Россия и США: познавая друг друга. Сборник памяти академика Александра Александровича Фурсенко / Russia and the United States: perceiving each other. In Memory of the Academician Alexander A. Fursenko - стр. 66

adopted, meetings and contacts between government and Jewish leaders notwithstanding. Although the Laws could have been even more onerous without the input of the Jewish leadership, as Klier suggests, Jewish disabilities were increased, not relaxed, and violent anti-semites took greater encouragement in the ensuing period from the government’s apparent support. How and why that happened despite Ignatiev’s replacement by the more accommodating Count Dmitrii Tolstoi is not entirely clear. What did Alexander III say in those meetings with Jewish leaders? How did government bureaucrats, despite Ignatiev’s departure, manage to turn the tragedy of the pogroms to the Jews’ disadvantage? It’s clear that “Ignatiev-ism” in governing circles outlived Ignatiev’s own departure. Given the interactive nature of pogrom politics in 1881–82, was this outcome the result of over-reaction to the pogroms by the Jewish masses and their journalist spokesmen, or of the “disloyalty” of those who turned to emigration and socialism? Or was it due to the institutional strength of an anti-Jewish bias that prevailed over the reservations and mixed views of key government figures? All the questions Klier raises have not been answered, yet his study has elevated the debate by disproving myths about the pogroms that have been repeated in textbook accounts of 1881–2 events, presenting a more authentic version of what transpired in higher government circles and among Jewish leaders, obliging future studies to rise to a higher and more nuanced level.

Klier shows that in the early 1880s Jewish interests received a hearing, informal but influential, within the Russian government. Besides the Gintsburg Circle’s personal contacts, an attentive, contentious, and vibrant Russian language Jewish press publicized Jewish views. Journals such as A. E. Landau’s Voskhod, or Sion, edited by Lev Pinsker – an acculturated, moderate physician, trained at Moscow University – argued the Jewish cause. The extent of Jewish acceptance of and acceptance into Russian society and its institutions has normally been overlooked in numerous studies whose leitmotif has been the exclusion of Jews rather than their inclusion. But the question of the actual integration of Jews into Russian Imperial society has receiving increased attention recently, most notably in Ben Nathan’s influential Beyond the Pale.[199] Natan Meir’s 2006 Slavic Review article continued that trend.[200] Meir’s book-length study of Jewish Kiev has not followed through with that theme; on the contrary, it has all but argued the converse.[201] From viewing the history of Kiev’s Jews as a part of the Russian mainstream, Meir has now put more stress on what set them apart.

His claim is twofold: By the late 19th Century Jews had become a dominant economic force in Kiev, when their rate of migration to the city outstripped all other groups, and when they became its largest non-Orthodox confession; and, at the same time, Meir contends, they had become a real community, despite the restrictions placed on Jewish residence, regular expulsions, and the unending enmity of the gentile majority. There is considerable truth to both claims. Under the leadership of their wealthy elite, headed by the Brodsky family, whose beet sugar fortune made possible their role as the principal donors to Jewish educational, religious, and welfare institutions, Kiev’s Jews found a permanent and indispensable, albeit precarious, position in the city’s social and economic life. The prominence of the Brodsky’s and other wealthy Jews both embodied and symbolized the commercial dominance of Kiev‘s Jews, who constituted 75 % of first-guild merchants within one decade of their first legal settlement in the city.