This wonderful edited volume is a welcome contribution to knowledge about tsarist and Soviet policy toward Jews and Muslims, the two largest groups of non-Christians in the nineteenth-century Russian Empire and the early Soviet Union.
The volume is original in its comparative approach to the histories of Jews and Muslims in Russia—they are usually written in isolation from one another—and consideration of how their histories were connected over two centuries of tsarist and Soviet rule. The editors propose that Jews and Muslims in Russia should be considered comparatively in part because they “presented the imperial bureaucracy with similar challenges” (7).
Nine essays cover a range of topics, including a comparison of Jews and Muslims in the tsarist army; a comparison of Jewish and Muslim “Enlightenments” in the late nineteenth century; the late nineteenth-century emergence of Yiddish as a literary language; a comparison of Jewish and Muslim parliamentary politics after 1905 (when a parliament first appeared in Russia); and Jews' ambivalence about their place in communist society and the Soviet state in the early twentieth century.
The history of Jews and Muslims in Russia and the USSR has important specificities that distinguish it from other European cases. These are laid out in the introduction and highlighted in various chapters. I will summarize the main points here. Muslims first came under Russian rule in the fifteenth century, which was early compared to other European empires. Russia acquired a Jewish population late by comparative European standards, only in the late eighteenth century, when it annexed a large chunk of Poland and inherited nearly a million Jewish subjects. Unlike most other European countries, Russia always had more Muslims than Jews. The all-Russian census of 1897 recorded around 14 million Muslims and 5 million Jews (11 and 4 percent of the empire's population, respectively). Muslims lived all over the Russian empire, mainly in the Caucasus, Crimea, Central Asia, and the Volga-Ural region, and western Siberia. Jews, by contrast, lived almost exclusively in the so-called Pale of Settlement in Russia's western borderlands, per late eighteenth-century decree by Catherine the Great. Jews were legally restricted from living elsewhere, though there were small-scale exceptions, including some 65,000 Jews who lived in Crimea, the Caucasus, and Central Asia by the late nineteenth century (most of them non-Yiddish-speaking).
The volume's comparative framework yields fascinating insights, and raises provocative questions for further exploration. Unlike Orthodox Christianity or Catholicism, Judaism and Islam traditionally had no formal religious hierarchy; therefore, both faced attempts by the Russian imperial government, as part of its efforts to integrate and effectively govern these large non-Christian populations, to reorganize and control their religious leaderships (65). Institutionally, Franziska Davies notes that there was no Jewish equivalent of the Orenburg mufti, and argues that Russia created a more elaborate bureaucratic structure for Muslims than Jews (61). Significantly, Vladimir Levin argues that Jews were more active in the late nineteenth-century revolutionary movement than Muslims, and that they were generally more engaged in the political life of the empire (67–68). He attributes this in part to geography (the 1905 revolution was especially active in the western borderlands), and uneven levels of urbanization (most Jews were largely town- and city- dwellers, while most Muslims were peasants) (68). And yet, after 1905, as disadvantaged minorities, both Jews and Muslims demanded civil equality (68).
Did one group fare better than the other under Russian rule? Historians Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern and Davies suggest that overall Muslims suffered less discrimination than Jews under the tsarist and Soviet regimes. This broad point is suggestive, if not fully supported with evidence, and should be taken up by other scholars. It would be interesting, for instance, to know, specifically how, where, and why the Russian and Soviet authorities treated Jews and Muslims differently, and, if so, how this may have influenced their relations with one another, and perceptions of their place in the empire and Soviet society and politics. Petrovsky-Shtern notes that several Russian officials had experience governing in both Jewish and Muslim regions of the empire (Aleksandr Dondukov-Korsakov, Konstantin von Kaufman, and Konstantin Palen, among them), and asks whether these officials “transferred their administrative and cultural experiences from their treatment of Jews to their treatment of Muslims”? (26).
Levin points out that both Jews and Muslims had coreligionists abroad, and were at times suspected of disloyalty by the tsarist regime for this. He also suggests that both confessional groups played a role in Russian foreign policy decisions, though for different reasons (65). This fascinating point also invites further elaboration and exploration. Jews and Muslims were arguably the most mobile of Russia's confessional groups, and yet are largely missing from standard narratives of Russian foreign policy and migration.
Less developed in this volume, though no less fascinating, are questions about Jewish-Muslim interactions, and shared histories. Levin argues that overall Jews and Muslims under Russian rule had little contact with one another, apart from the exceptional cases of non-Ashkenazi Jewish communities (Bukharan, Mountain, and Crimean) who lived alongside Muslims (67). However, this assumes that Jews and Muslims generally remained rooted in their regions of origin, which was becoming less true in the late nineteenth century, when modern transport made long-distance travel, migration, and resettlement possible. This question deserves further attention, and Odessa—Russia's main Black Sea port and a destination for Jewish and Muslim migrants and settlers in the late imperial period—is a good place to start. Studies of Jewish and Muslim global networks, and of patterns of contact and exchange with coreligionists abroad, are needed to help contextualize the history of Russian policies toward its Jews and Muslims, which often focus strictly on the domestic arena.
The authors offer a few examples of Muslim-Jewish interaction and collaboration, and of members of these confessional communities finding common cause in their status as minorities that suffered discrimination. One is that of Crimean Tatars and Zionists collaborating to resist Soviet persecution by forming a human rights movement in the 1960s–70s (25).
And yet, as Levin argues, common problems faced by Jewish and Muslim communities in Russia after 1905 did not result in cooperation between their political elites (81). This had to do with their different positions and levels of integration into the empire, perceived and real. Symbolically, Levin argues, Muslims were perceived as participants, while Jews were not. He argues that this was expressed architecturally in the imperial capital of St. Petersburg, where the government allowed the construction of a large, centrally-placed mosque, while the city's synagogue was an unimpressive building that “can barely be found today without a guide” (82).
Importantly, this volume joins a growing body of scholarship on the overlapping, intertwined, and comparative histories of Jews and Muslims in Europe more broadly. It deserves to be read alongside other recent works such as Maud S. Mandel's Muslims and Jews in France: History of a Conflict (Princeton, 2014) and Emily Greble's Sarajevo, 1941–1945: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Hitler's Europe (Cornell, 2011), among others. It is a first step toward integrating the Russian and Soviet cases into this broader, fascinating discussion about the fates and entangled histories of Jews and Muslims in modern Europe, and the legacies of these histories into the present.
