eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253000774 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/06/2006 |
| Series: | The Modern Jewish Experience |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 296 |
| File size: | 491 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Conscription and the Search for Modern Russian Jewry
By Olga Litvak
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2006 Olga LitvakAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-34808-1
CHAPTER 1
STEPCHILDREN OF THE TSAR: JEWISH CANTONISTS AND THE OFFICIAL ORIGINS OF RUSSIAN JEWRY
MAKING RUSSIAN JEWRY
In the second half of the nineteenth century Russian-Jewish writers raised the figure of the Nicholaevan recruit to the status of an icon, the cultural signifier of the difficult origins of Russian Jewish Enlightenment. Through their imaginative mediation, the story of Jewish conscription into the army of Nicholas I came to exemplify the defining moment in the creation of a common Russian-Jewish past. The singular dedication of post-Nicholaevan Jewish intellectuals to investing the conscription tale with contemporary meaning in an attempt to distill a modern Russian-Jewish ethnos out of the tangle of social, economic, and cultural differences that defined the lives of Jewish men and women in the Pale of Settlement emerged against the background of its precedent in tsarist policy. In fact, the nature and extent of the Russian government's investment in constructing Russian Jewry, a project dictated more by the changing definition of imperial raison d'état than by any Jewish agenda, anticipated and informed the concerns of the Russian-Jewish intelligentsia long past the age of Nicholas I down to the fall of the Romanov empire.
The imposition of the conscription decree in 1827 marked the inception of the state's ambitious program of social engineering, a project that aimed at using Russia's extensive military resources to transform a generation of Jewish boys into a model Russian Jewry. Reared at the expense of the state, Jewish minors, drafted first into cantonist battalions and then, once they came of age, into regular army ranks, exemplified to their superiors both the reach and the limits of the government's ambitious efforts to reform its Jewish subjects. The ambiguities implicit in this situation found reflection in official discourse before Nicholaevan conscription became a commonplace in the repertoire of Jewish storytellers. The earliest version of the conscription tale appeared in the form of a bureaucratic narrative that chronicled the struggle of the military administration, specifically the Department of Military Settlements (DMS) to realize, in spite of substantial difficulties of principle and practice, the tsar's uncompromising vision of Jewish manhood reborn in Nicholas's own image.
Driven by the growing discrepancy between ends and means, the official story of Jewish conscription under Nicholas I stands up to historical scrutiny far more consistently than its normative Jewish version given to posterity and retold in a variety of ways to the present day. This, for a number of reasons: first, the bureaucratic narrative concerns the immediate realities of Nicholaevan conscription. Conscription literature, produced almost in its entirety by Jewish authors in the post-reform period, is, to the same extent, contemporary; that is, it subordinates the interest in the Nicholaevan past to the cultural concerns of its own moment; Jewish conscription literature derives its historical character precisely from its imaginative relationship to the past, from all of the ways, in other words, that it gets history wrong. Second, the bureaucratic narrative reproduces a variety of different, competing voices. These voices include the tsar, the local command, the administration, regimental priests, the minister of war, parents of Jewish recruits, sometimes even the recruits themselves. Conscription literature, contrary to the contemporary notion that its essential truthfulness is rooted in the authenticity of Jewish vernacular memory ostensibly undisturbed by the passage of time between the reign of Nicholas I and the end of the imperial period, developed and changed in accordance with the power of individual authorial control. Unselfconsciously polyphonic, the bureaucratic narrative often speaks against the avowed interest of the state which it ostensibly serves. At such moments, it gets closest to the historical contingencies of conscription, vastly more complicated and confusing than its expressly ideological — normative — representation, either in the tsar's law or in Jewish literature, allows. The bureaucratic narrative emerges as a kind of historical, secular, we might say, commentary on the programmatic confessional and political interest of the autocracy, enunciated in the tsar's decree. Conscription literature, by contrast, constitutes its narrative teleology against the grain of secular historical experience. Every single one of its Jewish authors read the Nicholaevan past as past in relation not only to his (it is, without exception, his and not hers, in itself a critical aspect of the story I tell in this book) own present but also to the Jewish literary tradition in which he located the enduring cultural significance of his work. In fact, the post-reform work of making the Russian-Jewish encounter into an exemplary Jewish tale cannot be divorced from the attempt of Nicholas's disciplinary state to make Russian Jewry.
Under Nicholas I, the Russian military reached its apotheosis as the state's laboratory for social discipline and integration, and thus an ideal site for the creation of Russian Jewry. The subject of the imposition of military conscription as emblematic of imperial Jewish policy and the high point of Nicholas's particular interest in the Jews is not new to students of Russian-Jewish history; but, in the past, the scholarly treatment of Russian political aims vis-à-vis the tsar's Jewish subjects relied almost exclusively on codified legislation and the rhetorical pronouncements that emerged out of seemingly interminable ministerial debates over the notorious Jewish question. Such sources by their very nature imply and promote a rigid hierarchical view of imperial administration, a staple in the commonplace view of the autocracy as a political monolith, unrelentingly hostile to Judaism and Jews. In fact, the state's Jewish agenda developed within a highly contested bureaucratic arena where the will of the tsar collided with the extent to which his servitors proved willing and able to carry it out. The imperial ideal often clashed with administrative realities and, for all the plans carefully laid out in St. Petersburg, the palpable contradictions between ukaz and prikaz — between legislation and execution, law and order — manifest an attitude of official ambivalence toward implementing any radical change that might challenge the authority or strain the capacity of established government institutions.
A closer look the bureaucratic fate of the tsar's momentous decision to dedicate the imperial army to the reformation of Russian Jews exposes the fissures between explicit endorsement of Nicholas's magisterial pedagogical aims and tacit resistance against using the military to pursue what rapidly proved to be a costly and confusing experiment, the results of which consistently fell short of royal expectations. The orderly absorption into Russian ranks of some fifty thousand Jewish children presented a formidable prospect. Charged with the task, the staff of the Department of Military Settlements left a substantial paper trail of the Russian military bureaucracy beset by the difficulties which, from the beginning, dogged any attempt to turn the Jews of Russia into Russian Jewry.
FROM PARTITION TO CONSCRIPTION
Between the period of the Polish Partitions (1772–1795) and the end of the reign of Nicholas I, the policy of the Russian government vis-à-vis its Jewish subjects wavered between a vision of radical reform and the reality of social and administrative conservatism heavily laced with Judaeophobia. Despite the persistence of the latter, throughout the half-century between partition and conscription, the autocracy demonstrated in various ways its commitment to forging a well-ordered Russian Jewry out of the welter of economic distinctions, regional variations, and social frictions that constituted the "patchwork" of Jewish life in the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. However, Russia's Jewish policy, aimed at replacing the lingering chaos of Polish self-rule with its own hegemonic vision of imperial uniformity, consistently suffered from a fundamental contradiction. Legislative measures promoted the gradual erosion of Jewish autonomy and the parallel integration of Jews into the Russian estate structure even as the state continued to support the corporate confessional discipline of the Jewish community for the collection of taxes and the preservation of order. Catherine II (r. 1762–1796), for instance, instituted new laws that made Jews voting members of the urban strata to which they belonged in accordance with their economic position, residence, and occupation. At the same time she undercut the impact of such a bold move by explicitly endorsing the authority of local Jewish communities over its members. While every Russian subject simultaneously belonged to an estate and a confession, only in the case of the Jews did membership in the one implicitly undercut the power of the other. The Jewish policies of Catherine's immediate imperial successors never resolved this problem of dual jurisdiction, either in theory or practice. While Russia's first official statute on Jews, passed by the government of Alexander I in 1804, encouraged individual Jews to enroll in Russian institutions of higher learning as a way of moving from one estate category to another, the new law did not vitiate the formal power of Jewish leadership, both religious and lay, that remained invested for social and theological reasons in combating the potential allure of secular education as a means of departure from the community. Deepening the tension still further, the statute encouraged Jews to turn to municipal courts for settling internal disputes even as it backed the legal power of communal bodies, effectively bolstering the system of local Jewish self-government that reform-minded Russian bureaucrats themselves deplored as unregenerate, corrupt, and exploitative. The state explicitly favored the Jewish individual at the expense of the Jewish community, associated in the Russian administration with a whole host of persistent evils, but the prospect of abolishing communal authority raised the "specter of insolvency" and the still more difficult problem of local tax collection, an effort beyond the straitened resources of the imperial administration. Thus the statute of 1804 not only tightened the prerogatives of the rabbis and the lay elders elected to the local board of governors (Heb. kahal) but confirmed in law the previously ad-hoc residential restrictions that confined Jews to the fourteen western provinces known collectively as the Pale of Jewish Settlement. Under these conditions, Jewish life in Russia could hardly be expected to transcend the social and cultural limitations imposed by its own provincialism. Not surprisingly, the statute of 1804 aroused strong religious opposition particularly within the nascent Hasidic movement and inspired few Jews to take the high road to St. Petersburg.
The trouble with the "phantom" of reform that hovered over the statute of 1804 was that the Russian state remained heavily dependent on the social status quo to ensure the orderly execution of its laws. Jewish communities in the post-partition age were no exception in this regard. Throughout the course of its imperial advance between the eighteenth and the mid-nineteenth century, Russian state power had consistently maintained, even strengthened, existing hierarchies and backed established authority of rival faiths, even as it claimed its new territories in the name of Holy Russia. Russia experienced its greatest period of territorial expansion between the reigns of Catherine II and Nicholas I; during this period, Russian civilian and military authorities, charged with the administration of conquered territories, continually strained for personnel. Forced to co-opt non-Orthodox, occasionally hostile elites — an enterprise fraught with the potential for subversion of imperial aims — for the purposes of governing its ever expanding frontiers, the Russian bureaucracy nevertheless aspired toward juridical uniformity and social transparency. The disparity between reach and grasp that characterized tsarist policy toward Russia's recently acquired Jewish population resulted in new social and cultural divisions being superimposed upon old ones.
Instead of fostering homogeneity and reform, the state's support of a dual system of jurisdiction actively exacerbated internal division and promoted a sense of religious entrepreneurship, hardly consistent with the bureaucratic vision of order. For example, competition for state patronage and access to government power aggravated the most important split in the spiritual life of Eastern European Jews, the late-eighteenth-century conflict between Hasidism and its rabbinic opponents. In Vilna, both the followers of the new pietism and their opponents (Heb. mitnagdim; sing., mitnagged) took turns denouncing each other to the state; effectively institutionalizing the dispute, the statute of 1804 formally sanctioned the existence of Hasidic conventicles (Heb. minyanim) alongside established synagogues and study houses. At the same time the mythology attached to the St. Petersburg imprisonment and official vindication of R. Shneur Zalman of Liady, the founder of the Habad branch of Hasidism, in connection with this case endowed the movement with substantial cultural cache. The subsequent popularity of Habad Hasidism derived, at least in part, from the perpetuation of its sense of political triumph over its competitors.
Thus, despite its rhetorical commitment to the idea of "gathering its Jews" under a single legal and social rubric, prior to the accession of Nicholas I, the Russian state succumbed to the countervailing needs of policing that made the notion of a Russian-Jewish administrative ingathering practically untenable, even though most Russian Jews already lived in a single territory. The preamble to the new "general" Jewish statute of 1835, already in the works during the last years of the reign of Alexander I but officially passed under his successor, affirmed as much: "With the putting of this statute [of 1804] into practice, local difficulties were uncovered, indicating from the very beginning the need for several modifications. In the aftermath of such difficulties, specific needs and occurrences eventually led to the enactment of a variety of particular measures regarding the Jews." Such were the first official inklings of a divide between the designs of St. Petersburg and the "local" realities of bureaucratic administration, a divide that would widen into a chasm during Nicholas's reign. In fact, the more ambitious the plans conceived in high places, the greater the possibility for resistance and ambivalence at the level of their implementation.
Nicholas's departure from the Jewish policy of his predecessors did not, in fact, constitute a profound structural shift. Rather, the break manifested itself as part of the general movement during the last years of Alexander's reign away from an Enlightenment-inspired faith in legislative solutions to the problems of social integration that bedeviled the expanding imperial landscape. This turn reflected a mounting sense of disappointment with so-called constitutional experiments that developed in Russian official circles in the wake of the Napoleonic wars. With respect to the Jewish population, Orthodoxy now rose to the fore as a disciplinary alternative to civic integration; the last years of Alexander I saw the earliest government attempts to evangelize actively among the Jews. At the same time the political faith in the Russian nation-at-arms that became attached to the cultural memory of 1812 dovetailed with Alexander's personal interest in the use of the military as a school of citizenship, specifically the plan, first contemplated in 1810, to transform state peasants into a stable hereditary caste of soldier-farmers.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Conscription and the Search for Modern Russian Jewry by Olga Litvak. Copyright © 2006 Olga Litvak. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
ContentsA Note on TransliterationAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: The Literary Response to Conscription and the Persistence of Enlightenment in Russian-Jewish Culture1. Stepchildren of the Tsar: Jewish Cantonists and the Official Origins of Russian Jewry2. Great Expectations: The Beginnings of Cantonist Literature and the Emancipation of Russian-Jewish Consciousness3. The Romance of Enlightenment: Gender and the Critique of Embourgeoisement in the Recruitment Novels of I. M. Dik, Grigorii Bogrov, and J. L. Gordon4. Return of the Native: The Nicholaevan Universe of Sh. J. Abramovich and the Enlightenment Origins of Russian-Jewish Populism5. Dead Children of the Hebrew Renaissance: The Conscription Story as Nationalist Myth6. The Writing of Conscription History and the Making of the Russian-Jewish DiasporaConclusionNotesBibliographyIndexWhat People are Saying About This
"Litvak has written an imaginative, path-breaking study that contributes immeasurably to the study of modern Jewish history and culture, Imperial Russian history, and theoretical discussions regarding the intersection between literature, history and memory."--(Scott Ury, Faculty of Humanities, Tel Aviv University)