1. HISTORIOGRAPHY FROM THE MARGINS

Simon Dubnov was a pioneer, if not the founder of Jewish historiography in the Russian multinational empire, and even more importantly, in Eastern Europe. Dubnov was born in 1860 in a shtetl in what is today Belorus’. He received a traditional Jewish education and learned Russian relatively late, at the age of thirteen. His life was marked by two distinct periods: in the first, during the 1880s, he was attracted to the idea of assimilation into Russian culture, and he resided illegally in St. Petersburg. From the 1890s onward he opted more decisively for Jewish national history and Jewish nationalism. He never graduated from a university but like many of his Jewish contemporaries, was an autodidact historian. Although he had to struggle for financial security as well as intellectual status, he became a central figure in nationally-minded literary and political circles in Odessa in the 1890s. By the 1890s, Dubnov had become not only a well know author of textbooks and articles on Jewish history but also a prominent public figure in the world of Jewish nationalist politics. Although his “World History of the Jewish People from its Earliest Times to the Present Day”^[1] was published after his emigration to Berlin in the 1920s, Dubnov’s worldview and the intellectual background of his major work in history remained shaped by the Jewish milieu of the Russian Empire. During the years after his emigration, until his murder by the Nazis in the Ghetto of Riga in 1941, he was a universally renowned intellectual and was widely perceived as a spokesman for the Jewish and especially the “Ostjudisch” cause.^[2] Despite his European standing, he remained an intellectual and historian of the nineteenth century Jewish world of Russia. Consequently, Dubnov’s master narrative of Jewish history reveals insights into the history of the discourse on the so-called “Jewish question” in late Imperial Russia.
Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi noted that modern Jewish historiography crystallized relatively late and developed parallel to the process of Jewish emancipation.^[3] This interesting observation cannot hold true for the Russian Empire in the second half of the nineteenth century. In the empire of the tsars, Jewish historiography had reached, not least due to Dubnov’s efforts, a well-institutionalized and professional niveau by 1917,^[4] although Jewish emancipation had not yet taken place.^[5] This historical paradox brings to our attention the hypothesis that Dubnov’s historical writing was not a bourgeois or even bildungsbьrgerlich cultural enterprise (as was the case with his predecessors’ “Wissenschaft vom Judentum”^[6] developed in Germany), but was developed from the cultural margins of the Russian Empire. The absence of emancipation was an important factor that provided an impetus to Russian Jewish activities in the field of historical writing. The search for a collective or even national identity through the invention of a Jewish national past was used as an intellectual weapon against the political and cultural discrimination and suppression, which Jews in the Russian Empire experienced in the hands of the Russian government and imperial society. Russian Jewish historians such as Dubnov, “were for the most part men of action as well as scholarship, and their research was a weapon in their struggle for human and political rights for Russian Jewry.”^[7]
In the light of the above, Dubnov’s historical master narrative was not an affirmation of an idealized image of the state and of its leading nation, as was the case with much historical writing in the 19th century, but represents rather a voice from the margins, a narrative that opposed the dominant one, which may make it comparable to the national historiographies of other non-Russian nationalities in the Empire.^[8]
However, this Jewish “writing from the margins” has also a second perspective, as it was deeply rooted in the intellectual traditions of the Russian Empire, for the details of higher education and the structure of the intellectual habitus in Russia were different from those of Germany. If intellectual capital was a mark of elitism or bourgeois self-esteem among the German bьrgertum, in Russia it often implied opposition to the existing regime. The concept of the “intelligentsia,” common to educated Russian society implied marginality and social and political opposition.^[9]
Thus in Russia, Jewish intellectual activities, and the writing of history in particular, were marginalized in more than one sense. As members of the intelligentsia and as inorodtsy, Jewish secular intellectuals in the Russian Empire were forced to write their history as “counterhistory.”^[10] It is interesting to note that secular Jewish members of the Russian “intelligentsia” were also marginalized within the Russian Jewish society in the second half of the nineteenth century. In the intellectual life of Russia Jewry, traditional religious elites still exercised influence, while wealthy Jewish merchants and entrepreneurs had already taken the lead in Russian Jewish society as a whole.^[11] Such secular leaders were often intellectually active and prided themselves on being maskilim. For the most part, these economic leaders received the kind of formal and professional academic training that the Russian Jewish intelligentsia such as Dubnov and his circle lacked.^[12] These well-established maskilim were also patrons of Jewish cultural life in the Russian empire. It was this maskilim patronage that provided the starting point for the Russian Jewish historical writing.

2. HISTORICAL CONSCIOUSNESS AS NATIONAL IDENTITY

Initially, it was those maskilim who began to devote themselves to studies of the history of Jews in the Russian lands, beginning with accounts of Russian legislation concerning the Jews. Most of these nineteenth-century Russian-Jewish secular historians were lawyers or at least had training in jurisprudence that allowed them to examine the legal status of Jews in Russia.^[13] But the “centrality of law”^[14] in early Russian Jewish historiography also prevailed due to the fact that the public discourse about the “Jewish question” in the Russian Empire focused on Tsarist legislation toward the Jews. This kind of historiography drew a picture of Jews as passive objects of governmental action. Dubnov criticized these foundations of Jewish historical writing and their profound weaknesses. In his famous article of 1891, “On the study of the history of Russian Jews and on the establishment of a Russian-Jewish historical society,” he posed an almost rhetorical question: “Does a historiography of Russian Jews exist?” and answered it right away: “We, the Russian Jews, have practically no knowledge of our history in the land where we have resided for eight centuries and, apparently, we do not feel any particular need to become acquainted with it.”^[15]
What Dubnov found lacking among his predecessors was a certain kind of historical approach. Instead, he demanded a history that depicted the Jews as a collective group that took an active part in the historical process. He wanted a history of “what the Jews did, and not of what was done to them.” This kind of history would deliberately cultivate a secular Jewish national consciousness, because in his opinion “the Jewish national idea is based primarily on historical consciousness.”^[16] For Dubnov, Jewish national identity would be brought about by the collective spirit of the people, a romantic notion of the nature of nations inspired by his reading of Ernest Renan.^[17] Similarly to Renan, Dubnov understood this collective spirit to be the result of the common history of the collective group:

"Every generation in Israel carries within itself the remnants of worlds created and destroyed during the course of the previous history of the Jewish people. [...] The soul of each generation emanates from the soul of the (collective) “body” of all preceding generations, and what endures, namely, the strength of the accumulated past, exceeds the wreckage, the strength of the changing present."^[18]

As a historian, he believed it his duty to stir up this inherited knowledge of the collective’s history. This need for energizing the collective spirit was even more pronounced if the nation was in a state of crisis, which was exactly the case for the Jews of the Russian Empire. The collective memory, holding the nation together, would be stronger than the “wreckage, the strength of the changing present.”
Writing history was therefore a task of national importance and an act of heroic opposition for Dubnov. He thus dedicated his life to the maintenance of national memory: “My life’s task has become clear to me: to spread historical science and to work especially on the history of the Russian Jews. I have become a missionary for history.”^[19]

3. THE MASTER NARRATIVE AND THE RUSSIAN CONTEXT

As a historian, Dubnov changed the paradigms of Jewish historiography that had dominated the maskilim tradition of the Russian Empire and of Central and Western Europe. He treated the Jewish nation in the same way other national historians treated their subjects: “In Dubnov, the Russian Jewry found its own version of the nineteenth-century European ideal: the historian as nation-builder and culture-hero.”^[20] Correspondingly, Dubnov’s historiographical opus magnum can be analyzed as a master narrative, that is a coherent historical narrative with an explicit perspective at the service of a national cause. The master narrative, typically, is not only influential in the historiographical discourse of the academic world but also gains influence in the public sphere.^[21] This explains why historians were often granted an important position within the collective, which was also the case for Dubnov. In the public sphere he was referred to as “the leader of the people,” a “teacher,” and the “greatest historian of his time”.^[22]
In the following statement by Amos Funkenstein on the role of historians in nineteenth-century national projects, we find the typical paradox of historiography in the nineteenth century: “While it is true that during the nineteenth century history became professionalized and, therefore, less accessible to the reading public, it is likewise true that at the same time the historian was given a special position as a high priest of culture, responsible for the legitimation of the nation-state.”^[23] This paradox developed along two distinct lines: as an heir to the Enlightenment, historiography was on the one hand developing scientific specialization and professionalization. At the same time, historiography was becoming more and more subject to sacralization. History was rapidly emerging as an academically-established science and used scientific methods, yet at the very same time, it was becoming increasingly important to the creation of myth, tradition, and the supposedly historically-inherited feeling of collective belonging. Dubnov’s historical work fully reflects the double nature of the development of the historical profession in the nineteenth century, for it combined both scientific Standards and Sacralization.
As a national historian Dubnov focused his master narrative on the “Jewish people” or the “Jewish nation.” He did not write the history of a state or a political history but quite in the opposite. The main subject of his historical project was “the people, the national individuality, its emergence, development, and struggle for existence.”^[24] Taking the people as his point of departure, Dubnov situated the Jewish nation in two broader contexts: “vertically,” in the four thousand year-long tradition of Jewish nationhood (as he saw it), and “horizontally” in the setting of Eastern Europe in the nineteenth century. The latter context, obviously, implied the struggle of stateless nationalities striving for various forms of self-government. Eastern Europe in the nineteenth century was structurally shaped by the nationalization of numerous minority populations, and these emerging nationalisms were the centrifugal forces of the three grand multinational empires of the region: the Ottoman, the Habsburg, and the Russian Empires. For Dubnov, the Jews of Eastern Europe constituted just one among many national minorities in European continental empires.
Dubnov’s perspective has recently been revitalized, as in the work of Dan Diner, who refers to the Jews as an “imperial population.”^[25] The historical experience of East European Jews was shaped by extraterritorial and transnational factors, and in that respect they “fitted” even more with the multinational empires of Eastern Europe than with the newly founded nation-states that emerged from the dissolution of empires and strove for national, ethnic, and cultural homogeneity.

3.1 THE INVENTION OF “RUSSIAN JEWS”

The imperial context of Dubov’s writing must be taken into account in order to explain his use of the term “Russian Jews.” Eli Lederhendler rightly claims that there had been no “Russian Jewry” prior to 1917.^[26] The vast majority of Russian Jews, who lived in the Russian Empire from the time of the Polish Partitions onward, had no possibility or even a reason to develop a “Russian” or “Russian Jewish” identity. Their heritage was the history of Polish Jewry with the collective memory of a flourishing past, as well as of the catastrophe of 1648, when atrocities were committed by elements that could be attributed to the “Russian sphere” in late 19th century.^[27] The Jews of the Russian Empire were prohibited from moving into the “Russian” parts of the Empire and were thus surrounded by Poles, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, or Belorussians. Whenever they interacted with their non-Jewish environment they used a language other than Russian: Polish, Lithuanian, or Ukrainian. Even the leading circles or the intellectuals of the cities of the Pale of Settlement were for the most part non-Russian, but throughout the course of the 19th century, those non-Russian elites became increasingly nationalist.
Indeed, it was the transnational and extraterritorial features of the longue duree that formed Jewish identity in the Pale of Settlement. For example, the Jews in the northwest of the Russian Empire proudly identified themselves as “Litvaks”^[28]: Litvaks were held (and held themselves) to be very rationalist and learned. They recalled a noble intellectual past symbolized by the Gaon of Wilna. Wilna was considered the “Jerusalem of Lithuania,” a center of study, of rabbinical as well as modern science, and a place of study houses, streets informally named after biblical sites, and distinguished book publishers – a city where even simple Jews spoke, or so it was often claimed, a language replete with midrashic allusion.^[29] This tradition was used as a stronghold of Orthodox Judaism against mystical “Schwaermerei” as represented by Hassidism. Other long-lived stereotypes illustrate the diverse identities of Jews in Eastern Europe: “Litvaks were known to have a brain, but no heart. Polish Jews were held to be ignorant, their wives dirty. Galicians were supposed to be stingy and vain. All of them claimed that they had earned a degree at the University of Vienna.”^[30]
Despite this diversity, “Russian Jews” existed even though they were very few in numbers. Jews in the Russian Empire who accepted Russian as their literary language and were willing to assimilate within Russian high culture called themselves “Russian Jews.” In 1881, Dubnov had begun to publish in the prestigious St. Petersburg-based periodical Russkij evrej [Russian Jew]. The “Russian Jew” belonged to cultural imagery of a small elite. The spatial center of this “cultural imagination” was St. Petersburg, the heart of the Russian Empire and a city not accessible to the “Jewish masses.” Although Dubnov would not share this elite’s vision of assimilation into Russian culture, it was from their perspective that he referred to the “Jewish masses” of the Russian Pale of Settlement as “the Russian Jews.” This population, rather than Russian Jewish elite of St. Petersburg, were the objects of his vision of Jewish national life in the East European diaspora. In the 1891 article mentioned above, “On the Study of the History of Russian Jews and on the Establishment of a Russian-Jewish Historical Society,” Dubnov turned to the “Jewish masses” in the Pale of Settlement. The Hebrew version of this manifesto gained numerous responses from the Pale, from the Litvaks, and from Polish Jews.^[31] Dubnov addressed them as “Russian Jews” and they responded to his call to “everyone in his language, Russian or Yiddish”.^[32]
Dubnov’s “Russian Jew” was thus a product of cultural imagination, derived from the heterogenity of the historical experience of Jews in the Russian Empire, rather than from a concept of assimilation into a homogenous Russian culture. Dubnov’s attitude to the use of Russian as literary language also fit that pattern. Thus the Russian multinational Empire and not a nation-state – not even a Jewish state – was the framework for Dubnov’s construction. The nation-states in Western Europe, striving for ethnic and cultural homogeneity, were not suitable for Dubnov’s concept of diaspora nationalism. He demanded the rights to national autonomy as the legitimate political outcome of the Jewish nation’s historical evolution in the diaspora.
For Dubnov, autonomous Jewish communities, a modified type of the traditional “kahal,”^[33] would hopefully develop out of the Russian Empire of his time to form a modern, democratic, and multi-national state that would provide the institutional foundation for national and cultural self-government of the modern and secular Jewish nation in the Diaspora.^[34] This theory of political autonomy was designed for the multinational composition of Eastern Europe, namely the all-Russian environment of Dubnov’s contemporaries. Dubnov’s was a pre-1918 concept for a democratic transformation of the multinational entities in Eastern Europe, as were the theories of the Austro-Hungarian Social-Democrats Karl Renner and Otto Bauer.^[35] Dubnov’s plan for Jewish national life did not include a nation state and therefore depended on a vision of an all-Russian polity, which in turn shaped his conception of Russian Jewish identity and his invention of “Russian Jews.” This position differed sharply from, for example, the concept of “Germans of Jewish faith,” which Dubnov harshly condemned.^[36] This complex political vision also led him to view the Jews of the Russian Empire, the “Russian Jews,” as the culturally “hegemonic”^[37] center of world Jewry at the time.
Dubnov’s experience of Jewish crisis and catastrophe in his Russian environment also shaped his Jewish national narrative. Jewish martyrdom in ancient and modern times was an important motif of Dubnov’s master narrative, written from the margins of his Russian-Jewish experience and from the perspective of opposition to the discrimination and suppression of the Jews in the Russian Empire. The anti-Jewish pogroms in late Imperial Russia also played a significant role in the development of Dubnov’s master narrative, as well as in his public activities. Dubnov was the first historian who gathered materials and offered a synthesis of the violent anti-Jewish riots of 1881-84 and of 1903-1906.^[38] His images of the pogroms as carefully organized by the Russian government became part of collective and scholarly memory.^[39] According to Dubnov, the Russian-Jewish catastrophe and the “long war” of the Russian government and the Russian people against the “Russian Jews” that began in 1881^[40] was the reason for the emergence of Jewish nationalism:

"Our national catastrophe, which is as vast as the sea, must cure our estranged intelligentsia. This catastrophe offers it a sacred and exalted ideal and will give meaning and purpose to its life. May all the vital elements of our people, all those in whose souls the ‘spark of Judaism’ is not yet extinguished, all those who strive for the preservation and revival of our nation, unite over the fresh graves of our national martyrs!"^[41]

Crisis and catastrophe, present in Dubnov’s particular Russian-Jewish experience, as well as in Jewish history more generally, constitute an important factor in Dubnov’s construction of Jewish collective memory.

3.2 THE IMPORTANCE OF CRISIS

In his fascinating book “Zachor!” Yerushalmi describes how Jewish historical or proto-historical narratives were always reactions to major catastrophes of Jewish history.^[42] While an undoubtedly rich Jewish intellectual history was lacking almost any kind of historical narrative until modern times, the few texts that dealt with history focused on the destruction of the Second Temple, the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, and the Crusades. Throughout the course of history, Jewish collective memory had to cope with numerous catastrophes. Any new catastrophic experience was integrated into archetypal forms of dealing with catastrophe. Contemporary crises could be integrated into the founding myths of Jewish history, and meaning ascribed to modern events by traditional techniques of collective memory, which could in turn contribute to the “creative survival”^[43] of the Jewish people in the permanent crisis of the Diaspora existence.
Dubnov employed this tradition of Jewish collective memory in his contribution to modern Jewish historiography. He integrated the present catastrophes facing his contemporaries into the long chain of tragic events that composed the course of the entire Jewish history. According to Dubnov, collective memory was constituted by certain historical experiences imprinted into the collective soul in the course of generations: “Because of the similarity of historical destinies during the course of the centuries a sequence of generations acquires the same experiences. These experiences crystallize and account for what can be called the ‘Jewish national soul’.”^[44] It is this “similarity” of experiences, which according to Hallbwachs, gives an historical event the character of a “memory image.”^[45] The memory image transforms the historical fact into a symbol within the meaningful narrative of the collective and thus grants the fact historical significance.
Biblical cataclysms, evidently, were particularly important in Jewish collective memory. The “Exodus” is the central memory image and the founding myth of Jewish culture, religion, and national tradition. The story of Egyptian slavery describes the archetypal confrontation of the Jewish people with “the other.”^[46] The Egyptian “other” is overwhelmingly powerful, barbaric, and atrocious. The memory image of confrontation with the “other” is employed throughout the Biblical and post-Biblical history of the Jewish people. Particularly after the destruction of the Second Temple and during the period of the Diaspora, the confrontation with an almighty and gruesome “Other” remained a constant challenge of Jewish history. Dubnov, for his part, used the archetypal “other” to describe the catastrophic Russian-Jewish relations. He referred to the Russian bureaucracy as “Egyptian dignitaries”^[47] and the Russian government as “the Russian Pharaohs.”^[48] Confronted with the pogroms of late Imperial Russia, Dubnov described the period after 1881 as one long war waged by the Russian government against the Jews, in which the former used the “inexhaustible reserve of pogrom energy, which was concealed in the depth of the Russian masses.”^[49] He thus identified the Russian government as the instigator of pogrom activities, while at the same time condemning the brutality and violent “pogrom energy” of the “Russian masses.”
In order to establish this vision of the pogroms in collective memory, Dubnov used a familiar memory image: “Remember what Amalekt did unto thee by the way as he came forth out of Egypt!” (Deut. 25, 17). Using the archetypal form of catastrophical memory, he reintegrated the old biblical command “Zachor! = Remember!” into the nationalist narrative of collective in- and exclusion that would eventually bring about the autonomous Jewish nation in the Russian Empire: “Do not put your trust in Amalek, neither Amalek’s government nor its people, because the old Russia is bound to reappear in any Russia that is to come!”^[50] This renewed biblical command is clearly directed against Russian-Jewish politics of assimilation. Dubnov’s whole historical narrative, deriving from the memory image of Jewish catastrophe, is not only quantitatively dominated by tales of martyrdom, but also by the metahistorical quality of his description of Jewish suffering. Pharaoh, Haman, the Spanish inquisition, the haidamaks, the Russian tsars, and the black-hundreds all merge into one motif and one tale, in which their evils all overlap with each other in different historical times and epochs. The themes of Jewish catastrophes and martyrdom recurred in Dubnov’s Jewish history according to a pattern of certain “similarity.” This “similarity of historical destinies” called upon the Jews to stand up to their national cause.^[51] One can see that this technique, as well as Dubnov’s missionary approach to the Jewish national memory, lends his narrative an almost sacral character: “This is history written not only in a national but almost in a biblical vain.”^[52]

3.3 A CONTEXT OF THE MASTER NARRATIVE: THE RUSSIAN DISCOURSE ON THE JEWISH QUESTION

A historical master narrative combines disciplinary scientific perceptions with cultural traditions of memory, political debates, and public discourses. It is thus a product of “social memoralization.”^[53] Therefore, Dubnov’s historical work was a product of the public discourse on the “Jewish question” in late Imperial Russia. It was also a part of that same discourse and had its own effects on it. This interaction of the public discourse with the master narrative can be illustrated by the history of the term “Kahal,” which was frequently used in the discourse on the “Jewish question” in the Russian Empire.

3.3.1. “Kahal”

The term Kahal referred to the Jewish community. In sixteenth-century Poland several privileges were granted to the Jews, including that of autonomy of the community. The Kahal was an instrument of the Polish government’s fiscal politics, and as a collective was responsible for the payment of taxes by Jewish subjects. In return, the Kahal was allowed to establish a highly institutionalized level of autonomous life within the community. Jewish authorities were responsible for jurisdiction, as well as for the establishment and maintenance of educational and charity systems within the autonomous Kahal. Granted these privileges, the Kahal authorities were capable of simultaneously aligning the lives of the Polish Jews to traditional Jewish laws and to the regime of the community. In addition to this Jewish self-administration on the local level, the Kahal also sent its delegates to the “Waad,” the “Council of the Four Lands,” where the Kahal leaders acted as guardians of Jewish interests in the whole of Poland-Lithuania. Thus the Jews of Poland had their own pre-modern form of government in the Kahal authorities and the Waad. The term “Kahal” was increasingly used not only for the community, but also for its authorities, “the communal administration, representing the totality of all Jewish institutions of a given locality, including the rabbinate.”^[54]
The Kahal continued to exist, with some modifications, even after the Polish Partitions and the absorption into the Russian Empire. However, since the kind of collective autonomy represented in the institution of the Kahal did not fit into a more modern, absolutist understanding of a well-ordered police-state, the Kahal was abolished as a form of Jewish internal government in 1844. Nevertheless, it continued to exist as a group responsible for tax collection under the Tsars. However, the notion of “Kahal,” underwent certain changes in denotation and became a keyword within the discourse on the “Jewish question” in the second half of the nineteenth century.

3.3.2. The Kahal in the Discourse on the “Jewish Question”

The “Jewish question” in the Russian Empire was subject not only to public debates but also to deliberations by several governmental commissions. The Jews in the Pale of Settlement lived for the most part a life dictated by Jewish traditions. They used their own language, educational system, and charity organizations, and were thus often described as isolated and alien. The Russian government used this “separatism” as an argument to legitimatize its discriminating legislation towards Russian Jews. The maskilim and Russian liberals alike argued for the assimilation of Jews into a more Russian and secular way of life and governmental commissions dealt with the question of whether the discriminating laws would prevent the traditional Jewish shtetl-world from being reformed. While most of the commissions came to the conclusion that Russian Jews were excluded from any possible and desirable all-Russian process of modernization by anti-Jewish legislation, anti-Semitic orders from the highest levels of Russian government repeatedly foreclosed opportunities for emancipation. To the contrary, legal discrimination intensified during the course of the nineteenth century, especially after 1881.
In 1871 a new commission was established, and the “Commission for the Amelioration of the Conditions of the Jews” was assigned the task “of considering ways and means to weaken as far as possible the communal cohesion among the Jews.”^[55] This intensified governmental struggle against Jewish “separatism” was to some extent due to a book published in 1869: “The Book of the Kahal.”^[56] The author of this book was Jakov Brafman, an “infamous apostate,”^[57] according to Jacob Katz. “The Book of the Kahal” was supposedly an edition of the record books (pinkasim) of the Kahal of Minsk from 1794 until 1833. While the edition of the pinkasim was more or less authentic, there were several errors in the translation and Brafman’s annotations drew a dark picture of the Kahal. Brafman suggested that the kahal, despite its abolition in 1844, still existed as an almighty institution, a secret government of the Jews. This organization had allegedly subordinated the Jewish masses with the help of Talmudic legislation, the threat of “herem” (ban), and the promise of “hazaka” (certain priority rights) under a despotic regime. This regime was interested in Jewish “separatism” and had thus forced the Jews into an isolated way of life, as well as promoting severe hostility against their Christian environment. The secret government was said to have exploited the miserable Jewish masses and gained additional profits from the exploitation of non-Jews. Moreover, this local Kahal was itself subordinated to a world-wide secret government: the universal Kahal. Brafman identified the recently founded “Alliance Israelite Universelle” as a constituent society of this universal organization. The universal Kahal became a synonym for a “Jewish world conspiracy.” The term was also used in the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”^[58] and thus became widely known in universal anti-Semitic discourse.^[59]
Brafman’s “Book of the Kahal” became a big success in the Russian Empire. Although it was published with the help of the government, the responses to Brafman’s ideas developed their own dynamic. Russian newspapers – liberal to conservative alike – eagerly reviewed the book and thus helped to bring Brafman’s theory of the Kahal to the attention of a broader public. In addition, Brafman’s image of the Kahal was benevolently received in the “Commission for the Amelioration of the Conditions of the Jews;” “The communications of the governors and the reports of the members of the Committee were all animated by the same spirit, the spirit that spoke through Brafman’s ‘Book of the Kahal.’”^[60] Thus the very commission that was supposed to examine the social conditions of Jews in the Russian Empire used as its main source the conspiracy theories of Jakov Brafman.^[61] Brafman’s Kahal promoted an anti-Semitic image of the Jews of the Russian Empire as forming “a state within a state.” This “anti-Semitic slogan”^[62] could also be found in the literary discourse of the time. Brafman’s reader F. M. Dostoevsky used his formula to describe Jewish separatism in his “Diary of a Writer,” where he expressed his views on the “Jewish question.”^[63] From that point on Brafman’s notion of Kahal became a keyword in the Russian discourse on the Jewish question as it spread within the administration, the government, and the reading public:

"More importantly, Brafman’s work served as a symbolic philosopher’s stone for an understanding of the bewilderingly complex Jewish Question. At a stroke, the entire Jewish Question was elegantly oriented into a new frame of reference. Religious fanaticism, economic exploitation and social alienation, phenomena which heretofore had been disparate problems, could now all be viewed as deriving from the same first principle, the kahal. [...] “The kahal” became a convenient catch-all phrase to characterize any aspect of Russian Jewry that opponents found inconvenient, offensive or undesireable."^[64]

3.3.3. Jewish Participation in the Kahal-Discourse

Most reactions by Jewish authors to Brafman’s reinterpretation of the term “kahal” were very defensive. In the maskilic tradition, the “kahal” was also perceived very critically. The maskilim had written about the Kahal as the main cause for Jewish isolation, the persistence of traditional ways of life, exploitation within Jewish communities, and a system of oligarchic subordination. Jewish reformers marked the Kahal as a roadblock to internal Jewish modernization and, ultimately, emancipation:

"[They] published articles against the kahal establishment and its persecution of the maskilic Jewish youth, and even sought the support of the Russian authorities in denouncing the orthodox leaders of the Jewish community."^[65]

In addition to Brafman’s book, some materials used by “Commission for the Amelioration of the Conditions of the Jews” were drawn from memoranda written by so-called “expert Jews” about the problem of the Kahal.^[66]
After the publication of Brafman’s book, however, most Jewish intellectuals and scientists, confronted with this new anti-Semitic notion of the Kahal, tried to deconstruct this image by pointing to its mistakes and misinterpretations. Most important in this respect was the publication by the Jewish journalist I. I. Shershevskii, who wrote several articles combined in the collection “About the ‘Book of the Kahal,’” first published in 1872.^[67] Shershevskii attempted to prove that Brafman’s thesis resulted from a vast amount of mistranslations, mistaken dates, and chronological misunderstandings. He also argued that Brafman misinterpreted the internal hierarchies of the Kahal. But as Dubnov complained, “it was in vain that Brafman’s ignorance of rabbinic lore and his entire distortion of the role played by the Kahal in days gone-by was exposed by Jewish writers in articles and monographs.”^[68] And the famous Russian Orientalist of Jewish origin D. A. Khvol’son analyzed aptly: “Everybody has read Brafman’s ‘Book of the Kahal’ but nobody has ever heard of Shershevskii’s important and thorough investigation of the falsification.”^[69]
The Russian-Jewish public recognized that the invention of the Kahal as an anti-Semitic symbol was a threat and many tried to appease the debate about the Kahal. Since the Kahal was abolished in 1844, most members of the Russian-Jewish maskilic elite argued that no form of communal self-administration was present in the Pale, let alone a secret government. In April 1882, in a reaction to a wave of pogroms in the Pale of Settlement, the delegates of largest Jewish communities gathered in St. Petersburg to find political answers or solutions to the problems and suffering caused by the pogroms and the resulting emigration. After two weeks of meetings, their only statement was a public denial of the Kahal:

"We, the undersigned, the representatives of various centers of Jewish settlement in Russia, rabbis, members of religious organizations, and synagogue boards, consider it our sacred duty, calling to witness God Omniscient, to declare publicly, in the presence of the whole of Russia, that there exists neither an open nor a secret Kahal administration among the Russian Jews; that Jewish life is entirely foreign to any organization of this kind and to any of the attributes ascribed to such an organization by evil-minded persons."^[70]

3.3.4. Dubnov’s Contribution to the Kahal-Discourse

Within this Jewish mainstream of denial of the
Kahal’s existence, critique, and appeasement towards the anti-Semitic threat, Dubnov reacted in a completely different manner. For the leaders of Jewish communities, who denied the Kahal’s existence, Dubnov had nothing but contempt: “The signers of this solemn pronouncement were evidently unaware of the degrading renunciation of national rights which was implied in the declaration that not only had the Jews lost their former comprehensive communal organization – this was in accordance with the facts – but that, were such an inner autonomous organization to exist, they would regard it as a criminal offence, subversive to the public order and punishable by the forfeiture of civil rights.”^[71] In contrast, he took up portions of the anti-Semitic arguments and reinterpreted the symbol of “Kahal” and the notion of “a state within a state” within the Jewish national context:

"In all generations, our enemies cry out: “There is a certain people scattered abroad and dispersed among the peoples and their laws are diverse from those of every other people” (Est. 3,8), and this, in recent generations, has been called a state within a state. And all this time, the community of Israel traverses its historical path declaring: “Indeed, a state within a state, an internally autonomous group existing within an outer group, the state; and so, by nature, it should be...”^[72]

Dubnov reinterpreted the Kahal to become the central symbol and most important memory image of his master narrative. The main subject of his history was “the people, the national individuality, its emergence, development and struggle for existence.”^[73] Dubnov analyzed this national development as a historical evolution of autonomism: “This nation, endowed with perennial vitality, fought always and everywhere for its autonomous existence in the sphere of social life, as well as in all other fields of cultural activity.”^[74] The Jewish struggle for autonomy is symbolized in community institutions and in the evolutional process culminating in the Kahal: “Even at the time of the existence of the Judean state, the Diaspora had already attained a high development and had its autonomus communities everywhere. Later on, it also had central organs of self-administration, its own legislative institutions (corresponding to the Sanhedrin, the Academies and Patriarchs in Roman-Byzantine Palestine; Exilarchs, Geonim, and legislative academies in Babylonia; the aljamas and congresses of communal delegates in Spain; kahals and vaads, or congresses of kahals, in Poland and Lithuania, etc.)”^[75] The Kahal, criticized within the Jewish maskilim and the Russian anti-Semitic discourse, was according to Dubnov, the legitimate outcome of the historical development of the Jewish people; at the same time, it presented the Jewish path into modern existence in the form of an emancipated nation:

"The latest national movement among the Jews (i.e. the kahal. – A.H.), linked as it is with this historical process and combining the older heritage of autonomism with the modern principle of minority rights, testifies to the immortality of this eternal driving force of Jewish history."^[76]

Based on this historical perspective, Dubnov invented a tradition that was transformed into a political vision. The Kahal became the building block of his political concept of Jewish autonomous national life in the Diaspora. In his party program, “On the tasks of the Folkspartay,” he linked this understanding of the Kahal to his theory of autonomism:

In our program of autonomy, the Folkspartay proposes to use the idea of communal self-administration that has been hallowed by the historical experience of many generations. [...] In all periods of the Diaspora, Jews in different countries had a substitute for territorial autonomy in the form of a more or less extensive communal organization. In the areas of Jewish settlement in Russia today and in the former Polish state there was a highly ramified organization of communities, unions of communities, and councils of the lands.[...] The unit of self-administration in our time can only be the free people’s community (kahal), with elected councils that administer the local cultural institutions, co-operatives, and philanthropic agencies.^[77]

3.3.5. The Structural Significance of the Kahal in Dubnov’s Master Narrative

The notion of the Kahal was of structural importance for Dubov’s master narrative. Not only was the whole narrative quantitatively dominated by a historical description of different forms of communal self-government throughout Jewish history, culminating in the kahal, but the kahal also held fundamental significance for Dubnov’s innovations in the methodology of Jewish historiography. Dubnov’s new approach to Jewish history as ‘a history not of what the Jews did, but of what was done to them’ was linked with his methodological focus on the “sociological view.”^[78] In the nineteenth century, historical writing was mostly concentrated on the state and its policies. Dubnov presented in the form of the Kahal a political and politically active institution as a “surrogate of state.”^[79] Dubnov based his methods and questions of the contemporary historiography of the Jewish people from this definition of the Kahal as a form of statehood. He did not write a mere “history of ideas” or a history of anti-Jewish legislation (presenting a history of suffering and learning, as “Wissenschaft vom Judentum” often did), but rather composed a history of autonomous communities, of active institutions, of the communal life of the common people. Dubnov’s methodological innovations were inherently linked to his introduction of a new type of sources into Jewish historiography. While the traditional understanding of Jewish history as intellectual history relied on literary, philosophical, religious, and mystical texts as historical sources, Dubnov wanted to learn about the political pursuits of the institutions of communal self-government. He thus began collecting and editing the record books of the Kahal, the pinkasim. It is interesting to note that Brafman’s “Book of the Kahal” was itself an edition of the pinkasim of the Kahal of Minsk, though intentionally misarranged and misrepresented. One of Dubnov’s main contributions to Jewish historiography was the compilation of pinkasim, in turn linked with his first public appearance as a historian through the 1891 article “On the study of the history of Russian Jews and on the establishment of a Russian-Jewish historical society.” In this article, Dubnov appealed to the Russian Jewish masses to collect the pinkasim and help publish and record them:

"I turn to all of you: help to construct the great building of history! Not everybody with a normal education can be a great author or historian, but all of you can help to collect documents and build up our history. […] Let us start working, let us gather our exiled, let us straighten them up, collect them and let us build the temple of our history on this fundament."^[80]