Confessions of the Shtetl: Converts from Judaism in Imperial Russia, 1817-1906
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Confessions of the Shtetl: Converts from Judaism in Imperial Russia, 1817-1906
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Overview
Over the course of the nineteenth century, some 84,500 Jews in imperial Russia converted to Christianity. Confessions of the Shtetl explores the day-to-day world of these people, including the social, geographic, religious, and economic links among converts, Christians, and Jews. The book narrates converts' tales of love, desperation, and fear, tracing the uneasy contest between religious choice and collective Jewish identity in tsarist Russia. Rather than viewing the shtetl as the foundation myth for modern Jewish nationhood, this work reveals the shtetl's history of conversions and communal engagement with converts, which ultimately yielded a cultural hybridity that both challenged and fueled visions of Jewish separatism.
Drawing on extensive research with conversion files in imperial Russian archives, in addition to the mass press, novels, and memoirs, Ellie R. Schainker offers a sociocultural history of religious toleration and Jewish life that sees baptism not as the fundamental departure from Jewishness or the Jewish community, but as a conversion that marked the start of a complicated experiment with new forms of identity and belonging. Ultimately, she argues that the Jewish encounter with imperial Russia did not revolve around coercion and ghettoization but was a genuinely religious drama with a diverse, attractive, and aggressive Christianity.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781503600249 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Publication date: | 11/16/2016 |
| Series: | Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 360 |
| File size: | 6 MB |
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Read an Excerpt
Confessions of the Shtetl
Converts from Judaism in Imperial Russia, 1817â"1906
By Ellie R. Schainker
STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2017 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5036-0024-9
CHAPTER 1
THE GENESIS OF CONFESSIONAL CHOICE
PERHAPS the most sensational Jewish conversion to Christianity in nineteenth-century imperial Russia — aside from Lenin's great-grandfather Moshko Blank — was that of Moshe Schneerson, scion to the Chabad Hasidic dynasty. The Schneerson family hailed from Liubavichi (Mogilev Province), and after marriage, Moshe settled near his in-laws in the small town of Ula (Vitebsk Province), where he became communal rabbi. Together with his brothers, Dov Ber and Chaim Avraham, Moshe wrote haskamot (rabbinic approbations) for two of his father's most revered works, the Tanya and the Shulhan aruh harav. In his early career, Moshe received the honorary title of member of the Liozno hevra kadisha (Jewish burial society), and he alone among his brothers was known to recapitulate and help clarify his father's teachings. Moshe's brothers petitioned provincial authorities in 1820 to annul the conversion due to the documented mental instability of their brother. According to them, Moshe's conversion to Catholicism was provoked by a disgruntled Lieutenant-Colonel Puzanov, who was billeted in Ula and was denied superior housing by Moshe's in-laws. In retaliation, Puzanov lured Moshe to his quarters, where he gave the rabbi alcohol, non-kosher food, and shaved his beard and sidelocks. Puzanov coaxed Moshe to sign a letter of intent to convert, after which he was given shelter by a local Catholic priest and baptized on July 4, 1820.
The enigmatic story of a Russian officer luring Moshe to the Catholic Church over a billeting debacle is highly suspect, but it is possible that Puzanov, like the other witnesses to Moshe's declaration of conversion intent (three local nobles, a parish priest, and local civil and military officials), served more as mediating rather than vengeful forces. The provinces of Mogilev and Vitebsk, partitioned from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1772, were part of the northwestern imperial periphery with a large and ethnically varied Catholic population; as late as 1863, the Ministry of the Interior estimated that about a quarter of the population in the western provinces was Catholic.
Moshe's shocking conversion was succeeded by an unsuccessful attempt to convert a second time to Russian Orthodoxy in October 1820, just months after his Catholic baptism. Though his bid for multiple baptisms aroused some intrigue among clerics, Moshe's serial conversions were enabled by imperial Russian religious toleration and state sponsorship of religious diversity in the western borderlands of the empire, which permitted Jews to convert to the tolerated, "foreign" faiths of the empire. Empowered by Moshe's documented history of mental illness and the confusion engendered by his second conversion petition, the Schneersons temporarily succeeded in wresting Moshe from a Catholic monastery in Mogilev and taking him into custody. The family reunion was short-lived; Moshe's conversion caught the attention of the metropolitan of the Catholic Church in Russia, Sistrensevich Bogush, who convinced officials in St. Petersburg that Moshe's Catholic conversion was legitimate despite his poor mental health, and that the metropolitan himself — rather than local Jewish deputies — should care for Moshe in the capital and keep him in the Christian fold.
Tsar Alexander I took an interest in Moshe's conversion case, and acquiesced to the metropolitan's desire to care for Moshe as a Catholic. Even so, there were lingering suspicions in the capital that Moshe's illness unsettled the efficacy of his baptism and that he would be better served medically and financially by the state-sponsored Jewish deputies, or communal representatives, in the capital. The issue of money highlights a practical side of confessional belonging — in the case of conversion, which family member or acquaintance could claim responsibility for a neophyte? In this moment of confessional confusion, Jewish claims of filial responsibility struck a chord with tsarist officials. In this high-profile case, though, the interest of the Catholic Church in conversion and the ecumenical zeal of the tsar momentarily converged to trump any financial or legal objections to Moshe changing his community. Moshe was famous enough to warrant Christian charity and the assistance of the metropolitan himself. In the end, Moshe's medical condition proved too troublesome for Metropolitan Bogush, and Moshe was transferred to a St. Petersburg hospital that specialized in nerve treatment.
In the extended bureaucratic wrangling over the legitimacy of Moshe's conversion and which confessional community should care for him, a Catholic cleric cited the tsar's 1817 manifesto of the Society of Israelite Christians as a prooftext for the imperial promotion of Jewish conversion to any of the tolerated faiths in the empire — an initiative that will be discussed shortly. Thus, Moshe's case illuminates the multiconfessional backdrop of the earliest imperial discussions of Jewish conversion — when the tsar himself supported the Catholic Church's control of a high-profile Jewish convert in the imperial capital, and when there were Jewish deputies in St. Petersburg who disputed Moshe's conversion in their capacity as representatives of the Jewish community to the imperial government. Though exemplary in some ways due to Moshe's documented mental illness, the Schneerson affair has much to recommend it as a pendant case of conversion from Judaism in imperial Russia — it was civilian, voluntary, and conditioned by the multiconfessional politics of Jewish life in the empire's western borderlands.
The Schneerson story is exemplary of circumstances in pre-reform imperial Russia (1817–1855) that shaped the conversion landscape for Jews. The state was interested and involved in proselytizing Jews and yet its missionary impulse was tempered by religious toleration and the empire's increasing patronage and sponsorship of a variety of Christian and non-Christian religions. In other words, a tension lay at the heart of the Russian imperial enterprise; religious toleration and recognition of ethno-religious difference existed alongside state-sponsored programs for the assimilation of minorities. Thus, the state encouraged and rewarded Jewish conversion to a variety of Christian confessions, all while attempting to create an indigenous Jewish elite and buoy up the confession of Judaism. Such a story would in many ways be an impossibility by the late imperial period, when the state exited the Jewish conversion business and state officials increasingly started to conflate minority integration with conversion to Russian Orthodoxy, alongside a growing political conservatism suspicious of baptism as a means to upend Jewishness.
Overall, religious toleration, extending to confessional choice, set the terms for how the state and its Russian Orthodox Church engaged Jewish conversion. Thus, an overview on state policy and interactions between the state and the tolerated confessions will lay the groundwork for the book as a whole, which explores the influence of toleration and multiconfessionalism on everyday encounters and interactions between imperial subjects. In addition to illuminating the social geography of conversion in the imperial Russian provinces, the Schneerson case highlights the responses of Jewish families to conversion. Contemporary Jews grappled with the problem of Jewish conversion and leveraged their confessional status to vie with the state for control over apostasy and communal belonging.
Religious Toleration and Empire
One of the striking aspects of the Schneerson case, and one that confounded post-Soviet scholars searching for archival documentation of Moshe's baptism, was that Moshe initially sought out the Catholic Church rather than the state religion of Russian Orthodoxy. The Russian Empire legally promoted Russian Orthodoxy as the "preeminent and predominant" imperial faith, and it was led by an Orthodox autocrat who was hailed as the "supreme defender and keeper of dogmas of the ruling faith." The state nonetheless recognized and granted religious toleration to a host of non-Orthodox confessions and non-Christian groups in the empire and even sought to bolster a variety of confessional orthodoxies and their clerics as key instruments in imperial management. Imperial Russia's strategy of religious toleration was not just a nominal acceptance of religious diversity but a structure for integrating non-Orthodox subjects based on the Enlightenment principle of the essential similarities of organized religions as elaborate systems of discipline.
The Russian Empire by the nineteenth century controlled and supported the faithful of four world religions — Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and Buddhism — in addition to followers of "nature religions" or animists. The diversity of imperial confessional life was especially pronounced in the conquered western provinces of the empire and New Russia, an area of imperial expansion north of the Black Sea, where the majority of Russian Jews lived alongside sizeable indigenous populations of Catholics, Uniates, and Lutherans. By 1827, imperial law extended permission to Jews to convert to all of the tolerated Christian confessions, not just Orthodoxy. As late as 1863, the Ministry of the Interior (MVD) created a color-coded map of the western provinces (excluding New Russia) to document this confessional diversity at the level of province and town as it responded to a recent Polish uprising and tried to reassess the strength of Russian Orthodoxy in the region. While Jews by virtue of their diffusion throughout the provinces did not merit a distinguishing color on the atlas according to the cartography notes, the MVD mapped the populations of Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant, and Muslim faithful in the area with an accompanying statistical table of all ethno-confessional groups in the region (see Map 1.1). According to published statistics, around 15,000 Jews in total are estimated to have converted to Catholicism (about 12,000) and Protestantism (about 3,136) over the course of the nineteenth century, and roughly 69,400 are reported to have converted to Russian Orthodoxy.
Published statistics on conversions from Judaism in imperial Russia were collected by the tsarist bureaucracy, which documented each religious conversion for the corporate status change that it initiated. A subject's civil status (place of residence, community, tax obligation, liability to conscription) was determined by confession and social estate, and, therefore, one's documented religious ascription largely determined his or her legal and social standing in the empire. Since the empire had neither civil marriage nor the legal category of konfessionslos (without a religion), one's confession also determined permitted marriage partners. Official data on conversions to Russian Orthodoxy were culled by both the Russian Orthodox Church's Holy Governing Synod (for the years 1836–1914) and the MVD from annual reports from governors-general in the western provinces. Not always with precision, the Synod maintained data on the conversions of non-Orthodox Christians, Orthodox sectarians, and non-Christians, including Jews. In addition, as of 1842 the MVD mandated that governors-general reports from the western provinces include conversion information on inovertsy (non-Orthodox subjects). Inconsistent reporting from the provincial governors over the years makes it difficult to analyze the regional data, but still there are a few statistical novelties to note (see Table 1.1). There appears to have been a higher proportion of converts from Judaism in the southern provinces of the Pale of Jewish Settlement. This can be connected to the prevalence of agricultural colonies in the south that attracted some Jews, especially those looking for economic opportunity and tax abatements. There is evidence from the first quarter of the nineteenth century of Jewish male members of agricultural colonies in the south who converted to escape debt. Beyond that, the provinces of New Russia were a Jewish frontier, with newly formed Jewish communities that tended to attract more enlightened, or non-traditionalist, Jewish migrants. The regional statistics also reveal a spike in conversions in Podolia in 1854, surely connected to coerced cantonist conversions around that time.
Published data on Jewish conversions to all Christian confessions in imperial Russia combine published Synod data for the period 1836–1914 with a modest estimate of Jewish conversions to Russian Orthodoxy for 1800–1835, based on the lowest yearly number (322, in 1836), from which a scaled-back average of three hundred conversions per year is derived for the undocumented thirty-five-year period. Statistics on non-Orthodox conversions are based on piecemeal data, mostly from the late imperial period, from Evangelical, Reformed, and Lutheran Consistories in imperial Russia (including statistics for Congress Poland). From these data, a minimum number of converts for the long, undocumented periods has been extrapolated. In statistics on conversions to Catholicism, Jewish conversions via evangelical missions (approximately 1,716) were multiplied by a factor of seven, based on the greater proportion of Catholics to evangelicals in the former Polish territories.
Fluctuations in the statistics on Jewish conversion in various tsarist reigns suggest there was a connection between political repression and conversion. Modest rates of conversion under Alexander I (r. 1801–1825) sharply increased under Nicholas I (r. 1825–1855) and the induction of Jews, especially underage boys or cantonists, into the Russian military beginning in 1827. The period from 1827 to 1855 witnessed the largest proportion of conversions in the century, with the highest yearly average of 4,439 converts in 1854, during a period of coerced cantonist conversions. During the Great Reform era of the more liberal reign of Alexander II (r. 1855–1881), conversion rates dropped considerably. Rates rose again in the last decades of the century, when the more reactionary and conservative reign of Alexander III (r. 1881–1894) initiated admissions quotas for Jews in institutions of higher education and restrictions on Jews in the liberal professions. The years following the liberal concessions of Nicholas II (r. 1894–1917) in the wake of the failed 1905 revolution witnessed a drop in conversion numbers and the legal relapse of over 600 apostates to Judaism. Between 1907 and 1917, statistics reveal a new wave of conversion among Russian Jews.
After the revolution of 1905, the tsar liberalized some restrictions, allowing converts to officially relapse to their ancestral faith. The St. Petersburg Jewish communal registry of relapsed converts from 1917 to 1923 shows 157 conversion relapses, the majority from Reformed and Lutheran churches, following the Bolshevik revolution and the end of official Jewish disabilities. Thus, as Moshe Schneerson's Catholic conversion attests, a religious marketplace existed for converts from Judaism whereby confessional choice was mediated by local contacts and diverse forms of Christian rites and culture. While restrictive legislation affected conversion rates, it does not fully illuminate the sociocultural factors conditioning conversion nor the relationship between conversion and confessional choice.
To the extent that the Russian Orthodox Church never experienced a reform movement and Russian Orthodoxy retained a monopoly on proselytizing and criminalizing apostasy in the Russian Empire, historians long ignored the ways imperial Russian religious tolerance empowered minority groups and undermined the hold of Eastern Orthodoxy on imperial identity and local confessional politics. Only recently has the confessional state model (or more aptly, the multiconfessional state model) of early modern Central Europe been applied and modified to nineteenth-century Russia to better frame the triangular power relations between the state, religious minorities, and the Orthodox Church, and how state centralization was accompanied by the "clericalization, centralization and social regulation of religious life."
In this light, Alexander I's support of a Jewish convert to Catholicism in 1820 is understandable. From the reign of Catherine the Great (1762–1796) during the partitions of Poland through to the reform era under Alexander II, the state made the non-Orthodox, or "foreign," confessions of the empire into state religions, thus institutionally and administratively bringing these religions into the imperial order. Before this, Peter the Great (r. 1682–1725) brought the Russian Orthodox Church into the structure of imperial governance by abolishing the patriarchate, or independent spiritual leadership over the Eastern Orthodox Church, in 1721. Peter established synodal oversight of the Russian Orthodox Church and it thus became an arm of the state in its overarching goal of creating loyal imperial subjects. For most of the nineteenth century, confession was the "salient feature" of imperial policy, thus effecting a tsarist politics that transcended ethnicity and embraced religion as a means of undergirding autocracy.
State regulation and institutionalization of the foreign faiths continued under Alexander I and Nicholas I, by which point Russia's "multiconfessional establishment" was firmly in place. Although Nicholas I famously articulated an Orthodox imperial identity and deeply invested the state in Jewish missionary work through the institution of the military, his reign must be analyzed alongside his continued support and patronage of the tolerated confessions. In this context, the banner of Nicholas I's reign, "Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality," designed by his minister of education Sergei Uvarov, takes on greater nuance. In a key proposal, Uvarov referred to religion in general rather than "Orthodoxy" in particular as embodying one of the core tenets of the empire. In this revised reading of the motto of Nicholas I's reign, "Nationality" should be understood in an imperial sense, connoting imperial loyalty as opposed to Russian nationalism, such that the autocracy self-consciously transcended ethnicity.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Contents and AbstractsIntroduction: Converts and Confessions chapter abstractThematically, the introduction first probes the role of the Russian government in managing religious diversity and toleration, and thus the relationship between mission and empire with regard to the Jews. Second, it explores the day-to-day world of converts from Judaism in imperial Russia, including the social, geographic, religious, and economic links among converts, Christians, and Jews. This exploration of daily life is attuned to convert motivations and post-baptism trajectories, and perhaps more significantly, it focuses on everyday relations of trust and attraction between Jews and their neighbors in the imperial Russian borderlands. Finally, the introduction examines the challenges of constructing, transgressing, and maintaining ethno-confessional boundaries by casting the convert as a boundary-crosser who exposes and thus renders violable the borders of faith, community, and nationhood.
1The Genesis of Confessional Choice chapter abstractChapter 1 charts the institutionalization of confessional difference in the Russian Empire, from Tsar Alexander I and the genesis of confessional choice for Jews in 1817, to freedom of conscience measures instituted by Tsar Nicholas II in the wake of the 1905 revolution, which allowed Jewish converts to all tolerated confessions to legally reclaim their ancestral faith. The chapter uses the 1820 conversion to Catholicism of Moshe Schneerson, scion to the Chabad Hasidic dynasty, to illustrate the conditions in pre-reform imperial Russia (1817-1855) that shaped the conversion landscape for Jews. The tsarist state's missionary impulse was tempered by religious toleration and the empire's increasing patronage and sponsorship of a variety of Christian and non-Christian religions. The Schneerson case also highlights how contemporary Jews actively engaged with the problem of Jewish conversion and leveraged their confessional status to vie with the state for control over apostasy and communal belonging.
2The Missionizing Marketplace chapter abstractChapter 2 uses the story of the convert from Judaism turned missionary Alexander Alekseev to highlight the overall reactive missionary policy of the state and the Orthodox Church with regard to Jews. The chapter analyzes self-appointed convert missionaries, their struggles with the strict translation politics of the Holy Synod, and how many leveraged foreign, non-Orthodox investments in proselytizing Jews to access Hebrew and Yiddish publications of scriptures. The intellectual and literary biographies of individual convert missionaries further illuminate how toleration and multiconfessionalism created ambivalence about proselytizing Jews, and how everyday Jewish encounters with Christianity were mediated by a range of religious groups beyond just the Russian Orthodox Church. These convert cum missionary stories are instructive for thinking about how converts navigated the multiconfessional landscape and were acutely aware of the marketplace of religion for Jews in a confessional state.
3Shtetls, Taverns, and Baptism chapter abstractChapter 3 explores the social dynamics of religious toleration and the confessional state from below by examining the spaces of Jewish conversion. The chapter presents a range of conversion narratives which locate interfaith encounters at the local tavern as the springboard for migrating to a different confessional community. It analyzes daily social interactions among Jewish and neighboring Polish, Lithuanian, Belorussian, and Ukrainian communities, and how these encounters nurtured intimate knowledge of other confessional lifestyles, facilitated interfaith relationships, and provided access to the personnel and institutions of other faiths. By taking a geographical approach, the chapter presents the western provincial towns and villages of imperial Russia as interreligious zones wherein conversion was predicated on interconfessional networks, sociability, and a personal familiarity with Christianity via its adherents. In exploring forms of encounter, the chapter highlights the role of the local godparent—often local elites or civil/military personnel—in facilitating confessional transfers.
4From Vodka to Violence chapter abstractChapter 4 analyzes narratives of Jewish violence against converts as another aspect of the provincial social threads of conversion. Here, the local spaces of conversion are important for the proximity of baptisms to the controlling gaze of Jewish family and community and the vulnerability of convert relapse into a Jewish milieu. Conversion as a form of boundary crossing raised anxieties about close interfaith living and became a flashpoint for negotiating the local politics of confessional coexistence and religious toleration. In these stories of violence in response to conversions, confessional feuds became family affairs—complete with familial contestation and the breakdown of the imperial, patriarchal family through conversion. The chapter offers a view of Jewish politics, shaped through empire and the confessional state, and the ways Jews worked through state documentary practices to alternatively endorse and resist conversion, and even mimic the previously violent, coercive practices of the state towards converts.
5Relapsed Converts and Tales of Marranism chapter abstractChapter 5 analyzes narratives of relapsed converts and their multiple cultural fluencies using legal cases of converts suspected of illegally relapsing back to Judaism before 1905 and petitions for relapse after the legalization of apostasy in 1905. Imperial sponsorship of Russian Orthodoxy combined with the criminality of Orthodox deviance until 1905 created an environment in which Jewish converts often lived in the interstices of communal and confessional life, defying clear religious categorization. Relapsed converts and their tales of marranism, or secret Jewish practice, called into question the confessional state's strategy of mapping identity and community onto confessional ascription— especially in the wake of the cantonist episode when legal and chosen religious identities were often at odds. As church and state officials grappled with these difficulties, relapsed converts and their defenders tried to inscribe their cultural mobility into imperial law through freedom of conscience measures.
6Jewish-Christian Sects in Southern Russia chapter abstractChapter 6 charts the proliferation of Jewish-Christian sects in southern Russia in the 1880s and the confessional journeys of their leaders and adherents who were in conversation with contemporary sectarian and revolutionary political movements. These sects provided a forum for a cross-cultural conversation in the public press on Jewish and Russian fears of conversion, cultural hybridity, and trespassing the boundaries of imperial confessions. The liminal space occupied by the sects highlighted the tension between tolerated confession and personal faith in the empire, and the question of where converts and schismatics communally belonged.
Epilogue: Converts on the Cultural Map chapter abstractThe epilogue summarizes how the phenomenon of Russian Jewish conversion, though marginal in number, left an outsized imprint on the cultural map of East European Jews who grappled with questions of Jewish identity and the role of religion in the increasingly powerful Jewish secular nationalist ideologies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The epilogue explores evolving Jewish attitudes towards baptism, interfaith sociability, and cultural mobility in the late-imperial period, and it puts conversions from Judaism in imperial Russia in conversation with conversions from Judaism in the modern period more broadly. Finally, the epilogue looks ahead to the inter-revolutionary period (1906-1917) and the Soviet period when conversions from Judaism accelerated, accompanied by a growing ethnic conception of Jewish identity whereby national Jewishness found explicit harmony with Christian religious adherence.