Polish Shtetls under Russian Rule, 1772–1914

Summary

ON 24 Heshvan 5561 (11 November 1800), the parnasim, or communal elders, of the Minsk kahal voted to send a delegation to Vitebsk ‘to see how things are done there’. At first, this may appear a curious decision. What could the Jews of Minsk, a large and respected community, learn from their ‘little brothers’ in Vitebsk? The answer has to do with chronology: since 1772 Vitebsk had been under the power of Russia, serving as a laboratory for the implementation of policies designed to regulate a newly acquired Jewish minority for whom there were no existing legal provisions. Russian policy had brought Belarusian Jewry greater statutory rights than any other contemporary Jewish community in Europe. The Jewish denizens of Minsk, having fallen under Russian control only in 1793, wished to learn how to deal with their new rulers.

This incident may serve as a salient reminder that the Jews of the Russian empire were in fact Polish Jews—or, more accurately, subjects of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, the state that was devoured by Russia, Prussia, and the Habsburg empire in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. As its name implied, the Commonwealth was a multi-ethnic state, inhabited by peoples of diverse ethnicities, religions, and traditions. Even the Jews of the Commonwealth were a diverse lot: there were mitnagedim, hasidim, Karaites, and even a few maskilim—as the partisans of the Jewish Enlightenment movement, the Haskalah, were known. The Yiddish that they spoke was not uniform across regions. Their political traditions differed, especially between the Jews of the Polish ethnic heartland and those of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Nor were political boundaries a bar to communications across frontiers; the boundaries between the lands of (Russian) Ukraine and (Austrian) Galicia were especially porous.

In response to the question ‘did Russian Jewry exist prior to 1917?’, Eli Lederhendler has answered in the affirmative. He has argued that the factors uniting the Jews of the empire were greater than those dividing them. One may accept Lederhendler's assessment with one major caveat: we must differentiate clearly between Jews in the provinces of the Pale of Settlement and Jews in the Kingdom of Poland.