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. 67

This dominance was complemented by the receptivity of Jewish hospitals and schools to gentiles, and both facilitated relations between open-minded members of the city’s Christian elite and wealthy, acculturated Jews.

Yet much of the book is inward-looking, treating the mutual relations among Jews and Jewish institutions. Kiev is little more than the stage setting for their affairs. The “Jewish Metropolis” of the title is thus an ambiguous characterization, suggesting Jewish hegemony, if not dominance, of a Slavic capital, but actually describing how the Jews constituted their own “metropolis”, self-sufficient and self-sustaining within the limits mentioned above. However, for a study set in the vibrant Russian and cosmopolitan center (arguably, the Empire’s third city) one misses a sense of Jews moving about in that larger urban, Slavic space. Even the acculturated and wealthy elite, the Jews’ most viable and influential link with the power and character of greater Kiev, is discussed principally in its relation with Jewish institutions and projects. No very concrete sense is evoked of how its members navigated their way in the alien yet attractive world of urban, modernizing Kiev. Does this represent a deliberate change of emphasis on Meir’s part, or simply an oversight, perhaps based on an implied understanding that the earlier article had treated the other side of the story and needn’t be repeated?

The case for the former possibility is strong. Assessing the communal nature of Kiev’s Jews must, in the first instance, take into account the severity of the conditions militating against community of any kind and leading to a tendency to draw together. Meir provides plenty of evidence of the obstacle to community formation among Kiev’s Jews. The only Jews legally allowed permanent residence in the city were first-guild merchants, and although other categories were granted temporary residence, the greatest number of the Jewish population were “illegals” in managing to live and even do business in Kiev without legal permission. Although that spoke to the bribability of Kievan officialdom and the resourcefulness of Jews in evading the law, legality was enforced frequently and harshly enough to make life in Kiev for most Jews an anxious and precarious experience, ever threatened with sudden expulsion. The hostility of most Russian, Polish and other Christian residents, reinforced by the known illegal status of most Jews and the open antisemitism of the city’s leading newspaper, encouraged the popular belief that Jews did not enjoy or deserve the protection of the law. That erroneous belief fostered frequent lawless, violent outbursts against Jews, especially after 1881, heightening the insecurity already felt from their residential status. It made Kiev not only a “Jewish metropolis”, but the capital city of antisemitism.

While all of this legal and extra-legal hostility toward Kiev’s Jews surely helped to draw them together against a common and seemingly ubiquitous enemy, it also created a tension between close community ties and the urge to acculturate or assimilate to Christian, Russian culture and society. To be sure, far from all Jews had the inclination or opportunity to adopt Russian ways, let alone assimilate or convert to Orthodoxy. Yet the bustle and opportunity for Jews in Kiev, indeed, the very closeness of urban relations, did encourage and maintain a steady, growing movement toward acculturation. The very prominence of Jews in trade to and from the city and the limits placed on Jewish residence made for much coming and going, meaning that community for many was a fleeting experience. Finally, the great wealth gap among Jews further divided the community in ways that the philanthropic nurturance of the needy by the wealthy elite could not completely offset. Wealthy Jews lived in different, more exclusive parts of the city from poor traders and workers. They insured cordial relations with state authority and their social ascendance among ordinary Jews by arranging the reelection of the same Crown Rabbi, who for over three decades protected the interests and provided religious legitimacy to the acculturated elite. For these several reasons, it would seem that the only reason to raise the question of community among Kiev’s Jews would be to note the anomaly that there was a community at all. Yet Kiev’s “Jewish Metropolis” functioned as a community of necessity that shielded Jews from a hostile and bigoted environment and that condition also engendered stronger and more meaningful common bonds.