In the 1920s, the Soviet Union was the only country in the world to have state-sponsored Yiddish language publishing houses, writers’ groups, courts, city councils, and a school system. The Soviet Union also supported the creation of a group of socialist Jewish activists dedicated to creating a new kind of Jewish culture for a new kind of Jew, what I call the Soviet Yiddish intelligentsia. This group of people served the dual function of building the Soviet empire among the Soviet Jewish nation in its official Soviet national language, Yiddish, and fostering the very creation of this Soviet Jewish nation.
In some ways, the Soviet Union was a classic empire in that it created an elite group of natives, in this case socialist Jews, who were to serve as exemplars of the civilizing, modernizing imperial mission. On the other hand, traditional empires created the natives in the metropole’s image. They learned the language of the metropole, were brought to the metropole to learn the ways of the colonizer, and then were sent back to serve as a light unto the colonized. In the Soviet case, as in other imperial cases, the Soviet Yiddish intelligentsia served as this group of imperial native elites invested with limited power to remake Soviet Jews into a Soviet Jewish nationality.
Studying the Soviet Union as a multiethnic empire became popular after the swift collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of ethnic nationalism in Communism’s place. The most pressing question for those studying this movement has been how Russia and the Soviet Union have managed, and in some cases created, ethnic difference. Many scholars took theories of imperialism and post-colonialism as their point of departure for studying how the tsarist and Soviet empires imagined their ethnic minorities.^[1] Because of this, there has been a focus on state policy toward ethnic minorities. Terry Martin’s work on Soviet nationalities policy shows how the Soviet Union’s interest in developing national minorities was an integral part of Soviet imperial policy. He coins the term “affirmative action empire” to describe the way Soviet policy fostered ethnic minorities by supporting and creating intelligentsias for these minorities, and giving them conditional access to power to remake the ethnic group in the state’s own image.^[2] State and Communist Party policies varied depending on the ethnic minority, but what remained constant was the interest in fostering and building these nationalities by means of language, territory, and culture, policies that collectively were called “nativization” or korenizatsiia. One might call this an imperialist model of state building.^[3]
The emphasis on state policy has left out one of the most important factors in understanding how the Soviet Union operated imperially and nationally – the ethnic minorities’ own leaders who had developed their own ideas about a socialist future before the Revolution. I am interested in the ethnic minorities’ own voice, one minority in particular, in the creation of a national culture in an imperial context. In the case of Jews, the initial vision of what the new socialist Soviet Jew was to look like and the ideology driving this refashioning came from the native elite themselves. What made the Soviet Union the only country in the world with a huge state-sponsored network of Yiddish culture and eventually a territory designated as a Jewish region was the state’s political interest in bringing socialist ideology to its ethnic minorities in their native languages and to support the development of ethnic minorities’ cultures. But more important in the case of Soviet Jews was the Soviet Yiddish intelligentsia’s own visions of the new secular Soviet Jew.

* * *

It is well known that Jews were well represented in the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party, both in its Menshevik branch and, to a lesser extent, in the Bolshevik leadership, with Lev Bronshtein (Trotsky), Grigorii Apfelbaum (Zinoviev), and Lev Rosenfeld (Kamenev) among the top five leaders of the Russian Communist Party. Despite Jews’ presence in Bolshevik leadership positions, the Bolsheviks faced several problems in trying to organize Soviet Jewry. First, even though many leaders were Jewish, numerically, there were not very many Jews in the Bolshevik Party. Most socialist Jews opted for Menshevism, Bundism, or any of the other varieties of Jewish socialism, many of which made the propagation of Yiddish culture a centerpiece of their political agendas. The second problem was that, in the words of the Yiddish writer Daniel Charny, in 1918, “there still was no sign of a Jewish Bolshevism.”^[4] While most Jewish socialists organized the Jewish population in Yiddish, Bolshevik Jews like Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev, were more Russified, and, like Joseph Stalin, the head of the Soviet Commissariat of Nationalities, believed that the path to political emancipation was through the assimilation of Jews into broader Russian culture. Bolsheviks, both Jews and non-Jews, were not speaking to a specifically Jewish audience. The original Jewish Bolsheviks were not interested in fostering a particularly Jewish socialist culture and would never have formed the backbone of a Soviet Yiddish intelligentsia, because they had no desire to do so.^[5] They had no desire to make the new Soviet Jew; they were interested in creating the new Soviet citizen. These two projects – Russified Jews’ assimilation of Soviet Jewry into Soviet citizens and the Yiddish intelligentsia’s simultaneous creation of a particular Soviet culture for Jews – went on simultaneously through the 1930s.
Socialist Jewish writers, ideologists, poets, political activists, and teachers who had been active in organizing the Jewish working classes of the pre-revolutionary Russian Empire became the Soviet Yiddish intelligentsia. Before the Bolshevik Revolution, this group of Jewish intellectuals had deep ideological and political divisions, deeper in fact than those within the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party. They often fought more intensely with each other than with the perceived capitalist or tsarist enemy. Bundists, socialist Zionists, socialist autonomists, and others created new political movements as new ideas about how to lead Jews into the future arose. This diversity of political expression continued in Poland, Lithuania, and in other parts of Europe in the interwar period, but political diversity was not tolerated in the Soviet Union as the Bolsheviks quickly turned the Soviet Union into a one-party state. With the formation of the Jewish sections of the Communist Party (Evsektsiia), and with the closing down and consolidation of all remaining political parties, Jewish political and cultural activists across the political, ideological, and aesthetic spectrum were forced to come together as the Soviet Yiddish intelligentsia. Some of them chose to join the Communist Party; many did not. But party affiliation did not determine whether a cultural or political activist was a member of this group. Working in Yiddish for the creation of the new Soviet Jew did.
This group was “Soviet,” because it was engaged in the state- and empire-building process that the Communist Party and the Soviet state made its highest priority. This intelligentsia, like other non-Russian, ethnic intelligentsias in the Soviet empire, was created to bring enlightenment and Soviet ideology to the multiethnic Soviet empire. This group was “Yiddish,” because Yiddish marked the Jews as a Soviet nation, as opposed to a religion, and Yiddish was the medium through which Soviet Jewry would foster a new kind of collective identity – secular and socialist, but marked as Jewish. Until the adoption of internal passports establishing a citizen’s ethnic identity in 1932, Yiddish culture was the most visible marker of Soviet Jewish ethnic difference. It was Yiddish, because Yiddish is what brought this group of activists together and is what distinguished this group of colonial leaders from other imperial examples in which the native elite encouraged the use of the metropole’s language. The Soviet Yiddish intelligentsia actually had to work against Jewish linguistic assimilation – the kind demonstrated by the Trotskys, Kamenevs, and Zinovievs, and the millions of Jews moving to the Soviet Union’s big cities – and convince Jews that Yiddish was a language worthy of Soviet culture.
This group was an “intelligentsia,” because, for one, it was a very small and highly educated group of people who had taken it upon themselves to lead “their people” into the socialist future. They were an intelligentsia engaged in an imperial project of cultural translation – bringing Soviet ideology and cultural trends to Soviet Jews and lobbying for Jewish issues before the non-Jewish, and usually more authoritative, members of the Communist Party and the Soviet state. But as some postcolonial historians have shown, although they got their power from the imperial state, they brought their own cultural, political, and ideological agenda with them, with Yiddish as the centerpiece of their modern Jewish revolution.^[6]

THE IDEOLOGY OF THE SOVIET YIDDISH INTELLIGENTSIA

For the Soviet Yiddish intelligentsia who worked with and for the Soviet state, Yiddish marked the Jews as a distinct ethnic group – or, in the language of the Soviet Union, a distinct nationality – and Yiddish marked the new Soviet Jewish culture that this intelligentsia created. These writers, activists, Communist Party bosses, literary censors, book publishers, cultural critics, university scholars, and others were drawing on a tradition of leftist, populist, and socialist Jewish culture and politics, which made Yiddish – the vernacular language of Eastern European Jewry – the defining feature of Jewish culture in the modern world.
These “Yiddishists” were not alone. For many intellectuals in the age of nationalism, language was not just a means of communication; it was the embodiment of a people. In this case, Yiddish reflected the soul of the Jewish folk. (For some Zionists, it was Hebrew that reflected the soul of the Jewish nation.) By the turn of the twentieth century, many intellectuals were attributing vast importance to Yiddish. “In Yiddish the Jewish spirit is reflected and its value for the survival of our nation is beginning to be comprehended,” read the invitation to the Czernowitz Language Conference in 1908 – the first major gathering of people interested in raising the status of the Jews’ lowly “jargon,” their kitchen language and mother tongue. In 1923, fifteen years after Czernowitz and six years after the Bolshevik Revolution, Esther Frumkina, the chief socialist delegate at Czernowitz and one of the most important Yiddish cultural activists in the Soviet Union, wrote, “How much long-held pain and joy, how many profound experiences, how many gray secrets, how many eternal longings are embodied in the language. And how much intrinsic beauty and harmony lies within it. Whether it is beaming or laughing, serious and harsh or soft and dreamy, dry or damp – [Yiddish] is always a divine work of art, always a picture of the people that created it.”^[7] Yiddish was much more than a means of communication before, during, and according to Frumkina, after the Revolution as well.
Mikhail Levitan, an editor and important member of the Soviet Yiddish intelligentsia in Ukraine, joined the Communist Party shortly after the Revolution in 1917 and was charged with insuring that the Soviet state and Communist Party’s goals were at the core of Soviet Jewish culture building.^[8] He wrote a series of articles in 1926 explaining just what he thought Soviet Jewish culture was, and was not, about.

“We said that Yiddish is, for us Communists, not a goal in and of itself, but is only a means for Communist education and re-education of the Jewish masses. Does that mean that the culture building that we’ve done in Yiddish is just a tactical maneuver for us?… Do we approach Yiddish from the standpoint that it is a lesser evil than Hebrew?… Is it just meant to elicit sympathy from the worldwide Jewish masses to our work in the Soviet Union? And finally, does it mean that after we completely liquidate Zionist influence from the Soviet Union, and if the Communist International finds the key to the hearts and minds of the Jewish workers of bourgeois lands, will we suddenly throw out, as unnecessary baggage, all of Yiddish-language culture building?”^[9]

In one statement, Levitan summed up the political arguments explaining the Soviet imperial state’s simultaneous interest in a distinct Soviet Yiddish culture and in Jewish assimilation into Russian culture. Some thought that Yiddish was a convenient way to spread Soviet propaganda to the Yiddish-speaking Jewish masses, both within the Soviet Union and abroad. Until Soviet Jews all spoke Russian, the state would have to bring them Communism in Yiddish. He also addressed other propagandistic reasons for the state’s support of Yiddish. Did the Soviet Union support Yiddish to get Jews around the world to support the fledgling and desperately poor country both politically and financially? Was the Soviet state supporting Yiddish as a front for the fact that it was persecuting Judaism, Hebrew culture, Zionism and other forms of Jewish culture and politics? And finally, he poses the question, once all Jews became Communists, would Yiddish still be necessary?
There was a degree of truth to all of these claims, although the way he phrased these hypothetical questions suggests negative intentions, rather than positive, propagandistic motivation. The Soviet state and the Soviet Yiddish intelligentsia wanted Jews’ support for the new socialist experiment, and Yiddish was a great way of doing that. The intelligentsia’s creation of an alternative Jewish culture in Yiddish would certainly serve as a substitute for the forms of Jewish culture it was suppressing like “bourgeois, nationalist” Zionism and “benighted, backward” traditional Jewish religion. These political and utilitarian arguments Levitan raised were also informed by the history of Jewish cultural development in Eastern Europe. Nineteenth-century Jewish modernizers, maskilim, thought that to be modern, Jews needed to speak the languages of high culture that surrounded them – Russian and German – and needed to resurrect the Jews’ classical language, Hebrew. For most maskilim, Yiddish was a relic of a time past, when Jews had their own vernacular language, because they lived in a world apart. In the modern world, Jews were part of, not apart from, society. Those maskilim who chose to work in Yiddish saw its use in literature, newspapers, and other forms of print culture as a means of bringing new ideas to the Jewish population in their native tongue. Yiddish was not seen as a language of high culture, nor as a language Jews should be proud of. It was a language of convenience. Most maskilim would have approved of abandoning Yiddish once the modernizing goals had been accomplished, in this case, once Soviet Jewry was speaking Russian and quoting Lenin.
But Levitan was not a nineteenth-century enlightener.
In Eastern Europe, Yiddish had been seen as the lowly vernacular language of Jews, not the language of high, literary culture. Hebrew was the traditional textual language that bound Jews around the world together. The role of Yiddish in Jewish culture began to change when Eastern European Jewish intellectuals encountered nineteenth-century nationalism. Benedict Anderson, one of the foremost scholars of nationalism, has shown that secularization, imperialism, language politics, and the dissemination of print were four processes that fostered national identification in place of other kinds of local and religious identities.^[10] In the context of the Russian empire, Jewish secularization was taking place in the nineteenth century, just as the Russian empire was struggling to define itself as both an empire and a nation. This tension encouraged the empire’s ethnic minorities to assimilate into Russian culture, but also fostered nationalist politics among the elite of many minorities. Jewish assimilationists struggled with the question: “If I speak and dress like a Russian, can I become Russian?” For Jewish nationalists, who saw language as the key to a separate Jewish identity, the question was “In what language should Jews develop a post-religious Jewish communal identity, what might be called a Jewish national identity?” As urbanized Jews in Petersburg were developing a Jewish Russian-language press and eventually trying to break into the mainstream Russian press, Yiddish and Hebrew cultural activists in the Russian empire began developing a literature, a periodical press, school systems, and other institutions that laid the groundwork for a new form of collective Jewish identity, potentially in both Jewish languages.
But this nationalist current met radical socialist politics and radical Jewish nationalism, which spelled the rapid end to internal Jewish bilingualism, to the symbiotic relationship that Yiddish and Hebrew had maintained in Eastern European Jewish culture for hundreds of years.^[11] The most important movement for the development of Yiddish culture was the General Jewish Workers’ Union, known as the Bund, which in 1897 held its first conference. It soon began publishing its Yiddish-language newspaper, The Worker’s Voice (Di Arbeter Shtime), and in 1901, officially adopted a platform calling for “national and cultural autonomy,” and made its official language “that of the Jewish working classes – Yiddish.”^[12] Zionists, who also convened their first world congress in 1897, eventually placed Hebrew at the center of their national platform, and, over time, did for Hebrew what socialists did for Yiddish – created a Jewish culture in the one and only language that, each believed, embodied the Jewish people. Both Zionists and Jewish socialists were envisioning “an alternative construct of Jewish identity grounded in a secular definition of Jewish peoplehood and reinforced by secularized narratives of the Jewish past.”^[13] If Jewish Bolsheviks were a legacy of the urbanized Russian Jewish йlite, Levitan and the Soviet Yiddish intelligentsia were a legacy of all three of these particularly Jewish movements – the Jewish enlightenment, Jewish nationalism, and Jewish socialism.
After laying out the political, utilitarian arguments explaining Soviet Yiddish culture, Levitan took apart the whole notion of culture that underlay the idea that Yiddish was just a convenient means to an end.

“The first issue is the concept of means and ends. Such a division is rather artificial…Culture-building…is one of the most secure means to building our international socialist culture in the transition period from capitalism to communism… If we say that Yiddish is not an end, but a means, then can we come to the conclusion that we Communists are not interested in the Yiddish language, in its purity, its blossoming, and its refinement? Does it mean that we are nihilists toward the Yiddish language? …Of course not. …We don’t talk about making the language eternal. Historical materialists don’t talk about things being eternal…We have established a tremendous network of institutions to serve the Yiddish speaking masses. We are not building just any Jewish culture; we are building a Soviet Jewish culture, a socialist Jewish culture, and a part of international socialist culture.”^[14]

The first step in the building of Soviet Jewish culture was the attempt to establish Yiddish as the language that defined Soviet Jewry. The victory over Hebrew, the other Jewish language, was fierce and swift. The Soviet Yiddish intelligentsia, and therefore the Soviet state, successfully associated Hebrew with bourgeois nationalism and religious clericalism, and used state power to suppress Hebrew culture immediately after the revolution. By the early 1920s Hebrew culture had gone underground. The language war in the Soviet Union is a perfect example of the native elite teaching the socialist metropole how to refashion Jews in a Soviet image.^[15]
As for the non-Jewish language of high culture, to be sure, by the late-1930s Russian had caught up to Yiddish as the day-to-day language of Soviet Jews, and there were plenty of Soviet Jews producing culture and making policy in Russian. After all, the modernization and urbanization of Eastern European Jews in places like Kiev, St. Petersburg, Warsaw, and also New York, London, and Berlin had been taking place since the middle-nineteenth century.^[16] These social, cultural, and economic processes only increased after the Revolution and the removal of Jewish residency restrictions that defined the Pale of Settlement, the region of the Russian Empire in which Jews were permitted to live relatively freely during the late tsarist period. For example, the Jewish population of Kharkov, Ukraine, increased 900% between the 1897 and 1926 censuses, and the Jewish population of Moscow went from 28,000 in 1920 to 131,000 in 1926.^[17] As Jews moved to large Russian-speaking cities, they began to speak Russian (and as they moved to New York and London, they spoke English). The 1926 Soviet census showed that 72.6% of Soviet Jews listed Yiddish as their native language, down from 97% according to the 1897 census, and the numbers in the larger cities showed a dramatic turn toward Russian. Linguistic and cultural modernization and assimilation was happening “from the bottom up” without any outside interference from Jewish intellectuals or the Soviet state.^[18] Weren’t Jews reaching the “end” of political and cultural assimilation without having the Soviet state and the Yiddish intelligentsia resort to the Jews’ native tongue? If this was the case, why would the Soviet Yiddish intelligentsia and non-Jewish Communist Party leaders be interested in Yiddish?
In the modern world, many Jewish nationalists, whether they were socialists, Communists, or Zionists, thought Jews needed a language that differentiated them from other groups in order to maintain a distinct collective identity in a rapidly secularizing modern world. If Jewish religious practice and separate Jewish communities stopped being that which defined Jews, then language could serve as a substitute.^[19] Despite linguistic assimilation, there was a concerted effort on the part of the intelligentsia to make Yiddish the defining feature of Soviet Jewishness. Otherwise, theoretically, in a socialist, atheist, modern world, what would define Jews?^[20]
The next step in creating Soviet Yiddish culture was the one expressed in Levitan’s article: to turn Yiddish from a lowly jargon into a beautiful, modern language, worthy of serving as the basis of a modern socialist Jewish culture.^[21] With a single, modernized language in place, the native intelligentsia could create the institutions Levitan discussed that were needed to propagate Yiddish and build a culture in it, even as Soviet Jews were becoming Russian-speaking Soviets.

THE SOVIET STATE’S INTEREST IN YIDDISH

If the Jewish intelligentsia worked for a Soviet Jewish culture to create a modern Jewish nation, why did non-Jewish Soviet and Party leaders of the new state listen to and support these activists, especially if the socialist empire was intended to unite the proletariat of the world, not to foster linguistic divisions among them? After the Revolution, with Ukrainians declaring independence, Jews organizing their own political and cultural institutions, and the Poles leaving the empire, the Soviet leadership had to balance ideological desire and political pragmatism to keep the multiethnic empire together. Seen through the lens of political pragmatism, supporting the leadership of the empire’s ethnic minorities might sway them to join the Soviet state rather than fight against it. Supporting the creation of ethnic intelligentsias and ethnic minorities’ cultures was a means of creating a single Soviet socialist state out of diverse ethnic groups.
Other imperialisms, however, created a native intelligentsia and systems of imperial power in the language of the metropole, which makes sense if part of the imperial civilizing mission was to teach the natives how to be good Western people. All roads led to London and Paris, to English and French culture. In the Soviet case, the natives’ own language and developing culture in their own territories was important, central in fact, to Soviet imperial policy – why?^[22] Lenin himself suggested that the tsarist Russian empire was different from Western empires in that it was both the oppressor of other national groups and the victim of oppression by the capitalist West.^[23] Russia was an empire to those within its borders and a colony on a global scale. It was, Lenin argued, a prime candidate for both a proletarian and an anti-imperial revolution. Once the Revolution happened, the Bolsheviks found themselves in the position of being: 1) state-building modernizers of a multinational empire, 2) revolutionaries dedicated to inaugurating socialism, and 3) de-colonizers combating the pernicious effects of tsarist Russian imperialism on its constituent nationalities. As Francine Hirsch has argued, “for Soviet policymakers, colonization and ‘making nations’ went hand in hand.”^[24]
In the Jewish case, socialist Jewish nationalists were the ones empowered by the empire to create those policies for Jews, policies that would foster a new kind of Jewish identity and culture and would also foster allegiance to and support for Communism and the Soviet state. These policies – collectively known as “nativization “or “korenizatsiia” – provided the political framework and the financial and material resources for the Soviet Yiddish intelligentsia to build Soviet Jewish culture.^[25] Soviet state building and Jewish nation building in Yiddish were not mutually exclusive. One could call for class struggle and insist that Jewish children go to Yiddish schools. Soviet socialism and secular Jewish nationalism were not opposite ends of a spectrum in which the Soviet Yiddish intelligentsia operated. Leading ethnic minority activists were not nationalists or socialists. In the imperial context, this intelligentsia became both colonizer and colonized. In the 1920s, these ideologies and cultural and political projects developed together, each simultaneously informing and circumscribing the other.^[26]

JEWS AS A UNIQUE SOVIET NATIONAL MINORITY

Within Soviet nationalities policy and nativization, Jews were treated just like any other national minority until World War II (and in many cases, Jews as a nationality were treated better than other nationalities until World War II). Nonetheless, Jews as a group did not fit neatly into Soviet categories. In the Soviet imperial categorization of its nationalities, Jews were often compared to Poles and Germans, due to their common “Westernness,” their high level of education, and their high rate of literacy. Because of this, Jews had more autonomy to develop their own Soviet culture because they could, due to their perceived level of cultural development, and because they wanted to, because of their long and well-developed socialist political organizing. Yet at the same time, Jews were compared to the Roma (“Gypsies,” as they were called) because of their common landlessness. This lack of a defined and bounded place put Jews in an anomalous position within Soviet categories, which used territory as well as language to define national groups. In fact, this landlessness was a source of definitional challenge for many Soviet theoreticians, who had difficulty calling Jews a nationality precisely because of their landlessness. The Yiddish intelligentsia also found Jews’ landlessness an impediment to the full realization of a Soviet Jewish nation. Like Zionists, who needed territory in which to incubate a Hebrew nation in Palestine, Soviet Jewish activists fought to establish Jewish agricultural colonies, Jewish city councils, and eventually an entire Jewish region, called Birobidzhan, in which the official languages were Yiddish and Russian, in order to create the territorial foundations of their Soviet nation.^[27] Jews were also different, because Jews in the Soviet Union were made up of several distinct ethnic groups with different languages, territories, and cultures. In fact, the 1926 Soviet census recognized six different Jewish ethnic minorities – Jews (Ashkenazi), Bukharan Jews, Mountain (Dagestani) Jews, Georgian Jews, Crimean Jews, and Karaite Jews – and the government and intelligentsias of each group developed policies particular to each group.^[28]
What also makes Jews unique is an aspect of Jewish collective identity that makes them perennially unique: the fact that Jews have been and still are both a religious and an ethnic group. Even Hitler, whose antisemitism was firmly based in theories of race, mixed the two up when the Nuremberg Laws denied citizenship to converts to Judaism, who had no connection to “Jewish blood.”^[29] Until 1917, the Russian government recognized Jews as both a religious and an ethnic entity living within its borders. Jewish marriages were handled by Jewish religious courts, most Jewish kids went to Jewish schools overseen by official Jewish councils headed by rabbis, and enmity toward Jews was still often seen through the lens of anti-Christian polemics despite the appearance of a racial anti-Semitism in the late nineteenth century. At the same time, from the middle nineteenth century on, Jews and Russians began to see Jews in overlapping categories –sometimes as a nation and other times as a “religious faith”. The officially atheistic Soviet Union inherited this Jewish problem. Did fighting against religion mean fighting against Jews as Jews? Would Jews be treated like Christians in the Soviet Union or would they be treated like Ukrainians or Russians? Would they have religious representation that would maintain official relations with the Soviet state? The secular Yiddish intelligentsia’s and the Soviet state’s goal was to eliminate a religious and support a secular Jewish identity and culture in Yiddish. But this tension (and suspicion) about Jews’ claim to all of the benefits of being a Soviet nation lingered throughout the Soviet period, especially since Jews were trying to have it both ways – to maintain a distinct Jewish culture in Yiddish while also quickly becoming one of the most upwardly mobile ethnic groups in Russian-speaking society.
One of the first things the Soviet Yiddish intelligentsia did was to close down the traditional Jewish communities (kehilot) that had served as an independent political and religious authority in the Jewish world, although this action was hotly debated. Members of the Soviet Yiddish intelligentsia also closed down synagogues, traditional Jewish schools, and arrested rabbis, teachers of Hebrew, and others who were continuing to serve as leaders of traditional Judaism. Although some non-Soviet Jews have accused these members of the intelligentsia of self-hatred because of their suppression of traditional expressions of Jewish identity, it is more useful to see their actions as their own wrestling with the question of Jewish identity within the context of a socialist empire.
Jews were also different from other ethnic minorities because of their hugely successful acculturation and integration into Russian society. They were over-represented in the Soviet professions, in Soviet cities, in the Soviet bureaucracy, in the Soviet Russian intelligentsia, the secret police, and the Communist Party until World War II.^[30] To put it crudely, the Soviet Union treated Jews well by giving them social, economic, and political opportunities denied them by the conservative tsarist government and by neighboring countries in Eastern Europe.^[31] Another way to look at the same social phenomenon is that Jews were well-represented in the empire’s intelligentsia, but, as with other empires, these assimilated and acculturated Jews upset the boundaries between Russian and Jew that had been fairly clear in the Russian empire, and upset the very notion that Jews were a subaltern group within the Russian empire. Perhaps Jews fit in too well.

* * *

The Soviet Yiddish intelligentsia, on the one hand, and the overwhelming Jewish presence in the imperial Russian intelligentsia, on the other, show how complicated Soviet empire and nation building was. (Even more complicated is the fact that sometimes the same person could be a member of both groups.) Among Russia’s ethnic minorities, Yiddish marked Jews as different, and those Jews who no longer operated in Yiddish theoretically lost their ethnic difference; however this theoretical invisibility provoked new ways of finding the Jew within. In order to fit in, many Jews had changed their names to sound more Russian; they frequently did not “look” different than their Russian counterparts, and they were some of the most skilled crafters of Russian literature. Some argue that the Soviet empire’s intelligentsia became truly pan-ethnic. But just as Jews were integrating into the Soviet Russian intelligentsia, the state was also fostering Jewish particularity, what some might call Jewish national consciousness, by supporting a whole network of Yiddish culture and of Jewish territory throughout the Soviet Union. How could Soviet Jews have it both ways?
By the 1930s, the tension between universality and particularity, between the invisibility of the Jew and the marked presence of a Soviet Jewish nation became apparent. The 1920s campaign against “bourgeois” anti-Semitism, a hallmark of early Soviet policy, waned, and the suspicion of Jews’ overrepresentation in the Party and the secret police became the question that dare not be asked. The conditions of Hitler’s war against the Soviet Union and against the Jews, the moment when Soviet Jews were most radically integrated into the heroic Soviet nation as soldiers and singled out as radically different as victims ended the romance of Soviet Jewry with the Soviet Union. The union of imperial and national policies fell apart. Jews couldn’t have it both ways.
After the war, the Soviet Yiddish cultural apparatus was destroyed, and the pan-ethnic, Russian Soviet intelligentsia “unmasked” its Jews, in many cases literally, by publishing Jews’ original family names (Bronshteyn and Apfelbaum) after their “fake” Russian/Soviet pseudonyms.^[32] Jews never were Russian; they simply performed being Russian.
By the early 1950s nearly all members of the Soviet Yiddish intelligentsia were dead, most by unnatural means, and many Jewish members of the imperial Russian intelligentsia lost their jobs, and the very word “Jew” became, for many, a mark of shame. The collapse of the ideological union between empire- and nation-building, between supporting the union of all peoples and the fostering of visible ethnic difference, manifested itself most visibly among Soviet Jews, who simply blurred too many boundaries. The policing of those boundaries meant the end of both the Soviet Jewish nation and the attempted assimilation of Soviet Jewry.