Classless: On the social status of Jews in Russia and Eastern Europe in the late nineteenth century

Comparative Studies in Society and History

Volumn 50, Issue 2, 2008, Pages 509-534

  Lederhendler, Eli ^a  

^a HEBREW UNIVERSITY OF JERUSALEM   (Israel)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

CASTE SYSTEM; CLASS; ETHNIC MINORITY; HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY; LABOR SUPPLY; NINETEENTH CENTURY; SOCIAL EXCLUSION; SOCIAL HISTORY; SOCIAL STRUCTURE;

EASTERN EUROPE; EURASIA; EUROPE; RUSSIAN FEDERATION;

EID: 42449150842     PISSN: 00104175     EISSN: 14752999     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0010417508000224     Document Type: Article

References (195)

1. Throughout this paper, I use "eastern Europe" and "Russia" almost interchangeably, despite differences in legal, political, and economic status that obtained across the region. I do so partly for convenience, given the Russian Empire's domination over 80 percent of east European Jewry. In addition, my use of "eastern Europe" underscores that "Russian" Jews did not actually live in "Russia," per se, but in lands that were ethnically Polish, Lithuanian, Belorussian, Ukrainian, and Moldavian (among others).
2. Evyatar Friesel, Atlas of Modern Jewish History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 10-15, 32-36
3. Simon Kuznets, "Immigration of Russian Jews to the United States: Background and Structure," Perspectives in American History 9 (1975): 38, Table 1
4. Isaac M. Rubinow, "Economic Conditions of the Jews in Russia," Bulletin of the Bureau of Labor, No. 72 (Washington, D.C.: Department of Commerce and Labor, 1907; repr. New York: Amo Press, 1975), 495-96.
5. Niles Carpenter, Immigrants and Their Children, 1920. Census Monographs, vol. 7 (Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, 1927), 344, Table 158
6. Joel Perlmann, Italians Then, Mexicans Now. Immigrant Origins and Second-Generation Progress, 1890-2000 (New York: Russell Sage Foundation and the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, 2005), 11-12.
7. For the general literature, see Walter Nugent, Crossings: The Great Transatlantic Migrations, 1870-1914 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992)
8. Alan M. Kraut, The Huddled Masses: The Immigrant in American Society, 1880-1921 (Arlington Heights, Ill.: Harlan Davidson, 1982)
9. Salo W. Baron, "United States 1880-1914," in Steeled By Adversity. Essays and Addresses on American Jewish Life (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1971), 269-414
10. Liebman Hersch, "International Migration of the Jews," in Imre Ferenezi and Walter F. Willcox, eds., International Migrations (New York: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1931), vol. 2, 471-520
11. and idem, "Jewish Migrations during the Last Hundred Years," in The Jewish People Past and Present (New York: Jewish Encyclopedic Handbooks, Central Yiddish Culture Organization [CYCO], 1946), vol. 1, 407-30
12. Samuel Joseph, Jewish Immigration to the United States from 1881 to 1910 (New York: Arno, 1969; repr. of 1914 ed., New York: Longmans, Green).
13. Kuznets, "Immigration": 116-19
14. Shaul Stampfer, "The Geographic Background of East European Jewish Migration to the United States before World War I," in, Ira A. Glazier and Luigi De Rosa, eds., Migration across Time and Nations: Population Mobility in Historical Contexts (New York and London: Holmes and Meier, 1986), 227-28
15. idem, "Patterns of Internal Jewish Migration in the Russian Empire," in, Yaacov Ro'i, ed., Jews and Jewish Life in Russia and the Soviet Union (Ilford, Essex: Frank Cass, 1995), 37
16. Rubinow, "Economic Conditions," 491-92, 495-96, 502.
17. On the pogroms see: I. Michael Aronson, Troubled Waters: The Origins of the 1881 Anti-Jewish Pograms in Russia (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990)
18. Jonathan Frankel, "The Crisis of 1881-82 as a Turning Point in Modern Jewish History," in, David Berger, ed., The Legacy of Jewish Migration: 1881 and Its Impact (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 9-22
19. Shlomo Lambroza and John Klier, eds., Pogroms: Anti-Jewish Violence in Modern Russian History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
20. Carpenter, Immigrants, 173, Table 78.
21. Cf. Kuznets, "Immigration of Russian Jews": 95, Table 10
22. cf. Peter Gatrell, The Tsarist Economy, 1850-1917 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986), 215
23. Joseph Kissman, "The Immigration of Rumanian Jews up to 1914," YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Science, 2-3 (1948): 177-78.
24. Areadius Kahan, Russian Economic History: The Nineteenth Century, Roger Weiss, ed. (Chicago and London: University ofChicago Press, 1989), 10
25. Nicolas Spulber, Russia's Economic Transitions, From Late Tsarism to the New Millennium (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 84
26. Paul R. Gregory, Before Command: An Economic History of Russia from Emancipation to the First Five-Year Plan (Princeton: University of Princeton Press, 1994)
27. Gatrell, Tsarist Economy; Michael F. Hamm, "The Modern Russian City, An Historiographical Analysis," Journal of Urban History 4, 1 (1977): 40-42.
28. Gatrell, Tsarist Economy, 32
29. M. E. Falkus, The Industrialisation of Russia, 1700-1914 (London: Macmillan/Economic History Society, 1972), 11-12
30. Alexander Gerschenkron, Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective (New York: Praeger, 1962), 138.
31. Austrian Galicia, the source of 236,500 Jewish emigrants between 1881 and 1910, was also chronically underdeveloped. See Georges Gliksman, L'Aspect économique de la question juive en pologne (Paris: Editions Rieder, 1929), 26-29.
32. Kahan, Russian Economic History, 13
33. William L. Blackwell, The Beginnings of Russian Industrialization, 1800-1860 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968)
34. Olga Crisp, Studies in the Russian Economy before 1914 (London: Macmillan/New York: Harper and Row, 1976), 5-54
35. Falkus, Industrialisation of Russia, 44-75
36. Gatrell, Tsarist Economy, 67
37. Spulber, Russia's Economic Transitions, 85-99
38. Gerschenkron, Economic Backwardness, 119-42.
39. Falkus, Industrialisation of Russia; Spulber, Russia's Economic Transitions; Kahan, Russian Economic History, ch. 2; Hugh Seton-Watson, The Russian Empire, 1801-1917 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988 [1967]), 520-21.
40. Ezra Mendelsohn, Class Struggle in the Pale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 17
41. Louis Greenberg, The Jews in Russia (New York: Schocken, 1976), vol. 1, 160-67
42. Robert J. Brym, Jewish Intelligentsia and Russian Marxism (London: Macmillan, 1978), 26-28.
43. Gatrell, Tsarist Economy, 40.
44. Arcadius Kahan, "Impact of Industrialization on the Jews in Tsarist Russia," in, Roger Weiss, ed., Essays in Jewish Social and Economic History (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 3-4.
45. Rubinow, "Economic Conditions," 537.
46. Phillip Friedman, "Di industrializatsye un proletarizatsye fun lodzher yidn in di yorn 1860-1914," Lodzher visnshaftlekher shriftn 1 (1938): 76.
47. Yoav Peled and Gershon Shafir, "From Caste to Exclusion: The Dynamics of Modernization in the Russian Pale of Settlement," in, Ezra Mendelsohn, ed., Studies in Contemporary Jewry, Vol. 3: Jews and Other Ethnic Groups in a Multi-Ethnic World (1987), 100-1.
48. In 1867, ninety-one Jewish-owned factories in Warsaw employed 1,761 workers (19.4 per factory on average). For the Kingdom of Poland as a whole, 434 Jewish manufacturing enterprises employed 11,539 workers (or an average of 26.6 workers per factory). Bernard Weinryb, Neueste Wirtschaftsgeschichte der Juden in Russland un Polen: Von der I. Polnischen Teilung bis zum Tode Alexanders II (1772-1881) (Hildesheim and New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 1972 [Breslau: Verlag M. & H. Marcus, 1934]), 75-76.
49. Nearly two-thirds of all Jewish workers in Warsaw before World War I worked in shops employing between one and ten people, and in such workplaces Jews constituted between 97 and 99 percent of all those so employed. Sixty-one percent worked in hand-operated, non-mechanized workshops and factories, and only 39 percent in proper industrial plants. Among non-Jews, the proportions were just the reverse. Bina Garncarska-Kadary, "Be'ayot matsavah hahomri vehahevrati shel hàukhlusiyah hayehudit bevarshah beshanim 1862-1914," Gal-'Ed 1 (1973): 115, 118, 120, 128-30.
50. Cf. Friedman, "Di Industrializatsye": 81-82.
51. Stephen D. Corrsin, Warsaw before the First World War: Poles and Jews in the Third City of the Russian Empire 1880-1914 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 55-56, 145-58
52. Bina Garncarska-Kadary, Helkam shel hayehudim behitpathut hata'asiyah shel varshah bashanim 1816/20-1914 (Tel-Aviv: Tel-Aviv University Press, 1985), 245.
53. Nationwide, 12 percent of the Jewish population was classified as messengers, day laborers, employees in private service, people of uncertain profession, or "unproductive." See: Kahan, "Impact of Industrialization," 20-21.
54. Kahan, "Impact of Industrialization," 20-21
55. Mendelsohn, Class Struggle, 67-68
56. (seen. 4 on p. 68, citing Akimov)
57. Isaac Levitats, The Jewish Community in Russia, 1844-1917 (Jerusalem: Posner, 1981), 148
58. Gliksman, L'Aspect économique, 58.
59. Jewish factory workers comprised only 1 percent of all Jewish wage earners, while Russian factory workers were 12.5 percent in the urban population of European Russia. See Peled and Shafir, "From Caste to Exclusion," 100.
60. Kahan, "Impact of Industrialization," 16.
61. Kuznets, "Immigration": 63, Table VI
62. Kahan, "Impact of Industrialization," App. 50, Table A2.
63. Kahan, "Impact of Industrialization," 6-8
64. Kuznets, "Immigration": 62-77, 101
65. Jacob Lestchinsky, "Statistikah shel 'ayarah ahat," Hashiloah 12 (1903): 89
66. Garncarska-Kadary, "Be'ayot matsavah hahomri": 106-9
67. Friedman, "Industrializatsye": 69.
68. In 1897, according to the Russian census, some 28 percent of the Jewish population was younger than ten years of age. An additional 24 percent were aged ten to nineteen, and 1.4 percent over seventy. There were 2.24 dependents to every Jew employed in the craft and industry sector; 3.16 dependents for every person employed in trade; and over 3.3 per person in such service branches as religious functionaries and transportation workers. Kahan, Essays in Jewish Social and Economic History, 56, Table A6
69. Gliksman, L'Aspect économique, 28.
70. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics ofthe United States. Colonial Times to 1970 (Washington, D.C., 1975), 127.
71. Kuznets, "Immigration": 80
72. cf. Shaul Stampfer, "Yedi'at kro ukhtov'etsel yehudei mizrah eiropah batekufah hahadashah," in, Shmuel Almog et al., eds., Temurot bahistoriah hayehudit hahadashah: Kovets màamarim shai le-Shmuel Ettinger (Jerusalem: Merkaz Zalman Shazar, 1988), 459-83
73. Joel Perlmann, "Literacy among the Jews of Russia in 1897: A Reanalysis of Census Data," Working Paper no. 182 (Annandale-on-Hudson, NY. Levy Economics Institute, Bard College, 1996).
74. The general population in Russia was considerably less literate compared with the Jewish population: In 1897, some 60 percent of Russia's men and 83 percent of its women could neither read nor write (Gatrell, Tsarist Economy, 35).
75. Heinz-Dietrich Löwe, The Tsars and the Jews: Reform, Reaction and Anti-Semitism in Imperial Russia, 1772-1917 (Chur, Switzerland: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1993), 96, and esp. ch. 3.
76. Gershon David Hundert, Jews in Poland-Lithuania in the Eighteenth Century. A Genealogy of Modernity (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004)
77. idem, "On the Problem of Agency in 18th Century Jewish Society," in, Adam Teller, ed., Studies in the History of the Jews in Old Poland in Honor of Jacob Goldberg. Scripta Hierosolymitana, vol. 38 (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1998), 82-89
78. M. J. Rosman, The Lords' Jews: Magnate-Jewish Relations in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth during the 18th Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990).
79. H. Sliozberg, Politicheskii kharakter evreiskago voprosa (1907), 136ff.
80. John D. Klier, Imperial Russia's Jewish Question 1855-1881 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)
81. Löwe, Tsars and the Jews.
82. A ruble was roughly equivalent in value at the time to US$0.51. In terms of the local purchasing power of the ruble in Russia, however, the ruble was comparable to the dollar in America.
83. Sbornik materialov ob ekonomicheskom polozhenie evreev v rossii (St. Petersburg: Jewish Colonization Association, 1904), vol. 1, 220-26, 245, 285-86, 308.
84. Cf. Mendelsohn, Class Struggle, 11-13
85. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Victor Gollancz, 1965), 250, 262, and esp. ch. 8: "Artisans and Others."
86. Kahan, "Impact of Industrialization," 21-22
87. Garncarska-Kadary, Helkam shel hayehudim, 184-89
88. Mendelsohn, Class Struggle, 18, 23.
89. Kahan, "Impact of Industrialization," 11.
90. Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, 312.
91. Levitats, Jewish Community, 153, 167, 169.
92. Jocelyn Cohen and Daniel Soyer, eds. and trans., My Future Is in America. Autobiographies of Eastern European Jewish Immigrants (New York and London: New York University Press, published with the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, 2006), 36 (autobiography of Benjamin Reisman: "Why I Came to America").
93. Susan A. Glenn, Daughters of the Shtetl: Life and Labor in the Immigrant Generation (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1990), 15-16. Glenn writes that women willingly became artisans and workers, citing for example, the lace-making trade; but lace-making was an extremely low-paying type of work, barely providing any income at all. Glenn's treatment omits such details in favor of a thesis that emphasizes and valorizes women at work.
94. Moshe Mishkinsky, "Regional Factors in the Formation of the Jewish Labor Movement in Czarist Russia," YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Science 14 (1969): 39.
95. Marcus F. Ravage, An American in the Making. The Life Story of an Immigrant (New York: Dover, 1971 [Harper and Bros., 1917]), 9, 47-50, 53.
96. Emily Greene Balch, Our Slavic Fellow Citizens (New York: Arno/New York Times, 1969 [New York: Charities Publication Committee, 1910]), 100-1.
97. Lestchinsky, "Statistikah": 91, 94.
98. Mark Zborowski and Elizabeth Herzog, Life Is with People (New York: Schocken, 1962 [1952]), 256. Life Is with People is notorious for its static, ahistorical, over-simplified, and uncritical picture of shtetl society. When its authors lapsed into over-generalized, "thick descriptive" paraphrase, purporting to characterize a sort of corporate Jewish mental attitude or ethic, they were apt to fall short of historical accuracy, as illustrated in the following statement: "A good employer, mindful of the evils of idleness, will keep his workers busy even in slack season" (240). This is at odds with reported facts on the ground and clearly reflects a romanticized view of "folk" values. But the book also contains some more credible verbatim quotes drawn from the interviews conducted by the research team, reflecting the informants' individual family experiences prior to their (or their families') emigration.
99. David Koheleth to Arthur Ruppin, 11 Nov. 1913, quoted in Gur Alroey, "Imigrantim": Hahagirah hayehudit lèerez yisrael bereishit hamèah ha'esrim (Jerusalem: Yad Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, 2004), 67-68.
100. Kuznets, "Immigration": 104-7. Interestingly, Lestchinsky was persuaded that petty trades-people from the Kiev area were more apt than artisans to go abroad to developed industrial countries. He believed that in a more highly developed market they were liable to find a better business situation, whereas artisans were far more likely to try migrating to a large city close at hand, such as Odessa, Nikolaev, or Ekaterinoslav (Lestchinsky, "Statistikah": 94).
101. One wonders, for example, how one would classify Minnie Goldstein's father (see above), a failed petty tradesman, who prior to his emigration told his wife: "That's exactly what I want. I want to go to a country where heavy labor is no disgrace... where I can work hard and make a living for my wife and children and be equal to everyone" (Cohen and Soyer, eds., My Future Is in America, 21).
102. Herman Frank, "Di yidishe treyd-yunion bavegung in amerike," YIVO Yorbukh fun am-opteyl 2 (1939): 104-7.
103. Joel Perlmann, "Selective Migration as a Basis for Upward Mobility? The Occupations of the Jewish Immigrants to the United States, ca. 1900," Working Paper 172, The Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, Oct. 1996
104. and idem, "Which Immigrant Occupational Skills? Explanation of Jewish Economic Mobility in the United States and New Evidence, 1910-1920," Working Paper 181, The Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, Dec. 1996.
105. Michael Stanislawski, Tsar Nicholas I and the Jews: The Transformation of Jewish Society in Russia, 1825-1855 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1983), 170-82.
106. Peled and Shafir, "From Caste to Exclusion," 98.
107. Jacob Katz, Tradition and Crisis: Jewish Society at the End of the Middle Ages (New York: Schocken, 1993), 170-79.
108. Isaiah Trunk, "The Council of the Province of White Russia," YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Science 11 (1956-1957), 203-4
109. Levitats, Jewish Community, vol. 2, 23-33
110. cf. Chone Shmeruk, "Mashma'utah hahevratit shel hashehitah hahasidit," Ziyyon 20 (1955), repr. in David Assaf, ed., Zaddik va'edah: hebetim historiim vehevratiim beheker hahasidut (Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center, 2001), 169.
111. Jacob Katz, Tradition and Crisis.
112. Hundert, Jews in Poland-Lithuania, 93.
113. Eli Lederhendler, The Road to Modern Jewish Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), ch. 1.
114. Theodore Bienenstock, "Social Life and Authority in the East European Jewish Shtetel [sic] Community," Southwestern Journal of Anthro pology 6 (1950): 239.
115. Tony Michels, A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005).
116. Werner Sombart, Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben (Munich and Leipzig: Duncker and Humblot, 1911),
117. translated by M. Epstein as The Jews and the Rise of Modern Capitalism (New York: 1951).
118. E. Lederhendler, "American Jews, American Capitalism, and the Politics of History," in, Eli Lederhendler and Jack Wertheimer, eds., Text and Context: Essays in Modern Jewish History in Honor of Ismar Schorsch (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 2005), 504-46.
119. Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, 36, 51-52.
120. Levitats, Jewish Community, 100.
121. Ezra Stiles, Discourse on the Christian Union (1760),
122. quoted by Walter Nugent, Structures of American Social History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981), 46.
123. On the early history and social aspects of the Hasidic movement, see Ben-Zion Dinur, Bemifneh hadorot (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1972), 131-59
124. Haviva Pedaya, "Lehitpathuto shel hadegem hahevrati-dati-kalkali bahasidut: Hapidyon, hahavurah, veha'aliyah baregel," in, Menahem Ben-Sasson, ed., Dat vekhalkalah, yahasei gomlin. Kovets màamarim shay le-Yaakov Katz (Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center, 1995), 311-71.
125. Cf. David Assaf, ed., Zaddik va'edah; and Gershon David Hundert, "The Conditions in Jewish Society in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the Middle Decades of the Eighteenth Century," in, Ada Rapoport-Adler, ed., Hasidism Reappraised (London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1996), 45.
126. Simon Dubnow, Toledot hahasidut (1944).
127. See my translated sections of Dubnow: "The Beginnings: The Baal Shem Tov (Besht) and the Center in Podolia," and "The Maggid of edzyrzecz, His Associates, and the Center in Volhynia (1760-1772)," in, Gershon David Hundert, ed., Essential Papers on Hasidism: Origins to Present (New York and London: New York University Press, 1991), esp. 26-36, 40-41, 71-73
128. and in the same volume, see my translated excerpts of Dinur's Bemifneh hadorot, ibid., 87-89, 95-159.
129. Cf. Raphael Mahler, Hahasidut vehahaskalah (Merhavya, Israel: Sifriat Poalim, 1961), ch. 1.
130. On literary constructions of Hasidism as heroic radicalism, see David G. Roskies, A Bridge of Longing. The Lost Art of Yiddish Storytelling (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 115.
131. Hundert dismisses any notion of class-based "rebellions" or "class warfare" in the internal communal disputes that wracked some major Jewish communities in Poland-Lithuania in the late eighteenth century (Hundert, Jews in Poland-Lithuania, 110-18).
132. Moshe Rosman, "Mezhibozh verabbi yisrael ba'al shem tov," Ziyyon 52 (1987): 177-89.
133. Glenn Dynner, "Merchant Princes and Tsadikim: The Patronage of Polish Hasidism," Jewish Social Studies, n.s. 12, 1 (2005): 64-66
134. idem, Men of Silk: The Hasidic Conquest of Polish Jewish Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006)
135. Shmuel Ettinger, "Hasidism and the Kahal in Eastern Europe," in, Rapoport-Adler, ed., Hasidism Reappraised, 63-75
136. idem, "The Hasidic Movement: Reality and Ideals," in, Haim Hillel Ben-Sasson and Shmuel Ettinger, eds., Jewish Society through the Ages (New York: Schocken, 1971), 251-66
137. David Assaf, "'Money for Household Expenses': Economic Aspects of the Hasidic Courts," in, Adam Teller, ed, Studies in the History of the Jews in Old Poland in Honor of Jacob Goldberg. Scripta Hierosolymitana vol. 38 (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1998), 14-50
138. Hundert, "Conditions in Jewish Society," 45-50
139. Moshe J. Rosman, "Social Conflicts in Miedzybó̇ z in the Generation of the Besht," in, Ada Rapoport-Adler, ed., Hasidism Reappraised (London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1996), 51-62
140. Shmeruk, "Mashma'utah hahevratit," 182-83.
141. Pedaya, "Lehitpathuto shel hadegem hahevrati," 338-47
142. Immanuel Etkes, "The Early Hasidic 'Court,"' in, Eli Lederhendler and Jack Wertheimer, eds., Text and Context: Essays in Modern Jewish History in Honor of Ismar Schorsch (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 2005), 176-79.
143. These are performed around the commontable (tish) of the rebbe and generally focus on food and drink. Further examples of spiritualized consumption among Hasidim would include an association between tobacco use and spirituality, and the custom of marking the anniversary of a death in the family by providing alcoholic drinks for those present at prayers. Mahler, Hahasidut vehahaskalah, 31-32
144. Aharon Wertheim, Halakhot vehalikhot bahasidut (Jerusalem: Mosad Harav Kook, 1960), 221-25.
145. Assaf, "Economic Aspects of the Hasidic Courts."
146. Levitats, Jewish Community, 99.
147. Mordecai Levin, 'Erkei hevrah vekhalkalah bàideologiyah shel tekufat hahaskalah(Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1975), 17-21
148. Mahler, Hahasidut vehahaskalah, 295-98.
149. Katz, Tradition and Crisis, 212.
150. Levin, 'Erkei hevrah vekhalkalah.
151. The gendering of all bi-polar relationships, including abstract representations of the cosmic order, was typical of Jewish mystical thought. Human gendering (and human sexual union) was therefore fraught with mimetic significance as it both reflected and enhanced the 'cohabiting' aspects of the divine order itself.
152. Katz, Tradition and Crisis, 212.
153. Etkes, "The Early Hasidic 'Court,'" 178, cited from Shever posh'im text in Mordecai Wilensky, Hasidim umitnagdim (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1970), vol. 2, 172-73.
154. Stripped of the anti-Hasidic, polemical critique, however, the point that Hasidic life was apt to offer material as well as spiritual sustenance does appear to be valid. See Reisman, "Why I Came to America," in, Cohen and Soyer, eds., My Future Is in America, 55.
155. There was some degree of continuity between Orthodox, proto-maskilic arguments and later more radical writings. An early example of a would-be economic reformer was the Lithuanian rabbi, Menashe of Ilya (1767-1831), author of Pesher davar (1804) and Alfei Menashe (1822), and particularly the brochure Shekel hakodesh (1823). These works stressed the importance of rationalism, knowledge, the value of productive labor, and the need for socio-economic reform in Jewish society "for the common good." See Israel Zinberg, A History of Jewish Literature: The Haskalah Movement in Russia (Cincinnati and New York: HUC Press/Ktav Publishing House, 1978), vol. 11, 15.
156. Isaac Baer Levinson, Di hefker velt, printed in Shmuel Rozhansky, ed., Nusakh haskoleh (Buenos Aires: Yivo, 1968), 64.
157. Levin, 'Erkei hevrah vekhalkalah, 151-53
158. Michael Stanislawski, "For Whom Do I Toil?" Judah Leib Gordon and the Crisis of Russian Jewry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 28, 125-28
159. Olga Litvak, Conscription and the Search for Modern Russian Jewry (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2006), 78-83, 89-90, 93, 97.
160. Frank, "Di yidishe treyd-yunion bavegung," 107.
161. Peled and Shafir, "From Caste to Exclusion"; Mendelsohn, Class Struggle in the Pale, chs. 1-3
162. Moshe Mishkinsky, Reshit tenu'at hapo'alim hayehudit berusiah: megamot yesod (Tel-Aviv: Tel-Aviv University and Hakibbutz Hameuchad Press, 1981), chs. 1-6
163. Levitats, Jewish Community, 151-60.
164. For some standard histories, see Elias Tcherikower, "Der onheyb fun der yidisher sotsialistisher bavegung," YIVO Historishe shriftn 1 (1929): 469-532
165. Abraham Menes, "Di yidishe arbeter-bavegung in rusland fun onheyb 70-er bizn sof 90-er yorn," YIVO Historishe shriftn 3 (1939): 1-59
166. Isaiah Trunk, "Di onheybn fun der yidisher arbeter bavegung," in, J. S. Herts, ed., Di geshikhte fun bund (New York: Farlag Unser Tsait, 1960), vol. 1, 26-39, 63-96
167. Kh. S. Kasdan, "Der 'bund' - biz finftn tsusamenfor," in Herts, Di Geshikhte, vol. 1, 218-30
168. Henry J. Tobias, The Jewish Bond in Russia from Its Origins to 1905 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1972)
169. N. A. Bukhbinder, Di geshikhte fun der yidisher arbeter-bavegung in rusland (Wilno: Farlag "Tomor," 1931)
170. Michael Hendel, Melakhah uba'alei melakhah be'am yisrael (Tel-Aviv: Joshua Chachik Publishing House, 1956), ch. 6.
171. Mendelsohn, Class Struggle, 61, 115
172. cf. ibid., 14-16, 26, 112-14
173. idem, "The Russian Jewish Labor Movement and Others," YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Science 14 (1969): 98
174. and cf. Peled and Shafir, "From Caste to Exclusion," 100-1, 107.
175. Arthur Liebman, Jews and the Left (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1979), 70.
176. Mendelsohn, Class Struggle, 41-44.
177. Mendelsohn, Class Struggle, 43
178. cf. Levitats, Jewish Community, 151.
179. Hendel, Melakhah uba'alei melakhah, 127-29.
180. Even Arthur Liebman admits, "The Jewish working class that emerged in Russia... was rife with... contradictions" (Jews and the Left, 86), and he cites the complaint of Ber Borochov, perhaps the leading Russian Jewish Marxist theoretician of his day, that Jewish artisans and workers were typically eager to leave the working class behind. Ber Borochov, "Hahitpathut hakalkalit shel ha'am hayehudi," in Ketavim nivharim (Tel-Aviv: Am Oved, 1944), vol. 1, 206.
181. Hyman Lumer, ed., Lenin on the Jewish Question (New York: International Publishers, 1974)
182. Jonathan Frankel, Prophecy and Politics: Socialism, Nationalism, and the Russian Jews, 1862-1917 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 203-8, 227-33, 236-48
183. Tobias, The Jewish Bond, chs. 14-16
184. Zvi Gitelman, Jewish Nationality and Soviet Politics. The Jewish Sections of the CPSU 1917-1930 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 41-46
185. Liebman, Jews and the Left, 117-23.
186. Frankel, Prophecy and Politics, 256.
187. The switch from intensive Marxist consciousness-raising in conspiratorial cells ("propaganda") to economic activism ("agitation") was the hinge upon which the pre-Bund radicals transformed their organization into a full-fledged party for the Jewish workers. Mendelsohn, Class Struggle, chs. 3-4
188. Frankel, Prophecy and Politics, 171-210
189. Bukhbinder, Di Geshikhte, 64-74.
190. On the 1905 pogroms see: Bukhbinder, Di Geshikhte, 350-56
191. Tobias, The Jewish Bund, 306, 313-16
192. Liebman, Jews and the Left, 126.
193. Liebman, Jews and the Left, 77
194. Gerald Sorin, The Prophetic Minority. American Jewish Immigrant Radicals, 1880-1920 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 8, 11-41.
195. Löwe notes, for example, that the quotas placed on Jewish registration in Russian secondary schools in 1887 succeeded by 1892 in reducing the proportion of Jewish pupils in such schools to just 58 percent of the 1886 levels (Tsars and the Jews, 95).