The Jews of the Russian Empire

The Geographic, Ethnic, and Linguistic Diversity of the Multinational Russian Empire

In 1880, the multinational Russian empire, a highly diverse ethnic, cultural, and linguistic mosaic, contained by far the largest Jewish population in the world. The vast majority of nominally Russian Jews were actually part of the eastern wing of the pan-European Ashkenazic diaspora, descendants of the Jews of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth who continued to live overwhelmingly in the same Polish, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian regions that their ancestors had inhabited for centuries. 

Not all of the Jews of Russia were Ashkenazim. In the Asian territories north of Afghanistan, Iran, and the Ottoman Empire, which were annexed to Russia in the nineteenth century, there were centuries-old communities of Bukharan, Caucasian, and Georgian Jews. These were joined over the course of the century by Russian-born Ashkenazic immigrants who moved to the developing commercial and industrial centers of Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, and Georgia. The Crimean Peninsula was home to a small ancient community of Krymchaks who spoke a vernacular Turkic. Karaites who had their own Turkic language lived in ancient communities of Lithuania in western Ukraine, the Crimean Peninsula, and in the new community of Odessa.

Jewish Subjects of the Tsar: An Ethnoreligious Distinctiveness

Though subjects of the tsar for a century, few were Russified in any meaningful sense, though that was beginning to change. Most still used Yiddish as their primary language and lived lives permeated with an eastern Ashkenazic religious and cultural tradition that layered rabbinic, folk, and Hasidic traditions bound together with a strong sense of ethnoreligious distinctiveness from their neighbors. 

Adding to the complexity, this population was subjected to not one but rather two clashing powerful acculturative currents. While some “Russian” Jews looked to Russian as the language of modernity, those in the heart of old Poland, which Russia ruled but never colonized, looked to Polish high culture as the beckoning alternative if they felt any acculturative attractions at all.

Legal Status: Rights and Privileges

Jews in Russia did not enjoy equal civil rights—such a thing did not exist in Russia until 1917—but they did have the legal privileges accorded townspeople. Due to legal restrictions on the permanent residence of Jews in all areas of the empire, which were first established in the late eighteenth century, most Ashkenazic Jews continued to live in what was known as the Pale of Settlement: the western governorships of the empire, stretching from the Baltic region to the northern shore of the Black Sea in the south. 

In 1881, some 2,912,000 Jews lived in the Pale of Settlement, more than 11 percent of the total population, while 1,020,000 lived in Russian Poland (Congress Poland), 13.62 percent of the population. Most of these Jews still maintained traditional lifestyles, although since the reforms of Tsar Alexander II in the 1860s, a Jewish bourgeoisie oriented toward the Russian language and toward imperial culture had begun to develop in cities large and small.

Population Movement within the Empire

Internal population movements led to the transfer of a significant portion of Jews living in the northern governance of the Pale of Settlement to the southern regions, turning Odessa into the empire’s second largest Jewish center after Warsaw and creating new Jewish communities in cities like Kharkiv and Dnipro (formerly Kharkov and Ekaterinoslav). 

In 1880, only a small percentage of all Russian Jewry lived in large cities outside the Pale of Settlement. However, this group, especially residents of Moscow and St. Petersburg, which included a Jewish intelligentsia that embraced the language of the empire and maintained ties with the Russian cultural world, would play an important role over the coming decades in the political life of Russian Jewry and the blossoming of a multilingual Jewish culture.

Pogroms, Anti-Jewish Policy, and Suspicion of Jews and Their Loyalties

The assassination of Tsar Alexander II by radicals in March 1881 and an ensuing wave of pogroms led to a new era in the history of the empire’s Jews. Thereafter, the government pursued a largely anti-Jewish policy marked by extreme suspicion of Jewish loyalty. This produced a growing rift between the Russian government and much of Russia’s diverse Jewish population, including those Jews who had already undergone a process of Russification and identified with the state culture. Meanwhile, economic hardships that resulted in the disintegration of the old socioeconomic order accelerated internal and external migrations and further advanced political radicalization. Those political seeds had already begun to germinate in the 1860s and 1870s.