The present issue completes the annual theme of Ab Imperio for 2003, which focused on “Imperial Borders and Liminalities.” Within the framework of this theme we tested the potential of the concept of “boundary” to serve as a metanarrative for understanding the imperial and national historical experience. The journal’s issues of this year explored situations of transfer, political, economic, and symbolic boundaries within and between national and multiethnic communities and channels of translation of specifically imperial or national experiences to new contexts. The issue on Russian nationalism was focused on the problem of the alleged center and its relation to the boundaries that were drawn in the history of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. Finally, in the present issue we focus on the problem of limits of marginality, i.e. the situation in which from the view point of European civilization, a marginal status (despite many centuries of presence and involvement in the continent’s economics, culture, and politics) becomes the core identity of a people, whose history is inseparable from the history of the European continental empires. This paradox forced us to formulate the theme of the present issue in the following way: “The Limits of Marginality – Jews as Inorodtsy of Continental Empires.”
The working hypothesis for all the materials of this issue is that the Jews have to be reconsidered as an “imperial nation.” This notion may appear controversial at first sight. We suggest it in order to understand the entire spectrum of relationships between the Jewish population and the empires. As an “imperial nation” Jews utilized and at the same time transgressed their marginality. This notion remained true when the empire placed them on the margins of the legal, social, economic, and political space. From this position Jews identified with the collapsing imperial regime which was disintegrating under the pressure of centripetal national movements. It also remained true when Jews attempted to integrate into different segments of imperial society. Despite the fact that the European continental empires contained the largest Jewish populations, we know much less about the role of Jews as an “imperial nation” than about their role in the history of different European nationalisms.

"As the obligatory Other, the indigestible foreign element, Jews have defined everything that Europeans, at various times and places, have felt that they are not. They have played this role effectively because they have been able to represent two opposites simultaneously: progress and tradition, revolution and capital, West and East, licentiousness and patriarchy. This system relies on the Jew as an empty sign, the single unpredictable and negative factor in an otherwise stable universe."^[1]

In this comprehensive formula, G. Safran captured the experience of studies of European Jewry in the age of Nations and Nationalism. The Jews appear to be an “empty sign”, which acquires meanings when a nation attempts to draw its boundaries and when it needs the Other as a manifest “border marker”. These diverse meanings are also generated by different groups within the Jewry in response to the challenge of the situation. The Jew as the Other is a “border marker” because s/he encapsulates the boundary: the Jews that reside within the national body in their formation, appearance and language (and maybe even thoughts) might resemble representatives of the dominant nation. For this reason different attitudes toward Jews and degrees of inclusion and exclusion reveal in the most telling manner the nature of a national project.
When placed in the imperial context the formula of the Jew as the universal Other looses its certainty and acquires complexity and numerous qualifications. The Jew in an empire is a part of a multilayered hierarchy in which his or her otherness is relative and is being permanently redefined; moreover this otherness is related to those of other groups of an empire’s population. Thus, “the Jewish question” in the Russian Empire is set in various contexts, be it the Jewish-Polish relationship and the governmental policy in the Western borderlands, the colonization of Central Asia, or Russian nation-building. All European empires with significant Jewish population were home to processes that were structurally similar to those that were taking place in the Russian Empire: the Jews of Prague were placed in the situation choosing between Czech and German nationalism, while the Jews of Galicia unequivocally supported the imperial project and the German “civilizing mission”. Therefore, the definition of Jews as an “imperial nation” is capable of explicating the “Jewish question” in its full complexity, that is in the context of various tripartite relationships: the Poles, the Jews, and the imperial center; the Ukrainians, the Jews, and the imperial center; the Russian nationalists, the Jews, and the imperial state policy, etc. The hypothesis of an “imperial nation” allows us to uncover different layers of experience in Jewish history: as one part of Jewry is excluded from imperial society, other parts appear to be integrated into different segments of imperial social life through identification and/or acculturation into Russian (Polish, German) high cultures.
Apart from the fact that Jews seemed to be the only universal minority that transgressed the borders between European continental empires, they also created possibilities for dialogue (both positive and negative) between empires and national states. Jewish politics seemed to be a test of a state’s allegiance to the ideals of the Enlightenment; it was a test of modernity. Thus, empires with the largest Jewish populations in Europe had to confront the experience of national states. Jewish politics was a measuring stick which allowed for the interrelating of supposedly incompatible phenomena. At the same time the multifaceted Jewish historical experience was understood and described within the framework of common Jewish history, which was separate from and marginal to the defined context of European history.
The described problem of Jewish universality/marginality can be approached within the framework of new imperial history. In this framework it is possible to discern the attempts of empires to transform themselves into national states and to understand the national state as a heterogeneous space undergoing homogenization. The “universal European minority” – the Jews – again can be used as a measurement of general processes in empires. They are a window into the ways in which complex societies, political regimes, and boundaries function.
This situation implies the possibility of fruitful imperial comparative studies, including comparative study of imperial Jewry, of policies towards Jews and of Jewish strategies of adaptation in empires and national states. In view of such a comparison it is impossible to directly explain or define “reactionary” Jewish policy as a result of the backwardness of continental empires, particularly in the undemocratic regimes. It is evident that European democracies did not have a blueprint for effective and fair management of multiethnic populations within the political, administrative, and ideological framework of the nation-state. A comparison of the continental empires’ and Western European national states’ strategies toward nationally heterogeneous populations (and toward “the Jewish question” in particular) appears to be especially interesting. From the point of view of “new imperial history” such a comparison would be especially fruitful considering that Russian reality fed the European discourse of “orientalization” of empires unable to resolve the Jewish question. In that discourse, empire became a synonym of intolerance, archaism, and organic inability to reform itself (the acceptance of the Russian term “pogrom” as a global symbol of Jewish policies in the Russian Empire attests to the influence of this “orientalizing paradigm”).
At the same time the suggested perspective is capable of changing the view of Jewish history properly. This approach construes Jewish history as “history in context,” in which “context” means not the specifically Jewish milieu but the context of empire. The central question from this perspective is Jewish socialization in the heterogeneous and uneven space of empire. From this viewpoint a comparative approach appears to be an indispensable analytical tool for writing Jewish history. We sought to represent this perspective in the structure of the present issue of the journal. The materials therein explore Jewish strategies of transgressing and/or utilizing their own marginality in empires as well as the attempts of empires to define and redefine the limits of Jewish marginality in the processes of modernization, unification, expansion, government formation, colonization, etc. This optics brings about interesting results. Articles from the “Theory and Methodology” section demonstrate that differences between Jews of continental empires (Russian and Habsburg) in defining their own role in imperial society might have been deeper that those between “Western” and “Eastern” Jewry. This latter distinction is traditional for historiography and a tradition of Jewish self-reflection. The distinction highlighted the difference between the Jews of empire and Jew-citizens of national states, the former symbolizing oppression, archaism, and autarky, the latter – emancipation, modernization and assimilation. The same distinction could also be formulated at the beginning of the 20th century where an opposition existed between Jews with a sense of nationhood and those lacking national identity. Empire could have its own “Western” and “Eastern” Jews; it could implement a plethora of Jewish policies at the same time whose directions were determined by the general situation inside the empire or in the outer world. Empire created such situations in which Jewish policy was significantly influenced by other national minorities and those minorities determined the limits of marginality of imperial Jewry. At the same time Jews of empire adjusted to the imperial situation by identifying with supranational regimes, forging their own identity in imperial borders (Russian Jews) and laying claim to their ancient and continuous presence on the historical territory of the empire. They strove to move to the center away from the borderlands and occupied islands of relative freedom (Siberia, Harbin). They contributed their own ways of life to the culture of the dynamically developing imperial cities. The articles in the present issue explore different encounters between Jews and empire. This issue’s materials testify that the limits of Jewish marginality in empire was variable, often porous and most frequently – multifaceted. Finally, those limits changed as the empire changed. The Soviet project of ethno-federalism revealed in a new way one of the facets of marginality of Jews in empire. Accepting the claims of other national minorities of the former tsarist empire, the Soviet leadership presented the Jews with a dilemma: either full identification with the revolution and rejection of specific national identity or territorialization, which led to emigration or resettlement in the Jewish Autonomous Region and its main city, Birobidzhan. Finally, the history of the 20th century demonstrated literally the limits of the marginality of Jews both in the Europe of nations and the Europe of empires. These limits were delineated by the Holocaust.
Thus, the marginality of imperial Jewry can itself be understood as an empty sign, which can be filled with different meanings. A historical interpretation of these meanings can provide insights into the logic of imperial states and societies as well as into the life strategies of Jews as an “imperial nation.”

Editors of Ab Imperio:

I. Gerasimov
S. Glebov
A. Kaplunovski
M. Mogilner
A. Semyonov