Historical scholarship has turned its attention to studying not only historical events, but also the act of remembering and recalling those events. Nineteenth and early twentieth century historians have often been credited with creating a “usable past” that would become the basis for nation building. This phenomenon has been particularly noticeable in Jewish history, a discipline that has always been acutely aware of the authority of memory and its connection to communal awareness.^[1] In the words of Ismar Schorsch, historical thinking has become “the dominant universe of discourse in Jewish life and historians its major intellectual figures.”^[2] It is historical thinking, he argues, that defines Jewish modernity itself. When Russian Jewish historians in the early twentieth century turned toward the construction of a usable past for the relatively new collective of “Russian Jewry,” though, they were confronted with numerous problems. As Benjamin Nathans asked in his work on the development of Russian-Jewish historiography, “How were diverse Jewish communities, having come under Russian suzerainty during different eras and as part of widely diverging societies, to be made part of a single ‘Russian-Jewish’ history?”^[3] This paper will discuss how the Jewish Historical and Ethnographic Society sought to unite these disparate communities within a single historical narrative and the problems it encountered along the way.
The Jewish Historical and Ethnographic Society (JHES) was formed in St. Petersburg in November 1908 in the aftermath of the liberalization of tsarist restrictions on public assembly that followed the Revolution of 1905. Before becoming an officially recognized society, the group had already been meeting as a commission of the Society for the Spread of Enlightenment Among the Jews of Russia. The commission in turn was an outgrowth of a circle of lawyers, meeting around Aleksandr Passover, who compiled compendiums of Russian law relating to the Jews in order to ascertain the legal situation of Russian Jewry. Over a period of fifteen years, this circle evolved into the JHES. Among the members of the JHES were liberal activists of all stripes as well as both amateur and professional historians and ethnographers. They included the preeminent historian of Russian and Polish Jewry, Simon Dubnov; the political activist and future Duma member, Maksim Vinaver; the lawyer, publicist and amateur historian, Mikhail Kulisher; the anthropologists Lev Shternberg and Samuel Weissenberg; and the writer and ethnographer S. An-sky, whose famous ethnographic expedition to Volhynia and Podolia was conducted under the auspices of the JHES. The society was part of a broad movement toward the formation of voluntary associations among the Jews of Russia, as many educated intellectuals in the capitals as well as common folk in the provinces sought new secular modes of identity and public assembly. The JHES was also part of a global trend among Jewish scholars to form historical societies with the aim of studying Jewish history in local contexts. In particular, it was modeled on the French Société des Études Juives, the American Jewish Historical Society, and the Jewish Historical Society of England.
The aspirations of the society were clearly articulated in its charter, approved in March 1908:

“1) The goals of the JHES are a) studying and researching all realms of Jewish history and ethnography; and b) working out theoretical questions of historical and ethnographic scholarship.
2) To reach these goals the Society will a) arrange meetings of its members, with proper permission [from the authorities], for the purpose of academic reports and discussions; b) arrange public lectures about Jewish history and ethnography; c) publish, in fulfillment of these articles, works in the form of single books, collected volumes, and periodical publications; d) propose problems to be solved by awarding monetary prizes and rewards.”^[4]

The primary means by which the JHES disseminated and articulated its vision of Russian Jewry was through its quarterly journal, Evreiskaia starina (Jewish Antiquities), edited until 1918, by Simon Dubnov. Dubnov also used the journal to promote his theories of hegemonic centers and communal autonomy. Indeed it was in Jewish Antiquities that most of his monumental three-volume History of the Jews in Russia and Poland from the Earliest Times Until the Present Day was first serialized.^[5] The journal generally consumed over sixty percent of the society’s annual budget and was regarded as its most important activity. Jewish Antiquities was a scholarly journal, of the type of thick journals common throughout contemporary Russia, with a full and extensive scholarly apparatus. It published in the Russian language, but used Hebrew and Latin typescript extensively. In addition to publishing scholarly articles, the journal also published book reviews, letters to the editor, significant primary documents in numerous languages, memoirs, and news from the JHES.
After enumerating the means by which the society would accomplish its goals, the charter continues by delimiting its area of responsibility, placing contemporary Imperial Russian borders at the center of its mission. Paragraph 3 of its charter states: “the region of activity of the society is the entire territory of the Russian Empire.”^[6] This clause echoed those of similar societies formed in Western Europe, such as that of the Jewish Historical Society of London, whose charter stated: “the objects of the Society shall be: a) the promotion and organisation of research into and study of, the history of the Jews of the British Empire.”^[7] And indeed, the Jewish Historical Society of London did study Jewish settlements in the New World, but rarely the older Jewish settlements of Cochin or the Bene Israel in India, implicitly recognizing that these communities could not properly be called British Jewry. The JHES under Dubnov’s leadership, on the other hand, was adamant that the histories of ancient Jewish settlements in the colonies be incorporated into the imperial narrative. In Dubnov’s introduction to the first issue of Jewish Antiquities, the goal of encompassing the entire region of Imperial Russia was again articulated: “we intend to embrace all epochs – from the development of Jewish settlements in ancient Rus and Poland to the present times; our range of interests encompass the Dark Ages of medieval times, as well as the bright prospects of modern times and the recent past, through which our generation is living.”^[8] Dubnov and the other St. Petersburg-based founders of the JHES sought to embrace the precinct of the Russian Empire as a legitimate framework within which to envision the limits of Russian Jewry. In practice, however, they found that this was a harder vision to maintain than their rhetoric implied. For instance, despite the relative novelty of a Russian Empire embracing the lands of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the society saw fit to include the entire history of the Commonwealth within the rubric of the history of the Russian Empire. In its acceptance of the borders of Imperial Russia as legitimate historical and national boundaries, the Jewish Historical and Ethnographic Society sought to form a new sense of cultural identity among its constituents. Although most of its members recognized the vast differences that encompassed the Jewish communities within this broad rubric, the historians who comprised the leadership of the JHES nevertheless felt fit to include all within a single purview, regardless of the separatist tendencies of individual communities. Thus, the JHES leadership implicitly imposed Russian imperialist notions of nationality upon its subject communities.
It should be noted, however, that many of the historians of the JHES were ardent opponents not only of tsarist policies toward the Jews, but also of the tsarist polity in general, and even belonged to oppositional political parties. Thus, political opposition to the tsarist polity coexisted with a cultural, or intellectual endorsement of the imperial project. This is hardly unusual in the history of historiography. Many have observed before the imperialist tendencies of national histories that devour peripheral communities into a single narrative rubric. However, in this case it was not the conquerors cementing a military conquest by enforcing their own historical narratives upon their subjects. Rather, many Jews, as members of a minority group within the empire, embraced imperial boundaries as both a means of solidifying national awareness within the Jewish community and of communicating with general Russian society through recognized categories. The JHES’ sanction of these borders led many of its members to construct a national narrative that would provide a justification for greater rights, and recognition of a distinct Russian Jewish national identity within the empire. This proto-nation had to be formulated in a manner that would allow it to embrace all Jewish groups within the Russian Empire while at the same time differentiating itself from non-Jews within the same geographic area.
The problem with this endeavor was that the territory of the Russian Empire did not correspond to the way the Jewish communities living within its borders traditionally defined their own communal limits. The nucleus of the community and the largest segment of the Jewish population in the Russian Empire was the Ashkenazic Ostjuden of the dismembered Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, who despite geographic, ideological, linguistic, and other differences, had since at least the eighteenth-century shared many basic cultural assumptions and historical perceptions. Those Ostjuden comprised only a segment of an even larger bloc of world Jewry – Ashkenaz. But with the advent of the Haskalah and subsequent formation of nation-states in Western and Central Europe, Ashkenaz as a collective identity diminished. It had largely failed to adapt to the new conditions of nationalism that emerged throughout Europe. Instead, Jews in the lands of Ashkenaz grafted new national identities onto preexisting Jewish notions of the self. The Ashkenazic Jews of the French Rhineland became French Jews whereas those on the east side of the Rhine became German Jews, or even famously “Germans of the Mosaic Faith.” By the mid nineteenth-century, though, Jews living in Imperial Russia had not yet adopted the identity of “Russian Jews.” Instead, the Ashkenazic segments of this population, dwelling in the lands of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, were widely regarded as Ostjuden.
This bloc of world Jewry was united by several shared historical experiences, including residence centered in shtetls and a religious life dominated by Hasidism (either in support or in opposition to it). It included not only most of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, but also parts of what became neighboring Rumania and Hungary.^[9] However, the Polish partitions had divided this population, most evidently by excluding Galicia from the Russian Empire, annexing it instead to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Although Galicia was the most obvious district whose Jewish population was excluded from the new category of Russian Jewry, it was not the only one. The new imperial borders of the Russian Empire cut across the territory of the Ostjuden. The new Russian Jewish identity had to take these anomalies into account.
The Russian Jewish community was not only innovative in terms of those it excluded, but also in terms of those it included. The territory of the Russian Empire embraced numerous Jewish communities whose cultural identities had little in common with the Ostjuden majority. These included Bukharan Jews of Central Asia, Tat-speaking Mountain Jews of the Caucasus, Greek Jews in the Crimea, Karaites, and even Subbotniks. The JHES’ charter obligated it to amalgamate the histories of these communities with those of the Ashkenazic Ostjuden. The proponents of a Russian Jewish identity knew that the test of their success would be in their ability to incorporate these liminal groups into their rubric. For this reason, Jewish Antiquities and the Jewish Historical and Ethnographic Society spent a good deal of effort on these marginal communities. Through an analysis of the limits of Russian Jewry, those communities who are borderline either by virtue of geographic location or cultural distance from the Ostjuden of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, we can examine the process of consolidating Russian Jewry.

KARAITES

The Karaites are a Jewish sect characterized primarily by their rejection of the Talmud and rabbinical tradition. Traditional Karaite histories trace their origins to ancient Israelite schismatics from the reign of Jeroboam in the tenth century BCE. More likely they came into being in eighth-century Babylon under the influence of eastern Islam and the leadership of Anan ben David. The first Karaite communities in the territory of the Russian Empire emerged sometime during the Tatar conquest of the thirteenth-century, when Karaite communities appeared in the Crimea, probably having emigrated from Byzantium. By the end of the fourteenth century, many Karaites had migrated to Lithuania, forming large communities in Troki, Lutsk, and Halicz. Although the Karaites had been treated similarly to rabbinical Jews under Polish rule, once they came under Russian rule, the two communities began to separate.^[10]
In the 1830s the historian Abraham Firkovich, who had been a staunch defender of Karaite independence from rabbinical Judaism, claimed to have found inscriptions demonstrating that the Karaites had settled in the lands of Russia in antiquity, having been among the first settlers of the Crimean peninsula and the probable source of the Khazar conversion. He hoped that by demonstrating Karaite antiquity and independence, he could convince the tsarist government to exempt Karaites from most restrictions imposed upon the Jews. Firkovich’s arguments resonated within St. Petersburg, and probably contributed to Alexander II’s 1863 bestowal of full citizenship rights to the Karaites. Soon after Firkovich’s 1874 death, though, Abraham Harkavy and others demonstrated that Firkovich had falsified names and dates and even forged crucial parts of the documents on which he had based his findings.^[11] Nevertheless, many Karaite historians and activists continued to resist identification with rabbinical Jews.
Along with the refutation of Firkovich’s scholarship came a reaction against his ideology and support for Karaite independence. The liberal historian Iulii Gessen, for instance, looked back upon a period when Karaites and Jews were equated within legal discourse. He showed that the privilege to the Jews of Troki (Judaei Trocenses), dated 24 June 1388, probably referred to the Karaites of Troki rather than the rabbinical Jews, as did the privileges granted to the Jews of Brest one week later. Yet both seem to have been applied to rabbinical Jews in practice. Similarly, most official documents of the next century and a half (including the privileges of Casimir Jagiello of 1441, Aleksander of 1492 and Sigismund I of 1507) did not recognize the Karaites as a distinct community, presumably equating them with rabbinical Jews. Although the Jews and Karaites were continually engaged in polemics against each other, argued Gessen, they were still regarded as a single community throughout the fifteenth century.
The first instance Gessen could find of the Karaites seeking separate status was in 1514 when Mikhail Yosefovich was appointed starosta of all Lithuanian Jews, at which point the Karaites of Troki petitioned not to be included within this category. Their petition was approved. The legal separation of Jews and Karaites continued in many respects from this point on, and was affirmed by the Russian government after the partitions, first when Catherine freed the Karaites of the double tax and permitted them to own land, and then when Nicholas I exempted them from the military draft laws. In 1835 the government found that the 1388 privileges of Troki did not apply to rabbinical Jews and revoked their residency rights on this basis. Gessen ended his article with an appeal to reinstate the spirit of the ancient privileges that allowed for Jews and Karaites to live side by side as a single community.^[12] It was not only Gessen who dreamed of such a reunion, but by including articles on the Karaites, the editors of Jewish Antiquities implicitly regarded their history as part of the Russian Jewish past.

CENTRAL ASIAN, CAUCASIAN AND CRIMEAN JEWRY

It was not just the Karaites that the JHES sought to incorporate into its purview but other groups of non-Ashkenazic Jews as well. One means of accomplishing this was through the publication of works, particularly travel accounts, that introduced readers to other populations of the state. Ethnography and travel have long been identified as one of the primary means by which expanding states encompass remote societies.^[13] In order to promote the ideology of a united state it was crucial that residents of one region feel a sense of affinity with their new neighbors in another part of the state. With this goal in mind, the JHES sought to familiarize its readers with Jewish communities from beyond St. Petersburg and the Pale of Jewish Settlement, where most of its readers resided, and to create a historical narrative for these peoples when a usable one was lacking. An article on Uralic Jews, for instance, complained of the lack of information available on the history of this community.^[14] In his article on the historian David Ben Eliezer Lekhno (d. 1735), I. Markon called for more attention to Crimean Jewry, and in particular for the publication in Russian translation of Lekhno’s Devar sefatayim, a Jewish Chronicle on the Crimean Kingdom of the Tatars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.^[15] Lekhno incidentally, who was of Polish origins himself, was heralded as a scholar who had been able to bridge Jewish and Karaite communities, much as the JHES sought to do.
In order to help remedy the lacuna of information available on non-Ashkenazic Jewish communities of Russia, the society sponsored an ethnographic expedition by the Jewish anthropologist Samuel Weissenberg, which traveled from Tashkent to Eupatoria (on the western coast of the Crimean Peninsula), traversing Central Asia, the Caucasus and the Crimea. In December Weissenberg delivered his findings to a meeting of the JHES. His report, which was subsequently published in Jewish Antiquities, was largely devoid of anthropological jargon, and was filled mostly with ethnographic observations on the language, customs, education, physical appearances and religious observances of the Jews he encountered.
Weissenberg was probably the most prominent Jewish anthropologist in Russia at the time, having made a reputation both within Russia and abroad as a physical anthropologist and cultural ethnographer.^[16] An opponent of those theories that posited universal Jewish racial characteristics, Weissenberg studied the differences between world Jewish communities. “Although by religion and national-spiritual (national’no-dukhovnomy) temper they compose a single common group,” he wrote “Jews of various countries differ from one another not only ethnologically – by language, beliefs, and habits – but also anthropologically – by type.”^[17] Weissenberg’s previous research, based on extensive travel through the Near East, Europe and Russia, had led him to advance the theory that world Jewry is divided into two fundamental types: the dolicocephalic (long-headed) Jews of North Africa and Palestine and the brachycephalic (broad-headed) Jews of Eastern Europe and Germany. The question that interested Weissenberg was how those he regarded as the original dolicocephalic Jews had become brachycephalic. The answer, he believed, lay in the Caucasus, where the Jews were also brachycephalic. This would give credence to the theory that modern Russian Jewry is descended from the pre-Christian Jewish communities of the Caucasus rather than from German Jews who fled Christian persecutions in the medieval period. Thus, modern Russian Jewry, he believed, was the progeny of the ancient Jewish communities of the Caucasus, ethnically linking these two communities.
According to Weissenberg, all also shared common myths of origin, tracing their departure from the Near East to the Lost Tribes of Israel. Indeed, the Crimean Karaites had used this as an argument for expanded rights, claiming it exonerates them from responsibility for the crucifixion of Christ, which occurred long after their departure from Palestine. Regardless of their original birthplace, both Jews and Muslims in Central Asia believed that they arrived in this region directly from Persia during the glory age of Central Asia, when they were a demographically significant population. Indeed, Benjamin of Tudela wrote of 50,000 Jews in Samarkand, and there are still Persian elements in the language of Bukharan Jews. It is alleged that during the time of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane, many Jews converted to Islam and to this day there are large Muslim communities of Jewish provenance in Central Asia. Thus, according to this theory, not only are the Jews of Central Asia ethnically analogous to Ashkenazic Jewry, but are even ethnically related to non-Jewish populations of the Russian Empire. Further, Weissenberg continued, both Crimean Jews and Karaites are related to the possible progenitors of all Russian Jewry – the Khazars. His theory of the ethnic composition of Crimean Jewry ends by emphasizing the intermingling of Crimean Jews with Ashkenazic Russian Jewry, thereby cementing the geographic proximity of the two with ethnic mixing.
Weissenberg portrayed Russian Jewry as a mosaic, to which he ascribed hierarchical values. Despite their quaintness and exoticism – or perhaps as a result of it – the non-Ashkenazic Jews of the Caucasus and Central Asia were at the bottom of this hierarchy. He noted:

“the rather low cultural level of Mountain Jews and of Georgian Jews is particularly striking in comparison with the Armenians and Georgians among whom they live. At the time that the Armenians and Georgians were developing independent cultures, growing in breadth and depth even during those unfavorable conditions, and their intelligentsia enthralled the entire Caucasus, supplanting all that is foreign, the Jews remained behind this movement. And if in later times, one notices a turn for the better, one ought not to ascribe this completely to their own initiative, but rather to the influence of Russian Jews, whose success called forth some emulation. The complete backwardness in everything, even in religious matters, forced the Jews of the Caucasus to search for support among their Russian brethren since a long time ago.”^[18]

Between the Mountain Jews and Georgian Jews, Weissenberg placed the Georgians at the bottom. The Mountain Jews have a higher standard of living, claim to be an older group (tracing their descent to the Lost Tribes) and possess their own language – Judeo-Tat, which he believed would help them preserve their own unique customs against the hegemony of Ashkenazic Russian Jewry. As for the Crimean Jews, he believed they would mix easily with Ashkenazic Jews:

“The origins of the Crimchaks (Crimean Jews) has been lost for centuries. One can only say that the Turkish blood in them is less than in the Karaites, although the well-known relationship of the two peoples with the Khazars can hardly be denied. But the Crimchaks during the middle ages and modern times constantly mixed with their European brethren. …In more recent times, the opportunity to mix with Russian Jews became more frequent.”^[19]

Thus in his public lectures and the series of articles he published on his travels, Weissenberg articulated a vision of Russian Jewry encompassing disparate groups with their own perceptions of history, myths of origins, and cultures. Yet all were intermingled and connected, ultimately forming a single diverse community.

SUBBOTNIKS

In amalgamating non-Ashkenazic Jewish communities into the rubric of Russian Jewry, the JHES also expanded the category to embrace sects and religious groups not always identified as being Jewish. For instance, both the Subbotniks (Sabbath observers), who accepted the Hebrew Bible but not the Talmud, and the Gery (Proselytes) were considered appropriate for inclusion within the narrative of Russian Jewry. The Subbotniks were converts to Judaism from Russian Orthodoxy who originated in Inner Russia (primarily Riazan, Saratov, and Voronezh) and spoke Russian as their mother tongue. The Subbotniks not only observed the Sabbath, but also prayed as Jews – in Hebrew whenever possible and with phylacteries and prayer shawls – kept the Jewish dietary restrictions, observed Jewish laws of ritual purity, and celebrated Jewish holidays. Both Subbotniks and Gery were not generally recognized as Jews. For instance, Weissenberg could observe that “among the Bukharan Jews the opinion is widespread that the Jews of the Caucasus are not Jews at all, but are Gery.”^[20] Yet in its efforts to be inclusive and to bring as many groups as possible within the Russian Jewish collective being constructed, the JHES decided that sectarians would be included within its purview.
In 1913 the journal published a serialized article about the Subbotniks of Siberia, written by, according to Dubnov’s introduction, “a Subbotnik from the village of Zima, in Irkutsk region (he signs ‘Mosei Zakharov Koz’min, from the Jewish Subbbotnik sect’), who used to be a farmer, but now teaches children Hebrew literacy and Bible in a Subbotnik kheder.” Dubnov continued with a call for further investigation into the group: “welcoming this first attempt to portray the unknown life of the Subbotniks from the perspective of one of their own, the editors of Jewish Antiquities will gladly give a place for similar authentic accounts of the life of Jewish sectarians (Subbotniks, Gery, and others) in various places, particularly in the Caucasus, where their numbers are very significant.”^[21]
The article was a compilation of information gathered from Koz’min’s 83-year-old father together with Koz’min’s personal observations. “Having begun to collect information on my co-religionists a long time ago,” he wrote, “I did not intend on using this for publication, and was making notes only for myself and for the memory of my descendants. But on the advice of those who are interested in daily life and Subbotnik believers, I decided to make this information available for publication.”^[22] In addition to a historical account, the article provides ethnographic information on the community, describing their relations with Jews, their language, their prayer houses, their religious practices, daily life, their economic situation, demography and social life.
Throughout the article, Koz’min differentiates between “Jews” and Subbotniks, with phrases such as “in the village of Zima, amidst the settlement of our Subbotniks, there lived several Jewish families,”^[23] thereby taking for granted a distinction between the two groups. Further Koz’min notes that tension between Jews and Subbotniks had increased in recent years with some Jews referring to Subbotniks as “ignorant goyim,” and Subbotniks countering with the epithet “zhid.” Intermarriage between the two groups was extremely rare, and when it did occur, usually failed. The only successful marriages between the two groups came when the husband was a Siberian-born Jew, rather than a migrant from the Pale. Even more rare were intermarriages in which the husband was a Subbotnik and the wife a Jew. Thus in most respects the two communities recognized their own distinctness and retained their separateness.
As with all non-Ashkenazic groups, though, Koz’min admitted a hierarchical relationship between the Subbotniks and the Siberian Ashkenazic Jews. The Subbotniks, according to Koz’min, were always entirely reliant upon the local Jewish population. Koz’min displays a great deal of reverence toward the Jews and describes how the Subbotniks emulated Jewish practice and learned from resident Jews:

“The names of these good and noble people, the former teachers of our ancestors, were always recalled with reverence by my father… This is confirmed in many of my father’s stories of their good lives. It is evident that they were not aloof observers. Recognizing the religious poverty of our ancestors, who were like children, not knowing anything about the Jewish religion, they took them into their embrace. They were both teachers and mentors for the Subbotniks, leading them in close friendship.”^[24]

Even in current times, Koz’min writes that the Subbotniks follow the example set by the Jews, even when that example is not a positive one, such as the failure to observe the Sabbath.^[25]
Further the narrative structure that Koz’min gives to his history of the Subbotnik community mirrors precisely that of Russian Jewry. The story begins with anti-sectarian persecutions under Nicholas I and the expulsion of the Subbotniks to Siberia. Koz’min displays a great deal of reverence for the elder Subbotniks who retained their faith in the face of such persecutions. The story ends with a sense of apprehension about the future of the community. He laments the decline of religious observance, notes the youth’s newfound predilection for secular learning (freethinking) and for political parties, and chastises the community for intermarriage. In a warning that could have come from countless Jewish writings of the time, Koz’min writes: “It is not very difficult to foresee their dismal future. Scarcely three to four generations have passed and they, whose religious spirit is not being preserved by anyone or anything, scatter like sheep without a shepherd and mix with the surrounding population.”^[26] Clearly Koz’min sought to include Subbotniks within the narrative of Russian Jewry, a move welcomed by Simon Dubnov and the other editors of Jewish Antiquities.

GALICIA

The examples of the Karaites, Central Asian and Mountain Jews, and Subbotniks demonstrate the inclusiveness of Russian Jewish identity as advanced by the JHES. The editors of Jewish Antiquities, though, also accommodated a countervailing narrative that was chiefly advanced by a group of professional historians based in Austrian Galicia and led by the renowned Lwуw historian Majer Balaban. This group articulated a vision of Ashkenazic identity, which included Galicia – indeed was centered on Galicia – but excluded non-Ashkenazic Jews such as the Karaites. Balaban, for instance, in an article published in Jewish Antiquities, argued that in the early period of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth Red Ruthenian (Galician) Karaites retained completely separate existences from rabbinical Jews. They even used Tatar as their spoken language until the seventeenth-century.^[27] Balaban’s Galician colleague, Ignacy Schipper shared this opinion, pointing out that many cities in the fifteenth century registered the Karaites as a separate community.^[28]
Balaban’s vision of Polish Jewry was far more connected to the Ashkenazic Jews of Western Europe than to the Karaites and Mountain Jews of the Imperial Russian vision. His analysis of the legal history of Jews in Poland indicates the extent to which Polish Jewish culture is derived first and foremost from that of Germany Jewry. Although most scholars affiliated with the JHES recognized the tremendous impact migrations from Western and Central Europe played on Russian Jewish history, the historical narrative promoted by Dubnov and others nevertheless began with the Khazars. Even those who questioned the Khazar theory of the ethnic origin of Russian Jewry and denied all linkages of a cultural or spiritual nature between the two, still sometimes regarded the Khazars as the progenitors of Russian Jewry, often for no other reason than that they were among the first Jews to occupy the territorial space of what would become the Russian Empire. Rejecting all attempts to trace the origins of modern Ostjuden to the Khazars, Balaban sought the origins of Polish Jewry in the German migrations of the thirteenth-century instead. Although some early settlers came from Khazaria, it was from the later settlements of German Jews that Polish Jewry derived its cultural, religious, and legal traditions. He saw Polish Jewry as part of a larger Ashkenaz community rather than of Russian Jewry. He also opposed those, such as Ludwik Gumplowicz, who argued that Jewish institutions in Poland were unique to Poland.^[29]This is most evident in the thirteenth century privilege of Boleslav of Kalisz (1264), which he showed is clearly based on the prototypes of earlier privileges granted to the Jews of Austria by Friedrich II in 1244, which in turn are based on earlier eleventh century privileges. The Polish privileges, though, did expand on several rights given in earlier models, most notably by adding new protections from accusations of ritual murder, and by expanding Jewish mercantile rights.^[30]
In contrast to Dubnov, Gessen and other members of the JHES based in the imperial capital, who made their reputations on grand narratives of Jewish history in Russia, Balaban’s emphasis was on local history. The communities he studied were smaller entities, provinces (Galicia), cities (Lwуw), towns (Zolkiew), and even a single street. One of his most original contributions to Jewish Antiquities traced the history of the Jewish street (Ulica Żydówska) of Lwуw in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He situates the Jewish street in the midst of the multicultural environment of Lwуw, where Jews lived alongside Russian Orthodox, Dominicans, Armenians and others.^[31] The emphasis on local history implicitly challenged the grand imperial narratives of the JHES. This article together with Balaban’s other writings also demonstrated an interest in Jewish relations with non-Jews rather than relations between different Jewish communities. For instance, his “Jewish Doctors in Krakуw and the Tragedy of the Ghetto (XV-XVII c.)” juxtaposes stories of Jewish success in Krakуw with oppressions and atrocities committed against these same Jews. Representative is the story of Moisei Fishel, the son of Efraim Fishel, a wealthy merchant, confidant of Sigismund I, and chief tax-collector for Little Poland. The younger Fishel was a Padua trained doctor, respected talmudist, student of Jacob Polack, and royal appointee to the position of chief rabbi of Krakуw and later, together with Shalom Shakhno, co-chief rabbi of Little Poland. Despite this incredible resume and royal connections, Fishel, according to Balaban, was still victimized by the religious fervor of the Counter-reformation. Balaban believes he was burned to death in 1542 for the alleged crime of providing education to a Protestant heretic of the Judaizing sect. (Dubnov in an editorial note questions this hypothesis). Similarly, the Italian immigrant to Krakуw, Mattathiah Calahora, was an apothecary in Krakуw. One day he chanced upon the Dominican Priest in the market square and got involved in a discussion with the priest regarding the messiah, conducted in Italian. The priest invited Calahora to conduct a disputation with him in the monastery. Calahora refused but suggested instead that he put his thoughts in writing and present them to the priest. A few days later a German-language letter was found in the monastery blaspheming the Virgin Mary. Although he denied writing the letter, and indeed did not even know the German language, Calahora was accused of heresy and convicted to a gruesome execution in 1663.^[32] Balaban believed that these anecdotes from everyday life reveal the intimate details of the history of Jewish life in Poland in the only way it was actually lived – on a small, local scale.

UNIVERSALISM AFTER 1917

Following the Revolutions of 1917 the JHES continued to exist, but in a truncated form. Paper shortages, financial problems, and the general confusion of the Civil War contributed to its journal’s haphazard publication in its final decade. With Dubnov’s 1922 departure to Berlin, Lev Shternberg took over as editor and articulated a new vision of the journal’s mission and purview. Shternberg, a former Narodnik who had spent time in exile in Sakhalin Island for his political activity, was one of the most favored anthropologists under the new Soviet regime. His work on the Gilyak (Nivkh) of the Russian Far East led to his appointment as Dean of the Ethnography Division of the newly-created Geography Institute (which would become the Geography Department of Leningrad University). His enhanced role at the JHES was a product of his intensifying interest in Jewish affairs. With the consolidation of the Soviet state and its universalistic pretensions, the vision of Russian Jewry originally expressed by the JHES and other activists was outdated. As Shternberg wrote in his introduction to the 1924 edition of Jewish Antiquities:

“The horizon of our academic work has broadened. In our historical investigations we now can move out of the narrow frame of the history of Jews in Russia, Poland and Lithuania. We may permit ourselves the luxury of accepting for investigation the most varied general and particular problems of our past, covering all periods and all countries of the Jewish sojourn.”^[33]

The Soviet state in its infancy reacted against the authority of all imperial boundaries and borders, instead committing itself to the ideal of universal jurisdiction. Shternberg’s revision of the JHES’ mandate was a reflection of this political change.
Shternberg’s own article, “The Problem of Jewish national psychology,”^[34] published in the 1924 volume, provided an anthropological justification for extending the purview of the journal and society to universal Jewry. He argued against Weissenberg that “the Jewish people possess a complex of psychological particularities, which continue to run through its entire history, regardless of all vicissitudes and all changes in its historical fate.”^[35] All peoples, believed Shternberg have prototypical identifying traits. As nations come into contact with other nations, though, intermixing occurs, making it sometimes difficult to identify the prototypical traits. It is the job of the anthropologist to isolate those characteristics that still dominate. The psychological traits that have dominated among Jews, regardless of where they live or when they lived, he believed, are rationalism, monism, social activism and optimism. These traits developed as a logical byproduct of monotheism: “monotheism, in the end, is not one doctrine of a single god, it is a complete worldview …from the idea of a single creation to the ethical monotheism of the prophets to the idea of single humanity to the idea of fairness as a law of social life, to the ideal of the kingdom of God on earth – each step follows one from the other in a logical progression of discovery.”^[36] Thus, “intellectualism and rationalism, which clearly manifested themselves in the creation of the conception of monotheism, always remained the most characteristic particularities of Jewish creativity.”^[37] As evidence, Shternberg wrote, “Is it necessary to cite names? The names can fill pages, but among them are such names as Heine, Boerne, Marx, Erlikh, Bergson, Hertz, Einstein, etc, familiar to all literate people!”^[38] He found the roots of Jewish social activism in the biblical figures of Moses and Ezra and the second century rebel Bar Kokhba, all of whom shared a sense of fairness and justice best expressed by the biblical prophets. Although Jews have always been in the forefront of the fight for justice, he continued, the nineteenth-century revolutionary movements have represented an era of “neo-prophecy.” Among those who led this movement, Shternberg notes were many Jews, all of whom carried on the tradition of social activism. Finally, regarding optimism, he wrote: “without this psychological factor, the other aforementioned factors like rationalism, monism, and social action would give to Jewish creativity a completely different direction.”^[39]
Shternberg’s article and editorial retooling of Jewish Antiquities demonstrates that the vision of a Russian Jewish identity as articulated by the liberal historians associated with the JHES was a product of a particular time and place. It anachronistically projected contemporary imperial boundaries into the past, awkwardly seeking to unite diverse peoples who haphazardly found themselves living under tsarist rule as a result of the interplay of military and political maneuvers of which they played no part. The “imagined community” of Russian Jewry was always an uncomfortable fit, but one that certain segments of society felt worth promoting.^[40] Simon Dubnov and the other individuals affiliated with the Jewish Historical and Ethnographic Society were predominantly liberals who sought to work for the expansion of rights while accommodating themselves to the political climate in which they found themselves. The JHES eschewed clandestine activity; it was a legal organization designed to work for the advancement of Jewish interests within the bounds of tsarist restrictions. It was part of a broad group of societies engaged in organic work – that movement that recognized the futility of revolutionary change and sought instead gradual cultural and social improvement of material and spiritual conditions.^[41] Part of organic work was accommodation, not only with the regime’s politics, but also with its imperial vision. In accepting the political status quo, the JHES was obligated to accept the current boundaries of the empire as legitimate and to work within that framework. The members of the JHES probably also accommodated all groups claiming Jewish heritage, because as part of an excluded group themselves, they were sympathetic to others seeking inclusion.
Ultimately, however, the Russian Jewish identity they sought did not stand the test of scholarship. It functioned as a slogan to be engraved in the charter of the society, trumpeted in public rhetoric, and justified in editorial glosses, but the scholarly articles intended to give the idea substance demonstrated its limitations instead. Iulii Gessen’s dream of a return to Karaite and rabbinical unification was based, in Gessen’s own admission, on a reality that had come to an end four hundred years earlier. Samuel Weissenberg’s ethnographic expedition through the Russian Empire posited hierarchical divisions among its Jewish communities instead of a unified culture. Even Koz’min’s work on the Subbotniks recognized that despite their aspirations, the Subbotniks would never become full “Jews.” Balaban challenged the imperial vision from a different perspective. He showed the historical resonance of Ashkenaz, demonstrating how legal culture was impervious to state borders. On the other hand, he illustrated that the only palpable communities were local communities. Perhaps no other article challenged the imperial vision as potently as his study of the diversity that existed within a single street. By the time the revolutionary ferment of the 1920s had settled, both the imperial vision of Russian Jewry as advocated by the pre-revolutionary JHES and the international universalism of the society in its post-revolutionary manifestation were abandoned in favor of the construction of a new Soviet identity. The JHES was officially closed in the fall of 1929, and with it the most significant attempt to construct a usable past for Russian Jewry in the imperial context.