories at the End of the Russian Empire (1897-1917)," Russian Review 64 (2005): 440-55. 24. On population displacements during the First World War and beyond, see Peter Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia during World War One (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999); and Nick Baron and Peter Gatrell, eds., Homelands: War, Population and Statehood in Eastern Europe and Russia, 1918-1924 (London: Anthem, 2004).

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move and how long they could travel. Even after the political cns1s of 1881, when imperial laws "departed significantly from the overall contours of government policy and were aimed quite self-consciously at the Jews," the Jewish population found creative ways to maneuver around the myriad laws, ordinances, and special statutes. 25 The state's containment policies did not succeed in isolating or alienating Jews from the broader social, political, and cultural world: the boundaries of the pale proved too porous, the territories of the empire too vast, and government administrators too uncoordinated and understaffed to effectively regulate Jewish movement and residence. For the imperial bureaucracy, the building of the railroad, rapid industrialization, and the growth of a commercial culture in urban and rural Russia produced unprecedented demographic dislocations that created all sorts of tensions in documenting individual identities. 26 As police and government officials sought in desperation to track their movement and place in the social landscape, Jews resorted to a variety of scams, cover-ups, and swindling tricks to mask their identities. At times, Jews forged passports, refashioned their social identities, and even converted in an attempt to subvert a maze of legal codes, all of which attempted to regulate their professional and residential existence. On a number of other occasions, they abandoned some of the most recognizable symbols of their identity such as names, dress, and speech with the hopes of blending in, feeling more accepted, and ultimately hiding the public expressions of their Jewishness.

25. Michael Stanislawski, "Russian Jewry, the Russian State, and the Dynamics of Jewish Emancipation," in Paths of Emancipation: Jews, States, and Citizenship, ed. Pierre Birnbaum and Ira Katznelson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 277. The troubled, often hostile, nature of Russian-Jewish relations forms the point of departure for most historians who have focused on political alternatives to Jewish life in imperial Russia (such as Zionism and various form of socialism) and constructed their narratives by making socioeconomic and cultural fragmentation the cornerstones in their work. Since Russian Jewry experienced neither "liberalism" nor "emancipation" under the old regime, so the argument goes, Jews turned to "postliberal" solutions in a distinctly antiliberal setting. On 18 81 as a turning point in RussianJewish history, see Jonathan Frankel, Prophecy and Politics: Socialism, Nationalism, and the Russian Jews, 1862-1917 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981 ); and Frankel, "The Crisis of 1881-82 as a Turning Point in Modern Jewish History," in The Legacy of Jewish Migration: 1881 and Its Impact, ed. David Berger (New York: Brooklyn College Press, 1983), 9-22. For a comparative perspective, see Pierre Birnbaum and Ira Katznelson, "Emancipation and the Liberal Offer," in Paths of Emancipation, 3-36, esp. 26. For a critique of Frankel, see Nathans, Beyond the Pale, 9-13. For a cautious approach to the events of 1881, see Israel Barta!, The Jews of Eastern Europe, 1772-1881, trans. Chaya Naor (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 4-5. 26. On identification politics in the Russian Empire, see the suggestive discussion in Leonid Gorizontov, Paradoksy imperskoi politiki: Poliaki v Rossii i russkie v Pol'she (Moscow: Indrik, 1999), chap. 3.

Introduction

13

III

The collapse of the Soviet Union and the declassification of archival materials have contributed to a fundamental rethinking of the entanglement of ordinary Jews with the imperial Russian state. While the first and second generation of Russian-Jewish historians assumed that the highly burdensome legal codes debilitated an entire generation of Russian Jews by restricting their economic, religious, and civil rights, recent scholars have demonstrated the ways in which Jews participated in Russian civil societyY The policy of what historian Benjamin Nathans termed "selective integration" created a distinctive framework that allowed some of the empire's most productive members of the Jewish community-such as wealthy firstand second-guild merchants, students, soldiers, and select artisans-to take part in middle-class professions, institutions of higher education, and cultural life. The emergence of new communities outside the Pale of Settlement helped facilitate the crossing of both social and geographic boundaries in the late imperial period. 28 Yet the individuals who traveled beyond the pale or migrated to rapidly expanding cities such as Odessa and Kiev were not the only ones who crossed social and geographic boundaries or engaged with the legal-administrative system. ChaeRan Freeze's analysis of Jewish marriage and divorce breaks new ground by demonstrating the multiple ways in which ordinary individuals in the western provinces of the empire relied on Russia's legal-administrative system for settling intimate disputes and familial controversies. 29 Utilizing petitions, complaints, police reports, and many other forms of legal-administrative correspondence, Jews and the Imperial State builds on these two pioneering studies by analyzing how ordinary Jews participated in a legal-administrative system most people found terribly confusing and difficult to negotiate. While contemporary writers and subsequent commentators interpreted imperial policies toward Jews in essentially negative terms, this book shifts the analytical focus by analyzing what the law

27. See, for example, Simon Dubnow, History of the Jews in Russia and Poland, from the Earliest Time until the Present Day, trans. I. Friedlander, 3 vols. (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1916-1920); and Isaac Levitats, The Jewish Community in Russia, 1772-1844 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943). On the historiography of Russian Jewry, see Michael Stanislawski, "Eastern European Jewry in the Modern Period: 1750-1939," in Oxford Handbook of Jewish Studies, ed. Martin Goodman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 396-411; and Benjamin Nathans, "On Russian-Jewish Historiography," in Historiography of Imperial Russia: The Profession and Writing of History in a Multiethnic Empire, ed. Thomas Sanders (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1999), 397-432. 28. Nathans, Beyond the Pale. 29. ChaeRan Freeze, Jewish Marriage and Divorce in Imperial Russia (Waltham, Mass.: Brandeis University Press, 2002).

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jews and the Imperial State

made possible. 30 Some Jews accommodated to the system of government by circumventing legal statutes; others by bribing, converting, or resorting to various forms of manipulations; and still others by appealing to the state with individual grievances and requests. The transition from communal to individual forms of political expression, which began to take place in mid-nineteenth-century Russia, marked an important turning point in the history of Russian Jewry. It is a central argument of this book that these practices, whatever their contradictions and limitations, did much more than constrain spatial movement, facilitate government surveillance, and inspire individuals to misrepresent their public personas in hopes of appearing invisible in the public eye. Passports, service records, and birth and marriage certificates played an influential role in dictating the kinds of choices Jews were able to make. Without these essential documents, Jews could not register with a social estate, enroll in educational institutions, register for the all-estate military draft, leave their permanent places of residence, and enter into marriage. Recognizing the power of documentation, Jews wrote numerous complaints and petitions in order to negotiate what they often perceived as highly confusing and often contradictory statutes. Authorities did not respond in the affirmative to a great number of the petitions. Yet these documents nevertheless allow us to analyze the engagements of ordinary Jews with the world around them. While contemporary satirists poked fun at the slow, burdensome, and, on occasion, futile bureaucratic-administrative process, individuals continued to turn to the state with their requestsY During the Great Reform era, Jews communicated so frequently with the imperial bureaucracy that the Ministry of the Interior "complained to regional authorities that it was being flooded with petitions written in Jewish [na evreiskom iazyke]." In 1870, the interior minister reminded the petitioners "that nobody here reads the language. If Jews wished for the state to act on their petitions, they needed to submit them in Russian-and on stamped government paper!" 32

30. My thinking on the politics and possibilities of everyday life has been influenced by two outstanding studies of Soviet Russia: Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); and Douglas Northrop, Veiled Empire: Gender and Power in Stalinist Central Asia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004 ). 31. Pavel Veinberg, "Proshenie," in Stseny iz evreiskago byta, 5th ed. (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia. K.N. Plotnikova, 1874), 128-39. 32. John D. Klier, "Polish Shtetls under Russian Rule, 1772-1914," Polin 17 (2004): 102 (TsDIAK, f. 442, op. 49, d. 271, II. ·1-2 [1870]; Klier's translation slightly altered). In those instances when Jews submitted petitions in either Yiddish or Hebrew, with corresponding Russian translations, imperial authorities complained that it took them too long to verify the translations and respond to the petitions. TsDIAK, f. 442, op. 181, d. 752 (1867).

Introduction

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15

Over the course of the second half of the nineteenth century, Jews petitioned in hopes of settling all sorts of concerns that they encountered in everyday life: to mediate familial and religious disputes; to settle the more mundane, but equally important, questions of improper or faulty record keeping; and perhaps most frequently, to receive an exemption from one of the many Jewish statutes on the books. With the absence of a parliamentary democracy, petitioning in the name of the tsar provided direct access to the autocrat and allowed individuals to negotiate the highly confusing legal system. The tens of thousands of petitions preserved in regional and central archives attest to the power that these upward means of communication had for the population. Without proper knowledge of the Russian language or the juridical system, Jews turned to private attorneys (known to the public as "underground street advocates") to resolve their legal predicaments. These attorneys, who owned licenses but had little legal training, made considerable sums of money from needy and often desperate individuals by ghostwriting petitions, specializing in legal questions such as property disputes, bankruptcy, personal injury, and residence rights cases. Underground advocates composed petitions or complaints when Jews needed to request formal permission to reside in a specific territory, to extend or receive a residence permit, to file a complaint against tsarist administrators or police officials for not observing the letter of the law, or to obtain an exemption from any of the other statutes governing everyday Jewish life. 33 Long after the Judicial Reform of 1864 created independent courts and introduced a modernized judicial system, petitioning in the name of the tsar continued to serve as an important means of upward communication. Although imperial subjects had turned to the tsar with humble supplications for hundreds of years, the volume of individual requests received by the Chancellery for Receipt of Petitions more than doubled between 1846 and 1893. 34 The chancellery's statistical records reveal in meticulous detail how significant these forms of communication were for both the state and the imperial population. Throughout the nineteenth century, authorities read and 33. On the creation of the underground lawyers, see William E. Pomeranz, "Justice from the Underground: The History of the Underground Advokatura," Russian Review 52 (1993 ): 321-40. On the petitions written by underground advocates for various peoples (including Jews) in Kiev, Podolia, and Volynia provinces, see, for example, TsDIAK, f. 442, op. 830, d. 177, II. 1-83 (1880-86); op. 833, d. 25, II. 1-24 (1883); op. 836, d. 238,11. 1-69 ( 1886-91); op. 835, d. 124, II. 1-72 (1885-92); op. 835, d. 156, II. 1-29 (1885-86). 34. In 1810, as part of the overall restructuring of the bureaucratic order, Alexander I established the chancellery to adjudicate official complaints and requests. For an official history of the chancellery, seeS. N. l'isarev, Uchrezhdenie po priniatiiu i napravleniiu proshenii i zhalob, prinosimykh na Vysochaishee imia, 1810-1910 (St. Petersburg: R. Golike i A. Vil'horg, 1911). See also Barbara Alpern Engel, "In the Name of the Tsar: Competing Legalities and Marital Conflict in Late Imperial Russia," Journal of Modern History 77 (2005): 76-81.

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responded to almost every petition filed with the chancellery (between 1846 and 1855, for example, it answered 110,684 out of 111,136 petitions). 35 By 1893, the chancellery received more than 21,000 requests, filed in fifty-three separate categories, ranging from such mundane matters as name changes to more practical requests dealing with marital conflict, monetary assistance, land disputes, and religious questions. In the context of the Great War, revolutionary fervor, and social disturbances, the numbers of petitions received jumped to 178,000 in 1913 and 85,000 in 1915. Whereas authorities had responded to almost every petition filed with the chancellery throughout the nineteenth century, in the very last years of the old regime, the imperial bureaucracy had neither the financial resources nor the manpower to answer every request flooding its offices. 36 Marking an important turning point in the ways in which individual Jews used the state for political means, the Great Reform era expanded the individual's authority to resolve neighborly conflicts, express discontent, and contest formal, administrative edicts. In the early modern period, Jewish intercessors played some of the most important political roles in Jewish communities by appealing to the legal authority of the state by filing complaints. The complaint was usually filed as a collective petition in an attempt to lobby and persuade the state to fulfill the larger interest of the Jewish community. 37 While the political lobbyist-in the form of extremely wealthy and influential merchants, railroad magnates, bankers, and sugar tycoonscontinued to represent the collective interest of the Jews, in the late imperial setting, the intercessor served as only one possible conduit for expressing discontent and resolving social conflict. As a consequence of the judicial and administrative reforms, the proliferation of legal institutions, and the diffusion of political forms of authority, ordinary individuals began to use, in an unprecedented fashion, the structures sanctioned by the state to adjudicate everyday concerns by either petitioning or turning to the court system. 38

35. RGIA, f. 1412, op. 251, d. 100 (1855-1860). 36. RGIA, f. 1412, op. 251, d. 116 (1913); and op. 251, d. 117 (1915). These statistics reflect only the petitions received directly by St. Petersburg and not those received by provincial administrators. Nevertheless, they do demonstrate the overall increase in the writing of petitions and complaints in the last decades of the old regime. Moreover, the chancellery did not categorize the petitions by social identity or religion, and it is impossible to estimate how many of the total number of petitions, in any given category, were made by Jews. 37. On early modern political practices, see Eli Lederhendler, The Road to Modern Jewish Politics: Political Tradition and Political Reconstruction in the Jewish Community of Tsarist Russia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 11-57. 38. On the judicial reforms and legal consciousness in the Russian Empire, see Richard Wortman, The Development of a Russian Legal Consciousness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976); Jane Burbank, Russian Peasants Go to Court: Legal Culture in the Countryside, 1905-1917 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004); and E. A. Pravilova, Zakonnost' i

Introduction

I

17

Hundreds of legal statutes delineated where Jews could live, how long they could travel, and what precise professions and trades they could practice. According to the liberal legal historian Iulii Gessen, the limitations of freedom of residence and movement represented the most "pernicious of the restrictive laws" by "disenfranchising painfully almost every aspect of Jewish existence." 39 In the wake of the 1881-82 pogroms, Jewish socialists and nationalists also interpreted the antisemitic legal restrictions not only as a permanent inconvenience but also as a direct threat to Jewish ways of life in the empire. 40 If the arbitrariness of the law polarized the Jewish community from the Russian state-as Jewish liberals, socialists, and nationalists maintained-ordinary Jews nevertheless continued to turn to the state to voice individual grievances and resolve neighborly conflicts with both Jews and non-Jews. In a regime that recognized and actively maintained social, religious, and legal differences, the types of obligations, restrictions, and special privileges regulating Jewish daily life corresponded to the larger administrative ethos of assigning, reassigning, and taking "away rights, duties, and privileges from the groups that comprised the empire's population. " 41 And even if imperial law was based more on privilege, difference, and particularity than on uniformity, it nevertheless enabled all the empire's subjects, including Jews, to participate in Russian administrative practice by filing petitions and using the court system. For the vast majority of Jews who resided within the territories of the empire, then, the legal-judicial framework proved to be the most convenient and perhaps effective means for negotiating all the rules, obligations, and special statutes governing everyday life. IV

An analysis of the individual entanglements with the law not only reveals how frequently Jews turned to the state for political purposes. It also sheds much light on the day-to-day functions and operations of the legal-administrative system. The Russian bureaucracy was slow and inefficient, and much time was spent (and wasted) on the production of reports, communications, and documents. "In this world of petitions, applications, inquiries, and reports," one historian has written, "ambitious chancery scribes and junior officials labored to make their handwriting elegant, embellished reports with eyecatching designs, and even on occasion added charts hand-tinted with prava lichnosti: Administrativnaia iustitsiia v Rossii (vtoraia polovina xix v.-oktiabr' 1917 g.) (St. Petersburg: Izd-vo obrazovanie-kul'tura, 2000). 39. lulii Gessen, Zakon i zhizn': Kak sozidalis' ogranichitel'nye zakony o zhitel'stve evreev v Rossii (St. Petersburg: A. G. Rozena, 1911), 4. 40. Frankel, Prophecy and Politics, 51. 41. Burbank, "An Imperial Rights Regime," 403.

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jews and the Imperial State

watercolors. " 42 Although the organization of a rational administrative system first emerged in the middle of the seventeenth century, it was Alexander I (1801-25) who created the ministerial structures that supported the division of Russian government until its collapse. Significant efforts were made to create what Max Weber called the "management of the modern office," the training of professional, responsible, and educated officials who produced written documents ("files"), which were preserved in their original or draft form. 43 New ministerial institutions such as Finance, Interior, Justice, and Enlightenment gradually replaced Peter the Great's (1689-1725) administrative colleges. The Senate became the exclusive judicial body for criminal and civil cases, while the Council of State reviewed final drafts of new legislation. Laws regulated the process of recording, managing, and filing written documents, but the official processing of records was not lawmakers' only concern. 44 Laboring over the shape and appearance of documents, scribes prepared texts that were then read aloud during ministerial meetings. Provincial governors often confronted a virtual avalanche of papers that slowed the process of government (according to some estimates, over 100,000 documents required signature on a yearly basis)Y The historian and conservative political theorist Nicholas Karamzin, for example, criticized the "endless stream of papers" as a product of the inefficiency of the Russian government. 46 He was not alone. During the Great Reform era, the state made significant efforts to manage paperwork and to increase bureaucratic efficiency_47 In the 1860s, the records of the ministerial committees began to be published by government printing houses, and in the 1890s, with the appearance of typewriters, civil servants typed the more important correspondence and administrative reports. 48 While these developments in bureaucratic practices expedited government work, the avalanche of papers also presented administrative challenges. 42. W. Bruce Lincoln, In the Vanguard of Reform: Russia's Enlightened Bureaucrats (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1986), 23. 43. Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, 2 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 2:957. 44. On the transformation of government during the reign of Alexander I, see Marc Raeff, Imperial Russia, 1682-1825: The Coming of Age of Modern Russia (New York: Knopf, 1971 ), 83-88. 45. L E. Shepelev, Chinovnyi mir Rossii, xviii-nachalo xx v. (St. Petersburg: Iskusstvo, 2001), 53-54, 85; and Lincoln, In the Vanguard of Reform, 10. 46. Richard Pipes, Karamzin's Memoir on Ancient and Modern Russia: A Translation and Analysis (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959), 159. 47. For the background to these administrative reforms, see George L. Yaney, The Systematization of Russian Government: Social Evolution in Domestic Administration of Imperial Russia, 1711-1905 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973), 230-399. 48. For a short history of deloproizvodstvo, see Shepelev, Chinovnyi mir Rossii, 47-55.

Introduction

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19

By the turn of the twentieth century, imperial authorities had neither the administrative capacity nor the financial resources to respond to the endless streams of paper that both the state and its subjects generated every year. 49 In July 1909, for instance, the Gomel' district police department (Magilev Province) reported that its office received 17,832 official documents in 1905,24,041 in 1906,25,952 in 1907, and 29,309 in 1908. The five office assistants-who earned between twenty and thirty rubles a month-were overwhelmed by all the complaints, notices, and requests they received each year. For any given year, the police department spent more than 90 percent of its budget responding to the petitions and other individual requests that piled up in the office, which left no more than two hundred rubles for managing all other police work. 5° Police departments all across the empire faced similar administrative challenges. In Kishinev (Bessarabia Province), one police department processed as many 44,800 official documents in 1910. In the western borderlands, some of the larger departments of police such as Vil'na, Berdichev, Belostok, and Bendery handled on average between 50,000 and 100,000 documents per year, while the Kiev department of police sifted through almost 800,000 papers in 1910. 51 In addition to preserving public order and combating vagrancy, police officials thus spent their days performing the tedious task of reading, collecting, and responding to paperwork, as well as housing and preserving, ordering and sorting, and indexing and filing the incoming knowledge. The first comprehensive state archives to store governmental documents were founded during the reign of Peter the Great. 52 With the introduction of the new division of government during the reign of Alexander I, all government-related records were required to be preserved in official state archives. As the imperial bureaucracies obsessed over the written word and generated more and more knowledge of the empire-by conducting surveys, filing reports, codifying laws, generating studies, responding to petitions, and creating lists-provincial archival institutions faced the challenge of storing and preserving the incoming paperwork. By the mid-nineteenth century, 49. For a suggestive analysis of the demons of paperwork and the problems of governance in revolutionary France, see Ben Kafka, "The Demon of Writing: Paperwork, Public Safety, and the Reign of Terror," Representations 98 (2007): 1-24. See also Peter Becker and William Clark, eds., Little Tools of Knowledge: Historical Essays on Academic and Bureaucratic Practices (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001). 50. For these numbers, see Kratkoe opisanie mestnostei, na kotorye proektiruetsia rasporostranit' reformu politsii (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia ministerstva vnutrennikh del, 1913). 51. Ibid. 52. On the establishment and organization of archives during the imperial period, see "Arkhivy," in Entsiklopedicheskii slovar', 41 vols. (St. Petersburg: F.A. Brokgauz, I.A. Efron, 1890-1904), 2:259-63; and V. N. Samoshenko, Istoricheskie arkhivy Moskvy i Peterburga (xviii-nach. xx vv.) (Moscow: Izd-vo VZPI, 1990).

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historical, administrative, and scientific archives appeared throughout the provinces, which were responsible for preserving, collecting, and organizing imperial knowledge. But the effort at archive building was no easy task. Limited in space, financial resources, and reliable administrators, archives also lacked centralized regulations to help organize the paperwork. 53 For the Russian government, documentary records proved crucial for policing the empire, even as administrators struggled with acute personnel shortages, budget deficits, and organizational deficiencies. And for those individuals who required access to the written files-especially some of the most vital personal papers such as birth and death certificates, census data, passport records, or other official notices and communications-the burdens of paperwork management caused numerous difficulties, inconveniences, and conflicts in everyday life. Many of the papers received and produced by the imperial bureaucracy were lost, destroyed, or not properly stored in government archives. But the ones that have survived and have been made available to researchers since the collapse of the Soviet Union form a series of rich narratives and texts of the organizational and ideological structures of the imperial administrative system. The police reports, statistical surveys, laws, individual and collective petitions, and various forms of internal government correspondence enable historians to analyze how the imperial Russian bureaucracy administered its diverse territories and populations. Yet as we will see in the chapters that follow, these files also shed light on how individual Russian Jews engaged with the bureaucracy and all the laws, statutes, and edicts regulating their everyday lives.

53. N. I. Khimina, "Otechesrvennoe arkhivnoe stroitel'stvo: Ideia tsentralizatsii na rubezhe xix-xx vekov," Otechestllennye arkhivy 4 (1998): 9-16. The complete centralization of Russian archives would not occur until1917-18. V. N. Avtokratov, "Iz istorii tsentralizatsii arkhivnogo dela v Rossii (1917-1918 gg.)," Otechestvennye arkhivy 3-4 (1993): 9-35, 3-27.

1 Making jews Legible But a name, Leyzer Yank!. Where are you going to get a name?

-S. Y. ABRAMOVITSH, The Wishing-Ring

I

Shortly after the third and final partition of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the senator and poet Gavriil Romanovich Derzhavin recommended that the Russian government take a special census of the Jewish population. "It is impossible to assume that the census administered by the kahal [the executive board of the Jewish community] will take an accurate count of the Jews," Derzhavin pointed out. "The kahals are afraid to show the complete numbers so that they would pay taxes for only those individuals who had been registered in their communities [since the most recent census revision], and not for the newcomers. To eliminate their fears and obtain an accurate count of the Jews, we need to make a special undertaking." In his memorandum, the senator suggested a more efficient means by which the state would not only collect taxes but also recognize Jews as distinct individuals: "A universal census needs to be begun on the day of the announcement of his imperial majesty's manifesto and concluded unequivocally in four months. Moreover, for the accurate count of [Jewish] souls and for convenience in juridical matters, as well as for the recovery of debts and for ascertaining the guilty and the innocent in [criminal] investigations, all Jews need to add to their name and patronymic a Russian surname." Thus, a Khatskil Mordukhovich would be known as Khatskil Mordukhovich Dikii, while a Leib ltskovich and a Leizar Movshovich would be called Leib Itskovich Promyshlennyi and Leizar Movshovich Derevenskii. A fixed

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surname, Derzhavin reasoned, would help determine the exact identity of each member of the Jewish community. 1 Over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, censuses and statistical studies allowed government officials and professional researchers to categorize populations in radically new ways while enhancing the state's ability to refashion the boundaries of corporate communities. 2 During this period, the social domain emerged as an arena that gradually distinguished itself from the more traditional conceptions of the political and economic spheres. If the promotion of national prosperity, the articulation of sovereignty, and the acquisition of wealth characterized the political and economic domains, the body social signified a radically new metaphor for comprehending the mechanisms of society in its totality. 3 In an age when the power of numbers signified empirical reliability, Russian administrators and statisticians acknowledged the incompleteness of statistical enumeration and reasoned that population counts should not be mistaken for absolute truths. Poll tax censuses or census revisions were designed to enumerate portions of the population only for taxation and conscription purposes.4 With tens of thousands of people absent from population counts, the

1. Gavriil R. Derzhavin, "0 sochinenii novoi evreiskoi pogolovoi perepisi," in Sochineniia Derzhavina, ed. Ia. K. Grata, 9 vols. (St. Petersburg: Imperatorskoi akademii nauk, 1864-83), 7:273-74. On naming practices and the role of the state in a worldwide context, see James C. Scott, John Tehranian, and Jeremy Mathias, "The Production of Legal Identities Proper to States: The Case of the Permanent Family Surname," Comparative Studies in Society and History 44 (2002): 4-44. 2. For a global perspective, see, for example, C. A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780-1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); and Edward Higgs, The Information State in England: The Central Collection of Information on Citizens since 1500 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). 3. On the body social in the western European context, see, for example, Joshua Cole, The Power of Large Numbers: Population, Politics, and Gender in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000); and Mary Poovey, Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 1830-1864 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 4-11. On the imperial Russian context, see Peter Holquist, "To Count, to Extract, to Exterminate: Population Statistics and Population Politics in Late Imperial Russia and Soviet Russia," in A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin, ed. Ronald Grigor Suny and Terry Martin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 112-14. 4. In 1719, Peter the Great conducted the first census revision with the hopes of financing a regular standing army and navy. On the creation of the first census revision, see PSZRT, series 1, vol. 5, no. 3245 (November 26, 1719). See also V. M. Kabuzan, Narody Rossii v xviii veke: Chislennost' i etnicheskii sostav (Moscow: Nauka, 1990), 11, 55; John P. LeDonne, Absolutism and Ruling Class: The Formation of the Russian Political Order, 1700-1825 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991 ), 258-63; and David Moon, The Russian Peasantry, 16001930: The World the Peasants Made (New York: Longman, 1999), 20-21. For an overview of the history of population statistics in the imperial period, see Lee Schwarz, "A History of Russian and Soviet Censuses," in Research Guide to the Russian and Soviet Censuses, ed. RalphS. Clem (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), 48-50. Often census revisions excluded the entire female population from enumeration.

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census revision proved neither reliable nor comprehensive. Groups such as the inorodtsy (non-Russians), raznochintsy (peoples of various ranks), and inovertsy (peoples of other faiths) who did not fit easily into the prescriptive social-estate system presented numerous problems for social-scientific documentation. For self-conscious reformers and progressive officials, the trust in statistical representation arose alongside an ingrained skepticism of the objective reality that these numbers purported to depict. During census revisions, the state obligated the kahals to collect all government and communal taxes as well as conduct official counts of members of their communities. Although Paul I (1796-1801) and later Alexander I recognized that high taxes forced kahals to hide their Jews from official enumeration, both tsars insisted that the Jewish communities continue to perform population counts. 5 Until 1827, at which time Nicholas I ( 1825-55) required young Jewish men between the ages of twelve and twenty-five to serve in the army, the burdens of taxation proved to be the most powerful incentive for hiding from official counts. The Jewish Committee (established by the Ministry of the Interior during the reign of Nicholas I to realign Jewish life and society) estimated that more than 25 percent of the Jewish population was not recorded in the censuses. 6 In an 1814 report to the Ministry of Finance, for example, one official noted that more than 64,000 Jewish souls could not be accounted for in Volynia Province/ Largely because of the onerous nature of taxation, the poorer sectors of the Jewish communities continually refrained from making payments. After reviewing the statistical data for the ninth census-revision, taken in 1850, the Ministry of Finance acknowledged that many of the numbers recorded by the Jewish communities were inconsistent with the previous census, taken in 1834. A significant number of the communities, the ministry claimed, documented from one-third to one-half of all Jewish males as "unexplained absences," while other Jews recorded as "missing" were found residing in their homes on further inspection. 8 The Minsk treasurer cited another example of "incredible abuse." In Kletsk, a small market town located in Minsk Province, the eighth census revision 5. Iulii Gessen, "Podatnoe oblozhenie," in Evreiskaia entsiklopediia: Svod znanii o evreistve i ego kul'ture v proshlom i nastoiashchem, 16 vols. (Moscow: Terra, 1991), 12:638; and Richard Pipes, "Catherine II and the Jews: The Origins of the Pale of Settlement," Soviet jewish Affairs 5 (1975): 10-13. 6. RGIA, f. 1269, op. 1, d. 69, I. 4 (1857-58). Chaired by Count Pavel D. Kiselev, the Committee for the Determination of Measures for the Fundamental Transformation of Jews in Russia (also known as the jewish Committee) carried out its work between 1840 and 1863. For a detailed discussion, sec Benjamin Nathans, Beyond the Pale: The jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 31-79. 7. RGIA, f. 560, op. 11, d. 45, I. 4 (1821); and RGIA, f. 1269, op. 1, d. 69, I. 4 (1857-1858). 8. RGIA, f. 560, op. 1, d. 1338, II. 2-2b (1851).

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documented 1,236 Jewish souls. Sixteen years later, however, the ninth census recorded only 750 Jews, of whom 294 could not be accounted for by the treasurer. In his report to the Ministry of Finance, the treasurer asked in desperation, "From whom will we receive the rest of our finances, and why will we conduct a military draft for 456, and not for 1,236, Jews?" 9 Until1858, the imperial Russian state continued to rely on the census revision to count its male population, collect taxes, and identify potential military recruits (and for Jews, it also used special "rotation books" [ocherednye knigi] after 1827 for conscription purposes). The tsarist government used "communal responsibility" (krugovaia poruka) to count the population and enforce fiscal and administrative matters, while Jewish communities continued to frustrate officials as they resisted population counts, bribed tax inspectors, and distorted numbers. Moreover, underdeveloped provincial archives helped erase the memory of fiscal transactions, the documentation of who paid and how much. And other factors such as bribery, endemic corruption, and misclassification of information only contributed to the memory loss. 10 Boris Miliutin, in one of the first published government studies of Jewish communities, expressed disbelief at how three distinct administrative bodies-the Ministry of the Interior, the Department of Spiritual Affairs of Foreign Confessions, and the Jewish communities themselves--could provide three radically different population counts. 11 As the empire grew in size and increased in ethnic diversity, the limitations of statistical enumeration became even more apparent. The statistician Petr Keppen wrote in his study of the ninth census revision: I have adopted the word revision [reviziia] because, as is known, we still do not have a population census-that is, the enumeration of all individuals who constitute the population. Revisions entail counting individuals who have been assigned to tax-paying status. These revisions ... have an economic objective, for which they supply, for the most part, the necessary information about the male population that earns salaries and receives privileges. About the nontaxpayers we have very little data, and this is why I consider these [statistical] results as having only a minimal approximation to the truthY

Keppen's own published work provided one of the first reliable statistical maps of the multiethnic empire, charting and dividing Russia's territories by 9. RGIA, f. 571, op. 6, d. 50, 1. 2b (1851-1853); and RGIA, f. 1286, op. 13, d. 1360, 1. 4 (1851-1852). 10. S. Frederick Starr, Decentralization and Self-Government in Russia, 1830-1870 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 40. 11. Boris Miliutin, Ustroistvo i sostoianie Evreiskikh obshchestv v Rossii (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia ministerstva vnutrennikh del, 1849-50), 197-98. 12. Petr Keppen, Deviataia reviziia: Isledovanie o chisle zhitelei v Rossii v 1851 godu (St. Petersburg: Imperatorskoi akademii nauk, 1857), x-xi.

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ethnic component. Although the work failed to meet the rigorous standards of objectivity, Keppen nevertheless insisted that all social-scientific analyses needed to be predicated on the power of "numerical data." "Statistical knowledge needs to be centralized," Keppen argued, "and should be utilized by all administrative branches to govern the empire." 13 Even with the development of specialized disciplines such as statistics, ethnography, and other social sciences, which employed new scientific methods for counting and describing Russia's population in the first half of the nineteenth century, the census revision remained the most popular tool for empirewide counts. 14 With a poorly developed system of provincial administration, the imperial government counted on local intermediaries to perform crucial bureaucratic functions, often blurring the direct links between the individual and the state. In the 1840s, key members of the bureaucracy such as Pavel D. Kiselev, Dmitrii and Nikolai Miliutin, and Lev Perovskii recognized the difficulties of governing the population and implementing effective social policies without reliable statistics. 15 As part of the administrative modernization of the empire, the 1844 reform to curtail the juridical autonomy of the Jewish community by abolishing the kahal represented a crucial moment in the state's efforts to forge direct links with Jews. 16 In the years leading up to the 1844 decree, the kahals played important mediating roles between the state and the Jewish communities, enjoying a great deal of administrative jurisdiction and disciplinary control over the population. As internal administrative organs, the kahals presided over a variety of fiscal and juridical matters concerning the everyday lives of 13. RAN-SPb, f. 30, op. 1, d. 177, II. 24b-26 (1844). 14. On the development of statistics in Russia, see David Alan Rich, The Tsar's Colonels: Professionalism, Strategy, and Subversion in Late Imperial Russia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 41-64; Holquist, "To Count, to Extract, to Exterminate"; and A. Kaufmann, "The History and Development of the Official Russian Statistics," in The History of Statistics: Their Development and Progress in Many Countries, ed. John Koren (New York: Macmillan, 1918), 469-534. On ethnography, see Nathaniel Knight, "Science, Empire, and Nationality: Ethnography in the Russian Geographical Society, 1845-1855," in Imperial Russia: New Histories for the Empire, ed. Jane Burbank and David L. Ransel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 108-41. 15. W. Bruce Lincoln, In the Vanguard of Reform: Russia's Enlightened Bureaucrats, 18251861 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1986), chap. 4. 16. In the early modern period, Jewish communities enjoyed juridical authority over their population. Jews tried cases between Jews according to Jewish law and chose their communal leaders without interference from the state. On early modern juridical autonomy, see Gershon D. Hundert, Jews in Poland-Lithuania in the Eighteenth Century: A Genealogy of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 80. In the 1840s, however, neither the provincial bureaucracy nor the Jewish communities were ready for such a radical restructuring of the administrative system. On the persistence of Jewish administrative-juridical autonomy, see Azriel Shochat, "Ha-hanhaga be-kehilot rusiya im bitul ha-kahal," Zion 42, no. 3-4 (1979): 143-233; and Michael Stanislawski, Tsar Nicholas I and the Jews: The Transformation of Jewish Society in Russia, 1825-1855 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1983), 123-27.

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Jews in the western borderlands. In a typical case, the townsman Leib Itskovich Sirkin petitioned the Minsk kahal for a permanent residence permit so that he and his three sons could relocate to Poltava Province. Without an internal passport, Sirkin and his family did not have the right to travel within the empire. The widow Rakhel Rubinovich requested that the kahal register correctly the name and age of her son, Yankel, in a census ledger so that he could sign up for the draft in a neighboring community (presumably because Yankel's permanent place of residence no longer corresponded to the place in which he registered initially). Some individuals asked for material help in light of the extreme poverty and economic conditions in which they lived, while others pleaded for extensions when they could not collect sufficient funds to pay their portion of the communal tax bill on timeY Even though the 1844 decree abolished all kahals, stipulating that "no special Jewish governance should exist," Jewish communities (evreiskie obshchestva) continued to preside over collective responsibilities such as the collection of taxes, the election of crown rabbis, the supervision of charitable institutions, and the counting of populations, while a handful of Jews, handpicked by the Jewish communities themselves, performed the crucial function of counting members of their communities during census revisions and reporting this data to the government. 18 In addition, heads of households continued to play vital administrative functions by providing family records of their households, and sborshchiki (community officials elected to supervise the collection of taxes) preserved many of the responsibilities of the executive board of the kahal. 19 The 1844 statute reflected what the historian George Yaney called an "ideal," that is, the prescriptive way Russian administrators believed the law should function. 20 The Senate declared that even though the Jewish community no longer maintained

17. For a sample of the petitions that the Minsk kahal presided over during 1844, see YIVO, RG 12, box 6, folder 9 (no pagination). The authority of the kahals was also subject to massive individual and collective denunciations ranging from corruption, fiscal mismanagement, and fraudulent accounting procedures to improper record keeping, embezzlement of funds, and the violation of recruitment procedures. For a reassessment of the kahal, see John D. Klier, "The Kahal in the Russian Empire: Life, Death, and Afterlife of a Jewish Institution, 1772-18 82," Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 5 (2006): 33-50, esp. 41-45. 18. On the crown rabbinate, see Azriel Schochat, Mosad "ha-rabanut mi-ta'am" be-rusyah (Haifa: University of Haifa, 1975); ChaeRan Freeze, Jewish Marriage and Divorce in Imperial Russia (Waltham, Mass.: Brandeis University Press, 2002), 98-116; and Michael Stanislawski, "Reflections on the Russian Rabbinate," in Jewish Religious Leadership: Image and Reality, ed. Jack Wertheimer, 2 vols. (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 2004), 2: 429-46. 19. RGIA, f. 821, op. 9, d. 101, 1!. 85-86 (1874-1880); and Miliutin, Ustroistvo i sostoianie Evreiskikh obshchestv, 41. 20. George Y. Yaney, The Systematization of Russian Government: Social Evolution in the Domestic Administration of Imperial Russia, 1711-1905 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973), 20-21.

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a self-governing organ, it nevertheless should be recognized as a "juridical personality" (iuridicheskoe litso ). 21 The state, in other words, was unable and in many respects unwilling to effectively "annihilate" Jewish separateness by dismantling the administrative autonomy of the Jewish community. Long after the 1844 statute, communal responsibilities continued to bring much frustration to provincial and central officials (as a result of false reporting and other acts of direct and indirect resistance), as well as to those Jews who attempted to perform the administrative work of counting individual Jewish identities. II

One Jewish community from Mogilev Province petitioned authorities for an extension for the ninth census revision, citing illness and death as explanations for its inability to fulfill record-keeping duties. Twenty-eight members of the community, the petitioners claimed, had become terribly ill and died at the precise time the revision needed to be administered. 22 In a similar fashion, the sborshchik ltsak Rubinchik from the town of Klimovichi (Mogilev Province) petitioned to have the late fee waived for submitting the necessary documents three weeks late. Members of the Jewish community asked him to deliver the documents to the treasurer on January 28, 1851, two days before the deadline; on his way, Rubinchik also became ill and could not fulfill his communal responsibility until February 19. However, once the treasurer inspected the documents, other problems arose. Since the revisions did not have the necessary signatures from the community's rabbi and elders, the treasurer claimed that he could not receive them because they did not adhere to the letter of the law. In a report to the Ministry of Finance, the Mogilev treasurer complained that he had received only around half of all revisions from the Jewish communities by the required deadline, and these were "in such disorder" (v takom bezporiadke) that he deemed them unacceptable. Although in some cases the dissatisfaction with Jews' failure to comply with formal procedures was warranted-since officials noted that Jews omitted such pertinent data as birth dates for newborns or failed to record explanations for those documented as "absent"-in other instances their refusals were more examples of the bureaucracy's concern with formalism. Russian writers parodied the parochial bureaucratic concerns in novels, short stories, and plays, but the failure to comply with bureaucratic 21. Ia. I. Girnpel'son, cornp., Zakony a evreiakh: Sistematicheskii obzor deistvuiushchikh zakonopolozhenii o evreiakh, ed. L. M. Bramson, 2 vols. (Petrograd: Iurisprudentsiia, 191415), 2:828. 22. RGIA, f. 571, op. 6, d. 50, I. 33b (1851-1853).

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procedure could (and often did) have grave consequences for Jews in their everyday lives. 23 For the Jews of Letitchev (Podolia Province) the failure to comply with the law led to a steep fine. Sixteen Jews petitioned Minister of Justice Viktor Panin to extend the deadline for the ninth census revision. The community asked the Jews to compile the revision by November 1, 1850. "We began to prepare the necessary paperwork as soon as we were nominated," they wrote, "and recorded all those who were born, died, conscripted, sent to Siberia, converted to Christianity, committed crimes, and ran away from our community after the eighth revision." Since imperial law required the revision to be written on stamped government paper, the petitioners proceeded to the town treasury to purchase the paper. The treasury, however, did not have the necessary amount, and so they waited until January 1 (which was the grace period given to all imperial subjects for turning in the revision), but a shipment did not arrive then either. A second grace period passed, and there was still no sign of the paper. "We then became worried that the government would assess a fine for not turning in the revision," they wrote, "even though we are completely innocent." They petitioned for a one-month extension, as well as for permission to use regular paper. The petition was forwarded to the Ministry of Finance, and upon further investigation the ministry concluded that the town treasury had plenty of stamped government paper for the Jews to use. In the end, after a protracted discussion of the query, the Ministry of Justice once again refused to honor the petition, noting that this was yet another instance of Jews' unwillingness to fulfill their civic duties. 24 Since the early modern period, an intricate system of informal exchanges, in cash and in kind, developed as an important part of the inner workings of the imperial administrative system. Those government institutions responsible for keeping track of fiscal and demographic statistics were acutely aware of the general deception, forgery, payments, gifts, and concealment of official enumeration occurring on a routine basis throughout the empire. In response to these affairs, the state codified a series of laws in the 1830s toreduce the widespread corruption, forgery, speculation, and bribery of provincial administrators, police officials, and other members of the bureaucracy. While the bureaucracy (on both the central and provincial levels) evolved into an ever more formalistic, ethical, and legally conscious apparatus, 23. See, for example, Nikolai Gogol's Dead Souls (1842) and Inspector General (1836), and Mikhail Saltykov Shchedrin's ProL'incial Sketches (1856-57). For an analysis of these and other works of Russian literature that deal with bribery, see Andrei Rogachevskii, "The Representation of Bribery in Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature," in Bribery and Blat in Russia: Negotiating Reciprocity from the Middle Ages to the 1990s, ed. Stephen Lovell, Alena Ledeneva, and Andrei Rogachevskii (New York: St. Martin's, 2000), 114-40. 24. RGIA, f. 571, op. 6, d. 50, ll. 59-60b (1851-1853).

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anecdotal and archival evidence suggests that informal exchanges continued to dictate how local affairs operated in the empire. 25 According to a study made by one government official for the Jewish Committee, the state lost more than three hundred rubles in revenue annually for every Jewish soul and around 625 recruits during each recruitment period. Though the Polotsk community (Vitebsk Province) recorded 3,444 souls, the official reported that more than 900 Jews were still presumed missing. The Jewish Committee argued that, without the registration of such basic data as forename and surname, place and date of birth, religion, social status, profession, and the precise home and town of the individual, any meaningful reforms of the Jewish population would be problematic. The committee noted moreover that much "energy and efficiency is required to fulfill the revision's intended goals, especially with respect to Jews, who are always ready to lie and hide [from their administrative obligations]." 26 The problem of Jewish population statistics usually centered around two specific obstacles, which helped prevent accurate and efficient record keeping: that Jews tended to travel outside their permanent places of residence without travel permits and that they often used names that did not correspond to those recorded in their official papers. Officially registered as either town dwellers or merchants, Jews often moved from town to town and region to region to trade goods in the western borderlands and, on occasion, in the heart of the empire. Enough Jews appeared as absent in poll registers for central authorities to recognize that unregulated geographic mobility presented a serious obstacle to accurate Jewish population counts. Shortly after the ninth census revision, the Ministry of Finance suggested that heads of households needed to record the exact number of male members who resided in each household, and all Jews who traveled without internal passports needed to be deported immediately to their permanent places of residence. 27 That Jews utilized a wide variety of personal names and nicknames also hindered effective governance in the western borderlands: the arbitrary use of forenames created all sorts of tensions when imperial officials attempted to document individual Jewish identities. As one author explained in the official journal published by the Ministry of Interior, "Since ancient times Jews have customarily used either one or a number of nicknames 25. On the legislation on corruption and bribery during the reign of Nicholas I, see V. V. Astanin, Bor'ba s korruptsiei v Rossii xvi-xx vekov: Dialektika sistemnogo podkhoda

(Moscow: Rossiiskaia kriminologicheskaia assotsiiatsiia, 2003), 16-20. See also Irina Davydova, "Bureaucracy on Trial: A Malaise in Official Life as Represented in Nineteenth-Century Russian Thought," in Lovell, Ledeneva, and Rogachevskii, Bribery and Blat in Russia, 95-113. 26. RGIA, f. 1269, op. 1, d. 69, II. 4-4b (1857-1858). 27. RGIA, f. 560, op. 1, d. 1388, II. 3-3b (1851).

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instead of their 'real' [sacred] names." The author warned that in the majority of cases Jewish nicknames bore no correlation whatsoever to their sacred names. 28 Provincial police and government officials often confused the sacred name with the nickname, which only increased the illegibility of Jews by making the imposition of social order difficult and, on occasion, simply impossible. At other times, officials disagreed whether Jews should be identified by all their names and nicknames or only by their sacred names. 29 In an effort to improve the administration of Jewish communities, the Jewish Committee recommended that Jews should be identified only by those names by which they would be registered in the tenth census revision-names that they would not be able to change under any circumstances. 30 Neither fines nor increased government regulation prevented Jews from doctoring records, leaving for an extended period of time during census revisions, using a variety of different names and nicknames, or making what were often perceived as outrageous excuses for their alleged ineptitude in completing the paperwork. In comparing the totals of the eighth and ninth census revisions for two regions in Minsk Province, one official noted, "Even if the number of newly born does not increase over the number of deaths in these two regions, and even if we were to exclude those recorded as 'absent' from the totals, then the number of Jewish souls should be 16,795." But the ninth census revision documented only 10,393, which meant that Jewish communities could not account for 6,402 souls. 31 In a similar fashion, when a civil servant inspected the town of Vilkomir (Kovno Province), he promptly discovered two Jews who were recorded as absent and eighteen who were not registered at all. Many Jews, he wrote in his report, "don't possess the proper documents that they should be registered under. " 32 The wild fluctuations in Jewish population statistics so enraged central officials that the Rabbinical Commission was asked what, if any, limits Jewish religious law placed on Jews to keep them from fulfilling their record-keeping duties. The commission reassured the Jewish Committee that Jewish law placed no such restrictions upon its people. 33

28. "Sobstvennye imena, upotrebliaemye evreiami," Zhurnal ministerstvo vnutrennikh del 4 (1843): 100-111. 29. RGIA, f. 560, op. l, d. 1338, l. 5b (1851); and RGIA, f. 1269, op. 1, d. 69, l. 33 (1857-1858). 30. RGIA, f. 1269, op. 1, d. 69, l. 33 (1857-1858). 31. RGIA, f. 571, op. 6, d. 50, ll. 7-7b ( 1851-1853). 32. Ibid., l. 185. 33. RGIA, f. 1269, op. 1, d. 69, l. 56b (1857-1858). Established in 1848 by the Jewish Committee, the Rabbinical Commission deliberated on social and familial problems concerning Jewish life. On the Rabbinical Commission, see Freeze, Jewish Marriage and Divorce, 83-95.

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Unforeseen calamities, which destroyed vital documents and forced Jews to miss deadlines and seek extensions, played havoc with the efficiency of the bureaucratic process as well. The Jew Aizek Marmor petitioned on behalf of the Jewish community of Rodishchak (Volynia Province) for an extension for the ninth census revision. "For an unknown reason the tax collector's house caught on fire. All of the belongings disappeared. Nothing was saved," he wrote. Outside of valuable property, all the paperwork prepared for the ninth census revision burned up as well: "All the papers, documents, receipts, notebooks, registers, metrical books, and various other papers disappeared-in short, all the papers that were necessary for completing the census." Whether the ministry granted Marmor's request we cannot tell from the extant archival sources, but fires and conflagrations were indeed quite common in the small urban settlements of the pale, where the majority of Jews resided, just as they were in the villages of the countryside where most peasants made their home. So even if Marmor stretched the truthsince the fire occurred conveniently at midnight on January 1, 1851, the precise date the revision was due-this example serves as a useful reminder that unforeseen calamities such as fires, floods, and deaths could (and often did) delay the fulfillment of civic obligations. 34 The requirement that all census revisions be written in the Russian language also caused problems for Jews, since in the small market towns and settlements in the Pale of Settlement it was often difficult, at times impossible, to find even one Jew who could read and write Russian. But in the large and diverse empire, Jewish communities were not the only ones who faced such concerns. Linguistic mistranslations, misunderstandings, and misperceptions appeared and reappeared in a variety of borderland encounters between non-Russian communities and Russian officialdom. 31 To alleviate the administrative tensions caused by linguistic misunderstandings, Jewish communities often hired scribes to fill out the required paperwork. Since the hired record keepers frequently took bribes from wealthier Jews, recording data at their discretion, these arbitrary practices prompted a number of disgruntled Jews to inform on their Jewish neighbors to local authorities. 34. RGIA, f. 571, op. 6, d. 50, II. 17-17b (1851-1853). On fires in Jewish shtetls, see BenCion Pinchuk, "The Shtetl: An Ethnic Town in the Russian Empire," Cahiers du Monde Russe 41 (2000): 501. On fires in late imperial Russia, see Cathy A. Frierson, All Russia Is Burning: A Cultural History of Fire and Arson in Late Imperial Russia (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002). 35. On the language requirements, see Svod zakonov Rossiiskoi imperii, vol. 9, no. 1679 (1857). For other examples that led to "misunderstandings" between indigenous communities and Russian clergy, see Paul W. Werth, At the Margins of Orthodoxy: Mission, Governance, and Confessional Politics, 1827-1905 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), 25-26; and Michael Khodarkovsky, "Of Christianity, Enlightenment, and Colonialism: Russia in the North Caucasus, 1550-1800," journal of Modern History 71 (1999): 394-430.

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Beniamin Tanis, a nineteen-year-old Jew from the town of Zaslav (Minsk Province), claimed that he and three other Jews (David Lapedus and the brothers Vul'f and Mikhel Frainblium) had examined records for the ninth revision and found over eighty omissions in two towns alone. "These people," Tonis warned, "reap big rewards from their clerical duties, since Jews cannot write in Russian." 36 Authorities, of course, often collaborated with local communities and pocketed payments for inspection. III

Nicholas's interventionist policies played an important role in altering the ways in which Jews went about their daily lives. The conscription of Jews into the imperial army signaled the beginning of the reconstruction of the Jewish community. As Jews began to abandon customary occupations such as trade, commerce, and the liquor industry in favor of artisanal work, the economic and social composition of the pale began to shift. The modernization of education (for both girls and boys) promoted-albeit with limited results at first-Western languages, customs, and mores among an emerging Jewish public, while the abolition of the kahal helped destabilize the administrative autonomy of the communities. Although elected community officials preserved many of the responsibilities of the former executive board-mainly the collection of taxes and the supervision of military recruits-the administrative and judicial autonomy of the Jewish community nevertheless began to weaken after around 1844_37 The administrative changes occurred unevenly, but they were in line with the broader imperial policies that gradually abandoned early modern political practices favoring cooperation with the non-Russian elite, religious toleration, and the maintenance of corporate status among ethnic groups. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the cautious reformist agenda taken together with the durability of the corporate estate structure set the tone and framework for Russia's distinct modernity. As economic, political, and social dislocations transformed the empire in the mid-1850s, the state recognized that the older techniques of documenting, categorizing, and policing imperial society had suddenly become anachronistic. Although census revisions appeared at one point revolutionary in counting the population and documenting individuals' legal status, they

36. RGIA, f. 571, op. 6, d. 50, II. 204-204b (1851-1853). 37. Eli Lederhendler, The Road to Modern Jewish Politics: Political Tradition and Political Reconstruction in the jewish Community ofTsarist Russia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 52; Stanislawski, Tsar Nicholas I and the Jews, 127; and Eliyana R. Adler, "Private Schools for Jewish Girls in Tsarist Russia" (PhD diss., Brandeis University, 2003 ).

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became less useful by the mid-nineteenth century as the bureaucracy began to rely increasingly on passports, city censuses, and metrical books. While passports controlled territorial movement and identified subjects by signature, residence, and "conspicuous visible marks" (primety) and while city censuses performed the crucial function of counting peoples in specific urban spaces, metrical books documented individuals' legal status in an entirely novel fashion. The information inscribed in these books played an important role in determining the legal rights, privileges, and obligations to which all imperial subjects were entitled. 38 In May 1722, Peter the Great issued the first statute on the registration of vital events: "All clergymen are required to have books in which metrical records are recorded, that is, notebooks where the births and baptisms of infants are recorded, with the precise year and date, and the name of the parents and godparents. In these same books marriages are recorded as are deaths, with the precise year and date." 39 By the 1740s, the recording of vital events became a familiar and routine process for almost the entire Russian Orthodox population. The state used the information recorded in the books to determine birth and death rates as well as resolve questions and disputes dealing with fiscal and juridical matters. By the 1830s and 1840s, as the Russian government sought to modernize the empire along administrative lines, it required the clergies of all its tolerated denominations to record the vital events for their respective communities. 40 In 1835, the state required rabbis to record the Jewish population's births, marriages, deaths, and divorces. 41 For jews, as for all other subjects in the empire, the recording of vital events allowed the state to recognize the population not only as a religious community but as individuals with distinct civic identities. Before Jewish

38. On the metrical records system, see Charles Steinwedel, "Making Social Groups One Person at a Time: The Identification of Individuals by Estate, Religious Confession, and Ethnicity in Late Imperial Russia," in Documenting Individual Identity: The Development of State Practices in the Modern World, ed. Jane Caplan and John Torpey (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 69-73; Paul W. Werth, "In the State's Embrace: Civil Acts in an Imperial Order," Kritika: Exploration in Russian and Eurasian History 7 (2006): 433-58; Freeze, jewish Marriage and Divorce, 110-15; D. N. Antonov and I. A. Antonova, Metricheskie knigi Rossii xviii-nachala xx veka (Moscow: Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi gumanitarnyi universitet, 2006); Gregory Freeze, "Bringing Order to the Russian Family: Marriage and Divorce in Imperial Russia, 1760-1860," journal of Modern History 62 (1990): 716-18; and G. Vol'tke, "Metricheskie knigi i svidetel'stva," in Evreiskaia entsiklopediia 10: 925-27. 39. PSZRI, series 1, vol. 6, no. 4022, art. 29 (May 1722). 40. Antonov and Antonova, Metricheskie knigi Rossii, 43-48; and Werth, "In the State's Embrace?" 41. Although a decree issued in 1826 obligated rabbis to record vital events, the 1835 statute was the first systematic description of the role that state rabbis would play in this process. Freeze, jewish Marriage and Diuorce, 95.

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communities began to register their vital statistics, Jews could only approximate their age and dates of birth. One Jewish resident commented, for example, that "I am quite old, but I do not remember how old," and another Jew wrote that "I am thirty-eight or thirty-nine and I am not sure which." 42 In his autobiography, the writer S. Y. Abramovitsh wrote similarly, "My birth date is nowhere recorded. Jews didn't pay attention to such things in those days, particularly in the small towns. But I have assumed that I was born in the year 1836, and my family determined December 20 to be my date of birth. " 43 Throughout the nineteenth century, metrical books served as one of the most effective and reliable means for monitoring the movement and growth of populations, as well as registering an individual's identity and origin (proiskhozhdenie): who they were, where they were born, and what religion and legal status they were born into. 44 Since metrical books played such an important juridical function in Russian society, lawmakers felt it necessary to "place the responsibility of record keeping on those who were most entrusted" to fulfill this vital bureaucratic role. 45 Although local police officials constituted the most obvious choice, in highly populated Jewish regions a variety of difficulties were bound to arise that an understaffed police force could not be expected to resolve. Police officials proved utterly ignorant in religious matters and cultural customs, which turned out to be yet another reason why so-called crown rabbis were handed these responsibilities. After 184 7, the Ia w sanctioned only those rabbis who graduated from either the rabbinical seminary in Zhitomir (Volynia Province) or Vil'na (Vil'na Province) to perform religious rites such as circumcisions and marriages. 46 By co-opting religious elites for its own administrative needs, the state attempted to intervene in the daily lives of Jews in an unprecedented fashion. Influenced by the administrative-consistorial model first established by Napoleon, the interventionist practices constituted an important dimension of the imperial modernization project. During the reign of Nicholas I, the state became involved directly in all its tolerated religious 42. As quoted in Jacob Goldberg, "Jewish Marriage in Eighteenth-Century Poland," Polin 10 (1997): 20. 43. Mendele Moykher Sforim [S. Y. Abramovitsh], "Notes for My Biography," in Selected Works of Mendele Moykher Sforim, ed. Marvin Zukerman et a!. (Malibu: Joseph Simon, 1991), 31. For the problems of establishing the precise date in Mendele's biography, see the insightful discussion by Max Weinreich, "Mendeles ershte 25 ior," YIVO bleter 10 (1936): 167-80. The sculptor M. M. Antokol'skii's date of birth was also the subject of some dispute by his biographers. D. G. Maggid, "Kogda rodilsia Antokol'skii?" Perezhitoe 2 (1910): 3-4. 44. RGIA, f. 821, op. 10, d. 772, I. 28 (1870-1885); and RGIA, f. 1269, op. 1, d. 69, II. 68-68b. 45. RGIA, f. 821, op. 9, d. 109, I. 213. 46. Svud zakunuv Russiiskoi imperii, vol. 9, no. 1457 (1857).

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communities-Jewish, Muslim, Catholic, Protestant, and Buddhist. 47 In addition to recording vital statistics, crown rabbis fulfilled a number of other important bureaucratic and social functions, which encroached on the self-governing institutions of Jewish communities. According to the 1835 statute, rabbis were required to play a vital administrative function in the imperial administrative order by ensuring that Jews obeyed moral responsibilities and observed the civic law code. In contrast to the 1804 statute, which decreed rabbis to be moral and religious authorities of the Jewish community, the 1835 statute increased rabbis' jurisdiction beyond the religious domain. Like parish priests who recorded the births, deaths, marriages, and divorces of the Russian Orthodox population, crown rabbis were required to conduct all religious rites and record this information in metrical books. The crown rabbi recorded the names for the newborns in Russian and Hebrew during either the circumcision for the boys or the naming ceremony for the girls, and upon marriage, the rabbi documented the age, name and nickname, legal status, and cause of death. 48 As soon as the statute went into effect, officials quickly found many flaws and inconsistencies in record keeping, with respect to form as well as content. The Jewish student and philanthropist V. 0. Harkavi noted a common occurrence for most Russian Jews who were born after the statute of 1835. Harkavi assumed that he had been born in either 1846 or 1847, but he could not say with exactitude. "In those days, when I was born, no one obeyed the rules of registration," Harkavi noted. 49 Unlike in Russian Orthodox practice, Jewish law did not obligate rabbis to supervise religious rites. The Statisticheskii vremennik Rossiisskoi imperii (The Statistical Chronicle of the Russian Empire) observed that birth, death, and marriage counts of the Russian Orthodox population came very close to objective truth, "save for only a few, vital errors." The most important of these errors was the confusion of the precise date of birth with the baptismal date. When infants died before their baptismal ceremony (which was not an infrequent occurrence in the empire), the dates of birth would not be accounted for statistically. 5° For the Jewish population, not only did officials have to con47. For an elaboration of this argument, see Robert Crews, For Prophet and Tsar: islam and Empire in Russia and Central Asia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006). 48. PSZRT, series 2, vol. 10, no. 8054, art. 96 (April13, 183S). 49. V. 0. Garkavi, Otryvki vospominanii (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia I. Fleitmana, 1913), 3. 50. Statisticheskii vremennik Rossiisskoi imperii 1 (1866): xix; and Antonov and Antonova, Metricheskie knigi Rossii. In Orthodox Russia, as in Christian Europe, parents usually named their children after the saints on whose birthdays they were horn. Orthodox Russians usually celebrated their birthdays on "name days" that could have been (but were usually not) separated by intervals in time from the official date of birth. See, for example, Daniel H. Kaiser, "The Naming Culture of Early Modern Russia," Harvard Ukrainian Studies 19

36 I Jews and the Imperial State tend with similar statistical omissions, but more important, they also had to convince a people with no historical tradition of recording vital statistics that the registration of births, marriages, deaths, and divorces possessed a civic importance. Only five years after the original 1835 statute, the imperial government issued an amendment in hopes of ameliorating record-keeping practices. As per the 1840 instructions, rabbis were held responsible for every error recorded in the books. They were subject to a fine of fifteen rubles for incorrect entries pertaining to Jewish males and seven-and-a-half rubles concerning entries for females. In addition, rabbis could be tried in a court of law for intentional omissions and, if convicted, could be punished for forgery. 51 Still, even with all the irregularities and inconsistencies, metrical books represented an important innovation in documentary practice. While the state used census revisions primarily to collect taxes and fulfill conscription quotas, metrical books identified each individual by denomination, legal status, ethnic origin, and place of residence. As a fundamental marker of identity, the document followed individuals as they changed place of residence, marital status, and even religious denomination. The document's civic importance-as the most important tool by which the state obtained knowledge of its population-ensured that officials took much time in enforcing proper registration while continuing to devise new administrative methods to improve record-keeping practices. During the reign of Nicholas I, the accurate tabulation of Jewish population statistics emerged as an important concern for the tsarist government as it sought to intervene in the daily lives of all its subjects, improve fiscal conditions, and maintain diligent social order. The lack of manpower, rampant corruption, and the Jews' propensity to resist registration ensured disastrous results in the tabulation of Jewish population statistics, which presented, in turn, a host of problems for the government as it devised social policy to reshape Jewish society. On the eve of the Great Reforms, even while officials lamented the current state of statistical record keeping in the empire, reformers noted that Jewish population counts lagged behind those of the peasantry and many other ethnic groups. 5 2 Since the books served as the only legitimate source for validating a person's birth, death, and marriage dates, the stakes increased to record the data correctly. Given the relative novelty of the books and their manifest

(1995): 271-91; and Kaiser, "Quotidian Orthodoxy: Domestic Life in Early Modern Russia," in Orthodox Russia: Belief and Practice under the Tsars, ed., Valerie Kivelson and Robert H. Greene (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2003 ), 179-92. 51. PSZRI, series 2, vol. 15, no. 13750 (August 31, 1840). 52. Sec the discussion in Nathans, Beyond the Pale, 35, 69.

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37

civic importance, a number of technical questions emerged in the 1840s and 1850s that needed to be quickly resolved. What agency should be responsible for distributing the books to crown rabbis? Who should pay for the books, and how much should they cost? Who should issue a certificate if a person was born, married, or had died prior to 1835? 51 The solutions to these pressing issues were neither always satisfactory nor effective, however, and would remain on the reformers' agendas throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. Although the statute of 1835 standardized the procedures for documenting Jewish births, marriages, and deaths, in the 1850s the Ministry of the Interior maintained that metrical books continued to be poorly supervised. 54 For the imperial Russian government, the most pressing issue was the incompatibility of the civil code with Jewish law. As a member of the Bessarabian statistical committee explained, "By Jewish law, any eligible and informed Jew can perform religious rites. These rites need not be observed in an institutionalized religious ceremony. The bigger the Jewish community, the more eligible Jews [who can perform the rites]; official government rabbis do not have the means to supervise all naming ceremonies, or at least force [members of the community] to report names of the newborn." 55 To put it slightly differently, the incompatibility of religious and cultural customs with the larger integrationist ambitions of administrative practices helped sharpen the differences between Jewish communities and imperial management policies during the last years of Nicholas's reign. The differences between civil law and cultural practice were not peculiar to the Jewish community, however, for similar tensions occurred in many other imperial communities. 56 Beyond the tensions between religious and civil law, authorities needed to deal with a host of other issues as well. That Jews did not pay much attention to their dates of birth also represented a significant obstacle for administrative integration. As Abramovitsh wrote, "Of what use was such knowledge? A Jew remembers an anniversary of a death; but an anniversary of birthwhat for?" 57 Since late antiquity, Jews did not celebrate birthdays, nor did they inscribe the dates of births on tombstones. Although exceptions to this general custom can be found in Jewish history, most notably in northern Europe, birthday celebrations were a very recent, invented tradition. The historian Ivan Marcus has suggested that because Jews attached "negative 53. RGIA, f. 821, op. 10, d. 766, II. 37-39 (1847-1857). 54. Ibid., I. 53. 55. RGIA, f. 821, op. 8, d. 377, I. 6 (1862). 56. For the incompatibility of Islamic law with civic law, see Crews, For Prophet and Tsar, 68-69. 57. Abramovitsh, "A Little Man," in Selected Works, 144-45.

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religious associations" to the "pagan gods and Christian saints that lie at the heart of this custom," they might have been "inhibited from imitating [this cultural practice]," that is, not celebrating their dates of birth. Whatever the reason may have been, Jews did observe yahrzeit, the anniversary of a parent's death, by lighting a memorial candle, attending synagogue services, and reciting kaddish, the prayer for the dead. The recording of deaths therefore did not present the same types of difficulties as the documentation of births. Jewish cultural practices, in other words, helped complicate the ability of the Jewish community to comply with the imperial mandate of recording dates of births in metrical books. 1 s In contrast to the Jewish communities and other non-Orthodox groups, the Russian Orthodox population did not pose the same challenges of administrative enforcement. Since the seventeenth century, most Muscovite Christians lived in basic harmony with the prescriptive practices of the Russian Orthodox Church. The Russian Orthodox population, as the historian Daniel Kaiser explained, "measured time against the church's festival calendar, established new families in consonance with the church's demands, named their children after Christian saints, and summoned priests to preside over important domestic moments, including when they prepared themselves for death. " 59 But for the non-Orthodox peoples who lived on the peripheries of the empire and lacked "clergies" (or record keepers) to document vital events, the state was faced with all sorts of problems in enforcing strict and diligent record keeping. Something similar occurred with many of the new religious sectarian communities that proliferated in the empire in the nineteenth century, many of whom the state refused to recognize as legitimate. 60 IV

During the first half of the nineteenth century, Russia continued to follow a gradualist program of integration predicated on the abandonment of Jewish differences, or their substantial diminution. In their drive to construct 58. According to Marcus, when and how this change occurred "is still unclear and worth investigation." Jews may have begun to celebrate birthdays only after they became aware of their birth dates. On Jewish life cycle customs in historical perspective, see Ivan G. Marcus, The Jewish Lile Cycle: Rites ol Passage lrom Biblical to Modern Times (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004), 39-41, 221-22. 59. Daniel H. Kaiser, "Church Control over Marriage in Seventeenth-Century Russia," Russian Review 65 (2006): 568. 60. Paul Werth also notes that various apostates who were forced to convert to Russian Orthodoxy and who subsequently returned (illegally) to their former religion also caused particular problems, since their marriages, birth of children, and deaths were not recorded. For these and other examples, see "In the State's Embrace?"

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a more legible social order, imperial Russian reformers encouraged Jews to discard the more conspicuous markers of their collective identity. Dress regulations, sumptuary laws, and other documentary techniques, which were used by government administrators to identify populations in the early modern period, gradually gave way to more impersonal and universal methods of identification. In the modern period, states no longer identified Jews by badges, distinctive headgear, and clothing but by passports, identification cards, and other written documents. 61 Like Peter the Great, who forbade aristocrats and city residents from wearing Russian-style dress, Alexander I decreed that all Jews who traveled into the interior provinces of the empire, studied in gymnasiums, and served on town councils needed to don "German" attire. 62 The 1804 statute instructed police officials to immediately expel any individual from the interior provinces of the empire who was caught wearing "Jewish" dress. Lawmakers hoped that the reformation of Jewish dress would gradually expedite the integration of Jews with neighboring populations while improving their social utility and economic productivity. Yet during the reign of Alexander I these laws were not seriously enforced. As was true of many other Jewish reforms enacted during Alexander's reign, the state was left with neither the money nor the time to implement them after the Napoleonic war. 63 Some thirty years later, as part of the 1835 statute, Nicholas I instructed all Jews who traveled outside the Pale of Settlement to wear clothing that did not differentiate them from those individuals "with similar civil status" (odinakovago s nimi grazhdanskago sostoianiia). 64 Four years later, the state al-

61. In the early modern period, dress codes stigmatized not only Jews; lepers, prostitutes, beggars, and other outsiders were bound by clothing restrictions as well. For a comparative perspective, see Robert Jiitte, "Stigma-symbole: Kleidung als identitiitsstiftendes merkmal bei spiitmittelalterlichen und friihneuzeutlichen randgruppen (juden, dirnen, aussiitzige, bettler)," Saeculum 44 (1993): 65-89. 62. On Peter the Great's dress reform and hair codes, see Christine Ruane, The Empire's New Clothes: A History of the Fashion Industry, 1700-1917 (New Haven: Yale University Press 2009), 1-2, 19-25; Lindsey Hughes, Russia in the Age of Peter the Great (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 280-88; Evgenii V. Anisimov, The Reforms of Peter the Great: Progress through Coercion in Russia, trans. John T. Alexander (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1993), 218-20. On the reform of Jewish dress, see Iulii Gessen, "Bor'ba pravitel'stva s evreiskoi odezhdoi v Imperii i Tsarstve Pol'skoi," Perezhitoe 1 (1910): 10-18; Gessen, "Russkoe zakonodatel'stvo ob odezhde evreev," in Evreiskaia entsiklopediia, 12:46-50; Alfred Rubens, A History of the Jewish Costume, rev. ed. (New York: Crown, 1973), 104-8; Israel Klausner, "Ha-gezerah a! tilboshot ha-yehudim, 1844-1850," Gal-Ed 6 (1982): 11-26; David Assaf, The Regal Way: The Life and Times of Rabbi Israel of Ruzhin, trans. David Louvish (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 194-98. 63. John D. Klier, Rossiia sobiraet svoikh evreev: Proiskhozhdenie evreiskogo voprosa v Rossii, 1772-1825, expanded and translated ed. (Moscow: Mosty kul'tury, 2000), 229; and Gessen, "Russkoe zakonodatel'stvo ob odezhde evreev," 46-47. 64. PSZRI, series 2, vol. 10, no. 8054 (April13, 1835).

40

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Jews and the Imperial State

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