In the 1860s and 1870s, the Russian imperial administration began to transform the social and political institutions that served as the basis of the absolute autocracy. The systematic collection of data about the population played a decisive role in the regime’s ability to swiftly carry out the Great Reforms. The creation of a more unified, efficient, and well-ordered polity rested on the belief that numerical representation could illuminate the population in all its complexity and make the empire more visible. The emancipation of the peasantry and the municipal, military, and judicial reforms were implemented in part to heighten Russia’s reputation and prestige. But policy makers also sought to strengthen the empire by instituting reforms that affected professional disciplines, communal autonomy, and economic opportunities. These changes were linked to a desire to bolster provincial and central governance and better comprehend the workings of society. While enlightened bureaucrats of the 1830s and 1840s had prepared the way for the changes that gripped Russia’s society and institutions, a new generation of reformers quickly conceded that the state of statistical knowledge impeded Russia’s ability to dramatically reorganize.^[1]
Nor was the autocracy prepared for the contradictions of the modernization project. The Great Reforms played an instrumental role in realigning power relations between the autocracy and a society becoming more mobile and less visible within a social structure that retained many of the pre-existing hierarchies.^[2] Urbanization, social mobility, and the weakening of communal autonomy constituted important elements in this realignment. The Great Reform era not only represented an important moment in the unification and systemization of a culturally and religiously variegated empire, but the 1860s and 1870s also marked a fundamental reorientation between geographic space and the ordering and policing of the social body. As a consequence of increased internal migration and economic and professional opportunities, local and central authorities began to rely on the power of documentation – passports, service records, and metrical books – to regulate and control spatial movement.
Russia’s interest in the power of numbers and documentation practices paralleled those of the rest of Europe, as state officials focused their energies on learning, describing, and quantifying the population. As a number of social theorists and historians have argued, the preoccupation with scientific understandings of the social order emerged in nineteenth-century Europe as part of a desire to manage and refashion societies and individuals.^[3] In Russia, as in Europe, governments and trained professionals conceived of new technologies of intervention to not only study the population, but also to create a body of usable knowledge about its society and individuals. Censuses and various forms of statistical studies, as well as the newly emerging social sciences of demography, anthropology, and biology, enhanced the understandings of society and the day-to-day routines of the population. In the nineteenth century, the social domain emerged as an arena that could be distinguished from more traditional conceptions of the “political” and “economic” spheres. If the promotion of national prosperity, the articulation of sovereignty, and the acquisition of wealth characterized the political and economic domains, the body social signified a radically new metaphor for comprehending the mechanisms of society in its totality.^[4]
In Russia, as in Europe, the preoccupation with the “social” and with social-scientific technologies of documentation developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as states moved away from territorial and communal concerns to a preoccupation with individuals.^[5] The bureaucratic preoccupation with regulation and recognition generated massive paper trails that became important tools by which states guaranteed public safety and welfare and at the same time constrained individual freedoms. Documentation practices, however, not only constrained movement and facilitated government surveillance, but linked individuals to the body social. Passports, service records, and birth and marriage certificates bestowed imperial subjects with a sense of entitlement, recognition, and belonging, without which they would not be able to participate in civic life. Beginning with the Great Reform era, the tensions between the “inclusive” and “repressive” aspects of documentation became especially pronounced due to the restructuring of Russian life.
The Great Reforms offered unprecedented opportunities for social advancement and created new professional avenues for almost all social and ethnic groups in the empire. Russian society became more open and less burdened by the traditions and institutions that governed communal culture and politics. Yet despite concerted efforts to monitor and curtail geographic mobility, the second half of the nineteenth century also witnessed a rise in population movement that threatened social order and stability. Due to internal migration, new communities emerged throughout the empire that presented immediate concerns for a poorly developed and understaffed provincial bureaucracy. In major industrial centers, illegal migration of the peasantry and other marginal groups already overwhelmed overcrowded urban spaces. These two developments hindered the autocracy’s efforts to control movement between the provinces and the industrial centers and their flustered efforts to identify and document the empire’s inhabitants. Moreover, inaccurate or unrecorded data in passports, metrical books, and service records helped stymie state-initiated integrationist reforms and curtail popular participation in civic life by the empire’s subjects.
For select segments of the Jewish population such as merchants of the first and second guild, artisans, and students at institutions of higher education, the Great Reforms offered them the legal right to cross the Pale of Permanent Settlement and reside in the interior provinces of the empire.^[6] The Great Reform epoch marked a decisive moment in the integration of Jews within the legal and administrative order, and not only for those Jews who crossed the geographic threshold. In the Pale, the liberalization process created a more ordered and disciplined administration that destabilized, however tentatively at first, communal stability and solidarity. As the state began to play an increased role in the daily lives of Jews, the dislocations of the 1860s and 1870s raised radically new questions with respect to record keeping and social control that neither the administration nor the Jews themselves could effectively address.

NEW COMMUNITIES EMERGE

Long before the Great Reforms dispersed tens of thousands of Jews beyond the Pale and created practical and institutional dilemmas with respect to documenting their identities, Jews eluded official registration. While provincial bureaucratic ineptitude and fear of government intervention contributed to the difficulties in Jewish record keeping during the reign of Nicholas I, two other factors that had their origins during Nicholas’s reign caused the most pressing difficulties in the late imperial period. First, for those Jews who were born before 1835, births, marriages, deaths, and divorces were not registered in metrical books. Without this documentation, many cases of confused or mistaken identities arose, since rabbis could not issue certificates that verified Jews’ civil status (their names, places and dates of birth). Such practical concerns served as an impetus for an 1848 law that allowed three “honorable” Jews to legally verify an undocumented identity by testifying to the age and name of an individuals in question born before 1835.^[7] This law, however, became a convenient loophole for avoiding conscription duties and for falsifying identity documents in the pre- and post-Reform periods. Vilenskii vestnik reported that Jews born prior to 1835 had not been registered: “That is, all the Jews who are older than forty-seven years of age. Never mind the fact that forty-seven years has passed [since Jewish metrical books were first introduced]!”^[8] In the port city Odessa, local officials also claimed that younger Jews routinely used three witnesses to obtain false documentation.^[9] After numerous complaints and reports of abuse, the Senate, the highest court in the empire, repealed the law in 1881, although it did not stipulate at the time by what other means Jews could legally prove an unregistered birth.^[10]
Similarly, the discrepancies between lived realities and the law code also hindered the administration’s ability to register the population in a timely fashion. The law on metrical books obligated state rabbis to perform record-keeping duties only in their respective territorial domains. Since a significant number of Jews lived in small villages and towns without state rabbis, these Jews usually were left without any means of registering their civil status.^[11] And since local officials often were not familiar with Jewish rituals, communal procedures, and cultural and religious customs, the imperial administration allowed Jewish communities to administer their own record keeping. For civil authorities, then, the institution of the state rabbinate represented an extremely useful administrative organ – one that mediated civil concerns between Jewish communities and the state. Still, the inability of this institution to fulfill its civic obligations alarmed authorities as Nicholas’s reign came to an end.^[12]
In the Reform and post-Reform periods, as during the reign of Nicholas I, the principal conflict between Jewish communities and imperial administration thus centered on the limitations of the institution of the state rabbinate. That Jewish law permitted any eligible Jew to perform marriage, death, and birth rites greatly circumscribed the power of the state rabbinate and in turn their principal duty – record keeping. As more and more Jews came into contact with the imperial administrative, legal, and institutional order, the absence of these documents or any errors or omissions in record keeping began to play important roles in their daily lives.^[13]
The Great Reforms not only exacerbated the challenges of record keeping that emerged in the pre-Reform period, but also created entirely unforeseen and unexpected dilemmas due to rapid industrialization, which increased population movement in Russia’s cities. Between 1725 and 1863, the number of towns and cities more than doubled, rising from 342 to 678 in the territories of European Russia.^[14] An increase in economic and industrial activity in mining and manufacturing only accelerated urbanization in the second half of the nineteenth century. On the eve of World War I, the urban population in large cities such as Moscow, St. Petersburg, Odessa, and Kiev, not to mention many other smaller centers throughout the empire, increased in extraordinary numbers. Russia’s urban population grew from nine million subjects in 1856 to around twenty-five million in 1913.^[15] In the borderland cities as well as the capitals, ethnic diversity constituted a significant component of the cultural landscape.^[16] Most of the urban dwellers came to the cities to seek new economic opportunities due in part to commercial and industrial expansion. As a result of this growth, a tremendous turnover in population became a dominant characteristic of late nineteenth-century urban history. According to one historian, urban centers served as “great revolving doors through which passed a significant proportion of the population of large regions of Russia.”^[17] Population movement, however, not only flowed to the capitals and the interior regions of the empire. Beginning in the 1860s, and continuing on to the 1890s, government-initiated programs encouraged migrants to settle borderland territories such as Siberia, Kazakhstan, and the Far East.^[18] In short, population movement to the borderlands as well as the urban centers became two of the defining features of nineteenth-century internal migration.
In Russia, the increase in migration during the second half of the nineteenth century paralleled a European-wide growth in international and internal population movement.^[19] Before the Great War solidified state controls over national boundaries and territories, individuals enjoyed freedom of movement on an unprecedented scale.^[20] Due to rural decline, industrialization, and transoceanic migration, fundamental though highly uneven demographic shifts occurred throughout Europe.^[21] During the long nineteenth century, states rarely intervened in controlling movement. In fact, they facilitated and shaped mobility by actively encouraging the construction of railroads, roads, and small and large-scale industries. To be sure, control over movement did not vanish entirely, as Leo Lucassen reminds us, but the period between 1860 and the Great War generally gave birth to laissez-faire attitudes to travel.^[22]
While Russian internal passports restricted movement of privileged and non-privileged groups as early as 1719, the social and legal transformations of the 1860s and 1870s offered many of these groups either permanent or temporary travel rights. Although internal passports and residency permits continued to control travel between the cities and the provinces, an important shift occurred during the Great Reform period.^[23] With the Emancipation of the serfs in 1861, large numbers of peasant workers began to travel to industrially-developed areas to work in factories and shops. For state officials, these otkhodniki (who numbered as much as six million in European Russia in the 1890s) posed considerable challenges to those administrators trying to keep track of their identities in order to collect taxes and arrears.^[24] Thus, as Russian society became more mobile and less constrained by the burdens of land, community, and family, migration patterns generally followed Europe’s fluid model of population movement.
It is within this context that internal Jewish migration took place.^[25] Although considerable regional variations characterized Jewish mobility, internal migration was a widespread phenomenon that touched the lives of many Jews in tsarist Russia. Jews not only migrated to America and industrial centers such as Kiev, Odessa, or St. Petersburg, but also to a host of other smaller and relatively unknown places in the empire. As the historian Shaul Stampfer has argued, “[M]any of the Jews in the tsarist empire could regard themselves as newcomers.”^[26] This increased population movement, especially to previously forbidden territories in the interior regions, quickly began to raise practical administrative concerns.
In the interior provinces, the legal and administrative procedures that governed Jewish communal life were established piecemeal and usually haphazardly. Since Jews moved to regions that had no communal infrastructure to speak of – no rabbis, synagogues, or collective presence – they needed to create Jewish communities ex nihilo.^[27] The documentation of civil status in particular concerned central and local authorities and became a common problem debated in administrative circles as well as in the mass circulation press.^[28] Because the registration of vital statistics was introduced gradually and unevenly in the interior provinces, local authorities quickly began to question how and with whom Jewish births, deaths, marriages, and divorces should be registered. What institution should be responsible for keeping track of the metrical books? And who should verify the records? These social and political developments of the 1860s not only hindered efficient governance (mainly, population counts and the accurate documentation of civil status) but also directly affected Jews’ participation in Russian society.
In 1879, for example, twenty-four Jewish families, totaling 121 persons, resided in the city of Vladimir. Jews needed to nominate a state rabbi to perform birth, marriage, and death rites and record the community’s data in metrical books. Since the elected rabbi did not have the required state certification, the governor did not permit him to record vital statistics in metrical books, and because Jews maintained their own prayer house in Vladimir, they performed all the rites themselves. “Neither marriages, births, nor deaths are registered in metrical books” the governor reported.^[29] In those instances when the Jewish community did not or could not support state rabbis, imperial law required Jews to turn to the nearest town’s rabbi to register their vital statistics.^[30] In practice, Jews in neither Vladimir nor other regions rarely traveled to neighboring towns for certificates. But in cases when Jews required verification of births, marriages, deaths, or divorces, they turned, usually in desperation, to the local police or the provincial governor. “These requests,” the Vladimir governor noted, “are not met satisfactorily.”^[31] “In the past few years,” Vilenskii vestnik similarly reported, “a large proportion of Jews who asked for birth certificates were not able to receive them because they were not registered in the first place.”^[32] In such cases, when Jews were not registered, they could only obtain legal proof of their identities in a court of law after 1883.^[33] But for deaths, metrical books continued to serve as the only acceptable form of documentation, at least until 1906.^[34]
Record-keeping practices had their own fault lines, and created practical dilemmas for the state and the Jews. Mistakes and omissions occurred frequently. In towns such as Kishinev, Orgeev, Bendery, and Akkerman, the number of male Jewish births was significantly higher (in most cases twice) than that of Jewish females. Upon inspection of the metrical books in this region, one official commented, “Since the proportion [of male to female births] cannot be explained by mathematical laws, then it is obvious that Jews hide newly born girls from registration, and it is obvious to me that they do this for strategic reasons.”^[35] In fact, police and other authorities routinely questioned whether Jews would begin to register births, marriages, and deaths in a timely fashion.^[36]
In St. Petersburg, for example, the institution of the state rabbinate, as well as the registration of vital statistics, was formally established in 1863 only for Jewish merchants and artisans.^[37] As Jews began to migrate by the thousands, rules and procedures needed to be established that governed the registration of Jewish identities. When parents arrived in the capital with children born in areas where neither state rabbis nor metrical books existed, they quickly encountered a dilemma that did not have a clear-cut solution. How could their children’s identities be proved without any formal documentation? In some instances, they presented written statements from their coreligionists or local police officials in lieu of metrical records. But the majority of the time these Jews did not have any documentation to corroborate their children’s identities. Moreover, since the law code did not establish any guidelines or parameters, authorities were hard pressed to find effective solutions. The Commission for Restructuring Jewish Life (1872-1881) remarked: “In light of the significant number of unregistered Jewish children and the constant flow of Jews to the interior provinces, this problem can grow to unmanageable proportions.”^[38]
Even though the registration of vital statistics had been an institutional phenomenon since the reign of Peter the Great and for Jews and other ethnic minorities since the reign of Nicholas I, the imperial administration only recognized their larger social significance during the Great Reforms. The Statisticheskii vremennik Rossiiskoi imperii noted that “with extreme precision, metrical books allow [governments] to determine the well being of the population and examine how various social factors affect society.”^[39]
Vital statistics thus helped reconstitute a new geography of the population by quantifying the regularities and norms of life cycles and by providing key data to a wide variety of social problems. Intimately tied to the “counting of all individuals in the polity,” vital statistics also helped dissect the borders and spaces that separated the vast cultures and religions of the empire by bringing them together under the rubric “population.”^[40]
A heightened interest in the registration of births, marriages, deaths, and divorces stemmed from the modernization projects of the 1860s and 1870s. The study of numbers and the application of statistical research to ameliorate social conditions went hand in hand with the development and growth of Russian state and society.^[41] Statistics allowed government officials and researchers to divide the “population” into categories and subgroups that could then be compared and contrasted under constant denominators. In addition, numerical representation made it possible to generalize about collective and individual interests and obligations, and to relate the individual to a collective body. While statisticians and other social scientists argued that vital statistics could be used to apply universal laws to better understand the population’s life cycle, government officials used the registration of births, marriages, and deaths as a means for linking imperial subjects with the larger aspirations of governance and modern statecraft. Metrical books, the Department of Religious Affairs of Foreign Confessions (DDDII) remarked, “determine [Jews’] legal status and rights.”^[42]
If the larger social significance of statistical records played an important role in the systemization and standardization of the Russian Empire, then cultural and religious heterogeneity posed perhaps the single greatest obstacle to these aspirations. And as in the reign of Nicholas I, statisticians and other members of the bureaucracy were at odds in constructing effective solutions to remedy what often appeared as insurmountable problems. “In our Russia,” the Statisticheskii vremennik Rossiiskoi imperii declared, “errors and irregularities (neispravnosti) in metrical books are natural, so to speak, because the composition of the population of our empire is distinguished greatly by ethnic and religious dimensions, as well as its comparatively low level of development.”^[43] The concern with record keeping had important consequences for Russian Jewry, as for the autocracy, as universal military service was first introduced in 1874. The registration of births and deaths thus took on new social meanings in the 1870s, as the politics of Jewish record keeping reached new heights.^[44]

THE MILITARY REFORM OF 1874

On 1 January 1874, all males over the age of twenty-one became eligible for the first all-estate military draft in the empire, often considered by historians as the last of the Great Reforms.^[45] “The defense of the fatherland,” the statute read, “is the holiest duty of every Russian subject.”^[46] The effective implementation of the military reform hinged upon the accurate registration of males. In an effort to curb evasion, reformers attempted to make the population count a simple and transparent process. All eligible males needed to register in a local district. For the Jews, the system of recruitment differed from the previous process that relied on communal responsibility to fulfill the necessary draft quota. While in the previous system respective communities fulfilled quotas based on 1,000 male counts, the reform of 1874 required all eligible Jews to be registered for the draft.^[47] As early as January 1874, the Ministry of the Interior attempted to create a reliable and efficient method to establish the exact number of male Jews. The ministry blamed the kahals and the sborshchiks for hiding Jews, obstructing population counts, and profiting from the previous system of recruitment. For almost every Jewish family, the ministry argued, there exist two or three individuals who were not registered. For these reasons, the 1874 reform sought to unify the system of recruitment for all the empire’s subjects, including the Jews.^[48]
But even before the implementation of the reform, the popular press as well as local and central administrators quickly began to question whether and to what extent Jews would evade population counts under the new guidelines. Since the original statute did not specify quotas based on either religion or ethnicity, some circles debated the merits of differentiating Jews from non-Jews in the draft. But as the conservative Kievlianin argued, “We can’t ignore the fact that the entire Jewish community supports the evasion of individuals [from registration].”^[49] This and other arguments that emerged in the public sphere led to a series of laws that sought to decrease Jewish resistance to registration. Even after an 1876 statute, which allowed Jews to replace other Jews in the quotas, evasion remained a powerful trope in the mass circulation press.^[50]
To the surprise of many observers, however, the registration process proceeded rather smoothly at first. The Kovno Governor wrote to the Ministry of Internal Affairs in December 1874: “At first, the population count perplexed the Jews and aroused apprehension and mistrust, but then, when they began to trust the process and realized that the count can even benefit them, they began to register, and cases of evasion occurred rarely.”^[51] Golos reported that although local authorities believed that 5,000 male Jews resided in Minsk, around 15,000 were actually counted: “There are constant requests from the Jews themselves to register in the local Jewish districts.”^[52] While the press and local administrators reported, often with great surprise, of Jewish compliance in the registration process during the first few months after the promulgation of the reform, in the end the numbers narrated a different story.^[53] Shortly after 1874, therefore, the Ministry of the Interior helped draft a series of laws which assumed “that there’s always a shortage [of Jewish recruits].”^[54]
In particular, the 1876 addendum to the original 1874 reform recognized that Jews readily took advantage of an exemption granted to families with sons who had not reached the majority age. Jewish families with either a single son or a son who had not reached the majority age received exemptions from service. It was vital, therefore, for the administration to be informed of the exact number and age of each son in each Jewish family. The Senate determined that metrical books would not be recognized as conclusive proof of the exact age of Jews. Instead, the court instructed local police officials to determine the exact number and age of each Jewish household.^[55] In this regard, the Kingdom of Poland constituted an important exception to this decree, for in this province government officials relied exclusively on metrical books to determine an individual’s civil status.^[56]
Nevertheless, in the Kingdom of Poland, as in the western provinces of European Russia, Jews attempted to exploit this exemption. While cases of self-mutilation, desertion, and forms of resistance or manipulation often sprinkled the pages of the mass circulation press, the problem was not solely one of overt resistance to a totalizing and oppressive autocracy.^[57] “In order to unravel the numerical quagmire,” Russkii evrei suggested, “we need to examine the so-called registration lists.”^[58] A closer analysis of the Jews’ encounter with the reform of 1874 reveals that population mobility, on the one hand, and documentary practices on the other, played a vital, if often overlooked role in obstructing accurate population counts. Contemporary observers of Jewish and non-Jewish origin often viewed the question of resistance to military service as part of a larger social debate over citizenship and the physical ability of Jews to serve in the military. But the reconstruction of “number politics” also allows us to begin reevaluating the traditional narratives between imperial policies and the Jews, too often been framed in terms of autocratic “domination,” and to analyze the fascinating interplay between Jews, officialdom, and imperial Russian society.
First, even before thousands of Jews began immigrating to Western and Central Europe, the United States, and Palestine, population mobility caused frequent conflicts with respect to the unambiguous identification of individuals, since many Jews often registered in two or sometimes even three districts as they moved from region to region in search of work.^[59] “There are many instances,” Nedel’naia khronika voskhoda reported, “of a person registering in two separate towns.” In 1880, for example, Leib Itsykovich Levi registered in his hometown of Plungianakh for the military draft. Four years later, Levi and his entire family moved in search of work to the town Nezhin, where he also registered in the local district. Once Levi learned that he had been drafted in Plugianakh, he quickly returned, but in the meantime, he had been documented as an “evader” in Nezhin.^[60] While the record books clearly showed that a Leib Itsykovich Levi had avoided the draft in Nezhin, Jewish publicists cited such cases of mistaken identities as products of the distinct economic and social circumstances in which they lived, which could be easily explained and rectified. And although a special statute exonerated Jews from serving twice if they registered in more than one district, these incidents only contributed to the inflation and distortion of Jewish population counts and fueled anti-Jewish rhetoric in conservative periodicals.^[61] As one author of a critical study of Jews and the military remarked, “[...] the registration lists document an enormous number of Jews who simply do not exist.”^[62]
After the assassination of Alexander II and the pogroms of 1881-82, emigration played a significant role in stymieing the registration process. If between 1871 and 1880 more than 15,000 Jews (male as well as female) left Russia for America, between 1890 and 1898 this number had risen to around 279,000. More than 1.5 million Jews left Russia after the assassination of Alexander II and the beginning of the Great War.^[63] While in absolute terms the percentage of Jews who left Russia was indeed substantial, a disproportionate number of these Jews were male (well over half the total number) and in the precise age group eligible for the draft, which presumably only added greater chaos to the draft process.^[64] In the last decades of the nineteenth century, therefore, the twin factors of increased internal and international population movement created a new category of “neiavivshikhsia” (individuals not present at the time of registration) that should be differentiated, as one Russian-Jewish reporter argued, from the “ukloniayushchikhsia” (evaders).^[65]
In addition, faulty documentary practices and poor record-keeping procedures led to numerous cases of “mistaken or dual identities” since authorities often could not identify Jews by the exact age, name, or location, all of which were absolute requirements for the efficient implementation of the 1874 reform. In those instances when authorities doubted the age of an individual because of missing, nonexistent, or falsified documents, imperial law allowed them to determine the age of Jews (and other inorodtsy) “by external appearance” (po naruzhnomy vidu).^[66] With this law, the imperial administration assured itself that each Jew would possess a set of papers that clearly denoted his age. “Young Jews,” one Russian-Jewish newspaper reported, “began to carry a set of documents on which the words ‘do not destroy’ are clearly marked, and routinely appeared at the draft when they reached the eligible age.”^[67] The determination of age by external appearance stemmed from a desperate need to bring order to a set of existing documentary practices and record-keeping procedures that were simply unreliable.
To be sure, during the reign of Nicholas I, as in the Reform and post-Reform periods, Jews doctored identity documents by falsifying their age and took advantage of a plethora of loopholes in the bureaucratic system. For imperial administrators, the most frustrating as well as the most common problem occurred when Jews used nicknames or Russified forms of their original Hebrew names in everyday life. “It seems that there is nothing strange or out of the ordinary when a boy is called by his diminutive name,” one reporter wrote. “But it so turns out that this naпve custom can have fatal consequences.”^[68] Indeed, as Jews began to associate and interact with the majority culture, the natural tendency to conform to these surroundings by using Russian-sounding forenames in their everyday lives often made the unambiguous identification of Jews a prolonged and difficult process, as for example, when an “Avram” became an “Al’bert” or an “Andrei.” Moreover, as in the identification of criminals in nineteenth-century France, Russian authorities simply could not readily distinguish individuals with the same name.^[69]
A number of Jews never even bothered to adopt surnames, and with the absence of surnames and identity documents, authorities were often at a loss as to how to register Jews for the draft.^[70] Simple name changes also created numerous misunderstandings and wreaked havoc on bureaucratic knowledge. However, for military service, as for other public acts, it was the transliteration of names from Hebrew to Russian and variations in the spelling of names that presented the gravest obstacles to easy recognition and identification of individual Jews.^[71] In one town, for example, over 460 Jews appeared in a local district to register for the draft. Since many Jews did not have proof of their age, authorities used the “external appearance” method. But when they sought to unambiguously identify each Jew’s identity, they quickly ran into a problem. When Hebrew names were transliterated into Russian, there appeared a “Zalman” and a “Zalmon,” a “Noson” and a “Nison,” and a “Borukh” and a “Borokh” with identical surnames. On numerous occasions individuals who had been drafted refused to serve, because they argued that authorities had confused them with other individuals with similar sounding names. Thus, for example, when a Brustin Zalmen had been drafted, he refused on the grounds that authorities mistook him for another individual. He argued that his name was properly spelled as “Zal’men” and not “Zalmen.”^[72]
Similar cases occurred when state rabbis either never recorded the death of infants or registered their forenames and surnames in slightly different variations under the “birth” and “death” headings in the metrical books. In the town Fastov, for example, a Moishe Khalmov Shliakh, Avrum Iankelev Gol’dman, Aizik Berov Khait, Vol’ko Aronov Matus, and a Ben’iamin Moshkov Rabenko were drafted. Although all five had died in infancy, the state rabbi had recorded the names in a slightly different form under the “death” heading in the metrical books, and authorities presumed that all five were still alive at the time of the draft.^[73] In another town, authorities levied three hundred ruble fines on at least ten families whose children’s surnames, forenames, and patronymics in the metrical books did not identically conform to the draft lists:^[74]

<img src=http://abimperio.net/pics/avrutin1.jpg>

These simple, often careless, mistakes in transliteration, record keeping, and orthography became for the state, as well as the Jews, sites of deep conflict. Imperial authorities marked the dead children as “evaders” and assessed hefty fines on the families, while the parents claimed, often in desperation and great distress, that their children had long ago passed away.
Printed and archival sources repeatedly point to the difficulties that Jewish parents had in proving the identities of children who were, in many instances, long dead without any formal documentation of the deaths. In an age of conservatism and heightened antisemitism, authorities continued to levy fines on the parents in order to curtail “disorder” (bezporiadok) in Jewish record keeping. As the Mogilev governor wrote to the Ministry of the Interior in 1897: “There is no doubt that in Mogilev province a significant number of those counted as ‘neiavivshimisia’ (not present at the time of the draft) are due to the fact that the names were never recorded in metrical books upon death. And to prove the death, in many instances many years after the fact, is impossible.”^[75] Whatever the practical demands may have been, the burden of proof rested squarely on the parents’ shoulders.^[76] The parents needed to somehow establish that their children had died during infancy, but without any official evidence or documentation, how could these Jews prove that the children had in fact died?
Since metrical books constituted the only legally recognized proof of death, and since imperial law did not establish other legally viable alternatives in the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s, Jews turned to a centuries-old Russian custom and petitioned for the tsar’s benevolence. In a typical case, a townsman from Poltavskii province, Shlema Yudelevich Leibovich Ioffe, petitioned authorities that his son Kel’man died only two years after birth. Not having formally recorded his son’s death date in the metrical books, Ioffe asked local officials if he could utilize alternative means to legally verify the death. To his dissatisfaction and consternation, the officials replied that metrical books constituted the only legal documentation of death. Exasperated and on the brink of poverty, Ioffe petitioned the DDDII.^[77] In a similar fashion, the Russian-Jewish press reported of a “herd” of Jews who petitioned authorities to exonerate them from not registering their dead sons and paying the three hundred ruble fine. With a touch of irony, one reporter wrote that local officials instructed the Jews that if any of the dead souls “returned to life then they would be freed from military service.”^[78]
Local administrators, in turn, did not fruitfully resolve these cases, and so they passed the petitions on and looked to St. Petersburg for instructions. Finally, on 17 April 1906, almost thirty years after the problem first appeared, the Senate ruled that town administrators were required to handle all such cases. The majority of the cases could be verified by repeated questioning of local witnesses, the Senate argued, but Jews could also utilize the so-called “family lists” that each Jewish household needed to maintain or present documentary proof from their local state rabbis’ notebooks.^[79] In a spirit of political and religious accommodation, the Senate’s decision represented an important concession to the books’ hegemony over the documentation of vital events.
While the Senate resolved (at least on paper) the procedures for verifying an undocumented death, the imperial administration continued to confront what seemed to some commentators a more pervasive problem affecting the efficient and accurate registration of vital statistics. As one Jewish publicist argued, “If state rabbis paid more attention to their record-keeping duties, they would be able to rectify many of the [misunderstandings and confusions] that have emerged [in the past few years between Jews and the imperial administration].^[80] It is to an examination of this problem – of record keepers and their record-keeping politics – that we now turn.

RECORD KEEPERS AND THEIR POLITICS

Government-sanctioned rabbis quickly became the object of severe criticism after the establishment of the state rabbinate in 1835. Spiritual rabbis and other conservative segments of the Jewish communities castigated state rabbis for challenging their authority in communal affairs and the family sphere. The liberal educated Jewish public (maskilim) regarded the state rabbinate as incompetent bureaucrats, who often lacked the knowledge and religious training required for the esteemed title of rabbi.^[81] The Russian imperial administration and the conservative press argued that the state rabbinate played no small part in fostering disorder in record keeping and the documentation of vital events,^[82] and ordinary Jews likewise complained that state rabbis performed their jobs haphazardly and irreverently.
By the mid-1870s, as the reports and denunciations of the state rabbinate increased, it became apparent to central and local authorities alike that major changes needed to be instituted to reform record-keeping practices and personnel. The municipal reform of 1870 and the Jewish record-keeping practices in the Kingdom of Poland attracted imperial administrators to the idea of secularizing registration – to transforming the registration of vital events from a religious ritual to a civil act. Applied in at least 423 cities in European Russia, the 1870 reform improved and greatly expanded municipal administration; the management of the municipal economy and the administration of the city now lay in the hands of a representative body (duma) and not with the merchant and noble elite.^[83] As in the Kingdom of Poland, where civil servants recorded Jewish vital events, the Ministry of the Interior envisioned Russian city administrators taking over the rabbinate’s record-keeping duties. The Polish example, one official argued, served as an invaluable comparison for the registration of Jewish vital events in the Russian Empire.^[84] But even though it was highly desirable to make the registration of vital events a civil act and hence replace the rabbinate with modern civil servants, reformers recognized that such a policy change was impossible to implement given the bureaucratic apparatus at hand.^[85]
The idea of secularizing the registration of births, marriages, deaths, and divorces also emerged from commonly accepted West European practices. In France, the civil registration of vital events was adopted in 1792, and marked an important moment in the ways in which French individuals became members of the larger civil community. Under the ancien rйgime, the Catholic Church controlled the registration of vital events; members of religious minorities born before 1792 did not officially register their births, marriages, and deaths. Though irregularities, evasion, and various other difficulties confounded French authorities when civil registration was first introduced, these contestations slowly gave way to bureaucratic routine by the end of the nineteenth century.^[86]
While the state rabbinate continued to record vital events throughout the imperial period, the imperial administration sought to bring greater institutional order to what was commonly perceived as chaotic practices. Beginning in 1882, the DDDII required provincial governors to supervise Jewish record keeping by monitoring the integrity of data entry.^[87] But even when vital events were recorded accurately, provincial authorities needed to house and archive the records in a safe and easily accessible public institution. “Every year,” the Volynsk governor wrote in one report, “the province receives around 1,128 books. In order to house these books, from as early as 1835, we need a special institution, which our province lacks. But we also need shelves to store the books for the past sixty-eight years, not to mention that for such an enormous institution of such important documents we need a reliable archivist as well.”^[88] Thus whatever the accuracy of Jewish record keeping, the practical limitations of organization also presented a challenge to provincial bureaucracies that were often understaffed and lacked sufficient space to house the books that each year could total in the thousands.
Nonetheless, even with the practical limitations of space and bureaucratic management, state rabbis continued to be publicly denounced for intentional omissions and criticized for not performing their duties in an efficient and reliable manner in turn-of-the-century Russia.^[89] After an examination of the 1900-1904 metrical books, for example, the Tashkent municipal authorities concluded that their state rabbi recorded the data “negligently and incorrectly.” “The books contain an enormous amount of mistakes,” they wrote in their report. The authorities deemed the books useless for issuing certificates of civil status due to “careless errors and omissions of facts.”^[90] The Ekaterinoslav police, moreover, detected a rabbinical conspiracy to free Jews from military service in 1911.^[91] A certain “Mart” denounced the Kobrinsk state rabbi Shafit for a similar reason, for “belonging to an illegal gang” that was founded to free Jews from military service.^[92]
State rabbis defended themselves from such accusations. The Tashkent state rabbi Kirsner described the practical difficulties of convincing the Jewish masses of reporting their vital events in a timely fashion. “In Tashkent, where the registration [of Jewish vital events] was only instituted in 1899,” he wrote, “Jews from the poorer classes do not recognize the significance of this requirement; the rabbi frequently has to seek out [the individuals] and record the missing data himself.”^[93] In a letter to the governor of Saratov, the state rabbi Arii Shulman did not deny that mistakes and gaps in Jewish record keeping persisted, but he argued that they did not stem from “contempt” (zlo) on behalf of the record keepers: “While some parents don’t, in fact, register their children these cases usually come from the poorer and less educated classes.”^[94]
The liberal educated Jewish public did not lose sight of the larger social significance of the records, even as the reliability of population evidence continued to be the subject of heated debate in the last decades of the Old Regime. In fact, a growing segment of the Jewish public seemed to have begun to appreciate the power of these documents. As Rabbi F. Perel’man wrote in an article for a Russian-Jewish weekly: “There is no doubt that the correct registration of Jewish vital events is important not only for administrative, but also for everyday, relations, since metrical books [...] determine [an individual’s] civil status and touch upon some of the most significant aspects of civil life and legal relations.”^[95] But even as many educated Jews began to realize their importance, these same Jews often emphasized in journalistic and other published writings the estrangement of their brethren (who often knew little or no Russian and continued to abide by the precepts of Orthodox Judaism) from the civic order. The conservative press and numerous imperial administrators often made similar assumptions.^[96] Such accounts represented “ordinary” and “tradition-minded” Jews as having virtually little or no awareness of the broader legal and administrative principles that helped govern the polity. “Who needs records about us? What will be the upshot of the statistics?” a number of Tomaszow Jews remarked in I. L. Peretz’s Impressions of a Journey.^[97]
As we soon shall see, ordinary Jews began to comprehend and appreciate the power of documentation as they came into closer contact with Russian society and the state, not only in the metropolitan centers, but also in the far reaches of the Pale. Omissions or mistakes in the registration of vital statistics had grave consequences for functioning within the prescribed legal parameters of the polity, for Jews as for all imperial subjects. As the Odessa General Lieutenant Zelenoi remarked:

“Any spelling errors of first or last names in metrical books, insufficient attention to record keeping [by the rabbis], or entire omissions denied [Jews] subjecthood (pravosposobnost’). Jews cannot enroll in institutions of higher education or receive government certifications, register for military service, or be legally married, among other things.”^[98]

In the late imperial period, therefore, the registration of vital statistics began to carry as much significance for individuals as it did for the state. The remaining part of this essay examines the interactions, engagements, and contacts between a people often regarded as “outsiders” to the administrative and social system and the Russian state.

POWER OF DOCUMENTATION

On April 1894, the townsman Duvid Kel’manovich Barinshtein petitioned the Ministry of the Interior to legally register the birthdates of his two children, as well as his undocumented marriage date. Barinshtein argued that similar cases occurred rather frequently in Zaslav (Bessarabia province). Since neither the town administrators nor provincial authorities recognized the family’s civil status, these officials instructed him to appear in a court of law to prove his children’s “identities” (samolichnosti). However, the court refused him. “With such requests, parents can only turn [to a court of law] when their children were born before the petitioner’s marriage date,” he was told. “In light of such circumstances and all of my un-honored petitions,” he wrote, “my children have yet to be registered, and now I do not know who to turn to with my request.”^[99] Iosel Vasser petitioned for a similar reason. At their birth, his son Iankel and daughter Khana were not registered in their hometown Shlissel’burg. When Vasser attempted to register his children with the merchant estate, he quickly encountered difficulties when authorities asked for proof of his children’s birth dates. “To register my children,” he wrote, “I am obligated to present their birth certificates. But I cannot fulfill this request since I am simply not able to supply the necessary documents.”^[100] Authorities also turned down the soldier Movsha Aron Avseev Smolenskii’s request to register his daughter as a permanent resident of Riga, because she lacked proper documentation of her birth date. “Till this day,” he wrote, “the rabbi refuses to officially register her in the metrical books, because at the time of my daughter’s birth I resided in the town of Dubbelen.”^[101]
As these and many other cases demonstrate, the state did not recognize claims to membership in the Russian civil order without the proper documentation of an individual’s life cycle.^[102] In their petitions, Jews often expressed that as subjects of the polity they felt entitled to basic institutional and administrative rights denied them by the state for a variety of legalistic reasons that were often beyond their immediate control. When individuals could not prove their identities, as the jurist A. Palivin argued, they lost the gamut of rights bestowed upon them as subjects of the Russian Empire.^[103] Without birth certificates, Jews could not enroll in institutions of state-sponsored education, register their family in their respective hometown, lawfully marry, or travel from region to region. In other words, the state could not acknowledge Jews’ civil status or recognize their membership in the polity, which hindered meaningful participation in institutional, professional, and social life.
As early as the 1830s, the imperial administration recognized that the registration of Jews’ civil status furthered its governing interests, enhancing its capacity to rule its subjects in a direct and efficient manner. In fact, when cases of “mistaken,” “undocumented,” or “dual” identities began to impede effective governance, as the implementation of the 1874 military reform demonstrated, the state recognized the need to mitigate these uncertainties in a court of law. For those individuals who lacked documentation, the Senate’s decision of 1883 (to allow Jews to determine their lawful birth and marriage dates in a court of law) proved to be a viable option that significantly eased the integration of Jews into the imperial civic order. For the state, the judicial process also provided a forum for settling cases that had serious administrative consequences.
For the majority of the Jews, however, the issue at stake was not to document an unregistered birth or marriage date, but rather to correct a misspelled name, an incorrect birth date, or any other data not correctly inscribed in the metrical books. Simple mistakes in the recording of names or dates created numerous misunderstandings and difficulties in daily life. Yet when Jews turned to the courts to settle these disputes, their cases were routinely denied, and making corrections in metrical books proved to be long and arduous processes that often required the writing of many petitions to local and central authorities. For example, Srul-Aba Iosiov Fainzil’ber pleaded that his name be changed to Aba Srul-Iosiovich, a name he used in daily life. The law, however, clearly prohibited corrections of the entries once either the state rabbi or the rabbi’s assistant filled in the required data in the metrical books, and only made one exception: “With the exception of a ‘clerical error’ (pogreshnost’ pistsa) corrections are not permitted.”^[104] But what constituted a “clerical error,” and how did a “clerical error” differ from a simple “mistake?” For these two cases, as for the majority that appeared in the last years of the imperial regime, the courts denied Jews their requests to change names. In a typical fashion, courts ruled that with respect to name changes “a clerical error in the registration of the name, patronymic, or surname was not determined.”^[105]
The desire to change either a misspelled or an incorrectly inscribed name emerged as a problem that frustrated both the state and the Jews. With respect to the state, the regulations on metrical books were part of a broader social engineering project that attempted to create a more coordinated and unified system. By not permitting any unnecessary changes to these vital records (records that fundamentally linked the population with the administrative order), the state furthered its own interests, which relied on its ability to easily identify individuals, primarily for purposes of taxation, military conscription, policing, and legal disputations. Thus when Jews used names that did not correspond to the forenames and surnames recorded in metrical books, or when they requested to legally change their names, authorities argued that they would not be able to identify the individual in question. They were afraid that if, for example, a Khaim-Mordko Gluzman changed his name to Eishia-Mordko Gluzman “an entirely new person would appear, who would declare that he did not know a ‘Khaim-Mordko Gluzman’ and could not be held accountable for [Khaim’s financial or civic] obligations.”^[106]
Record-keeping problems emerged not only through state rabbis’ incorrect inscription of names and dates in metrical books or because parents forgot to register their children’s birth dates, but also because of the politics of names and naming practices, which created irreparable internal conflicts in Jewish communities as well as misunderstandings and confusions between the state and the Jews. When, for example, a father from Riga wanted to name his newly born son “Maksmilian,” the rabbi refused and registered the son as “Mordukh-El’ia.” The rabbi later explained that “Maksmilian is a Christian name,” and argued [incorrectly] that “from the point of view of the Jewish religion” he could only inscribe a “Jewish” name in the metrical book.^[107] In this instance, the father petitioned the Ministry of the Interior to legally change his son’s name, but in other cases, parents would ignore their children’s “official” names and in personal and social interactions use the names they personally chose for their sons or daughters. In time, the children (and the parents) would become attached to the name and would refuse to be identified by the name that the rabbi arbitrarily adopted for them.
But since the law forbade Jews to change their names and since the bureaucratic process could drag on for years, on a number of occasions Jews who attempted to abide by the legal order could be recognized by surnames that did not correspond to their parents’ family names, and in this process be accused of “criminal behavior.” Due to an innocuous clerical error, one petitioner argued, his son’s name was registered as “Breslavskii,” and not as “Bereslovskii” (his family’s lawful name). Although the Ministry of Justice finally ruled in the petitioner’s favor, this particular case took over ten years to resolve. In the meantime, the petitioner continued to use a name that did not correspond to the one he was officially registered under in the metrical book.^[108] The bureaucratic process, in short, also contributed in no small way to the frustrations of identifying individuals.

CONCLUSION

In the last years of the imperial regime, official and popular discussions portrayed Jews as a people resistant to the legal and administrative order. On the whole, Jews continued to be seen as a dangerous, dark, and deceptive people – a people averse to regulation, skeptical of the bureaucratic process and of popular participation in the civic order. Moreover, Jewish record keeping continued to be described as chaotic, disorderly, and unruly. While Russian journalists and local administrators often emphasized the enormous difficulties in documenting Jewish identities, similar problems appeared in the late imperial landscape with respect to other members of the population. A popular manual on Russian Orthodox metrical books warned its readers that the “registration of births, marriages, and deaths seems to be a simple process at first glance… but it only takes to take a look at any register to notice that things are indeed not so simple. Those who are in charge of the books are constantly in need of instruction.”^[109] To be sure, as comparisons with England so clearly demonstrate, many of the same defects and inadequacies that plagued Jewish record keeping in Russia also appeared in England before the advent of civil registration. “It was only rarely,” the historian D. V. Glass wrote in his study of British population statistics, “that local efforts to collect comprehensive and accurate vital statistics appeared to be successful.”^[110]
But whatever the difficulties of compiling statistics and registering individual identities may have been, the larger point is that Jews began to realize the social value and legal power of documentation. In other words, whatever the literacy or education of the individuals, they quickly recognized the importance of possessing a set of papers that clearly represented their names, the dates and place of their birth, and other vital information. For the segregated Jews in the Pale, as well as for their more elite counterparts in the interior provinces, documentation not only facilitated their integration into the emerging middle-class circles of St. Petersburg, Moscow, Kiev, or Odessa, but also into the relatively modest institutions and social spaces of late imperial Russia. For those who attempted to “cope with the mundane demands of daily life,” to become “productive, or at least self-sustaining, members of society-at-large” the advantages of the identity document clearly outweighed its political and social constraints.^[111] By the end of nineteenth century, in light of increased anti-Jewish sentiment, hostility, and emigration to North America, Palestine, and Western Europe, Jews began to participate in surprising fashion in the institutional frameworks of the civic order.