Contrary general perceptions concerning Russia during this era, Jewish political activities continued beyond 1907, and given the political limits of Tsarist Russia, transformed and modernized Jewish society to the fullest extent possible. From 1900 to 1914 Jewish Liberals initiated, organised and coordinated various forms of Jewish representation in Russian politics in order to achieve legal emancipation, national- cultural autonomy and even more important the integration of Russian Jews into a modernizing Russian society and economy.
The most comprehensive surveys ever undertaken of Jews in Russia and Ukraine show that their sense of Jewishness is powerful but detached from religion. Their understandings of Jewishness differ from those of Jews elsewhere and create tensions in their interactions with other Jews, especially in Israel. This book examines in depth post-Soviet Jews' attitudes toward religion, intermarriage, emigration, anti-Semitism, and rebuilding Jewish life.
The eighth and final volume of The Cambridge History of Judaism covers the period from roughly 1815–2000. Exploring the breadth and depth of Jewish societies and their manifold engagements with aspects of the modern world, it offers overviews of modern Jewish history, as well as more focused essays on political, social, economic, intellectual and cultural developments. The first part presents a series of interlocking surveys that address the history of diverse areas of Jewish settlement. The second part is organized around the emancipation. Here, chapter themes are grouped around the challenges posed by and to this elemental feature of Jewish life in the modern period. The third part adopts a thematic approach organized around the category 'culture', with the goal of casting a wide net in terms of perspectives, concepts and topics. The final part then focuses on the twentieth century, offering readers a sense of the dynamic nature of Judaism and Jewish identities and affiliations.
In this multidisciplinary volume, leading historians provide new understanding of a time that sent shockwaves through Jewish communities in and beyond the Russian Empire and transformed the way Jews thought about the politics of ethnic and national identity.
This book examines the emotional aspects of revolutionary experience during a critical turning point in both Russian and Jewish history - the 1905 revolution. Shtakser argues that radicalization involved an emotional transformation, which enabled many young revolutionaries to develop an activist attitude towards reality.
This comparative historical sociology of the Bolshevik revolutionaries offers a reinterpretation of political radicalization in the last years of the Russian Empire. Finding that two-thirds of the Bolshevik leadership were ethnic minorities - Ukrainians, Latvians, Georgians, Jews and others - this book examines the shared experiences of assimilation and socioethnic exclusion that underlay their class universalism. It suggests that imperial policies toward the Empire's diversity radicalized class and ethnicity as intersectional experiences, creating an assimilated but excluded elite: lower-class Russians and middle-class minorities universalized particular exclusions as they disproportionately sustained the economic and political burdens of maintaining the multiethnic Russian Empire. The Bolsheviks' social identities and routes to revolutionary radicalism show especially how a class-universalist politics was appealing to those seeking secularism in response to religious tensions, a universalist politics where ethnic and geopolitical insecurities were exclusionary, and a tolerant 'imperial' imaginary where Russification and illiberal repressions were most keenly felt.
Essays by 46 historians reflect the impact of the fall of the Soviet Union on the study of the revolution that birthed it, including better access to archives and new opportunities for collaborations between Russian and other specialists. They cover the revolution as event; actors and the question of agency; parties, movements, and ideologies; institutions and institutional cultures; social groups, identities, cultures, and the question of consciousness; economic issues and problems of everyday life; and nationality and regional questions. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
At a time of both rising anti-Semitism and burgeoning Jewish nationalism, how and why did Russian music become the gateway to Jewish modernity in music? Loeffler offers a new perspective on the emergence of Russian Jewish culture and identity.
Antisemitism has had a long and complex history in Russian intellectual life and has revived in the post-Communist era. In their concept of the identity of the Jewish people, many academics and other thinkers in Russia continue to cast Jews in a negative or ambivalent role. An inherent rivalry exists between "Russia" and "the Jews" because Russians have often viewed themselves-whether through the lens of atheistic communism or that of the most conservative elements of the Orthodox Church-as a chosen people whose destiny is to lead the way to world salvation. In this book, Vadim Rossman presents the foundations and present influence of intellectual antisemitism in Russia. He examines the antisemitic roots of some major trends in Russian intellectual thought that emerged in earlier decades of the twentieth century and are still significant in the post-Communist era: neo-Eurasianism, Eurasian historiography, National Bolshevism, neo-Slavophilism, National Orthodoxy, and various forms of racism. Such extreme right-wing ideology continues to appeal to a certain segment of the Russian population and seems unlikely to disappear soon. Rossman confronts and challenges a range of disturbing, sometimes contradictory, but often quite sophisticated antisemitic ideas posed by Russian sociologists, historians, philosophers, theologians, political analysts, anthropologists, and literary critics.
