Marina Mogilner's A Race for the Future: Scientific Visions of Modern Russian Jewishness tells the story of Jewish race science as it emerged in the late-Russian empire and early Soviet Union. At the turn of the twentieth century, national distinctiveness was increasingly important in the Russian empire. Jews, however, were by and large not considered to be a “nationality,” which was taken by the figures treated in the book as a liability to be overcome. The concept of race and innovative forms of biopolitics were intended as solutions to the problem: Jewish difference was biosocial and therefore scientifically demonstrable. “Jewish self-racialization” was intended as a bulwark against invisibility or erasure in a nationalizing empire, and a tool for achieving collective development and progress in the “postimperial” (6) Soviet Union. Self-racialization was taken to be an urgently needed project for the purpose of bringing about progress for Jews in Russia and the Soviet Union, hence the double meaning of “race” in the title of the book.
The book is organized into two main parts framed as intellectual history (part one, “The Science of Race”) and social history (part two, “The Biopolitics of History”), respectively. The methodological shift between these two halves entails consideration of an impressive range of sources and highlights Mogilner's attunement to the relationship between methodological approaches and the questions they allow us to answer. The problems the book addresses, in other words, justify the integration of the two approaches—racial discourses formulated by the Jewish intelligentsia intersected with social histories of biopolitical practices and institutions that affected the Jewish population and the imperial contexts in which they lived. The book indeed offers “a comprehensive story of ‘race’ as an empowering discourse embraced by Jews in the Russian Empire in response to the specific challenges of their imperial situation” (4).
A Race for the Future makes several important contributions to our understanding of empire, the relationship between politics and race, and changes from imperial to “postimperial modernity” (3). Jewish self-racialization in Eurasia and eastern Europe during the period under consideration, Mogilner argues, was a form of subaltern anticolonial resistance to the threat of Jewish groupness disappearing in the context of the Soviet Union's incompatible efforts to deal with the question of nationality. It is ironic, therefore, that these efforts at creating a Jewish race science themselves have, until now, been forgotten because of historical “aphasia” for reasons Mogilner addresses in the second half of the book.
Mogilner's book contributes to studies in “new imperial history,” explaining the roles and places occupied by Jewish intellectuals and professionals within the Russian and Soviet “imperial situation” in terms of complexity, incongruity, unpredictability, and paradox. For instance, the three primary figures profiled in the first half of the book—Samuel Abramovich Weissenberg, Arkadii Danilovich El΄kind, and Lev Iakovlevich Shternberg—represent three distinctive “paradigms” of Jewish racialization and three distinctive political visions. At the same time, all three paradigms depended on “preserving empire in the region as a form of democratized supranational polity” (8). Empire was a “dominant context-setting category” for Jewish self-racialization throughout the period, even, paradoxically, into the 1920s when empire was effectively omitted in the consciousness of some “as a political reality of the recent past” (207). While the new Soviet regime claimed to have transcended empire, however, Mogilner argues that the Soviet “Imperial situation” did not go away, even if people at the time (and many historians since) thought it did.
Anticipating changes to the imperial situation is an important dynamic among historical actors in the book racing to the future. Jewish self-racialization was motivated by an awareness that Russia was changing in ways that challenged the status of ethnic and national minorities. There was increasingly “less and less space for imperial particularism and hybridity,” which prompted Jewish intellectuals to “reinvent themselves for the future postimperial modernity” (40). The entire period under consideration (1860s–1930s) beginning with the Great Reforms was indeed affected by expectation and at times foreboding in politics, culture, and otherwise. Jewish intellectuals hedged against the future by reconceptualizing their own form of groupness in terms of race, a category independent of the bureaucracy and legal structure of the state and by virtue of its seeming rationality and universalism. The efforts to racialize Jews, however, were fraught with the same tensions that characterized other trends towards “universal modernity,” namely, that the universalistic category of race entailed assimilation and at the same time assertions of purity and difference. Even El΄kind, who was part of the liberal anthropological network based in Moscow that stressed mixing, hybridity, and assimilation when it came to explaining how groups interacted with one another, considered Jews to be exceptional in terms of their racial purity (98). Considering Jews to be a distinctive race, for El΄kind as for the other characters in the book, was “an anticolonial strategy” shaped by the changes they saw and anticipated in imperial politics (6, 103).
The book joins a growing body of work that “transcends the historical divide of 1917” (6) in its chronology. As with other works that take this approach, the transcendence is more than chronological: considering trajectories that cross the revolutionary year, Mogilner uncovers patterns and explains ideas and practices that would otherwise be difficult to see and understand. The revolution in October 1917 is not the explanation for historical change. Rather, it is one of many sets of events in a longer transformation that affected the main object of analysis here, the process of self-racialization of Jews. The conceptual demotion, so to speak, of 1917 is evident, among other places, in the index, which does not contain entries for “revolution,” “Bolshevik,” “Soviet,” any leading Bolsheviks, “Civil War,” “communism,” or other related terms that might direct the reader to the places in the themes and characters examined in the book that intersect with the revolution.
Given this, it is striking how important nevertheless the changes wrought through the 1917 Revolution and ensuing Civil War are for Mogilner's argument. One realizes that the “transcendence” of the 1917 divide does not mean the book lacks an account of its consequences. Instead, the approach allows Mogilner to register the impact of 1917 over the course of almost two decades, at which point historical materialism finally supplanted sociobiological groupness in Soviet accounts of human difference. The impact is evident in changes in thinking among Jewish intellectuals. For example, Shternberg advanced a more overtly racial conception of Jewishness after 1917 to protect against the threat of “postimperial modernity” (143) assimilating Jews out of existence. The biopolitics practiced by Jewish doctors and statisticians described in the second half of the book demonstrate a clear shift in Jewish race science toward national consciousness. Mogilner defends the striking claim that “Jewish activists performed collectively like a nation-state without having any Jewish state backing their efforts” (158). Pre-revolutionary conceptions of race coalesced, in a sense, in the biopolitical activism after 1917.
In another sense, the continuities in Jewish race science across 1917 highlight the extent to which the “imperial situation” was radically changing all around them. In the early 1920s, biosocial data was thought to be “immune to ideological pressures” (203), making it even more attractive as a basis for Jewish nationhood. Over time, however, there was less and less space for what Mogilner calls “apolitical politics” (208) in the Soviet state, a regime in which everything came to bear ideological weight, including its own efforts at anticolonial nation-building on its own terms. Eventually, for example, the Society for the Protection of the Health of the Jewish Population (OZE), founded in 1912, and other Jewish self-help organizations outlived their ability to effectively function because of their “apolitical politics.” They did not espouse a political ideology, which was, as Mogilner shows, better suited to an imperial than the Soviet state (180). Jewish biopolitics based on late imperial conceptions of the Jewish race ultimately gave way to the Soviet materialist and geographical “solutions” to national difference. In the case of Soviet Jews, this meant the creation of a Jewish autonomous region in eastern Siberia, Birobidzhan, in 1934. Until then, Jewish activists operated within a “gray zone of Jewish biopolitics” (226)—neither fully sanctioned nor wholly illegal.
Mogilner's story ends in the 1930s, but World War II and its aftermath are essential context for understanding one of the main contributions of the book. The reason the story of Jewish self-racialization has not been told until now is the “aphasia” that erased Jewish contributions to creating race science in the pre-World War II period. This was forgotten, censored, or self-censored after, and because of, the Holocaust (158). Mogilner's book, through thorough and careful intellectual and social historical analysis, recovers the process whereby Jewish intellectuals and professionals deployed “race” as a means of self-reflection and self-reinvention. It took on different meaning in the hands of different people, and in the context of different and variably changing imperial settings. The book is a model of argumentation. It is also a compelling combination of empirical and conceptual contributions to questions of Eurasian and east European Jewish history, the history of race, and the limits and possibilities of human agency in modern “imperial situations.”
