Stephen M. Berk Year of CrisisYear of Hope. Russian Jewry and The Pogroms of 1881-1882

Summary

The pogrom movement of 1881-82 had both an immediate and a longrange impact on the subsequent development of modern Jewish history. Firstly, the pogroms gave rise to a massive Jewish emigration from tsarist lands that served to redistribute dramatically the world Jewish population. Secondly, the existing Jewish communities of central and western Europe, confronted by the plight of their Russian co-religionists, were forced to evaluate their own identities as Jews and their relationships to both foreign Jews and to fellow non-Jewish citizens in the lands they were living in. Finally, the assessment of the pogroms, and especially the subsequent hostile response to the Jewish community by the Russian government, led numbers of Jews to question whether the liberal, integrationist path remained the most effective means by which to attain true equality for the Jews of Russia. For such writers, the picture of a genuinely harmonious coexistence of Jews and non-Jews in a context of mutual respect and acceptance did not appear to be credible in the aftermath of the riots. Hence, the post-1881 development of those Jewish movements and ideologies which focused attention primarily on Jewish needs and interests rather than on the general perfection of society can be traced to a Jewish reading of the pogroms as they focused attention on the modern forms of anti-semitism in Russia and in other European locations. In retrospect then, Jewish responses to and evaluations of the events of 1881-82 have been especially significant as they have contributed to the subsequent Jewish effort to deal with the new realities of life, be they in new geographical locations, or in new understandings of identity, or in the forging of new relationships with the non-Jewish world.

In assessing the character of modern Jewish history in recent years, scholars have been paying more and more attention to the 1881-82 period as they have analyzed the impact that Jewish responses to the pogroms played in the shaping of the last one-hundred years of Jewish history. While Stephen Berk's book belongs to this general body of literature, it is not one of the stronger representatives of such scholarship. In the main, this is because Berk is more interested in describing the events of 1881 rather than in examining, in a critical manner, the reactions to or internalizations of those events by either the Jews or the Russians.