General Introduction

Summary

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY saw a fundamental transformation of Jewish life in eastern Europe. The attempts of governments of the Enlightenment and of their successors to turn the Jews of the region from a religious and cultural community transcending national boundaries into subjects (and, in some cases, citizens) of their respective states disrupted traditional Jewish life. By and large, in the lands of the former Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth these efforts were unsuccessful. In the areas annexed by Prussia, government policy did lead to a radical restructuring of Jewish life and the emergence of a community whose members mostly defined themselves as ‘Germans of the Jewish faith’. But elsewhere, integrationist policies, which stimulated a positive response from important sections of the Jewish elite, were not consistently pursued and in the tsarist empire were for the most part abandoned after the wave of pogroms of 1881–2, which the authorities blamed on ‘Jewish oppression’ of the surrounding population. As a result, although a minority of Russified Jews emerged in the tsarist empire and a similar group of ‘Poles of the Jewish faith’ in the Kingdom of Poland and in Galicia (Austrian Poland), the large majority of Jewish communities in these areas came to define themselves and to be seen by the surrounding popu - lations as a proto-nation, like the other emerging nations of the area, the Ukrainians, Lithuanians, and Belarusians.

The ‘new Jewish politics’, with its stress on peoplehood rather than religion as the marker of a modern Jewish identity, now began to displace integrationism within a significant section of the Jewish elite. Various brands of Zionism now competed with the aims of those who wished to establish an autonomous structure for the Jews in the diaspora. Socialism, in both its reformist and its revolutionary incarnations, also gained increasing support, sometimes in a specifically Jewish form as in the Bund. It was, in a sense, a new form of integrationism, with its thesis that only the abolition of capitalism and the exploitation it inevitably involved would enable the genuine integration of the Jews into the societies in which they lived. In response to these developments, those who sought to preserve a traditional religiously based Jewish identity began to have recourse to modern methods of political mobilization in order to defend their interests.