Introduction

Summary

The study of the history of the Jews of the Soviet Union has made considerable progress in the last thirty years. The subject has been treated from new angles, using new methods of research, and central issues have been tackled that were previously almost completely ignored. Nevertheless, the results have been patchy and we still lack even the raw materials for a definitive history of the Soviet Jewry.

The aim of the present book is modest: to present the successive stages in the annals of Soviet Jews since the outbreak of the October Revolution. There will be little descriptive writing, only essential quotations, and a pre-defined set of central themes.

As early as 1891, Shimon Dubnov, the most influential historian of East European Jewry, asked, ‘Is there a historiography of the Jews of Russia?’ and replied without qualification, ‘No such historiography exists in the true sense of the word.’ He may have been right, and the general and specialized works on Russian Jewry that began appearing early in the nineteenth century were of little help in the historiography of Russian Jews towards the end of the century. This writing reached its peak, in quantity and quality, between 1900 and 1917.

Interest in the history of Russian Jewry was first aroused in the 1870s by the publication of a two-volume collection of articles by a young Jewish jurist, I.