Jews and the

Imperial State
Jews and the
Imperial State
IDENTIFICATION POLITICS
IN TSARIST RUSSIA

Eugene M. Avrutin

Cornell University Press

ITHACA AND LONDON
Cornell University Press acknowledges that support for this project has
been provided by the Cahnman Publication Subvention grant, awarded
by the Association for Jewish Studies.

Copyright © 2010 by Cornell University

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or
parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in
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First published 2010 by Cornell University Press

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Avrutin, Eugene M.
Jews and the imperial state :identification politics in tsarist Russia I
Eugene M. Avrutin.
p.cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8014-4862-1 (cloth: alk. paper)
1. Jews-Russia-History-19th century. 2. Jews-Legal status, laws,
etc.-Russia-History-19th century. 3. Jews, Russian-
Ethnic identity-History-19th century. 4. Identification-Russia-
History-19th century. I. Title.
DS134.84.A97 2010
305.892'404709034-dc22 2010010711

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 To Michael
and Tatyana Avrutin
 Contents

Acknowledgments IX

Note on Transliteration X Ill

Abbreviations XV

Introduction 1
1. Making Jews Legible 21
2. Power of Documentation 53
3. Movement and Residence 86
4. Invisible Jews 116
5. The Jewish Name 147
Epilogue: Collapse of the Imperial Ghetto 180
Bibliography 189
Index 207
 Acknowledgments

I thank the individuals and institutions that facilitated the writing and re-
search of this book. My undergraduate teachers at the University of Texas
at Austin (Leslie O'Bell, Joan Neuberger, and Sidney Monas) deserve spe-
cial mention, for without their encouragement and support, I would never
have chosen to pursue graduate school. At the University of Michigan, Bill
Rosenberg, Todd Endelman, Valerie Kivelson, and Zvi Gitelman provided
expert guidance. Since my first semester in Ann Arbor, Bill Rosenberg has
improved my work with astute and judicious criticism in more ways than I
could ever express. Todd Endelman trained me as a Jewish historian and has
been a wonderful critic of my work. Valerie Kivelson deserves special men-
tion as well for introducing me to the history of early modern Europe and
for her meticulous readings of my chapters. Zvi Gitelman saved me from a
number of embarrassing errors, and his remarks made me rethink some of
my initial conclusions.
I also thank the other individuals who read and critiqued my work, shared
their research with me, and broadened my horizons as a historian. These
include Paul Werth, Benjamin Nathans, Shaul Stampfer, Jim Loeffler, Olga
Litvak, and the late John Klier. During my time in Jerusalem as a graduate
student, the late Jonathan Frankel and Scott Ury were generous with their
time, and Michael Silber sparked my interest in Jewish names and naming
practices. The staff at RGIA allowed me to work in the archive when it was
officially closed to the public. At Colby College, Rob Weisbrot, Paul Joseph-
son, Elizabeth Leonard, Jim Webb, and the tireless interlibrary loan staff
made my two academic years in central Maine enjoyable and productive.
x I Acknowledgments

The bulk of the book was written at the Kennan Institute for Advanced
Russian Studies of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
My thanks to Blair A. Ruble, William E. Pomeranz, and the amazing library
staff for making my five months in Washington, D.C. so productive. At
Cornell University Press, John Ackerman believed in this project from the
very beginning. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Kenneth Moss for read-
ing the entire manuscript, offering numerous constructive suggestions, and
sharing with me his vast knowledge of Jewish history. My thanks also go to
the second outside reader for bringing me back to reality by asking all the
right questions. I am especially grateful to Bob Greene for critiquing the en-
tire manuscript in record time. Since our very first days of graduate school,
Bob has been a wonderful friend and a discerning critic and has read more
of my drafts and listened to more of my presentations than he probably
cares to remember.
At the University of Illinois, I am fortunate to have wonderful friends and
colleagues. Mark Steinberg, John Randolph, Diane Koenker, and Antoinette
Burton answered all my questions. Fred Jaher and Max Edelson (who is
now at the University of Virginia) were exceptionally generous with their
time. Michael Shapiro, Dale Bauer, and Matti Bunzl, the past and present
directors of the Program in Jewish Culture and Society, offered financial
assistance for overseas travel and have made the Jewish Studies program
truly unique. In particular, I would like to say a special thank you to Harriet
Murav and Bruce Rosenstock for their companionship and intellectual sup-
port over the past three years.
I am grateful to the following institutions for their financial assistance: the
Fulbright liE Program; the International Research and Exchanges Board;
the Social Science Research Council; the University of Michigan, includ-
ing the Department of History, the Center for Russian and East European
Studies, the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies, and the Rackham Graduate
School; Colby College; the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture; the
University of Illinois, including the Program in Jewish Culture and Society,
the Department of History, and the Research Board; and the Kennan Insti-
tute for Advanced Russian Studies of the Woodrow Wilson International
Center for Scholars. A Cahnman Publication Subvention grant awarded by
the Association for Jewish Studies helped offset publication costs.
Parts of this book have appeared in print elsewhere. An earlier version of
chapter 1 was published as "The Politics of Jewish Legibility: Documenta-
tion Practices and Reform During the Reign of Nicholas I," Jewish Social
Studies 11, no. 2 (2005): 136-69. A portion of chapter 2 was first published
as "The Power of Documentation: Vital Statistics and Jewish Accommoda-
tion in Tsarist Russia," Ab Imperio 4 (2003 ): 2 71-300. A small portion
of chapter 4 appeared in Slavic Review 65, no. 1 (2006): 90-110, and is
 Acknowledgments I x1

reprinted here with the permission of the American Association for the Ad-
vancement of Slavic Studies.
Finally and most important, without the assistance and understanding of
my family, I would never have finished the book. Yingying Guo has shown
remarkable support for this project and my long absences from home. I'm
sure she's glad that it's finally done. Our daughter, Abi, was born one week
after I sent the initial draft for review, and she has made it all worthwhile
ever since. My parents, Michael and Tatyana Avrutin, have provided en-
couragement in all sorts of ways over the years, and that is why I dedicate
this book to them.
 Note on
Transliteration

All geographic names are spelled as they appear in their original historical
context. I have generally followed the Library of Congress system for trans-
literating Russian and Hebrew words and the YIVO one for Yiddish. The
vast majority of the names that appear in this book have been transliterated
according to these rules, with a few notable exceptions. Well-known names
such as Iankel and Tolstoi, for example, appear as Yankel and Tolstoy.
 Abbreviations

DAKO Derzhavnyi arkhiv Kylvskoi' oblasti

GARF Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi federatsii
PSZRI Polnoe sobranie zakonov Rossiiskoi imperii
RAN-SPb St. Peterburgskii filial arkhiva Rossiiskoi akademii nauk, St. Petersburg
RG Record group
RGIA Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv
TsDIAK Tsentral'nyi derzhavnyi istorychnyi arkhiv Ukrai'ny, Kiev
TsGIA-SPb Tsentral'nyi gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv, St. Petersburg
YIVO YIVO Institute for Jewish Research
 AUSTRIA-HUNGARY

OTI'OMAN EMPIRE
BLACK SEA

Figure A. Pale of Settlement. Map drawn by Merrily Shaw of the Russian, East Euro-
pean, and Eurasian Center at the UtJiversity of Illinois.
 Introduction
"I explained to her why I had no papers. The archives of the town
in which I was born were destroyed by fire during the war. If I
wanted my birth certificate, I'd have to travel to that town and get
witnesses to prove that I came from there. To get a passport, I also
needed a copy of my father's birth certificate, or something that was
called an 'extract from the permanent record.' All this required both
time and money."
-IsAAC BASHEVIS SINGER, The Certificate

On February 4, 1910, a Jew who was known by the literary pseudonym

S. An-skii arrived in Zhitomir (Volynia Province) on the evening train.
Shortly after his arrival, An-skii went to drop off his things at the home
of an acquaintance, Vladenburg, who resided in house number 12 on Ba-
zarnaia Street. Wasting little time, An-skii then set off to read a lecture
entitled "On the Origins and Characteristics of Contemporary Jewish Lit-
erature" at a public gathering of the local branch of the Jewish Literary
Society. The lecture drew a large audience, including several police officials
who reported that the "orator did not read or say anything other than what
was listed on the program and concluded his lecture at midnight." Early
the next morning An-skii departed for Berdichev (Kiev Province), where
he boarded an overnight train to Lutsk (Volynia Province). As soon as An-
skii arrived in Lutsk, a dentist by the name of Bromberg escorted him to
the Hotel Bristol. After dropping off his bags at the hotel, An-skii lectured
for almost two hours on the same topic to another capacity audience. That
night An-skii and four other men gathered at Bromberg's apartment, where
they ate and talked until four in the morning. An-skii managed to sleep only
a few hours before he appeared at the photography studio Rafael, where he,
Bromberg, and nine other Jews posed for a group portrait. After leaving the
studio, Bromberg and An-skii set off for the train station. Bromberg pur-
chased a 1:15 ticket to Polonnoe (Volynia Province), while An-skii bought
a second-class ticket to Grodno (Grodno Province). An-skii waited at the
2 I Jews and the Imperial State

station until his friend departed and then spent the remaining time alone
in his hotel room, making only a brief sojourn, for no more than fifteen or
twenty minutes, to the photography studio. An-skii departed as scheduled
on the 3:30 afternoon train to Grodno, under the close supervision of an
undercover plainclothes detective.
In a memo to the Department of Police, Captain Budnitskii reported
that the man who had stayed the night at the Hotel Bristol was none other
than the forty-five-year-old Vitebsk townsman Shlioma Rappoport, a mem-
ber of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, a talented orator, and the author
of numerous illegal writings. On September 4, 1907, the department is-
sued circular number 150038115 to all police officials instructing them to
closely supervise a man who was deemed politically dangerous, easily able
to avoid detection, and perhaps even subversive. To plainclothes detectives,
Rappoport was known by the nickname "Chital'nyi" (the bookish one) or
"Sedoi" (the gray-haired one) and not by his literary pseudonym "An-skii,"
which he had adopted in the year 1892, after arriving in St. Petersburg
with the hopes of making a name for himself in the Russian literary world.
Although Rappoport's internal passport officially listed his permanent place
of residence as Vitebsk (Vitebsk Province), authorities had a hard time locat-
ing exactly where the Jew lived, since "the gray-haired one" was constantly
traveling from town to town throughout the western territories of the em-
pire, reading lectures on diverse literary topics. To the secret agent shadow-
ing Rappoport, it thus came as no surprise that the gray-haired one stayed
in Grodno only long enough to read his lecture on contemporary Jewish
literature. At exactly one in the morning, only a few hours after finishing
his lecture, Rappoport boarded a train to Belostok (Grodno Province). But
even before the first stop on the route, he somehow managed to change
directions-presumably in an effort to escape the watchful eye of the detec-
tive-and hopped on an oncoming train headed to Vil'na. Upon receipt of a
comprehensive intelligence report, the chief of the Kiev gendarmes division
asked the Department of Police to determine Shlioma Rappoport's place of
permanent residence while continuing to monitor his precise movement and
behavior. 1
The case of S. An-skii illustrates many of the administrative challenges of
documenting individual Jewish identities. Much like their western and cen-
tral European counterparts, imperial Russian administrators, journalists,

1. TsDIAK, f. 275, op. 1, d. 1747, II. 8-8b, 10, 15, 23, 25, 26-27 (1910). On the adop-
tion of the nom de plume, see Gabriella Safran, "An-sky in 1892: The Jew and the St. Peters-
burg Myth," in The Worlds of S. An-sky: A Russian Jewish Intellectual at the Turn of the
Century, ed. Gabriella Safran and Steven J. Zipperstein (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2006), 53-82.
 Introduction 3

and police officials expressed concerns about the problem of knowing ex-
actly who was Jewish. In the Russian Empire, however, these discussions
centered not only on the dilemma of recognizing Jews visually, as they usu-
ally did in the West, but also on the more widespread imperial anxieties
of identifying Jews by documentary records. 2 The practice of identifying
Jews by passports, vital statistics records, censuses, and other documentary
records was tied to the growth and development of government institu-
tions, the creation of elaborate record-keeping procedures, the preservation
of these documents in accessible archives, and the challenge of identifying
every person in the empire. At a time when the imperial Russian state placed
increasing trust in the power of paper to govern its vast territories and com-
munities, Jews appeared invisible in the public eye by continually defying
conventional criteria of administrative classification. 3
This book explores one of the fundamental arenas of imperial statecraft-
the techniques by which the Russian government ruled its populations. A
central argument of the pages that follow is that documentary records played
a crucial, if often overlooked, role in the construction, manipulation, and
eventual unraveling of the empire. The challenges of determining who was
Jewish and where Jews were provide a window onto the broader process
by which the tsarist regime attempted to fashion a sufficiently unified social
order capable of accommodating imperial diversity and the actual, every-
day practices of administration. In particular, Jews and the Imperial State
provides a case study of how one imperial population, the Jews, shaped the

2. See, for example, Mary Gluck, "The Budapest Flaneur: Urban Modernity, Popular Cul-
ture, and the 'Jewish Question' in Fin-de-Siecle Hungary," Jewish Social Studies 10 (2004):
3-7; Shulamit Volkov, Germans, Jews, and Antisemites: Trials in Emancipation (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006), 170-223; Steven Beller, Vienna and the Jews, 1867-1938:
A Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 165-206; and Marion
Kaplan, "As Germans and as Jews in Imperial Germany," in Jewish Daily Life in Germany,
1618-1945, ed. Marion Kaplan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 264-69.
3. On documentation practices, see, for example, Jane Caplan and John Torpey, eds.,
Documenting Individual Identity: The Development of State Practices in the Modern World
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); John Torpey, The Invention of the Passport:
Surveillance, Citizenship, and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); An-
dreas Fahrmeir, Olivier Faron, and Patrick Wei!, eds., Migration Control in the North Atlantic
World: The Evolution of State Practices in Europe and the United States from the French
Revolution to the Inter-War Period (New York: Berghahn Books, 2003); Adam M. McKeown,
Melancholy Order: Asian Migration and the Globalization of Borders (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2008); Peter Holquist, '"Information Is the Alpha and Omega of Our Work':
Bolshevik Surveillance in Its Pan-European Context," Journal of Modern History 69 (1997):
415-50; and Gerard Noire!, The French Melting Pot: Immigration, Citizenship, and National
Identity, trans. Geoffroy de Laforcade (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). For
the early modern context, see Valentin Groebner, Who Are You? Identification, Deception, and
Surveillance in Early Modern Europe, trans. Mark Kyburz and John Peck (New York: Zone
Books, 2007).
4 I Jews and the Imperial State

world in which they lived by negotiating with what were often perceived as
contradictory and highly restrictive laws and institutions.
In the Russian Empire, the preoccupation with techniques of government
based on the power of numbers emerged as part of an administrative effort
to manage societies, refashion populations, and create a transparent social
order. 4 Beginning with the reign of Nicholas I, the imperial state began to
gradually shift its administrative focus from ruling territories and commu-
nities to managing populations. The administrative, fiscal, and linguistic
demands of governing an ethnically diverse and territorially expansive em-
pire, however, impeded the state from making a successful transition to a
national model. As one of the most undergoverned states in all of Europe,
Russia ruled its populations through the mediation of religious personnel
and institutions, even as it attempted to establish universal administrative
practices common to all civil statuses and religious groups. In this system of
government, which simultaneously relied on the more direct techniques of
population management as well as the indirect practices of social control,
Jews were subject to an astonishing number of laws regulating their precise
movement, residence, and career paths.

II

In 1772, 1793, and 1795, the imperial Russian state acquired a large con-
stellation of territories (around 463,200 kilometers), peoples (estimated at
7.5 million subjects including Ukrainians, Belorussians, Lithuanians, Lat-
vians, Poles, and Jews), and religious denominations (Roman Catholicism,
Calvinism, Lutheranism, Russian Orthodoxy, and Judaism). 1 In the Rus-
sian Empire, most Jews continued to live in small market towns in the
western borderlands, where they often constituted a large proportion of the
population, at times even forming the absolute majority. As soon as Russia
acquired the largest Jewish population in the world, Catherine the Great
(1762-96) contained the movement and residence of Jews in the regions of
the empire that had been their historic home for well over three hundred
years. Although during Catherine's reign prominent merchants received
permission to travel and trade in the interior provinces on a temporary
basis, tsarist administrators continued to bar Jews from taking up perma-
nent residence in the imperial core. The formal delineation of the Pale of

4. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improue the Human Condi·
tion Haue Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); and Michel Foucault, "Govern-
mentality," in Power: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984, ed. James D. Faubion (New
York: New Press, 2000), 201-22.
5. On the expansion of the western borderlands, see Edward C. Thaden, Russia's Western
Borderlands, 1710-1870 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984).
 Introduction I 5

Settlement, however, was a gradual process, which grew out of the imperial
state's population policies of containment and isolation. 6
In 1790, almost two decades after the first Polish partition, a group of
Russian merchants pleaded with authorities to forbid Jews the right to
travel and engage in business in the interior provinces of the empire, argu-
ing that the Jewish competitors had undersold their prices, smuggled con-
traband, and "only brought great harm" to the Russian community. The
Russian merchants complained that a large number of Jews had appeared
in Moscow, disguised their national origin by pretending to be Prussians
and Belorussians, and ·engaged in shady business practices such as selling
goods at bargain prices, importing illegal merchandise, tax evasion, and
various forms of corruption. Furthermore, they requested that no Jews be
allowed to enroll in the Moscow merchant guilds or trade goods outside the
borders of Belorussia. In response to the complaints, the Jewish merchants
submitted a counterpetition, requesting to be included in the Smolensk and
Moscow merchant guilds. The State Council, however, rejected the request
and ordered the Jews to sell their immovable property and leave the interior
provinces within eight months. 7 This decree led to the highly controversial
law of December 23, 1791, that delineated Belorussia (Vitebsk and Mogilev
provinces) and parts of New Russia (Ekaterinoslav and Taurida provinces)
as the only territories where Jews could reside, travel, and conduct business. 8
Forty-four years later, the 1835 statute designated these territories as well as
the provinces of Grodno, Kovno, Vil'na, Volynia, Minsk, Podolia, Poltava,
Bessarabia, Kherson, Kiev, and Chernigov as the Pale of Settlement. 9 For the
next eighty years, the vast majority of Jews continued to reside, engage in
commercial affairs, and acquire property only within the western border-
land regions where they had lived prior to Russia's annexation of Poland. 10

6. "Zhitel'stvo i peredvizhenie evreev po russkomu zakonodatel'stvu," in Evreiskaia

entsiklopediia: Svod znanii o evreistve i ego kul'ture v proshlom i nastoiashchem, 16 vols.
(Moscow: Terra, 1991), 7: 590-93.
7. See the discussion in Dmitrii Zakharovich Fel'dman, Stranitsy istorii evreev Rossii
xviii-xix vekov: Opyt arkhivnogo issledovaniia (Moscow: Drevlekhranilishche, 2005),
168-170, 185-88.
8. PSZRI, series 1, vol. 23, no. 17006 (December 23, 1791); Richard Pipes, "Catherine II
and the Jews: The Origins of the Pale of Settlement," Soviet Jewish Affairs 5 (1975): 14; and
Fel'dman, Stranitsy istorii evreev Rossii, 187.
9. A separate legal code regulated the legal status of Jews who lived in the ten prov-
inces that comprised the Kingdom of Poland. Until 1868, the Russian law code isolated
the Pale of Settlement from the Kingdom of Poland by prohibiting Jews from moving back
and forth between these two territories. "Zhitel'stvo i peredvizhenie evreev po russkomu
zakonodatel'stvu," 592.
10. In fact at the end of the eighteenth century, Catherine the Great expanded the terri-
tories where Jews could reside to include parts of the Black Sea regions (New Russia). These
agricultural territories eventually became part of the Pale of Settlement, as it was constituted
6 I Jews and the Imperial State

Until the middle of the nineteenth century Jewish collective identity con-
tinued to remain stable, even if Russian Jewry constituted a diverse popula-
tion divided along religious, linguistic, and culturallinesY Travelers, police
officials, and journalists who visited the western borderlands spoke of the
distinct "Jewish" look of the hundreds of small market towns. According to
a member of the Russian Geographical Society, for example, it was difficult
to encounter another "tribe" (plemia) in the empire that possessed the degree
of solidarity and isolation that characterized the Jews: "The Jews represent
a nation within a nation; they are an isolated tribe, with its own language,
its own religion, its own economic base, and its own community. " 12 A trav-
eler passing through the western borderlands described Jewish women as
well proportioned and attractive: "Their large eyes are overshadowed with
thick, black eyebrows; the nose is Asiatic; the cheeks are fresh and bright;
a pale neck covered with large necklaces; a magnificent bust." 13 Yet con-
temporary observers also felt that Jews could be distinguished not only by
these traits but also by an exceptional and barely imperceptible "imprint"
permeating their entire soul. This imprint could be found among the edu-
cated and uneducated, among the wealthy and the poor in all the countries
Jews inhabited. 14
While Jews could be easily identified visually as a collective group or de-
fined in legal terms (by law, anyone who converted from Judaism to Chris-
tianity ceased to be a Jew), authorities found it much more challenging to
document Jews as individuals. 15 In the second half of the nineteenth cen-
tury, the challenges of identification grew more problematic. Not only were
Jewish population statistics notoriously unreliable, but more important, the
categories used by government administrators failed to capture unambigu-
ously who was Jewish. Should Jews be defined as a social estate, a religious

in 1835. On the historical construction of the pale, see Obshchaia zapiska vysshei kommisii
dlia peresmotra deistvuiushchikh o evreiakh v imperii zakonov, 1883-1888 (St. Petersburg:
[n.p.], 1888), cxxiii.
11. Eli Lederhendler, "Did Russian Jewry Exist Prior to 1917?" in Jews and Jewish Life
in Russia and the Soviet Union, ed. Yaacov Ro'i (Portland: Frank Cass, 1995), 18-19; and
Steven J. Zipperstein, The Jews of Odessa: A Cultural History, 1794-18 81 (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1985), 14.
12. P. P. Chubinskii, ed., Trudy etnografichesko-statisticheskoi ekspeditsii v zapadno-
russkii krai, vol. 7 (St. Petersburg: K. B. Trubnikov, 1872), 3. See also Robert Johnston, Travels
through Part of the Russian Empire (1816; repr., New York: Arno, 1970), 331.
13. A. Glagolev, Zapiski russkogo puteshestvennika s 1823 po 1827 (St. Petersburg: Ti-
pografiia Imperatorskoi rossiiskoi akademii, 1837), pt. 1:129.
14. Narody Rossii: Etnograficheskie ocherki, 2 vols. (St. Petersburg: Obshchestvennaia
pol'za, 1878), 1:390.
15. For a discussion of the bureaucratic dilemmas of identifying Jews, see Darius Staliunas,
Making Russians: Meaning and Practice of Russification in Lithuania and Belarus after 1863
(Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), 121-27.
 Introduction I 7

community, a distinctive race, or perhaps an ethnic corporation? Did the

individuals who had converted to Russian Orthodoxy, Catholicism, or Prot-
estantism lose their Jewishness, as the law instructed? How could adminis-
trators keep track of an individual whose passport read Russian Orthodox
but whose ethnoreligious origin (proiskhozhdenie) was marked Jewish?
The answers to these and many similar questions grew more ambiguous
as the Russian government began to restructure the social and economic
order of the empire. The modernization projects of the Great Reform era
created new professional and entrepreneurial classes, laying the foundations
for the technologies that made travel accessible and affordable. The con-
struction of the railroad played an important role in the development of
commerce and industry in cities such as Moscow, Warsaw, Odessa, Kiev,
St. Petersburg, and Ekaterinoslav, all of which attracted sizable Jewish mi-
grant populations. The expansion of travel and the emergence of consumer-
ism fostered the cross-fertilization of tastes, fashions, behaviors, and forms
of conduct and appearances. 16 Jews flocked to these and many other cities
in search of higher forms of secular education, professional opportunities,
and social experiences. By around 1900, as an unprecedented number of
Jews traveled throughout the empire by way of a vast network of paved and
unpaved roads and railroad lines, in the process adapting to the new tastes
and fashions of the day, it became increasingly difficult to know who was
Jewish and where Jews were.
A central premise of this book is that three particular factors-all of
which were linked to the state's efforts to fashion a more direct relationship
with the population-created difficulties in identifying individual Jews: the
construction of a legal-administrative order capable of accommodating the
empire's remarkable juridical distinctions and confessional diversity, the or-
dering of clear and distinct cultural boundaries between Jews and non-Jews,
and the containment of Jews in their permanent places of residence.
First, over the course of the nineteenth century, imperial Russian reform-
ers and government administrators relied on social-scientific technologies
of intervention to eliminate mediating collective bodies between the state
and the population. By introducing passport laws, compulsory vital sta-
tistics registration, and the income tax, the state attempted to break down
corporate self-government and isolationY Despite these efforts, a direct
and unmediated relationship with its population proved challenging to

16. On the development of the fashion industry in the Russian Empire, see Christine Ruane,
The Emperor's New Clothes: A History of the Russian Fashion Industry (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2009).
17. Yanni Kotsonis, "'No Place to Go': Taxation and State Transformation in Late Imperial
and Early Soviet Russia," Journal of Modern History 76 (2004 ): 531-77; Paul W. Werth, "In
the State's Embrace? Civil Acts in an Imperial Order," Kritika: Explorations in Russian and
8 I jews and the Imperial State

construct. Until the collapse of the old regime, the Russian government
continued to depend on collective categories and communal institutions
to govern the empire. Marked by an astonishing religious, territorial, and
legalistic diversity, the imperial Russian state relied on "difference" not
only to define and allocate rights but also to shape population policies. 18
All the particularistic customs, laws, and statutes that comprised impe-
rial law-and were further differentiated by such categories as religion,
social estate, sex, occupation, and territory-created tensions in the legal-
administrative interactions between the state and its subjects. While this
culture of governance based on difference and particularity survived
until the fall of the old regime, the imperial population and the provin-
cial administrators, police officials, and civil servants found it challeng-
ing to grasp the laws, statutes, and special edicts regulating all facets of
everyday life.
Second, Jews illustrate many of the tensions, uncertainties, and dilemmas
that made religious uniformity and communal solidarity increasingly dif-
ficult to preserve in the multiconfessional empire. In the Polish-Lithuanian
Commonwealth, Jews and their Christian neighbors had lived and inter-
acted with one another for over three hundred years. During the early
modern period, religion and language served as the two primary cultural
markers, which clearly delineated the ethnoreligious boundaries and so-
cial spaces between communities. Jewish law (Halakhah) as expressed in
the legal texts of the Talmud and Shulhan Arukh regulated daily life. Jews
spoke a different language (Yiddish), perceived time differently (observ-
ing the Sabbath on Saturday rather than on Sunday), abided by differ-
ent dietary restrictions, and usually dressed differently by wearing dark
and modest clothing. This does not mean that the boundaries between
Jews and non-Jews were always fixed, respected, and observed. Nor does
this mean that church authorities and government administrators were
always able to know who was who. But even as Jews and their neighbors
intermingled with each other in marketplaces, neighborhoods, houses,
and streets the bonds of family, communal structures, and religious insti-
tutions preserved the distinctiveness of Jewish life. By perpetuating these
deep-rooted differences, Jews maintained their collective identity, and the

Eurasian History 7 (2006): 433-58; and V. G. Chernukha, Pasport v Rossii, 1719-1917

(St. Petersburg: Liki Rossii, 2007).
18. Jane Burbank, "An Imperial Rights Regime: Law and Citizenship in the Russian Em-
pire," Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 7 (2006): 397-431. See also Bur-
bank, "Thinking Like an Empire: Estate, Law, and Rights in the Early Twentieth Century," in
Russian Empire: Space, People, Power, 1700-1930, ed. Jane Burbank, Mark von Hagen, and
Anatoly Remnev (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 196-217.
 Introduction 9

boundaries between Jews and their neighbors were, on the whole, neither
elusive nor problematic. 19
While most Jews continued to reside in small market towns in the west-
ern borderlands of the empire, hundreds of thousands of individuals settled
in many of the larger cities in and beyond the pale during the second half of
the nineteenth century. As the Jewish encounter with modernity stretched
the limits of what it meant to be a Jew, the formerly fixed categories of
collective identity proved highly malleable and elastic. The forced mod-
ernization of the economy and advances in modes of public transportation
offered all subjects of the empire, including Jews, unprecedented economic,
professional, and educational opportunities. A significant number of people
began to acquire linguistic knowledge of Polish or Russian, change their
style of clothing in favor of more fashionable or, in some cases, less distinc-
tive dress, and participate in the institutional frameworks of the civic order.
While such changes were experienced most profoundly in the great indus-
trial centers such as Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kiev, Warsaw, and Odessa, the
more remote parts of the empire were also affected. The flux in movement
due to seasonal and regional migrations meant that the Jews who resided in
the western borderlands engaged in the transmission and dissemination of
popular cultures, material conditions, and worldviews. 20 At the turn of the

19. As recent studies have shown, Jewish men (mostly elites) not only participated in a wide
spectrum of economic activity but also were influenced by, and shared in, Polish culture. How-
ever, unlike those in early modern Italy, England, and Spain, Jewish identities and boundaries
in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth did not shift, nor were they redefined. By contrast
with other early modern contexts, Polish Jews did not face expulsions, and conversions were
relatively rare. See, for example, Moshe Rosman, "Innovative Tradition: Jewish Culture in
the Polish-Lithuania Commonwealth," in Cultures of the jews: A New History, ed. David Biale
(New York: Schocken, 2002), 519-70; David Frick, "Jews and Others in Seventeenth-Century
Wilno: Life in the Neighborhood," jewish Studies Quarterly 12 (2005): 8-42; Frick, "Jews
in Public Places: Further Chapters in the Jewish-Christian Encounter in Seventeenth-Century
Vilna," Polin 22 (2010): 215-48; and Magda Tetter, "'There Should Be No Love between Us
and Them': Social Life and the Bounds of Jewish and Canon Law in Early Modern Poland,"
Polin 22 (2010): 249-70. For a slightly different interpretation, see Adam Teller, "The Shtetl
as an Arena for Polish-Jewish Integration in the Eighteenth Century," Polin 17 (2004): 25-40.
For the broader early modern European Jewish context, see Stefanie B. Siegmund, The Medici
State and the Ghetto of Florence: The Construction of an Early Modern jewish Community
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006); and Miriam Bodian, Hebrews of the Portuguese
Nation: Conversos and Community in Early Modern Amsterdam (Bloomington: Indiana Uni-
versity Press, 1999).
20. On cultural change, reformation of religious practices, and the emergence of new Jewish
communities, see, for example, Zipperstein, The Jews of Odessa; Benjamin Nathans, Beyond
the Pale: The jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2002); and Natan Meir, "From Pork to Kapores: Transformations in Religious Practice
among the Jews of Late Imperial Kiev," Jewish Quarterly Review 97 (2007): 616-45. See also
Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, jews in the Russian Army, 1827-1917: Drafted into Modernity
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
10 I Jews and the Imperial State

twentieth century, as Jews transcended the fixed and commonly accepted

notions of Jewishness, the expressions and symbols of Jewish identity un-
derwent enormous change, and the cultural boundaries between Jews and
their many neighbors gradually lost their distinctiveness.
The destabilization of Jewishness had parallels with the broader refor-
mation of religious practices, beliefs, and customs in the Russian Empire.
Sectarianism, apostasy, and increased secularization challenged the purity
of Russian Orthodoxy in many of the same ways that cosmopolitanism,
syncretism, and pragmatic conversions divided Jewish communal and reli-
gious cohesiveness. Christian sectarians such as Old Believers, Khlysty, and
Skoptsy, who had broken away from Russian Orthodoxy, denied the official
religious legitimacy of the church and its spiritual and theological teachings.
Groups such as the Dukhobors, Molokans, and Subbotniks also opposed the
Russian Orthodox Church as an institution and rejected the secular author-
ity of the tsar. Moreover, those individuals who converted from Judaism to
Christianity in order to bypass legal disabilities and residential restrictions
compromised the purity of both religious groups. All these developments
helped destabilize the discrete boundaries governing religious identities and
what it meant to be a heretic, a Russian, and a Jew. 21
Government censuses, passports, and vital statistics records relied on reli-
gious affiliation to document individuals as part of a larger collective group.
Like the category of social estate (soslovie) that was used to delineate collec-
tive rights and ascribe social obligations, religious categories, institutions,
and personnel were used by the tsarist regime to regulate morality and ad-
minister local organs of government, welfare, and education in the empire.
While the state continued to rest on confessional foundations until the last
years of the old regime, by the second half of the nineteenth century it be-
came increasingly apparent that the category of religious affiliation could
no longer function as the sole criterion by which difference was marked. 22

21. See, for example, Vera Shevzov, Russian Orthodoxy on the Eve of Revolution (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2003); Laura Engelstein, Castration and the Heavenly Kingdom: A
Russian Folktale (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999); Nicholas B. Breyfogle, Heretics and
Colonizers: Forging Russia's Empire in the South Caucasus (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
2005); Gregory Freeze, "Policing Piety: The Church and Popular Religion in Russia, 1750-
1850," in Imperial Russia: New Histories for the Empire, ed. Jane Burbank and David L.
Ransel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 210-49; and Mark D. Steinberg and
Heather J. Coleman, eds., Sacred Stories: Religion and Spirituality in Modern Russia (Bloom-
ington: Indiana University Press, 2007).
22. On the significance of religious categories in tsarist Russia, see Robert Crews, "Em-
pire and the Confessional State: Islam and Religious Politics in Nineteenth-Century Russia,"
American Historical Review 108 (2003): 50-83. On the social estate, see Gregory Freeze,
"The Soslovie (Estate) Paradigm and Russian Social History," American Historical Review 91
(1986): 11-36; and Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter, Social Identity in Imperial Russia (DeKalb:
Northern Illinois University Press, 1997).
 Introduction 11

Bureaucrats, police officials, statisticians, ethnographers, and demographers

began to rely more often on ethnicity (narodnost' or natsional'nost') to de-
fine difference through a combination of factors such as language, cultural
practices, and religion. At a time when traditional symbols could no longer
locate and order social boundaries and everyday relationships, government
officials and police officers employed ethnicity-as both a descriptive and
an administrative category-to mark distinctions between individuals, col-
lectivities, and social groups. 23
And finally, for imperial authorities, the mass movement of populations
caused profound administrative anxiety. Long before the experiences of the
Great War and the subsequent revolutions challenged the state's govern-
ing powers by displacing millions of people across the territories of eastern
Europe, European Russia, Siberia, and Eurasia, the modernization projects
of the 1860s and 1870s weakened the bureaucracy's ability to regulate ef-
fectively internal boundaries and international borders. 24 Even as Russian
society became more mobile and less constrained by the fixity of land, com-
munity, and family, travel within the empire remained heavily regulated as
a result of the large and diverse number of individual laws comprising the
general statute on passports. When traveling outside their permanent places
of residence, all subjects of the empire were required to carry a document
that stated their personal identity, outlining the route of their journey, the
purpose, and the eventual destination. As an unprecedented number of indi-
viduals traveled across wide geographic terrains, government officials faced
the dilemma of identifying them on the basis of documents such as inter-
nal passports and metrical records (birth, marriage, and death certificates),
which were often unreliable, easily manipulated, and poorly managed. Er-
rors, omissions, and various kinds of irregularities hindered the population's
ability to participate in civic life and challenged the state's ability to regulate
mobility, manage its territorial borders, and contain individuals in their per-
manent places of residence.
Jews presented numerous difficulties for regulating internal migration,
even if a host of laws, edicts, and statutes determined where they could

23. On ethnicity in Russia, see Charles Steinwedel, "To Make a Difference: The Category
of Ethnicity in Late Imperial Russian Politics, 1861-1917," in Russian Modernity: Politics,
Knowledge, Practices, ed. David L. Hoffmann and Yanni Kotsonis (New York: Palgrave Mac-
millan, 2000), 67-86; Eric Lohr, Nationalizing the Russian Empire: The Campaign against
Enemy Aliens during World War I (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003); and
Juliette Cadiot, "Searching for Nationality: Statistics and National Categories at the End of the
Russian Empire (1897-1917)," Russian Review 64 (2005): 440-55.
24. On population displacements during the First World War and beyond, see Peter Gatrell,
A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia during World War One (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1999); and Nick Baron and Peter Gatrell, eds., Homelands: War, Population
and Statehood in Eastern Europe and Russia, 1918-1924 (London: Anthem, 2004).
12 Jews and the Imperial State

move and how long they could travel. Even after the political cns1s of
1881, when imperial laws "departed significantly from the overall con-
tours of government policy and were aimed quite self-consciously at the
Jews," the Jewish population found creative ways to maneuver around the
myriad laws, ordinances, and special statutes. 25 The state's containment
policies did not succeed in isolating or alienating Jews from the broader
social, political, and cultural world: the boundaries of the pale proved too
porous, the territories of the empire too vast, and government adminis-
trators too uncoordinated and understaffed to effectively regulate Jewish
movement and residence. For the imperial bureaucracy, the building of the
railroad, rapid industrialization, and the growth of a commercial culture in
urban and rural Russia produced unprecedented demographic dislocations
that created all sorts of tensions in documenting individual identities. 26 As
police and government officials sought in desperation to track their move-
ment and place in the social landscape, Jews resorted to a variety of scams,
cover-ups, and swindling tricks to mask their identities. At times, Jews
forged passports, refashioned their social identities, and even converted
in an attempt to subvert a maze of legal codes, all of which attempted to
regulate their professional and residential existence. On a number of other
occasions, they abandoned some of the most recognizable symbols of their
identity such as names, dress, and speech with the hopes of blending in,
feeling more accepted, and ultimately hiding the public expressions of their
Jewishness.

25. Michael Stanislawski, "Russian Jewry, the Russian State, and the Dynamics of Jewish
Emancipation," in Paths of Emancipation: Jews, States, and Citizenship, ed. Pierre Birnbaum
and Ira Katznelson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 277. The troubled, often
hostile, nature of Russian-Jewish relations forms the point of departure for most historians
who have focused on political alternatives to Jewish life in imperial Russia (such as Zionism
and various form of socialism) and constructed their narratives by making socioeconomic and
cultural fragmentation the cornerstones in their work. Since Russian Jewry experienced neither
"liberalism" nor "emancipation" under the old regime, so the argument goes, Jews turned to
"postliberal" solutions in a distinctly antiliberal setting. On 18 81 as a turning point in Russian-
Jewish history, see Jonathan Frankel, Prophecy and Politics: Socialism, Nationalism, and the
Russian Jews, 1862-1917 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981 ); and Frankel, "The
Crisis of 1881-82 as a Turning Point in Modern Jewish History," in The Legacy of Jewish
Migration: 1881 and Its Impact, ed. David Berger (New York: Brooklyn College Press, 1983),
9-22. For a comparative perspective, see Pierre Birnbaum and Ira Katznelson, "Emancipation
and the Liberal Offer," in Paths of Emancipation, 3-36, esp. 26. For a critique of Frankel, see
Nathans, Beyond the Pale, 9-13. For a cautious approach to the events of 1881, see Israel
Barta!, The Jews of Eastern Europe, 1772-1881, trans. Chaya Naor (Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 4-5.
26. On identification politics in the Russian Empire, see the suggestive discussion in Leonid
Gorizontov, Paradoksy imperskoi politiki: Poliaki v Rossii i russkie v Pol'she (Moscow: Indrik,
1999), chap. 3.
 Introduction 13

III

The collapse of the Soviet Union and the declassification of archival ma-
terials have contributed to a fundamental rethinking of the entanglement
of ordinary Jews with the imperial Russian state. While the first and sec-
ond generation of Russian-Jewish historians assumed that the highly bur-
densome legal codes debilitated an entire generation of Russian Jews by
restricting their economic, religious, and civil rights, recent scholars have
demonstrated the ways in which Jews participated in Russian civil societyY
The policy of what historian Benjamin Nathans termed "selective integra-
tion" created a distinctive framework that allowed some of the empire's
most productive members of the Jewish community-such as wealthy first-
and second-guild merchants, students, soldiers, and select artisans-to take
part in middle-class professions, institutions of higher education, and cul-
tural life. The emergence of new communities outside the Pale of Settlement
helped facilitate the crossing of both social and geographic boundaries in
the late imperial period. 28 Yet the individuals who traveled beyond the pale
or migrated to rapidly expanding cities such as Odessa and Kiev were not
the only ones who crossed social and geographic boundaries or engaged
with the legal-administrative system. ChaeRan Freeze's analysis of Jewish
marriage and divorce breaks new ground by demonstrating the multiple
ways in which ordinary individuals in the western provinces of the empire
relied on Russia's legal-administrative system for settling intimate disputes
and familial controversies. 29
Utilizing petitions, complaints, police reports, and many other forms of
legal-administrative correspondence, Jews and the Imperial State builds on
these two pioneering studies by analyzing how ordinary Jews participated
in a legal-administrative system most people found terribly confusing and
difficult to negotiate. While contemporary writers and subsequent com-
mentators interpreted imperial policies toward Jews in essentially nega-
tive terms, this book shifts the analytical focus by analyzing what the law

27. See, for example, Simon Dubnow, History of the Jews in Russia and Poland, from the
Earliest Time until the Present Day, trans. I. Friedlander, 3 vols. (Philadelphia: Jewish Publica-
tion Society of America, 1916-1920); and Isaac Levitats, The Jewish Community in Russia,
1772-1844 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943). On the historiography of Russian
Jewry, see Michael Stanislawski, "Eastern European Jewry in the Modern Period: 1750-1939,"
in Oxford Handbook of Jewish Studies, ed. Martin Goodman (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2002), 396-411; and Benjamin Nathans, "On Russian-Jewish Historiography," in His-
toriography of Imperial Russia: The Profession and Writing of History in a Multiethnic Em-
pire, ed. Thomas Sanders (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1999), 397-432.
28. Nathans, Beyond the Pale.
29. ChaeRan Freeze, Jewish Marriage and Divorce in Imperial Russia (Waltham, Mass.:
Brandeis University Press, 2002).
14 I jews and the Imperial State

made possible. 30 Some Jews accommodated to the system of government

by circumventing legal statutes; others by bribing, converting, or resort-
ing to various forms of manipulations; and still others by appealing to the
state with individual grievances and requests. The transition from commu-
nal to individual forms of political expression, which began to take place
in mid-nineteenth-century Russia, marked an important turning point in
the history of Russian Jewry. It is a central argument of this book that
these practices, whatever their contradictions and limitations, did much
more than constrain spatial movement, facilitate government surveillance,
and inspire individuals to misrepresent their public personas in hopes
of appearing invisible in the public eye. Passports, service records, and
birth and marriage certificates played an influential role in dictating the
kinds of choices Jews were able to make. Without these essential docu-
ments, Jews could not register with a social estate, enroll in educational
institutions, register for the all-estate military draft, leave their permanent
places of residence, and enter into marriage.
Recognizing the power of documentation, Jews wrote numerous com-
plaints and petitions in order to negotiate what they often perceived as highly
confusing and often contradictory statutes. Authorities did not respond in
the affirmative to a great number of the petitions. Yet these documents nev-
ertheless allow us to analyze the engagements of ordinary Jews with the
world around them. While contemporary satirists poked fun at the slow,
burdensome, and, on occasion, futile bureaucratic-administrative process,
individuals continued to turn to the state with their requestsY During
the Great Reform era, Jews communicated so frequently with the impe-
rial bureaucracy that the Ministry of the Interior "complained to regional
authorities that it was being flooded with petitions written in Jewish [na
evreiskom iazyke]." In 1870, the interior minister reminded the petitioners
"that nobody here reads the language. If Jews wished for the state to act on
their petitions, they needed to submit them in Russian-and on stamped
government paper!" 32

30. My thinking on the politics and possibilities of everyday life has been influenced by
two outstanding studies of Soviet Russia: Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as
a Civilization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); and Douglas Northrop, Veiled
Empire: Gender and Power in Stalinist Central Asia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004 ).
31. Pavel Veinberg, "Proshenie," in Stseny iz evreiskago byta, 5th ed. (St. Petersburg: Ti-
pografiia. K.N. Plotnikova, 1874), 128-39.
32. John D. Klier, "Polish Shtetls under Russian Rule, 1772-1914," Polin 17 (2004): 102
(TsDIAK, f. 442, op. 49, d. 271, II. ·1-2 [1870]; Klier's translation slightly altered). In those
instances when Jews submitted petitions in either Yiddish or Hebrew, with corresponding Rus-
sian translations, imperial authorities complained that it took them too long to verify the
translations and respond to the petitions. TsDIAK, f. 442, op. 181, d. 752 (1867).
 Introduction I 15

Over the course of the second half of the nineteenth century, Jews pe-
titioned in hopes of settling all sorts of concerns that they encountered in
everyday life: to mediate familial and religious disputes; to settle the more
mundane, but equally important, questions of improper or faulty record
keeping; and perhaps most frequently, to receive an exemption from one of
the many Jewish statutes on the books. With the absence of a parliamentary
democracy, petitioning in the name of the tsar provided direct access to
the autocrat and allowed individuals to negotiate the highly confusing legal
system. The tens of thousands of petitions preserved in regional and central
archives attest to the power that these upward means of communication had
for the population. Without proper knowledge of the Russian language or
the juridical system, Jews turned to private attorneys (known to the pub-
lic as "underground street advocates") to resolve their legal predicaments.
These attorneys, who owned licenses but had little legal training, made con-
siderable sums of money from needy and often desperate individuals by
ghostwriting petitions, specializing in legal questions such as property dis-
putes, bankruptcy, personal injury, and residence rights cases. Underground
advocates composed petitions or complaints when Jews needed to request
formal permission to reside in a specific territory, to extend or receive a
residence permit, to file a complaint against tsarist administrators or police
officials for not observing the letter of the law, or to obtain an exemption
from any of the other statutes governing everyday Jewish life. 33
Long after the Judicial Reform of 1864 created independent courts and
introduced a modernized judicial system, petitioning in the name of the tsar
continued to serve as an important means of upward communication. Al-
though imperial subjects had turned to the tsar with humble supplications
for hundreds of years, the volume of individual requests received by the
Chancellery for Receipt of Petitions more than doubled between 1846 and
1893. 34 The chancellery's statistical records reveal in meticulous detail how
significant these forms of communication were for both the state and the im-
perial population. Throughout the nineteenth century, authorities read and

33. On the creation of the underground lawyers, see William E. Pomeranz, "Justice from
the Underground: The History of the Underground Advokatura," Russian Review 52 (1993 ):
321-40. On the petitions written by underground advocates for various peoples (including
Jews) in Kiev, Podolia, and Volynia provinces, see, for example, TsDIAK, f. 442, op. 830,
d. 177, II. 1-83 (1880-86); op. 833, d. 25, II. 1-24 (1883); op. 836, d. 238,11. 1-69 ( 1886-91);
op. 835, d. 124, II. 1-72 (1885-92); op. 835, d. 156, II. 1-29 (1885-86).
34. In 1810, as part of the overall restructuring of the bureaucratic order, Alexander I estab-
lished the chancellery to adjudicate official complaints and requests. For an official history of
the chancellery, seeS. N. l'isarev, Uchrezhdenie po priniatiiu i napravleniiu proshenii i zhalob,
prinosimykh na Vysochaishee imia, 1810-1910 (St. Petersburg: R. Golike i A. Vil'horg, 1911).
See also Barbara Alpern Engel, "In the Name of the Tsar: Competing Legalities and Marital
Conflict in Late Imperial Russia," Journal of Modern History 77 (2005): 76-81.
16 I Jews and the Imperial State

responded to almost every petition filed with the chancellery (between 1846
and 1855, for example, it answered 110,684 out of 111,136 petitions). 35 By
1893, the chancellery received more than 21,000 requests, filed in fifty-three
separate categories, ranging from such mundane matters as name changes to
more practical requests dealing with marital conflict, monetary assistance,
land disputes, and religious questions. In the context of the Great War, revo-
lutionary fervor, and social disturbances, the numbers of petitions received
jumped to 178,000 in 1913 and 85,000 in 1915. Whereas authorities had
responded to almost every petition filed with the chancellery throughout the
nineteenth century, in the very last years of the old regime, the imperial bu-
reaucracy had neither the financial resources nor the manpower to answer
every request flooding its offices. 36
Marking an important turning point in the ways in which individual Jews
used the state for political means, the Great Reform era expanded the in-
dividual's authority to resolve neighborly conflicts, express discontent, and
contest formal, administrative edicts. In the early modern period, Jewish in-
tercessors played some of the most important political roles in Jewish com-
munities by appealing to the legal authority of the state by filing complaints.
The complaint was usually filed as a collective petition in an attempt to
lobby and persuade the state to fulfill the larger interest of the Jewish com-
munity. 37 While the political lobbyist-in the form of extremely wealthy
and influential merchants, railroad magnates, bankers, and sugar tycoons-
continued to represent the collective interest of the Jews, in the late imperial
setting, the intercessor served as only one possible conduit for expressing
discontent and resolving social conflict. As a consequence of the judicial and
administrative reforms, the proliferation of legal institutions, and the diffu-
sion of political forms of authority, ordinary individuals began to use, in an
unprecedented fashion, the structures sanctioned by the state to adjudicate
everyday concerns by either petitioning or turning to the court system. 38

35. RGIA, f. 1412, op. 251, d. 100 (1855-1860).

36. RGIA, f. 1412, op. 251, d. 116 (1913); and op. 251, d. 117 (1915). These statistics
reflect only the petitions received directly by St. Petersburg and not those received by provincial
administrators. Nevertheless, they do demonstrate the overall increase in the writing of peti-
tions and complaints in the last decades of the old regime. Moreover, the chancellery did not
categorize the petitions by social identity or religion, and it is impossible to estimate how many
of the total number of petitions, in any given category, were made by Jews.
37. On early modern political practices, see Eli Lederhendler, The Road to Modern Jewish
Politics: Political Tradition and Political Reconstruction in the Jewish Community of Tsarist
Russia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 11-57.
38. On the judicial reforms and legal consciousness in the Russian Empire, see Richard
Wortman, The Development of a Russian Legal Consciousness (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1976); Jane Burbank, Russian Peasants Go to Court: Legal Culture in the Countryside,
1905-1917 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004); and E. A. Pravilova, Zakonnost' i
 Introduction I 17

Hundreds of legal statutes delineated where Jews could live, how long
they could travel, and what precise professions and trades they could prac-
tice. According to the liberal legal historian Iulii Gessen, the limitations of
freedom of residence and movement represented the most "pernicious of the
restrictive laws" by "disenfranchising painfully almost every aspect of Jew-
ish existence." 39 In the wake of the 1881-82 pogroms, Jewish socialists and
nationalists also interpreted the antisemitic legal restrictions not only as a
permanent inconvenience but also as a direct threat to Jewish ways of life in
the empire. 40 If the arbitrariness of the law polarized the Jewish community
from the Russian state-as Jewish liberals, socialists, and nationalists main-
tained-ordinary Jews nevertheless continued to turn to the state to voice
individual grievances and resolve neighborly conflicts with both Jews and
non-Jews. In a regime that recognized and actively maintained social, reli-
gious, and legal differences, the types of obligations, restrictions, and special
privileges regulating Jewish daily life corresponded to the larger administra-
tive ethos of assigning, reassigning, and taking "away rights, duties, and
privileges from the groups that comprised the empire's population. " 41 And
even if imperial law was based more on privilege, difference, and particu-
larity than on uniformity, it nevertheless enabled all the empire's subjects,
including Jews, to participate in Russian administrative practice by filing
petitions and using the court system. For the vast majority of Jews who re-
sided within the territories of the empire, then, the legal-judicial framework
proved to be the most convenient and perhaps effective means for negotiat-
ing all the rules, obligations, and special statutes governing everyday life.

IV

An analysis of the individual entanglements with the law not only reveals how
frequently Jews turned to the state for political purposes. It also sheds much
light on the day-to-day functions and operations of the legal-administrative
system. The Russian bureaucracy was slow and inefficient, and much time
was spent (and wasted) on the production of reports, communications, and
documents. "In this world of petitions, applications, inquiries, and reports,"
one historian has written, "ambitious chancery scribes and junior officials
labored to make their handwriting elegant, embellished reports with eye-
catching designs, and even on occasion added charts hand-tinted with

prava lichnosti: Administrativnaia iustitsiia v Rossii (vtoraia polovina xix v.-oktiabr' 1917 g.)
(St. Petersburg: Izd-vo obrazovanie-kul'tura, 2000).
39. lulii Gessen, Zakon i zhizn': Kak sozidalis' ogranichitel'nye zakony o zhitel'stve evreev
v Rossii (St. Petersburg: A. G. Rozena, 1911), 4.
40. Frankel, Prophecy and Politics, 51.
41. Burbank, "An Imperial Rights Regime," 403.
18 I jews and the Imperial State

watercolors. " 42 Although the organization of a rational administrative sys-

tem first emerged in the middle of the seventeenth century, it was Alexander
I (1801-25) who created the ministerial structures that supported the divi-
sion of Russian government until its collapse. Significant efforts were made
to create what Max Weber called the "management of the modern office,"
the training of professional, responsible, and educated officials who pro-
duced written documents ("files"), which were preserved in their original
or draft form. 43 New ministerial institutions such as Finance, Interior, Jus-
tice, and Enlightenment gradually replaced Peter the Great's (1689-1725)
administrative colleges. The Senate became the exclusive judicial body for
criminal and civil cases, while the Council of State reviewed final drafts of
new legislation.
Laws regulated the process of recording, managing, and filing written
documents, but the official processing of records was not lawmakers' only
concern. 44 Laboring over the shape and appearance of documents, scribes
prepared texts that were then read aloud during ministerial meetings. Pro-
vincial governors often confronted a virtual avalanche of papers that slowed
the process of government (according to some estimates, over 100,000
documents required signature on a yearly basis)Y The historian and con-
servative political theorist Nicholas Karamzin, for example, criticized the
"endless stream of papers" as a product of the inefficiency of the Russian
government. 46 He was not alone. During the Great Reform era, the state
made significant efforts to manage paperwork and to increase bureaucratic
efficiency_47 In the 1860s, the records of the ministerial committees began
to be published by government printing houses, and in the 1890s, with the
appearance of typewriters, civil servants typed the more important corre-
spondence and administrative reports. 48
While these developments in bureaucratic practices expedited govern-
ment work, the avalanche of papers also presented administrative challenges.

42. W. Bruce Lincoln, In the Vanguard of Reform: Russia's Enlightened Bureaucrats

(DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1986), 23.
43. Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, ed. Guenther
Roth and Claus Wittich, 2 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 2:957.
44. On the transformation of government during the reign of Alexander I, see Marc Raeff,
Imperial Russia, 1682-1825: The Coming of Age of Modern Russia (New York: Knopf,
1971 ), 83-88.
45. L E. Shepelev, Chinovnyi mir Rossii, xviii-nachalo xx v. (St. Petersburg: Iskusstvo,
2001), 53-54, 85; and Lincoln, In the Vanguard of Reform, 10.
46. Richard Pipes, Karamzin's Memoir on Ancient and Modern Russia: A Translation and
Analysis (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959), 159.
47. For the background to these administrative reforms, see George L. Yaney, The System-
atization of Russian Government: Social Evolution in Domestic Administration of Imperial
Russia, 1711-1905 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973), 230-399.
48. For a short history of deloproizvodstvo, see Shepelev, Chinovnyi mir Rossii, 47-55.
 Introduction I 19

By the turn of the twentieth century, imperial authorities had neither the
administrative capacity nor the financial resources to respond to the endless
streams of paper that both the state and its subjects generated every year. 49
In July 1909, for instance, the Gomel' district police department (Magi-
lev Province) reported that its office received 17,832 official documents in
1905,24,041 in 1906,25,952 in 1907, and 29,309 in 1908. The five office
assistants-who earned between twenty and thirty rubles a month-were
overwhelmed by all the complaints, notices, and requests they received each
year. For any given year, the police department spent more than 90 percent
of its budget responding to the petitions and other individual requests that
piled up in the office, which left no more than two hundred rubles for man-
aging all other police work. 5° Police departments all across the empire faced
similar administrative challenges. In Kishinev (Bessarabia Province), one
police department processed as many 44,800 official documents in 1910.
In the western borderlands, some of the larger departments of police such
as Vil'na, Berdichev, Belostok, and Bendery handled on average between
50,000 and 100,000 documents per year, while the Kiev department of po-
lice sifted through almost 800,000 papers in 1910. 51
In addition to preserving public order and combating vagrancy, police
officials thus spent their days performing the tedious task of reading, col-
lecting, and responding to paperwork, as well as housing and preserving,
ordering and sorting, and indexing and filing the incoming knowledge.
The first comprehensive state archives to store governmental documents
were founded during the reign of Peter the Great. 52 With the introduction
of the new division of government during the reign of Alexander I, all
government-related records were required to be preserved in official state
archives. As the imperial bureaucracies obsessed over the written word and
generated more and more knowledge of the empire-by conducting surveys,
filing reports, codifying laws, generating studies, responding to petitions, and
creating lists-provincial archival institutions faced the challenge of stor-
ing and preserving the incoming paperwork. By the mid-nineteenth century,

49. For a suggestive analysis of the demons of paperwork and the problems of governance
in revolutionary France, see Ben Kafka, "The Demon of Writing: Paperwork, Public Safety,
and the Reign of Terror," Representations 98 (2007): 1-24. See also Peter Becker and William
Clark, eds., Little Tools of Knowledge: Historical Essays on Academic and Bureaucratic Prac-
tices (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001).
50. For these numbers, see Kratkoe opisanie mestnostei, na kotorye proektiruetsia raspo-
rostranit' reformu politsii (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia ministerstva vnutrennikh del, 1913).
51. Ibid.
52. On the establishment and organization of archives during the imperial period, see
"Arkhivy," in Entsiklopedicheskii slovar', 41 vols. (St. Petersburg: F.A. Brokgauz, I.A. Efron,
1890-1904), 2:259-63; and V. N. Samoshenko, Istoricheskie arkhivy Moskvy i Peterburga
(xviii-nach. xx vv.) (Moscow: Izd-vo VZPI, 1990).
20 I Jews and the Imperial State

historical, administrative, and scientific archives appeared throughout the

provinces, which were responsible for preserving, collecting, and organiz-
ing imperial knowledge. But the effort at archive building was no easy task.
Limited in space, financial resources, and reliable administrators, archives
also lacked centralized regulations to help organize the paperwork. 53 For
the Russian government, documentary records proved crucial for policing
the empire, even as administrators struggled with acute personnel shortages,
budget deficits, and organizational deficiencies. And for those individuals
who required access to the written files-especially some of the most vital
personal papers such as birth and death certificates, census data, passport
records, or other official notices and communications-the burdens of pa-
perwork management caused numerous difficulties, inconveniences, and
conflicts in everyday life.
Many of the papers received and produced by the imperial bureaucracy
were lost, destroyed, or not properly stored in government archives. But the
ones that have survived and have been made available to researchers since
the collapse of the Soviet Union form a series of rich narratives and texts
of the organizational and ideological structures of the imperial adminis-
trative system. The police reports, statistical surveys, laws, individual and
collective petitions, and various forms of internal government correspon-
dence enable historians to analyze how the imperial Russian bureaucracy
administered its diverse territories and populations. Yet as we will see in the
chapters that follow, these files also shed light on how individual Russian
Jews engaged with the bureaucracy and all the laws, statutes, and edicts
regulating their everyday lives.

53. N. I. Khimina, "Otechesrvennoe arkhivnoe stroitel'stvo: Ideia tsentralizatsii na rubezhe

xix-xx vekov," Otechestllennye arkhivy 4 (1998): 9-16. The complete centralization of Rus-
sian archives would not occur until1917-18. V. N. Avtokratov, "Iz istorii tsentralizatsii arkh-
ivnogo dela v Rossii (1917-1918 gg.)," Otechestvennye arkhivy 3-4 (1993): 9-35, 3-27.
 1
Making jews
Legible
But a name, Leyzer Yank!. Where are you going to get a name?
-S. Y. ABRAMOVITSH, The Wishing-Ring

Shortly after the third and final partition of the Polish-Lithuanian Com-
monwealth, the senator and poet Gavriil Romanovich Derzhavin recom-
mended that the Russian government take a special census of the Jewish
population. "It is impossible to assume that the census administered by the
kahal [the executive board of the Jewish community] will take an accurate
count of the Jews," Derzhavin pointed out. "The kahals are afraid to show
the complete numbers so that they would pay taxes for only those individu-
als who had been registered in their communities [since the most recent
census revision], and not for the newcomers. To eliminate their fears and
obtain an accurate count of the Jews, we need to make a special undertak-
ing." In his memorandum, the senator suggested a more efficient means
by which the state would not only collect taxes but also recognize Jews as
distinct individuals: "A universal census needs to be begun on the day of the
announcement of his imperial majesty's manifesto and concluded unequivo-
cally in four months. Moreover, for the accurate count of [Jewish] souls and
for convenience in juridical matters, as well as for the recovery of debts and
for ascertaining the guilty and the innocent in [criminal] investigations, all
Jews need to add to their name and patronymic a Russian surname." Thus,
a Khatskil Mordukhovich would be known as Khatskil Mordukhovich
Dikii, while a Leib ltskovich and a Leizar Movshovich would be called
Leib Itskovich Promyshlennyi and Leizar Movshovich Derevenskii. A fixed
22 I Jews and the Imperial State

surname, Derzhavin reasoned, would help determine the exact identity of

each member of the Jewish community. 1
Over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, censuses and
statistical studies allowed government officials and professional research-
ers to categorize populations in radically new ways while enhancing the
state's ability to refashion the boundaries of corporate communities. 2 Dur-
ing this period, the social domain emerged as an arena that gradually dis-
tinguished itself from the 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. 3 In an age when
the power of numbers signified empirical reliability, Russian administra-
tors and statisticians acknowledged the incompleteness of statistical enu-
meration and reasoned that population counts should not be mistaken for
absolute truths. Poll tax censuses or census revisions were designed to enu-
merate portions of the population only for taxation and conscription pur-
poses.4 With tens of thousands of people absent from population counts, the

1. Gavriil R. Derzhavin, "0 sochinenii novoi evreiskoi pogolovoi perepisi," in Sochineniia

Derzhavina, ed. Ia. K. Grata, 9 vols. (St. Petersburg: Imperatorskoi akademii nauk, 1864-83),
7:273-74. On naming practices and the role of the state in a worldwide context, see James
C. Scott, John Tehranian, and Jeremy Mathias, "The Production of Legal Identities Proper to
States: The Case of the Permanent Family Surname," Comparative Studies in Society and His-
tory 44 (2002): 4-44.
2. For a global perspective, see, for example, C. A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intel-
ligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780-1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1996); and Edward Higgs, The Information State in England: The Central
Collection of Information on Citizens since 1500 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).
3. On the body social in the western European context, see, for example, Joshua Cole, The
Power of Large Numbers: Population, Politics, and Gender in Nineteenth-Century France
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000); and Mary Poovey, Making a Social Body: British
Cultural Formation, 1830-1864 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 4-11. On the
imperial Russian context, see Peter Holquist, "To Count, to Extract, to Exterminate: Popula-
tion Statistics and Population Politics in Late Imperial Russia and Soviet Russia," in A State of
Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin, ed. Ronald Grigor Suny
and Terry Martin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 112-14.
4. In 1719, Peter the Great conducted the first census revision with the hopes of financing a
regular standing army and navy. On the creation of the first census revision, see PSZRT, series
1, vol. 5, no. 3245 (November 26, 1719). See also V. M. Kabuzan, Narody Rossii v xviii veke:
Chislennost' i etnicheskii sostav (Moscow: Nauka, 1990), 11, 55; John P. LeDonne, Absolut-
ism and Ruling Class: The Formation of the Russian Political Order, 1700-1825 (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1991 ), 258-63; and David Moon, The Russian Peasantry, 1600-
1930: The World the Peasants Made (New York: Longman, 1999), 20-21. For an overview
of the history of population statistics in the imperial period, see Lee Schwarz, "A History of
Russian and Soviet Censuses," in Research Guide to the Russian and Soviet Censuses, ed.
RalphS. Clem (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), 48-50. Often census revisions excluded
the entire female population from enumeration.
 Making Jews Legible I 23

census revision proved neither reliable nor comprehensive. Groups such as

the inorodtsy (non-Russians), raznochintsy (peoples of various ranks), and
inovertsy (peoples of other faiths) who did not fit easily into the prescrip-
tive social-estate system presented numerous problems for social-scientific
documentation. For self-conscious reformers and progressive officials, the
trust in statistical representation arose alongside an ingrained skepticism of
the objective reality that these numbers purported to depict.
During census revisions, the state obligated the kahals to collect all govern-
ment and communal taxes as well as conduct official counts of members of
their communities. Although Paul I (1796-1801) and later Alexander I rec-
ognized that high taxes forced kahals to hide their Jews from official enumer-
ation, both tsars insisted that the Jewish communities continue to perform
population counts. 5 Until 1827, at which time Nicholas I ( 1825-55) required
young Jewish men between the ages of twelve and twenty-five to serve in the
army, the burdens of taxation proved to be the most powerful incentive for
hiding from official counts. The Jewish Committee (established by the Min-
istry of the Interior during the reign of Nicholas I to realign Jewish life and
society) estimated that more than 25 percent of the Jewish population was
not recorded in the censuses. 6 In an 1814 report to the Ministry of Finance,
for example, one official noted that more than 64,000 Jewish souls could
not be accounted for in Volynia Province/ Largely because of the onerous
nature of taxation, the poorer sectors of the Jewish communities continually
refrained from making payments. After reviewing the statistical data for the
ninth census-revision, taken in 1850, the Ministry of Finance acknowledged
that many of the numbers recorded by the Jewish communities were incon-
sistent with the previous census, taken in 1834. A significant number of the
communities, the ministry claimed, documented from one-third to one-half
of all Jewish males as "unexplained absences," while other Jews recorded
as "missing" were found residing in their homes on further inspection. 8 The
Minsk treasurer cited another example of "incredible abuse." In Kletsk, a
small market town located in Minsk Province, the eighth census revision

5. Iulii Gessen, "Podatnoe oblozhenie," in Evreiskaia entsiklopediia: Svod znanii o evre-

istve i ego kul'ture v proshlom i nastoiashchem, 16 vols. (Moscow: Terra, 1991), 12:638; and
Richard Pipes, "Catherine II and the Jews: The Origins of the Pale of Settlement," Soviet jew-
ish Affairs 5 (1975): 10-13.
6. RGIA, f. 1269, op. 1, d. 69, I. 4 (1857-58). Chaired by Count Pavel D. Kiselev, the
Committee for the Determination of Measures for the Fundamental Transformation of Jews
in Russia (also known as the jewish Committee) carried out its work between 1840 and 1863.
For a detailed discussion, sec Benjamin Nathans, Beyond the Pale: The jewish Encounter with
Late Imperial Russia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 31-79.
7. RGIA, f. 560, op. 11, d. 45, I. 4 (1821); and RGIA, f. 1269, op. 1, d. 69, I.
4 (1857-1858).
8. RGIA, f. 560, op. 1, d. 1338, II. 2-2b (1851).
24 I Jews and the Imperial State

documented 1,236 Jewish souls. Sixteen years later, however, the ninth cen-
sus recorded only 750 Jews, of whom 294 could not be accounted for by
the treasurer. In his report to the Ministry of Finance, the treasurer asked in
desperation, "From whom will we receive the rest of our finances, and why
will we conduct a military draft for 456, and not for 1,236, Jews?" 9
Until1858, the imperial Russian state continued to rely on the census re-
vision to count its male population, collect taxes, and identify potential mili-
tary recruits (and for Jews, it also used special "rotation books" [ocherednye
knigi] after 1827 for conscription purposes). The tsarist government used
"communal responsibility" (krugovaia poruka) to count the population and
enforce fiscal and administrative matters, while Jewish communities con-
tinued to frustrate officials as they resisted population counts, bribed tax
inspectors, and distorted numbers. Moreover, underdeveloped provincial
archives helped erase the memory of fiscal transactions, the documentation
of who paid and how much. And other factors such as bribery, endemic cor-
ruption, and misclassification of information only contributed to the mem-
ory loss. 10 Boris Miliutin, in one of the first published government studies of
Jewish communities, expressed disbelief at how three distinct administrative
bodies-the Ministry of the Interior, the Department of Spiritual Affairs of
Foreign Confessions, and the Jewish communities themselves--could pro-
vide three radically different population counts. 11
As the empire grew in size and increased in ethnic diversity, the limita-
tions of statistical enumeration became even more apparent. The statistician
Petr Keppen wrote in his study of the ninth census revision:

I have adopted the word revision [reviziia] because, as is known, we still do not
have a population census-that is, the enumeration of all individuals who con-
stitute the population. Revisions entail counting individuals who have been as-
signed to tax-paying status. These revisions ... have an economic objective, for
which they supply, for the most part, the necessary information about the male
population that earns salaries and receives privileges. About the nontaxpayers
we have very little data, and this is why I consider these [statistical] results as
having only a minimal approximation to the truthY

Keppen's own published work provided one of the first reliable statistical
maps of the multiethnic empire, charting and dividing Russia's territories by

9. RGIA, f. 571, op. 6, d. 50, 1. 2b (1851-1853); and RGIA, f. 1286, op. 13, d. 1360, 1.
4 (1851-1852).
10. S. Frederick Starr, Decentralization and Self-Government in Russia, 1830-1870 (Prince-
ton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 40.
11. Boris Miliutin, Ustroistvo i sostoianie Evreiskikh obshchestv v Rossii (St. Petersburg:
Tipografiia ministerstva vnutrennikh del, 1849-50), 197-98.
12. Petr Keppen, Deviataia reviziia: Isledovanie o chisle zhitelei v Rossii v 1851 godu
(St. Petersburg: Imperatorskoi akademii nauk, 1857), x-xi.
 Making Jews Legible I 25

ethnic component. Although the work failed to meet the rigorous standards
of objectivity, Keppen nevertheless insisted that all social-scientific analy-
ses needed to be predicated on the power of "numerical data." "Statistical
knowledge needs to be centralized," Keppen argued, "and should be utilized
by all administrative branches to govern the empire." 13
Even with the development of specialized disciplines such as statistics,
ethnography, and other social sciences, which employed new scientific meth-
ods for counting and describing Russia's population in the first half of the
nineteenth century, the census revision remained the most popular tool for
empirewide counts. 14 With a poorly developed system of provincial admin-
istration, the imperial government counted on local intermediaries to per-
form crucial bureaucratic functions, often blurring the direct links between
the individual and the state. In the 1840s, key members of the bureaucracy
such as Pavel D. Kiselev, Dmitrii and Nikolai Miliutin, and Lev Perovskii
recognized the difficulties of governing the population and implementing
effective social policies without reliable statistics. 15
As part of the administrative modernization of the empire, the 1844 reform
to curtail the juridical autonomy of the Jewish community by abolishing the
kahal represented a crucial moment in the state's efforts to forge direct links
with Jews. 16 In the years leading up to the 1844 decree, the kahals played
important mediating roles between the state and the Jewish communities,
enjoying a great deal of administrative jurisdiction and disciplinary control
over the population. As internal administrative organs, the kahals presided
over a variety of fiscal and juridical matters concerning the everyday lives of

13. RAN-SPb, f. 30, op. 1, d. 177, II. 24b-26 (1844).

14. On the development of statistics in Russia, see David Alan Rich, The Tsar's Colonels:
Professionalism, Strategy, and Subversion in Late Imperial Russia (Cambridge, Mass.: Har-
vard University Press, 1998), 41-64; Holquist, "To Count, to Extract, to Exterminate"; and
A. Kaufmann, "The History and Development of the Official Russian Statistics," in The His-
tory of Statistics: Their Development and Progress in Many Countries, ed. John Koren (New
York: Macmillan, 1918), 469-534. On ethnography, see Nathaniel Knight, "Science, Empire,
and Nationality: Ethnography in the Russian Geographical Society, 1845-1855," in Imperial
Russia: New Histories for the Empire, ed. Jane Burbank and David L. Ransel (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1998), 108-41.
15. W. Bruce Lincoln, In the Vanguard of Reform: Russia's Enlightened Bureaucrats, 1825-
1861 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1986), chap. 4.
16. In the early modern period, Jewish communities enjoyed juridical authority over their
population. Jews tried cases between Jews according to Jewish law and chose their communal
leaders without interference from the state. On early modern juridical autonomy, see Gershon
D. Hundert, Jews in Poland-Lithuania in the Eighteenth Century: A Genealogy of Modernity
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 80. In the 1840s, however, neither the pro-
vincial bureaucracy nor the Jewish communities were ready for such a radical restructuring of
the administrative system. On the persistence of Jewish administrative-juridical autonomy, see
Azriel Shochat, "Ha-hanhaga be-kehilot rusiya im bitul ha-kahal," Zion 42, no. 3-4 (1979):
143-233; and Michael Stanislawski, Tsar Nicholas I and the Jews: The Transformation of
Jewish Society in Russia, 1825-1855 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America,
1983), 123-27.
26 I Jews and the Imperial State

Jews in the western borderlands. In a typical case, the townsman Leib Itsk-
ovich Sirkin petitioned the Minsk kahal for a permanent residence permit
so that he and his three sons could relocate to Poltava Province. Without
an internal passport, Sirkin and his family did not have the right to travel
within the empire. The widow Rakhel Rubinovich requested that the kahal
register correctly the name and age of her son, Yankel, in a census ledger so
that he could sign up for the draft in a neighboring community (presumably
because Yankel's permanent place of residence no longer corresponded to
the place in which he registered initially). Some individuals asked for mate-
rial help in light of the extreme poverty and economic conditions in which
they lived, while others pleaded for extensions when they could not collect
sufficient funds to pay their portion of the communal tax bill on timeY
Even though the 1844 decree abolished all kahals, stipulating that "no
special Jewish governance should exist," Jewish communities (evreiskie ob-
shchestva) continued to preside over collective responsibilities such as the
collection of taxes, the election of crown rabbis, the supervision of chari-
table institutions, and the counting of populations, while a handful of Jews,
handpicked by the Jewish communities themselves, performed the crucial
function of counting members of their communities during census revi-
sions and reporting this data to the government. 18 In addition, heads of
households continued to play vital administrative functions by providing
family records of their households, and sborshchiki (community officials
elected to supervise the collection of taxes) preserved many of the respon-
sibilities of the executive board of the kahal. 19 The 1844 statute reflected
what the historian George Yaney called an "ideal," that is, the prescriptive
way Russian administrators believed the law should function. 20 The Senate
declared that even though the Jewish community no longer maintained

17. For a sample of the petitions that the Minsk kahal presided over during 1844, see YIVO,
RG 12, box 6, folder 9 (no pagination). The authority of the kahals was also subject to massive
individual and collective denunciations ranging from corruption, fiscal mismanagement, and
fraudulent accounting procedures to improper record keeping, embezzlement of funds, and the
violation of recruitment procedures. For a reassessment of the kahal, see John D. Klier, "The
Kahal in the Russian Empire: Life, Death, and Afterlife of a Jewish Institution, 1772-18 82,"
Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 5 (2006): 33-50, esp. 41-45.
18. On the crown rabbinate, see Azriel Schochat, Mosad "ha-rabanut mi-ta'am" be-rusyah
(Haifa: University of Haifa, 1975); ChaeRan Freeze, Jewish Marriage and Divorce in Imperial
Russia (Waltham, Mass.: Brandeis University Press, 2002), 98-116; and Michael Stanislawski,
"Reflections on the Russian Rabbinate," in Jewish Religious Leadership: Image and Reality, ed.
Jack Wertheimer, 2 vols. (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 2004), 2: 429-46.
19. RGIA, f. 821, op. 9, d. 101, 1!. 85-86 (1874-1880); and Miliutin, Ustroistvo i sos-
toianie Evreiskikh obshchestv, 41.
20. George Y. Yaney, The Systematization of Russian Government: Social Evolution in the
Domestic Administration of Imperial Russia, 1711-1905 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1973), 20-21.
 Making Jews Legible I 27

a self-governing organ, it nevertheless should be recognized as a "juridical

personality" (iuridicheskoe litso ). 21 The state, in other words, was unable
and in many respects unwilling to effectively "annihilate" Jewish separate-
ness by dismantling the administrative autonomy of the Jewish community.
Long after the 1844 statute, communal responsibilities continued to bring
much frustration to provincial and central officials (as a result of false re-
porting and other acts of direct and indirect resistance), as well as to those
Jews who attempted to perform the administrative work of counting indi-
vidual Jewish identities.

II

One Jewish community from Mogilev Province petitioned authorities for an

extension for the ninth census revision, citing illness and death as explana-
tions for its inability to fulfill record-keeping duties. Twenty-eight members
of the community, the petitioners claimed, had become terribly ill and died
at the precise time the revision needed to be administered. 22 In a similar fash-
ion, the sborshchik ltsak Rubinchik from the town of Klimovichi (Mogilev
Province) petitioned to have the late fee waived for submitting the necessary
documents three weeks late. Members of the Jewish community asked him to
deliver the documents to the treasurer on January 28, 1851, two days before
the deadline; on his way, Rubinchik also became ill and could not fulfill his
communal responsibility until February 19. However, once the treasurer in-
spected the documents, other problems arose. Since the revisions did not have
the necessary signatures from the community's rabbi and elders, the treasurer
claimed that he could not receive them because they did not adhere to the
letter of the law. In a report to the Ministry of Finance, the Mogilev treasurer
complained that he had received only around half of all revisions from the
Jewish communities by the required deadline, and these were "in such dis-
order" (v takom bezporiadke) that he deemed them unacceptable. Although
in some cases the dissatisfaction with Jews' failure to comply with formal
procedures was warranted-since officials noted that Jews omitted such per-
tinent data as birth dates for newborns or failed to record explanations for
those documented as "absent"-in other instances their refusals were more
examples of the bureaucracy's concern with formalism.
Russian writers parodied the parochial bureaucratic concerns in nov-
els, short stories, and plays, but the failure to comply with bureaucratic

21. Ia. I. Girnpel'son, cornp., Zakony a evreiakh: Sistematicheskii obzor deistvuiushchikh

zakonopolozhenii o evreiakh, ed. L. M. Bramson, 2 vols. (Petrograd: Iurisprudentsiia, 1914-
15), 2:828.
22. RGIA, f. 571, op. 6, d. 50, I. 33b (1851-1853).
28 I jews and the Imperial State

procedure could (and often did) have grave consequences for Jews in their
everyday lives. 23 For the Jews of Letitchev (Podolia Province) the failure to
comply with the law led to a steep fine. Sixteen Jews petitioned Minister of
Justice Viktor Panin to extend the deadline for the ninth census revision.
The community asked the Jews to compile the revision by November 1,
1850. "We began to prepare the necessary paperwork as soon as we were
nominated," they wrote, "and recorded all those who were born, died, con-
scripted, sent to Siberia, converted to Christianity, committed crimes, and
ran away from our community after the eighth revision." Since imperial
law required the revision to be written on stamped government paper, the
petitioners proceeded to the town treasury to purchase the paper. The trea-
sury, however, did not have the necessary amount, and so they waited until
January 1 (which was the grace period given to all imperial subjects for
turning in the revision), but a shipment did not arrive then either. A second
grace period passed, and there was still no sign of the paper. "We then
became worried that the government would assess a fine for not turning
in the revision," they wrote, "even though we are completely innocent."
They petitioned for a one-month extension, as well as for permission to use
regular paper. The petition was forwarded to the Ministry of Finance, and
upon further investigation the ministry concluded that the town treasury
had plenty of stamped government paper for the Jews to use. In the end,
after a protracted discussion of the query, the Ministry of Justice once again
refused to honor the petition, noting that this was yet another instance of
Jews' unwillingness to fulfill their civic duties. 24
Since the early modern period, an intricate system of informal exchanges,
in cash and in kind, developed as an important part of the inner workings
of the imperial administrative system. Those government institutions re-
sponsible for keeping track of fiscal and demographic statistics were acutely
aware of the general deception, forgery, payments, gifts, and concealment of
official enumeration occurring on a routine basis throughout the empire. In
response to these affairs, the state codified a series of laws in the 1830s tore-
duce the widespread corruption, forgery, speculation, and bribery of provin-
cial administrators, police officials, and other members of the bureaucracy.
While the bureaucracy (on both the central and provincial levels) evolved
into an ever more formalistic, ethical, and legally conscious apparatus,

23. See, for example, Nikolai Gogol's Dead Souls (1842) and Inspector General (1836),
and Mikhail Saltykov Shchedrin's ProL'incial Sketches (1856-57). For an analysis of these and
other works of Russian literature that deal with bribery, see Andrei Rogachevskii, "The Repre-
sentation of Bribery in Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature," in Bribery and Blat in Russia:
Negotiating Reciprocity from the Middle Ages to the 1990s, ed. Stephen Lovell, Alena Lede-
neva, and Andrei Rogachevskii (New York: St. Martin's, 2000), 114-40.
24. RGIA, f. 571, op. 6, d. 50, ll. 59-60b (1851-1853).
 Making Jews Legible I 29

anecdotal and archival evidence suggests that informal exchanges continued

to dictate how local affairs operated in the empire. 25
According to a study made by one government official for the Jewish
Committee, the state lost more than three hundred rubles in revenue annu-
ally for every Jewish soul and around 625 recruits during each recruitment
period. Though the Polotsk community (Vitebsk Province) recorded 3,444
souls, the official reported that more than 900 Jews were still presumed
missing. The Jewish Committee argued that, without the registration of
such basic data as forename and surname, place and date of birth, religion,
social status, profession, and the precise home and town of the individual,
any meaningful reforms of the Jewish population would be problematic.
The committee noted moreover that much "energy and efficiency is required
to fulfill the revision's intended goals, especially with respect to Jews, who
are always ready to lie and hide [from their administrative obligations]." 26
The problem of Jewish population statistics usually centered around two
specific obstacles, which helped prevent accurate and efficient record keep-
ing: that Jews tended to travel outside their permanent places of residence
without travel permits and that they often used names that did not cor-
respond to those recorded in their official papers. Officially registered as
either town dwellers or merchants, Jews often moved from town to town
and region to region to trade goods in the western borderlands and, on oc-
casion, in the heart of the empire. Enough Jews appeared as absent in poll
registers for central authorities to recognize that unregulated geographic
mobility presented a serious obstacle to accurate Jewish population counts.
Shortly after the ninth census revision, the Ministry of Finance suggested
that heads of households needed to record the exact number of male mem-
bers who resided in each household, and all Jews who traveled without
internal passports needed to be deported immediately to their permanent
places of residence. 27
That Jews utilized a wide variety of personal names and nicknames also
hindered effective governance in the western borderlands: the arbitrary
use of forenames created all sorts of tensions when imperial officials at-
tempted to document individual Jewish identities. As one author explained
in the official journal published by the Ministry of Interior, "Since ancient
times Jews have customarily used either one or a number of nicknames

25. On the legislation on corruption and bribery during the reign of Nicholas I, see
V. V. Astanin, Bor'ba s korruptsiei v Rossii xvi-xx vekov: Dialektika sistemnogo podkhoda
(Moscow: Rossiiskaia kriminologicheskaia assotsiiatsiia, 2003), 16-20. See also Irina Davydova,
"Bureaucracy on Trial: A Malaise in Official Life as Represented in Nineteenth-Century Russian
Thought," in Lovell, Ledeneva, and Rogachevskii, Bribery and Blat in Russia, 95-113.
26. RGIA, f. 1269, op. 1, d. 69, II. 4-4b (1857-1858).
27. RGIA, f. 560, op. 1, d. 1388, II. 3-3b (1851).
30 I Jews and the Imperial State

instead of their 'real' [sacred] names." The author warned that in the ma-
jority of cases Jewish nicknames bore no correlation whatsoever to their
sacred names. 28 Provincial police and government officials often confused
the sacred name with the nickname, which only increased the illegibility
of Jews by making the imposition of social order difficult and, on oc-
casion, simply impossible. At other times, officials disagreed whether Jews
should be identified by all their names and nicknames or only by their
sacred names. 29 In an effort to improve the administration of Jewish com-
munities, the Jewish Committee recommended that Jews should be identi-
fied only by those names by which they would be registered in the tenth
census revision-names that they would not be able to change under any
circumstances. 30
Neither fines nor increased government regulation prevented Jews from
doctoring records, leaving for an extended period of time during census
revisions, using a variety of different names and nicknames, or making
what were often perceived as outrageous excuses for their alleged inepti-
tude in completing the paperwork. In comparing the totals of the eighth
and ninth census revisions for two regions in Minsk Province, one offi-
cial noted, "Even if the number of newly born does not increase over the
number of deaths in these two regions, and even if we were to exclude
those recorded as 'absent' from the totals, then the number of Jewish souls
should be 16,795." But the ninth census revision documented only 10,393,
which meant that Jewish communities could not account for 6,402 souls. 31
In a similar fashion, when a civil servant inspected the town of Vilkomir
(Kovno Province), he promptly discovered two Jews who were recorded as
absent and eighteen who were not registered at all. Many Jews, he wrote in
his report, "don't possess the proper documents that they should be regis-
tered under. " 32 The wild fluctuations in Jewish population statistics so en-
raged central officials that the Rabbinical Commission was asked what, if
any, limits Jewish religious law placed on Jews to keep them from fulfilling
their record-keeping duties. The commission reassured the Jewish Commit-
tee that Jewish law placed no such restrictions upon its people. 33

28. "Sobstvennye imena, upotrebliaemye evreiami," Zhurnal ministerstvo vnutrennikh del

4 (1843): 100-111.
29. RGIA, f. 560, op. l, d. 1338, l. 5b (1851); and RGIA, f. 1269, op. 1, d. 69, l.
33 (1857-1858).
30. RGIA, f. 1269, op. 1, d. 69, l. 33 (1857-1858).
31. RGIA, f. 571, op. 6, d. 50, ll. 7-7b ( 1851-1853).
32. Ibid., l. 185.
33. RGIA, f. 1269, op. 1, d. 69, l. 56b (1857-1858). Established in 1848 by the Jewish
Committee, the Rabbinical Commission deliberated on social and familial problems concerning
Jewish life. On the Rabbinical Commission, see Freeze, Jewish Marriage and Divorce, 83-95.
 Making Jews Legible 31

Unforeseen calamities, which destroyed vital documents and forced Jews

to miss deadlines and seek extensions, played havoc with the efficiency of the
bureaucratic process as well. The Jew Aizek Marmor petitioned on behalf
of the Jewish community of Rodishchak (Volynia Province) for an exten-
sion for the ninth census revision. "For an unknown reason the tax collec-
tor's house caught on fire. All of the belongings disappeared. Nothing was
saved," he wrote. Outside of valuable property, all the paperwork prepared
for the ninth census revision burned up as well: "All the papers, documents,
receipts, notebooks, registers, metrical books, and various other papers
disappeared-in short, all the papers that were necessary for completing
the census." Whether the ministry granted Marmor's request we cannot tell
from the extant archival sources, but fires and conflagrations were indeed
quite common in the small urban settlements of the pale, where the majority
of Jews resided, just as they were in the villages of the countryside where
most peasants made their home. So even if Marmor stretched the truth-
since the fire occurred conveniently at midnight on January 1, 1851, the
precise date the revision was due-this example serves as a useful reminder
that unforeseen calamities such as fires, floods, and deaths could (and often
did) delay the fulfillment of civic obligations. 34
The requirement that all census revisions be written in the Russian lan-
guage also caused problems for Jews, since in the small market towns and
settlements in the Pale of Settlement it was often difficult, at times impossi-
ble, to find even one Jew who could read and write Russian. But in the large
and diverse empire, Jewish communities were not the only ones who faced
such concerns. Linguistic mistranslations, misunderstandings, and misper-
ceptions appeared and reappeared in a variety of borderland encounters
between non-Russian communities and Russian officialdom. 31 To alleviate
the administrative tensions caused by linguistic misunderstandings, Jewish
communities often hired scribes to fill out the required paperwork. Since the
hired record keepers frequently took bribes from wealthier Jews, record-
ing data at their discretion, these arbitrary practices prompted a number of
disgruntled Jews to inform on their Jewish neighbors to local authorities.

34. RGIA, f. 571, op. 6, d. 50, II. 17-17b (1851-1853). On fires in Jewish shtetls, see Ben-
Cion Pinchuk, "The Shtetl: An Ethnic Town in the Russian Empire," Cahiers du Monde Russe
41 (2000): 501. On fires in late imperial Russia, see Cathy A. Frierson, All Russia Is Burning: A
Cultural History of Fire and Arson in Late Imperial Russia (Seattle: University of Washington
Press, 2002).
35. On the language requirements, see Svod zakonov Rossiiskoi imperii, vol. 9, no. 1679
(1857). For other examples that led to "misunderstandings" between indigenous communities
and Russian clergy, see Paul W. Werth, At the Margins of Orthodoxy: Mission, Governance,
and Confessional Politics, 1827-1905 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), 25-26; and Mi-
chael Khodarkovsky, "Of Christianity, Enlightenment, and Colonialism: Russia in the North
Caucasus, 1550-1800," journal of Modern History 71 (1999): 394-430.
32 I jews and the Imperial State

Beniamin Tanis, a nineteen-year-old Jew from the town of Zaslav (Minsk

Province), claimed that he and three other Jews (David Lapedus and the
brothers Vul'f and Mikhel Frainblium) had examined records for the ninth
revision and found over eighty omissions in two towns alone. "These peo-
ple," Tonis warned, "reap big rewards from their clerical duties, since Jews
cannot write in Russian." 36 Authorities, of course, often collaborated with
local communities and pocketed payments for inspection.

III

Nicholas's interventionist policies played an important role in altering the

ways in which Jews went about their daily lives. The conscription of Jews
into the imperial army signaled the beginning of the reconstruction of the
Jewish community. As Jews began to abandon customary occupations such
as trade, commerce, and the liquor industry in favor of artisanal work, the
economic and social composition of the pale began to shift. The moderniza-
tion of education (for both girls and boys) promoted-albeit with limited
results at first-Western languages, customs, and mores among an emerg-
ing Jewish public, while the abolition of the kahal helped destabilize the
administrative autonomy of the communities. Although elected commu-
nity officials preserved many of the responsibilities of the former execu-
tive board-mainly the collection of taxes and the supervision of military
recruits-the administrative and judicial autonomy of the Jewish commu-
nity nevertheless began to weaken after around 1844_37
The administrative changes occurred unevenly, but they were in line
with the broader imperial policies that gradually abandoned early mod-
ern political practices favoring cooperation with the non-Russian elite,
religious toleration, and the maintenance of corporate status among eth-
nic groups. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the cautious re-
formist agenda taken together with the durability of the corporate estate
structure set the tone and framework for Russia's distinct modernity. As
economic, political, and social dislocations transformed the empire in the
mid-1850s, the state recognized that the older techniques of documenting,
categorizing, and policing imperial society had suddenly become anachro-
nistic. Although census revisions appeared at one point revolutionary in
counting the population and documenting individuals' legal status, they

36. RGIA, f. 571, op. 6, d. 50, II. 204-204b (1851-1853).

37. Eli Lederhendler, The Road to Modern Jewish Politics: Political Tradition and Politi-
cal Reconstruction in the jewish Community ofTsarist Russia (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1989), 52; Stanislawski, Tsar Nicholas I and the Jews, 127; and Eliyana R. Adler, "Pri-
vate Schools for Jewish Girls in Tsarist Russia" (PhD diss., Brandeis University, 2003 ).
 Making Jews Legible 33

became less useful by the mid-nineteenth century as the bureaucracy began

to rely increasingly on passports, city censuses, and metrical books. While
passports controlled territorial movement and identified subjects by sig-
nature, residence, and "conspicuous visible marks" (primety) and while
city censuses performed the crucial function of counting peoples in specific
urban spaces, metrical books documented individuals' legal status in an
entirely novel fashion. The information inscribed in these books played an
important role in determining the legal rights, privileges, and obligations
to which all imperial subjects were entitled. 38
In May 1722, Peter the Great issued the first statute on the registration
of vital events: "All clergymen are required to have books in which metri-
cal records are recorded, that is, notebooks where the births and baptisms
of infants are recorded, with the precise year and date, and the name of
the parents and godparents. In these same books marriages are recorded
as are deaths, with the precise year and date." 39 By the 1740s, the recording
of vital events became a familiar and routine process for almost the entire
Russian Orthodox population. The state used the information recorded in
the books to determine birth and death rates as well as resolve questions and
disputes dealing with fiscal and juridical matters. By the 1830s and 1840s,
as the Russian government sought to modernize the empire along admin-
istrative lines, it required the clergies of all its tolerated denominations to
record the vital events for their respective communities. 40 In 1835, the state
required rabbis to record the Jewish population's births, marriages, deaths,
and divorces. 41
For jews, as for all other subjects in the empire, the recording of vital
events allowed the state to recognize the population not only as a religious
community but as individuals with distinct civic identities. Before Jewish

38. On the metrical records system, see Charles Steinwedel, "Making Social Groups One
Person at a Time: The Identification of Individuals by Estate, Religious Confession, and Ethnic-
ity in Late Imperial Russia," in Documenting Individual Identity: The Development of State
Practices in the Modern World, ed. Jane Caplan and John Torpey (Princeton: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 2001), 69-73; Paul W. Werth, "In the State's Embrace: Civil Acts in an Imperial
Order," Kritika: Exploration in Russian and Eurasian History 7 (2006): 433-58; Freeze, jew-
ish Marriage and Divorce, 110-15; D. N. Antonov and I. A. Antonova, Metricheskie knigi
Rossii xviii-nachala xx veka (Moscow: Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi gumanitarnyi universitet,
2006); Gregory Freeze, "Bringing Order to the Russian Family: Marriage and Divorce in Im-
perial Russia, 1760-1860," journal of Modern History 62 (1990): 716-18; and G. Vol'tke,
"Metricheskie knigi i svidetel'stva," in Evreiskaia entsiklopediia 10: 925-27.
39. PSZRI, series 1, vol. 6, no. 4022, art. 29 (May 1722).
40. Antonov and Antonova, Metricheskie knigi Rossii, 43-48; and Werth, "In the State's
Embrace?"
41. Although a decree issued in 1826 obligated rabbis to record vital events, the 1835 stat-
ute was the first systematic description of the role that state rabbis would play in this process.
Freeze, jewish Marriage and Diuorce, 95.
34 I Jews and the Imperial State

communities began to register their vital statistics, Jews could only approxi-
mate their age and dates of birth. One Jewish resident commented, for ex-
ample, that "I am quite old, but I do not remember how old," and another
Jew wrote that "I am thirty-eight or thirty-nine and I am not sure which." 42
In his autobiography, the writer S. Y. Abramovitsh wrote similarly, "My
birth date is nowhere recorded. Jews didn't pay attention to such things in
those days, particularly in the small towns. But I have assumed that I was
born in the year 1836, and my family determined December 20 to be my
date of birth. " 43 Throughout the nineteenth century, metrical books served
as one of the most effective and reliable means for monitoring the movement
and growth of populations, as well as registering an individual's identity and
origin (proiskhozhdenie): who they were, where they were born, and what
religion and legal status they were born into. 44
Since metrical books played such an important juridical function in Rus-
sian society, lawmakers felt it necessary to "place the responsibility of record
keeping on those who were most entrusted" to fulfill this vital bureaucratic
role. 45 Although local police officials constituted the most obvious choice, in
highly populated Jewish regions a variety of difficulties were bound to arise
that an understaffed police force could not be expected to resolve. Police
officials proved utterly ignorant in religious matters and cultural customs,
which turned out to be yet another reason why so-called crown rabbis were
handed these responsibilities. After 184 7, the Ia w sanctioned only those rab-
bis who graduated from either the rabbinical seminary in Zhitomir (Volynia
Province) or Vil'na (Vil'na Province) to perform religious rites such as cir-
cumcisions and marriages. 46
By co-opting religious elites for its own administrative needs, the state
attempted to intervene in the daily lives of Jews in an unprecedented
fashion. Influenced by the administrative-consistorial model first estab-
lished by Napoleon, the interventionist practices constituted an impor-
tant dimension of the imperial modernization project. During the reign of
Nicholas I, the state became involved directly in all its tolerated religious

42. As quoted in Jacob Goldberg, "Jewish Marriage in Eighteenth-Century Poland," Polin

10 (1997): 20.
43. Mendele Moykher Sforim [S. Y. Abramovitsh], "Notes for My Biography," in Selected
Works of Mendele Moykher Sforim, ed. Marvin Zukerman et a!. (Malibu: Joseph Simon,
1991), 31. For the problems of establishing the precise date in Mendele's biography, see the
insightful discussion by Max Weinreich, "Mendeles ershte 25 ior," YIVO bleter 10 (1936):
167-80. The sculptor M. M. Antokol'skii's date of birth was also the subject of some dispute
by his biographers. D. G. Maggid, "Kogda rodilsia Antokol'skii?" Perezhitoe 2 (1910): 3-4.
44. RGIA, f. 821, op. 10, d. 772, I. 28 (1870-1885); and RGIA, f. 1269, op. 1, d. 69, II.
68-68b.
45. RGIA, f. 821, op. 9, d. 109, I. 213.
46. Svud zakunuv Russiiskoi imperii, vol. 9, no. 1457 (1857).
 Making Jews Legible 35

communities-Jewish, Muslim, Catholic, Protestant, and Buddhist. 47 In

addition to recording vital statistics, crown rabbis fulfilled a number of
other important bureaucratic and social functions, which encroached on
the self-governing institutions of Jewish communities. According to the
1835 statute, rabbis were required to play a vital administrative function
in the imperial administrative order by ensuring that Jews obeyed moral
responsibilities and observed the civic law code. In contrast to the 1804
statute, which decreed rabbis to be moral and religious authorities of the
Jewish community, the 1835 statute increased rabbis' jurisdiction beyond
the religious domain. Like parish priests who recorded the births, deaths,
marriages, and divorces of the Russian Orthodox population, crown rab-
bis were required to conduct all religious rites and record this information
in metrical books. The crown rabbi recorded the names for the newborns
in Russian and Hebrew during either the circumcision for the boys or the
naming ceremony for the girls, and upon marriage, the rabbi documented
the age, name and nickname, legal status, and cause of death. 48
As soon as the statute went into effect, officials quickly found many flaws
and inconsistencies in record keeping, with respect to form as well as con-
tent. The Jewish student and philanthropist V. 0. Harkavi noted a com-
mon occurrence for most Russian Jews who were born after the statute of
1835. Harkavi assumed that he had been born in either 1846 or 1847, but
he could not say with exactitude. "In those days, when I was born, no one
obeyed the rules of registration," Harkavi noted. 49 Unlike in Russian Ortho-
dox practice, Jewish law did not obligate rabbis to supervise religious rites.
The Statisticheskii vremennik Rossiisskoi imperii (The Statistical Chronicle
of the Russian Empire) observed that birth, death, and marriage counts
of the Russian Orthodox population came very close to objective truth,
"save for only a few, vital errors." The most important of these errors was
the confusion of the precise date of birth with the baptismal date. When
infants died before their baptismal ceremony (which was not an infrequent
occurrence in the empire), the dates of birth would not be accounted for
statistically. 5° For the Jewish population, not only did officials have to con-

47. For an elaboration of this argument, see Robert Crews, For Prophet and Tsar: islam
and Empire in Russia and Central Asia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006).
48. PSZRT, series 2, vol. 10, no. 8054, art. 96 (April13, 183S).
49. V. 0. Garkavi, Otryvki vospominanii (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia I. Fleitmana,
1913), 3.
50. Statisticheskii vremennik Rossiisskoi imperii 1 (1866): xix; and Antonov and Anton-
ova, Metricheskie knigi Rossii. In Orthodox Russia, as in Christian Europe, parents usually
named their children after the saints on whose birthdays they were horn. Orthodox Russians
usually celebrated their birthdays on "name days" that could have been (but were usually
not) separated by intervals in time from the official date of birth. See, for example, Daniel
H. Kaiser, "The Naming Culture of Early Modern Russia," Harvard Ukrainian Studies 19
36 I Jews and the Imperial State

tend with similar statistical omissions, but more important, they also had
to convince a people with no historical tradition of recording vital statistics
that the registration of births, marriages, deaths, and divorces possessed a
civic importance.
Only five years after the original 1835 statute, the imperial government
issued an amendment in hopes of ameliorating record-keeping practices.
As per the 1840 instructions, rabbis were held responsible for every error
recorded in the books. They were subject to a fine of fifteen rubles for in-
correct entries pertaining to Jewish males and seven-and-a-half rubles con-
cerning entries for females. In addition, rabbis could be tried in a court of
law for intentional omissions and, if convicted, could be punished for forg-
ery. 51 Still, even with all the irregularities and inconsistencies, metrical books
represented an important innovation in documentary practice. While the
state used census revisions primarily to collect taxes and fulfill conscription
quotas, metrical books identified each individual by denomination, legal
status, ethnic origin, and place of residence. As a fundamental marker of
identity, the document followed individuals as they changed place of res-
idence, marital status, and even religious denomination. The document's
civic importance-as the most important tool by which the state obtained
knowledge of its population-ensured that officials took much time in en-
forcing proper registration while continuing to devise new administrative
methods to improve record-keeping practices.
During the reign of Nicholas I, the accurate tabulation of Jewish popula-
tion statistics emerged as an important concern for the tsarist government as
it sought to intervene in the daily lives of all its subjects, improve fiscal con-
ditions, and maintain diligent social order. The lack of manpower, rampant
corruption, and the Jews' propensity to resist registration ensured disastrous
results in the tabulation of Jewish population statistics, which presented,
in turn, a host of problems for the government as it devised social policy
to reshape Jewish society. On the eve of the Great Reforms, even while of-
ficials lamented the current state of statistical record keeping in the empire,
reformers noted that Jewish population counts lagged behind those of the
peasantry and many other ethnic groups. 5 2
Since the books served as the only legitimate source for validating a per-
son's birth, death, and marriage dates, the stakes increased to record the
data correctly. Given the relative novelty of the books and their manifest

(1995): 271-91; and Kaiser, "Quotidian Orthodoxy: Domestic Life in Early Modern Russia,"
in Orthodox Russia: Belief and Practice under the Tsars, ed., Valerie Kivelson and Robert H.
Greene (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2003 ), 179-92.
51. PSZRI, series 2, vol. 15, no. 13750 (August 31, 1840).
52. Sec the discussion in Nathans, Beyond the Pale, 35, 69.
 Making jews Legible I 37

civic importance, a number of technical questions emerged in the 1840s and

1850s that needed to be quickly resolved. What agency should be respon-
sible for distributing the books to crown rabbis? Who should pay for the
books, and how much should they cost? Who should issue a certificate if
a person was born, married, or had died prior to 1835? 51 The solutions to
these pressing issues were neither always satisfactory nor effective, however,
and would remain on the reformers' agendas throughout the second half of
the nineteenth century. Although the statute of 1835 standardized the pro-
cedures for documenting Jewish births, marriages, and deaths, in the 1850s
the Ministry of the Interior maintained that metrical books continued to be
poorly supervised. 54
For the imperial Russian government, the most pressing issue was the in-
compatibility of the civil code with Jewish law. As a member of the Bessara-
bian statistical committee explained, "By Jewish law, any eligible and
informed Jew can perform religious rites. These rites need not be observed
in an institutionalized religious ceremony. The bigger the Jewish commu-
nity, the more eligible Jews [who can perform the rites]; official government
rabbis do not have the means to supervise all naming ceremonies, or at
least force [members of the community] to report names of the newborn." 55
To put it slightly differently, the incompatibility of religious and cultural
customs with the larger integrationist ambitions of administrative practices
helped sharpen the differences between Jewish communities and imperial
management policies during the last years of Nicholas's reign. The differ-
ences between civil law and cultural practice were not peculiar to the Jewish
community, however, for similar tensions occurred in many other imperial
communities. 56
Beyond the tensions between religious and civil law, authorities needed to
deal with a host of other issues as well. That Jews did not pay much attention
to their dates of birth also represented a significant obstacle for administra-
tive integration. As Abramovitsh wrote, "Of what use was such knowledge?
A Jew remembers an anniversary of a death; but an anniversary of birth-
what for?" 57 Since late antiquity, Jews did not celebrate birthdays, nor did
they inscribe the dates of births on tombstones. Although exceptions to this
general custom can be found in Jewish history, most notably in northern
Europe, birthday celebrations were a very recent, invented tradition. The
historian Ivan Marcus has suggested that because Jews attached "negative

53. RGIA, f. 821, op. 10, d. 766, II. 37-39 (1847-1857).

54. Ibid., I. 53.
55. RGIA, f. 821, op. 8, d. 377, I. 6 (1862).
56. For the incompatibility of Islamic law with civic law, see Crews, For Prophet and
Tsar, 68-69.
57. Abramovitsh, "A Little Man," in Selected Works, 144-45.
38 I Jews and the Imperial State

religious associations" to the "pagan gods and Christian saints that lie at the
heart of this custom," they might have been "inhibited from imitating [this
cultural practice]," that is, not celebrating their dates of birth. Whatever
the reason may have been, Jews did observe yahrzeit, the anniversary of
a parent's death, by lighting a memorial candle, attending synagogue ser-
vices, and reciting kaddish, the prayer for the dead. The recording of deaths
therefore did not present the same types of difficulties as the documentation
of births. Jewish cultural practices, in other words, helped complicate the
ability of the Jewish community to comply with the imperial mandate of
recording dates of births in metrical books. 1 s
In contrast to the Jewish communities and other non-Orthodox groups,
the Russian Orthodox population did not pose the same challenges of ad-
ministrative enforcement. Since the seventeenth century, most Muscovite
Christians lived in basic harmony with the prescriptive practices of the Rus-
sian Orthodox Church. The Russian Orthodox population, as the historian
Daniel Kaiser explained, "measured time against the church's festival cal-
endar, established new families in consonance with the church's demands,
named their children after Christian saints, and summoned priests to preside
over important domestic moments, including when they prepared them-
selves for death. " 59 But for the non-Orthodox peoples who lived on the
peripheries of the empire and lacked "clergies" (or record keepers) to docu-
ment vital events, the state was faced with all sorts of problems in enforcing
strict and diligent record keeping. Something similar occurred with many
of the new religious sectarian communities that proliferated in the empire
in the nineteenth century, many of whom the state refused to recognize as
legitimate. 60

IV

During the first half of the nineteenth century, Russia continued to follow a
gradualist program of integration predicated on the abandonment of Jew-
ish differences, or their substantial diminution. In their drive to construct

58. According to Marcus, when and how this change occurred "is still unclear and worth
investigation." Jews may have begun to celebrate birthdays only after they became aware of
their birth dates. On Jewish life cycle customs in historical perspective, see Ivan G. Marcus,
The Jewish Lile Cycle: Rites ol Passage lrom Biblical to Modern Times (Seattle: University of
Washington Press, 2004), 39-41, 221-22.
59. Daniel H. Kaiser, "Church Control over Marriage in Seventeenth-Century Russia,"
Russian Review 65 (2006): 568.
60. Paul Werth also notes that various apostates who were forced to convert to Russian
Orthodoxy and who subsequently returned (illegally) to their former religion also caused par-
ticular problems, since their marriages, birth of children, and deaths were not recorded. For
these and other examples, see "In the State's Embrace?"
 Making Jews Legible 39

a more legible social order, imperial Russian reformers encouraged Jews

to discard the more conspicuous markers of their collective identity. Dress
regulations, sumptuary laws, and other documentary techniques, which
were used by government administrators to identify populations in the early
modern period, gradually gave way to more impersonal and universal meth-
ods of identification. In the modern period, states no longer identified Jews
by badges, distinctive headgear, and clothing but by passports, identification
cards, and other written documents. 61
Like Peter the Great, who forbade aristocrats and city residents from
wearing Russian-style dress, Alexander I decreed that all Jews who trav-
eled into the interior provinces of the empire, studied in gymnasiums, and
served on town councils needed to don "German" attire. 62 The 1804 statute
instructed police officials to immediately expel any individual from the inte-
rior provinces of the empire who was caught wearing "Jewish" dress. Law-
makers hoped that the reformation of Jewish dress would gradually expedite
the integration of Jews with neighboring populations while improving their
social utility and economic productivity. Yet during the reign of Alexander
I these laws were not seriously enforced. As was true of many other Jewish
reforms enacted during Alexander's reign, the state was left with neither the
money nor the time to implement them after the Napoleonic war. 63 Some
thirty years later, as part of the 1835 statute, Nicholas I instructed all Jews
who traveled outside the Pale of Settlement to wear clothing that did not
differentiate them from those individuals "with similar civil status" (odina-
kovago s nimi grazhdanskago sostoianiia). 64 Four years later, the state al-

61. In the early modern period, dress codes stigmatized not only Jews; lepers, prostitutes,
beggars, and other outsiders were bound by clothing restrictions as well. For a comparative
perspective, see Robert Jiitte, "Stigma-symbole: Kleidung als identitiitsstiftendes merkmal bei
spiitmittelalterlichen und friihneuzeutlichen randgruppen (juden, dirnen, aussiitzige, bettler),"
Saeculum 44 (1993): 65-89.
62. On Peter the Great's dress reform and hair codes, see Christine Ruane, The Empire's
New Clothes: A History of the Fashion Industry, 1700-1917 (New Haven: Yale University
Press 2009), 1-2, 19-25; Lindsey Hughes, Russia in the Age of Peter the Great (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1998), 280-88; Evgenii V. Anisimov, The Reforms of Peter the Great:
Progress through Coercion in Russia, trans. John T. Alexander (New York: M.E. Sharpe,
1993), 218-20. On the reform of Jewish dress, see Iulii Gessen, "Bor'ba pravitel'stva s evre-
iskoi odezhdoi v Imperii i Tsarstve Pol'skoi," Perezhitoe 1 (1910): 10-18; Gessen, "Russkoe
zakonodatel'stvo ob odezhde evreev," in Evreiskaia entsiklopediia, 12:46-50; Alfred Rubens,
A History of the Jewish Costume, rev. ed. (New York: Crown, 1973), 104-8; Israel Klausner,
"Ha-gezerah a! tilboshot ha-yehudim, 1844-1850," Gal-Ed 6 (1982): 11-26; David Assaf,
The Regal Way: The Life and Times of Rabbi Israel of Ruzhin, trans. David Louvish (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2002), 194-98.
63. John D. Klier, Rossiia sobiraet svoikh evreev: Proiskhozhdenie evreiskogo voprosa v
Rossii, 1772-1825, expanded and translated ed. (Moscow: Mosty kul'tury, 2000), 229; and
Gessen, "Russkoe zakonodatel'stvo ob odezhde evreev," 46-47.
64. PSZRI, series 2, vol. 10, no. 8054 (April13, 1835).
40 I Jews and the Imperial State

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Figure 1. Receipt for the payment of taxes on Jewish dress. Source: Perezhitoe 1 (1910).

lowed individual Jewish communities the right to tax, on a voluntary basis,

clothing that cost more than ten rubles to manufacture. Only those Jews
over the age of sixty received an exemption from the tax. The voluntary
tax was part of an internal tax levied on the slaughter of meat and poultry
(known as the korobka), which targeted the wealthier members of the Jew-
ish community. 65
In 1840, shortly after the Jewish Committee was established to reevaluate
Jewish life, corporate institutions, and communal separateness, the ques-
tion of Jewish clothing customs appeared on its administrative agenda. The
reformation of dress constituted only one aspect of a government-wide ef-
fort to intervene in the private sphere of the Jewish community. 66 For the
Russian government, the easily distinguishable clothing customs symbolized
the insularity of the Jewish community. According to the Jewish Commit-
tee, the dark, conspicuous clothing symbolized the separateness and general
aversion of Jews to the civility that the state looked to enforce from above.
As it strove to refashion Jewish life and institutions, the committee looked

65. Gessen, "Russkoe zakonodatel'stvo ob odezhde evreev," 46.

66. Markus Kagan, "Domashnii reglament v Belorussii (1845)," Evreiskaia starina 3
(1910): 110.
 Making Jews Legible I 41

to the unprecedented cultural transformation of Jewish ways of life that

was taking place in the West. Whereas in western Europe Jews could no
longer be distinguished from their neighbors by their dress customs, in the
Russian Empire Jews formed a distinct caste and remained steeped in their
prejudices despite governmental efforts. The committee reasoned that since
Jews did not attach religious meaning to their clothing, they should not
object "to exchanging their distinctive dress for either Russian or German
styles within a fixed period of time, and according to the social status of
each individual. " 67 "It is true that the lower classes are deeply attached to
their style of dress," the committee observed, "but the worldly and the more
educated Jews continue to wear their clothing only because they are afraid
that their coreligionists would despise them if they didn't. This is also true,
and anyone who has ever resided in the western provinces or interacted with
the Jewish population [on even a minimal level] would not object [to this
statement]." 68
In the geographically expansive and ethnically diverse empire, clothing
played an important role in masking, but also maintaining, cultural differ-
ences. 69 In hopes of decreasing the visibility of Jews, the committee suggested
certain administrative measures that would forbid all Jews-women and
men, young and old, and rich and poor-from wearing their style of dress.
Men, for example, were not permitted to wear coats that extended below
the knee or that were manufactured from any fabrics other than camlet, cot-
ton, or felt. All adult males were allowed to own only one heavy coat and no
more than two lighter ones, which could not cost more than three rubles per
arshin (around seventy-one centimeters). All cloaks and greatcoats needed
to be manufactured out of either camlet or a slightly coarser material, but
neither the cloaks nor the greatcoats could cost more than three rubles per
arshin. In addition, men were prohibited from wearing long, expensive trou-
sers. Winter coats could be manufactured only from rabbit and squirrel
skins and belly pieces (with the total cost not exceeding forty rubles), while
fur or silk hats could not cost more than two and a half rubles and sealskin
hats could not be worn under any circumstances. 70
Women, on the other hand, were allowed to wear the same styles of dress
they had worn before the clothing decree, but they were strictly prohibited
from purchasing any of the more expensive, stylish costumes. Dresses, for

67. RGIA, f. 1269, op. 1, d. 36, I. 29 (1843).

68. RGIA, f. 1269, op. 1, d. 17, I. 13 (1843-50).
69. Ruane, The Empire's New Clothes, 4. On deception in the early modern period, see
Valentin Groebner, Who Are You? Identification, Deception, and Surveillance in Early Modern
Europe, trans. Mark Kyburz and John Peck (New York, 2007), 82.
70. Kagan, "Domashnii reglament v Belorussii," 110-12.
42 I Jews and the Imperial State

example, could be manufactured only from two types of cotton. Unmar-

ried women needed to restrict themselves to wearing dresses made out of
cheaper wool; the law prohibited women from purchasing dresses that cost
more than one ruble per arshin. On Saturdays, Jewish women were per-
mitted to wear slightly more expensive silk dresses that cost no more than
fifteen rubles, while on Jewish holidays they were permitted to wear dresses
that cost more than twenty rubles. Moreover, women's fur coats could be
manufactured only from rabbit or squirrel skins and belly pieces, with the
total cost of the coats not exceeding thirty rubles. The cost of shawls could
range anywhere from two to twelve rubles. 71
Shortly after the 1845 edict, one provincial police official reported con-
fidently that the "majority of Jews, including the followers of the Hasidic
sect, especially the younger ones, have dutifully fulfilled His Majesty's wishes
and changed their national costume." In Kiev Province, at least 1,034 Jew-
ish families changed their dress without any difficulties and with only the
slightest persuasion, while the younger Jews "can't wait to change their
costumes." Similarly, another official observed that Jews dutifully cut their
side locks, changed their coats and yarmulkes, and began to wear ordinary
clothing by their own free will. 72 The optimism did not last long, however.
In 1845, for example, Shmuil Lezinskii, a merchant of the second guild,
refused to take off his yarmulke when prompted by local police officials.
After a rumor circulated that police officials had not arrested Lezinskii, a
number of other Jews were said to have exclaimed, "If we had more Jews
like him then we would continue to adhere to our traditions and [wear]
our clothing." Other Volynia Jews continued to wear their "national cos-
tumes," proclaiming, "When everyone else changes their costume, so will
we. Why should we be the first?" The Jewish philanthropist and communal
spokesman Izrail Hal'pern reportedly donated at least a thousand rubles
to the poorer Jews to help pay the taxes on yarmulkes, which seemed only
to contribute to the overall ineffectiveness of the reform. 73 In Krementsa,
Yanke! Shkurnik wanted to pay the tax for wearing Jewish dress, but his
Jewish neighbors forbade him. A large group of Krementsa Jews encircled
Shkurnik, crowded around him, pulled on his coat, shoved him, and uttered
all sorts of obscenities when Shkurnik attempted to leave his home to pay
the tax. 74

71. Ibid.
72. GARF, f. 109, ekspeditsiia 1, op. 20, d. 136, ll. 5b, 25b, 27b (1845).
73. Ibid., II. 1-7b. On Hal'pern's activities as a spokesman for the Jewish communities in
the southwestern regions of the Russian Empire, see Evreiskaia entsiklopediia, 6:117-18.
74. TsDIAK, f. 442, op. 1, d. 7535, II. 6-6b (1848). For other examples from a later pe-
riod, see "Delo o nalozhenii Lutskim uezdnym sudom shtrafa na evreev za noshenie peisov,"
TsDIAK, f. 442, op. 47, d. 155, ll. 1-3 (1868).
 Making Jews Legible I 43

As it looked to remake Jews into more socially useful subjects, the Jewish
Committee determined that all Jews, over a fixed period of time, would be
forbidden to wear distinctive clothing. The committee targeted Jews under
the age of sixty and envisioned the gradual reformation of Jewish dress.
First, Jews in the larger provincial towns would be required to change their
clothing, and only in time would the state enact the reform in the smaller
towns or villages. The committee emphasized the gradual nature of the re-
form project not only because it assumed that Jews would resist the edict but
also because its members were skeptical that provincial authorities would
be able to enforce such radical measures in the hundreds of small towns
and villages in the pale. While a number of the statutes repeated previous
attempts to ban, tax, and fine Jewish dress, revolutionary changes also ap-
peared that quickly enraged Jewish communities, though the severity of the
measures differed from region to region. In 1845, Jews were taxed from
three to five rubles for wearing yarmulkes in public; three years later Jews
were prohibited from wearing side locks; and in 1851 women were forbid-
den to shave their heads upon marriage. By January 1, 1851, all Jews were
required to change their distinctive clothing (once again, Jews over the age
of sixty constituted the sole exception)?5
Although the tsar's edict of 1851 banned Jewish women from shaving
their heads, the Zhitomir Jewish community pointed out in a petition to
the Jewish Committee that police officials took the law to extremes, forc-
ing the women to remove all their head coverings. "On the streets, district
inspectors tear the wigs off Jewish women's heads, their bonnets, and other
head attire. They pull them by their hair to the police station or detention
cells and pour buckets of cold water on them. They keep them under ar-
rest for forty-eight hours, and then they make them sweep the streets in
public. " 76 Even after an imperial edict allowed the women to shave their
heads in exchange for a five-ruble fine, the Zhitomir Jews maintained that
police officials nevertheless used "coercive and illegal measures [to force
the women to remove their head coverings], even after they had paid the
fines." As they abused and personally assaulted the women of Zhitomir,
the police paid no attention to either their age or social status, as the law
instructed. 77
For the women of Zhitomir, the personal assaults had severe conse-
quences. Ashamed and frightened, many of the women became severely ill,

75. RGIA, f. 1269, op. 1, d. 36, I. 29b (1843); and TsDIAK, f. 442, op. 1, d. 10779, ll.
1-10 (1853).
76. "Ukaz Senata ot 12 Aprelia 1851 o zapreshchenii brit' golovy zhenshchinam-evreiakam,"
TsDIAK, f. 442, op. 770, d. 90, I. 52 (1851).
77. The full petition has been reprinted in "Goneniia m zhenskie golovnye ubory (1853),"
Evreiskaia starina 8 (1915): 400-401.
44 I Jews and the Imperial State

some never recovered from the trauma inflicted upon them, while others
even lost their lives from the assaults. In the petition, the Jews of Zhito-
mir reminded the Jewish Committee that imperial law did not intend for
Jewish women to reveal their hair in public and thus violate religious law.
They pointed out that according to the imperial edict of 1851, the women
were instructed only to shave their heads. "We have fulfilled your Excel-
lency's wishes with the utmost piety," they pleaded, "and all the women
[in our community] wear their hair [as the law instructs], without shaving
it or cutting it. Moreover, when they [the women] appear in public, they
cover their hair with wigs or use other similar hair coverings, and cannot
be distinguished from Christian women of similar social status." Despite
these good-faith efforts, the petitioners claimed, the Zhitomir police forced
women to break religious laws, "performed tortures which even the most
reprehensible criminals would not commit," and continually insulted them
in public. After this brutal and unjust behavior, the Jewish community of
Zhitomir decided to petition the Jewish Committee in hopes that the com-
mittee would be able to put an end to the capricious behavior of the provin-
cial police. When roughly twelve months had passed without a response, the
Zhitomir Jewish community pleaded once again for the committee to stop
the "stern measures undertaken by the provincial police to enforce a law we
had fulfilled long ago. " 78
The dress reforms attempted to efface external Jewish differences from
public view. Yet in light of the state's religious toleration policies, imperial
officials could not constrain Jewish religious practices and institutions.79
The Jewish Committee spent much time determining whether the clothing
decree had in fact violated Jewish religious practices, customs, and beliefs. In
the voluminous internal correspondence on this question, imperial adminis-
trators carefully noted that such items as prayer shawls and yarmulkes were
not prohibited in synagogues or prayer houses-only on the streets, where
they should not be made visible to the public. In a reply to a series of angry
petitions, the administrators explained that the "government only wants to
minimize differences in clothing styles, and not constrain or violate Jewish
religious practices." The governor of Grodno Province, for example, was
one of several provincial administrators who reassured the Jewish Commit-
tee that the police had not imposed any oppressive measures or made any
unlawful demands on Jewish women. Furthermore, the Grodno governor

78. This petition has also been reprinted in Evreiskaia starina 8 (1915): 401-3.
79. On the concept of toleration, see Peter Waldron, "Religious Toleration in Late Imperial
Russia," in Civil Rights in Imperial Russia, ed. Olga Crisp and Linda Edmondson (Oxford: Ox-
ford University Press, 1989), 103-19; and Robert P. Geraci and Michael Khodarkovsky, intro-
duction to Of Religion and Empire: Missions, Conversion, and Tolerance in Tsarist Russia, ed.
Robert P. Geraci and Michael Khodarkovsky (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 200 I), 5-7.
 Making Jews Legible I 45

pointed out that his office had not received any accusations or complaints
that officers had indeed violated the law. "The only thing I instructed the
provincial police to do," the governor added, "was to prohibit them [the
women] from wearing various matching silk taffeta scarves and hair cover-
ings over their shaved heads. " 80
While the Jewish Committee busied itself with examining the indiscre-
tions of provincial administrators, the laws on Jewish dress proved diffi-
cult to enforce because of police incompetence and Jewish noncompliance.
Numerous questions quickly emerged with respect to the religious politics
of administrative enforcement. Would Jews be allowed to wear yarmulkes
in public after January 1, 1851, even if they had paid the tax of three to
five rubles? How could police officials differentiate those Jews who paid
taxes on their dress from the ones who did not? What was to be done
with those Jews who changed only part of their clothing, such as their
belts, but continued to wear the long caftans? Should Jews be allowed to
grow side locks? Would anyone under the age of sixty be allowed to walk
to synagogues on Saturdays wearing ritual prayer shawls and yarmulkes?
Were rabbis also prohibited from wearing Jewish attire, and on what legal
grounds? 81
Much like Peter the Great's sartorial decree, the "clothing decree" (as it
was called by contemporaries) divided the Jewish community along ideo-
logical lines. 82 By the reign of Nicholas I, the Jewish community became
increasingly polarized around issues such as education, economic productiv-
ity, language, and cultural values. On one end of the ideological spectrum
were the maskilim, the followers of enlightened Jewish values, who may
not have adhered to a unified program but nevertheless battled Jewish sepa-
ratism, promoted secular education and social productivity, and remained
loyal to the monarch. On the other side were the conservative spokesmen
represented by both the Hasidim and their opponents. For the traditional-
ists, maskilic values of progress and productivity threatened time-honored
religious practices, ways of life, and communal institutions. There were, to
be sure, many other intellectual types who fell somewhere between the two
ideological camps. But no matter what side was represented in the debate,
the clothing reform engendered fundamental disagreements about the direc-
tion that the Russian-Jewish community should follow. 83

80. RGIA, f. l269, op. 1, d. 36, II. 105-105b (1843).

81. Ibid., ll. 37b-38, 92b.
82. On the debates surrounding Peter's decree, see Ruane, The Empire's New Clothes,
151-53.
83. On Jewish enlightenment in the Russian Empire and the ideological divisions, see Im-
manuel Etkes, "Haskalah," in The YIVO Encyclopedia of.Jews in Eastern Europe, 2 vols.
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 1:682-84. See also Marcin Wodzinski, Haskalah
46 I Jews and the Imperial State

Figure 2. Le chasside et sa femme. Source: Leon Hollaenderski, Les Israelites de Pologne

(Paris, 1846).

Some of the conservative-minded men such as Rabbi Israel of Ruzhin-a

Hasidic leader who wore fashionable, Western clothing, disapproved of
side-locks, and could have been mistaken for a nobleman-interpreted the
clothing decree as a prelude to the eradication of all things Jewish. In a
letter to the prominent Anglo-Jewish philanthropist Sir Moses Montefiore,
who paid a visit to the Russian Empire in 1846, Rabbi Israel wrote, "Ob-
serving from afar, I am sure that the decrees [issued by the government] are
specifically intended to damage and violate the law of our holy Torah, to
cause desertion of the Jewish faith. In particular, for our sins, in these times,
when the sinners of Israel themselves desire this. For we have seen this re-
cently in regard to a slight decree promulgated to change Jewish clothing,

and Hasidism in the Kingdom of Poland: A History of Conflict, trans. Sarah Cozens (Portland:
Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2005), 48-71.
 Making Jews Legible I 47

which the rulers are doing in relation to the law of the holy Torah, and how
much more so with other decrees." 84 For Rabbi Israel, the clothing decree
threatened the religious values and ways of life that he and other religiously
conservative spokesmen sought to preserve. Rabbi Israel reasoned that by
not protesting and eventually agreeing to a compromise on the clothing
question, he himself would only help undermine and perhaps even destroy
Jewish communal solidarity.
Although religiously devout, Sir Moses Montefiore believed that a "change
of dress need not involve any serious consequence," and that the Jews of
Russia would have no difficulties complying with the state's demands. 85
Montefiore's own views most likely resembled those of a group of Vil'na
merchants who offered a radically different interpretation of the decree than
did Rabbi Israel. In a petition to the Ministry of Popular Enlightenment, the
merchants argued that the distinguishable costume served as a barrier to the
enlightenment of Russian Jewry: "All attempts to educate and enlighten this
people will remain in vain until the Jews themselves agree to change their
distinctive style of dress." In contrast to Rabbi Israel and some of the other
conservative spokesmen, the merchants argued that "none of the trustwor-
thy Jews, who desire to exchange their superstitious beliefs for enlightened
ideals, associate clothing with their religious customs." Although the pro-
gressive merchants understood the benefits and importance of the decree,
they nevertheless continued to wear their old style of dress because they
feared the wrath of the more "superstitious" and "hypocritical" members
of the Jewish community. All Jews who desired to exchange their dress for
Russian or European styles, the merchants observed, should fear the super-
stitious and hypocritical, fanatical members of their own community. The
merchants recognized that clothing perpetuated real and imagined differ-
ences between groups of people, and from their perspective, the symbolic
distinctions only served as a barrier to the enlightenment and the eventual
integration of Jews. 86 If some of the poorest members of the Jewish com-

84. As quoted in Assaf, The Regal Way, 197.

85. As cited in Louis Loewe, ed., Diaries of Sir Moses and Lady Montefiore, Comprising
Their Life and Work as Recorded in Their Diaries from 1812-1883 (London: Jewish Histori-
cal Society of England, 1983), 1:352. On Montefiore's visit, see Vivian D. Lipman, "Sir Moses
Montefiore: A Reassessment," in The Age of Moses Montefiore: Collection of Essays, ed. Israel
Barta! (Jerusalem: Misgav, 1987), xxviii-xxx. For a recent reassessment of Montefiore's career,
see Abigail Green, "Rethinking Sir Moses Montefiore: Religion, Nationhood, and International
Philanthropy in the Nineteenth Century," American Historical Review 110 (2005): 631-58.
86. On the symbolic distinctions of clothing, see Philippe Perrot, Fashioning the Bourgeoi-
sie: A History of Clothing in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Richard Bienvenu (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1994), 8; and Daniel Roche, The Culture of Clothing: Dress and
Fashion in the Ancient Regime, trans. Jean Birrell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1994), S-6.
48 I jews and the Imperial State

munity could afford to change their clothing, then so could the wealthier
Jews, who wore expensive silk caftans and fur hats that cost anywhere from
ten to thirty rubles and whose splendor had caused entire families financial
strain. 87
Other, more liberal participants in the discussion of the clothing decree
made similar points. In their petition, the maskilim outlined the benefits of
enlightenment and suggested that a change in the style of dress would eradi-
cate visible differences and thereby help perpetuate the eventual integration
of Jews. "In no country does a particular style of dress exist for my coreli-
gionists," one maskil wrote, "not in Europe, not in Asia, and not in Africa.
Only we Jews who live in Poland and Lithuania distinguish ourselves from
our neighbors, to our own detriment." "Even when Polish and Lithuanian
Jews travel to our capital [St. Petersburg]," the maskil continued, "they do
not count wearing German or Russian clothing a [religious] sin. It's evident
that Jews continue to wear their traditional clothing because they see it as
a religious obligation. " 88 In their petitions, the maskilim agreed collectively
that Jewish law did not require Jews to wear specific dress: "I have searched
in vain to find one place where our holy books regulate the style of clothing
for our religious Israelites, and I have found nothing of the sort." At the
present moment, when a significant number of Israelites desired to merge
with the Christian population, the conspicuous style of Jewish dress con-
tinued to divide Jews from their Christian neighbors, in the civil as well as
religious sphere. "I can confidently state," the maskil concluded his petition,
"that a large number of my coreligionists look forward to the time when
Jews would no longer be distinguished from their Christian neighbors by
their appearance. " 89
Some of the more moderate participants in the discussion, such as Rabbi
Shneerson of Berdichev and Rabbi Shtern of Odessa, agreed that the long
caftans, fur hats, and other distinguishable items of clothing reinforced
Jewish communal isolation. Despite their general support of the state's ef-
forts to eradicate the symbolic expressions of separatism, both rabbis felt
that the petitions from the Vil'na Jews did not give an accurate portrayal
of the Jewish community as a whole: "Twenty to thirty signatures, out of
some sixty thousand [people], do not accurately describe the feelings of the
majority, especially in a place like Vil'na." The Vil'na merchants "are de-
tached from [their own] community and for this reason have deceived the
government by giving a false impression of the social conditions in which
Jews live." The rabbis suggested that the imperial administration should

87. As quoted in Gessen, "Bor'ba pravitel'stva s evreiskoi odezhdoi," 12.

88. RGIA, f. 1269, op. 1, d. 36, I. 7 (1843).
89. Ibid.
 Making Jews Legible I 49

refrain from taking such drastic measures; any change in style of clothing
would come gradually and naturally with enlightenment. "Simple police
measures will not enforce these laws," they warned. "Jews will continue
to pay taxes on their clothing until they are broke, and won't give them up
under their own free will. The state will need to use force or perhaps even
resort to other, more drastic measures." The rabbis concluded by point-
ing out that the masses of Jews saw the state's interventionist policies as a
violation of their religious beliefs and obligations, and for this reason, the
vast majority of the population continued to refuse to change their style
of dress. 90
At the beginning of 1852, shortly after the deadline had passed for Jews
to change their dress, the Jewish Committee reiterated once again that all
distinctions in style of clothing between Jews and non-Jews needed to be
eliminated. The committee deemed that Jewish men could not, under any cir-
cumstances, grow side locks. Jews were allowed to wear prayer shawls and
fringes only in synagogues and prayer houses during religious services, and
should not appear in these garments in public view. Moreover, the committee
determined that rabbis also needed to wear ordinary clothing in public, since
the Jewish people did not attach particular religious meaning to their style of
dress. But after the death of Nicholas I in 1855, the Jewish Committee sud-
denly narrowed its focus to what it deemed a more important line of work-
the integration of the more socially useful, economically viable subjects in
Russian society-and dropped the dress reforms from its agenda. 91 Although
the clothing decree was reissued in the Kingdom of Poland during the reign
of Alexander II (1855-81), it was not enforced there. As late as 1883, one
newspaper commented that the tax on yarmulkes "has not been enforced for
a long time now, and if in some unknown provincial town Jews continued to
be taxed, then the tax collector surely pocketed the payments. " 92
The reformation of the Jewish costume grew out of the Jewish Commit-
tee's broader vision of what the ideal Russian Jew should look like. For a
committee that worked to remake Jews into more socially useful, politically
reliable, and culturally integrated subjects, clothing served as a powerful
symbol of integration. But unlike other colonial regimes that also endowed
clothing with important symbolic codes and social values, the Russian

90. Gessen, "Bor'ba pravitel'stva s evreiskoi odezhdoi," 14.

91. On the Jewish Committee during the reign of Alexander II, see Nathans, Beyond the
Pale, 50-72.
92. Kievlianin 240 (1883), 2. Kievlianin predicted that if the state could have enforced the
decree on yarmulkes, it would have collected 15 million rubles annually. For the twenty-five
years of unpaid taxes, Jews of Russia owned at least 375 million rubles (a figure calculated
without interest). On the 1871 dress laws, see RGIA, f. 821, op. 9, d. 82, and "Goneniia na
evreiskuiu odezhdu (1871)," Evreiskaia starina 5 (1912): 334-38.
50 I Jews and the Imperial State

government had neither the financial resources nor the manpower to enforce
the laws. While the reforms caused a public sensation in the Jewish commu-
nity, they did little, if anything, to transform Jewish religious practices and
ways of life in the mid-nineteenth century. 93 Western and Russian observers
routinely noted in their travels that Jews continued to wear their typical at-
tire: "A long coat or frock coat in black cloth edged in front with velvet and
fastened from the neck to the waist; a wide belt, socks, shoes or slippers; a
skull cap; a hat with a wide brim most of which is shaped like a sugar loaf or
cut off with a deep edge of sable or other fur." 94 Such testimony suggests that
long after the promulgation of the edict many members of the Jewish com-
munity continued to be recognized as Jews by their distinct style of dress.
To the travelers who happened to pass through the western borderland re-
gions, the visible and easily identifiable garments made it unproblematic to
distinguish Jews from their neighbors. Even when Jews shaved their beards
and side locks, the memoirist Abraham Paperna recalled, the beards and
side locks grew back in time and "things returned to their old ways." 95 Like
Peter the Great, who reformed the nobility's costume, Nicholas envisioned
the reformation of the Jewish costume as an important symbolic step in
the overall transformation of Jewish culture, society, and institutions that
would take place in mid-nineteenth-century Russia. And just as Peter's re-
form of dress and hair codes went largely unheeded away from the court,
in the end, the government did little, if anything, to compel Jews to change
their style of clothing. 96

v
During the second quarter of the nineteenth century, Nicholas and his ad-
ministrative advisers attempted to minimize collective cultural differences

93. For a comparative perspective, see Jean Allman, "'Let Your Fashion Be in Line with
Our Ghanaian Costume': Nation, Gender, and the Politics of Cloth-ing in Nkrumah's Ghana,"
in Fashioning Africa: Power and the Politics of Dress, ed. Jean Allman (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press 2004), 144-65.
94. As cited in Alfred Rubens, A History of the Jewish Costume, 105. For other examples,
see V. L'vovich, comp., Narody Russkago Tsarstva: Sbornik statei po etnografii (Moscow:
M.V. Kliukin, 1901), 584; A. A. Alekseev, Ocherki domashnei i obshchestvennoi zhizni evreev:
Ikh verovaniia, bogosluzhenie, prazdniki, obriady, talmud, i kagal, 3rd ed. (St. Petersburg:
I.L. Tuzova, 1896); A Sementovskii, Etnograficheskii obzor Vitebskoi gubernii (St. Petersburg:
Tipografiia M. Khana, 1872), 58-67; M. I. Berlin, Ocherk etnografii evreiskago narodonasele-
niia (St. Petersburg: V. Bezobrazova, 1861). For an examination of Jews in nineteenth-century
Russian ethnographic literature, see Volf Dubnov, "Tsu der ekonomisher geshikhte fun di yidn
in rusland," Shriftn far ekonomik un statistik 1 (1928): 92-97.
95. Abraham Paperna, "Iz Nikolaevskoi epokhi," in Evrei v Rossii: XIX vek, ed. Viktor
Kel'ner (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2000), 54.
96. Hughes, Russia in the Age of Peter the Great, 280-88.
 Making Jews Legible I 51

and foster administrative unity among a remarkably diverse polity. Although

Nicholas continued to promote the power of the state either by military re-
pression or by forced conversion, the introduction of Russian law in local
administration, the abolition of self-government in the western borderlands,
and the founding of state-sponsored educational institutions represented an
unprecedented attempt to destabilize corporate autonomy. Predicated on
the power of numerical representation and the rule of law, the reforms of
the Jewish community were part of a larger social transformation of the
civic order that sought to unite a multiconfessional, multicultural, and eth-
nically diverse empire. With the creation of the political police force, the
codification of imperial Russian law, and the centralization of administra-
tive chancelleries, the reformist agenda of Nicholas I attempted to intervene
in administrative affairs of imperial communities in an unprecedented fash-
ion. As part of an empirewide administrative effort to construct a social
order predicated on the power of social-scientific methods of registration,
the imperial government attempted to curtail Jewish cultural isolation by
forcing Jews to remove the more discernible markers of their ethnoreligious
identities in favor of documentation techniques that relied on statistics and
numerical representation.
By placing trust in statistics and the power of paper to help govern the
population, Nicholas attempted to construct a society that was easy to gov-
ern: where individuals were known and relations were fixed. The statistical
revolution attempted to produce a new type of observer who would be able
to see beyond the collective categories and administrative organizational
structures that formed the basic framework of imperial government. When
Nicholas passed away, however, the empire hardly resembled the social
order that either he or his advisers had envisioned. Neither conventional
social hierarchies nor communal forms of administrative organization had
been eradicated. The dearth of trained civil servants, police officials, and
cultural intermediaries such as crown rabbis frustrated the state's efforts to
modernize the empire along administrative lines. Moreover, improper record
keeping, linguistic barriers, and illegal territorial movement created unex-
pected difficulties in executing the measures. In short, the state lacked both
the personnel and the funds to enforce immediate and lasting change from
above. All these developments meant that, in the mid-nineteenth century,
the vast majority of ordinary Jews hardly internalized the larger social sig-
nificance of administrative and social change. Even when Jews participated
in the business of empire by providing taxation monies, military recruits,
and census data, they often found the bureaucracy slow, unresponsive, and,
on occasion, hostile.
No matter how slow or inefficient Nicholas's system may have been,
the second and third generations of Russian Jews-that is, those born in
52 I Jews and the Imperial State

the 1840s, 1850s, 1860s, and 1870s-began to gradually realize the im-
portance of paperwork, record keeping, and legal practices. As these in-
dividuals began to experience the consequences of the political and social
dislocations that touched the late imperial period, new questions emerged
for which authorities did not have straightforward answers. When, for ex-
ample, Jews formed small communities in the interior provinces of the em-
pire without crown rabbis, how would new births, marriages, and deaths
be recorded in metrical books? Who, in other words, would be responsible
for registering an individual's civic identity, and by what means would Jews
prove who they actually were if their birth dates were never recorded in the
first place? However, for these more mobile and in many respects less leg-
ible people (the Russian Jews born in the mid-nineteenth century), the accu-
rate registration of births, marriages, and deaths proved to be an absolute
necessity if they wished to take part in civic or professional life, to engage
with state and society on even the most mundane level. But the manner in
which the imperial administration as well as both ordinary and more edu-
cated Jews attempted to resolve these issues confounded all involved parties
well into the second half of the nineteenth century.
 2
Power of Documentation
And because they forgot to score out the name of his younger
brother-who is dead, God preserve us all!-from the register, they
called him up for service, although as an only son he should have
been exempted.
-SHOLEM AscH, Petersburg

"What's your name, sir?"

"Levi Isaac."
"And your last name?"
"Why do you need to know?"
"What's the matter, is it a secret?"
-1. L. PERETZ, Impressions of a Journey

Over the course of the second half of the nineteenth century, journalists,
statisticians, and police officers reported that a significant number of errors,
omissions, and irregularities continued to be found in Jewish metrical rec-
ords. "Never mind the fact that forty-seven years have already passed [since
the law on the registration of vital statistics was first introduced]," a jour-
nalist writing for Vilenskii vestnik complained. "Not only are those Jews
born before 1835 not officially registered, but neither are those individuals
of Jewish descent who were born long after the date." At first, most Jewish
communities did not register their vital statistics because they mistrusted
"all things official," did not understand the social significance of govern-
ment laws, and lacked educated rabbis who could explain the importance
of record keeping to ordinary people. 1 During the reign of Nicholas I, the
repercussions of these omissions were fiscal, since the state relied on met-
rical records primarily to count the Jewish population and collect taxes.
But in the second half of the nineteenth century, the so-called metrical rec-
ords affair (metricheskoe del a) acquired much broader social and political

1. Vilenskii vestnik 119 (1882), 2.

54 / Jews and the Imperial State

significance, and both the Russian government and the Jews themselves
began to display greater interest in the accurate registration of vital events.
Like all subjects of the empire, Jews who lacked proper documenta-
tion encountered difficulties in their daily lives. Without their metrical
records-a set of papers that the state deemed the fundamental register
of an individual's identity-Jews could not enjoy basic institutional priv-
ileges and civil rights. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the
documents acquired social significance when new generations of Russian
Jews experienced unprecedented choices and opportunities as educational,
professional, and residential paths began to open. Without these essential
records, Jews could not belong to a social estate group; enroll in universi-
ties, gymnasiums, academies, or technical schools; register for the all-estate
military draft; obtain permits to travel outside their permanent places of
residence; or enter into marriage. For the state, vital statistics records pro-
vided the basic framework for enforcing the rights, obligations, and spe-
cial privileges of the empire's diverse and highly contradictory legal system.
When vital statistics records were misplaced, destroyed, or never officially
registered, cases of confused or mistaken identities arose. Without these
documents, individuals could not easily prove who they were or when and
where they were born. Simple clerical mistakes and omissions in record
keeping hindered the state's ability to control spatial movement, govern
the body social, identify individual identities in an efficient manner, and
allow individuals to participate in the imperial social order.

II

Following the death of Nicholas I, the imperial Russian administration

sanctioned a series of reforms to transform the institutions that served
as the basis of the absolutist autocracy. In the 1860s and 1870s, the state
emancipated the peasantry and implemented municipal, military, and judi-
cial reforms to heighten Russia's reputation and prestige by strengthening
the social order. As a result of the institutional and political reordering of
the empire, the Russian government granted the more socially useful seg-
ments of the Jewish population such as merchants of the first and second
guild, select artisans, and students at institutions of higher education the
legal right to cross the Pale of Settlement, reside in the interior provinces
of the empire, and contribute to the development of the imperial economy
and society on an unprecedented leveJ.2 The Great Reform epoch marked a

2. On the movement and resettlement of the Jewish population outside the prescriptive
boundaries of the Pale of Settlement, see Benjamin Nathans, Beyond the Pale: The Jewish En-
counter with Late Imperial Russia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); and Yvonne
 Power of Documentation I 55

decisive moment in the integration of Jews within the legal and administra-
tive order, and not only for those individuals who crossed the geographic
threshold. In the Pale of Settlement, the reforms created a more ordered
and disciplined municipal administration that slowly began to destabilize
communal cohesion and solidarity. As the imperial government began to
play an increased role in the daily lives of Jews, the political and economic
dislocations of the Great Reform era created radically new questions with
respect to imperial management, policing practices, and self-definition that
both the state and the Jewish communities found difficult to address.
In the Pale of Settlement, Jews usually constituted between 10 and
17 percent of the entire population. 3 Many of the larger cities, such as
Vil'na, Vitebsk, Brest-Litovsk, Grodno, and Berdichev, had highly visible
and dynamic Jewish communities, which formed the very backbone of
the economic and social tapestry of the regions. In places like Vil'na, Jews
made up a statistically significant proportion of the population (around
41 percent), but on other occasions, Jews comprised such a clear majority,
as was the case with Berdichev (78 percent), that some observers sim-
ply called the city Jewish. 4 Almost all the cities and market towns in the
pale, regardless of size, had a long-established tradition of community and
communal infrastructure.
While Jews maintained a large communal presence in the pale, they rep-
resented only a very small fraction of the empire's population in the newly
opened territories (usually less than 1 percent). When Jews moved to regions
that had no established communal infrastructure to speak of-no rabbis,
synagogues, or collective presence-they needed to create the community ex
nihilo. 5 In the interior regions of the empire, the state established the legal
and administrative structures responsible for regulating Jewish communal
life piecemeal and usually haphazardly. Unlike the Jews of St. Petersburg,
Kiev, or Moscow (cities that had the financial resources and know-how to
construct the institutions that helped create the community), many of the
settlements that mushroomed in the interior regions did not have the criti-
cal mass to support even a single rabbi.

Kleinmann, Neue Orte-neue Menschen: ]udisches Leben in St. Petersburg und Moskau (Got-
tingen, Ger.: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006).
3. Chernigov and Ekaterinoslav provinces, where Jews constituted only 5 percent of the
entire population, were the exceptions to the rule.
4. Evreiskoe naselenie Rossii po dannym perepisi 1897 g. i po noveishim istochnikam (Pe-
trograd: Kadima, 1917), 5, 29.
5. This is an important theme in Nathans, Beyond the Pale, 83-164. See also Natan Meir,
"The Jews in Kiev, 1859-1914: Community and Charity in an Imperial Russian City" (PhD
diss., Columbia University, 2004); and Kleinmann, Neue Orte-neue Menschen.
56 I Jews and the Imperial State

From the imperial government's perspective, the institution of the crown

rabbinate represented an administrative organ that helped mediate civil
concerns between the Jewish community and the state. 6 With little knowl-
edge of Jewish rituals, communal procedures, and customs, the Russian
government entrusted crown rabbis with the important task of recording
the births, marriages, deaths, and divorces of the Jewish population. The
Statisticheskii vremennik rossisskoi imperii noted, "With extreme preci-
sion, metrical books allow [governments] to determine the well-being of the
population and analyze how various social factors affect society. And only
by means of a thorough analysis of vital statistics has an economic truth
recently been discovered: a country does not grow wealthier when more
individuals are born, but when fewer persons pass away. " 7 Vital statistics
helped reconstitute a new geography of the population by quantifying the
norms of life cycles and thus provided key data to ameliorate a wide variety
of social problems. Intimately tied to the "counting of all individuals in the
polity," vital statistics helped disaggregate the vast cultures and religions of
the empire by bringing them together under the rubric of "population." 8
A heightened interest in the study of numbers and the application of sta-
tistical research to ameliorate social conditions went hand in hand with the
development and growth of the imperial Russian state and society. 9 Statistics
allowed government officials and researchers to divide the population into
categories and subgroups that could then be compared and contrasted under
constant denominators. Numerical representation, in other words, made it
possible to generalize about collective and individual obligations by relating
the individual to the body social. While statisticians and other social scien-
tists argued that vital statistics could be used to apply universal laws to better
understand the population's life cycle, government officials used the registra-
tion of births, marriages, and deaths to link imperial subjects with the larger
ambitions of governance and statecraft. Metrical records, the Ministry of
Interior remarked, "determine [Jews'] legal status and rights." 10

6. In the multireligious empire, Russian administrators relied on state-regulated clergy for

performing necessary administrative and bureaucratic work for the state. See Robert Crews, For
Prophet and Tsar: Islam and Empire in Russia and Central Asia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 2006), esp. 141-42; and Paul W. Werth, "In the State's Embrace? Civil Acts in
an Imperial Order," Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 7 (2006): 433-58.
7. Statisticheskii vremennik rossisskoi imperii 2 (1872): ii.
8. RGIA, f. 821, op. 10, d. 772, l. 28 (1870-1885).
9. For an overview of the study of statistics and the statistical discipline, including the
Central Statistical Committee of the Ministry of the Interior, during the Great Reform era, see
Henning Bauer, Andreas Kappeler, and Brigitte Roth, eds., Die Nationalitiiten des russischen
Reiches in der Volsziihlung von 1897, 2 vols. (Stuttgart: F. Steiner, 1991 ), 1:31-36.
10. RGIA, f. 821, op. 10, d. 806, l. 4b (1903). See also Charles Steinwedel, "Making Social
Groups One Person at a Time: The Identification of Individuals by Estate, Religious Confession,
 Power of Documentation I 57

If provincial bureaucratic ineptitude and fear of government interven-

tion contributed to the difficulties in Jewish record keeping during the reign
of Nicholas I, two other factors, which had their origin during Nicholas's
reign, created the most pressing concerns in the late imperial period. First,
for those Jews who were born before 1835, vital statistics records were not
registered in metrical books. Without the documentation of vital events,
cases of confused or mistaken identities arose, since crown rabbis could
not issue certificates to verify names, birthplaces, and birth dates. To allevi-
ate confusion, the state passed a law in 1848 that allowed three respected,
or "honorable," Jews in the community to verify the age and name of an
undocumented personY This statute caused more problems than it solved,
however, because so many individuals used it as a convenient loophole to
avoid conscription duties and falsify identity documents. In Odessa, for ex-
ample, local authorities claimed that young men routinely used three wit-
nesses to obtain false documentation in hopes of avoiding conscription. 12
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 prove an unregistered birth. 13
Two years later, the state determined that individuals could obtain legal
proof of their dates of birth in a court of law. 14 But for the verification of
a death, metrical records continued to serve as the only acceptable form of
valid documentation. 15
Second, the discrepancies between everyday realities and the larger admin-
istrative ambitions of the law code hindered the state's ability to register the
population in a timely fashion. That Jewish law permitted any eligible Jew
to perform birth, marriage, and death rites greatly circumscribed the power
of the crown rabbinate and in turn its principal duty-record keeping. As

and Ethnicity in Late Imperial Russia," in Documenting Individual Identity: The Development
of State Practices in the Modern World, ed. Jane Caplan and John Torpey (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2001 ), 69-73.
11. G. Vol'tke, "Metrikatsiia," in Evreiskaia entsiklopediia: Svod znanii o evreistve i ego
kul'ture v proshlom i nastoiashchem, 16 vols. (Moscow: Terra, 1991), 10:925; and RGIA, f.
821, op. 10, d. 788, II. 39-39b (1890).
12. RGIA, f. 821, op. 10, d. 788, II. 39-39b (1890). For other examples, see Novorossiiskii
telegraf 1491 (1880) and 2769 (1884).
13. Ia. I. Gimpel'son, comp., Zakony o evreiakh: Sistematicheskii obzor deistvuiushchikh
zakonopolozhenii o evreiakh, ed. L. M. Bramson, 2 vols. (St. Petersburg: lurisprudentsiia,
1914-1915), 2:625.
14. RGIA, f. 821, op. 10, d. 795, I. 40b (1883-1904). In 1899, the Senate upheld this deci-
sion. See the discussion in A. Palibin, "Ispravlenie metrik," Zhurnal ministerstva iustitsii, 4
(1912): 220.
15. In 1884, the Senate ruled that metrical books constituted the only acceptable means to
document deaths. For a discussion of this law, see RGIA, f. 821, op. 10, d. 795, I. 38b (1884);
and Palibin, "Ispravlenie metrik," 221-22.
58 I Jews and the Imperial State

more and more Jews came into contact with the administrative, legal, and
institutional order, the absence of these documents or any errors or omis-
sions in record keeping played important roles in their everyday lives. For
these reasons, the crown rabbinate found itself at the very center of a heated
public controversy over a document that was gaining increasing importance
in daily life. 16
Imperial law governed the production, distribution, and surveillance of
record keeping. First, provincial administrators needed to distribute metri-
cal books to Jewish communities. Crown rabbis were also required to main-
tain separate notebooks for jotting down all the vital events over which they
presided. Then, within one month, each rabbi needed to transfer the records
from the private notebook to the official metrical book. And finally, at the
end of every calendar year, the provincial governor (or one of his assistants)
collected all the documentation from the crown rabbinate, examined both
the official metrical books and the private notebooks for any inconsisten-
cies or inaccuracies, and preserved the documents in an official government
archive. 17
Although in the Pale of Settlement the more established communities had
the financial resources to support crown rabbis, many of the newly founded
settlements in the interior were not able to pay crown rabbis their modest sal-
aries. Even when a community attempted to nominate and employ a crown
rabbi, as did the twenty-four Jewish families that resided in Vladimir (a city
located two hundred kilometers east of Moscow), provincial administrators
argued that the rabbi lacked the required state certification to perform birth,
marriage, and death rites and to record the data in metrical books. In this
case, the absence of a crown rabbi did not stop the Vladimir Jews from per-
forming all the rites themselves in one another's homes. "Neither marriages,
births, nor deaths are registered here," the Vladimir governor remarked. JH
In those instances when the Jewish community did not or could not support
a crown rabbi, imperial law required Jews to travel to a nearby town to
register their vital statistics. 19 In practice, in either Vladimir or other places,
Jews rarely made the journeys. Only when they required verification of a
birth, marriage, death, or divorce did they turn, usually in desperation, to

16. For a recent discussion of this controversy in the mass circulation press, see John D.
Klier, Imperial Russia's Jewish Question, 1855-1881 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1995), 332-49.
17. For a description, see 0 poriadke sostavleniia i vedeniia metricheskikh zapisei u evreev
(St. Petersburg: Tipografiia M. M. Stasiulevicha, 1888), 1; and M. I. Mysh, comp., Ruko-
vodstvo k russkim zakonam o evreiakh, 4th ed. (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia A. Benke, 1914),
appendix no. 1.
18. RGIA, f. 821, op. 10, d. 792, II. 15-16 (1887-1903).
19. Mysh, Rukovodstvo o russkim zakonam o evreiakh, 37-38.
 Power of Documentation I 59

either the local police or the provincial governor for help. "These requests,"
the Vladimir governor noted, "are not met satisfactorily. " 20 "In the past few
years," one journalist reported, "a large number of Jews who have asked
for birth certificates did not receive them because they were not registered
in the first place. " 21
In the interior regions of the empire, Jewish communities began to record
their vital statistics gradually and often reluctantly. In St. Petersburg, for
instance, it was not until 1863 that crown rabbis were required to record
vital statistics. 22 Before the 1860s, Jews were prohibited from residing in the
capital, and only those who either enrolled in the military or worked for the
police received an exemption.Z1 As Jews began to migrate by the thousands
in the 1860s and 1870s, rules and procedures needed to be established that
governed the registration of vital events. When parents arrived in the capital
with children born in areas where crown rabbis did not record births, mar-
riages, and deaths, they quickly encountered a dilemma that did not have
a clear-cut solution. How could a child's legal identity be proved without
the formal documentation of a birth? In some instances, parents presented
signed written statements from their coreligionists or local police officials
in lieu of formal metrical records. At other times, they turned to the court
of law to receive a document attesting to the child's date and place of birth.
But for the most part, the individuals had no way of corroborating their
children's identities. Since the law code did not establish any guidelines or
legal parameters, authorities were hard-pressed to find effective solutions.
"In light of the significant number of unregistered Jewish children and the
constant flow of Jews into the interior provinces," the Commission for Re-
structuring Jewish Life (1872-81) remarked, "this problem can grow to
unmanageable proportions. " 24
Record-keeping practices had their own fault lines and created all sorts
of tensions, misunderstandings, and disputes between the imperial govern-
ment and the Jews. In certain regions of the Caucasus, where "mountain"
Jews resided, officials noted that crown rabbis did not sign metrical books
after performing religious rites, and in some cases entire years were found

20. RGIA, f. 821, op. 10, d. 792, I. 16 (1887-1903).

21. Vilenskii vestnik 119 (1882), 2.
22. RGIA, f. 821, op. 10, d. 772, II. 75b-76b (1870-1885).
23. RGIA, f. 821, op. 9, d. 80, I. 14 (1869-1874); and RGIA, f. 821, op. 10, d. 792,!. 67b
(1887-1903). See also the discussion in Nathans, Beyond the Pale, 62-64; and Kleinmann,
Neue Orte-neue Menschen, 130.
24. RGIA, f. 821, op. 9, d. 109, l. 3S9b (1880-1904). On the Commission for Restructur-
ing Jewish Life, see Iulii Gessen, Istoriia eureiskogo naroda v Rossii, 2 vols. (Moscow: Evreiskii
universitct v Moskve, 199 3 ), 2:204-12.
60 I jews and the Imperial State

to be missing. 25 In Tersk Province officials warned Khazkiia Amirov, after

his election as crown rabbi, that "no other individuals, save for those [per-
sons] approved by the state, may fulfill religious rites." For a first offense,
anyone who usurped a crown rabbi's duties could be punished with a prison
sentence that lasted anywhere from forty days to four months, and for a
second offense, the individual could spend up to four years in confinement.
Crown rabbis such as Amirov were similarly discouraged from committing
egregious record-keeping errors with threats of fines and prison sentences
that could last up to four years. 26
In western Siberia, Jews rarely recorded their vital events in metrical
books until the appearance of the crown rabbinate. But even when Jew-
ish communities began to elect crown rabbis in cities such as Irkutsk and
Verkhneudinsk in the 1870s and 1880s, the distances that the rabbis needed
to travel made record keeping a very difficult affair. Crown rabbis com-
plained repeatedly that parents did not remember to register their children's
birth dates until many years after the actual births. In 1900, for instance,
two Irkutsk merchants, Yakov Patushinskii and Mikhail Sheinis, petitioned
the provincial governor to register their children many years after they were
born. In a report on the registration of metrical records, Siberian officials
explained that parents such as the Patushinskii and Sheinis families usually
turned to a spiritual, rather than a crown, rabbi after the birth of a child
and would therefore either forget or neglect to record the birth dates in
the booksY
During the Great Reform era, the compilation of accurate population
statistics began to play an important role in the imperial state's ability to
govern the population. The empire's remarkable cultural and religious di-
versity posed one of the greatest obstacles to governance. Statisticians and
members of the imperial bureaucracy expressed frustration at the inabil-
ity to construct effective solutions to remedy problems that often appeared
insurmountable. "In our Russia," the Statisticheskii vremennik rossiiskoi
imperii declared, "errors and irregularities in metrical records are natural,
so to speak, because the composition of the population of our empire is
distinguished by a [remarkable] ethnic and religious dimension, as well as
its comparatively low level of development." 28 In its report on Jews and
metrical books, the Commission for Restructuring Jewish Life argued along
similar lines: "The statistical information about the empire's population,

25. RGIA, f. 821, op. 10, d. 792, I. 93b (1887-1903).

26. S. A. Danilova and E. S. Tiutiunina, eds., Istoriia gorskikh evreev severnogo kavkaza v do-
kumentakh (1829-1917): Sbornik arkhivnykh materialov (Nal'chik: El'-Fa, 1999), 217-18.
27. L. V. Kal'mina, Evreiskie obshchiny vostochnoi Sibiri, seredina xix v.-feural' 1917
gada (Ulan-Ude: VSGAKI, 2003), 109.
28. Statisticheskii vremennik rossiiskoi imperii 2 (1872): vi.
 Power of Documentation 61

which has been gathered by government and scientific establishments, is

rather inaccurate, and with respect to the Jews, especially doubtful. This
phenomenon can be explained, first of all, by the scattered, nonstandard
legal codes, which do not amount to anything resembling a whole; and sec-
ond of all, by the aversion of not only the Jewish, but also the [ethnic] Rus-
sian, population to record keeping and statistical enumeration. " 29 Before
the first empirewide census in 1897, metrical records constituted the most
important data by which the state attempted to construct accurate and reli-
able population counts. The registration of vital statistics thus took on new
social and political meanings as the state introduced universal military con-
scription, the last of the Great Reforms.

III

On January 1, 1874, all males over the age of twenty-one became eligible
for the first all-estate military draft in the empire. Active duty consisted of
six years with an additional nine years in reserves. 30 "The defense of the
throne and fatherland," the statute read, "is the holiest duty of every Rus-
sian subject. " 31 Since the effective implementation of the statute hinged on
the accurate registration of all male subjects, reformers attempted to make
the population count as simple and transparent a process as possible. 32 Reg-
istration began at the local district office. Officials used the tenth census re-
vision, family lists compiled by heads of households, and metrical records to
determine an individual's precise age, name, location, religion, and ethnicity.
Provincial governors, police officials, and other municipal authorities facili-
tated the registration of every male over the age of sixteen. Once registered
with the local district office, individuals received special certificates, which
were required for participation in the actual draft. These certificates comple-
mented other identity documents, such as passports and metrical records,

29. "Metrikatsiia," in Spravka k dokladu po evreiskomu voprosu, 13 vols. (St. Petersburg:

Tipografiia glavnago upravleniia udelov, 1910-16), 13:1-2.
30. On the military reform of 1874, see, for example, Bruce W. Menning, Bayonets be-
fore Bullets: The Imperial Russian Army, 1861-1914 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1992), 21-29; Dana M. Ohren, "All the Tsar's Men: Minorities and Military Conscription in
Imperial Russia, 1874-1905" (PhD diss., Indiana University, 2006); Mark von Hagen, "The
Limits of Reform: The Multiethnic Army Confronts Nationalism, 1874-1914," in Reforming
the Tsar's Army: Military Innovation in Imperial Russia from Peter the Great to the Revolu-
tion, ed. David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye and Bruce W. Menning (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2004), 34-55; and Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, Jews in the Russian
Army, 1827-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 129-66.
31. Statisticheskii vremennik rossiiskoi imperii 3, no. 12 (1886), iii.
32. The 1874 statute, however, provided a number of important exemptions. For an in-
depth analysis, see Ohren, "All the Tsar's Men," 137-38.
62 I jews and the Imperial State

and were deemed essential for participating in the legal and administrative
structures of the empire. 11
The new system of recruitment differed from the process initiated during
the reign of Nicholas I, which relied on communal authorities to fulfill the
draft quota. As a consequence of the 1874 military reform, all eligible Jews
were required to register for the draft; Jewish communities no longer had to
meet their quotas based on the 1,000 male count rule. 34 In the months lead-
ing up to the reform, the popular press and imperial administrators ques-
tioned whether, and to what extent, Jews would resist conscription under
the new guidelines. 35 Among government institutions, the Ministry of the
Interior turned out to be the harshest critic of Jews. 36 But to the surprise of
many observers, the registration process began relatively smoothly. In De-
cember 1874, the governor of Kovno Province stated that, at first, the popu-
lation count "aroused apprehension and mistrust, but then, when [Jews]
began to trust the process and realized that the population count could even
benefit them, they began to register, and cases of evasion occurred rarely." 37
The newspaper Golas reported that although local authorities believed that
five thousand male Jews resided in Minsk, around fifteen thousand were
actually counted: "There are constant requests from the Jews themselves to
register in the local districts." 38 In the reports prepared for the Ministry of
Interior, provincial governors similarly claimed that Jews waited with "great
zeal" to receive their certificates: "Many Jews who were registered as 'miss-
ing' later asked municipal officials to register their names so that they could
be issued certificates." 39
But even if statisticians and the imperial administration characterized
the military reform as an initial success, the tropes of evasion and Jew-
ish "malfeasance" (zloupotreblenie) quickly began to inform popular and

33. Statisticheskii vremennik rossiiskoi imperii 3, no. 12 (1886), iv-v. See also the discus-
sion in Ohren, "All the Tsar's Men," 141.
34. On the conscription of Jews during the reign of Nicholas I, see Petrovsky-Shtern, Jews
in the Russian Amy, 24-60; Olga Litvak, Conscription and the Search for Modern Russian
Jewry (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 13-41; and Michael Stanislawski, Tsar
Nicholas 1 and the Jews: The Transformation of Jewish Society in Russia, 1825-1855 (Phila-
delphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1983), 13-34.
35. During the Great Reform era, the politics of evasion remained a powerful trope in the
mass circulation press. Both the Russian and the Jewish press contributed frequent reports on
Jews' evasion of military conscription. See the discussion in Klier, Imperial Russia's Jewish
Question, 332-49.
36. Petrovsky-Shtern, Jews in the Russian Amy, 132.
37. RGIA, f. 821, op. 9, d. 109, 11. 270-270b (1874).
38. Golos 349 (1874), 3.
39. RGIA, f. 821, op. 9, d. 109, II. 270b (1874).
 Power of Documentation 63

bureaucratic discourse. 40 In an effort to curb evasion, the Ministry of the

Interior attempted to create an efficient and comprehensive population
count of all male Jews. The ministry blamed kahals and sborshchiks for
hiding Jews, obstructing population counts, and profiting from a system
of recruitment based on communal enforcement. "For almost every Jew-
ish family," the ministry argued, "there exist two or three individuals who
avoid registration because sborshchiks receive bribes for hiding Jews from
censuses and for providing false identity cards and passports." 41 In Febru-
ary 1875, the ministry instructed provincial governors to conduct a census
designed specifically to count the Jewish population. Provincial governors
requested that crown rabbis translate the decree into Yiddish and publicize
it to the Jewish communities. Furthermore, police officials were instructed
to enforce population counts "to make sure that not a single Jew resists,"
and they were awarded fifty rubles for every Jew caught hiding from the
draft. In an effort to curb noncompliance, the state imposed a hefty fine
of three hundred rubles, which was increased by as much as two hundred
rubles in 1880. 42
While cases of self-mutilation, desertion, and everyday forms of non-
compliance or manipulation sprinkled the pages of the conservative mass-
circulation press, a closer analysis of the Jewish encounter with the
military reform of 1874 reveals that population mobility and poor docu-
mentary practices were circumstances that further undermined accurate
population counts. Many contemporary observers interpreted the ques-
tion of resistance to military servitude as part of a larger societal debate
over citizenship and Jews' physical inability to serve in the military. 43 Yet
as one journalist writing for the Jewish weekly Russkii evrei suggested,
"In order to unravel the numerical quagmire, we need to examine the so-
called registration lists. " 44 The reconstruction of number politics, in other
words, allows us to reevaluate a series of narratives, which have often
been framed in terms of Jewish resistance to autocratic domination, and

40. In their writings and correspondence, imperial administrators used the term "malfea-
sance" to characterize the evasion of civic duties with evil intent. This term appeared readily
in both archival and published correspondence on the problem and politics of Jewish record
keeping.
41. Mysh, Rukovodstvo o russkim zakonam o evreiakh, 413-14.
42. For the imperial census decree that has been preserved in both Yiddish and Russian
for Volynia Province, see YIVO, RG 30, box 3, folder 47 (no pagination). And for the best
and most comprehensive scholarly treatment of the politics of Jewish evasion of the draft, see
Petrovsky-Shtern, Jews in the Russian Amy, 136-38.
43. For two contemporary studies, seeM. L. Usov, Evrei v armii (St. Petersburg: Razum,
1911 ); and F. Gets, Otbyvanie voinskoi povinnosti evreiami (St. Petersburg: Ts. Kraiz, 1903 ).
44. Russkii evrei 14 ( 1881), 522.
64 I Jews and the Imperial State

to analyze the fascinating interplay among Jews, officialdom, and impe-

rial Russian society. 45
Long before thousands of Jews began to emigrate to western and cen-
tral Europe, North America, and Palestine, human movement caused
frequent conflicts as authorities attempted to unambiguously identify in-
dividuals.46 Because of the high rates of internal labor migration, many
Jews registered in two, sometimes even three, districts as they moved
from region to region in search of work. The new military statute re-
quired all individuals to show up for the military draft where they had
registered initially rather than where they currently resided. 47 "There are
many instances," one journalist reported, "of a person registering in two
separate towns." In 18 80, for example, Leib ltsykovich Levi registered
for the draft in his hometown of Plungian (Kovno Province). Four years
later, Levi and his entire family moved from Plungian to work in the
northern Ukrainian town of Nezhin (Chernigov Province), where he also
registered in the local district office. Once Levi learned that he had been
drafted in Plungian, he quickly returned, but in the meantime, he had
been documented as an evader in Nezhin. While the record books clearly
showed that a Leib Itsykovich Levi had avoided the draft in Nezhin, Jew-
ish publicists cited such cases of mistaken identities as products of the dis-
tinct social and economic times in which they lived-misunderstandings
that, they argued, could be easily explained and rectified. 48 Although a
special statute exonerated Jews from serving twice if they had registered
in more than one district, incidents such as the Levi case only fueled anti-
semitic rhetoric and contributed to the inflation and distortion of Jewish
population counts. 49 "The registration lists," as one author of a critical
contemporary study of Jews and the military remarked, "document an
enormous number of Jews who simply do not exist." 50 According to an-
other journalist, the increase of human movement created a new category
of neiavivshikhsia (individuals not present at the time of registration) that
needed to be differentiated from the ukloniaiushchikhsia (evaders). 51

45. For an important study of resistance in a comparative framework, see Ohren, "All the
Tsar's Men," esp. 178-91.
46. On the immigration of Russian jews, see Simon Kuznets, "Immigration of Russian Jews
to the United States: Background and Structure," Perspectives in American History 9 (1975):
35-124; and Yakov Lestchinsky, Di yidishe vanderung far di letste 25 ior (Berlin: Emigdirekt,
1927), 74-75. In absolute terms, the percentage of Jews who left Russia was indeed substan-
tial, but a disproportionate number of all the migrants were male (over half the total number)
in the precise age group eligible for the draft, adding greater chaos to the registration process.
47. Petrovsky-Shtern, Jews in the Russian Amy, 133.
48. Nedel'naia khronika voskhoda 30 (1886), 810-11.
49. PSZRI, series 2, no. 8362 (November 2, 1876).
50. Usov, Evrei v armii, 25.
51. Russkii evrei 14 (1881), 523.
 Power of Documentation I 65

Faulty documentary practices and poor record-keeping procedures led to

numerous cases of mistaken or dual identities, since authorities had a dif-
ficult time identifying Jews by their exact age, name, or hometown, all of
which were absolute requirements for the efficient implementation of the
1874 statute. When authorities doubted a recruit's age because of missing,
nonexistent, or falsified documents, imperial law reserved the right to deter-
mine age "by external appearance" (po naruzhnomu vidu). 52 The brothers
Isaak and Mordukh Perski showed up for an external appearance examina-
tion after Volynia authorities noticed that the dates in their metrical records
and family lists did not match up exactly. Mordukh claimed that he was
twenty-years old, but a simple inspection of his birth record revealed that the
stamp had been smudged and the handwriting forged. On the basis of this
evidence, authorities concluded that Isaak and Mordukh were nineteen and
twenty-one, respectively, making Mordukh eligible for the draft. 53
The press provided numerous tales of Jews doctoring identity documents,
falsifying birth dates, and attempting to register multiple times, using a dif-
ferent identity card in each instance, with the hopes of confusing authori-
ties. 54 Furthermore, government officials and conservative publicists claimed
that Jews feigned illnesses in hopes of receiving an exemption from their
civic duties. In 1891, for instance, seven wealthy merchants were accused of
organizing a criminal ring that helped young Jews pretend to be suffering
from bad eyesight, ruptured hernias, and abasement of intestines in order
to receive an exemption. The ring reportedly operated across the southern
regions of the empire such as Vladikavkaz, Rostov-on-Don, Khar'kov, Kre-
menchug, Odessa, Kherson, and Nikolaev. 55
However widespread the stories may have been, cases of mistaken or dual
identities did not always stem from a desperate need to circumvent the sys-
tem; more often than not, they were the products of everyday life. The pub-
licist and lawyer Henrik Sliozberg related one such incident:

In Ufa lived the Jew V. who was registered in either Shklov or Slinim. This Jew
had three sons-Mikhail, Aleksandr, and Boris. When it came time for them
to register for the draft, there appeared not three, but six, sons: two Mikhails,
two Aleksandrs, and two Borises. And since only three Jews registered, a three
hundred-ruble fine was assessed for every "evader."
The sons were born and registered in the metrical books in Ufa. Every time V.
renewed his passport in Shklov he declared a newly born son. The authorities,

52. For a discussion of this law, see Gimpel'son, Zakony o evreiakh, 2:499, 510-11.
53. The petitions and the reports have been preserved in YIVO, RG 30, box 4, folder 61 (no
pagination); and YIVO, RG 30, box 4, folder 62 (no pagination).
54. Russkii evrei 14 (1881), 524. See also the discussion in Klier, Imperial Russia's jewish
Question, 332-49.
55. GARF, f. 102, deloproizvodstvo 2, op. 55, delo 45, ll. 10-11b (1898).
66 I Jews and the Imperial State

however, mistakenly registered the sons under different numbers in the "fam-
ily lists" than in the metrical books. Having looked over the case, I discovered
that between two Mikhails, two Aleksandrs, and so on, there existed a four- to
five-month gap between the births.

After the case reached St. Petersburg, Sliozberg asked authorities, "How
could only a four-month gap separate the births of two sons from the same
mother?" They in turn answered, "Who knows what goes on with the
Jews!" (Malo li chto u evreev byvaet!) 56
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 nickname," one reporter explained, "but it turns
out that this social custom can have fatal consequences. " 57 Name changes
-when, for example, an "Avraam" suddenly reinvented himself as an
"Al'bert" or an "Andrei"-made conscription a prolonged and exasperat-
ing process. Moreover, when two individuals possessed identical forenames
and surnames or when Jews never bothered to adopt surnames, authorities
could not readily differentiate one person from another. 58 In addition, all
sorts of linguistic misunderstandings arose when crown rabbis transliterated
Hebrew names into the Russian, since authorities did not use a standard
transliteration grid. In 1875, for instance, many of the 460 Jews that ap-
peared in a Polotsk provincial district to register for the draft were without
identity cards. Authorities thus relied on the external appearance method
to verify the age of each conscript. But when authorities attempted to un-
ambiguously identify each person, they quickly ran into another problem.
There appeared a "Zalman" and a "Zalmon," a "Noson" and a "Nison,"
and a "Borukh" and a "Borokh"-all with identical surnames. On other
occasions, some Jews refused to serve on the grounds that authorities had
confused them with other individuals with similar-sounding names. Brus-
tin Zalmen, for example, claimed that authorities had drafted the wrong
individual, arguing that his proper name was spelled "Zal'men" and not
"Zalmen." 59 As one provincial reporter asked his readers, "Who can suspect

56. As quoted in Usov, Evrei v armii, 31-32.

57. Russkii evrei 36 (1883), 19.
58. Nedel'naia khronika voskhoda 22 (1889), 554-55; and RGIA, f. 821, op. 9, d. 109, II,
272b-273 (1890). French authorities faced similar problems in identifying criminals until they
adopted a phonetic classification system that allowed them to identify an individual despite
variations in orthography or pronunciation. Simon A. Cole, Suspect Identities: A History
of Fingerprinting and Criminal Identification (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
2001), 16.
59. Novoe uremia 245 (1875), 4-5. For an examination of the politics of the Jewish name
and naming practices, see chapter 5 of this book.
 Power of Documentation I 67

that the name 'Manaim' is derived from 'Shunman,' and how are we to dif-
ferentiate a 'Shunman' from a 'Sheinman'?" 60
Other misunderstandings occurred when crown rabbis did not record
the death dates of infants or registered their forenames and surnames in
slightly different variations under the birth and death rubrics in the metri-
cal books. One rabbi failed to record the precise dates of death for five
boys who died in infancy. Some twenty years after the death of the boys,
the parents received a notice summoning the boys to the draft. Government
officials presumed that all five boys were still alive because the registration
lists and death certificates did not match up exactly. 61 Yankel Rakhlis, the
father of a Shlem Hersh Rakhlis who had died in infancy, tried to con-
vince authorities, without much initial success, that "Shlem Hersh Rakh-
lis" (the name recorded at birth) and "Shlem Rakhlis" (the name recorded
at death) were the same person. But after a simple investigation, authori-
ties approved the petition, ruled that this was a simple case of mistaken
identity, and dismissed the three hundred-ruble fine. 62 In another town,
authorities levied three hundred-ruble fines on at least ten families whose
dead children's surnames, forenames, and patronymics did not conform to
the draft lists. 63

Draft list Metrical Books (death)

1. Trut, Shlema Oizer Itskov - - , Shlema Eizer ltskov
2. Baranchuk, Moisei Leibovich - - , Moishe Leibovich
3. Zubatyi, Avrum loinov - - , Avrum Ioslev
4. Burilo, Itskhok Aizik Khaimov Burilo, Aizik Khaimov
5. Sukholetki, los if Iankelev Sukholetko, lose!' lankelev
6. Bilogolov, Moishe losif Shoilev - - , Shoil Iosifov
7. Tsigan, Khaim Getsev Chigan, Khaim Getsev
8. Erlikhman, Vol'f Ishiev (Ovseev) - - , Vol'f Ovseev
9. Kantor, Yanke! Aron Duvidov - - , Yanke! Aronov
10. Pavolotskii, Leib Gersh Shimonov Favlotskii, Leib Gersh Simonov

The image of the incorrectly registered dead Jew appeared and reap-
peared in humorous and satirical depictions of Jewish life. Commenting
on the conundrum parents faced when authorities assessed hefty fines after
their dead children did not appear for the draft, one journalist remarked
sarcastically, "Authorities will not recognize the children as dead until they

60. Litovskie eparkhial'nye vedomosti 52 (1874), 423.

61. Usov, Evrei v armii, 29.
62. RGIA, f. 821, op. 10, d. 804, I. 179 (1903-1904).
63. Usov, Evreii v armii, 29.
68 [ Jews and the Imperial State

rise from their graves and appear to the examiner." 64 Illustrated magazines
similarly poked fun at men who registered themselves as dead in order to
escape the draft. In a cartoon published in Pluvium, a government official
tells a Jew when he finally reports for the draft, "You are recorded as dead
in two drafts." In a heavy Jewish accent the Jew replies, "Well, you tsee,
that's because I am not at all afraid of de ash!" (figure 3 ). In the story "The
Automatic Exemption," the Yiddish writer and former crown rabbi Sholem
Aleichem satirizes the nightmarish circumstances in which Reb Yosl finds
himself when a rabbi fails to record his son's date of death. The son, Itsik
(who is also called by the nickname Alter), gains an automatic exemption
from the draft after a samovar burns his brother Eisik to death at a young
age. In the town of Mezritch, Itsik appears before the draft board because
the rabbi has never recorded Eisik's death. To the delight of his father, Itsik
eventually fails not one but two physicals, which frees the young man from
military service. Before moving to Mezritch, however, the young Itsik and
his family had lived in the town of Vorotolivke, at which time the state con-
ducted a census. When the census taker asked the mother her son's name,
she had given his nickname rather than his proper name. "Well, there are no
two ways about it: if you're a census taker and you're told 'Alter,' what do
you write down? You write down 'Alter.'" Itsik thus shows up for his third
physical; he manages to fail it again and once again receives an exemption
from military service. But the story gets even more confusing when the dead
son, Eisik, is asked to report for the draft because, as Reb Yosl remarks,
"the right reverend of Vorotolivke had forgotten to file a death certificate."
"How could I bring my Eisik to the draft board," Reb Yosl asks, "when he
was with the angels in heaven?" In the end, Reb Yosl turns to a number of
lawyers to resolve his predicament and learns that the worst that can hap-
pen if Eisik does not turn up for the draft is that the dead man will be faced
with a hefty three hundred-ruble fine. 65

IV

Simple, often careless, mistakes in transliteration, record keeping, and or-

thography such as the ones described in "The Automatic Exemption" cre-
ated awkward encounters between Jews and officialdom. In the second half
of the nineteenth century, provincial governors continued to receive nu-
merous petitions, complaints, and denunciations concerning Jewish record
keeping, with the crown rabbi at the very center of the queries. "If crown

64. Nedel'naia khronika voskhoda 30 (1886), 813.

65. Sholem Aleichem, "The Automatic Exemption," in Tevye the Dairyman and the Rail-
road Stories, trans. Hillel Halkin (New York: Schocken, 1987), 229-38. The story first ap-
peared in 1902.
 Power of Documentation I 69

rabbis only paid more attention to their record-keeping duties," one jour-
nalist suggested, "then they would be able to rectify many of the misunder-
standings, which have taken place [between Jews and the imperial state]. " 66
Since the reign of Nicholas I, the crown rabbinate had endured criticism
from all segments of society. Spiritual rabbis castigated it for challenging
their authority in communal affairs and the family sphere. The liberal edu-
cated public deemed crown rabbis incompetent civil servants who lacked
the necessary religious training for the esteemed title of rabbi. 67 The Russian
imperial administration and the conservative press argued that crown rabbis
played no small part in fostering disorder in record-keeping practices and
the documentation of vital events. 68 And on a variety of other occasions
ordinary Jews complained that crown rabbis performed their jobs haphaz-
ardly and irreverently.
On December 27, 1878, three Jews from the town of Lida (Volynia Prov-
ince) petitioned to dismiss the crown rabbi Karamnik for forging names and
dates in metrical books. They pointed out in their petition that the rabbi
"increased and decreased the age of certain young Jews and cut out and
replaced [entire] lists in the books, thereby helping them evade the draft."
Upon reading the petition and inspecting the metrical books, the governor
rose to the defense of the crown rabbi. He noted that although he did find
individual corrections of clerical errors, he did not notice that Karamnik
had removed entire pages from the books, and he found no conclusive evi-
dence to honor the petition and dismiss the rabbi from his post. A year later,
after Rabbi Karamnik received a three-year extension of his contract, the
Jews petitioned once again, this time claiming that the rabbi had boasted of
making thousands of rubles from his record-keeping duties. But the gover-
nor dismissed the second petition as well. 69 The Karamnik case was not an
isolated incident. Several Jews complained that crown rabbis lacked linguis-
tic competency in Russian; others argued that the state servants lived "quite
nicely" (kak bogachee) after accepting so many bribes from members of
their community; and still others wrote that they repeatedly forged entries
and doctored records/ 11
In Smeliansk, seven Jews denounced Rabbi Liapidus for falsifying met-
. rica! records by using ink made out of a chicory mixture to give it an

66. Nedel'naia khronika voskhoda 22 (1889), 554.

67. For an extensive discussion of these issues, see ChaeRan Y. Freeze, Jewish Marriage and
Divorce in Imperial Russia (Waltham, Mass.: Brandeis University Press, 2001), 95-124.
68. Almost all the reports compiled by imperial administrators made this point. See, for
example, RGIA, f. 821, op. 10, d. 806, 11. 70-70b (1903); and RGIA, f. 821, op. 10, d. 803,
ll.1-3b (1903).
69. RGIA, f. 821, op. 10, d. 782, ll. 4-4b, 8-9 (1877-1906).
70. For more examples, see RGIA, f. 821, op. 10, d. 803 (1903); and RGIA, f. 821, op. 10,
d.782, ll. 41-41b, 43-43h, 68-68b, 76 (1877-1906).
70 I jews and the Imperial State

Figure 3. The Draft:-You are recorded as dead in two drafts.-Well, you

tsee, that's because I am not at all afraid of deash! Source: Pluvium, Decem-
ber 8, 1907.

appearance of authenticity, for failing to conduct marriages properly, and

for issuing false birth certificates, at a total cost of twenty-three rubles, to
two individuals who were never registered in the first place. 71 The Zvenig-
orod Jewish community charged Rabbi Moshka Hrushevskii with forg-
ing birth certificates, creating counterfeit death certificates, and not only
ignoring but also having a negative influence on the moral and educa-
tional welfare of the community's children. 72 Two years later, after Izrail
Kal'varskii was elected crown rabbi of the Zvenigorod provincial district,
four members of the community proceeded to denounce him for numer-
ous infractions: demanding that Jewish communities in the district make
yearly payments ranging from 40 to 150 rubles; charging 50 rubles for a
burial and 100 rubles for a wedding ceremony; and conducting marriages
for couples who were under age. 73 The head of a technical institute for rail-
roads and roadways accused Mendel Yanke! Zaslavskii, an eighty-year-old
rabbi from Novogeorsk, of forging a birth certificate for Viktor Yudovskii,

71. TsDIAK, f. 442, op. 191, d. 7 A, II. 219-220b (1874).

72. TsDIAK, f. 442, op. 182, d. 261 (1868).
73. TsDIAK, f. 442, op. 184, d. 467 (1870).
 Power of Documentation I 71

a fifteen-year-old Jew seeking admission at the institute. Claiming that he

had been born on October 1, 1874, Viktor presented a birth certificate on
which the date of birth was smudged in black ink. As soon as he left to ask
Rabbi Zaslavskii for a new birth certificate, the head of the institute used a
weak sulfuric acid mixture to wash away the black ink from the certificate,
quickly realizing that the rabbi had forged the document. Viktor had, in
fact, been born on May 1 and not on October 1, making him ineligible as
a first-year student at the institute. During the trial that took place at the
Odessa Court of Justice, Rabbi Zaslavskii did not deny that he had violated
the law. He explained, rather, that he had committed the crime because Vik-
tor's uncle and brother had begged him to issue the certificate so that Viktor
would have an opportunity to study at the institute, and he claimed that he
had never asked or received payment for the service. 74
The law held crown rabbis accountable for the preservation of metri-
cal records. If the books were lost, destroyed, or stolen, the rabbis could
be charged with the negligent supervision of metrical books, fined, and
even dismissed from their posts. In March 1856, Rabbi Shekhel of Shep-
etovka had taken home the metrical books from the synagogue in order
to issue certificates when a fire occurred at his house and destroyed all his
belongings as well as the vital statistics records for the past three and a
half years. The governor-general of Kiev, Podolia, and Volynia provinces
found the rabbi guilty of negligence/5 Two years later, in Kuppel, Rabbi
Khaim Shmil Mardkovich Koifman's cows managed to escape to a nearby
pasture. The moment that Koifman left to look for his cows, a fire started
in his home. After noticing the fire, Koifman quickly ran home, but in
the meantime all his property (including the metrical books) had been
reduced to blackened ashes. Koifman did not bother reporting the fire to
the authorities because he felt that the entire community knew he had lost
everything. After conducting a simple investigation, provincial inspectors
found the rabbi's response "unfounded" (neosnovatel'nym) and severely
reprimanded him. 76
On October 30, 185 8, Rabbi Pustovskii of Ruzhin reported that someone
had broken a window in his home and stolen a chest with all his personal
belongings, money, and metrical records for the calendar year. After locat-
ing the stolen chest the next day, the Ruzhin police blamed the rabbi for
orchestrating the entire event by breaking the window in his home to make
it appear that a theft had taken place. Since the disappearance of metrical
books from the rabbi's apartment had occurred on more than one occasion,

74. TsDIAK, f. 348, op. 1, d. 859, II. 3-4b (1891).

75. TsDIAK, f. 442, op. 172, d. 611, II. 2b-3 (1859).
76. TsDIAK, f. 442, op. 172, d. 587 (1859).
72 I Jews and the Imperial State

Rabbi Pustovskii was charged with breaking the law by bringing home the
metrical books from the prayer house. 77
As early as the 1870s the Ministry of the Interior realized that if the reg-
istration of vital statistics were transformed from a religious ritual to a civil
act, many of the problems in Jewish record keeping would be resolved/8
The ministry envisioned that Russian city administrators, much like civil
servants in the Kingdom of Poland who recorded Jewish vital events, would
take over the rabbis' record-keeping duties/9 In 1879 the ministry discussed
the idea of replacing crown rabbis with "civil servants who worked for the
provincial municipal administration," and shortly thereafter it organized
a commission to investigate Jewish record-keeping practices. 80 Three years
later the commission concluded that police officials would not make reliable
record keepers, since they did not possess the requisite knowledge of Jew-
ish religious customs and laws. Similar arguments were made against using
municipal administrators. The commission recognized that record-keeping
practices would be greatly improved if trained, efficient, and reliable civil
servants were utilized, but the Russian government never implemented the
reform. Crown rabbis, the commission suggested, not only were more plen-
tiful but, more important, possessed the intimate knowledge of the Jewish
community and Jewish ways of life that municipal administrators or police
officials lacked. 81 On the basis of these recommendations, the Ministry of
Interior concluded, in 1892, that civil registration was impossible to im-
plement, and it decided against replacing the rabbinate with civil servants.
Even in 1905, when the movement to implement civil registration reached
its zenith with the introduction of the legislation on religious toleration, the
state was not prepared to abandon its reliance on religious groups. 82

77. TsDIAK, f. 442, op. 174, d. 706 (1861).

78. The discussions of civil registration grew out of the 1870 reform of municipal adminis-
tration. Applied in at least 423 cities in European Russia, the reform improved and expanded
governance on the local level. The management of the municipal economy and administration
lay in the hands of a representative body (duma) and not with the merchant and noble elite. On
the municipal reform of 1870, see V. A. Nardova, Gorodskoe samoupravlenie v Rossii v 60-kh-
nachala 90-kh godov xix veka (Leningrad: Nauka, 1984 ); and Walter Hanchett, "Tsarist Statu-
tory Regulation of Municipal Government in the Nineteenth Century," in The City in Russian
History, ed. Michael Hamm (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1976), 91-114.
79. The Polish example served as an invaluable model for the registration of Jewish vital
statistics in the rest of the empire. RGIA, f. 821, op. 9, d. 101, 11. 84h-85 (1874-1880); and
RGIA, f. 821, op. 10, d. 806, I. 72 (1903).
80. RGIA, f. 821, op. 10, d. 806, I. 70 (1903).
81. RGIA, f. 821, op. 9, d. 109, II. 425-31 (1890-1892).
82. RGIA, f. 821, op. 10, d. 806, II. 71-73 (1903). Old Believers, Baptists, and new groups
such as the Mariavites that emerged after "freedom of conscience" was introduced served as
important exceptions to confessional registration. As early as 1874, police officials began to
record the vital events of Old Believers. Werth, "In the State's Embrace?" 452-56.
 Power of Documentation 73

While in Russia civil registration remained an issue for a later date,

France had implemented the reform as early as 1792. Under the old regime,
the Catholic Church controlled the registration of vital events, and most
religious minorities, such as Jews, never bothered to register their births,
marriages, or deaths. At first, French administrators faced all sorts of dif-
ficulties in trying to convince the multiethnic population of the significance
of civil registration, but by the end of the nineteenth century, these problems
gave way to bureaucratic routine. As the historian Gerard Noiriel has noted,
civil registration became a "powerful factor in the process of national reg-
istration," marking an important moment in the process by which French
subjects became citizens of the larger civic community. 83 In England, civil
registration was implemented in 1836 after a decades-long population con-
troversy. An increase in population movement, nonconformity in record-
keeping practices, differences in local baptismal customs, and distances
between parish churches "produced a bewildering complexity in spatial
and temporal patterns of under-registration." 84 Before the advent of civil
registration, "it was only rarely that local efforts to collect comprehensive
and accurate vital statistics appeared to be successful. " 85 The implementa-
tion of civil registration in England helped supply proof of death, docu-
ment individual identities, and, most important, protect property rights by
recording lines of descent. 86 By the beginning of the twentieth century, most
western and central European countries had made the transition to the new
system. 87
Although the imperial Russian government never did implement civil reg-
istration, it nevertheless sought to bring greater institutional order to record-
keeping practices. Beginning in 1882, the Department of Spiritual Affairs

83. Gerard Noiriel, "The Identification of the Citizen: The Birth of Republican Civil Status
in France," in Caplan and Torpey, Documenting Individual Identity, 46.
84. N. L. Tranter, Population and Society, 1750-1940: Contrasts in Population Growth
(New York: Longman, 1985), 15. See also E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The Population
History of England, 1541-1871: A Reconstruction, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1989), esp. 19-30.
85. D. V. Glass, Numbering the People: The Eighteenth-Century Population Controversy
and the Development of Census and Vital Statistics in Britain (Farnborough, U.K.: D. C. Heath,
1973), 16.
86. On civil registration in England, seeM.]. Cullen, "The Making of the Civil Registra-
tion Act of 1836," Journal of Ecclesiastical History 25 (1974): 39-59; and most recently,
Edward Higgs, Life, Death, and Statistics: Civil Registration, Censuses, and the Work of the
General Register Office, 1836-1952 (Hatfield, U.K.: Local Population Studies, 2004).
87. Germany implemented civil registration in 1876; for a discussion of the law, see P. A.
Alsberg, "Registration of Births, Deaths, and Marriages in European Jewish Communities, in
Palestine, and in Israel," Archivum 9 (1959): 101-18. On civil registration in Scotland (imple-
mented in 1854), see Anne Cameron, "The Establishment of Civil Registration in Scotland,"
Historical Journal 50 (2007): 377-95.
74 I Jews and the Imperial State

of Foreign Confessions required provincial governors to supervise record-

keeping practices by monitoring the integrity of data entry. 88 According to
the reports, most of the records were either "correctable" (ispravnymi) or
entirely accurate. One governor even reported that "all the pages, laces, and
stamps remain intact in the majority of the books. " 89 From time to time, to
be sure, provincial governors scribbled down mistakes, omissions, and inac-
curacies in their reports. One governor confessed, for example, that metrical
records were never kept by the Arkhangel'sk Jewish community because it
had never elected a crown rabbi: "The Arkhangel'sk Jews could not even
turn to the nearest town's rabbi [as the law directed], since that particular
town also failed to elect a crown rabbi. " 90 Another governor noted that he
found spelling errors and omissions of important facts, as well as the signa-
ture of a certain Rabbi Fainshtein on rites he clearly had not performed. 91 As
it turned out, these "confessions" proved to be the most notable exceptions.
In their reports, spanning almost three decades and amassing thousands of
pages, the provincial governors usually noted tersely that the books were
"recorded under the strict guidelines of the law."
Given the gargantuan task of verification, the difficulties of travel across
such wide terrains, and the dearth of provincial administrators, it seems
highly unlikely that the governors checked the validity of every record, at
least as accurately as they claimed. Yet after over a half-century of record
keeping, authorities not only needed to contend with the accuracy and in-
tegrity of data entry. They also had more mundane issues to deal with: the
books needed to be stored and archived in safe and easily accessible pub-
lic institutions. "Every year," the Volynia governor noted, "the province
receives around 1,128 books. In order to house and preserve these books,
from as early as 1835, we need a special institution, which our province
lacks. But we also need bookshelves to store the books that have accumu-
lated for the past sixty-eight years, not to mention that, for such an enor-
mous institution with such important documents, we also need a reliable
archivist. " 92 The practical limitations of administrative organization, in
other words, presented numerous challenges to terribly understaffed pro-
vincial bureaucracies that often lacked sufficient space to house the books,
which continued to accumulate every year by the thousands.
Regardless of the state's increased involvement in Jewish record keep-
ing, the denunciations and criticisms of rabbis continued at the end of the

88. These reports are preserved in RGIA, f. 821, op. 10, d. 790 (1882-1894); RGIA, f. 821,
op. 10, d. 796 (1895-1903); and RGIA, f. 821, op. 10, d. 805 (1903-1910).
89. RGIA, f. 821, op. 10, d. 790, I. 24b (1882-1894).
90. Ibid., II. 58-58b.
91. RGIA, f. 821, op. 10, d. 805, II. 9-9b (1903-1910).
92. RGIA, f. 821, op. 10, d. 803, II. 92b-93 (1903).
 Power of Documentation I 75

nineteenth century. "Not one draft goes by," one journalist remarked in
a conservative Russian newspaper, "without crown rabbis abusing their
powers-increasing or decreasing dates of births or even, on occasion, turn-
ing brothers into twins." 93 In 1886, for instance, several Jews from Rovno
(Volynia Province) accused Rabbi Manus L'vovich Shor of an assortment
of infractions: allowing individuals to conduct their own religious rites; not
issuing birth, marriage, and death certificates in a timely manner; keeping
a private notebook in which he recorded only three rites the entire year;
allowing a marriage to take place between Yanke! Bel'skovoler and Tsipo-
ria Raiza Sil'tser before Sil'tser received her official divorce certificate; and
charging ten rubles for wedding rites without ever recording the event in the
metrical book. When the Jewish community ousted Shor from his duties by
electing Khaim Kats as the new crown rabbi, Shor responded with his own
denunciation:

I never committed any thefts, no robberies, no murders, or any other crime.

I was only bold enough to receive a few illegal payments from peasants and
some of the poorest Jews who lived in a small town in one of the most remote
districts. Without a doubt, these dealings infringed on the personal interests
of a few Jews, mostly the bigwig butchers of our community, but at the same
time, I protected the rest of the population in the town. It's true that the kahal
elders, with the spiritual rabbi serving as the head of the entire group, possess
a few ancient secrets, but these ancient secrets do not give them the power to
transform a robber into some kind of virtuous saint. What's so criminal that I
desired, just as the law instructs, for the Jewish people to have more equitable
relations with the peasants, among whom they live? Why is it illegal that I
instructed schoolchildren, at precisely the time when I myself was being pros-
ecuted, to read a prayer to the Tsar on the Sabbath so that they would not be
accused of holding the imperial government in contempt? 94

Shor understood that his deeds would enrage the Jewish community of
Rovno and a conflict would ensue. "But my senses told me that it would be
a local affair," he continued, "that it would be between me and a few of my
enemies who would want to make up with me after some time had passed."
Shor quickly denounced five respected members of the Jewish community
as well as the newly elected crown rabbi by claiming that these Jews had

93. Novorossiiskii telegraf 1491 (1880), 2. Spiritual rabbis received blame as well for in-
fringing on the administrative duties of crown rabbis. In Volynia Province, Jewish families
turned to spiritual rather than crown rabbis for marriage and circumcision rites. Although the
state endowed crown rabbis with authority, several Jewish families continued to conduct their
own ritual ceremonies and failed to record their vital statistics. YIVO, RG 30, box 3, folder
56 (no pagination).
94. TsDIAK, f. 442, op. 543, d. 354, ll. 1-1b, 10-10b (1890).
76 I jews and the Imperial State

brought an erroneous charge against him. They did this, Shor maintained,
in order to bring an "evil" rabbi to trial in a court of justice. "For a rabbi,
the false registration of vital events constitutes a crime," Shor explained. To
avoid breaking the law, Shor insisted that he had traveled from one end of
a 130-kilometer district to another, attempting as diligently as possible to
check every rite recorded in the books, but he had quickly realized the ab-
surdity and unmanageability of the Sisyphean task. As soon as he appeared
in one part of the district, several new deaths and births would occur on the
opposite side. For these reasons, he had managed to complete his work for
only one year and had never verified any of the requests submitted to him
by the Central Statistical Committee. In 1890, four years after the Jews of
Rovno filed their complaint and three years after they elected Khaim Kats as
the new crown rabbi, Manus Shor decided to convert to Russian Orthodoxy
and seek refuge in the Russian Orthodox community, feeling that he could
no longer live among the Jews. 91
Shor's apostasy turned out to be one of the most sensational resolutions
to an intramural conflict over record keeping. A more typical case occurred
when a member of the Jewish community would accuse a crown rabbi of
charging too much money for his clerical services. The shoemaker Shmul
Kaplun accused Rabbi Shmiel Moishev Godlevich of Gorodka (Podolia
Province) of charging too high a price for his son's death certificate. Kaplun
needed the certificate to make sure that his dead son would not be accused
of avoiding the draft, and he therefore paid Godlevich thirty kopeks to look
up his son's records. Kaplun testified that the rabbi had told him not to
worry about the records even though he had not been able to locate them,
and in the meantime he gave Kaplun a pair of boots to repair for 1.20 ru-
bles. After some time had passed, Rabbi Godlevich finally told Kaplun that
his son's date of death had never been recorded and recommended that he
ask a few of the more respected members of the community to sign a sworn
statement that his son had in fact died. Once Kaplun had shown him the
signed document, Godlevich told him that he would issue a death certificate
for an additional 6.50 rubles. In court, Rabbi Godlevich did not deny that
he had received 5 rubles from Kaplun, but he explained that the money was
for two certificates, which were issued for both of Kaplun's dead sons, and
not one, as Kaplun was asserting. Moreover, Godlevich claimed that he had
required Kaplun to pay the standard fee of 1.50 rubles for stamped govern-
ment paper. But with respect to the 1.20 rubles for the shoes, Godlevich
denied that he had ever given Kaplun the shoes to repair. 96

95. Ibid., ll. 10-10b.

96. TsDIAK, f. 348, op. 1, d. 1346, II. 3-4 (1914).
 Power of Documentation I 77

The court questioned numerous witnesses in the case. The fifty-five-year-

old Jewish townsman Fridel Shulimovich Kats testified that he had walked
into Kaplun's shop to have his own shoes fixed sometime at the beginning
of February. One of their neighbors, Frants Zhilovskii, also happened to
be there:

We started to chat, at which time Kaplun showed us some sort of metrical

records and began to complain that Rabbi Godlevich charged him too much
for the records. At first, Kaplun stated that he paid five rubles for them. After-
wards, he announced that he paid seven rubles, and finally he declared that he
gave Godlevich eight rubles. I didn't believe Kaplun since he has such a bad rep-
utation around town. This is why I told Kaplun that I would go to Godlevich
myself and find out the truth .... But when I told Godlevich what Kaplun told
me, the rabbi insisted that Kaplun wasn't telling the truth.

Kaplun agreed to explain his side of the story and to go with Kats to the
rabbi's apartment. On the way there, however, Kaplun threw a fit, refused
to go to the apartment, and instead decided to walk into a nearby pro-
duce store. In the store, Kaplun told anyone who cared to listen that the
rabbi owed him money. This time, however, he increased the amount from
five, seven, and eight rubles to as much as thirty, thirty-five, and thirty-nine
rubles. "Someone," Kaplun exclaimed, "will give me the money!" Stepan
Diomidovich Dvernitskii, a forty-one-year-old Russian Orthodox resident
of Gorodko, testified that all sorts of rumors could be heard around town-
that, for example, the rabbi was involved in a conspiracy to free Jews from
military service or that he had helped a number of Jews to escape across
state borders. But Dvernitskii declared that he did not have any hard evi-
dence to substantiate any of the rumors. After a rather lengthy trial at which
numerous Jewish and non-Jewish witnesses testified, the court acquitted the
rabbi of any wrongdoing. 97
While most disputes did not make it to court, complaints and reports of
negligence and conspiracy nevertheless continued to be filed with governors,
governors-general, and provincial police officials. After an examination of
the 1900-1904 metrical records, the Tashkent municipal authorities con-
cluded that the crown rabbi had recorded the data "negligently and incor-
rectly." "The books contain an enormous number of mistakes," they wrote
in their report. The authorities deemed the books useless for issuing certifi-
cates of civil status because of "careless errors and omissions of facts. " 98 On
July 31, 1911, a certain Mart denounced the crown rabbi Avram Govsei
Mairashovich Shafit of Kobrin (Grodno Province) for belonging to a criminal

97. Ibid., II. 79b, 86-86b.

98. RGIA, f. 821, op. 133, d. 721, I. 11b (1911-1913).
78 I Jews and the Imperial State

ring that worked tirelessly to "emancipate" Jews from military service. In

the last few years, Mart noted, the rabbi's entire family-wife, daughter,
and brother-had played an active role in the business. Once Shafit's opera-
tions were unmasked, the rabbi took cover and hid with over two thousand
rubles. "Criminals are always so likable and so generous," Mart warned,
"sometimes they give a little money, sometimes they help out a bit, and,
naturally, they are always considered one of 'us."' For these reasons, Mart
felt it his duty as a "faithful Russian" to implore the Kobrin provincial au-
thorities to think of a better method to watch over a "bureaucrat" who was
responsible for such important government work. 99
Crown rabbis, however, defended themselves from these types of accu-
sations. Rabbi Kirsner of Tashkent pointed out the difficulties he had in
convincing the Jewish population to report their vital events in a timely
fashion. "In Tashkent, where the law on the registration [of vital events]
was instituted only in 1899," he wrote, "Jews from the poorer classes do
not recognize the significance of the law, and the rabbi frequently has to
seek out [the individuals] and record the missing data himsel£." 100 In a letter
to the Saratov provincial governor, the crown rabbi Arii Shulman did not
deny that record-keeping gaps and mistakes had occurred but argued that
these mistakes were not made because of "contempt" (zlo) for the rule of
law. "While some parents don't, in fact, register their children, these cases
usually come from the poorer and less educated classes." But Shulman also
alerted the governor of the enormous demands placed on the crown rabbin-
ate. "I can testify," he lamented, "what an effort it is for a rabbi, even with
such a cultured Jewish population as the Saratov Jews, to record every birth
and death." 101 Other rabbis similarly pointed out the impossibility of total
registration when they needed to travel to four or five towns separated from
one another by between forty and ninety kilometers. 102
The crown rabbinate and municipal authorities not only faced great dif-
ficulties in the registration of vital events, but they also needed to resolve the
gendered imbalance of record keeping. In Bessarabia Province, in cities such
as Kishinev, Orgeev, Bendery, and Akkerman, the number of male Jewish
births was significantly higher than that of Jewish females. Upon inspection
of the metrical books in this region, one official commented, "Since the
proportion [of female to male births] cannot be explained by mathematical
laws, then it is obvious that Jews hide newly born girls from registration,

99. RGIA, f. 821, op. 133, d. 734, II. 11-13 (1910-1915). A month later, the Ekaterinoslav
police received similar denunciations.
100. RGIA, f. 821, op. 133, d. 721, II. 14b-15 (1911-1913).
101. RGIA, f. 821, op. 10, d. 803, II. 39-40b (1903).
102. Ibid., II. 90b-91.
 Power of Documentation 79

and it is obvious to me in particular that they do this for strategic reasons. In

their reports, the Kishinev police and other authorities have shown that such
occurrences happen every year. The police have tried all sorts of measures
to curb such infractions." 103 Imperial officials may have argued that parents
did not register the births of Jewish girls for "strategic reasons," but in real-
ity, the families that failed to record their daughters' births did so because
crown rabbis were usually not present at naming ceremonies (at which time
the registration of a birth needed to take place). As we will shortly see, this
seemingly innocuous omission not only caused difficulties for girls in their
adult lives as they began to encounter the legal system but also resulted in
the construction of a statistical myth: that a gendered birthrate imbalance
existed in Jewish communities. 104
In response to the "unsoundness of [Jewish] metrical records," the crown
Rabbi L. M. Tsirel'son issued an "appeal" to the Jewish communities, re-
questing that all Jews adhere to the following guidelines: marriages should be
conducted only by an official crown rabbi; individuals should register all their
vital events in a timely fashion and not regard metrical records lightly; regis-
tration of births should be completed in the first seven days after a child was
born; and in the case of infant mortality, parents should consider it their civic
duty to report the death to a crown rabbi, who would make sure that it was
properly recorded. Tsirel'son's guidelines appeared in the form of a poster
that sought to educate and instruct broad elements of the Jewish population
about the significance of metrical records and official record keeping. 105
At the turn of the century, government officials, journalists, and statisti-
cians continued to point out the deficiencies and difficulties of Jewish record
keeping. Yet in the geographically expansive and ethnically diverse empire,
other groups such as the new religious sects that proliferated at the time, the
non-Russian Orthodox peoples, and even the Russian Orthodox population
also had a hard time maintaining efficient and precise records. 106 Educated

103. RGIA, f. 821, op. 8, d. 377, 1. 5b (1862).

104. For a discussion of the higher birthrate of Jewish males, see V. I. Binshtok and
S. A. Novosel'skii, Materialy po estestvennomu dvizheniiu evreiskago naseleniia v evropeiskoi
Rossii za 40 let (1867-1906 g.g.) (Petrograd: Trud, 1915), ix-x; Freeze, Jewish Marriage and
Divorce, 59; Nathaniel Deutsch, "An-sky and the Ethnography of Jewish Women," in The
Worlds of S. An-sky: A Russian Jewish Intellectual at the Turn of the Century, ed. Gabriella
Safran and Steven J. Zipperstein (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 266; and David
Ransel, "The Ethno-Cultural Impact on Childbirth and Disease among Women in Western
Russia," Jews in Eastern t;urope 45 (2001): 30. According to freeze, the lack of female entries
may also have been due to the fact that parents wanted to avoid paying the registration fee
(one to five rubles).
105. L. M. Tsirel'son, "Oyfruf" (Kishinev, July 14, 1909).
106. Most administrators, statisticians, and other government officials pointed out that the
Russian Orthodox population usually maintained metrical records efficiently. For a compara-
tive analysis of record keeping in the empire, see Werth, "In the State's Embrace?" 443-51; and
80 / Jews and the Imperial State

Russians made attempts to instruct Russian Orthodox peasants and par-

ish priests about the administrative value of correct registration, printing
small, inexpensive booklets that summarized and easily explained the basic
laws of record keeping. One popular manual warned its readers that the
"registration of births, marriages, and deaths seems to be a simple process
at first glance, but it only takes a look at any parish register to notice that
things are far from being so simple. Those who are in charge of the books
are constantly in need of instruction." 107
The empire's metrical system continued to function until the collapse of
the old regime and was "by no means completely dysfunctional." 108 Despite
its many pitfalls, the importance of accurate registration of vital events only
increased at the beginning of the twentieth century. More and more Jews
began to recognize the power of these pieces of paper when they attempted
to participate in the legal and administrative system of the empire. While
authorities continued to levy fines with the hopes of curtailing "disorder"
(bezporiadok) in Jewish record keeping, Jews faced all sorts of difficulties
documenting individual identities in cases where metrical records were lost,
destroyed, or not correctly registered. As one governor wrote to the Minis-
try of the Interior in 1897, "There is no doubt that in Mogilev Province a
significant number of those individuals counted 'neiavivshimisia' [not pre-
sent at the time of the draft] are attributable to the fact that the names were
never recorded in metrical books upon death. But to verify the death, in
many instances years after the fact, is impossible." 109 The Senate may have
concluded, in 1903, that provincial authorities needed to resolve all cases
that dealt with unregistered vital events, but in everyday life, the burden of
proof continued to rest squarely on the individual and not the state. 110 But

for a discussion of the Russian Orthodox population, see D. N. Antonov and I. A. Antonova,
Metricheskie knigi Rossii, xuiii-nachala xx veka (Moscow: Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi gumani-
tarnyi universitet, 2006), 70-85.
107. L. P. Novikov, comp., Metriki (St. Petersburg, 1907), iii. For other similar examples,
see Rukovodstvo dlia /its, soderzhashchikh akty grazhdanskogo sostoianiia (Plosk: Kempner,
1894); Orest V. Mil'kov, Rukovodstvo k uedeniiu metricheskikh knig i aktov grazhdanskogo
sostoianiia v prikhodakh Kholmskoi eparkhii (Grubeshov: Tipografiia A. Gutfel'da, 1912); In-
struktsiia i formy chinam politseiskikh upravlenii i volostnym pravleniiam po predmetu vedeniia
metricheskikh knig brakov, rozhdenii i smerti raskol'nikov (Piatigorsk: I. P. Poklad, 1904); ln-
struktsiia dlia sostavleniia kartochek o brakakh rodivshikh i umershikh (Khar'kov, 1913 ).
108. Werth, "In the State's Embrace?" 456.
109. RGIA, f. 821, op. 10, d. 792, II. 218b-219 (1887-1903).
110. In 18 82, the Ministry of Interior ruled that the law did not hold police officials and
other civil servants responsible for establishing the precise time and location of birth or death.
But in 1903, the Senate overturned the ministry's decision and stipulated that municipal au-
thorities must handle all cases that dealt with unregistered vital events. On April 17, 1906, the
Senate reaffirmed that metrical records constituted the most fundamental register of identity,
stipulating that provincial authorities needed to handle all cases that dealt with unregistered
births and deaths. However, in those instances when metrical records were lost, destroyed, or
 Power of Documentation I 81

without any official evidence, how could parents prove to the state that their
son had in fact died or that their daughter had been born on a certain date
in a particular place?

v
Most individuals turned to the centuries-old custom of writing petitions tore-
solve their legal predicaments. One Russian-Jewish newspaper, for instance,
reported that a large group of Jews petitioned provincial administrators to
dismiss the three hundred-ruble fines and clear up any misunderstandings
about their not registering their dead sons for the draft. With a touch of
irony, the officials informed the Jews that they would be freed from military
service if any of the dead souls "returned to life." 111 The townsman Shlema
Yudelevich Leibovich Yoffe petitioned to register his son's death date after
he discovered that the crown rabbi had failed to do so. Yaffe also inquired
about alternative methods of verification, but to his dissatisfaction and con-
sternation, officials replied that metrical records constituted the only ac-
ceptable proof of death. 112 Naftel and Fanni Rozin similarly petitioned after
they discovered that a crown rabbi had failed to record their son's death.
"It is imperative that we determine the date of his death," they pleaded,"
first of all, because he may be recruited in 1904 [the year their son would
have turned twenty-one] and we may be fined three hundred rubles; and
second of all, because our remaining son, Bentsion, will not be exempt from
military service. " 113
Other individuals petitioned when a crown rabbi had neglected to record
dates of birth. In April 1894, the townsman Duvid Kel'manovich Barin-
shtein petitioned to register the birth dates of his two children, as well as
his undocumented marriage date. In 1883, Barinshtein had married Idasiia
Zeilikovna Voskoboinik, with whom he had two sons and one daughter.
Unfortunately, the rabbi's assistant had registered only one son. These types
of omissions, Barinshtein explained, occurred rather frequently in Zaslav
(Bessarabia Province). When neither town administrators nor provincial au-

never (properly) recorded, individuals could use other documents that the court deemed as hav-
ing "unquestionable integrity"-family lists, notebooks maintained by crown rabbis, or other
official government documents. The Senate's decision stipulated that only written documents
had unquestionable integrity in a court of law; honorable witnesses, therefore, could no longer
establish a person's identity in lieu of missing or nonexistent birth or death records. For a dis-
cussion of the laws, see RGIA, f. 821, op. 10, d. 786, l. 37 (1879-1893); TsDIAK, f. 442, op.
518, d. 310, II. 27-27b (1881); and RGIA, f. 821, op. 10, d. 804, ll. 169-177b (1903-1904).
111. Russkii evrei 36 (1883), 18-19.
112. RGIA, f. 821, op. 10, d. 792, ll. 218b-219 (1887-1903).
113. RGIA, d. 821, op. 10, d. 795, II. 189-190 (1883-1904).
82 I Jews and the Imperial State

thorities recognized the family's civil status, the officials instructed him to
appear in a court of law to prove his children's identities (samolichnosti).
The court, however, denied his request, citing a statute that allowed parents
to turn to a court of law only when the children had been born before the
actual marriage took place. "In light of these circumstances," Barinshtein
pleaded, "all of my petitions have been rejected, my children have yet to be
lawfully registered, and now I simply do not know who to turn to with this
extremely important request. " 114
The merchant Yosel Vasser moved with his family to Shlissel'burg, a town
without a crown rabbi located around thirty-five kilometers east of St. Pe-
tersburg. Vasser attempted to register his children, Yankel and Khana, with
the Shlissel'burg merchant estate, but 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 nec-
essary documents." 115 Authorities turned down the soldier Movsha Aron
Avseev Smolenskii's request to register his daughter as a permanent resident
of Riga after determining that she lacked a birth certificate. "Till this day,"
he wrote, "the rabbi refuses to register her in the metrical books, because I
resided in the town of Dub belen at the time of my daughter's birth." In this
case, the crown rabbi argued that he did not have the authority to register
someone who was born in another rabbi's district. 116
In Nizhnii-Tagiliia (Perm Province), the factory workers Shmerk Ham-
sheev and Mera Yakalev Zislin petitioned to register their son's name in the
metrical book. "Part of the blame [for failing to register their son] lies with
us," they conceded. But they also pointed out that because the crown rabbi
lived such a long distance from their town, they did not have the means to
make the trip to obtain a registration certificate. "Now, when the time has
come to educate our son, after he has performed so well in the elementary
state school and is yearning to study at the next level, we, the parents, natu-
rally wonder about his fate. We would, of course, like to educate him, but
to start school he must first present a birth certificate or at least some other
comparable document. " 117
In the majority of the cases, the issue at stake was not documenting an
unregistered birth or death date but rather correcting a record-keeping
error-a misspelled name, an incorrect date of birth, or any other data not

114. Ibid., II. 59-60h.

115. RGIA, f. 821, op. 10, d. 786, II. 126-126b (1879-1903).
116. Ibid., II. 52b-53b.
117. Irina Antropova, ed., Sbornik dokumentou po istorii eureeu Urala: Iz fond au uchrezh-
denii dosouetskogo perioda Gosudarstuennogo arkhiua Sverdlouskoi oblasti (Moscow: Dre-
vlekhranilishche, 2004), 300-301.
 Power of Documentation I 83

properly inscribed by the crown rabbi in the books. The law on record
keeping, however, strictly prohibited changes to the entries once the crown
rabbi or the rabbi's assistant recorded the data, making only one exception:
"With the exception of a 'clerical error' [pogreshnost' pistsa] corrections are
not permitted." 118 Under this particular statute, correcting a record-keeping
mistake proved to be a long and arduous process that required the writing
of many petitions in order to receive an exemption from the law's require-
ments. When Jews turned to a court of law to make changes in the vital
statistics records, the courts ruled in turn that they did not have the legal
authority to make the necessary changes and requested that the complain-
ants write petitions in order to receive an exemption to the law. 119 The father
of Srul-Aba Yosiov Fainzil'ber, for instance, pleaded that his son's name
should be changed to Aba Srul-Yosiovich, the name he used in daily life,
instead of Srul-Aba Yosiovich, the name the crown rabbi had recorded in
the metrical books. For a similar reason, the father of Abram-Itsek Einokh-
Vol'fov Zinger petitioned to change his son's name to Abram-Itsek Eiek-
hovich Zigel. For these and many other similar requests, however, no matter
how persuasive their logic may have been, authorities usually noted that
"a clerical error in the registration of the name, patronymic, or surname
could not be determined" and therefore denied the petitions to officially
change names. 120
By not permitting any changes to the vital records the state furthered
its own governing interests and ambitions. The strict regulations on name
changes were part of a broader state-driven social engineering project that
attempted to create a more coordinated system that linked the population
with the larger administrative order. When Jews used names that did not
correspond to both the forenames and surnames recorded in metrical books,
or when they asked to change their names, authorities insisted that they
would not be able to identify the individual in question. Officials feared that
if, for example, a Khaim-Mordko Gluzman changed his name to Eishia-
Mordko Gluzman, "an entirely new person would appear, who would de-
clare that he did not know a 'Khaim-Mordko Gluzman' and could not be
held accountable for [Khaim's financial or civic] obligations or debts. " 121
For the imperial government, a change in the document-however small
or inconsequential it may have appeared-undermined the integrity of the
entire record-keeping system.

118. This law was first instituted in 1835; see the discussion in Gimpel'son, Zakony o
evreiakh, 2:622-23.
119. RGIA, f. 821, op. 10, d. 795, II. 86-89 (1883-1904).
120. RGIA, f. 821, op. 133, d. 716, II. 83, 91, 92-92b (1911-1914).
121. Palibin, "Ispravlenie metrik," 240-41.
84 I jews and the Imperial State

For the individual, however, incorrect or missing vital statistics records

proved an impediment toward obtaining the most basic government privi-
leges and civil rights. The government failed to recognize claims to sub-
jecthood in the Russian Empire without the proper documentation of an
individual's life cycle. 122 As Rabbi Perel'man explained,

There is no doubt that the correct registration of vital events is not only impor-
tant for administrative purposes, but also for everyday relations as well, since
metrical books determine an individual's civil status and touch upon some of
the most significant aspects of civic life and legal relations. We only need to
think of the countless examples of individuals attempting to straighten out
unregistered metrical records to remember how much hardship and suffering
[these omissions] have brought our poor population. 123

After six members of the Rabbinical Commission voted, in 1910, to pro-

hibit crown rabbis from registering uncircumcised Jewish boys, the lawyer
Sliozberg pleaded with the rabbis to overturn the ruling. Metrical records
did not have religious meaning, he argued, and the boys would need them
in the future in their everyday dealings with the state. 124 The Odessa lieu-
tenant governor made a similar remark: "Any spelling errors of first or last
names, insufficient attention to record keeping, or entire omissions denied
[Jews] subjecthood fpravosposobnost']. Jews cannot enroll in institutions of
higher education, receive government certifications, register for the military,
or even be legally married, among other things." 125

122. For other examples, see RGIA, f. 821, op. 10, d. 795,11. 86-89, 107-109 (1883-1904);
RGIA, f. 821, op. 10, d. 788, 11. 59-59b (1890); RGIA, f. 821, op. 133, d. 716, 11. 233-233b
(1911-1914); and GARF, f. 102, deloproizvodstvo 2, op. 76A, d. 983 (1891-1893).
123. Nedel'naia khronika voskhoda 49 (1903), 1.
124. N. A. Pereferkovich, Religioznye voprosy u sovremennykh eureev v Rossii (St. Pe-
tersburg: Tipografiia P. P. Soikina, 1911), 46-47. Nevertheless, Rabbi Mazor pointed out, the
"registration of metrical records is a civil act, and has nothing to do with religion." In the end,
the Rabbinical Commission stipulated that rabbis were required to record the births of boys
whose parents either did not wish to circumcise them or neglected to do so. For such cases, the
commission suggested that the crown rabbi note in the margins of the metrical books "without
legal justification" or "the rite of circumcision was not performed, but not due to parents'
aversion." On the ruling, see Sbornik reshenii Ravvinskoi Kommisii sozyva 1910 gada (St.
Petersburg: Tipografiia ministerstva vnutrennikh del, 1912), 42-43. Russia, however, never
experienced the type of public disputes over the so-called circumcision question that Germany
did. On the disputes in the German context, see Robin Judd, Contested Rituals: Circumcision,
Kosher Butchering, and Jewish Political Life in German)\ 1843-1933 (Ithaca: Cornell Univer-
sity Press, 2007).
125. RGIA, f. 821, op. 10, d. 795,11. 9b-10 (1883-1904); and for other similar arguments
and examples about the difficulties of accepting individuals to institutions of higher education
without vital statistics, see Vilenskii vestnik 131 (1882), 2; and GARF, f. 102, deloproizvod-
stvo 2, op. 40, d.l39 (1883).
 Power of Documentation I 85

As the population became more mobile and less constrained by the fixity
of place, the state relied increasingly on documentary records such as metri-
cal records and internal passports to govern the empire. Any manipulations,
distortions, or inaccuracies of these records proved highly troublesome for
regulating internal movement, establishing the exact place of permanent
residence, documenting individual identities, and forging direct links with
the population. While the state viewed metrical records as a fundamental
tool of governance, Jews relied on the document as a ticket for participat-
ing in the imperial social order. By the turn of the twentieth century, more
and more Jews quickly realized that if they wished to take part in the legal-
administrative system, they must carry a document that proved who they
were and where they had been born. If individuals did not have a piece of
paper that proved their identity, they lost access to the rights, privileges, and
obligations that the state bestowed on them as subjects of the empire.
 3
Movement and Residence
There is a well-known peasant proverb which declares that a
"human being in Russia consists of a body, a soul, and a pass-
port." ... A single passport, moreover, will not serve for two bodies
and two souls.
-GEORGE KENNAN, "A Body, a Soul, and a Passport"

But should your papers not be in order, heaven forbid, or should

they find illegal merchandise, contraband, or, to be more precise,
a Jew without his residence permit, then they will ask you to be
so kind as to dress, the quicker the better, and do them the favor
of accompanying them to police headquarters. There you will be
investigated thoroughly and they will stamp your documents in red,
"Ordered to leave the city within twenty-four hours." Or they will
escort you with great honor to the city of our birth where you can
visit all your aunts and uncles whom you haven't seen for ages.
-SHOLEM ALEICHEM, Bloody Hoax

In 1884, the former rabbi Ikhel Zbarskii accused Yanke! Epshtein of or-
ganizing an underground criminal ring to steal 19,560 kilograms of sugar.
Ultimately, the theft never took place, and police officials were not able to
gather enough evidence to charge Epshtein with any criminal activity. A few
months after the denunciation, Epshtein spotted his nemesis Zbarskii on
Kreshchatik, the busiest and liveliest thoroughfare in Kiev, and quickly sum-
moned a nearby police official to "escort the thief to the precinct." This was
not the first time that Zbarskii had been charged with criminal behavior and
had appeared at the precinct. In the early 1860s, Kiev municipal authorities
had charged the former rabbi with "distributing counterfeit banknotes" and
ordered him to leave the city immediately. In order to spare himself from
punishment, Zbarskii had struck a deal with the governor-general of Kiev,
Podolia, and Volynia to work as a police informant. For the next twenty
years he gathered incriminating information on Jews who were registered
under an alias, lived in Kiev without a residence permit, and bought and
 Movement and Residence I 87

sold illegal merchandise. In 1879 authorities deemed Zbarskii "harmful"

for engaging in illicit behavior and expelled him once again. But making him
leave Kiev was no easy task. Five years after the expulsion edict, Zbarskii
continued to reside in the city, and police officials continued to escort him
to the precinct for extorting money from Jews, public intoxication, rude and
indecent behavior, and wandering up and down Kreshchatik for no appar-
ent purpose. After a thorough investigation of the case, the governor-general
did not find enough evidence to arrest Zbarskii or even justify expulsion,
since Zbarskii resided in Kiev on a permanent resident permit. However
indecent Zbarskii's behavior might have been, the governor-general pointed
out that police officials needed better legal justification; they could not expel
Zbarskii simply for misbehaving. As late as 1890, even as the Kiev police
monitored Zbarskii's every move, the former rabbi and police informant
continued to reside in house number 80 on Borshchavskaia Street. 1
The state's brutal expulsion policies against Jews received much public
attention from the Russian-Jewish press. "No other European capital has
a law that is so antiquated, devoid of the most rudimentary logic, and so
unusually harsh," Nedel'naia khronika voskhoda remarked. "Upon birth
a Jew ·is deprived of the freedom to move and the right to choose a place
of residence, in short, the most basic of all individual and civil rights-
rights which are enjoyed by all other subjects of the empire, with the excep-
tion of Jews. " 2 Jewish journalists, communal leaders, and ordinary people
characterized imperial laws on Jewish movement and residence as highly
arbitrary and extraordinarily draconian. "When an expulsion begins,"
another journalist remarked, the police "do not concern themselves with
how long the individuals lived in the town, what community they were
registered with, or the environment they were removed from." 3 "For us,
Russian Jews," I. M. Bikerman wrote in a study devoted to the political
and economic meanings of the Pale of Settlement, "a large portion of our
motherland does not exist. " 4
In the wake of the assassination of Alexander II, as educated Jews be-
moaned the contradictory effects of imperial laws on Jewish movement and
residence, provincial police officials and government administrators faced
mounting political pressure to restore social order. 5 For the imperial Russian

I. TsDIAK, f. 442, op. 534, d. 248, ll. 20-22, 27-29, 138b (1890).
2. Nedel'naia khronika voskhoda 16 (1883), 395.
3. Nedel'naia khronika voskhoda 41 (1887), 1025.
4. I. M. Bikerman, Cherta evreiskoi osedlosti (St. Petersburg: Razum, 1911), 104-5.
5. On the crisis of autocracy after the assassination of Alexander II, see Petr Andreevich
Zaionchkovskii, Russian Autocracy in Crisis, 1878-1882, ed. Gary Hamburg (Gulf Breeze,
Fla.: Academic International, 1979). On the emergence of modern Jewish politics as a con-
sequence of the assassination and the subsequent crisis of autocracy, see Jonathan Frankel,
88 I Jews and the Imperial State

government, illicit geographic mobility threatened the public tranquility

that the autocracy had fought so desperately to preserve. As the transporta-
tion revolution intensified territorial movement, tens of thousands of Jew-
ish migrants traveled to cities in search of work, education, and new social
experiences. The urban centers served as "great revolving doors through
which passed a significant proportion of the population of large regions of
Russia," and migrant stays were often marked by transience, dislocation,
and drift. 6 To regulate the movement of its large and diverse population,
the imperial government introduced such a large number of statutes that
authorities often struggled to make sense of their implicit contradictions
and numerous exceptions. But regardless of the contradictory nature of the
legal statutes, the imperial Russian government attempted to regulate Jew-
ish movement and residence within the boundaries of the law. As was the
case with Ikhel Zbarskii, authorities did not have the right to expel Jews for
inappropriate behavior if they possessed the requisite residency papers.

II

On the eve of the Great Reforms, roughly 1,000,000 Jews lived in the fif-
teen provinces that comprised the Pale of Settlement; another 467,682 Jews
resided in the Kingdom of Poland; and only 11,980 Jews made their home
outside the boundaries of the pale. 7 By 1881, according to the numbers pro-
vided by the Ministry of the Interior, the number of Jews living in the pale
had more than doubled to 2,331,880, while an additional1,010,378 resided
in the Kingdom of Poland and around 71,994 had settled on a permanent
basis in the interior provinces. H By 1897 the Jewish population in the Rus-
sian Empire was continuing its remarkable demographic transformation,
increasing in absolute numbers to around 5,189,401 individuals. While the
vast majority of Jews continued to reside either in the pale (3,558,060) or
in the Kingdom of Poland (1,316,576), a noticeable territorial shift had
taken place. By century's end, at least 207,706 Jews lived in territories desig-
nated as the interior provinces, with an additional 5 8,4 71 in the Caucasus,
34,477 in Siberia, and 12,729 in central Asia. 9

Prophecy and Politics: Socialism, Nationalism, and the Russian jews, 1862-1917 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1981).
6. Daniel R. Brower, "Urban Revolution in the Late Russian Empire," in The City in Late
Imperial Russia, ed. Michael F. Hamm (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 327.
7. "Naselenie," in Evreiskaia entsiklopediia: Svod znanii o evreistve i ego ku/'ture v prosh-
lom i nastoiashchem, 16 vols. (Moscow: Terra, 1991), 11:535-38.
8. Obshchaia zapiska vysshei kommisii d/ia peresmotra deistvuiushchikh o evreiakh vim-
perii zakonov, 1883-1888 (St. Petersburg, 1888), 1-11.
9. "Naselenie," 535-38. Yakov Lestchinsky provides slightly different figures in his Dos
yidishe folk in tsifern (Berlin: Klal-verlag, 1922), 29.
 Movement and Residence I 89

With Alexander II's accession to the throne, several privileged social es-
tate groups-merchants of the first and second guild, artisans, students, and
army veterans-received the right to travel and reside outside the bound-
aries of the pale on a permanent basis. 10 In the next three decades, Jews
began to migrate to all corners of the empire in search of new professional,
economic, and educational opportunities. Not all of the migrants traveled
long distances or to areas previously closed off to Jews, and not all of the
migrations were permanent. In fact, most individuals moved to nearby
towns and urban settlements with preexisting Jewish communities; only a
small percentage of Jews migrated to cities or settlements that lacked any
established social networks and institutional frameworks. Unlike Russian
Orthodox labor migrants (otkhodniki), Jewish migrants traveled as fami-
lies, and a large proportion of all migrants were women and children. And
unlike most Russian Orthodox newcomers, who needed not only to ad-
just to new urban conditions but also to work in entirely new occupations,
most Jewish migrants continued to be employed in the commercial and mer-
cantile sectors. For Jews, these continuities helped ease the apprehensions,
anxieties, and trauma of resettlement. By around 1900, despite the myriad
restrictions on Jewish movement and residence, internal migration was a
widespread phenomenon that helped transform the lives of Jews and Jewish
communities. 11
The transportation revolution and the relaxation of residence laws
created extraordinary opportunities for Jews to travel, work, and reside
in some of the empire's most culturally dynamic and economically vi-
brant cities. Whereas in 1862 only 1,411 Jews lived in Kiev, by 1897
the numbers had jumped to 31,801 and by 1910 to 50,792. Odessa and
Ekaterinoslav-two cities located in the southwestern portions of the
empire-witnessed similar demographic explosions as Jews took advan-
tage of the market economy by becoming highly visible participants in
wholesale industry, banking, the grain trade, and middle-class professions.

10. According to the historian Benjamin Nathans, the tsarist regime conceived social estates
"not as obstacles to the integration of the empire's Jews but as conduits for it." See Nathans,
Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2002), 26.
11. This paragraph is based on Shaul Stampfer's work on internal jewish migration: "Pat-
terns of Internal Migration in the Russian Empire," in Jews and .Jewish Life in Russia and the
Soviet Union, ed. Yaacov Ro'i (Portland: Frank Cass, 1995), 28-47. On internal migration in
the Russian context, see Yakov Lestchinsky, Di onkhoybn fun der emigratsie un kolonizatsie
bey yidn in 19-tn iorhundert (Berlin: Emigdirekt, 1922), 13-31; Barbara Anderson, Internal
Migration during Modernization in Late Nineteenth-Century Russia (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1980); S. I. Bruk and V. M. Kabuzan, Migratsionnyi protsessy v Rossii i SSSR
(Moscow: INION AN SSSR, 1991); B. V. Tikhonov, Pereselenie v Rossii vo vtoroi polovine
xix v. (Moscow: Nauka, 1978); and Daniel R. Brower, The Russian City between Tradition and
Modernity, 1850-1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), chap. 2 (Railroads,
Merchants, and Migrant Cities).
90 I jews and the Imperial State

By 1897, Odessa's Jewish population had increased to at least 138,935

from around 17,000 in 1855, and Ekaterinoslav's Jewish community had
grown from 1,125 in 1857 to 47,918. The Jewish population of Riga
underwent a similar population growth, from 2,641 in 1864 to 21,962 in
1897. In the Kingdom of Poland, the textile industry, the establishment
of credit institutions, and the creation of the railway played key roles in
attracting Jews to some of its largest and most prosperous cities. Warsaw
saw its Jewish population increase from 72,776 in 1864 to 254,712 in
1901, while t6dz's Jewish community displayed one of the most remark-
able demographic expansions in the empire, from 2,775 in 1856 to 79,785
in 1908_12
The Jewish communities in the largest and most cosmopolitan cities of the
empire, Moscow and St. Petersburg, did not grow at nearly the same pace.
Authorities monitored the presence of Jews in the imperial capitals, permit-
ting only the more economically useful subjects to reside there. Although the
St. Petersburg Jewish community continued to expand throughout the impe-
rial period, from 6,624 in 1869 to 16,826 in 1881 and to 34,995 in 1910,
the Jews of Moscow fared considerably worse. After a series of expulsions
devastated the Jewish population, the official total decreased from around
15,085 in 1882 to no more than 7,813 in 1897, and by 1902, slightly more
than 9,000 Jews resided in Moscow. 13
The mass movement of Jews took place at a time when the face of the
Russian Empire was experiencing unprecedented economic expansion. As
a result of the expansion of the mining and manufacturing sectors, Russia's
urban population grew from around 9 million in 1856 to around 25 million
in 1913. 14 Although considerable territorial distances separated most towns
(an average of 88 kilometers), the construction of the railroad helped ease the
burdens of transportation. Whereas in 1840 the imperial railroad stretched
for only 26 kilometers, nearly fifty years later 30,140 kilometers of railway
connected trade centers, facilitated commerce, and redrew the map of urban

12. For Warsaw, Ekaterinoslav, Kiev, Odessa, and Riga, see Eureiskaia entsiklopediia,
5:323; 7:503; 9:521, 526; 12:54; 13:484. For t6dz, see Julian K. Janczak, "The National
Structure of the Population in t6dz in the Years 1820-1939," Polin 6 (1991 ): 20-26.
13. For Moscow, see Yvonne Kleinmann, Neue Orte-neue Menschen: ]udisches Leben
in St. Petersburg und Moskau (Giittingen, Ger.: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006), 403-4.
And for St. Petersburg, see Nathans, Beyond the Pale. 92; and Kleinmann, Neue Orte-neue
Menschen, 397.
14. Michael F. Hamm, introduction to Hamm, The City in Late Imperial Russia, 2. Be-
tween the reign of Peter the Great and the start of the Great War, the number of towns more
than doubled in European Russia (from 280 to 729). On these numbers and on the difficulties
of precisely defining an urban settlement, see Boris N. Mironov, The Social History of Imperial
Russia, 1700-1917, 2 vols. (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 2000), 1:426-29; and Mironov, Russkii
gorod u 1740-1860e gody (Leningrad: Nauka, 1990), 226.
 Movement and Residence 91

and rural Russia. 15 The mass movement of populations, however, did not
always flow to the urban centers of European Russia. While peasant labor
migrants traveled to industrially developed areas to work in factories and
shops, the otkhodniki constituted only a portion of the population on the
move. 16 Beginning in the 1860s, government-initiated programs encouraged
migrants (including Jews) to settle borderland territories such as Siberia, Ka-
zakhstan, the Caucasus, and the Far East.ll The Trans-Siberian Railway was
constructed, in part, to help govern politically unstable border territories by
facilitating resettlement to western Siberia and the Far East, improving water
transport, and stimulating the local economy. Whatever its shortcomings,
the Siberian railroad transported thousands of railroad laborers, criminals,
prisoners, craftsmen, soldiers, miners, and watch guards across highly unfa-
vorable, uneven, and, on occasion, dangerous terrains. 18 Utilizing the newly
established networks of transportation, almost 9 million subjects migrated
to the imperial borderlands empire between 1871 and 1916.19
Since the reign of Peter the Great, imperial law had forbidden subjects
from traveling without an internal passport outside their permanent place
of residence (a radius of around thirty kilometers, which was expanded to
around fifty in 1894). 20 The internal passport played three distinct roles in

15. "Zheleznye dorogi," in Entsiklopedicheskii slovar', 41 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1890-

1904), 11A:783; and Brower, Russian City, 43.
16. Anderson, Internal Migration during Modernization, 148-50. On peasant labor mi-
gration, see Jeffrey Burds, Peasant Dreams and Market Politics: Labor Migration and the
Russian Village, 1861-190S (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh, 1998); and Joseph Bradley,
Muzhik and Muscovite: Urbanization in Late Imperial Russia (Berkeley: University of Califor-
nia Press, 1985).
17. V. M. Kabuzan, Emigratsiia i reemigratsiia v xviii-nachale xx veka (Moscow: Nauka,
1998), 111-17, 130-39; and Willard Sunderland, Taming the Wild Field: Colonization and
Empire in the Russian Steppe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), 177-220. On the set-
tlement of Jewish communities in Siberia, see L. V. Kal'mina, Evreiskie obshchiny vostochnoi
Sibiri, sere dina xix v.-fevral' 1917 goda (Ulan-Ude: VSGAKI, 2003 ).
18. On the construction of the Siberian railroad, see Steven G. Marks, Road to Power: The
Trans-Siberian Railroad and the Colonization of Asian Russia, 18S0-1917 (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1991). See also Donald Trcadgold, The Great Siberian Migration: Govern-
ment and Peasant Resettlement from Emancipation to the First World War (Princeton: Prince-
ton University Press, 1957).
19. David Moon, "Peasant Migration, the Abolition of Serfdom, and the Internal Passport
System in the Russian Empire, c. 1800-1914," in Coerced and Free Migration: Global Perspec-
tives, ed. David Eltis (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 349.
20. On the internal passport, see V. G. Chernukha, Pas port v Rossii, 17.19-1917 (St. Peters-
burg: Liki Rossii, 2007). See also Burds, Peasant Dreams and Market Politics, 56-61; Charles
Steinwedel, "Making Social Groups, One Person at a Time: The Identification of Individuals
by Estate, Religious Confession, and Ethnicity in Late Imperial Russia," in Documenting In-
dividual Identity: The Development of State Practices in the Modern World, ed. Jane Caplan
and John Torpey (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 73-78; Mervyn Matthews, The
Passport Society: Controlling Movement in Russia and the USSR (Boulder, Colo.: Westview,
1993); and Moon, "Peasant Migration," 324-57. Much like the Soviet passport system, the
92 I jews and the Imperial State

Russian political and economic life: it was used as a policing tool (to identify
individuals in a direct and unambiguous manner), to accrue government
revenue and to fulfill the payment of taxes and other state obligations, and
to regulate territorial movement. To obtain a passport an individual first
needed to request permission from communal elders, who usually acquiesced
if the applicant had paid all communal and state taxes and was a respected
and honorable member of the community (until1914 women could obtain
passports with either their husbands' or their fathers' permission). 21 Only
after the elders approved the request did municipal authorities issue the docu-
ment, which was usually valid for no more than five years. Passport laws
varied, however, with respect to creed, social identity, and geographic terri-
tory. For the nobility, Russian Orthodox merchants, and military personnel,
passport laws were quite lenient (merchants did not even need to declare a
reason for their journey), while for the clergy, peasants, townspeople, and
non-Russian Orthodox subjects, the laws governing territorial movement
were much stricter and more precise. To accommodate imperial expansion,
new exceptions and regulations continued to be added to the general statute
on passports, and by the reign of Alexander II, approximately 750 different
laws on movement and residence were on the books. 22
Recognizing the complexity of the passport system, Alexander II orga-
nized two commissions to make the system less constricting, more uniform,
and easier to comprehend. 23 In 1859, the Ministry of the Interior suggested
that the social estate hierarchy, which regulated the diverse passport legisla-
tion, should be abolished. The ministry argued that the internal passport
should be used solely for policing purposes and not as a tool to help enforce
collective fiscal responsibilities. But until the beginning of the twentieth cen-
tury collective responsibility remained a key source for gathering revenue,

imperial passport system retained a hierarchical differentiation based largely on religion and
estate classification. On the hierarchically differentiated passport system in the Soviet Union,
see David Shearer, "Elements Near and Alien: Passportization, Policing, and Identity in the
Stalinist State, 1932-1952," Journal of Modern History 76 (2004): 835-81.
21. Steinwedel, "Making Social Groups," 75; and GARF, f. 102, deloproizvodstvo 2, op.
76A, d. 1799 (1898-1902). On the 1914 law for allowing married women to obtain without
their husbands' permission, see Linda Edmondson, feminism in Russia, 1900-1917 (Stan-
ford: Stanford University Press, 1984), 139-40. See also M. I. Mysh, comp., Polozhenie vi-
dakh na zhitel'stvo, so vkliucheniem ostal'nykh deistvuiushchikh pasportnykh uzakonenii i
pravitel'stvennykh raz"iasnenii (St. Petersburg: M. I. Frolovoi, 1900), 5-9; D. M. Gol'denov,
comp., Ustav o pasportakh: Po offitsial'nomu izdaniiu 1903 g., s senatskimi i ministerskami
raz "iasneniiami is privedeniem dopolnitel'nykh uzakonenii i pravil (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia
N. N. Klobukova, 1905); and N. N. Ignatov, comp., Ustav o pasportakh: S dopolneniiami,
izmeneniiami i pravitel'stvennymi raz"iasneniiami (Moscow: Busygin, 1905).
22. Chernukha, Pasport v Rossii, 98-99.
23. On the passport commissions during the reign of Alexander II, see Chernukha, Pasport
v Rossii, 122-36; and Moon, "Peasant Migration," 333.
 Movement and Residence I 93

and the internal passport continued to play both fiscal and policing roles in
nineteenth-century Russian sociallife. 24 For the Ministry of the Interior, the
rise of revolutionary movements and disturbances in the last three decades
of the nineteenth century confirmed the importance of the internal passport
as a valuable policing instrument. Nevertheless, even as the autocracy found
itself in a state of revolutionary crisis, the Ministry of Justice suggested that
temporary movement within the empire should be made less strict and
confusing: "Temporary travel to neighboring towns that is deemed of es-
sential importance (when a person travels, for example, to various establish-
ments on business or due to the most pressing needs) should not be made
difficult." 25
The law of June 3, 1894, constituted the first major reform of the pass-
port system, expanding travel and residency requirements for both the
privileged estate groups and the nonprivileged ones. But the complexity of
the statutes on movement and residence continued to bewilder provincial
administrators, police officials, and imperial subjects. In cities with large
numbers of seasonal migrants such as St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Kiev,
legal consultation bureaus and private advocates made considerable sums
of money by offering legal advice to help resolve passport problems. 26
The educated public attempted to convince seasonal migrants of the so-
cial value of the document by publishing instructional booklets explain-
ing passport legislation in succinct fashion. One popular manual devoted
to the internal passport explained to the seasonal labor migrants, "The
passport was not invented by a scribe or the anti-Christ, as many of you
have maintained, but is vital to every person to certify his identity-to
prove who he is. " 27 Similar appeals sought to convince Jews of the im-
portance of a document that linked them to the state. "Not everyone can
look up a specific statute in the Complete Digest of I~aws," one brochure
warned. "Jews don't know the exact rules. Police officials, administra-
tors, justices of the peace, and town elders make numerous exceptions for
Jews because they don't have them [the laws] handy." "In order to help

24. Chernukha, Pasport v Rossii, 159; and GARF, f. 102, deloproizvodstvo 2, op. 43, d.
11, chast' 2, II. lOb-11 (1886). On the problem of individualizing imperial taxation, see Yanni
Kotsonis, "'Face-to-Face': The State, the Individual, and the Citizen in Russian Taxation,
1863-1917," Slavic Review 63 (2004}: 221-46.
25. GARF, f. 102, deloproizvodstvo 2, op. 43, d. 11, chast' 2, I. lOb (1886); and ibid.,
chast' 7.
26. By 1904, at least fifty legal assistance bureaus existed in the Russian Empire, providing
oral advice and written documentation for cases ranging from passport problems and property
disputes to divorce and pensions. On the emergence of the bureaus, see William Pomeranz,
"Legal Assistance in Tsarist Russia: The St. Petersburg Consultation Bureaus," Wisconsin In-
ternational Law ]ourna/14 (1996): 586-610.
27. P. V. Iashchershchyn, Kak i otkuda poluchit' pasport (Saratov, 1898), 5.
94 I Jews and the Imperial State

both parties, that is, the general public and the imperial administration,"
the editor of the brochure wrote in his introduction, "I publish this little
tiny volume that brings all the statutes together. " 28
Even though the vast majority of Jews could not reside in the interior
provinces on a permanent basis, imperial law did permit temporary travel
leaves. Temporary travel privileges, issued for either business or juridical
purposes, usually lasted for no more than six weeks. To facilitate the identi-
fication of Jews, authorities marked distinguishing bodily characteristics in
passports-birthmarks, warts, external signs of illness, mutilations, height,
width of chest, and other so-called deficiencies (nedostatki). 29 For merchants
traveling to the interior provinces, authorities marked the route of their
journey, the time and place of arrival and departure, and religious origin. 30
In St. Petersburg, police highlighted the religion category in a special color
(red) in hopes of making Jewish identities more visibleY Even those Jews
who had converted to Christianity and gained automatic residence privi-
leges did not escape scrutiny. Authorities inscribed the ethnoracial signifier
"of Jewish origin" in the convert's passport to help distinguish baptized
Jews from their coreligionists. 32
As more and more Jews traveled throughout the vast spaces of the
empire, the High Commission for Review of Legislation Pertaining to the
Jews of Russia affirmed that the institution of the Pale of Settlement con-
tinued to serve as an important tool for containing a population deemed
politically dangerous and culturally underdeveloped. "In the present mo-
ment," the commission explained, "the lower stratum of the Jewish popu-
lation finds itself in the same state of underdevelopment as in times past."
But during the Great Reform era, at which time tens of thousands of Jews
received permission to work and study in the interior provinces, adminis-

28. Prava evreev selit'sia vne gorodov i mestechek (v sel'skikh mestnostiakh ina dachakh)
(Kiev: Al'fa, 1910), 3-4. For other examples, see Pravozhitel'stvo evreev v Rossii (Odessa:
Narodnaia pol'za, 1913); Pravozhitel'stvo evreev (Odessa: Tipografiia A. M. Shveitsera,
1915); Lev Perel'man, Ob "iasnitel'naia zapiska po voprosu o prave vremennago prozhivaniia
na dachakh evreev, imeiushchikh uslovnoe pravo zhitel'stva vne cherty evreiskoi osedlosti, v
zavisimosti at zaniatiia imi svoim remeslom, svoei professiei (Saratov, 1914); and Vladimir
Osipovich Lishchenko, Sbornik zakonopolozhenii o prave zhitel'stva evreev v Imperii (Ekate-
rinoslav: Tipografiia gubernskoe pravitel'stvo, 1914).
29. Mysh, Rukovodstvo k russkim zakonam, 333-34.
30. On the marking of religious origin on Jewish merchants' business papers, see "Ob obo-
znachenii veroispovcdaniia v torgovykh dokumentakh vydavaemykh evreiam," GARF, f. 102,
deloproizvodstvo 2, op. 76A, d. 1017 (1891). For a summary of the passport laws for mer-
chants, see Mysh, Rukovodstvo k russkim zakonam, 323-30.
31. G. B. Sliozberg, Pravovoe i ekonomicheskoe polozhenie evreev v Rossii: Politicheskii
kharakter evreiskago uoprosa (St. Petersburg: Elektropechatnaia Levenshteina, 1907), 99.
32. RGIA, f. 821, op. 133, d. 792, II. 16-16b (1900-1914).
 Movement and Residence [ 95

trators found it much more difficult to contain the territorial movement of

Jews than in the first half of the nineteenth centuryY For police officials
and municipal administrators, making sense of all the laws on movement
and residence-in order to determine the exact social identity of the in-
dividual, establish residence rights, and issue expulsion notices-was no
easy task. Imperial law clearly spelled out what specific social categories
of Jews could leave the pale, but numerous exceptions limited the precise
locations they could settle. One popular manual on the legal status of
Jews in the Russian Empire devoted over forty pages to explaining the pe-
culiarities of the laws on Jewish movement and residence. 34 Cities such as
Riga, Nikolaev, Sevastopol, Kiev, Moscow, and Yalta; provinces such as
Kuban, Kurland, and Tersk; and territories such as the Caucasus, Turke-
stan, and Siberia all had their own peculiar statutes and special privileges
governing Jewish residence, on either a temporary or a permanent basis. 35
As a result of all these highly restrictive laws, Jews became the focus of
intense police surveillance, frequent roundups, and massive deportations
to their permanent places of residence in the last two decades of the nine-
teenth century.

III

After the assassination of Alexander II, the laws governing Jewish move-
ment and residence increased in numbers and severity. On August 14, 18 81,
Alexander III issued a temporary general edict known as the Ordinances
on Measures for the Preservation of the State Order and Public Tranquil-
ity, which was designed to reinforce security by granting police the right to
arrest or detain any person suspected of perpetrating state crimes. 36 A year
later, as the autocracy found itself in a state of political crisis, the Russian
government passed more temporary legislation to restore tranquility in the
countryside. By permitting permanent residence only in urban localities, the
so-called May Laws attempted to pacify popular rage by drawing distinct
boundaries between Jews and peasants and limiting the Jewish capitalist ex-
ploitation of the peasantry. The May Laws targeted some 580,000 Jews who

33. Obshchaia zapiska, cxxi-cxxii.

34. Mysh, Rukovodstvo k russkim zakonam o evreiakh, 102-46.
35. The contradictions in the statutes governing Jewish residence, on either a temporary or
permanent basis, received much attention from legal scholars. See, for example, Mysh, Ruko-
vodstvo k russkim zakonam o evreiakh, 264-322; and Ignatov, Ustav o pasportakh, 121-57.
36. On the security law of 1881, see Jonathan W. Daly, Autocracy under Siege: Security
Police and Opposition in Russia, 1866-1905 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press,
1998), 33-40.
96 I jews and the Imperial State

were officially counted as residents of rural settlements, but only those who
had settled in the countryside after May 3, 1882, were actually expelledY
After the passage of the May Laws, thousands of Jews who resided in
the countryside inundated provincial governors and governors-general with
various appeals, complaints, and petitions after they were issued expulsion
notices. 38 On those occasions when Jews felt that police officials or pro-
vincial administrators had violated their right of residence, they filed legal
justifications to protest against the arbitrary workings of the police system
and justify why they should remain in their homes. Citing the applicable
statutes, Jews filed petition after petition in hopes of either delaying or re-
versing the edicts of expulsion. "The Senate was compelled over and over
again to pass upon the appeals of illegally deported Jews and to enter into
an examination of all kinds of hair-splitting questions involved in the ma-
nipulation of the anti-Jewish laws by the lower courts," the historian and
contemporary observer Simon Dubnow remarked. 39 According to Henrikh
Sliozberg, the assistant counsel to the Ministry of the Interior and a legal
expert on the petitioning process, the petitions did not save Jews from ex-
pulsions when "provincial administrators determined that the Jew in ques-
tion did not have residence privileges as established by the law." But if the
petition happened to reach the Senate and the highest court in the empire
ruled in the petitioner's favor, the decision provided an important precedent
for future cases. 40
At the same time that provincial police officials determined which Jews
could remain in the countryside, peasants used the May Laws to their own
advantage by settling old scores and expelling their economic competitors. 41
For instance, in Velikii Cherniatin, a small village located in Kiev Province,

37. On laws regulating Jewish residence and movement within the Pale of Settlement, see
Mysh, Rukovodstvo k russkim zakonam o evreiakh, 102-46; Rogger, Jewish Policies and
Right-Wing Politics, 145; and Amelia Glaser, "Sunday Morning in Balta: Reading the May
Laws as a Redemptive Narrative," East European Jewish Affairs 37 (2007): 299-317. See also
Lowe, Tsars and the Jews, 62-76.
38. John D. Klier, "What Exactly Was a Shtetl?" in The Shtetllmage and Reality: Papers of
the Second Mendel Friedman International Conference on Yiddish, ed. Gennady Estraikh and
Mikhail Krutikov (Oxford: Legenda, 2000), 27.
39. Simon Dubnow, History of the Jews in Russia and Poland from the Earliest Time until
the Present Day, trans. I. Friedlander, 3 vols. (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of Ame-
rica, 1916-1920), 3:17.
40. G. B. Sliozberg, De/a minuvshikh dnei: Zapiski russkago evreia, 3 vols. (Paris, 1933-
1934), 2:13-15 (quotation on p. 13). For an analysis of Sliozberg's role in the petitioning
process, see Nathans, Beyond the Pale, 326-27. For an example of a petition that Sliozberg
presided over, see TsDIAK, f. 442, op. 635, d. 219 (petition from Shmul' Shusterman to delay
expulsion).
41. Provincial authorities expelled Jews whose names did not appear in a special list com-
piled by provincial administrators and who were unable to document that they had permanent
residence rights in the countryside before May 1882. Sliozberg, De/a minuvshikh dnei, 2:25.
 Movement and Residence I 97

several peasants requested that provincial administrators expel the forty-

two-year-old Jew Mendel-Khaim Gershov Piskun from the countryside
because of his "exploitative" behavior. The peasants argued that Piskun,
who worked for the landowner of the village, had marked up the price of
the transfer of beets, decreased their salaries, demanded unnecessary and
exorbitant payments, borrowed a hundred rubles from a certain Maksim
Omel'chuk without ever repaying his debt, and manipulated another neigh-
bor, Nikifor Fedoruk, out of a thousand rubles, which he used to purchase
livestock. In response to the complaint, Piskun denied all the charges against
him. "I don't owe a single kopek to any of these peasants," he wrote in his
complaint to the governor-general of Kiev, Podolia, and Volynia. "They [the
peasants] stirred up against me in order to extort money from me." Since
Piskun had settled in the village twenty-two years earlier-that is, long be-
fore the May Laws had been enacted-and since all his papers were in proper
order, the governor-general allowed the Jew to remain in the countryside. 42
Most Jews were not as lucky as Mendel Piskun, and the expulsions of
thousands gradually decreased the absolute presence of Jews in the country-
side.43 By the turn of the twentieth century, only a fraction of the total Jew-
ish population resided there. Although physical segregation had failed to
create the ideal divide between village and town and Jew and peasant that
authorities had envisioned when the May Laws were first legislated, the
imperial administration's endeavor to create an urban, segregated Jewish
community seemed to have had limited success. 44 Approximately 82 per-
cent of Jews in the Pale of Settlement lived in settlements categorized either
as a city (gorod) or a small market town (mestechko). Even though both
of these categories remained fluid, around 33 percent of Jews made their
home in communities of five hundred residents or more, while the allure of
the city and the forced modernization of the imperial economy ensured that
almost half of all Russian Jews (49 percent) lived in, or moved to, urban
settlements with a population of ten thousand or more. 45

42. TsDIAK, f. 442, op. 633, d. 109, II. 1-2b, 14 (1903).

43. At the same time that Jews relocated to urban communities, peasants also abandoned
villages for many of the same cities that attracted Jews. According to the 1897 census, almost
half of the urban population consisted of peasants. Moon, "Peasant Migration," 345-46.
44. This is not to suggest that the urbanization of Russian Jewry should be fully attributed
to the state's policies on settlement and resettlement.
45. B. D. Brutskus, Statistika evreiskogo naseleniia: Raspredelenie po territorii, demogra-
ficheskie i kul'turnye priznaki evreiskago naselenie po dannym perepisi 1897 g. (St. Peters-
burg: Evreiskoe kolonizatsionnoe obshchestvo, 1909), 2; and Hans Rogger, Jewish Policies and
Right-Wing Politics in Imperial Russia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 146. In
1904, the Senate finally ruled that certain useful categories of Jews could remain in the country-
side: merchants of the first and second guild, artisans, individuals who had graduated from in-
stitutions of higher education, dentists, medical assistants, and other nonarrisanal professionals
98 I Jews and the Imperial State

The widespread poverty in the western borderlands forced many of the

less privileged and economically disadvantaged Jews to travel clandestinely
to the larger towns and cities in hopes of earning a better living. Munici-
pal authorities in St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Kiev reported that consider-
ably more Jews lived in all three cities than were documented by either city
or police censuses. In hopes of decreasing illegal migration, police officials
began to keep lists of Jewish artisans-by far the largest social estate group
allowed to leave the pale-which were used to conduct random passport
checks and to expel Jews from places where they were prohibited from
residing. 46 The expulsions of Jews coincided with a more vigilant reinforce-
ment of security in the provinces, districts, and cities that Alexander III
deemed especially vulnerableY In some of the most populated cities of the
empire, Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Kiev, gendarmes conducted random
passport checks and issued numerous expulsion notices. 4 g
Over the course of the 1880s and 1890s, authorities targeted large num-
bers of Jews who masked their social identity to evade residence laws and
never bothered to engage in any "worthwhile pursuits. " 49 One of these Jews,
Vul'f Levin, owned a small workshop in St. Petersburg and lived with his
wife and two children in house number 71 on Bol'shaia Sadovaia Street.
According to a police report, Levin did not practice his craft and instead
used the workshop to hand out work permits to his fellow Jews who re-
sided in St. Petersburg without interior residence privileges. As it turned
out, Levin allowed a "large number" of the fugitives to live in his house,
using the workshop as a cover to "engage in petty black market affairs,
while making an especially handsome profit from buying and selling goods
at auctions." After seven years had passed, the police finally expelled Levin
from the St. Petersburg artisanal guild and deported the entire family to

such as bricklayers, stonemasons, carpenters, plasterers, gardeners, bridge workers, and canal
laborers. Sliozberg, Pravovoe i ekonomicheskoe polozhenie evreev, 86.
46. For the lists, see TsDIAK, f. 442, op. 534, d. 87, ll. 44-80 (1881); TsGIA-SPb, f. 223,
op. 3, d. 15 (1885-1893); and GARF, f. 102, deloproizvodstvo 2, op. 59, d. 14, chast' 6, L. A, 11.
32-34 (1902).
4 7. Eight out of the ten provinces that Alexander III declared in a state of reinforced secu-
rity were located in the Pale of Settlement, that is, in an area with a sizable Jewish population.
Daly, Autocracy under Siege, 36, 40.
48. The 1880s was the only decade in which the Jewish population in St. Petersburg de-
clined. Nathans, Beyond the Pale, 97-98. In St. Petersburg, for example, between 1884 and
1895 approximately four thousand individuals were expelled each year for nonpolitical crimes
(about forty thousand people in total). On mass expulsion in St. Petersburg, see Daly, Autocracy
under Siege, 36-40. On transience and mobility in Moscow and St. Petersburg, see James H.
Bater, "Transience, Residential Persistence, and Mobility in Moscow and St. Petersburg, 1900-
1914," Slavic Review 39 ( 1980): 239-54.
49. TsGIA-Sl'b, f. 965, op. 1, d. 14, I. 6 (1882).
 Movement and Residence I 99

the Pale of Settlement. 50 In a similar fashion, Rakhel Erozalimskaia was

expelled for renting rooms to prostitutes and engaging in numerous profi-
teering schemes. 5 1 The St. Petersburg police gave David Sherman four days
to leave the capital or risk deportation for masking his social identity. Only
one day before he was scheduled for deportation, Sherman pleaded with
authorities to allow him to remain in the city since "he has always worked
(and continues to work) as a tailor." The St. Petersburg police denied Sher-
man's request, sentencing him to jail approximately twelve days after he
failed to leave the city on his own. 52
Maksim Efimovich Livgindov denounced his Jewish neighbor Samuil As-
sakovich Suval'skii (who also went by the name Shmuel Ivanovich) as a
con artist who masqueraded as a shop assistant but in reality worked as an
underground advocate (podpol'nyi advokat). Livgindov pointed out that
someone should pay attention to this gesheft makher (wheeler and dealer),
who "should have been deported from the capital long ago" for writing
fictitious petitions and offering bad legal advice. Shortly after the denun-
ciation, the St. Petersburg police confiscated Suval'skii's passport, prohib-
ited the charlatan from practicing law, and ordered him and his family to
return to Volynia within seven days. Yet Suval'skii did not leave the capi-
tal, nor did he stop offering legal advice and writing petitions. In his own
appeal, written a few days after he first appeared at the precinct, Suval'skii
noted that he worked as a distinguished lawyer in the city and drummed up
so much business that he had even hired several professional clerks to work
for him. For the next four years, Suval'skii resorted to writing multiple
petitions, complaints, and appeals, a legal tactic that succeeded in postpon-
ing his deportation from the capital. While the St. Petersburg authorities
reviewed the case, Suval'skii remained in the capital and continued to work
as an underground street advocate. Approximately four years after the first
expulsion notice, the Senate finally ruled that Suval'skii did not enjoy the
right to reside in the capital, and it therefore deported the trickster to the
Pale of Settlement without further appeal. 5 3
On March 28, 1891, the Moscow police issued one of the most devastat-
ing expulsion edicts to date, forcibly removing all Jewish artisans from the
city limits. Their targets were not just disorderly and disruptive persons. 54
They also expelled individuals such as Faibus Chertov, a shoemaker who

50. TsGIA-SPb, f. 965, op. 1, d. 25, 11. 1-1b, 17-18b (1877-84).

51. TsGIA-SPb, f. 965, op. 1, d. 279,!. 2 (1891).
52. TsGIA-SPb, f. 965, op. 1, d. 138 (1888). For other examples, see TsGIA-SPb, f. 965,
op. 1, d. 85 (1882-1886); and TsGIA-SPb, f. 861, op. 1, d. 1238, II. 3, 16-17 (1877).
53. TsGIA-SPb, f. 965, op. 1, d. 19, II. 2,11-12,91-92,97 (1883-1887).
54. L. L'vov [L. M. Kliachko], Za kulisami starogo rezhima: Vospominaniia zhurnalista
(Leningrad: Avt., 1927), 3.
 -- ,.-

r . ......

--
Figure 4. -This is how we greet Moses Mendelssohn from Berlin.-And this is how we
greet Moshka Mendelssohn from Berdichev. Source: Vampir (1906).
 Movement and Residence I 101

earned around fifteen rubles a month, rarely left his neighborhood, and
led a modest and respectable Iife. 55 After the 1891 expulsions, the Jewish
population in Moscow declined by nearly 80 percent, with only around
eight thousand Jews remaining in the city (according to the 1897 census). 56
Some of the Jews deported from Moscow returned to the Pale of Settle-
ment, while many others settled illegally in neighboring provinces. After an
"excessive influx" of refugees appeared in Vladimir Province, the governor
recommended employing the most stringent measures to make sure that
these individuals did not take up residence in the region. According to a
police report, many of the Jews who were expelled from Moscow, such as
Aleksandr Osipov Gefter, refused to engage in worthwhile pursuits, spent
their time in the seediest parts of town among swindlers and tricksters, mis-
represented their identity every chance they could, worked in only the most
disreputable jobs, and lacked all moral conviction. 5 7
In Kiev, a city located in north-central Ukraine along the Dnieper River
and in the very heart of the Pale of Settlement, authorities faced the ar-
duous task of identifying Jews by their social status while containing the
Jewish population to the two districts of the city, Lybid and Plosk, where
residence was permitted to them. To reside in any other part of the city,
Jews needed to obtain special permission from the state. 58 Ivan Tomashenko
denounced Avrum Shliomov Staviskii (also known as Abram Solomonov)
for not working either as a craftsman or a trader but earning a considerable
amount of money by carrying out underhanded, dirty tricks. According to
Tomashenko, Staviskii was so skillful at his escapades that police found
it nearly impossible to catch and arrest him. A certain Luka Zolotushko
also denounced Staviskii for engaging in dishonest operations, hiring illegal
laborers to work for him, and extorting thousands of rubles each month
from his fellow Jewish competitors through various threats and accusations.
Zolotushko claimed that Staviskii earned so much money that he was able
to reside on Bol'shaia Zhitomirskaia Street, in the most fashionable district
of Kiev, while galloping around the city on expensive horses to flaunt his
wealth. In May 1882, the governor of Kiev requested that Staviskii and his

55. GARF, f. 63, op. 11, d.159 (1891).

56. M. S. Kupovetskii, "Evreiskoe naselenie Moskvy (xv-xx vv.)," Etnicheskie gruppy
v gorodakh evropeiskoi chasti SSSR, ed. I. I. Krupnik (Moscow: Akademiia nauk SSSR,
1987), 64.
57. GARF, f. 102, deloproizvodstvo 2, op. 59, d. 100, chast' 100, II. 36, 71-71b (1902).
58. For examples of such petitions, see TsDIAK, f. 442, op. 535, d. 77 (Aaron Arkin, mer-
chant of the first guild, 1882); and TsDIAK, f. 442, op. 534, d. 258 (Saul Rozenkrants, student,
1881). On Kiev as a frontier city, see Natan Meir, "From Pork to Kapores: Transformation in
Religious Practice among the Jews of Late Imperial Kiev," Jewish Quarterly Review 97 (2007):
618. See also Faith C. Hillis, "Between Empire and Nation: Urban Politics, Community, and
Violence in Kiev, 1863-1907'' (PhD diss., Yale University, 2009).
102 I Jews and the Imperial State

family relocate to either the Lybid or Plosk district, but Staviskii quickly
responded by claiming that his wife could not move on account of poor
health. Serving as expert witnesses, doctors Finkel' and Podrezanov testified
that Staviskii's sick wife was indeed suffering from hysteria and an inflam-
mation of the lungs and could not relocate under any circumstances. Only
a few months after issuing the relocation order, the governor learned that
Staviskii had been sentenced eight years previously for breaking the law,
and on the basis of this information, he deprived Staviskii of all special
privileges, including the right of ever returning to the city. Staviskii paid no
attention to the governor's order, however, and continued to travel to the
city "quite frequently" (davol'no chasto) on business, renting a furnished
room on the outskirts of town in hopes of hiding from the watchful eye of
the police. 59
As a result of widespread illegal migration in Kiev, the mass circula-
tion press published numerous stories of Jews' transgressing the laws on
residence. 60 "At the present moment," Kievlianin reported, "Jews engage
in scams and cover-ups to evade the laws on residence and movement. " 61
"Two years have already passed since Kiev police officials have employed
the most stringent measures to expel Jews from Kiev who dwell in all sorts of
seedy hangouts without proper residence permits," Novorossiiskii telegraf
reported in 1888. According to the newspaper report, the recent police sur-
veillance had made Jews even more cautious and timid, forcing them to
resort to all sorts of tricks to evade the law: "There is reason to believe that
many Jews have begun to look for nighttime shelters in the homes of their
coreligionists, making surveillance and any arrests problematic." Periodi-
cally, the police inspected dozens of suspicious homes without finding even
one illegal resident. "And only due to a chance encounter," the journalist
pointed out, "police were able to uncover a secret hideout overflowing with
fugitive Jews." In one of these seedy places in the Plosk district, authorities
arrested fifteen Jews who had hidden from the police in an attic. 62 As one
commentator suggested, the total number of Jews residing in Kiev should
not be judged by official statistics but rather by the pounds of kosher meat
consumed and by the number of chickens slaughtered (kapores) on the eve
of Yom Kippur. Although the city census documented 50,792 Jews in 1910,
the consumption of some 10,777,560 pounds of kosher meat in 1908 and

59. TsDIAK, f. 442, op. 537, d. 16, II. 1-2, 3-3b, 9, 21-22,29 (1882-1884).
60. For an examination of some of these newspaper stories, see Michael E Hamm, Kiev:
A Portrait, 1800-1917 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 122.
61. Kievlianin 235 (1886), 1-2.
62. Novorossiiskii telegraf 4117 ( 1888), 2.
 Movement and Residence I 103

the slaughter of at least 36,500 chickens on the eve of Yom Kippur in 1910
cast considerable doubt on the official numbers. 63
Thousands of Jews also left the pale to work either in the gold mines or
in the soap, leather, and flour mills in the Siberian cities of Tomsk, Kainsk,
Ishmisk, Petropavlovsk, Tobol'sk, Omsk, Verkhneudinsk, and Irkutsk. Pro-
claiming Jews as the new proprietors of the city, the conservative Novae vre-
mia observed that Verkhneudinsk had suddenly transformed into a "new"
Berdichev. 64 Although Jews provided useful services that helped develop the
economic infrastructure of the regions, Siberian officials became alarmed
at how many of them were traveling without permits. Between 1887 and
1902 passport checks became a routine part of daily life as officials de-
ported (or attempted to deport) hundreds of families to their permanent
places of residence. 65 The deportations usually occurred very rapidly, and
Jews were given two or three days, sometimes as little as twenty-four hours,
to pack their things and leave.
In Siberia the expulsions contributed to the overall poverty of the Jewish
community. According to one contemporary observer,

From the point of view of "population transfers," the entire affair became quite
heartbreaking. The police threw around human beings, as they would throw
around dried logs. From Irkutsk, they deported Jews who were registered in
Tomsk, Eniseisk, and other towns in Siberia. Instead of these individuals they
brought in Jews who were registered in Irkutsk [and other places] .... Peasants
could not comprehend why a certain Isaak Abramovich was expelled from
the village N. and replaced by a certain Dovid Yakovlevich [who resided in a
nearby village]."r' 6

Not all of the population transfers were permanent, however, and some
Jews resorted to paying handsome bribes-or "tariffs," as they were called
on occasion-for the privilege of remaining in their homes. One police of-
ficial observed that for every Jewish household officially registered in Sibe-
ria, two or three members of the family either did not have official permits
or did not reside in their permanent place of residence." 7 Authorities may

63. "Kiev," in Evreiskaia entsiklopediia, 9:526.

64. Although the governor of Verkhneudinsk did not dispute the Novae vremia proclama-
tion, he attributed the presence of Jews to their prominent role in trade and commerce in Ver-
khneudinsk as well as in most towns in the Far East: "Jews are more prosperous, have better
commercial connections, more suitable to that line of work, and don't have much competition
from the surrounding population." See RGIA, f. 1284, op. 224, d. 229, I. 119 (1909).
65. Kal'mina, Evreiskie obshchiny vostochnoi Sibiri, 63.
66. I. Neiman, "Kak prikrepili sibirskikh evreev k mestam pripiski (1885-1893): Polich-
nym vospominaniiam," Evreiskaia starina 8 (1915): 383-84.
67. Viktoriia Romanova, Vlast' i evrei na Dal'nem Vostoke Rossii: Istoriia vzaimootnoshe-
nii (vtoraia polovina xix v.-20-e gody xx v.) (Krasnoiarsk: Klaretianum, 2001), 36, 38.
104 I Jews and the Imperial State

have tolerated the more useful labor migrants who settled without proper
residence permits because, as one historian has suggested, a "total cleans-
ing of the [illegal] Jewish population would have devastated the Siberian
economy. " 68
For the police, by far the most difficult aspect of carrying out expulsions
was the accurate and systematic identification of social status. While the
law of June 22, 1865, allowed guilded craftsmen and apprentices the right
to practice their trade in the interior provinces, it did not specify what pro-
fessions actually constituted artisanal work. "What is an artisan, what is
a craftsman, what is an apprentice?" the legal expert Sliozberg inquired. 69
Initially, the language of the law code was quite vague:

In one place they take away residence privileges from Jewish typesetters, in
another place they expel Jewish glaziers, and in a third place the question arises
whether a Jewish tobacco manufacturer or vinegar maker has residence rights.
As is evident from recent provincial newspaper reports, at this point in time the
question of the non-guilded Jew has become one of the burning questions of
the day, since many municipal administrators have decided to omit such a large
number of non-guilded trades from artisanal status, while deporting a large
number of individuals to the Pale of Settlement. 70

After the Senate deliberated over so many "tragicomic incidents," the court
ruled that people who engaged in work that required a certain amount of
knowledge and technical skill should be categorized as artisans. 71 Professions
such as printers, land inspectors, photographers, bridge workers, stonema-
sons, carpenters, plasterers, butchers, fishermen, and tobacco manufactur-
ers did not require enough skills or technical knowledge. By contrast, roof
builders, wood engravers, soap manufacturers, dental technicians, tomb-
stone manufacturers, sausage makers, corkscrew manufacturers, window

68. Kal'mina, Evreiskie obshchiny vostochnoi Sibiri, 71. In 1903, the governor-general of
Irkutsk, A. I. Panteleev, urged the governor of Iakutsk to ask all government agencies to com-
pile more reliable and complete population statistics of Jews. Panteleev reassured the governor
that the administration would not use the data to expel Jews who resided in the region wit-
hout permission or proper documentation but were engaged in useful pursuits. The data was
needed for more effective governance of the region. The circular has been reprinted in L. V.
Kal'mina, "0 pravovam polozhenii evreev Sibiri," Istoricheskii arkhiv 1 (2003 ): 161-62 (Tsir-
kuliarnoe pis'mo Irkutskogo general-gubernatora A. I. Panteleeva-Iakutskomu gubernatoru
V. N. Skripitsynu, 1903).
69. Sliozberg, Prauovoe i ekonomicheskoe polozhenie evreeu v Rossii, 88-89. See also Ob-
shchaia zapiska, cxxviii.
70. Nedel'naia khronika uoskhoda 29 (1889), 729. For other similar newspaper reports,
see Nedel'naia khronika uoskhoda 9 (1884); and Nedel'naia khronika voskhoda 42 (1887).
71. Sliozberg, Prauouoe i ekonomicheskoe polozhenie evreeu u Rossii, 88-89.
 Movement and Residence I 105

manufacturers, and watchmakers were bestowed with all the legal rights
and special privileges of the artisanal social estate. 72
In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, officials thus spent their
days not only deciding what trades could be categorized as artisanal but also
determining whether Jews actually practiced the trades listed in their work
permits. As the Ministry of the Interior increased the employment of po-
lice agents, gendarme officers, and other security personnel and as passport
checks became more vigilant, thousands of Jews were expelled for either
not residing in their permanent places of residence or not practicing the
trades listed in their work permits/3 "On more than one occasion, we have
described how masses of Jews carry false residence papers which allow them
to remain in Kiev," Kievlianin warned. "All of this means that Jews may be
listed as wine manufacturers, butchers, tailors, and cooks in their residency
papers but in actuality lend money at high interest and buy, sell, and deliver
various goods and products. " 74 Ber Geshelev Zagoviazinskii, for example,
moved from Mogilev Province to the Urals to attend the Krasnoufimsk In-
dustrial Institute. After receiving his mining certificate and gaining auto-
matic residence privileges in the interior provinces, Zagoviazinskii found a
job as a technician and then as a supervisor in a sawmill. At the sawmill,
he hired, fired, and managed factory workers, as well as bought, stockpiled,
and distributed lumber materials. Although Ber Zagoviazinskii possessed a
metallurgical certificate from a respected trade school, which allowed him
to reside in the Urals, he never practiced the trade and was therefore given
two weeks to relocate to his permanent place of residence in the Pale of
Settlement. 75
Something similar happened to Avraam-Aron Osherov Shapiro, who was
expelled from Kursk, a city located in the western part of central Russia,
for masquerading as an artisan when in reality he made his living buying
and selling paint, varnish, paintbrushes, wallpaper, and other similar items.
Shortly after his expulsion, the former artisan decided to reinvent himself as
a first-guild merchant from Bobruisk (Minsk Province) so that authorities
would have no reason to expel him from Kursk. As soon as he arrived in
the city, Shapiro spent his days speculating on the stock market and issuing

72. Mysh, Rukovodstvo k russkim zakonam o evreiakh, 212-22.

73. According to the high commission, not long after receiving permission to leave the pale
and settle in the interior provinces, Jews would switch to more traditional occupations such
as small-scale traders, deliverers of various small-scale goods, and moneylenders. Obshchaia
zapiska, cxxviii.
74. Kievlianin 203 (1882), 2.
75. Irina Antropova, ed., Sbornik dokumentov po istorii evreev Urala: Iz fondov uchrezh-
denii dosovetskogo perioda Gosudarstvennogo arkhiva Sverdlovskoi oblasti (Moscow: Dre-
vlekhranilishche, 2004 ), 170-72.
106 I Jews and the Imperial State

promissory notes at excessive interest while treating the respectable people

of Kursk in such an offensive manner that many of his Jewish neighbors be-
came alarmed. "Shapiro's line of employment," the Kursk governor noted,
"is in no way related to either trade or manufacturing, professions which
give Jewish merchants the right to reside and work in the interior prov-
inces." Not long after the second expulsion notice, Shapiro petitioned to
remain in the city while his two sons, Frederik and Grigorii, finished their
studies. Although Frederik and Grigorii received permission to remain in
Kursk, Shapiro was deported a third time. But the expulsion notice did not
deter Shapiro from returning to Kursk two months later, this time passing
himself off as a shopkeeper who had come to the city to purchase three hun-
dred pounds of hemp seed and linseed oil from a certain Pushechnikov. "It's
evident that Shapiro made the transaction with Pushechnikov to mask his
stay in Kursk," the governor concluded, "since Shapiro could have ordered
the oil directly from the manufacturing facility, just as Pushechnikov does,
that is, if he ever needed the oil in the first place. " 76
Shapiro was one of hundreds of expelled Jews who filed multiple petitions
in hopes of receiving either temporary or permanent residence privileges
while highlighting the arbitrary and unjust nature of the expulsions. One of
these petitions, filed by Srul Minevich, caused a public sensation after Kiev-
lianin reprinted the document and then published an expose that charged
the Kiev police with corruption and unethical conduct/7 On August 20,
1901, Srul Minevich came to Kiev to purchase goods on a temporary travel
permit. He explained that he could not return home that day because his
ship was scheduled to depart at eight o'clock the next morning, and so he
had decided to spend the night at a friend's house. At four o'clock in the
morning the Plosk district police awakened Minevich and immediately es-
corted him to the precinct, ignoring the travel permit he showed them. That
morning, the police also proceeded to arrest five other Jews who had spent
the night in the same house, even though they all had valid permits. Min-
evich and the other Jews stayed at the precinct until eleven o'clock in the
morning, at which time they were all transferred to the central police sta-
tion. Five hours later, Minevich was locked up with a group of shady crimi-
nals, fugitives, and thugs. During the next eighteen days, he was transferred
from one prison cell to the next until he finally managed to send a telegraph
to Rezhits, begging his relatives to send him documents that would verify his
identity and attest to his trustworthy and honorable character as a property
owner. "I never committed any crimes," he wrote, "but I still had to sit in

76. YIVO, RG 30, box 2, folder 17 (no pagination).

77. The case has been preserved in TsDIAK, f. 442, op. 631, d. 360 (1901). For a reprint of
the petition and the newspaper story of the Minevich affair, see Kievlianin 288 (1901 ).
 Movement and Residence I 107

prison for eighteen days, during which time I became physically sick and
lost a large sum of my earnings."
According to Kiev police records, the Minevich case was not an isolated
incident. In a short period of time, gendarmes caught, arrested, and threw
into prison hundreds of Jews who arrived in Kiev on a temporary basis
without proper travel permits. In 1900, the police arrested 721 Jews and
deported 125, and a year later they arrested 716 individuals and deported
196. 78 Kievlianin interviewed some of the most respected citizens of Kiev,
who all confirmed that "one can only imagine the types of things that went
on [that] August." At the landing dock, shortly after passengers stepped off
the ships, police officials rounded up entire groups of Jews. Since most of
the Jews did not have official permits that explained the reason for their
arrival and stay in Kiev, they were dragged off to prison unless they had
sufficient cash for a bribe: "The negotiations took place right there at the
docks: freedom could be bought and sold, but a prison sentence was handed
out for free." "One doesn't have to be a legal expert," Kievlianin concluded,
"to understand that authorities treat Jewish migrants in Kiev in an entirely
arbitrary and unprofessional manner. " 79
After the publication of the article, the governor of Kiev began his own
personal investigation of the Minevich affair. According to the first wit-
ness, an officer by the name of Rabets spent much of his time patrolling the
ship docks, where he not only detained suspicious Jews but also demanded
bribes from them. A second witness heard similar rumors that officer Ra-
bets frequented Jewish shops and arrested shop clerks, even after receiving
ten-ruble bribes from them. A third witness confirmed the rumors but testi-
fied that Rabets did not detain any Jews, nor did he ask for bribes when he
frequented the witness's shop. The governor proceeded to question the Kiev
police, but all the officers vehemently denied any wrongdoing: "The Jew
Minevich may have explained that he arrived in Kiev to trade goods on Au-
gust 20 and on the very next day the Kiev police had already detained him.
But this explanation is a figment of his imagination, since we have proof
that Minevich has lived [in the city] with his wife Khaia-Elka for around
two years, and that, during the course of this time, he gave grammar les-
sons to Jewish children and served as a cantor at the local synagogue. He
was spotted and arrested by the police because he spent nights at the syna-
gogue, while his wife lived in the home of a certain Beinysh Bershtein,
where she was arrested on October 31." After finishing the investigation,
the governor concluded that the Kiev police had not violated investigative

78. TsDIAK, f. 442, op. 631, d. 360, II. 16b-17b (1901).

79. Ibid.
108 I Jews and the Imperial State

protocols, but he nevertheless reprimanded officer Rabets for not showing

enough skill or experience in the handling of police duties. 80

IV

Over the course of the nineteenth century, police officials continued to deport
Jews who lived in areas for which they had no valid residence permits, who
resided within fifty kilometers of either the Prussian or Austrian border, and
who adopted fictitious personas in order to remain in territories where they
were prohibited from residing. The expulsions of Jews were never total, vary-
ing in different times and places, but they nevertheless became a permanent
feature of everyday life, with the intensity usually corresponding to the larger
political climate in the empire. At the turn of the twentieth century, however,
an important shift occurred in the strength and scope of the revolutionary
and labor movements. The working-class unrest and interethnic violence,
which broke out in the southwestern regions of the empire-especially in cit-
ies with large Jewish populations such as Odessa, Kiev, Kishinev, Nikolaev,
and Ekaterinoslav-were so unusually fierce that the disturbances threat-
ened to undermine the social order that the autocracy looked to uphold and
preserve. 81 Not long after the start of the Russo-Japanese War, and amidst
a growing surge in radical working-class militancy, the minister of the inte-
rior, V. K. Pleve, retreated from the vigilant policy of security reinforcement
by issuing a temporary moratorium on Jewish expulsions. He believed that
expulsions of Jews would only fuel more disorder and unrest in the empire.
In a desperate attempt to ease interethnic tensions and reduce the flow of
unnecessary movement of populations, temporary reprieves were given to
Jews who had settled in the interior provinces without residence permits and
were deemed neither harmful nor antagonistic to their neighbors, who lived
with expired permits, who had resided in their homes long enough to start a
family and acquire private property, and who had settled in the countryside
for what was termed an extended period of time. 82

80. Ibid., II. 18b-19.

81. Charters Wynn, Workers, Strikes, and Pogroms: The Donbass-Dnepr Bend in Late
Imperial Russia, 1870-1905 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 165-226. See also
Shlomo Lambroza, "The Pogroms of 1903-1906," in Pogroms: Anti-Jewish Violence in Mo-
dern Russian History, ed. John D. Klier and Shlomo Lambroza (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1992), 195-247; Robert Weinberg, The Revolution of 1905 in Odessa: Blood
on the Steps (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993); and Hillis, "Between Empire and
Nation," 331-417.
82. RGIA, f. 1284, op. 224, d. 136, II. 31-34b (1904); Antropova, Sbornik dokumentov
po istorii evreev Urala, 175-76; and YIVO, RG 87, file 971, folios 74644-74645. The impe-
rial administration issued a temporary relaxation of Jewish expulsions on other occasions as
well: April3, 1880; June 21, 1882; and July 26, 1893. Pleve viewed the Jewish problem as the
 Movement and Residence I 109

As soon as the printed version of the moratorium reached the provinces,

several governors found Pleve's language not specific enough and on occa-
sion even confusing. One governor responded in typical fashion: when were
Jews not harmful to their peasant neighbors? Another governor claimed
that most occupations allowed Jews to mask their exploitation of the more
culturally backward peasant neighbors, and for this reason alone, they de-
served to be deported to the Pale of Settlement. 83 While provincial adminis-
trators voiced concerns over the illegal settlement of Jews, many individuals
nevertheless took advantage of the opportunity to remain in their homes.
When Girsh Faktorovich appeared in Smolensk on two separate occasions
without a valid travel permit, he was immediately expelled each time. But
in March 1904, when the Smolensk authorities spotted Faktorovich a third
time, shortly after Pleve had issued the temporary law on Jewish movement
and residence, the governor felt that he was no longer authorized to issue
another expulsion notice. As a result of Pleve's temporary moratorium on
the expulsions of Jews, Faktorovich remained in the city for an unspecified
period of time. 84
Something similar occurred to the 120 families (about 600 Jews) who
were expelled from Kiev, first in 1903 and then again in 1906. When au-
thorities issued the second expulsion notice on April 16, 1906, more than
fifty Jews sent a collective petition to St. Petersburg requesting permission
to remain in their homes:

We have lived in Kiev since ancient times, some for twenty to forty years, and
others have been born and raised here. Until 1903, we were registered as arti-
sans. But provincial administrators excluded all of us from this status because,
they explained to us, we do not work as artisans. Since that time we have suf-
fered terribly.... In Kiev, where we have been married, raised our families, and
worked, we are considered illegal residents. Our dire circumstances led us to
petition the Ministry of the Interior in 1903. The ministry concluded that all of
us have resided in Kiev for a long time now, that we obey the law, that we can
indeed be categorized as artisans, and that we have always worked and con-
tinue to work as artisans. So we were allowed to remain in Kiev [until 1906].

"We are hardworking, family-oriented, honest, politically loyal, and eco-

nomically productive," they pointed out. "The imperial administration does
not have the means to resettle us. At a minimum, it costs fifty rubles to

second most important concern for the imperial administration (the peasant question took
first place, while the student and worker questions took third and fourth places, respectively).
On Pleve and the Jews, seeN. Rakhmanova, "Evreiskii vopros v politike V. K. Pleve," Vestnik
evreiskogo universiteta Moskve 1 (1995): 83-103.
83. RGIA, f. 1284, op. 224, d. 136, ll. 31-34b (1906-1907).
84. Ibid., l. 107b.
110 I Jews and the Imperial State

resettle a person, and with six hundred people, they'll need to come up with
at least thirty thousand rubles." This time St. Petersburg approved the peti-
tion, and the six hundred Jews were permitted to remain in Kiev, at least on
a temporary basis. 85
On March 4, 1906, Shpaer Lipa, Srol Rudin, and fifteen other members
of the Riga Jewish community sent a telegram to St. Petersburg requesting
to remain in their homes. Lipa and Rudin began their appeal by proclaim-
ing that "in these historic times, a new era has dawned upon Russia, a time
when the Duma has convened and the hearts of millions of citizens are filled
with bright hope, a time when the entire world has fixed their gaze upon Pe-
tersburg, while all of Russia's nationalities await the healing of old wounds
and newfound freedom." Yet they also lamented that the persecution of
Jews continued in Riga: "Here, as in times past, Jews continue to be ex-
pelled and victimized, and entire families are destroyed because they do not
have [proper] residence permits." While several honest and hardworking
men and women did receive residence permits after writing requests to the
Riga municipal authorities, many others did not. During the labor unrest
that accompanied the 1905 Revolution, the police usually left the Jews of
Riga undisturbed. However, as soon as the elections to the Duma were over,
authorities resumed their brutal work. At a time of economic insecurity and
political disorder, the Jews continued, "we are expected to throw ourselves
to life's fate and, along with our children, find a new place to live and a new
place to work." With such high levels of unemployment and such fierce
economic competition in the Pale of Settlement, especially after the recent
pogroms, an expulsion edict proved devastating to the Jews. "We are so
worn out, so full of bitterness, and so completely destitute," they pleaded,
"and it would only be fair to us-since the government is at this very mo-
ment deliberating over legislation dealing with the Jewish question in all of
its complexity-to cease any expulsions, at least for the time being." Shpaer
Lipa and Srol Rudin hoped that authorities would stop the deportations, at
least until the Duma voted on legislation that would potentially allow them
to remain in Riga on a permanent basis. 86
Two months after Shpaer Lipa and Srol Rudin sent their telegram to
St. Petersburg, the soon-to-be prime minister, P. A. Stolypin, looked into the
matter himself. After reading the request, Stolypin decided that any massive
expulsions of Jews in the empire should not take place until the Council of
Ministers met to vote on the legislation he was currently putting together for
review. In October 1906, Stolypin submitted a modest proposal that eased
residence restrictions in the interior provinces for those individuals who had

85. Ibid., II. 172b-173.

86. Ibid., II. 203-7.
 Movement and Residence I 111

worked in artisanal professions or been engaged in productive trade in the

pale for at least ten years. According to the proposal, the wives, children,
and other direct descendents of these traders or artisans would also be per-
mitted to travel and reside in the interior provinces on a permanent basis.
Although Stolypin did not attempt to enact far-reaching Jewish reforms,
his proposal was designed to ease the burdens of legal restrictions on their
property and on the right of permanent movement and residence. But as
with so many other reforms proposed by Stolypin, the Council of Ministers
rejected the legislation, and no new measures on the Jewish question were
enacted. 87
However unsuccessful Stolypin's efforts may have been at easing mobility
restrictions for Jews, the 1905 Revolution did mark an important turning
point in the tsarist policy on movement and residence for everyone else.
Although the internal passport continued to play an important role in po-
licing territorial movement until the demise of the empire, in the aftermath
of 1905, tsarist administrators no longer attempted to control mobility as
rigidly as in times past. After 1906, the vast majority of Russian subjects,
including peasants, were allowed to choose their permanent place of resi-
dence. "Every subject," the last edition of the Fundamental Laws of the
Russian empire read, "has the right to choose freely [his] place of resi-
dence and occupation. 88 According to the historian Charles Steinwedel, the
passage of the 1906 legislation "provided the legal basis for migration in
succeeding years, and ended, for a time, the state's attempts to control mi-
gration through compulsion and through forcible return of illegal migrants
to their homes." 89 As soon as the revolutionary upheavals subsided and
social order was restored, an unprecedented number of peasants began to
populate territories, such as Siberia and the steppe region, deemed desirable
for economic colonization, cultural development, and the long-term security
of the empire.
While tsarist authorities made travel and resettlement less burdensome for
the imperial population at large, St. Petersburg continued to instruct provin-
cial police to "establish the most stringent surveillance of Jews who traveled

87. On Stolypin and the Jews, see Abraham Ascher, P. A. Stolypin: The Search for Stability
in Late Imperial Russia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 164-74. See also RGIA,
f. 1284, op. 224, d. 136, II. 215-215b (1906-1907).
88. A. A. Dobrovol'skii, Svod zakonov Rossiiskoi imperii dopolnennyi po Prodolzheniiam
1906, 1908, 1909 i 1910 g.g. i pozdnieishim uzakoneniiam 1911 i 1912 g.g., 16 vols. in 4 bks.
(St. Petersburg, 1913), bk. 1, col. 9, art. 76, as cited in Moon, "Peasant Migration," 337.
89. Charles Steinwedel, "Resettling People, Unsettling the Empire: Migration and the Chal-
lenge of Governance, 1861-1917," in Peopling the Russian Periphery: Borderland Coloniza-
tion in Eurasian History, ed. Nicholas B. Breyfogle, Abby Schrader, and Willard Sunderland
(London: Routledge, 2007), 134, 141. See also Chernukha, Pasport v Rossii, 167-88.
112 I jews and the Imperial State

[throughout the empire] without valid documents." 90 As a reactionary con-

servatism gripped Russian politics in the interrevolutionary period, the "pre-
viously sporadic expulsions of Jews" from all the cities, provinces, and
territories where Jews did not enjoy permanent residency privileges "assumed
massive proportions. " 91 Reactionary journalists encouraged authorities to
limit the number of illegal Jewish migrants who traveled outside the Pale of
Settlement. 92 "What happened to the pale? Why does Russian law even bother
establishing the Pale of Jewish Settlement?" one conservative Russian newspa-
per asked its readers. "In Kiev there will soon come a time when all businesses
will be closed on Saturdays, while in Tashkent all the stores, shops, hotels,
pubs, restaurants, and many of the other establishments have signs with ei-
ther Armenian or Jewish names." 93 Other publications similarly described the
"infiltration" of thousands of illegal Jewish migrants in the interior provinces
of the empire. In Baku hundreds of Jewish soap makers were reported to
have registered in the artisanal guilds, but gendarme officials could not find
even one soap factory in the surrounding region. In El'ts the governor-general
of Orel Province reported that out of the 205 Jewish families residing in the
town only 40 were registered legally. And in Perm, authorities cited numerous
instances of Jews' refusing to return to the Pale of Settlement even after they
were issued repeated expulsion notices. 94
For Jews who were forced to relocate because they had seemingly violated
the laws on movement and residence, the expulsions had devastating, some-
times even tragic, consequences. Abram Sholomov Vainshtein, along with
other members of his family, received an expulsion notice for not practic-
ing the trade listed in his work permit. 95 Since September 1907, Vainshtein
had worked at a sparkling fruit-drink factory in Belgorod (Kursk Province),
where, he claimed, he had always fulfilled his duties "conscientiously and
punctually." After receiving an expulsion notice, Vainshtein proclaimed that
the police could easily have noticed if he had not been practicing the trade
listed in his work permit: "Vladimir Mikhailovich Machurin, the owner of
several different factories in the region, would never have given me a work
certificate if I did not work for him or if he did not think I was an expert in

90. Antropova, Sbornik dokumentov po istorii evreev Urala, 181, 184.

91. Lowe, The Tsars and the jews, 291.
92. In article after article, radical right newspapers such as Russkoe znamia, Russkaia zem-
lia, and Zemshchina described the illegal settlement of Jews in the interior provinces of the
empire.
93. RGIA, f. 1284, op. 224, d. 229, l. 82 (newspaper clipping of Russkaia zemlia
10186 [1908]).
94. Ibid., ll. 36, 126 (newspaper clipping of Groza 20 [1907]).
95. For other examples, see Antropova, Sbornik dokumentov po istorii evreev Urala,
173-216.
 Movement and Residence I 113

my trade." Vainshtein had come to work for Machurin from the neighbor-
ing town of Volchansk, where he had lived and worked since 1897, and not
from the Pale of Settlement. One day, however, for reasons unbeknownst to
Vainshtein, municipal authorities suddenly declared that he was working as
a contractor and not as a skilled laborer in the factory. "If authorities had
investigated the case in a thorough manner and if they had only questioned
Machurin himself, for whom I have worked as a skilled laborer in his spar-
kling fruit-drink factory, then they would have learned that I sometimes as-
sisted my son, Lev Abramov, who works as a brewer and an administrator
in a beer factory that Machurin owns." As a father who worked in close
proximity to his own son, Vainshtein felt obligated to offer help on those oc-
casions when time permitted. "I would never have interfered with my son's
work if my boss or the law had forbidden me to do so or if I anticipated
that my actions would have such severe consequences." For all the reasons
he outlined in his appeal, Vainshtein argued that authorities should never
have issued an expulsion notice in the first place, and he therefore asked to
remain in Belgorod and continue his work in Machurin's factory. 96
Risia Mendel eva Go!' dshtein was deported to the Pale of Settlement from
Sudzhe (Kursk Province), where she had lived with her cousin for over ten
years and sewed women's hats in a workshop. After Gol'dshtein was served
with an expulsion notice, she decided to move in with her parents, who
were busy raising five other children in a state of poverty in Chernigov.
"I've had to cry myself to sleep on many occasions as a consequence of
my pointless life," she wrote. "At times, I don't even have a daily piece of
bread to eat nor can I find work to earn even a kopek to sustain myself. 97
The elderly father Shaia-Abram Aizikov Krasil'shchikov, who had lived in
a neighboring town for about thirty years, had a similarly tragic story to
tell. Krasil'shchikov's son, Genukh, had received an expulsion notice about
a year after he took over the family's hat store business. "If my son gets
deported," Krasil'shchikov pleaded, "my entire family, which consists of
me, my wife, and our three young daughters, will be left without a liveli-
hood, since I am no longer able to work and we will be forced to close
down the workshop." If his son were not permitted to remain with the
family, Krasil'shchikov saw only two possible outcomes: he would have to
either commit suicide or else turn to a social welfare organization, because
he had no other means to support his family. 98 Leizer Markovich Kreps,
who worked in a sugar factory, also received an expulsion notice for not
practicing the trade listed in his work permit. Shortly after receiving the

96. YIVO, RG 30, box 2, file 15 (no pagination).

97. Ibid.
98. Ibid.
114 I Jews and the Imperial State

notice, Kreps wrote a complaint that demonstrated why the Kursk authori-
ties should never have expelled him in the first place. Once the complaint
reached the Senate, the court determined that Kreps was performing his ar-
tisanal work with distinction. The Senate not only approved Kreps's petition
but also pointed out that the Kursk provincial administration had violated
the most basic principles of the law on movement and residence when it
issued the notice. After the Senate ruling, Kreps continued to work in the
sugar factory and enjoy residence privileges in Kursk Province. 99
The voluminous and often contradictory statutes on movement and resi-
dence caused numerous hardships in everyday life-breaking apart entire
families and causing severe economic hardships, physical abuse, and even
death. The residency laws determined where Jews were permitted to study,
raise a family, work, and travel. "What will we eat, where will we live, if
our entire family gets deported?" the artisan Shmul' Shusterman pleaded in
desperation after his family was given three days to leave Kiev because his
artisanal certificate had not been filled out correctly. 100 The Jewish weekly
Evreiskaia nedelia claimed that expulsions were causing even more physi-
cal destruction and lasting psychological damage than the pogroms that
had swept the southern and southwestern regions of the empire. Individuals
who endured pogroms could remain in their homes, in a physical environ-
ment familiar to them. After a pogrom, individuals could count on the sup-
port of the Jewish community, continue their line of work, and gradually
restore their way of life. Unlike pogroms, however, expulsions uprooted
entire families and placed the expellees in entirely hopeless and devastating
situations. "Where should they go? Where should they resettle in hopes
that families could begin to start all over again?" For the vast majority of
the individuals affected by expulsions, Evreiskaia nedelia pointed out, such
questions could not be answered satisfactorily. 101 While the writing of mul-
tiple appeals burdened provincial administrative offices with unnecessary
paperwork-making it increasingly difficult for the state to effectively man-
age Jewish movement and residence-Jews petitioned to delay, contest, and
sometimes even overturn edicts of expulsion. 102 For Shusterman, as for so

99. YIVO, RG 30, box 2, file 16 (no pagination).

100. TsDIAK, f. 442, op. 635, d. 219, 1. 4 (1905-1906).
101. "Vyscleniia," Evreiskaia nedelia 6 (1910), 1-3. For a fascinating discussion of the
visual depiction of Jews in the right-wing press in the aftermath of 1905, see Robert Weinberg,
"The Russian Right Responds to 1905: Visual Depictions of Jews in Postrevolutionary Rus-
sia," in The Revolution of 190S and Russia's jews, ed. Stefani Hoffman and Ezra Mendelsohn
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 55-69.
102. The governor-general of Kiev, Podolia, and Volynia, for example, expressed frustra-
tion at how frequently Jews resorted to writing petitions in hopes of receiving a favorable
response from the state. TsDIAK, f. 442, op. 540, d. 35, ll. 10-lOb (1887).
 Movement and Residence I 115

many other Russian Jews expelled from their homes, the petitions worked
only when authorities determined that the expulsions had been conducted
outside the boundaries of the law.
No matter how brutal or capricious the expulsions may have appeared
to Jewish intellectuals and other contemporary observers, they nevertheless
stopped short of what scholars have termed "ethnic cleansing" practices,
that is, the forcible removal of an entire ethnic group from a given terri-
tory. In other times and places, to be sure, Russian authorities had engaged
in forcible resettlements of ethnic populations (for example, the Muslims
from Crimea and the Caucasus and the Nogays from Tauris Province). 103
By contrast, the imperial population policies did not attempt to completely
cleanse (ochistit') specific cities, provinces, or territories of Jews. Rather, the
laws were designed to contain Jews in their permanent places of residence
according to two basic criteria, social status and occupation, while restrict-
ing mobility according to the codes outlined in the general regulations on
movement and residence. As a result of these administrative policies, Jewish
communities, despite the restrictions, were able to form across all parts of
the empire. 104

103. Sunderland, Taming the Wild Field, 151-52.

104. For a discussion of ethnic cleansing practices in comparative perspective, see Terry
Martin, "The Origins of Soviet Ethnic Cleansing," Journal of Modern History 70 (1998):
813-61; and Norman M. Naimark, Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century
Europe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001 ).
 4
Invisible Jews
Conversion is a privilege, and there are financial benefits, too; some
people have made good money from it.
-S.AN-SKII, "Go Talk to a Goy!"

"I'll go and get my passport chalked, then I'll stop right yonder
inside the grille where you see those peasants with their packs. You
be there, and I'll back up against the grille, and slip my passport to
you through the bars, then you tag along after the crowd and hand
it in, and trust to Providence."
"But, oh dear, dear, your description and mine don't tally any
more than ... "
"Oh, that's all right-difference between fifty-one and nineteen-
just entirely imperceptible to that shad-don't you fret, it's going to
come out as right as nails."
-MARK TWAIN, "The Belated Russian Passport"

One summer day Mordukh Davidovich Ozeranskii appeared in Stavropol,

a city located in the northern Caucasus of the southwestern region of the
empire. Not long after his arrival, Ozeranskii found work as a freelance
journalist with one of the local newspapers. Several months later, in No-
vember 1910, a police officer asked to see Ozeranskii's papers and immedi-
ately deported the Jewish journalist once he found out that he was residing
in Stavropol without a proper residence permit. After receiving the expul-
sion notice, Ozeranskii asked for a few days to gather his belongings before
leaving the city for good. But instead of preparing for the trip, he decided
to pay a visit to the patriarch Semen Nikol'skii, who baptized him on the
spot. After converting to Russian Orthodoxy, Ozeranskii proclaimed that
he had been bestowed with full residence privileges. Reinventing himself
as Mark Ivanov, Ozeranskii not only resumed his duties as a journalist but
also started a new career as a public advocate, writing petitions and offering
legal advice to anyone who paid a modest fee for his services. In 1903, the
 Invisible Jews I 117

Holy Synod designed a law to discourage strategic confessional transfers by

forbidding baptized Jews from relocating outside the Pale of Settlement un-
less they had possessed residence privileges prior to their conversion. After
reviewing Ozeranskii's file, the governor reasoned that the Jew had no legal
right to reside in Stavropol and ordered the con man to leave the city within
twenty-four hours. 1
After the death of her first husband, Gol'da Mordukhovna Sinegubchik
left her two daughters with her mother-in-law, married a Jewish tailor with
residence privileges, and moved to Moscow. Once the Moscow police com-
missioner inspected the case, he determined that the sixty-nine-year-old
husband was "utterly unfit for married life" (supruzheskoi zhizni sover-
shenno ne sposoben), since the couple did not even reside together in the
same apartment. When questioned by the Moscow police, it turned out
that the old man was renting a corner of a dirty room and could not even
recall the names of either Sinegubchik or her children. On the basis of this
evidence, the police commissioner concluded that Sinegubchik had married
for the sole purpose of attaining residence privileges in Moscow, and he is-
sued an immediate expulsion notice. 2
The Great Reform era marked an important turning point for the Jews
of Russia. "By the 1880s," as the historian Benjamin Nathans has demon-
strated, "there were in effect two Russian Jewries: the mass of legally and
culturally segregated Jews confined to the Pale and a small but growing
number in and beyond the Pale whose integration into the upper reaches
of the surrounding society ... was proceeding far more rapidly than anyone
had expected.'' 3 For the vast majority of Russian Jews who did not have
permanent residence privileges in the interior, the pale symbolized a wall
that imprisoned them within the confines of a ghetto. Over the course of the
second half of the nineteenth century, tens of thousands of Jews manipu-
lated a system that was determined to restrict their movement, residence,
and career paths. Like many other administrative systems across the globe,

1. YIVO, RG 30, box 5, folder 108 (no pagination). On the 1903 law, see GARF, f. 102,
deloproizvodstvo 2, op. 76A, d. 1042 (1891-1903); TsGIA-SPb, f. 1883, op. 38, d. 28 (1903);
and Irina Antropova, ed., Sbornik dokumentov po istorii evreev Urala: Iz fondov uchrezhdenii
dosovetskogo perioda Gosudarstvennogo arkhiva Sverdlovskoi oblasti (Moscow: Drevlekhra-
nilishche, 2004), 103.
2. GARF, f. 102, deloproizvodstvo 2, op. 76A, d. 1948, ll. 1-lb (1900). Fictitious mar-
riages were a relatively common strategy for progressive women whose parents forbade them to
leave their homes. On fictitious marriages, see, for example, Barbara Engel, Women in Russia,
1700-2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 72; and Emiliia Pimenova, "By-
gone Days," in Russia through Women's Eyes: Autobiographies from Tsarist Russia, ed. Toby W.
Clyman and Judith Vowles (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 311-34.
3. Benjamin Nathans, Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 377.
118 I Jews and the Imperial State

the imperial Russian government relied on identity control procedures-

passports, permits, censuses, and other documentary records-to render the
invisible visible. 4 But identity papers not only authenticated; they also de-
ceived. Errors, omissions, and various forms of irregularities hindered the
state's ability to manage its expansive territories and identify the population
in a timely manner. By forging identity papers, offering bribes, arranging fic-
titious marriages, converting, and resorting to a host of other tricks to ma-
nipulate an unwieldy system of government, Jews continuously frustrated
the imperial bureaucratic gaze.

II

In Russia, as in imperial Germany or the Habsburg Empire, Jews usually

turned to Christianity as a last resort. 5 Hoping to improve their social stand-
ing and career opportunities, most Jews chose to convert for strategic rea-
sons-to alleviate the existential burdens of Jewishness, marry a Christian
spouse, work in the profession of their choice, attend institutions of higher
education, or receive residential privileges in the interior provinces. 6 Upon
conversion, Jews took on a legal identity as Russian Orthodox subjects (or
after 1827, as Catholic or Lutheran) and enjoyed, at least in theory, all the

4. On masking and the problem of reinvention of the self in urban settings, see, for example,
Roshanna P. Sylvester, Tales of Old Odessa: Crime and Civility in a City of Thieves (DeKalb:
Northern Illinois University Press, 2005); Sheila Fitzpatrick, Tear Off the Masks!: Identity
and Imposture in Twentieth-Century Russia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); and
Mark D. Steinberg, St. Petersburg fin de Siecle: The Darkening Landscape of Modern Times,
1905-1917 (New Haven: Yale University Press, forthcoming), chap. 3 ("Black Masks"). See
also Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture
in America, 1830-1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 33-55. On identity control
procedures, see Jane Caplan and John Torpey, eds., Documenting Individual Identity: The
Development of State Practices in the Modern World (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2001 ); Valentin Groebner, Who Are You? Identification, Deception, and Surveillance in Early
Modern Europe, trans. Mark Kyburz and John Peck (New York: Zone Books, 2007); and
Andreas Fahrmeir, Olivier Faron, and Patrick Wei!, eds., Migration Control in the North At-
lantic World: The Evolution of State Practices in Europe and the United States from the French
Revolution to the Inter- War Period (New York: Berg hahn Books, 2003 ).
5. See, for example, Marsha Rozenblit, Jews of Viemza, 1867-1914: Assimilation and Iden-
tity (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983), 132-46; Deborah Hertz, How Jews
Became Germans: The History of Conversion and Assimilation in Berlin (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2007); and Alan Levenson, "The Conversionary Impulse in Fin de Siecle Ger-
many," Leo Baeck Institute Year Book (1995): 107-22.
6. On strategies of conversion, see Michael Stanislawski, "Jewish Apostasy in Russia:
A Tentative Typology," in Jewish Apostasy in the Modern World, ed. Todd M. Endelman
(New York: Holmes & Meier, 1987), 189-205; and Todd M. Endelman, "Jewish Converts in
Nineteenth-Century Warsaw: A Quantitative Analysis," Jewish Social Studies 4 (1997): 28-59.
For a recent study that analyzes the difficulties of distancing after baptism by focusing on fam-
ily, gender, and marriage, see ChaeRan Freeze, "When Chava Left Home: Gender, Conversion,
and the .Jewish Family in Tsarist Russia," Polin 18 (2005): 153-188.
 Invisible Jews 119

civil rights of their new religious identity/ Conversion entitled Jews to the
legal right to leave the Pale of Settlement and work in the profession of their
choice. As the prominent and influential nineteenth-century legal scholar
I. G. Orshanskii once argued, conversion meant that all the constraints
(stesneniia) and restrictions (ogranicheniia) burdening Jews immediately
vanished. By law, conversion erased much of the discrimination Jews faced
in their daily lives-in the process improving their civil and material plight
by allowing them to escape from the professional, geographic, and social
stigmas attached to Judaism. 8
In 1890, the Ministry of the Interior became alarmed by the growing
number of insincere conversions and appealed to Konstantin Pobedonost-
sev, the procurator of the Holy Synod, to limit strategic confessional trans-
fers. "We are aware of numerous cases of Jews acquiring residence rights
beyond the Pale of Settlement by converting to Christianity," the ministry
reported to the procurator. "As soon as a Jew files a petition, he is granted
right of residence in a territory forbidden to him." From the interior minis-
ter's point of view, the state needed to limit these types of strategic transfers
by making Jews accountable for their actions. 9 Pobedonostsev could not
have agreed more on this issue. At a time when sectarianism, apostasy, and
insincere transfers challenged the moral-religious authority of Russian Or-
thodoxy, the church intensified its campaigns against heresy by tightening
censorship, reestablishing parishes, and restoring its status as the privileged
religion in the Russian Empire. 10

7. PSZRT, series 2, voL 2, no, 1360 (August 20, 1827).

8. L G. Orshanskii, Russkoe zakonodatel'stvo o evreiakh: Ocherki i izsledovaniia (St. Pe-
tersburg: Tipografiia A. E. Landau, 1887), 7-8, Drawing on early modern paradigms of the
convert as "traitor" or "lost soul," Orshanskii maintained that religious transfer constructed
an eternal wall that forever separated the newly baptized from their brethren. Orshanskii's
analysis of conversion, as his reading of Jews' legal status, served as an influential reference
for future commentators. However, an examination of newly available archival sources such
as petitions, government correspondence, and other materials written by and about baptized
Jews reveals the difficulties, frustrations, and tensions that these individuals experienced as
they attempted to break religious, legal, and familial ties to the Jewish community. For two
studies that generally follow Orshanskii, see John D. Klier, "State Policies and the Conversion
of the Jews," in Of Religion and Empire: Missions, Conucrsion, and Tolerance in Tsarist Rus-
sia, ed. Robert P. Geraci and Michael Khodarkovsky (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001),
92-112; and Eli Weinerman, "Racism, Racial Prejudice, and Jews in Late Imperial Russia,"
Ethnic and Racial Studies 17 (1994): 442-95. On Orshanskii's influence, see Nathans, Beyond
the Pale, 319; and Michael Stanislawski, Tsar Nicholas 1 and the jews: The Transformation
of' jewish Society in Russia, 1825-1855 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America,
1983), 5-7.
9. GARF, f. 102, deloproizvodstvo 2, op. 76A, d. 1042, II. 3-3b (1891).
10. On the position of Russian Orthodoxy in late imperial Russian politics and society, see
Gregory Freeze, The Parish Clergy in Nineteenth-Century Russia: Crisis, Reform, Counter-
Reform (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983); Vera Shevzov, Russian Orthodoxy on
the t:ve of Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); and Richard S. Wortman,
120 I jews and the Imperial State

While the Holy Synod was busy strengthening its moral-religious author-
ity, baptized Jews came under intense administrative scrutiny. In the last
decades of the imperial social order, the state introduced a series of new laws
to help divide converts from the core Christian population by making their
integration into Russian society increasingly difficult. 11 Even when baptized
Jews did everything in their power to break familial, communal, and re-
ligious ties to their past, Russian law maintained that the newly baptized
would continue to be recognized as Jews by their ethnic origin. "Alongside
the appellation 'baptized Jew,'" a noted legal scholar remarked, "exists the
somewhat offensive term 'apostate from the Jews."' 12 In an attempt to "re-
inforce the traditions of Russian Orthodoxy," officials marked the descrip-
tor "of Jewish origin" (iz evreev) on all official government documents such
as internal passports and service records. 13 In addition, as more and more
baptized Jews petitioned to change their last names-to erase what they con-
sidered the most visible and recognizable symbol of their former identity-
the state routinely denied these requests (reasoning that a formal name
change would only help baptized Jews mask their origin). 14 And in 1903, the
Holy Synod decreed that Jews were not allowed to convert and live beyond
the Pale of Settlement without first presenting documentary proof of their
residence privileges. 15 All these administrative measures were designed to
limit the number of strategic confessional transfers while making baptized
Jews more identifiable in the imperial social order.
As a result of a largely skeptical and mistrustful bureaucracy, baptized
Jews experienced estrangement and alienation in their everyday lives. For
those who had converted to Russian Orthodoxy, the descriptor "of Jewish
origin" or "apostate from the Jews" did much more than just reinforce re-
ligious ascription; it signified that baptized Jews would not be able to easily
escape their Jewish roots. "The internal passport has become one of the
most important mechanisms [by which the state] keeps track of Jews con-
verting to Russian Orthodoxy," the Ministry of Interior pointed out. The

Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy, vol. 2 (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2000), 2: 239-44, 525-26.
11. Hans Rogger, jewish Policies and Right- Wing Politics in Imperial Russia (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1986), 34-36.
12. M. I. Mysh, comp., Rukuvodstvo k russkim zakonam o evreiakh, 4th ed. (St. Peters-
burg: Tipografiia A. Benke, 1914), 39.
13. GARF, f. 102, deloproizvodstvo 2, op. 76A, d. 1969, I. 14 (1900-1905); and RGIA, f.
1284, d. 134, 11. 15-15b (1906). The law did not apply to Jews who converted to either Ca-
tholicism or Protestantism.
14. The politics of the name change, for baptized Jews as well as the Jewish population at
large, is analyzed in chapter 5.
15. GARF, f. 102, deloproizvodstvo 2, op. 76A, d. 1042 (1891-1903).
 Invisible Jews I 121

ministry viewed the documentary surveillance of baptized Jews as serving an

essential function for both religious and civil authorities. 16
Pavel Osipovich Eizenberg converted to Russian Orthodoxy on Febru-
ary 14, 1890. Five years later he married a Russian Orthodox woman,
with whom he had three children. For fourteen years, Eizenberg's passport
listed him and his family as Russian Orthodox. But in 1904, for reasons
unbeknown to Eizenberg, the Warsaw police commissioner sent him a
passport that was marked "Russian Orthodox, apostate from the Jews."
As soon as Eizenberg received his new passport, he immediately wrote a
petition to the Ministry of Interior: "I have read so many newspaper sto-
ries detailing the reprehensible moral qualities of the Jews that I decided to
do everything in my power to hide my true origin from my children, until
they grew up to understand for themselves that I am in no way related to
the people who are described in the newspapers. This way, I was not only
able to command respect from my own family, but also from my Rus-
sian Orthodox neighbors." Eizenberg found the descriptor so offensive to
his sensibilities that he asked the ministry to remove the words "apostate
from the Jews" from his passport. In this fashion he hoped to fix his iden-
tity as either Russian Orthodox or Jew, since no one had told him of a
"middleground" when he converted: "And if they had told me something
different, then I would have thought twice about converting to Russian
Orthodoxy. " 17
Dovid Vladimirov (formerly known as Rabinovich) also requested to
erase his Jewish origin from his passport. At the age of eighteen Vladimirov
had converted to marry a Russian Orthodox woman. Shortly thereafter, he
did everything in his power to distance himself from his Jewish past, but de-
spite his efforts, he continued to experience inconveniences in everyday life
because of his origin. At first, for both Vladimirov and his family, the sur-
name Rabinovich served as a painful reminder of their Jewishness. Hoping
to eliminate this burden, Vladimirov filed a petition to change his surname,
and the request was approved (this was surprising because, as we will see in
chapter 5, imperial authorities dismissed most name-change requests filed
by baptized Jews). But even after formally changing his name, Vladimirov
could not eliminate all public traces of his Jewish past, since his passport
was marked "Russian Orthodox, apostate from the Jews." For this reason,
he filed yet another petition, this time asking to have his origin erased from
the passport. Convinced by Vladimirov's larger worldly interests-by his
efforts to distance himself from his roots while living a life devoted to the

16. RGIA, f. 821, op. 133, d. 792, I. 16 (1913).

17. GARF, f. 102, deloproizvodstvo 2, op. 76A, d. 1969, I. 16 (1900-1905).
122 I Jews and the Imperial State

spirit of Russian Orthodoxy-the state also approved the second request,

displaying a rare sign of leniency and sympathy. 18
Despite official efforts to reduce the number of insincere confessional
transfers, Jews continued to turn to the baptismal font in order to bypass res-
idence restrictions. "There are plenty of cases of Jews converting [to Chris-
tianity] without ever abandoning their Jewishness," Grazhdanin reported
in 1888. "One day a Jew states that he wants to convert, and in a week,
sometimes even the next day, he is already baptized. " 19 "If a Russian priest
refuses to baptize a Jew," Novorossiiskii telegraf commented the same year,
"then all he has to do is travel abroad, convert, and return in a few days with
Lutheranism stamped in his documents." 20 Some Jews did in fact choose
to cross the imperial border to obtain baptismal certificates, but most of
them found it much more convenient to make a relatively short sojourn to
a nearby town. After the 1891 expulsion of Jews from Moscow, the artisan
Boris Petrov Greitser decided to make such a trip to receive a baptismal
certificate rather than relocate, along with his entire family, to the Pale of
Settlement. Once baptized, Greitser escaped the gaze of the Moscow police
for eleven years, since no one marked "of Jewish origin" in his passportY
The merchant Evgraf Mikhailov Sokolov (formerly known as Yanke!
Itskov Kagen) converted without ever fulfilling Russian Orthodox rites or
obligations. The archpriest Ioann Vissonov conducted two interviews with
Sokolov, quickly concluding that he would never be able to "redirect" him
to a new spiritual truth:

I had my first conversation with him [Sokolov] on June 27, 1886, the day that
he first came to see me; and the second conversation was on June 28. From these
conversations, I came to the general conclusion that, even though the merchant
Sokolov had been baptized, he never transformed himself into a true Chris-
tian, but continued to inhale that ... devilish belief system that distinguishes the

18. RGIA, f. 1284, op. 224, d. 134, II. 15-16 (1906). In 1906, in fear of losing converts to
other tolerated Christian denominations and in the context of the debates on religious tolera-
tion, the Ministry of the Interior began to consider the possibilities of doing away with the
uncomfortable and unnecessary marker of origin. Bur as with so many other modest (and far-
reaching) reforms proposed by Stolypin, the Council of Ministers dismissed the proposal. See
Abraham Ascher, P. A. Stolypin: The Search for Stability in Late Imperial Russia (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2001 ), 170-74; and GARF, f. 102, deloproizvodstvo 2, op. 76A,
d. 1969 (1900-1905).
19. Grazhdanin 263 (1888), 1.
20. Novorossiiskii telegraf4157 (1888), 2.
21. GARF, f. 102, deloproizvodstvo 2, op. 76A, d. 1801, II. 15-21b (1898-1903). Greitser
turned out to be one of a number of Jews in Moscow who chose to convert to Christianity
rather than relocate to the Pale of Settlement. "Obrashchenie v khristianstvo," in Evreiskaia
entsiklopediia: Svod znanii o evreistve i ego kul'ture u proshlom i nastoiashchcm, 16 vols.
(Moscow: Terra, 1991), 11:894.
 Invisible Jews 123

Jews-that is, those people whose lives are completely hopeless-and immerses
himself in the religious beliefs of the Jews.

Although Sokolov defended himself by arguing that he had been baptized

against his wishes at a very young age, the Ekaterinburg authorities nev-
ertheless concluded that the merchant should not be allowed to reside in
the Urals and enjoy the benefits of Russian Orthodoxy while "his soul
continue[d] to revel in his sweet convictions of a Jew." For these reasons,
and on the basis of article 184 of the criminalla w code, Sokolov was found
guilty of apostasy: of repudiating Christianity in favor of Judaism. 22
Until 1905, in order to uphold the privileged status of Russian Ortho-
doxy and delineate firmer boundaries among the empire's religious groups,
apostasy from Russian Orthodoxy to any other religion was strictly for-
bidden and subject to punishment under the criminal law code. Imperial
law thus upheld the privileged status of Orthodoxy in the empire. Those
who converted had to remain obedient and faithful members of the church
while raising their children to respect its traditions and teachings; con-
version to Russian Orthodoxy was both hereditary and unalterable. The
April 17, 1905, statute on religious freedom, however, allowed converts
such as Sokolov to return to Judaism. By 1912, 684 individuals had made
the decision to return to their former religion (a relatively small number in
comparison with all Jewish converts in the late tsarist empire). 23
Although the 1905 law on religious freedom certainly represented a lib-
eralization of the attitudes toward religious differences and liberties, the
vast majority of baptized Jews never took advantage of the opportunity
to return to the religion of their ancestors. The reasons had as much to
do with the individual circumstances that had led Jews to convert initially
as with the general predicament of Judaism and Jews in late imperial Rus-
sian culture and society. 24 As soon as baptized Jews returned to Judaism,

22. Antropova, Sbornik dokumentov po istorii evreev Urala, 384-86 (March 31, 1887).
For other examples, see GARF, f. 102, deloproizvodstvo 2, op. 76A, d. 2017 (1901-1902).
23. On the law of religious freedom and the return of baptized Jews to Judaism, see Eugene
M. Avrutin, "Returning to Judaism after the 1905 Law on Religious Freedom in Tsarist Rus-
sia," Slavic Review 65 (2006): 90-110. For a comparative perspective, see Paul W. Werth, "Ar-
biters of the Free Conscience: State, Religion, and the Problem of Confessional Transfer after
1905," in Sacred Stories: Religion and Spirituality in Modern Russia, ed. Mark D. Steinberg
and Heather J. Coleman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 179-99.
24. Although the decree of April 17, 1905, allowed individuals the freedom to return to
their previous creeds, article 3 of the statute made the process difficult and confusing for per-
sons who had originally belonged to tolerated, non-Christian denominations. The law did not
allow all non-Christians to return to their former religions, "only those individuals who were
formally registered as Russian Orthodox, hut who in reality continued to confess a non-Chris-
tian faith that they or their ancestors belonged to prior to converting to Orthodoxy." Baptized
Jews who wished to return to Judaism not only needed to prove th3t they or their "ancestors"
124 I Jews and the Imperial State

they lost the perquisites that had motivated them to convert in the first
place-namely, small monetary payments, professional and educational op-
portunities, and most important, interior residence privileges. Conversion
remained, in short, a highly strategic and calculated political affair. Why
would converted Jews choose to return to their religion if that meant they
would have to relocate once again (this time, from the interior provinces
back to the Pale of Settlement), disrupting a social world that they had
worked so hard to reinvent? Those who petitioned and eventually returned
usually did so after experiencing either personal or communal disillusion-
ment as Christians. For many of these returnees, conversion to Christianity
had not alleviated the burdens of their Jewishness or helped them avoid the
professional, political, and social stigmas of their Jewish origin. Many indi-
viduals petitioned, in other words, because the benefits they had hoped to
gain from conversion had dissipated. On the other hand, those who opted
not to return to Judaism continued to stand on the boundary between the
Christian and Jewish realms. They remained Christians more for mundane,
pragmatic, and perhaps selfish reasons than from internal religious convic-
tions. Christianity seemed to make their (and their families') lives more
bearable.
Ultimately, the law on religious freedom did little to relieve baptized Jews
of their innate Jewishness. In the late tsarist period, Jews continued to be
tempted by the mythologies of conversion-the belief that baptism was the
quickest and surest means of ameliorating their personal, familial, and pro-
fessional situations. But even if more and more Jews continued to view con-
version as a quick and painless escape from the stigmas of their origin, the
process of reinvention-of erasing all the symbols and signs of their Jewish-
ness-proved difficult and demanding. In everyday life, authorities and the
broader public continued to recognize baptized Jews as "Evrei Khristiany"
(or Christian Jews), a term that reflected the inherent difficulties baptized
Jews had in overcoming their innate ethnoracial traitsY As with converso
Jews of the Iberian Peninsula in the early modern period, the ethnoracial
term served as a powerful signifier of the fears and suspicions of Jewishness
that pervaded Russian culture and politics, on both an institutional and

(predki) were Jewish but also had to demonstrate that they had in fact continued to observe
their ancestral religion prior to the April statute. The law allowed only those Jews who had
converted to Russian Orthodoxy for "pragmatic" or insincere reasons to return legally to Juda-
ism (those persons who were considered nominal Christians).
25. On the development of racialized forms of Jewishness, see Eugene M. Avrutin, "Racial
Categories and the Politics of (Jewish) Difference in Late Imperial Russia," Kritika: Explora-
tions in Russian and Eurasian History 8 (2007): 13-40.
 Invisible Jews I 125

a popular level. 26 Conversion hardly erased the psychological characteris-

tics and physiological peculiarities that forever separated Jews and baptized
Jews from their many neighbors.
In absolute terms, the rate of conversion to Russian Orthodoxy remained
small, with only a small fraction of the Jewish population converting in any
given year, but in the last years of the old regime the numbers did begin
to growY Although conversion statistics are notoriously incomplete and
at times even contradictory, they do point to an overall rise in the rate of
conversions during the more unstable and repressive periods in the political
and economic history of the empire. In the early 1890s, Jews found baptism
an attractive option as the state introduced a series of new laws to restrict
the admission of Jewish students to institutions of higher education and
rescind residence privileges to artisans in Moscow. In 1884 only 554 Jews
converted to Russian Orthodoxy, but in 1891 and 1894, the Holy Synod
reported 1,178 and 1,254 baptisms. Between 1905 and 1907, the numbers
declined because of the promises and hopes for the law on religious freedom
and the October Manifesto; in 1905 and 1907, for example, only 685 and
579 Jews chose to convert. But with the rise of the political right, the esca-
lation of antisemitic violence, and widespread economic deprivation in the
Pale of Settlement, the conversion rates peaked in the very last years of the
old regime, as 1,128 Jews converted in 1909, 1,299 in 1910, 1,198 in 1913,
and 1,387 in 1914.28
If we take into account that Jews also embraced other Christian de-
nominations, such as Catholicism and various branches of Protestantism,
then the rate of conversion, from Judaism to Christianity, was even higher
(although still small in absolute terms). As in Warsaw, where a significant
number of Jews chose to convert to Protestantism over Catholicism, Mos-
cow and St. Petersburg Jews turned to Protestantism for the simple reason
that the conversion process was quick and painless; Catholic and Orthodox
priests usually required longer and more comprehensive prebaptismal ex-
aminations.29 "In the last few years," the Department of Spiritual Affairs of
Foreign Confessions reported in 1910, "an extraordinary number of Jews
have transferred to rationalistic sects [that is, Protestantism] and are now
officially registered as Christians. As local authorities have reported, the

26. Miriam Bodian, ""Men of the Nation': The Shaping of Converso Identity in Early
Modern Europe," Past and Present 143 (1994): 48-76; and Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, "Assimi-
lation and Racial Anti-Semitism: The Iberian and the German Models" (Leo Baeck Memorial
Lecture, no. 26, New York, 1982).
27. Klier, "State Policies and Conversion of the Jews," 109.
28. These statistics are taken from Vsepoddanneishii otchet ober-prokurora sviateishago
sinoda po vedomstve pravoslavnago ispovedaniia (1886-1916).
29. For Warsaw, see Endelman, "Jewish Converts in Nineteenth-Century Warsaw," 47-48.
126 I Jews and the Imperial State

transfers are not as motivated by religious convictions as they are calculated

efforts to escape residence restrictions. " 30 Evreiskaia nedelia similarly noted
that, "masses of Jews convert to Lutheranism in order to obtain [internal]
residence rights or bypass [some of the] other restrictions." 11 In 1908, the
Lutheran pastor Pavel Briushveiler baptized eighty-eight Jews in Moscow,
while two years later another eighty-five Jews transferred to Lutheranism in
the two capitals of the empire and at least ninety converted to some of the
other branches of Protestantism. 12
During the very last years of the old regime, Jews also chose to convert
to Christian sectarian communities, which flourished as a consequence of
the law on religious freedom. In Rostov-on-Don, the Evangelical Men-
nonite preacher Joann Oskarov Ebin distributed authentic baptismal
certificates after baptizing Jews on the spot. One of the more respected
members of the Jewish community, Yakov Vul'fov Vul'fman, conspired
with Ebin in his plot to "emancipate" Jews from the burdensome restric-
tions on residence. As soon as the pastor baptized a Jew, Vul'fman would
record the rite in his own private metrical book. On the basis of the false
vital statistics records, Vul'fman would then issue internal passports that
suddenly gave the newly baptized persons interior residence privileges
(presumably this elaborate network was organized in exchange for a tidy
sum of money). Eventually the Rostov-on-Don police uncovered the plot,
but over the course of two years, Elbin managed to convert eighty Jews,
while Vul'fman managed to issue at least fifteen internal passports. 33 The
Rostov-on-Don affair was by no means an isolated incident. According
to one police report, Jews overwhelmed the Ministry of the Interior with
petitions to convert to the newly legalized Christian sectarian communi-
ties, which became so popular in the first decade of the twentieth cen-
tury (the Anglican Church was among the favorites). 34 The most famous
of all the converts may have been the poet Osip Mandel'shtam. 35 Like
Mandel'shtam, who converted to the Evangelical Methodist Church in

30. RGIA, f. 821, op. 10, d. 273, I. 10 (1910-1915).

31. Evreiskaia nedelia 10 (1910), 9.
32. These numbers are compiled from the conversion lists preserved in RGIA, f. 821, op. 10,
d. 489 (1908); RGIA, f. 821, op. 10, d. 472 (1910); and RGIA, f. 821, op. 10, d. 490 (1910);
for other cases of conversions to Lutheranism in the Russian Empire, see RGIA, 821, op. 10, d.
473 (1910), and to Catholicism, see RGIA, f. 821, op. 10, d. 432 ( 1905-1906).
33. RGIA, f. 1284, op. 224, d. 432, ll. 24-29 (1909-1910).
34. RGIA, f. 821, op. 133, d. 740, I. 60 ( 1911-1916).
35. The motivation behind Mandel'shtam's conversion to Evangelical Methodism remains
obscure, however, since he already belonged to the merchant guilds and enjoyed residence
privileges in the interior provinces. On Mandel'shtam's conversion, see Michael Stanislawski,
Autobiographical Jews: Essays in Jewish Self-Fashioning (Seattle: University of Washington
Press, 2004), 86-87.
 Invisible jews I 127

Vyborg, other Jews left for Finland to be christened by a pastor who bap-
tized them on the spot, gave them a baptismal certificate, and did not
require prior knowledge of Christianity. One of these evangelical Finnish
pastors, a certain Artur Pirom, issued fake baptismal records to Jewish
students, who then used the documents to bypass the numerus clausus
established for institutions of higher education. The pastor was caught,
tried for forgery, and convicted. 36
Eventually, the Senate ruled, in 1915, that a baptismal certificate issued
by one of the Finnish pastors did not guarantee baptized Jews the same
legal rights bestowed upon all other Christian subjects in the empire. The
pastors had not only handed out the documents to Russian Jews without
ever certifying the identities of the individuals but also violated a series of
laws established by church authorities to regulate the very sanctity of the
baptismal rite. For these reasons, the Senate decided that anyone baptized
by the Finnish pastors had not undergone a conversion in the first place,
from either a civil or religious perspective, and thus should continue to be
recognized as a Jew. 37

III

Over the course of the nineteenth century, the masking of social identity and
the reinvention of the self by way of confessional transfer served as two con-
venient, if on occasion traumatic, strategies to escape the burdens of the law.
But in a system of government predicated on the economy of paper, Jews
could readily purchase fake passports; forge birth certificates, work papers,
and other essential documents; or as a last resort, offer bribes to expedite
the bureaucratic process. As the finance minister Count Sergei Witte once
put it, the contradictions in the laws themselves "provided abundant op-
portunity to bribe the very officials who administered the laws. The greatest
incidence of bribery in our administration is to be found in the enforcement
of the laws against Jews." 38
No other document played as important a role in expediting the business
of empire as the internal passport. Granting everyone the rights of move-
ment, residence, and political membership, it linked the individual with the
larger administrative and legal framework of the imperial system. For the
Russian government, the passport facilitated detective work by desegregat-
ing the population by individual component. Under these clear and direct

36. TsDIAK, f. 707, op. 262, d. 4, I. 17 (1913).

37. RGIA, f. 821, op. 133, d. 770, II. 30-36b (1911-1916).
38. Sidney Harcave, ed., The Memoirs of Count Witte (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1990),
378 (Harcave's translation slightly altered).
128 I Jews and the Imperial State

legal principles, the Ministry of the Interior remarked, the internal pass-
port system should operate smoothly and efficiently. 19 But during the Great
Reform era matters turned out otherwise. In the mid-1870s, a counterfeit
passport (either of the internal or international variety) could be obtained
for as little as three to five rubles on the black market. 40 In addition, the
rise of the revolutionary movement created a robust demand for identity
documents, which allowed professional revolutionaries to easily escape po-
lice surveillance and travel freely within and beyond the imperial border.
Operating out of apartments, they used underground presses to print the
documents essential for conspiratorial activity-propaganda literature and
fake passports. Underground printing presses ensured that passports could
be produced cheaply and disseminated widely. 41
While passport irregularities, omissions, and inaccuracies plagued the
system as a whole, the most visible and recognizable perpetrators of such
nonviolent crimes as forgery, deception, and impersonation were Jews. Al-
though they were not overly represented in violent, nonpolitical crimes, the
High Commission for Review of Legislation Pertaining to the Jews of Rus-
sia observed that Jews did display a remarkable talent for resisting the law,
disappearing without a trace from their permanent places of residence, and
hiding in the homes of their coreligionists, circumstances that made Jew-
ish criminal statistics notoriously incomplete and inaccurate. 42 In Odessa,
a city known for its contempt for authority, Jews were overrepresented in
the dubious world of identity theft, fraud, and counterfeiting. In 1880, out
of 1,075 people who were tried for violating passport laws, 947 were Jews
(a remarkable 88 percent). And out of the 105 people placed under ad-
ministrative surveillance, Jews comprised slightly fewer than 50 percent. In
1886, they committed between 23 to 50 percent of all crimes involving inde-
cent behavior, impropriety, disrespect for authority and public tranquillity,
theft, and counterfeiting. That same year, Jews committed between 50 and
70 percent of all violations involving the tax on alcoholic beverages, customs
duties, and various other misdemeanors involving identity theft and appro-
priation. In addition, they committed between 70 and 100 percent of all

39. GARF, f. 102, deloproizvodstvo 2, op. 59, d. 14, chast' 6, L. A, 74 (1902).

40. RGIA, f. 821, op. 9, d. 94, II. 215-215b (1872-1880).
41. V. G. Chernukha, l'asport v Rossii 1719-1917 (St. Petersburg: Liki Rossii, 2007), 145.
42. Obshchaia zapiska uysshei kommisii dlia peresmotra deistuuiushchikh o evreiakh vim-
perii zakonov, 1883-1888 (St. Petersburg, 1888), 34-37. Arguing that the commission had
not taken into account social circumstances and geographical location, G. Vol'tka disputed
its analysis in an encyclopedia entry on Jewish crime in the Russian Empire. More important,
Vol'tka concluded his analysis by pointing out that it was the political and economic environ-
ment in which Jews lived, not a biological predisposition, that caused them to commit crimes.
See "Prestupnost' u evreev v Rossii," in Rureiskaia entsiklopediia, 12:907-10.
 Invisible Jews 129

crimes involving the evasion of military service, the nonpayment of taxes on

tobacco, violation of passport regulations, and various forms of fraud and
deception, including the production of counterfeit coins and banknotes. 43
In 1877, Yosel Minskin, who resided in the northern Russian city of Petro-
zavodsk and made his money in the wine business, had no problems procur-
ing a false passport that allowed him to remain in the city for over ten years.
On several occasions authorities attempted to close down his business and
prohibit him from working in Petrozavodsk, but Minskin disregarded each
notice, offering "payments" instead in exchange for new passports, each
under a different Christian name. As a result, Minskin not only acquired
enough capital to purchase a warehouse that he used for buying, selling,
and storing wine but also managed to build a full-fledged wine factory. Over
the course of a relatively short period of time, Minskin was able to earn a
considerable sum of money from his increasingly profitable enterprise and
employ at least twenty-three Jews, who, it turned out, did not have permis-
sion to reside in the city. 44
With the proliferation of false passports and identity theft in the late tsar-
ist period, the passport began to inspire doubt and scrutiny. 45 In the novella
"About the Jewish Passport," a Jew sold his identity to a Russian when he
left for Siberia. In a reversal of roles, the Russian protagonist asked his Jewish
interlocutor after procuring the passport, "And what about the distinguish-
ing marks-will they resemble mine?" "Why won't they resemble yours?" the
Jew answered thoughtfully. "Of course, they will." The Jew opened the docu-
ment and began to read: "Black hair, hazel eyes, medium mouth, typical nose,
no special marks. It's the spitting image of you." "Excellent, and the age?"
the Russian protagonist inquired. The Jew quickly changed the dates in the
passport. The Russian, however, was still not convinced. "But do I look like a
Jew?" The Jew looked at the Russian from head to toe and answered slowly:
"Jewish or not ... but excuse me, by God, you look like a Tatar. Just cut your
black curls in back and leave the front for side locks. Wear a caftan and
slouch, and you'll see you'll look just like me." 46 While passports, temporary

43. YIVO, RG 87, file 1055, folios 79103, 79126-79129. On crime in Odessa, see Sylves-
ter, Tales of Old Odessa; and Il'ia Vladimirovich Gerasimov, "Pis'ma odesskikh vymogatelei i
problema evreiskoi prestupnosti v Odesse nachala xx veka," in Istoriia i kul'tura rossiiskogo
i vostochnoevropeiskogo evreistva: Novye istochniki, novye podkhody, ed. Oleg Budnitskii
(Moscow: Dom evreiskoi knigi, 2004), 144-71.
44. RGIA, f. 1286, op. 38, d. 107 (1877). For other examples of Jews residing in the inte-
rior provinces under fake passports, see RGIA, f. 1286, op. 38, d. 92 (1877-1880).
45. On identity theft, see Harriet Murav, Identity Theft: The jew in Imperial Russia and the
Case of Avraam Uri Kovner (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003).
46. Ira Ian, "Po evreiskomu pasportu," Voskhod 8 ( 1903): 43. For other examples, see
0. L. D'or, "Pravozhitel'stvo," in Deshevaia iumoristicheskaia biblioteka "Satirikona" (St.
Petersburg: M. G. Korn'feld, 1911), 45-51.
130 I Jews and the Imperial State

travel permits, and other identity documents could be procured at the right
price, obtaining a document that matched the exact profile of the bearer was
not always easy. When the renowned revolutionary Pavel Axel'rod arrived in
St. Petersburg in the late 1870s without identity papers, his comrades feared
that the police would be able to distinguish him as a Jew by his appearance.
Although Axel'rod remained in the capital for several months, he frequently
needed to change apartments to escape detection because he did not have a
Jewish passport. 47
At a time when crime stories were gaining increasing popularity, the
mass circulation press published stories of scams, cover-ups, and forgeries.
The image of the renegade Jew became a prominent feature of the urban
landscape. 48 "The readers of our newspaper have observed," Novorossi-
iskii telegraf remarked in 1889, "that in the past two years Jews have been
repeatedly blamed for vagrancy and the exploitation of false passports." 49
Representations of Jews-as a highly visible but ultimately elastic presence-
also appeared in cartoons and caricatures on the pages of the mass-circu-
lation press and illustrated periodicals. Jews were frequently portrayed
as highly familiar and universal figures, engaging in scams, briberies, and
various forms of manipulative behavior in hopes of remaining outside the
grasp of the state (see Figure 5). The Jewish jokes that circulated at the turn
of the century also suggest that manipulation, imposture, and threats of
expulsions became an important part of the everyday landscape that Jews
inhabited. One joke related the futility of expelling Jews from the empire's
capitals. According to the story, a police official expelled a particular Jew
from one region, but as soon as he did so, the man quickly resettled in
another part of the city. After numerous attempts at expulsion, a group of
administrators and police officials finally escorted the Jew to the train sta-
tion, where he happened to meet a war general. "Where are you going?" the
Jew asked the general. "Abroad, on the highest orders," the general replied.
"And you?" "And I am leaving for the western provinces," the Jew replied,
"also on the highest orders." Similar jokes described how Jews masked their
social identities when the exchange helped them bypass the gaze of the po-
lice and remain in the capitals, while others recounted how forgeries, bribes,
and all sorts of manipulative schemes helped Jews evade police scrutiny.
On a routine document check, one police official asked a Jew what legal
right allowed him to reside outside the pale. "A residence permit," the Jew

47. P. B. Axel'rod, Perezhitoe i peredumannoe (1923; repr., Cambridge: Oriental Research

Partners, 1975), 304.
48. On crime and bandit tales in Russian popular culture, see Jeffrey Brooks, When Russia
Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861-1917 (Princeton: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 1985), 166-213.
49. Novorossiisskii telegraf 4455 ( 1889), 2.
 Invisible Jews I 131

Figure 5. The Warsaw Station in St. Petersburg. Source: Kar-

ikaturnyi listok 3 (1909).

answered."Where did you get it? " "From the Ministry of Finance." "Show
it to me," the policeman said. Once the official examined the document, he
was quickly satisfied-after he received a handsome imperial banknote. 50
A commission organized to examine the passport question reasoned that
the document "only complicates and hampers police work." Years of polic-
ing experience revealed that any individual who "desires to hide from police
surveillance can take a number of steps to procure [fake] documents, which
comply with all the standards of the law. These documents contain false
names and serve as [conclusive] proof of the person's identity. " 51 As a polic-
ing instrument, the internal passport was fraught with so many loopholes

50. "Anekdoty o evreiskom bezpravii," Evreiskaia starina 2 (1909): 275, 278, 280.
51. "Pasponnyi vopros," Russkaia rech' 6 (1880): 279.
132 I jews and the Imperial State

that the contemporary observer Petr Efimovich Shimanskii denounced the

entire system. First and foremost, Shimanskii pointed out that police offi-
cials encountered one misunderstanding after another when they attempted
to document individual identities, to "determine if an individual is in fact
that personality listed in his papers." According to Shimanskii, these types
of misunderstandings increased exponentially when police searched for
suspects in public gatherings or large crowds. Without a photograph, an
inspector was forced to rely on the personal descriptions recorded inside
the passport booklet to identify the suspect. Although authorities devoted
considerable financial resources and personal energy to tracking suspects,
Shimanskii felt that the investigations did not always produce fruitful re-
sults. The expansion of the railroad and the emergence of other forms of
public transportation only made detective work more difficult: criminals
were able to easily escape the gaze of the police by moving to and hiding in
any number of cities, towns, or villages armed with fake passports. 52
From the 1880s on, cities and towns located along the western border-
lands-such as Khar'kov, Vil'na, Odessa, Minsk, Kiev, Kremenchug, Poltava,
and Ekaterinoslav (all of which comprised significant Jewish populations)-
posed increasing threats to the internal security of the empire. In the bor-
derland regions, where territorial conquest, national agitation, and mass
movement of populations engendered social instability and political inse-
curity, authorities had a difficult time monitoring the comings and goings
of every person. Located at the intersection of railway lines, Poltava and
Kremenchug served as key entrepots for merchants, small-scale traders, and
peasants who traveled there to buy all sorts of goods and products, espe-
cially during the times of the great seasonal fairs. As a result of their strategic
locations, both Poltava and Kremenchug became important commercial-
manufacturing centers, attracting people from various parts of the empire:
some came from nearby districts, others from remote areas, and still others
because they had been expelled from one of the imperial centers. In 1891,
the Department of Police calculated that 43,500 legally registered souls re-
sided in Poltava, with an additional 3,000 additional domestic workers and
as many as 10,000 migrant workers who stayed in the city on a temporary
basis, while Kremenchug had 56,000 permanent residents, with a sizable
Jewish population that was "prone to frequent movement." By law, each
permanent resident had to inform the local precinct of anyone who stayed in
his home for more than three days, while hotel owners and individuals with
furnished rooms and any other temporary lodging had to report itinerant
travelers within twelve hours of their arrival. In practice, the Department

52. GARF, f. 102, deloproizvodstvo 2, op. 43, d. 343 (1886).

 Invisible Jews 133

of Police observed that large numbers of travelers were never reported, and
police officials in cities such as Poltava and Kremenchug found it nearly
impossible to keep track of them. 53
Kiev, a city that flourished as a result of its vibrant commercial activities
and manufacturing enterprises, attracted Jews from all parts of the south-
western regions of the empire. Many of the travelers came to the city to
make money or establish business connections but after arriving were not
able to find a place to sleep. Searching for a room, Jewish travelers came to
hotels such as Gostronom, but in fear of breaking the law its owners refused
anyone who failed to produce a proper travel permit. Furthermore, most of
the city's thirty-four hotels did not rent rooms to Jews because they were
centrally located in the more fashionable districts of the city, and authorities
forced Jews to sleep in seedy taverns, furnished and unfurnished rooms on
the outskirts of town, or even on the streets. Daniil Petrovich Okutarovskii,
the owner of the Hotel Gostronom, observed that the city police would
conduct passport checks in the middle of the night. When they found Jews
who did not have proper residence permits, they would immediately deport
them, even if they had come to the city on business for no more than one
or two days. 54
Like all subjects of the empire, Jews did not need to have a passport
when they resided in their permanent place of residence; the document was
required only for internal movement. 55 But even with this juridical caveat,
large numbers of people did not have the right to travel outside their per-
manent place of residence because they were not eligible to receive internal
passports in the first place. In 1875 the Ministry of the Interior conducted a
study that revealed that thousands of Jews (all males) had never registered
in the tenth census revision and were therefore not eligible to receive the
documents. In Kiev Province alone, more than 18,000 Jews did not pos-
sess internal passports, while in Grodno the number jumped to 20,532. In
Chernigov, Taurida, Grodno, Bessarabia, Mogilev, and Vitebsk as many as
13,900 men were without internal passports. By not registering with their
communities and by not possessing internal passports, these individuals did
not have the right to travel outside their permanent place of residence, even

53. GARr; f. 102, deloproizvodstvo 2, op. 48, d. 49, II. 13, 27-28 (1891).
54. TsDIAK, f. 442, op. 537, d. 32 (1884). See also "Kiev," in Kratkoe opisanie mest-
nostei, na kotorye prnektiruetsia rasporostranit' reformu politsii (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia
ministerstva vnutrennikh del, 1913 ), 4. Like Kiev, the port city of Odessa attracted workers,
unskilled laborers, and traders from all parts of the empire (many of whom were Jews). Ac-
cording to one estimate, 95 percent of all individuals who resided in the port district did not
have an official address. On Odessa, see Sylvester, Tales of Old Odessa, 31.
55. N. N. Ignatov, comp., Ustav o pasportakh: S dopolneniiami, izmeneiiami i
pravitel'stvennymi raz"iasneniiami (Moscow: Busygin, 1905), 1.
134 I Jews and the Imperial State

on a temporary basis. 56 Furthermore, the documents proved horribly inad-

equate as an objective indicator of identity, since not all the Jews who re-
ceived passports assumed a surname. Between 1854 and 1864, for example,
11 percent of the Jews born in one Baltic province were registered in metri-
cal books without surnames, while in another nearby province, fifty-eight
marriages took place in 1872, but twenty-four of the men and thirty-three
of the women did not bear surnames. 57
In an administrative system that placed increasing trust in the power of
paper, similar types of irregularities, omissions, and inaccuracies plagued
bureaucratic practices across the empire. Peasants often listed only their
forenames and patronymics in their passports, which allowed them to easily
escape detection, since police inspectors would have a difficult time identify-
ing an individual without a surname. 5 8 In St. Petersburg, the Department of
Police reported that out of all the passports it inspected in 1897, the surnames
in 20,612 of the documents were never listed, while in 584 of the passports,
the forenames, patronymics, and surnames did not match up to the person
who claimed to be the owner. Some of these irregularities were, to be sure,
simple record-keeping blunders-when Egarev should have been recorded
as Egorov, Astratov as Kalistratov, or Samoilov as Samuilov, but for the vast
majority of the cases, the ministry could not comprehend the logic behind
the name changes. "Why would the name Zav'ialov appear as Garevskii,
an Ivanov Drozhinskii, or Dymal Grendel?" the department wondered. The
study also revealed that in 232 of the documents the department inspected
the patronymic was recorded in lieu of the surname-Grigorii Konstantinov
Vast, for example, appeared as Grigorii Konstantinov Konstantinov, Vasilii
Vlasov Pukhlov as Vasilii Vlasov Vlasov, and Sergei Danilov Ivanov as Ser-
gei Danilov Danilov. There were 267 wives who never took on the surnames
of their husbands, while 35 children never assumed their father's family
name, and 12 brothers born from the same father had, according to their
passports, two distinct surnames. In addition, physical descriptions lacked
the kind of detail police inspectors required to establish a person's exact
identity-height, for example, was usually marked as "average," while the
color of hair usually appeared as "light." Such inaccuracies stemmed from
what the Department of Police termed a "complete disregard" for precise
and diligent record keeping. "What's the use of the passport," the report

56. RGIA, f. 1286, op. 36, d. 134, 1!. 1-77 (1875).

57. G. Agranovskii and R. Kopilevich, "Kogda rossiiskie evrei priniali familii?" Vestnik
evreiskogo universiteta v Moskve 1 (1995): 80-82. See alsoP. Gil', ""Evreiskaia geografiia' i
ee otrazhenie v familiakh ashkenzskikh evreev," Vestnik evreiskogo universiteta v Moskve 2
(1993): 40-67.
58. GARF, f. 102, deloproizvodstvo 2, op. 39, d. 180 (1882).
 Invisible jews 135

concluded, "if authorities can't even rely on the accuracy of the information
listed in the document?" 59

IV

The mass movement of populations across state borders contributed to the

administrative challenges of documenting every person in the empire. By
the turn of the twentieth century, approximately 4 million imperial subjects
had emigrated to North America, Palestine, west-central Europe, and South
America. Most of them were Poles, Germans, and Jews, while the number
of ethnic Russians was deemed "negligible" (only 1 to 3 percent of the total
number of emigrants}. 60 For the Jews of Russia, a series of political and
economic crises-the pogroms of 1881-84 and 1903-6, the famine of 1891,
the economic recession of the 1890s, and the revolution of 1905-fueled
emigration mania. Slightly more than 15,000 Jews (female as well as male)
emigrated to North America between 1871 and 1880, but between 1890
and 1914 an average of 96,000 individuals made the trans-Atlantic journey
each year. 61 The Jewish Statistical Society estimated that between 1897 and
1917 approximately 938,000 Jews left the Pale of Settlement (not includ-
ing the Kingdom of Poland) for the United States. 62 During this period, an
additional 120,000 to 150,000 Jews settled permanently in England, while
tens of thousands relocated to Germany. 63

59. GARt~ f. 102, deloproizvodstvo 2, op. 59, d. 14, chast' 6, L. A, ll. 74-76 (1902).
60. Eric Lohr, "Population Policy and Emigration Policy in Imperial Russia," in Migration,
Homeland, and Belonging in Eurasia, ed. Cynthia J Buckley, Blair A Ruble, and Erin Trauth
Hofmann (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 170.
61. On Russian-Jewish immigration, see Simon Kuznets, "Immigration of Russian Jews
to the United States: Background and Structure," Perspectives in American History 9 (1975):
35-124. See also the important studies by Yakov Lestchinsky, Di Yidishe vanderung far di
letste 25 ior (Berlin: Emigdirekt, 1927); and Lestchinsky, Di onkhoybn fun der emigratsie un
kolonizatsie bey yidn in 19-tn iorhundert (Berlin: Emigdirekt, 1922), 13-31.
62. For these numbers, see Evreiskoe naselenie Rossii po dannym perepisi 1897 g. i po
noveishim istochnikam (Petrograd: Kadima, 1917), vi. According to the historian John D.
Klier, the May Laws and the pogroms of 1881-82 did not "produce an immediate or sustained
mass emigration of Jews from the Russian Empire," as had been assumed in the historiogra-
phy. The turn-of-the-century upheavals, the technological and commercial innovations, and the
emergence of emigration societies all proved more significant for facilitating the mass migration
of Russian Jews. Klier, "Emigration Mania in Late Imperial Russia: Legend and Reality," in
Patterns of Migration, 1850-1914, ed. Aubrey Newman and Stephen E. Massi! (London: Jew-
ish Historical Society of England, 1996), 24. Also see the important study by Rebecca Kobrin,
"The 1905 Revolution Abroad: Mass Migration, Russian Jewish Liberalism, and American
Jewry, 1903-1914," in The Revolution of190S and Russia's Jews, ed. Stefani Hoffman and
Ezra Mendelsohn (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 228-35.
63. The number of Jewish migrants in England can only be approximated, since the British
government did not keep statistics of immigrants until 1890 (and then did not break down the
absolute number by ethnicity). See the discussion in Todd M. Endelman, The Jews of Britain
136 I Jews and the Imperial State

After 1835, emigration constituted a punishable offense under the crimi-

nal law code (anyone who crossed the border without a valid exit permit
or left the empire for more than five years was subject to criminal pros-
ecution). Although the Russian government did not rigorously enforce the
laws on emigration, it also did almost nothing over the next five decades to
ease international travel restrictions. 64 For border patrol guards, the vast
geographic spaces (both in the western and eastern parts of the empire)
presented extraordinary administrative challenges. Authorities faced the
daunting task of patrolling the borders of the empire, regulating popula-
tion movements, and limiting smuggling operations. 65 In memo after memo,
border patrols complained that passport laws were too diverse and difficult
to comprehend, urging the Ministry of the Interior to make the statutes
more strict and uniform. The western borderlands usually had little politi-
cal security-railroad station stops were the only places along the border
where inspectors checked papers consistently-and any person smuggling
contraband or traveling without a valid exit permit could leave the empire
at will. 66 The border province of Galicia in the Habsburg Empire became a
favorite destination not only for the people who looked to escape the abject
poverty and intermittent violence that plagued the southwestern regions of
the empire but also for the small-scale merchants who looked to make a
little extra money by selling various goods and products on the opposite
side of the border. Once emigration increased in volume in 1882, Austrian
security police arrested "large numbers" of destitute Russian Jews who fled
to border towns such as Szczawnica and Brody without proper documents.
Placing its gendarmes on high alert, Austrian authorities instructed border
patrols to stop people who were traveling illegally and deport them to the
Russian Empire. 67
In May 1892, the Russian government made a substantial effort to codify
its emigration laws when it approved Baron Maurice de Hirsch's petition to
create the Jewish Colonization Association. By settling Jews on agricultural
colonies purchased by the society (initially in South America but later in

1656 to 2000 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 127-28. For Germany, see Jack
Wertheimer, Unwelcome Strangers: East European jews in Imperial Germany (Oxford: Ox-
ford University Press, 1987).
64. For the best analysis of the Russian government's policies on Jewish emigration, see
Rogger, Jewish Policies and Right-Wing Politics, 177-84. See also Chernukha, Pasport v
Rossii, 238-60.
65. On the problem of patrolling the imperial borderlands, see John D. Klier, "Kontra-
banda liudei: Pravitel'stvo Rossii i emigratsiia iz tsarstva pol'skogo v 1881-1892 godakh,"
in Evreiskaia emigratsiia iz Rossii, 1881-2005, ed. Oleg Budnitskii (Moscow: ROSSPEN,
2008), 20-33.
66. GARF, f. 102, deloproizvodstvo 2, op. 40, d. 373, II. 5, 14-14b, 18b, 20-21 (1883).
67. TsDIAK, f. 442, op. 535, d. 206, II. 12-13, 21-21b (1882).
 Invisible Jews I 137

North America), Baron Hirsch hoped to assist the emigration of Jews who
were subject to special taxes and political disabilities. In the petition, Hirsch
requested the imperial government to issue exit permits free of charge and
without too many administrative difficulties. As a facilitator of the emigra-
tion enterprise, the Russian government would play an important role in
the resettlement of Jews by granting exit permits. After reviewing the pro-
posal, the Ministry of the Interior determined that it would welcome "any
measures which would reduce the number of Jews in the Russian Empire."
With the help of the Jewish Colonization Association, the interior ministry
concluded that the Russian government would be able to relocate as many
as 3,250,000 Jews out of the empire in the next twenty-five years. 68 After the
legalization of the society, emigration was made "quasi-legal and somewhat
easier" only for those individuals who left the empire under the auspices of
the association. In the next ten years, around 6,000 Jews used the services
provided by the society to obtain exit permits and relocate to Argentina
(only a tiny percentage of all the Jews who left the empire). 69
Until the collapse of the old regime, emigration remained a privilege
granted only to those individuals who submitted a formal written request.
Those who applied to leave could expect to wait up to three months before
receiving exit permits from provincial governors. The permits usually cost
around thirty-three rubles to acquire, which was a relatively large sum of
money for the more destitute Jews/ 0 Entire families could apply to emi-
grate, or individuals could choose to leave on their own if their fathers had
died or left earlier. In order to receive an exit permit, migrants needed to
provide documentary proof that they were living in their permanent place
of residence, that they had no debts and had paid all their financial obliga-
tions, and that there were no other legal reasons to prevent their departure.
In addition, males between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one needed to
document that they had either fulfilled their military obligations or received
an exemption from service. Once a provincial governor approved the re-
quest, he would then issue an exit permit, enabling the emigrant to leave the
empire. As soon as the emigrant crossed the imperial border, Russian law
forbade that person from returning. 71

68. On the creation of the Jewish Colonization Association, see TsDIAK, f. 442, op. 620,
d. 323, ll. 4, 6, 10b-11 (1891).
69. Rogger,jewish Policies and Right-Wing Politics, 181.
70. The statute on passports stipulated that an international passport should not cost more
than fifteen rubles, but the Jewish Emigration Society noted that emigrants usually paid much
more than the required sum (especially those who could not read or write in Russian). See, for
example, DAKO, f. 444, op. 2, d. 6, II. 9-10 (1910); and DAKO, op. 2, d. 23, I. 11 (191 0).
71. For a summary of the 1892 laws, see Mysh, Rukovodstvo k russkim zakonam o evre-
iakh, 340-43. See also Gur Alroey, "Bureaucracy, Agents, and Swindlers: The Hardships of
138 I jews and the Imperial State

After 1905, the imperial Russian government permitted the Jewish Colo-
nization Association to expand its activities to Brazil, Canada, and Mexico. 72
By the time the Great War broke out, around five hundred information
bureaus subsidized by the Jewish Colonization Association were operating
in the empire. The bureaus offered useful advice for people who were hun-
gry for information: how to apply for exit permits, where to obtain steam-
ship tickets, and how to avoid swindlers. 71 But when applying for formal
permission to emigrate, Jews often encountered a slow, burdensome, and
unresponsive bureaucracy. For those families who lived in the countryside
or in small provincial towns, the application process proved especially dif-
ficult. In the distant provinces, the postal system was slow and unpredict-
able, and many individuals did not bother to submit an application because
they could not afford the modest travel fare to the provincial capitals. Even
when provincial governors received all the required paperwork, they often
rejected the petition on the grounds that either the applicant no longer re-
sided in her or his permanent place of residence (which was not an unusual
occurrence) or had outstanding debts. Moreover, a husband who had emi-
grated without his family needed to leave behind a notarized notice that per-
mitted his wife and underage children to leave the empire, a law that caused
numerous administrative headaches for Jewish families. 74
Given all the hassles of obtaining exit permits, the vast majority of Jews
chose not to deal with the slow, unpredictable, and costly bureaucratic pro-
cess. They found it much more convenient to bribe border patrol guards or
make direct payments to any number of "agents" who specialized in smug-
gling masses of people across state lines. Recent studies have estimated that
between 75 and 90 percent of all emigration was illegaJ.7 5 "Since 1890," the
Ministry of the Interior remarked, "authorities have observed that a signifi-
cant number of rural and working-class people in the western borderlands
aspire to relocate to America." The Ministry of the Interior blamed the

Jewish Emigration from the Pale of Settlement in the Early 20th Century," in Studies in Con-
temporary Jewry 19 (2003): 217-18; Alroey, "Journey to Early-Twentieth-Century Palestine
as a Jewish Immigrant Experience," Jewish Social Studies 9 (2003): 28-64; and Alroey, "'And
I Remained Alone in a Vast Land': Women in the Jewish Migration from Eastern Europe,"
jewish Social Studies 12 (2006): 54-55.
72. Mark Wischnitzer, To Dwell in Safety: The Story of jewish Migration since 1800 (Phila-
delphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1948), 88-90.
73. Rogger, Jewish Policies and Right- Wing Politics, 182; Wischnitzer, To Dwell in Safety,
105-9; and Kobrin, "The 1905 Revolution Abroad," 233-35.
74. DAKO, f. 444, op. 2, d. 23, ll. 10-14 (1910-1913); and DAKO, f. 444, op. 1, d. 14,
l. 15b (1910-1913).
75. Alroey, "Bureaucracy, Agents, and Swindlers," 222; Lohr, "Popnlation Policy and Emi-
gration Policy in Imperial Russia," 171; and Klier, "Kontrabanda liudei," 29-30. See also
DAKO, f. 444, op. 2, d. 23, l. 8 (1910-1913).
 Invisible Jews \ 139

scheming agents-the promoters, solicitors, and brokers-for "artificially"

inducing masses of people to leave the empire. Working for some of the
most influential steamship companies in the business, the agents spread false
rumors of the abundant economic opportunities and leisurely lives await-
ing their potential customers in the distant lands. By providing exit per-
mits, steamship tickets, and transits to nearby ports, the agents earned small
fortunes, for themselves as well as for the steamship companies, from the
poverty-stricken Jews. 76
As emigration became an increasingly profitable underground enter-
prise-not only for the experts who specialized in the mysteries of emigra-
tion but also for the patrol guards on either side of the western border-the
would-be emigrants encountered various kinds of schemers, swindlers, and
con men as they prepared for their journeys. According to the reports filed
by the provincial emigration bureaus, the scheming agents would do ev-
erything in their power to exploit (and sometimes even rob) the naive and
helpless Jews who turned to the agents for help. Once Jews decided to cross
the border illegally, they found themselves at the mercy of the agents who
controlled much of the business of emigration. Without paying attention
to the needs of the emigrants, the agents procured steamship tickets, ex-
changed currency, and picked out travel routes according to what was most
cost-effective for the steamship companies. 77 A certain Moshko Mendelev
Niman, for example, received large sums of money for promising to escort
his customers across the imperial border to one of the port towns. But as
soon as he crossed the Russian border and collected his money, he left the
Jews to their own fate. 78 "Thanks to the fraudulent propaganda [spread
by the agents]," the Department of Police observed, "emigration became
a mass phenomenon. Without passports and with practically no money on
their person, the emigrants, escorted by the agents, would steal across the
border." 79

76. TsDIAK, f. 442, op. 620, d. 323, I. 126 (1896); Rogger,]ewish Policies, 183-84; Parnella
S. Nadell, "From Shtetl to Border: East European Jewish Emigrants and the 'Agents' System,
1868-1914," in Studies in the American jewish Experience: Contributions from the Fellow-
ship Programs of the American jewish Archives, ed. Jacob Rader Marcus and Abraham ].
Peck (Cincinnati: American Jewish Archives, 1984), 49-78; and William C. Fuller, The Foe
Within: Fantasies of Treason and the End of Imperial Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
2006), 16-25. As Rebecca Kobrin points out, the mass circulation press also helped facilitate
emigration mania by publishing stories, advertisements, and practical guides. Kobrin, "Revolu-
tion Abroad," 233-.35.
77. DAKO, f. 444, op. 2, d. 23, II. 8-9 (1910-1913).
78. TsDIAK, f. 442, op. 630, d. 592 (1900-1908).
79. GAR!-~ f. 102, deloproizvodstvo 2, op. 59, d. 8, chast' 39, II. 7-7b (1902). See also
Alroey, "Bureaucracy, Agents, and Swindlers," 220.
140 I jews and the Imperial State

At the turn of the century, tens of thousands of people crossed the impe-
rial border each year thanks in part to the scheming agents. Between 1891
and 1893, for example, as many as 466,058 individuals passed through
Volochisk, a small border town located on the Zbruch River, on their
way to the Habsburg Empire. 8° From the Habsburg Empire the migrants
traveled to Germany (usually in sealed train cars), where they spent their
days waiting in isolated transit facilities, before continuing on to North
America. The German patrol faced the daunting task of checking the pa-
pers of each person crossing the border. Once inside Germany, the East
European Jews caused enough disruptions that authorities began to deport
the more problematic and suspicious ones to the Russian Empire. Eventu-
ally the deportations proved so effective that German steamship companies
complained that they were losing too many customers to their French,
Belgian, and English competitors. In 1887, in response to the complaints,
German officials not only waived the requirement that all migrants needed
to possess at least four hundred marks but also began to allow hundreds
of thousands of destitute illegal border crossers to pass through Germany,
provided they had purchased their tickets from one of the national steam-
ship companies. 81
Meanwhile, the Russian government continued to experience all sorts
of difficulties regulating the flow of populations across its borders. Al-
though customs officers kept alphabetical lists of suspects and criminals
who needed to be detained at the border, the lists were usually in a state
of utter disorder. Even when political prisoners or criminal suspects chose
to pass through custom stations, authorities had no way of identifying
some of the more recent suspects since they would receive updates only
at four- or five-month intervals. To border patrol officials, it came as no
surprise that "a suspect was able to cross almost any transit station by
showing a fake or stolen passport." One officer concluded that the pass-
port control stations remained "in the most horrendous state of affairs,
and it proved impossible to have even a rough estimate of how many
passengers actually crossed the border [each year]. Almost any scribe can
issue a [fake] passport, and there is absolutely no control of passport rules
or regulations." 82 In 1907, in hopes of limiting illegal emigration and
the circulation of stolen or fake passports, the Warsaw governor-general

80. GARF, f. 102, deloproizvodstvo 2, op. 41, d. 596, II. 36b (1884).
81. Tobias Brinkmann, "'Travelling with Ballin': The Impact of American Immigration
Policies on Jewish Transmigration within Central Europe, 1880-1914," International Review
of Social History 53 (2009): 467-70. See also Brinkmann's "From Hinterberlin to Berlin: Jew-
ish Migrants from Eastern Europe in Berlin before and after 1918," Journal of Modern Jewish
Studies 8 (2008): 339-55.
82. GARF, f. 102, deloproizvodstvo 2, op. 41, d. 596, II. 36b-40 (1884).
 Ch~rnfgov
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Figure 6. Volynia, Kiev, and Podolia provinces around 1900. Map drawn by Suleyman Sarihan, Slavic and East European Library
at the University of Illinois, with the assistance of Merrily Shaw, Russian, East European, and Eurasian Center at the University
of Illinois.
142 I Jews and the Imperial State

marked all passports issued by his chancellery with red stamps in the
shape of crosses. 83
The Russian government's reluctance to pass an emigration law (which
would have made the entire enterprise less unpredictable and perhaps more
profitable for the state) left hundreds of thousands of Jews at the mercy
of the agents and swindlers who operated throughout the Pale of Settle-
ment. All individuals involved in the business of emigration-border pa-
trol personnel, municipal administrators, steamship companies, and travel
agents-made handsome profits from the individuals who were desperate to
leave the empire. In Kamenets-Podol'skii, two Jews worked at the customs
station and obtained exit permits with the original signature of the gen-
darme Lopukhin. It turned out that Lopukhin's wife also made a nice sum
of money from the scheme by selling twenty passports at a time to the Jews,
who in turn marked up the price of every passport they sold by three to six
rubles. Similar schemes occurred at almost every border patrol station. In
Belostok, the thirty-three-year-old Movsha Shmerkes lived with his wife
and three children, worked as a scribe at the local police station, and made
a handsome profit from issuing forged passports to Jews. 84 Khaim Yankel
Grishch (also from Belostok) and at least fifteen other Jews provided pass-
ports, steamship tickets, and other documents to those Jews who were not
able to obtain legitimate exit permits because they had been sentenced for
political or criminal activities or because other legal reasons prevented them
from receiving the permits. Once one of the agents rounded up fifty per-
sons, he would then accompany the group across the border until the first
railroad station stop, from where they would travel on their own to any
number of international port towns: Hamburg, Bremen, Antwerp, Rotter-
dam, or Liverpool. Russian-Jewish emigrants could also choose from two
of the more convenient points of departure that did not necessitate crossing
international borders-either Odessa or Libau (after 1905). 85
Not all the people who crossed the border left the empire permanently,
and large numbers of people traveled back and forth without passports or
exit permits. One historian has estimated that before 1900 between 15 and
20 percent of all Jewish emigrants returned to the Russian Empire (a number
that seems exaggerated but nevertheless points to the fluidity of movement
across the border). 86 While these migrants were returning, tens of thousands

83. TsDIAK, f. 313, op. 2, d. 1709, I. 8 (1907).

84. GARF, f. 102, deloproizvodstvo 3, op. 80, d. 475 (1884).
85. GARF, f. 102, deloproizvodstvo 2, op. 41, d. 596, II (1884). 154-157b; and GARF,
f. 102, deloproizvodstvo 3, op. 93, d. 1658, II. 18-22 (1895). See also Alroey, "Bureaucracy,
Agents, and Swindlers," 218; and Klier, "Kontrabanda liudei," 28-29.
86. For these numbers, see Jonathan Sarna, "The Myth of No Return: Jewish Return Mi-
gration in Eastern Europe, 1881-1914," American jewish Yearbook 71 (1981): 259.
 Invisible]ews I 143

of seasonal laborers were leaving for Germany each year in search of work
during the spring and summer months. 87 In addition, police officials re-
ported that Jews traveled back and forth across the Austrian border to visit
rebbes who were known for their majestic revelatory powers, while many
others crossed the Austrian border to sell horses, some making as many as
three trips per day, bringing back small contraband items such as kerosene,
salt, meat, and vodka, which they would sell at a small profit. 88
Gendarmes paid particular attention to professional revolutionaries such
as Isaak Abramov Efron, who transported subversive propaganda litera-
ture across state lines. Born in St. Petersburg to a wealthy merchant family,
Isaak received his doctorate at the University of Zurich and worked for a
short period of time in Brussels. As a sixteen-year-old idealist influenced
by populist social thought, Isaak helped organize a subversive organization
that was responsible for disseminating revolutionary propaganda in the sur-
rounding regions of Moscow. Arrested for spreading "turbulent" ideas, the
young Isaak shouted to the crowd that gathered around him, "Save me,
it is for you I suffer!" Although Isaak and his brother were exiled shortly
after his arrest in 1879, the revolutionary idealist managed to escape across
the northwestern border before he was scheduled to depart for the great
Siberian plains. During his short stay in Geneva, Isaak befriended some of
the most talented Marxist theoreticians of the day, such as Pavel Axelrod
and Georgii Plekhanov. But he did not remain in Geneva for long and reap-
peared in the police record books when he was spotted crossing the imperial
border. Armed with a Turkish passport and wearing a fez, Isaak crossed the
border to smuggle revolutionary propaganda while paying a visit to "either
his fiance or close companion by the name of Gintsberg." During his travels
in Kiev and Khar'kov, the charlatan stayed one step ahead of his pursuers
and managed to escape across the border yet again before the secret police
could arrest him. 89

v
Using the latest advances in police detection and amassing a large database of
index cards, photographs, and descriptive reports, police agents spent their
days observing revolutionary types. Monitoring the movement and behav-
ior of the population in their respective districts, the special security agents
recorded the most minuscule details in their journals. Police agents were
required to familiarize themselves with every person who resided in their

87. DAKO, f. 444, op. 2, d. 23, I. 8 (1910-1913).

88. GARt~ f. 102, deloproizvodstvo 2, op. 62, d. 8, chast' 174, II. 10-lOb (1907).
89. GARF, f. 102, dcloproizvodstvo 3, op. 93, d. 1710 (1895).
144 I Jews and the Imperial State

districts: to know who lived in all the homes, to watch for political criminals
by consulting photographs and other personal descriptions, and to monitor
everybody else who appeared in their districts and happened to frequent or
correspond with any unreliable or untrustworthy persons. 90 "Surveillants,"
according to the historian Jonathan Daly, "were trained to recognize known
revolutionary activists, to distinguish tiny differences in physiognomy, and
to observe a wide range of apparently trivial phenomena." 91
By 1900, the special section of the Department of Police had accumu-
lated a card index of 55,000 names, 20,000 photographs of revolutionary
and subversive persons, and a library of some 5,000 volumes of confis-
cated propaganda literature. 92 The Department of Police aspired to cre-
ate a massive database of all criminals and revolutionaries in the empire.
Filed according to the surname of the suspect, each dossier consisted of
detailed personalized written descriptions and a photograph. In 1906, the
Department of Police established the Central Registration Bureau to house,
preserve, and catalog the note cards. On the eve of the Great War, the
bureau preserved some 260,000 photographs of individuals suspected of
committing political crimes, indexing approximately 100,000 according
to the technically sophisticated portrait par/e. Devised by the French po-
lice officer Alphonse Bertillon, this identification system was premised on
the principle that all human measurements were racially fixed and obeyed
statistical norms. At the time, the portrait parte offered the most inno-
vative system to identify recidivist criminals and revolutionaries by using
extremely precise anthropometric measurements and physical descriptions
of the human body. 93
For the Russian government, however, the massive database of index
cards did not help ease the everyday frustrations of administration. At a

90. YIVO, RG 87, file 1055, folios 79106-79107 (1888).

91. Jonathan W. Daly, The Watchful State: Security Police and Opposition in Russia, 1906-
1917 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2004 ), 8.
92. Lain Lauchlan, "The Okhrana: Security Policing in Late Imperial Russia," in Late Im-
perial Russia: Problems and Prospects, ed. Robert B. McKean and Ian D. Thatcher (Man-
chester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 2005), 51.
93. TsDIAK, f. 341, op. 1, d. 38, I. 2 (1913-1914). In the interrevolutionary period, police
officials received taxonomic charts based on the Bertillon system and were instructed to pay
particular attention to physiognomic indicators that served as the most important clues for
rendering visible the identity of the criminal: nose, ear, skin color, forehead, build, ethnicity,
head, and eyes. See, for example, Kratkoe rukovodstvo dlia antropologicheskikh izmerenii s
tsel'iu opredeleniia retsidistov, sostavlennoe po sisteme Bertil'ona (izdano po rasporiazheniiu S-
Peterburgskago gradonachal'nika) (St. Peterburg: Tipografiia Kantscliarii S. Petersburgskogo
gradonachal'nika, 1891 ); M. W. Lebedeff, Note concernant ['organisation de Ia Police des
Recherches criminelles et Service d'identification des Recidivistes: Rapport fait au 1er Con-
gres de Ia Police judiciaire internationale (Paris: E. Worlff, 1914 ); and "Novyi oblegchennyi
universal'nyi fotograficheskii apparat A. Bertil'ona," Vestnik politsii 12, 13, 16 (1908).
 Invisible Jews I 145

time when the written document acquired universal significance for iden-
tifying every person in the empire, the imperial Russian state looked to
acquire knowledge of all its subjects and not just the subversive elements.
Even after easing restrictions on travel, the Russian government contin-
ued to use knowledge-based technologies-passports, censuses, travel
permits, and metrical records-to rule its territories and populations. 94 In
an age when most European states facilitated travel by actively encourag-
ing the construction of railways, roads, and industries (a period that has
been categorized by one historian as the "passportless regime" because
of the ease with which people moved from place to place), the Russian
government's reliance on the passport system proved in no way remark-
able.95 All across the globe (from the Netherlands to China), bureaucratic
regimes required travelers, labor workers, pilgrims, and all other types of
itinerant migrants to carry identity documents. 96
If in the early modern period only select groups of people were required to
carry permits, passports, or letters of introduction, by the beginning of the
twentieth century, official government documents (which identified the per-
son by name, place and date of birth, occupation, place of residence, and re-
ligion) had become a permanent feature of everyday life. To be effective, the
identity document needed to establish a person's identity on its own terms,
without arousing doubt, scrutiny, or mistrust. Yet as in other times and
places, Russian officials spent their days devising methods to cope with the
obstacles that had created so many administrative nightmares: poor record-
keeping practices, document mismanagement, forgery and imposture, and
rampant corruption. 97 Authorities could require Jews to adopt surnames,
to record their exact vital statistical information in metrical books, and to
travel with identity documents issued only on official stamped government
paper. They could even prohibit Jews from using multiple personal names or
force them to spell their names in the same way that they had first appeared
in their metrical records. But the imperial Russian state simply did not
have the administrative resources, money, or personnel to make everyone

94. For the classic statements on this topic, see Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms
of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); Benedict
Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev.
ed. (London: Verso, 1991); and James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to
Improve the Human Condition have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).
95. On the disappearance of the passport regime, see Leo Lucassen, "A Many-Headed
Monster: The Evolution of the Passport System in the Netherlands and Germany in the Long
Nineteenth Century," in Caplan and Torpey, Documenting Individual Identity, 245-48.
96. Andreas Fahrmeir, "Governments and Forgers: Passports in Nineteenth-Century Eu-
rope," in Caplan and Torpey, Documenting Individual Identity, 230-31.
97. On counterfeiting and forgery, see, for example, Fahrmeir, "Governments and Forgers,"
218-34; and Groebner, Who Are You? 82-83, 187-90.
146 I Jews and the Imperial State

everywhere abide by these rules. In the practice of everyday life, it was the
mundane discrepancies, omissions, and errors that made documenting indi-
vidual Jewish identities so problematic.
While physical anthropologists could argue that a "trained eye is able
to always recognize a Jew," authorities expressed frustration at how easily
Jews were able to defy conventional criteria of administrative classification,
reinvent themselves under assumed identities, and appear invisible in the
public eye. 98 Variations in the spelling of names, transliteration difficulties
from the Hebrew to the Russian, and poor record-keeping practices led
to wild fluctuations in Jewish population statistics, practical difficulties in
implementing administrative reform, and numerous problems in knowing
exactly who was Jewish. In the 1860s, when the Russian government first
encountered many of these administrative challenges on a large scale, of-
ficials began to devise creative ways to make the governance of the Jewish
population more effective. As we will see in chapter 5, by freezing the Jew-
ish name, imperial Russian administrators hoped not only to increase the
effectiveness of documents such as passports, metrical books, and censuses
but also to stabilize the religious boundaries that had begun to weaken and,
in some cases, break down altogether.

98. M. B. Kretsner, Otlichitel'nye cherty evreiskoi natsii po dannym antropologii, fiziop-

sikhologii, i patologii evreev (Dvinsk: I. Rashkes, 1904), 7-8. According to Kretsner, the nose
constituted the most typical feature of the Jewish face. Nevertheless, Jews could be also distin-
guished by their height (162-65 em), the color of their eyes (brown), the shape of their head
(short-headed), and their distinct cranial measurements (82-83 em).
 5
The] ewish Name
"And what's his name?"
"It's Katz," I say. "Moshe Katz, though we all call him Moshke."
"Moshke Katz?" says the teacher. "There's no Moshke Katz in
the Third Form. There is a Katz on the list, but his first name is
Mordukh, not Moshke."
"Well, we Moshked and Mordukhed each other back and forth
until the sad truth finally dawned on me; there had been a little
error. Do you get the picture? The goy had mixed up the names."
-SHOLEM ALEICHEM, "High School"

In 1877, a middle-aged Jewish merchant recently assigned to second-

guild status petitioned to change his forename and patronymic to Mikhail
Grigor'evich. "I was born in the 1830s," the merchant explained, "when
the state hardly affected the lives of ordinary Jews and was registered at
birth as Yokhel Girshovich Saker." After moving to St. Petersburg from a
small town in the pale, Saker had founded his own business and quickly
made many new acquaintances in the capital. Although most people knew
him as Mikhail Grigor'evich, Saker was obligated to use his lawful name
in all business transactions, an act that quickly aroused suspicion and con-
cern. His Russian business associates wondered why the Jewish merchant
needed to use two distinct names, questioning not only Saker's trustworthi-
ness but also the integrity of the purchase agreements as well as all other
official documents signed between them. For Saker's children, who attended
government-sponsored schools, their Jewish-sounding name elicited jokes,
puns, and sarcastic comments from the other students, helped spoil social
relations, and even strained friendships. In light of these social tensions, the
merchant petitioned to change his Jewish name. 1
For individuals who left the Pale of Settlement for larger metropolitan
areas or settled in places with no established Jewish communities, names
functioned as a symbolic reminder of Jewishness. By changing their names

1. RGIA, f. 821, op. 9, d. 92, II. 81-81b (1877).

148 I Jews and the Imperial State

for more Russian-sounding ones, Jews such as Saker sought acceptance in

a world where ethnic difference mattered. But not all Jews shared Saker's
point of view. For many other people who continued to reside in densely
populated Jewish communities in the pale, the Jewish name served as a
symbol of belonging and acceptance, helping connect the individual
with the collective. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the de-
bate over the Jewish name quickly spread beyond the narrow ideological
conflict within the Jewish community itself. As imperial administrators
and church officials attempted to reconstitute firmer boundaries between
the Russian Orthodox population and its multiethnic counterparts, the
Jewish-sounding name became a convenient, if not always reliable, sym-
bol by which Jews and baptized Jews could be distinguished as an ethnic
group. The Jewish name, in other words, quickly acquired political signifi-
cance at a time when ethnicity began to replace religion and social estate
as the primary means by which differences were determined. But even as
ethnic distinctions provided increasingly important categories for the state,
the cataloging of the population by these markers turned out to be a frus-
trating process. 1

II

During the early modern period, Jewish names were composed of the fore-
name (or given name) and patronymic. In the Russian Empire, patronymics
were created typically by adding the suffix-ovich or-evich to the fa-
ther's given name (e.g., Yudka Abramovich). Jews customarily used sacred
names (shemot ha-kodesh), beginning with the circumcision ceremony for
the boys and the naming ceremony for the girls, and nicknames or secu-
lar names (kinnuiim) in everyday life. The nicknames were usually based
on occupations or personal characteristics (e.g., Itska Brodavka [wart] or
Itska Dolgoshiia [long-necked]). Most Jews, moreover, used double names
(e.g., Judah Leib) or sometimes even triple names (e.g., Arie Yehuda Leib)
in everyday life. In 1804, as part of an administrative attempt to intervene
in internal communal affairs, the imperial Russian government required all
Jews to adopt surnames. As in France and Prussia, the requirement that all
Jews in the Russian Empire adopt surnames signified an important change

2. On the construction of ethnicity as a political category in the late imperial period, see
Charles Steinwedel, "To Make a Difference: The Category of Ethnicity in Late Imperial Rus-
sian Politics, 1861-1917," in Russian Modernity: Politics, Knowledge, Practices, ed. David L.
Hoffman and Yanni Kotsonis (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000). On names, see An-
drew M. Verner, "What's in a Name? Of Dog-Killers, Jews, and Rasputin," Slavic Review 53
(1994): 1046-70.
 The Jewish Name I 149

of their legal-administrative status. 3 The adoption of hereditary surnames,

the framers of the 1804 statute noted, facilitated the mediation of civil dis-
putes, the control of property, and the management of Jews in existing so-
cial categories. 4
Over the course of the first three decades of the nineteenth century, the
kahal (the executive board of the Jewish community) required Jews to adopt
surnames, which were usually based on occupations (e.g., Svechkov [candle-
stick maker]), personal characteristics (e.g., Skorokhodov [quick-footed]),
or place of residence (e.g., Dubnov [for the town Dubno]). The geographic
differentiations of the Pale of Settlement ensured that regional differences in
naming patterns existed among Jews. In the Belorussian regions, for exam-
ple, around one-third of the surnames Jews adopted used the suffix in (e.g.,
Dvorkin, Malkin, and Shifrin); in northern Ukrainian provinces almost half
of the Jewish surnames ended with the suffix man; and in Kiev and Grodno
provinces, surnames were created typically from place names by adding the
suffix ski (e.g., Kanevski, Smelianski, and Molchadski). The adoption of
names was a slow and uneven process, and elite and ordinary Jews alike
continued to know one another by their nicknames instead of their newly
adopted surnames. But since this adoption process did not proceed in an
entirely haphazard manner, many observers claimed (and would continue to
claim in the late imperial period) that the so-called Jewish names could be
distinguished from their non-Jewish counterparts partly on the basis of the
structural patterns outlined above. 5
In the. Great Reform era, the modest but steady movement of Jews from
the small market towns of the Pale of Settlement to many of the larger cities
of the empire precipitated a gradual reorientation of their self-image. The

3. As a consequence of the French Revolution, the law of 1792 imposed surnames on all
French citizens, including Jews. On March 11, 1812, Prussian authorities mandated that Jews
bear surnames. For France, see Gerard Noire!, "The Identification of the Citizen: The Birth of
Republican Civil Status in France," in Documenting Individual Identity: The Development of
State Practices in the Modern World, ed. jane Caplan and John Torpey (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2001), 36. On Prussia, see Dietz Bering, The Stigma of Names: Antisemitism
in German Daily Life, 1812-1933, trans. Neville Place (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1992), 27-33.
4. PSZRI, series 1, vol. 28, no. 21547, art. 32 (December 9, 1804).
5. This paragraph draws on Alexander Beider's studies on Jewish names and naming prac-
tices. For example, see Beider, "Names and Naming," in The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews
in Eastern Europe, 2 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 2:1248-51; Beider,
A Dictionary of Jewish Surnames from the Russian Empire (Teaneck, N.j.: Avotaynu, 1993),
10-13; Bcider, "Jewish Given Names in Eastern Europe," Revue des etudes juives 157 (1998):
169-98. See also Benzion Munitz, "Identifying Jewish Names in Russia," Soviet Jewish Affairs
3 (1972): 66-75; and Adam Penkalla, "The Socio-Cultural Integration of the Jewish Popula-
tion in Province of Radom, 1815-1862," Polin 3 (1988): 218-20. For an excellent discussion
of the shem ha-kodesh and the kinnui in historical perspective, see Rella Israly Cohn, "Yiddish
Given Names: A Lexicon," (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1995), 1:64-79.
150 I jews and the Imperial State

technological revolution brought together groups of people from all corners

of the empire, with the great industrial centers serving as the laboratories
for cultural change. Market capitalism stimulated changes in consumption,
material culture, and the conception of "civilization," of proper behavior,
speech, and appearance. The Jews who relocated to some of the most cos-
mopolitan cities of the empire-Kiev, Moscow, Odessa, and St. Petersburg-
transformed their tastes, behaviors, and presentation of self. "The path to
civility passes through their appearance," one Russian journalist remarked
in 1855, "as [Jews] begin to acquire markers of Russianness and an aware-
ness of humanity." 6 Many of the Jewish men and women who sought social
acceptance in the world around them changed their names, shaved their
beards, and donned more fashionable clothing.
In 1854, a Jewish student by the name of Eizik Gabrielovich was admit-
ted to the St. Petersburg Medical-Surgical Academy. Four years later, Eizik
pleaded with the rector of the academy to change his name to Evgenii in his
graduating diploma. After examining the request, the rector remarked that
Eizik "has absolutely no [semantic] resemblance to the name Evgenii," and
he forwarded the petition to the Department of Spiritual Affairs of Foreign
Confessions for extended official review. 7 "All Jews who have obtained the
slightest bit of culture realize [the symbolic significance of the name]," one
minister noted, "and none of these Jews, especially the ones who have been
educated in institutions of higher education, retain the names given to them
according to their local Jewish [customs]. The Jews who maintain these tra-
ditions are the ones who are steeped in their own civilization. " 8
Over the course of the 1860s and 1870s, various administrators (both
in the provinces and in St. Petersburg) began to receive "countless requests
from Jews wishing to change their nicknames to their Russian equivalents"
in official documents such as university diplomas, business records, and in-
ternal passports. Several Jewish students at the Military Medical Academy
complained that their names sharply distinguished them from their peers.
Similar requests came from students who studied at other institutions of
higher education and merchants who had recently gained residence privi-
leges in the interior provinces of the empire. 9 The student Tsvi-Gersh Roten-
berg, who had just graduated from Yur'ev University, wanted to change his

6. Sankt peterburgskie vedomosti 170 (1855), 855. The article originally appeared in
Podol'skie gubernskie vedomosti. See also Birzhevye vedomosti 85 (1871 ).
7. RGIA, f. 821, op. 8, d. 186, II. 1-1b (1860).
8. RGIA, f. 821, op. 9, d. 92, II. 66-66b (1875).
9. RG!A, f. 1405, op. 89, d. 2252, II. 29-30b (1888-1893). See also Nouorossiiskii telegraf
3632 (1887), 2; RGIA, f. 821, op. 10, d. 774, II. 96-98; and Benjamin Nathans, Beyond the
Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia (Berkeley: University of California Press
2002), 246-48.
 The Jewish Name I 151

personal name to the more Russian-sounding Grigor Efroimovich, a name

he was called by his friends and colleagues in everyday life. 10 After advancing
to merchant-guild status, Shmuel-Yankel Volershtein, a resident of Kovno
and former townsman, asked the governor to change his name to Samuil-
Yakov in the census records. To help his case, Volershtein presented a signed
affidavit from the Kovno crown rabbi explaining the genealogy of his name.
"The names Shmuel and Yanke! used in daily Jewish jargon [Yiddish]," the
rabbi certified, "are corrupted forms of the biblical-Jewish names Samuil
and Yakov." 11 Upon graduating from the Medical Military Academy and
receiving residence privileges in Kiev, the doctor Khaim-Genzel Barats peti-
tioned to change his forename to the semantic equivalent Vitalii. In his birth
certificate, the crown rabbi had registered Barats as "Khaim-Genzel, also
known as Vitalii." Barats argued that bearing all three names was a burden
that made for awkward and confusing social interactions. "As an 'honored
citizen' [pochetnyi grazhdanin] and a respected member of society," Barats
pointed out, "I should have the legal right to change my name." 12
"The desire to change personal diminutive Jewish names to more proper
Russian names occurs," one Jewish reporter explained in the 1870s, "be-
cause Jews seek to conform to their environment." 13 During the Great Re-
form era, Jewish intellectuals, writing in both the Jewish and Russian press,
spoke of the symbolic significance of the name while encouraging Jews to
adopt more distinguished names. At the very least, according to the journal-
ist and writer Osip Rabinovich, Jews should refrain from using diminutive
nicknames in daily life. 14 A doctor who had graduated from Kazan Uni-
versity wanted to change his Jewish-sounding name and patronymic, Evsei
Matveevich, to the more common Gozias Morkusovich. When the doctor
had first started taking courses at the university in 18 83, his acquaintances
had had a hard time pronouncing and writing his Jewish name. He therefore
began to call himself by a more socially accepted name. "Since I live among
Russians now," the doctor wrote in his petition, "it's important for me to

10. RGIA, f. 821, op. 10, d. 797, I. 5 (1896).

11. RGIA, f. 821, op. 9, d. 92, ll. 63-64 ( 1875).
12. RGIA, f. 821, op. 10, d. 797, ll. 53-59b (1901 ).
13. Vestnik russkikh evreev 25 (1871), 762.
14. Although Rabinovich did not encourage Jews to adopt Russian names, he did point out
that they should refrain from using Yiddish nicknames in daily life, a practice that the public
often deemed confusing and chaotic. "One Jew calls himself Ios'ka, another Ioscl', and a third
los'," Rabinovich wrote in Odesskii vestnik in 1858, "but all three of these names are derived
from Iosif. It's completely understandable the difficulties of making sense of !the chaotic nam-
ing schemes], unless one is initiated in these secrets. This is why administrators have begun
to note in official papers: los', also known as Ios'ka, also known as lose!'." On the public
debate surrounding the Rabinovich piece, see John D. Klier, Imperial Russia's Jewish Question,
1855-1881 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 32-50.
152 I Jews and the Imperial State

have a name that everyone can easily remember and recognize." The doctor
did not want his documents to bear the highly cumbersome "Evsei Mat-
veevich, also known as Gozias Morkusovich." 15 In a similar fashion, with
the hope of minimizing confusion in business matters and social relations,
the merchant Mordak Zaivelev Paksher petitioned to change his name to
Maksim Savel'ev in his business papers. 16 And the merchant Abram Shere-
shevskii asked to change his personal name to the more fashionable and
respectable Adol'f, while a townsman residing in Odessa wanted to change
his family name from Bardak (chaos) to the innocuous BerkovichY
Whether Jews had the legal right to change their names had become an
important topic of discussion among government administrators in the
early 1870s. Shortly after receiving a number of petitions from Jewish stu-
dents, the War Ministry did not see a problem with allowing all Jews who
graduated from military academies the right to change their names. Jewish-
sounding names, the ministry reasoned, could cause unnecessary problems
in the daily lives of the graduates, sharply dividing them from the Russian
public. The Ministry of the Interior, on the other hand, believed allowing
name changes would have much larger legal implications not only for the
students who wished to change their personal names but also for the Jew-
ish population at large. The deliberations continued until 1887, at which
time the High Commission for Review of Legislation Pertaining to the Jews
of Russia ruled that name changes, however small or inconsequential they
might be, were strictly forbidden. After much discussion and debate, the
1887 decree thus merely rephrased the wording of the 1804 statute: that
all Jews were required to adopt permanent names, which they must retain
throughout their lifetimes without correction or change.
The adoption of Russian names may have corresponded to the imperial
program of sblizhenie (rapprochement), but the state nevertheless refused
Jews the right to change their names. "The Jews' willingness to change their
names to those used by Russians [in daily life] testifies to their aspiration to
acculturate to the indigenous population. But these aspirations certainly do
not deserve to be encouraged [by the law]," the senator Petr Nikolaevich
Durnovo remarked in 1893. Like so many members of the Ministry of the
Interior, Durnovo reasoned that Jews could easily invent fictitious identi-
ties and avoid recognition by changing their names. 18 In official docu-
ments, all individuals, including Jews, were thus required to use only the
names-for~names, patronymics, and surnames-that appeared in their

15. RGIA, f. 821, op. 10, d. 797, II. 35-35b (1899).

16. GARF, f. 102, deloproizvodstvo 2, op. 76A, d. 1930 (1900).
17. Ibid., d. 888 (1890) and d. 218 (1885-1887).
18. RGIA, f. 1405, op. 89, d. 2252, I. 37b (1888-1893).
 The jewish Name I 153

metrical books; any corrections of the names or the records were strictly
forbidden.

III

In the very last years of the old regime, as the empire polarized along eth-
nic lines, an unprecedented number of individuals filed requests with the
Chancellery of Petitions to change their foreign-sounding and politically
suspect surnames. Baptized Jews petitioned the state to erase what they
considered the most visible reminders of their ethnoreligious identities. As
early as 1850, in an effort to increase the visibility of baptized Jews and
help distinguish the newly baptized from the core Christian population,
the imperial government had explicitly forbidden converts to change their
surnames (upon baptism all Jews were obligated to adopt new forenames
and patronymics but retain their original surnames). Because the name
usually appeared "as the person's main referent, as the principal marker of
identification," lawmakers reasoned that Jewish-sounding names would
hinder the total integration of the convert into imperial Russian society. 19
Authorities, in other words, did not want converts to have a convenient
loophole through which they could escape supervision by hiding their
Jewish origin. If baptized Jews were allowed to change their surnames,
the State Council reasoned, then all Jews who committed a crime or trans-
gressed the law would "be able to evade surveillance" by converting to
Christianity, changing their permanent places of residence, and masking
their ethnic origin. 20 In 1893, some forty years after the law was first
introduced, Tsar Nicholas II himself instructed the Chancellery of Peti-
tions "not to approve requests from Jewish converts save for the most
exceptional cases. " 21

19. RGIA, f. 1284, op. 224, d. 42, II. 7-7b, 8b, 14-14b (1849-1902). On the semiotics
of the name, see B. A. Uspenskii, "Sotsial'naia zhizn' russkikh familii," Izbrannye trudy, 2
vols. (Moscow: Iazyki russkoi kul'tury, 1996), 2:203. And more generally on name changes,
see in the same volume Uspenskii's "Mena imen v Rossii v istoricheskoi i semioticheskoi
perspektive," 187-201.
20. At least one high-ranking official recognized that Jewish-sounding names would con-
tinue to stigmatize baptized Jews long after their initial conversion. The minister of internal
affairs, L. A. Perovskii, reasoned that if converts were allowed to change their surnames, they
would be able to come into closer contact with Christian society and erase their past. Count
Perovskii suggested that in all official documents baptized Jews should be registered under
their forenames and surnames, which would be given to them during the baptismal ceremony.
Although Perovskii's suggestions were dismissed, in 1864 the state did recognize that Jewish-
sounding surnames could cause social anxieties for converts in the military and made a small,
but ultimately significant, exception. RGIA, f. 1284, op. 224, d. 42, I. 9, 12b (1849-1902; and
RGIA, f. 1269, op. 1, d. 130, l. 6 (1864).
21. RGIA, f. 1412, op. 251, d. 107, I. 14 (1893-1899).
154 I Jews and the Imperial State

The Great War was almost entirely responsible for the extraordinary rise
of petitions by individuals wishing to change their surnames. In 1900 only
152 people petitioned for this change, but in 1912 and 1915 the numbers
increased to 1,120 and 2,296. 22 Individuals petitioned to acquire a sur-
name, clarify a mistaken identity or a bureaucratic foul-up, or change their
offensive-sounding names. The imperial government was very selective in
approving the petitions. Between 1884 and 1889, for example, the chancel-
lery received 238 name-change requests but approved only twenty-three. 21
"A surname can only be changed because of special circumstances," the
Ministry of Justice remarked, "and not as a consequence of the petitioner's
whim [prikhota]." 24 All subjects of the Russian Empire (including Jews)
were obligated to retain throughout their lifetimes the forename and sur-
name originally recorded in metrical books. 25 Only when authorities deemed
the name indecent or "offensive" (nepristoinyi) did they permit a formal
change as an exception to the general law on name changes-an exception
that could be made only once during a person's lifetime.
Most petitioners asked to change a German, Jewish, or other politically
unreliable name. The Great War and the revolutionary upheavals marked the
profound culmination of the ethnic and social tensions that had devastated
the empire's vast territories since at least the end of the nineteenth century.
The petitions reveal the everyday frustrations and social tensions that Ger-
mans, Jews, and many foreigners experienced during this turbulent period.
In the Russian Empire, as in imperial Germany, conversion represented a
radical reaction to the social pressures of living as a Jew in a politically con-
servative environment. The Jews who converted to Christianity sought to
distance themselves from their Jewishness, and they petitioned because their
surnames served as real and imagined symbols of their ethnic origin. 26
In 1915, Vsevolod Petrovich Gendel'man, who was completing his second-
year studies at the Warsaw Polytechnic Institute, petitioned to change his
surname to Renskii. As a young boy, Gendel'man had begun to lose interest

22. RGIA, f. 1412, op. 251, d. 108 (1900); ibid., d. 116 (1913); and ibid., d. 117 (1915).
23. Ibid., d. 105 (1884-1889).
24. RGIA, f. 821, op. 10, d. 781, I. 9 (1877-1902). On the creation of the law, see ibid.,
II. 2-15b. For a history of the chancellery, see S. N. Pisarev, Uchrezhdenie po priniatiiu prosh-
enii i zhalob, prinosimykh na Vysochaishee imia, 1810-1910 (St. Petersburg: R. Golike i A.
Vil'borg, 1911).
25. RGIA, f. 1405, op. 89, d. 2252, II. 29-31 (1888-1893). See also "Russkii zakon o
evreiskikh imenakh," in M. l. Mysh, comp., Rukovodstvo k russkim zakonam o evreiakh, 4th
ed. (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia A. Benke, 1914), 34-35.
26. On the problem of distancing and erasing memories of Jewishness, see Todd M. Endel-
man, "Memories of Jewishness and Their Jewish Pasts," in .Jewish History and .Jewish Mem-
ory: Essays in Honor of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, ed. Elisheva Carlebach, John M. Efron, and
David N. Myers (Waltham, Mass.: Brandeis University Press, 1998), 311-29.
 The Jewish Name I 155

in all things jewish. "My family," he wrote, "cursed me for my apostasy and
reproached me for my friendship with Christians." Like many young Jew-
ish converts, Gendel'man decided to get ahead in life by receiving a higher
education and becoming a "cultured person." Once he finished the gym-
nasium, he entered the Warsaw Polytechnic Institute, where he met and
married a young Jewish woman whom he encouraged to convert to Russian
Orthodoxy. But as soon as he realized that his wife would not convert, he
felt trapped in the "narrow world of the Jews," a world in which he could
not attain happiness and be faithful to his ideals. He subsequently decided
to divorce his young wife and to convert. By disassociating himself from
the Jewish community, Gendel'man sought friendship and "moral support"
from his new Christian friends. Because of his Russian appearance and his
uncanny ability to hide his surname from his coworkers-what he called the
last external sign of his Jewishness-Gendel'man associated only with non-
Jews. Despite all his efforts to conceal his Jewishness, however, Gendel'man
ultimately was not successfulY
In 1909, Anatolii Federovich Ginsburg made the case that he no lon-
ger had spiritual or communal ties with Jews. Having achieved a degree
of respectability in his new surroundings and a modicum of acceptance
from his new acquaintances, Ginsburg asked to change his surname be-
cause he considered it the last symbolic reminder of his former life as a
Jew. In St. Petersburg he had married the daughter of a Russian Orthodox
merchant, with whom he had two daughters. Since he and his family as-
sociated only with ethnic Russians, Ginsburg explained, his surname was a
constant source of emotional hardship for his entire family. For Ginsburg it
was a reminder of something "foreign and abandoned" and for the rest of
his family something "hateful and contemptible. " 2 s In 1912, twenty years
after his initial conversion, Mikhail Vainshtein also complained that his
surname continued to remind him, his family, and everyone around him
of his Jewish origin. 29 For most converts, the Jewish-sounding surname
caused social harassment, teasing and pranks, petty insult, and many forms
of discrimination. It was also the source, as Ian Aidel'man explained, of
much moral and material heartache. Aidel'man had all sorts of difficul-
ties in finding a suitable marriage partner or a position in either the civil
service or the private sector. "These same hardshjps in life await my chil-
dren," Aidel'man warned," but they will have no connection whatsoever
to the Jews." 30

27. RGIA, f. 1412, op. 4, d. 443 (1915).

28. RGIA, f. 1412, op. 4, d. 398 (1909).
29. RGIA, f. 1412, op. 3, d. 135 (1912).
30. RGIA, f. 1412, op. 1, d. 208 (1905).
156 I Jews and the Imperial State

Nikolai Vladimirovich Aptekman echoed Aidel'man's warning. As a fa-

ther of three young children, Aptekman did not want his children to share
his past misfortunesY Baptized Jews such as Ian Aidel'man and Nikolai
Aptekman converted with the hopes of fashioning a new life for themselves
and their families. This was also true of Mariia (Mina) Segal, who moved
from Vil'na to St. Petersburg, where she hoped to practice a new profes-
sion. Having converted in order to become a dentist, Mariia petitioned to
change her surname so that her parents and relatives would not be able to
locate her. 32
Shortly before conscription, Lazar Evseevich Vol'kenzon also decided to
change his name. For seventeen years Vol'kenzon had worked as an actor
in a theater company in Khar'kov, quickly embraced Russian culture, and
tried to associate mostly with ethnic Russians. In 1911 he converted toRus-
sian Orthodoxy in order to marry a Russian woman. Like many other pe-
titioners, Vol'kenzon emphasized that his family socialized only with the
Russian Orthodox community. "I have opened a small grocery store in
Khar'kov with the hope of providing a little something for my family," he
wrote, "but the name 'Vol'kenzon' appears on the sign outside the store and
in my business papers." The Jewish surname not only caused Vol'kenzon
emotional suffering, since neither he nor his family had ties to Jewish cul-
ture or religion, but also harmed his commercial reputation. "The Jewish
population shuns those people who convert to Christianity and refuses to
purchase anything from me," Vol'kenzon made his case. "Ethnic Russians
would rather do business with a Russian merchant than with a Jew, and
since the name outside my store is Jewish-sounding, they assume that I am
a Jew." Vol'kenzon would have accepted these hardships, but he and his
wife were mainly concerned about their son: "We do not want our young
son, Aleksandr, to inherit the Jewish surname and experience these painful
circumstances, especially since on October 28 I am supposed to report for
the draft, and God only knows if I will return alive. " 33
Like so many other petitioners, Kirill Aleksandrovich Vigorchik also
looked to distance himself from "foreign" associations and symbolic re-
minders of his origin. In an atmosphere of radical national emergency,
military conflict, and increased identification with the Russian nation, Vig-
orchik claimed that he had "nothing to do with the Jews" after renouncing
his former religious identity and accepting Russian ideals, customs, and val-
ues. Despite this transformation, Vigorchik continued to experience social
tensions in everyday life. "I sense that my coreligionists do not trust me,

31. RGIA, f. 1412, op. 1, d. 471 (1904).

32. RGIA, f. 1412, op. 17, d. 308 (1890).
33. RGIA, f. 1412, op. 3, d. 698 (1915).
 The Jewish Name I 157

if only because they recognize my origin by my family name," he wrote in

October 1917. "The only way to resolve these circumstances, if emigration
is to be excluded as a possible solution, is to change the Jewish root of my
surname. " 34 As a greater sense of national unity developed in popular as
well as political culture during the time of the Great War, interethnic ten-
sions worsened. Baptized Jews such as Vigorchik experienced estrangement
and alienation even as they did everything in their power to distance them-
selves from their Jewish roots.
Precisely because the Jewish surname carried so much symbolic social
weight, the Chancellery of Petitions reviewed the vast majority of the re-
quests with suspicion and fear, approving requests only in exceptional cir-
cumstances. One such case was the petition authored by Evolmii Draispits.
"My surname brings me sorrow," Draispits wrote, "especially by the
thought that my children, who have nothing in common with the Jews, have
to contend with a Jewish name." The Ministry of Finance and a St. Peters-
burg municipal official reviewed the petition before the Ministry of Justice
and finally the Chancellery of Petitions responded to Draispits's request. In
their lengthy correspondence, the officials noted a number of factors that
played an important role in the decision-making process. Chief among them
were the petitioner's confessional status and his marriage partner. Since the
parents were raising their children in the "spirit of Russian Orthodoxy," the
Ministry of Justice concluded that the "surname appears especially burden-
some." Because of the petitioner's exceptional moral qualities and genuine
faith in Russian Orthodoxy, the chancellery found the request deserving.
Evolmii Draispits was allowed to officially call himself Evolmii Artemeev. 35
Although the chancellery did not use a set of guidelines for affirming
name-change requests, archival documentation provides ample clues of the
administrative logic it used to act on the petitions. For first-generation bap-
tized Jews such as Evolmii Draispits (Artemeev), the state usually looked
at several redeeming qualities when considering a request for approval. 36
First and foremost, the petitioner needed to show that the surname served
as a burden in his new life (most of the petitions were written by men since

34. RGIA, f. 1412, op. 3, d. 486A (1917).

35. RGIA, f. 1412, op. 5, d. 576 (1890).
36. In its yearly reports, the chancellery did not categorize the petitioners by religion, es-
tate, or ethnicity; the reports indicated only the total number of petitions received and the
total number either rejected or approved. In these reports, the chancellery made an occasional
reference to the number of petitions it received from baptized Jews. For example, there were
only three name-change petitions from baptized Jews in 1894, seven in 1897, and only one in
1899. RGIA, f. 1412, op. 251, d. 106 (1897-1899); and GARt~ f. 102, deloproizvodstvo 2,
op. 76A, d. 1987 (1897-1899). These numbers indicate a tendency to deny a high percentage
of the petitions written by Jews or baptized Jews who petitioned to receive a "special excep-
tion" to the rule of law (regardless of the nature of the request).
158 I Jews and the Imperial State

women automatically bore the surnames of their husbands). Officials "take

into consideration," the Ministry of the Interior noted, "that those individu-
als who transfer from Judaism to Russian Orthodoxy need to break all ties
to their families, friends, and acquaintances. The surname should not only
serve as a painful reminder [of past experiencesJ but also help the public
discern [an individual's Jewish origin]." 37 Second, the converts needed to
demonstrate what was regarded as "respectable conduct and ways of life."
Usually this meant that they had broken all ties with their Jewish parents
and relatives, had married a Russian Orthodox (or, in some cases, Catholic
or Protestant) spouse, and were doing everything in their power to raise
their children in a non-Jewish environment. For the vast majority of Jewish
converts, the breaking of familial bonds and the severing of all ties with the
Jewish community proved challenging to carry out. 38 Third, they needed to
demonstrate their social utility and political reliability; without question,
a criminal history signaled denial. And finally, all their official papers-
baptismal records, service papers, and birth and marriage certificates-had
to be in perfect order. First-generation baptized Jews had to demonstrate, in
other words, that their transition to the faithful was "complete," that they
had broken all ties with their past, and that the surname remained the last
symbolic marker of a life that had vanished altogether or had been relegated
to distant memory. Although some of the members of the chancellery may
have been sympathetic to the requests, most of the pleas were neverthe-
less rejected because the imperial government reasoned that the converts
had not sufficiently distanced themselves from their Jewish past. 39 Once the
Great War began, the chancellery softened its views. Recognizing that the
foreignness of a name could cause unnecessary conflict in everyday life, it
began to look more favorably on the petititions. 40
Second-generation converts and other imperial subjects with Jewish-
sounding names petitioned for many of the same reasons that the first-
generations converts did, but these requests were looked at more favorably
by the state. 41 In 1916, the townsman Aleksandr Mikhailovich Berenshtein,

37. RGIA, f. 1412, op. 26, d. 1421. 11 (1900).

38. On this issue, see, for example, ChaeRan Freeze, "When Chava Left Home: Gender,
Conversion, and the Jewish Family in Tsarist Russia," Polin 18 (2005): 153-88.
39. Some officials sympathized with Jews who had converted out of religious conviction:
"For sincere converts, changing a Jewish-sounding surname would help avoid the [hostile] at-
titudes and social relations that have [recently] developed between Jews and Christians." Their
requests, one official wrote, "have to be recognized as practical and deserving." RGIA, f. 1284,
op. 224, d. 42, I. 9 (1849-1902). In 1881 the Holy Synod also reasoned that changes of names
would help Jewish converts cut ties to their pasts. RGIA, f. 821, op. 9, d. 163, I. 4 (1881).
40. For a sample of some of these petitions, sec Verner, "What's in a Name?"
41. Since the vast majority of conversions, from Judaism to Christianity, occurred in the last
four decades of the old regime, the number of second-generation converts remained small.
 The jewish Name \ 159

the son of a baptized Jew, petitioned to change his surname to Andreev, a

name he had already used in everyday life. As a "native Russian," Beren-
shtein did not want to be associated with the Jews. 42 Timofei Nikolaevich
Gurevich made a similar point: "In these difficult times [due to wartime con-
ditions], when many of my coreligionists desire to change their last names to
purely Russian ones, it is burdensome for me and my family to be called by
a non-Russian surname, especially since neither I, my wife, nor my children
have anything to do with the Jewish people." 43 Osip Vasil'ev Barkovich
petitioned for a similar reason. As a self-proclaimed Russian, Barkovich did
not want to "turn red from painful accusations" that questioned his origin.
"Plenty of times people told me, 'Yes, you are a Jew. You have a Jewish
surname.' And when I explained to them, they just replied, 'If you are not
a Jew, then you are an apostate, and there's no difference."' 44 "All the in-
dividuals whom I encounter think that I am a Jew because of my surname,
or that I was not born Russian Orthodox. They think that I converted for
[economic and social] benefits, and not from religious conviction," another
petitioner wrote. 41 The officials who read such petitions usually respected
the wishes of second-generation baptized Jews or individuals with Jewish-
sounding names who had no connection with either Judaism or Jews, espe-
cially as ethnic consciousness and nationalist sentiment increased during the
time of the Great War.

IV

In comparison with the law of either France or Germany, the Russian law
on name changes was in no way remarkable. In those countries the criminal

42. RGIA, f. 1412, op. 2, d. 637 (1916).

43. RGlA, f. 1412, op. 4, d. 1257 (1916).
44. RGIA, f. 1412, op. 2, d. 740 (1909).
45. RGIA, f. 1412, op. 11, d. 127 (1904). For other petitions that make similar points, see
RGIA, f. 1412, op. 21, d. 17 (1903); RIGA, f. 1412, op. 4, d. 337 (1906); ibid., d.1622 (1916);
and ibid., d. 1356 (1911). Of course, most individuals who petitioned between 1914 and 1917
wanted to change their German-sounding names. "The war with Germany stimulated Rus-
sian society to dissociate itself from everything German," the petitioner Aleksandr Gol'tsman
wrote. Eduard Gol'dberg and his two sons similarly asked to change their name: "These days
in Russian society, due to the justified indignation and enmity to all things German, we are the
object of all sorts of ridicule because of our name, Gol'dberg." For the Gol'dbergs, the negative
associations with Germany and the Germans proved difficult to overcome in professional as
well as in everyday life, even though no one in their family had been born in Germany. RGIA,
f. 1412, op. 4, d. 733 (1915); ibid., d. 1257 (1916). For an in-depth discussion of the German
question, see Verner, "What's in a Name?"; Eric Lohr, Nationalizing the Empire: The Cam-
paign against Enemy Aliens during World War I (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
2003); and Peter Gatrell, Russia's First World War: A Social and J-:conomic Historv (London:
Pearson Education Limited, 2005), 178-83. ·
160 I Jews and the Imperial State

code forbade unauthorized changes of names, obligating all individuals to

use the exact names recorded at birth in all transactions with the state.
"The great interest that the public administration has in the reliable desig-
nation of every individual and in his differentiation from others," remarked
a German jurist in 1895, "entails that the regulation of name matters pro-
ceeds according to public-law principles and by means of fixed rules. The
right to choose or change one's family name is therefore no longer a mat-
ter of individual discretion, and while the forename may be freely cho-
sen, the individual is not empowered to change it at will. " 46 As political
antisemitism increased in imperial Germany in the last three decades of
the nineteenth century, so did the number of name-change requests. In con-
forming to German middle-class lifestyles and accepting new codes of be-
havior, Jews mastered the German language, changed rules of etiquette and
conduct, and accommodated to new dress customs. And like their Russian
counterparts, German Jews petitioned to erase the visible reminders of their
Jewishness as they attempted to become productive members of German
bourgeois society. Yet throughout the nineteenth century, both Germany
and France continued to regulate and, in most cases, reject name-change
applicationsY
Although Russian law forbade name changes (except by the express per-
mission of the tsar), it did not impose any limitations on the types of names
that parents could give their children or prohibit people from using differ-
ent names and nicknames in daily life. Punishments were reserved for those
who appropriated fake or counterfeit identity papers; who wore orders or
other distinguishing markers that did not belong to them; and who used
ranks, titles, or names that publicly misrepresented their identity. Like other
subjects of the empire who masqueraded as people they were not, Jews
could be punished under article 1416 of the criminal code by a fine of at
least two hundred rubles for a first-time offense, five hundred rubles for a
repeat offense, and a prison sentence of anywhere from three weeks to three
months for a third violation. 48 "Name changes," the high commission rea-
soned, "can often lead to misunderstandings, and although these mix-ups
aren't always carried out with the wrong intention, there were times when

46. As quoted in Jane Caplan, '"This or That Particular Person': Protocols of Identification
in Nineteenth-Century Europe," in Caplan and Torpey, Documenting Indiuidual Identity, 62.
The English state, by contrast, had little interest in the regulation of name changes.
47. On the regulation of the Jewish name in Germany, see Bering, The Stigma of Names,
89-90. For a suggestive analysis of the problems and politics of German-Jewish adaptation,
see Shulamit Volkov, Germans, Jews, and Antisemites: Trials in Emancipation (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006), esp. 181-201.
48. RGIA, f. 1405, op. 89, d. 2252, I. 36b (1888-1893); and Mysh, Rukovodstuo k russkim
zakonam o evreiakh, 36.
 The Jewish Name I 161

[police officials] searched for Jews, who used Russian names in everyday
life, by their real Jewish names. " 49 By using Russian or Christian names in-
stead of their official Jewish names, Novorossiisskii telegraf warned, "Jews
would continue to be registered in the metrical books as a Shmul or Itsak,
but in daily interactions use Christian or New Testament names. When the
time came to pay a bill, the Jew would present a copy of his birth certificate
and argue that he never signed such a document, but that it was signed by
an unidentified Samuil or Ivan. " 50
Notwithstanding the increase of name-change petitions, the vast ma-
jority of Jews never bothered to file formal requests with the state. They
used Russian-sounding names in daily life or diminutives of their Hebrew
names without fully comprehending the administrative, political, and legal
consequences of the name change. Alarmed at the number of Jews calling
themselves by Russian names, police officials nevertheless had a difficult
time enforcing article 1416 of the criminal code, since neither Russian civil
law nor Jewish religious law stipulated the exact names Jews could use. In
Odessa, authorities discovered at least fifty Jews using "forbidden" names
in their business documents, and many more were under investigation for
similar schemes. Among those tried for this offense were some of the most
respected members of the Odessa Jewish community: the director of a credit
bureau, a member of the stock exchange committee, and a representative
of one of the largest commercial trading houses in the city. 51 In Rostov-on-
Don, a municipal official reported that "masses" of unauthorized requests
had piled up in his office from Jews wishing to register their children under
Christian names. 52 Kiev municipal officials argued that Jewish merchants
should not be allowed to inscribe Russian names in their business papers,
for this act could lead to a variety of difficulties in ascertaining individual
Jewish identities. 53
For the imperial Russian government, the name change represented a
symbol of Jewish acculturation, which it had promoted and encouraged
since the reign of Nicholas I. But as Jews were becoming less "Jewish,"
at least to some observers, imperial authorities quickly became concerned
that they would no longer be able to identify Jews by their differences

49. RGIA, f. 1405, op. 89, d. 2252, I. 32 (1888-1893).

50. Novorossiisskii telegraf 4294 (1889), 2.
51. RGIA, f. 821, op. 133, d. 722, II. 15b-17 (1910-1917) (for the list compiled by the
Odessa police, see 16-16b).
52. RGTA, f. 821, op. 133, d. 722, I. 39 (1910-1917).
53. Nedel'naia khronika voskhuda 24 (188S), 555-56. In 1878, the Ministry of the In-
terior proposed that the religious identity of all first- and second-guild Jewish merchants
should be clearly marked in their papers. GARF, f. 102, deloproizvodstvo 2, op. 76A, d.
1017 (1891).
162 I Jews and the Imperial State

(obosoblennosti). 54 One St. Petersburg government official noted that name

changes allowed several Jews residing in the capital to "conceal their Jewish
origin" and therefore made it easier for individuals with Russian-sounding
names to relocate outside the Pale of Settlement. 55 After making a cursory
inspection of the metrical records in Minsk Province, another official no-
ticed that a number of Jewish children were called by Russian names such
as Anatolii, Vera, Mikhail, and Elena. "The naming of Jews by Christian
names can lead to misunderstandings," the official warned, "and serve as
yet another means for hiding their Jewish origin." 56 "Even those Jews who
are incapable of assimilation [nesposobnymi k assimiliatsii]," a Nizhegorod
police official remarked, "use all possible methods so as not to differentiate
themselves from their milieu, and the name change serves as their principal
tactic. " 57
Yakov Brafman, a converted Jew and the foremost government expert on
Jewish religious and cultural practices, reported to the Ministry of the Interior
in the 1870s that "during the course of the nineteenth century, at first in the
West and now here [in the Russian Empire], a growing number of Jews mask
their Jewish origin by adopting Christian names (either German or Russian
ones) in an entirely arbitrary manner when encountering the local popula-
tion." Jews attempted to mask their identities not only in daily encounters
and interactions but also when they referred to themselves in letters and other
written documents by Christian names. "Even in official government docu-
ments Jews use foreign names to identify themselves. The Jew Avraam calls
himself Albrekht, for example, Meir Mark, Isaak Isidor, and so forth." Ac-
cording to Brafman, these affectations had become popular not only among
the younger students in institutions of higher education, who adopted names
such as Matvei and Fedor or Varvara and Leonora, but among older Jews
as well. "I can't say with certainty that the adoption of Russian and German
names is always motivated by efforts to conceal their Jewish origin or crimi-
nal intentions," Brafman concluded his report. "Nevertheless, on several oc-
casions Jews concealed their origin because they were known by Russian or
German names such as Albrekht or Matvei, while officials searched for them
by their real [Jewish] names such as Khaim or Avraam." 58
In the 1880s, in hopes of making Jewish identities more visible while at
the same time reducing the flow of illegal Jewish migrants, the St. Peters-

54. "Doklad o evreiskikh imenakh," in Materialy kommissii dlia peresmotra zakunov o

evreiakh (n.p., 1887), 34.
55. RGIA, f. 821, op. 9, d. 195, I. 36 (1872-1893).
56. RGIA, f. 821, op. 133, d. 722, II. 61-61b (1912).
57. RGIA, f. 821, up. 133, d. 722, II. 63-63b (1912).
58. RGIA, f. 821, op. 9, d. 92, 11. 45b-46b (1872-1882).
 The jewish Name I 163

burg governor, PetrA. Gresser, ordered that Jewish shopkeepers and traders
clearly display their names outside their establishments in the precise form
in which they appeared in official government documents. St. Petersburg
set a precedent that other imperial capitals quickly imitated. 59 The Warsaw
governor-general instructed Mordakh Itsak Brandrendler to display his full
Jewish name as it appeared in his birth certificate instead of as M. Brandren-
dler and Company. 60 In Moscow, Natan Apostol and Yakov Natanz, who
operated the firm Apostol and Natanz, were instructed to clearly display
their forenames, patronymics, and surnames outside their establishment. 61
Frustrated at Gresser's refusal to allow him to operate an office supply
shop without displaying his official name, one St. Petersburg shopkeeper,
a certain Shmuil Kibal'skii, filed a complaint against the governor. After
reviewing the complaint, the Senate ruled that the original 1888 law (that
all signs hung outside shop windows must be approved by Gresser's office)
did not specify the type of information the shopkeepers should inscribe on
the signs, nor did it state which establishments were obligated to hang the
signs. However sympathetic the Senate may have been to Gresser's concern
for maintaining social order in the capital, the court nevertheless stipulated
that imperial law should not single out Jews. The Senate reasoned that be-
cause the original law did not mandate that either Russian Orthodox or
non-Orthodox merchants familiarize their customers with their origin, Jews
should not be forced to display their ethnoreligious origin either. 62
At the turn of the century, the intensification of the revolutionary move-
ment only helped highlight the broader political ramifications of the name
change. By the 1880s, Jews played a numerically significant role in revolu-
tionary circles, comprising almost 20 percent of all revolutionaries, while
in the south and southwestern regions of the empire, the Department of
Police estimated that Jews totaled 20 and 35 percent, respectively. An ex-
haustive study of the revolutionary movement may not have found any
evidence to support the claim "that radicals of Jewish descent altered the
focus of revolutionary activities or thought in this period because they were
Jews," but police officials and tsarist administrators who patrolled the em-
pire deemed otherwise. According to the Moscow chief of police, Jews had
become the most dangerous component of the revolutionary movement as
a whole: "The very people who resist a transition to the peaceful program

59. Gresser passed the law on names on November 17, 1890. For a short description of the
law, see G. B. Sliozberg, Prauovoe i ekonomicheskoe polozhenie eureev v Rossii (St. Petersburg:
Elektropechatnaia Ia. Levenshteina, 1907), 98-99. On Gresser and the Jews, see Nathans,
Beyond the Pale, 99-100.
60. GARF, f. 102, deloproizvodstvo 2, op. 76A, d. 1756 (1896-1902).
61. GARF, f. 102, deloproizvodstvo 2, op. 76A, d. 1344 (1892-1899).
62. GARF, f. 102, deloproizvodstvo 2, op. 76A, d. 1340, II. 3-3b, 12-13b, 30 (1892).
164 I jews and the Imperial State

are the Jews, who recently have been quietly attempting to grasp the initia-
tive of the revolutionary movement into their hands." 63 At the turn of the
century, the Department of Police continued to view the Jewish Question
as the single most important cause for the intensification of the revolution-
ary movement in the empire. In a report made to Nicholas II, the depart-
ment observed that the most destitute and intransigent peoples resided in
the territories of the Pale of Settlement: "Linking this condition [the abject
poverty] to the absence of Jewish political rights in comparison with the
rest of the population-while at the same time ignoring the peculiarities of
their own racial makeup-nearly the entire Jewish intelligentsia has joined
revolutionary organizations. " 64
Like so many other young revolutionary activists in the Pale of Settlement,
"Abram" transformed himself into a conscious revolutionary in hopes of
overthrowing what he saw as an oppressive autocratic regime. "Jews real-
ize that they are deprived of the most basic freedom and individual rights,"
the young Abram wrote to his fellow agitators. "Since we are the most
ancient of peoples, the most intelligent, the most educated, and the most
enterprising, they [the imperial administrators] deprive us of rights which
all other people in Russia enjoy. We must secure our freedom, our equality,"
he continued.

I look around and see two-and-a-half million people enslaved, and I must say
that we need to take the side of our weak, oppressed, and helpless brothers. We
must secure freedom for them, and if only this people would rebel in unison
against the oppressors, then I would arm myself with a dagger and a revolver
to fight for their freedom. But since [revolution] is not feasible at this moment,
then some prominent Jews have decided to fight for their freedom by relying
on the printed word. Since it [the printing press] has made a colossal contribu-
tion to mankind, why should it not also help Jews [attain their freedom and
rights]?

Yet in the existing political climate Abram felt that the printed word had
proved futile for generating political change. He therefore saw no other
choice than to transform himself into a conscious revolutionary by arming
himself with a revolver. 65

63. As quoted in Norman Naimark, Terrorists and Social Democrats: The Russian Revolu-
tionary Movement under Alexander III (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983),
92 (Nairmark's emphasis). On the high percentage of Jews in the revolutionary movement, see
also Erich E. Haberer, Jews and Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Russia (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1995), 255.
64. "Obzor vazhneishikh doznanii, proizvodivshikhsia v zhandarmskikh upravleniiakh za
1902 god," Russkaia istoricheskaia biblioteka 21 (1906): 3.
65. YIVO, RG 87, file 1055, folios 79100-79101.
 The Jewish Name I 165

Revolutionaries such as Abram became experts at avoiding detection by

hiding out in secret apartments, creating complex codes of communication,
disseminating illegal literature, forging identity papers, and adopting nick-
names and aliases in order to mask their true identities from the police.
When Vladimir Medem joined an underground revolutionary group, he
quickly adopted the name "Michael Vinitsky," a name that was neither dis-
tinctively Jewish nor Russian "but suitable for both a Jew and a gentile." 66
In the Russian Empire, where territorial conquest, national agitation, and
movement of populations engendered social instability and political insecu-
rity, police authorities had a difficult time monitoring every person. "The
most damaging activity of the younger Jews is their uncanny ability to con-
ceal all their willful tricks," the Vil'na police chief observed in the 1880sY
This is why the chief felt that authorities needed to compile the most precise
information about the styles of lives that Jews led, the types of occupations
they practiced, their capacity to make money, the kinds of persons they cor-
responded with, and the circle of people they befriended. Careful observa-
tion allowed detectives to spot the most dangerous Jews-those who proved
especially harmful because of the ideas they discussed, the styles of life they
led, and the number of innocent people they were able to influence. "Of
course, it's even more desirable if all this [information] would allow us to
know their [private] thoughts and aspirations," the police chief continued.
"These types of people must be closely watched so that police inspectors
would not miss any of their activities. " 68
Shaia ltskov-lsaakov Goloshchekin, also known at various times as
"Filipp," "Boris Ivanovich," or just "Ivanovich," received a two-year prison
sentence after he was arrested in St. Petersburg for behavior deemed "politi-
cally unreliable." On March 11, 1910, two years after his release, Golosh-
chekin (who now went by the name Georg Vladimir Semenov Avanesov)
was arrested once again for organizing a social democratic rally in Moscow
and was exiled to Tomsk for three years. But he did not remain in Siberia
for the duration of his sentence. On February 20, 1912, the Moscow po-
lice chief reported that one of his deputies had spotted Goloshchekin (who
had changed his public persona yet again, to Aleksandr Yakob Maida) at a
social democratic gathering. For this transgression, he was sentenced to yet
another term of hard labor in Siberia, although the records do not reveal
how long he remained there. 69 What remains clear from Goloshchekin's

66. Vladimir Medem, The Life and Soul of a Legendary jewish Socialist, ed. Samuel A.
Portnoy (New York: Ktav, 1979), 155.
67. YIVO, RG 87, file 1055, folio 79107 (1888).
68. Ibid., folios 79107-79108.
69. Irina Antropova, ed., Sbornik dokumentov po istorii evreev Urala: Tz fondov uchrezh-
denii dosovetskogo perioda Gosudarstvennogo arkhiva Sverdlovskoi oblasti. (Moscow: Drev-
lekhranilishche, 2004), 349-50.
166 I Jews and the Imperial State

escapades, however, is that the trickster continued to turn to the name

change as a way of appearing invisible in the public eye as he traveled from
place to place in the empire. For "police officials and government admin-
istrators," the Ministry of the Interior remarked tersely in 1915, "name
changes create massive difficulties in the identification of individual identi-
ties [ustanovleniia tozhestvo !its]. " 70
The lack of an unambiguous distinction between Jewish and Russian
names led to all sorts of confusion in establishing precise identities. In
Dubno, a town located on the Ikva River in the southwestern part of the em-
pire, the merchants Sender and Yanke! Cherkes were charged with imposture
for changing their names to Aleksandr and Yakov. Both men received a fine
and faced a ten-day prison sentence if they failed to make payment in a timely
fashion. During the trial, their defense attorney conceded that all subjects of
the empire, and not only Jews, should be called only by their actual names.
"The German Johan, the Polish Jan, the French Jean, and the English John,"
the attorney made the case, "can and should be translated as Ivan in Rus-
sian. But this is not a name change that results in a [formal] translation of
the name, but merely a change in pronunciation." The attorney pointed out
that no law in the Russian Empire specifically prohibited Jews from translat-
ing their names into the Russian. "And since there is no law, it is not enough
[for the prosecutor] to say, when ascertaining whether this or that Jew calls
himself by his actual name, that he is registered as, say, Avrum but calls him-
self Avraam. It's essential to determine that Avrum cannot be translated as
Avraam, and that the name [Avraam] is also an entirely independent name
that cannot be translated in the Russian language !as Avrumj." After an ap-
peal, the Kiev appellate court found Sender and Yanke! Cherkes not guilty of
imposture under article 1416 of the criminal code. They had not misrepre-
sented their identity, the court ruled, but merely called themselves by names
with "different pronunciations" [razlichnoe proiznoshenie ]. ~ 1
Although certain segments of the Jewish population attempted to change
their names with the hope of blending in, appearing less Jewish, or masking
their identity, other individuals resisted these temptations, either for ideo-
logical reasons or because of peer pressure. The more religiously observant
Jews and especially those who resided in densely populated Jewish towns
in the Pale of Settlement continued to use names that were conventionally
deemed Jewish. Yanke! Abramov Baltekalis, an eighty-two-year-old grand-
father, petitioned to change his family's surname to the Jewish-sounding

70. TsDIAK, f. 311, op. 1, d. 2, 11. 468-468b ("Tsirkuliar June 17, 1915, o zapreshchenii
v ofitsial 'noi perepiskc o litsakh iudeiskogo veroispovedanii nazyvat' ikh khristianskimi
imenami").
71. TsDIAK, f. 442, op. 626, d. 62, 11. 7b-8 (1896).
 The Jewish Name I 167

Gutman. "Everyone calls us by Gutman. This is the family name which I

even use to address my postal correspondence," the grandfather explained
in the petition. During the reign of Nicholas I a certain state official had ar-
bitrarily recorded the surname Baltekalis in Yankel Abramov's papers, and
since that time he and his family had been obligated to use the unfamiliar,
offensive, and strange name. Yanke! Abramov explained that in cities such
as Vil'na, where a sizable Jewish population resided, his sons and grandson
experienced all types of jokes and pranks in school as well as in everyday
life because of their foreign-sounding name. Unlike the Jews who petitioned
to change their Jewish-sounding names to their Russian equivalents, Yan-
ke! Abramov wanted to change his "strange and unfamiliar" surname to a
more socially acceptable one in order for his family to feel more at home in
a distinctly Jewish setting. 72 The soldier Gavriil Rozenfrukt petitioned for a
similar reason-to change his forename to Samuil in order to "feel closer to
his coreligionists and family members." In contrast to many other Jews who
had been conscripted into the cantonist (military) battalions at a young age,
Rozenfrukt claimed that he had never been baptized and therefore should
not have been forced to adopt the Christian name. 73
Even when parents wished to give Russian names to their children, some
of the more religiously conservative crown rabbis objected in order to pre-
serve customary Jewish naming practices. During a circumcision that took
place in 1898, Faivish Davidovich Yel'son asked the crown rabbi to record
his son's name as Maksimilian in the metrical records. Rabbi Deits refused
to inscribe a so-called Christian name in the metrical book, registering the
boy instead as Mordukh-El'ia. The rabbi explained that "Maksimilian is
a Christian name" and argued that "from the point of view of the Jewish
religion" he was obligated to inscribe only traditional Jewish names in the
metrical book during the circumcision rite. Faivish Yel'son filed a complaint
with the provincial governor, making the case that Rabbi Deits had violated
both Russian civil law and Jewish religious law. "Although the rabbi can
certainly try to persuade Jewish parents to give biblical names to their chil-
dren," from the point of view of Jewish religious law, Yel'son maintained,
"there's not one name that parents can't give to their children. " 74

72. RGIA, f. 1412, op. 2, d. 118, 11. 2-4 (1905). Yanke! Abramov's petition was
approved.
73. RGIA, f. 821, op. 8, d. 201 (1871). An inspection of the service records revealed that
Rozenfrukt had in fact been baptized in 1854, and the petition was therefore rejected. On can-
tonist battalions, see Michael Stanislawski, Tsar Nicholas I and the Jews: The Transformation
of Jewish Society in Russia, 1825-1855 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America,
1983); and Olga Litvak, Conscription and the Search for Modern Russian Jewry (Blooming-
ton: Indiana University Press, 2006).
74. RGIA, f. 821, op. 9, d. 49, I. 8 (1898-1903).
168 I jews and the Imperial State

Movsha Areevich Yoffe, a merchant of the first guild, experienced some-

thing similar when the Dvinsk crown rabbi refused to record the name Boris
in the metrical book for his newly born son. Shortly after his son's birth in
October 1895, Yoffe had asked the local crown rabbi to record Boris in the
metrical book. But the rabbi paid no attention to "the fact that the name
Boris is purely Jewish and is pronounced exactly the same in Yiddish as it is
in Russian, and refused to record my newly born son under the name that I
had picked out for him, explaining to me that, since Christians also have the
same exact name, he is obliged, by administrative decree, not to give such
a name to a newly born Jewish child." Movsha Areevich did not find any
legal justification for the rabbi's refusal, and he therefore sent a petition to
the Vitebsk municipal authorities to register his son in the Dvinsk metrical
records under the name Boris. After two years had passed without an affir-
mative response from Vitebsk, Movsha Areevich sent yet another petition,
this time to the Ministry of the Interior: "Since April 1896 authorities have
yet to act on the [first] petition, and due to this lack of developments, my
newly born son does not have an [official] name and is not registered in the
metrical book." Citing a number of similar cases, Movsha Areevich pointed
out that imperial law "allows Jews the right to give Christian names to their
newly born children." "And if after all this [authorities] continue to have
doubts about my request, then I must point out that the name Boris is not
a purely Christian name," Movsha Areevich concluded his petition. "The
name can also be found among Jews, but only in the partially distorted form
Borukh and in the diminutive form Berka. " 75
After several similar cases appeared throughout the empire, the Senate
reiterated, in 1899, that "Jews should be named only by the names that
appear in their metrical records, regardless of their origin." Moreover, the
Senate pointed out, the law forbade crown rabbis from refusing to record a
name simply because it did not originate in the Old Testament/6 But even
though imperial law may not have forbidden Jews to use Christian, Rus-
sian, or New Testament names, the larger question of what specific names
could be categorized as Christian, Russian, or New Testament continued to
provoke much public discussion among government officials, journalists,
and leading experts on Jewish religious law and Russian Orthodox theol-
ogy. The question of what constituted a Jewish name, to put it in slightly
different terms, was as much about differentiating one name from the other

75. RGIA, f. 821, op. 10, d. 797, 11. 25-26 (1897).

76. RGIA, f. 821, op. 133, d. 722, II. 92b-93 (1910-1917). The Senate ruled in 1899
and reaffirmed in 1900 and 1903 that Jews could use Evgenii, Boris, and Ol'ga-names that
were conventionally categorized as Russian or Christian. For these and other cases, see RGIA,
f. 821, op. 10, d. 797, II. 82-85, 113-l18b (1895-1910).
 The Jewish Name I 169

as it was about constructing a set of objective and clearly defined criteria for
differentiating Jews from everyone else.

v
Over the course of the second half of the nineteenth century, the Jewish
name and the politics of naming practices aroused considerable interest
from the state. As Jews began to play an increasingly visible role in impe-
rial Russian culture and society, the inability to identify them in a clear and
precise fashion alarmed government and church authorities.7 7 The search
for a reliable indicator of Jewishness led in many different directions. While
religious practices and cultural customs provided important clues, they did
not provide objective criteria of identification. As imperial administrators
turned to knowledge-based technologies-censuses, metrical records, and
passports-to govern populations and began to rely on ethnic distinctions
to mark differences, the Jewish name provided the most popular and widely
recognized marker of identity.
Since the 1860s, imperial administrators had recognized that the "anar-
chy" in Jewish naming practices limited the state's capacity to govern the
population, and they therefore commissioned experts to create an exhaus-
tive and authoritative archive of Jewish names.7 8 The Jewish Committee
first suggested that a book with Yiddish (diminutives), Hebrew (biblical),
and Russian names would greatly improve the state's ability to govern
the Jewish population by standardizing transliteration patterns from the
Hebrew to the Russian and offering a complete list of Yiddish variants of
Hebrew names, along with their Russian equivalents. A complete book of
names would allow crown rabbis to record only one standardized form
of each name under the Russian and Hebrew categories in the metrical
book. The committee reasoned that a complete book of names would
serve as a useful tool in solving much of the disorder in Jewish naming
practices, thereby helping improve the state's capacity to govern the Jew-
ish population. 79 Although a similar project never materialized for other
so-called dangerous or unreliable populations who continuously deviated

77. On the visibility of Jews in middle-class professions and institutions of higher educa-
tion, see Nathans, Beyond the Pale. On the visibility of Jews in revolutionary movements, see
Haberer, Jews and Revolution. See also Yuri Slezkine, A Jewish Century (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2004).
78. Jews and non-Jews often used the word "anarchy" to describe Jewish naming practices
in the Russian imperial context. See, for example, I. I. Kulisher, Sbornik dlia soglasovaniia
raznouidnostei imen: Bibleiskikh, natsional'nykh, talmudicheskikh, zaimstuouannykh i drugikh
upotrebliaemykh eureiami v Rossii (Zhitomir: Tipografiia Sh. Khorozhanskago, 1911), 6.
79. "Doklad o evreiskikh imenakh," 7.
170 I jews and the Imperial State

from imperial management policies, authorities repeatedly turned to the

name as a convenient marker to distinguish members of the imperial pop-
ulation by ethnic component. 80
Captain K. S. Zhurakovskii, with the assistance of the crown rabbiS. M.
Rabinovich, compiled the first attempt, entitled the Complete Collection
of Jewish Names, on July 29, 1870. Shortly after its completion, Zhura-
kovskii suggested in a letter to the Ministry of the Interior that the book
should have a large print run and wide circulation. "My efforts should be
of material significance," Zhurakovskii made his case, "and I request that
the ministry decree that the aforementioned collection be used in all terri-
tories of the empire where Jews reside." If for some reason the ministry did
not find it convenient to approve the request, then Zhurakovskii suggested
that it should limit the use of the collection, in a trial run, to one province.
"I am convinced that the appearance of the collection would be welcomed
not only by the Jews themselves," Zhurakovskii concluded his appeal, "but
also by those individuals who have been stationed in close proximity be-
cause of their governmental duties." 81
Organized by the Ministry of Popular Enlightenment, a committee of
experts reviewed Zhurakovskii's efforts, finding the book incomplete, not
entirely original, and replete with mistakes. The chairman of the commis-
sion and a leading expert on Judaism and Jews, Professor Daniel Khvol'son,
maintained that the authors had borrowed freely from recently published
compilations, and he concluded his report by arguing that the book did
not live up to the standards of critical scholarship. Other members of the
committee voiced similar reservations.x 2 Despite these harsh criticisms,
Zhurakovskii's Complete Collection of Jewish Names appeared in print in
1874, receiving at least one positive review. 83 The Litovskie eparkhial'nye
vedomosti exclaimed that the book was "of practical value" and "should
be used by the state to expedite judicial proceedings and criminal investiga-
tions, as well as [used by administrators] in schools and during military con-
scription." The author ended his review by exclaiming that Zhurakovskii's

80. Imperial authorities used Polish-sounding names to identity Poles, for example. See the
suggestive discussion in Leonid Gorizontov, Paradoksy imperskoi politiki: Poliaki v Rossii i
russkie v Pol'she (Moscow: lndrik, 1999), chap. 3.
81. RGIA, f. 821, op. 8, 380, ll. 20-20h (1871). See also "Doklad o evreiskikh
imenakh," 8.
82. Zhurakovskii had borrowed from compilations such as Ephraim Zalman ben Mena-
hem Mannes Margolioth's Tiv gitin (Vilna, 1849) and Leopold Zunz's Namen der Juden: Eine
geschichtliche Untersuchung (Leipzig, 183 7). He was also influenced by Jakob Rotwand's 1866
booklet published in Warsaw. RGIA, f. 821, op. 8, d. 380, ll. 23-23b (1871).
83. K. S. Zhurakovskii and S. M. Rabinovich, comps., Polnoe sobranie evreiskikh imen
s napisaniem ikh na russkom i evreiskom iazykakh (St. Petersburg: Suvalskaia gubernskaia
tipografiia, 1874). A second edition appeared in Warsaw in 1908.
 The Jewish Name I 171

efforts provided a great service: "It's about time we knew who it is that we
are dealing with. " 84
Yet after an exhaustive review of the Complete Collection of Jewish
Names, the Ministry of the Interior determined that it was dissatisfied with
Zhurakovskii's work and commissioned even more complete and authori-
tative editions. Yakov Brafman responded by completing his own manu-
script shortly after the publication of Zhurakovskii's book. 85 The crown
rabbi M. V. Pogorel'skii of Khar'kov Province compiled yet another edi-
tion, which was first serialized in the Jewish monthly Voskhod (1888-91)
and appeared in book form in 18 9 3. "In recent times," Pogorel' skii
wrote in the introduction, "misunderstandings concerning Jewish per-
sonal names have begun to play quite a significant role [in everyday life]."
"Every month [the Jewish weekly] Khronika voskhoda reports new inci-
dents when this or that person's military exemptions are not recognized
or when someone who had died is considered a fugitive. But all these
misunderstandings occur because [government officials] cannot accurately
identify the names of the people they are dealing with." Pogorel' skii hoped
that his edition would resolve many of these unfortunate misunderstand-
ings and discrepancies. 86
Although the authors made substantial progress, both Brafman's manu-
script and Pogorel'skii's volume were nevertheless criticized for failing to
provide complete and authoritative lists of Jewish names. 87 "No matter who
registers the names in the metrical books," the Rabbinical Commission re-
marked, "whether [these individuals] are crown rabbis, municipal authori-
ties, police officials, or individuals from other institutions, [the publication]
of such a volume is most pressing. It's important as a reference book for
[crown] rabbis, judicial establishments, notaries, municipal dumas, military
agencies during conscription, and so forth. " 88 In a similar fashion, the Min-
istry of the Interior envisioned that the book would provide an accessible
and straightforward guide for deciphering the highly confusing terrain of
Jewish names and naming practices.
The most frustrating aspect of the entire enterprise revolved around the
inherent difficulty of providing an unambiguous definitional boundary be-
tween Jewish and Russian names. The construction of a complete book

84. Litovskie eparkhial'nye vedomosti 52 (1874), 423.

85. Brafman's manuscript was never published, and is currently preserved in RGIA, f. 821,
op. 9, d. 92, II. 20-53b (1872-1882).
86. M. V. Pogorel'skii, comp., Evreiskie imena sobstvennye, chast' istoricheskaia: Imena bi-
bleiskie, novago zaveta i talmudicheskie (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia A. E. Landau, 1893), 3-4.
87. RGIA, f. 1405, op. 89, d. 2252, I. 29b (1888-1893); and RGIA, f. 821, op. 10, d. 774,
I. 97b (1872-1894).
88. RGIA, f. 821, op. 9, d. 44, II. 5b-6 (1897).
172 I Jews and the Imperial State

of Jewish names thus prompted state officials to determine, in a concise

but comprehensive fashion, what constituted a Jewish name. Could Jewish
names be grouped together in an aggregate category? And could they be eas-
ily recognized and distinguished from so-called Christian or Russian names?
The answers to these questions, however, were far from self-evident, trigger-
ing a long and drawn-out discussion among crown rabbis, church officials,
and imperial authorities over the very meaning of the Jewish name. The
debate began in the 1870s, shortly after the publication of Zhurakovskii's
volume, and lasted until the collapse of the old regime.
As early as the 1860s and 1870s, when the name-change question first
became a public controversy, conservative journalists wondered whether
imperial law even allowed Jews to be called by Russian names. 89 Similar
queries from provincial administrators and newspaper reporters provoked a
series of responses from Jewish religious experts in defense of Jewish nam-
ing practices. 90 As one crown rabbi observed in typical fashion, Jews did
not have a list of canonized names to choose from: "The Jewish religion
does not prescribe that Jewish children be called by Jewish names at the
time of their birth. The sages themselves were called by Greek, Syrian, and
Roman names: Aleksandr, Aristotul, Antiokh, Girkan, Trifon, Klimentii,
and other similar names. The names used by Jews are also of Slavic origin:
Zlata, Charta, Bela, Dobra, Mila, Slava, Liuba, Soniia, and many others.
All of these names have been adopted by Jews and, according to their cul-
tural traditions, are given the same value as purely biblical [Old Testament]
names." 91 Many other Jewish journalists and crown rabbis also explained
that Jews had always used the names of the peoples among whom they
lived. Jews "have the same right [as does everyone else] to call themselves by
names such as Aleksandr, Fabian, Viktor, and Benedikt, since these names
are, so to speak, international or pan-European," one reporter commented
in a Jewish weekly. 92 Other Jewish religious experts confirmed that Jewish
religious law did not prohibit Jews from using Christian or New Testament
names. It allowed parents to name their children by any name they chose,
the experts maintained, and crown rabbis were therefore obliged to register
these names in the metrical books. 93
In light of this argument, the High Commission for Review of Legisla-
tion Pertaining to the Jews of Russia suggested that it did not find enough

89. Novorossiiskii telegraf 3632 (1887), 2.

90. For a sample of the debate in the Russian press, see Rizhskii vestnik 1 (1889), 2; and
Novorossiiskii telegraf 1359 (1879), 3.
91. RGIA, f. 821, op. 133, d. 722, II. 50-SOb (1910-1917).
92. Nedel'naia khronika voskhoda 24 (1888), 556. See also Vestnik russkikh evreev 25
(1871), 760-63; and RGIA, f. 1405, op. 89, d. 2252, I. 3 (1888-1893).
93. RGIA, f. 821, op. 133, d. 722, II. 91-91b (1910-1917).
 The Jewish Name I 173

justification to limit the types of names Jews could call their children,
especially since many of the Christian names had their origin in the Old
Testament. 94 After reading the high commission's report, Konstantin Pobe-
donostsev, the procurator of the Holy Synod, pointed out that the name
constituted a symbol of devotion and piety to the Russian Orthodox Church
and suggested that Jews should call themselves by only Old Testament
names. Even though names might have no religious or spiritual significance
to the Jewish people, Pobedonostsev nonetheless felt that allowing Jews to
use Russian names would offend the religious sensibilities of the Russian
Orthodox community. For this reason, the procurator of the Holy Synod
decided that the imperial administration should pass a law requiring Jews
to inscribe only Old Testament names in metrical books. 95
The Ministry of the Interior agreed with Pobedonostsev in principle (that
Christian names should be given only to people associated with the Russian
Orthodox Church) but nevertheless found it challenging to draw an imper-
meable line between Jewish and Christian names. "If we keep in mind that
many of the names that the church has canonized have their origin in the
Jewish tradition," the ministry concluded, "then it becomes very difficult
[for us] to make Jews call themselves by [only Old Testament] names." 96
And since religious communities in different nations and in different histori-
cal epochs did not differentiate between Old Testament and New Testament
names, the ministry opined that a special book of Jewish names could not
be objectively constructed in the Russian Empire either. 97 By granting Jews
the right to be called by names registered in metrical books, regardless of the
historical origin of the name, the Ministry of the Interior recommended that
no substantial changes be made to Jewish naming practices. After two de-
cades of protracted and abstruse discussion over how to define a Jewish
name, the imperial administration thus conceded that there was no such
thing after all.
But the controversy over Jewish names did not end in 1892. At the turn
of the twentieth century, the transliteration of Jewish names continued to
pose problems for provincial authorities, the discrepancies over the registra-
tion of Jewish vital statistics continued to provoke much public controversy,
and conservative journalists and members of the Russian Orthodox Church
continued to disapprove of Jews' calling themselves by Russian or Christian

94. Ibid., II. 92-92b; "Doklad o evreiskikh imenakh," 38; and RGIA, f. 1405, op. 89,
d. 2252, I. 32 (1888-1893).
95. RGIA, f. 821, op. 133, d. 722, I. 92b (1892); and N. N. Glubokovskii, Po voprosu
o "prave'' evreev imenovat'sia khristianskimi imenanzi: Traktat i istoricheskaia spravka
(St. Petersburg: Sudebnaia tipografiia, 1911), 90-91.
96. RGIA, f. 1405, op. 89, d. 2252, I. 34 (1892).
97. Ibid.
174 I Jews and the Imperial State

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Figure 7. Complete Collection of Jewish Names. Source: K. S. Z hurakovskii and

S. M. Rabinovich, comps., Polnoe sobranie evreiskikh imen s napisaniem ikh na
russkom i evreiskom iazykakh, 2nd ed. (Warsaw, 1908).

names. In light of these developments, the Ministry of the Interior decided

to commission an even more complete and authoritative book of Jewish
names, even though it had just demonstrated the inherent difficulties of con-
structing such a book.
In 1908 the Ministry of the Interior reissued Zhurakovskii's Complete
Collection ofJewish Names, but the second edition was also received criti-
cally.98 After reviewing it, one critic remarked that he found the book full

98. K. S. Zhurakovskii and S. M. Rabinovich, comps., Polnoe sobranie evreiskikh imen s

napisaniem ikh na russkom i evreiskom iazykakh, 2nd ed. (Warsaw: I Edel'shteina, 1908). For the
 The]ewishName I 175

of significant om1sswns, far from complete when compared with other

similar publications, and in need of a significant number of additions and
corrections. Similarly, another critic found numerous translation errors
from the Hebrew into the Russian, deeming the author linguistically in-
competent to take on such an important task. 99 In 1910 the Rabbinical
Commission, convened by the Ministry of the Interior to discuss some of
the most important religious issues of the day, concluded that an objec-
tive, standardized book of Jewish names would be highly desirable for
easing relations between the imperial state and the Jews, and it nominated
the Kishinev crown rabbi, L. M. Tsirel'son, to complete the task. Like
so many other government institutions, the commission reasoned that an
authoritative edition of names would help resolve many of the misunder-
standings, disagreements, and conflicts between Jews and the imperial bu-
reaucracy that had occurred because names were either not transcribed
or not transliterated properly. 100 When one and a half years had passed
and Tsirel'son had failed to produce a manuscript, the Zhitomir crown
rabbi, Isser Isasvich Kulisher, decided to take over the work and compile
his own book of Jewish names. 101 But as soon as Kulisher finished editing
and compiling the volume, several leading experts criticized the rabbi's
efforts as "insufficiently thorough." As with other published and unpub-
lished manuscripts of Jewish names, the book was not used for administra-
tive purposes. 102 After Tsirel'son finally finished his own version in 1913,
the Yiddish-language newspaper Haynt characterized the entire enterprise
as "ridiculous," since Jewish law did not place any limits or restrictions on
the names Jews could use. 103
In the meantime, V. K. Sabler, who had replaced Pobedonostsev as the
procurator of the Holy Synod, maintained that the name constituted an
important symbol for the Russian Orthodox community-a symbol of the

publication history of the book (petitions by Zhurakovskii, as well as commentary by the Min-
istry of the Interior and provincial authorities), see RGIA, f. 821, op. 10, d. 797, 11. 89-lOOb,
119-122, 164-184.
99. RGIA, f. 821, op. 133, d. 771, ll. 7-7b (1912-1913).
100. Ibid., 11. 1-2; and Sbornik reshenii Ravvinskoi Kommisii sozyva 1910 gada (St. Peters-
burg: Tipografiia ministerstva vnutrennikh del, 1912), 161-62.
101. DAKO, f. 444, op. 1, 45, l. 2b (1910-1911). Kulisher's Sbornik dlia soglasovaniia
raznovidnostei imen appeared in 1911. An English translation of Kulisher's volume was pub-
lished by Boris Feldblyum, Russian-Jewish Given Names: Their Origins and Variants (Teaneck,
N.J.: Avotaynu, 1998).
102. RGIA, f. 821, op. 133, d. 771, l. 11 (1912-1913).
103. On February 25, 1913, the Kishinev rabbi, L. M. Tsirel'son, petitioned for permission
to work in the St. Petersburg Imperial Public Library in order to put the finishing touches on
his manuscript of Jewish names. The Department of Spiritual Affairs of Foreign Confessions
granted him permission to work on his book in the capital. For a review of Tsirel 'son's project,
see Haynt 119 (1913).
176 I Jews and the Imperial State

graceful unity of Christ with the power of the sacred. In an attempt to up-
hold the centrality and purity of the Russian Orthodox Church in the wake
of growing sectarianism, secularization, and apostasy, Sabler argued that
Jews should not under any circumstances have the right to call themselves
by Christian names:

For Jews, as for Christians, the naming ceremony is considered a religious rite;
they [the Jews] say a special prayer [during the naming ceremony], and the
Jewish religion, if for no other reason than this, is not indifferent to naming
practices. If the Jewish religion permitted Jews to use foreign names, then this
should be interpreted as a simple concession to a specific historical moment-a
concession that may have been tolerated, but certainly not sanctioned, by Jewish
religious law itself. The only individuals who desire to use Christian names are
the religiously indifferent Jews, and most of these individuals are either atheists
or without religion altogether. The more religious Jews cannot adopt and use
Christian names in a sincere fashion, since they find these names burdensome
and repulsive because of their Christian associations. 104

Sabler summarized an ideology that equated baptismal names with a sta-

ble, unambiguous Russian Orthodox identity. The procurator might have
sympathized with Jews if the "supply of names had been deemed meager."
However, as Sabler himself pointed out, Jews had an exceptionally rich sup-
ply to choose from: "In the Old Testament alone, there are 15,000 biblical
personalities with 2,800 personal names." As a last resort, the Russian Or-
thodox Church would agree to let Jews call themselves by Christian names
but only if doing so would somehow tempt them to convert to Christianity.
Yet even Sabler himself acknowledged that the conversion of the Jews was
wishful thinking on his part, and he could not think of even one instance
when a Jew had converted after taking on a Christian name. 105
At a time when Russian ecclesial identity was beginning to fragment, the
Holy Synod was determined to draw distinct and unambiguous boundaries
between Jewish and Christian names in hopes of solidifying religious identi-
ties, which became increasingly porous and indeterminate. 106 Responding
to the broader crisis in Russian Orthodox identity, V. K. Sabler organized
a special panel to discuss the political meanings and religious implications
of names and naming practices in historical and theological perspective.
Among those in attendance were some of the most esteemed experts in

104. RGIA, f. 821, op. 133, d. 722, 11. 32b-33 (1911).

105. Ibid., 11. 33-34.
106. For an analysis of the broader debates on the subject of the growing isolation and
marginalization of the Russian Orthodox Church at the beginning of the twentieth century,
see Vera Shevzov, Russian Orthodoxy on the Eve of Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2004), 12-53.
 The Jewish Name I 177

Russian Orthodox theology, Professors N. N. Glubokovskii, A. A. Dmit-

rievskii, and I. G. Troitskii of the St. Petersburg Spiritual Academy. At least
two professors favored setting impermeable boundaries between Jewish and
Christian names, while a third member saw no problem with allowing Jews
to use Christian names if this practice would somehow expedite their even-
tual conversion. 107 In a book-length study devoted to the question of Jews'
using Christian names, Professor Glubokovskii argued that "the govern-
ment cannot bestow upon Jews the right to use Christian names without ex-
pecting at least some sort of beneficial political outcome from such a law."
Echoing the thoughts of so many other church and government authorities,
Glubokovskii recommended that the church compile as quickly as possible
a book of names used by Russian jews. The work would not be simple,
he warned, but would alleviate many unnecessary administrative compli-
cations and help draw distinct boundaries around the Russian Orthodox
community. 10 s
For the liberal Russian-Jewish intelligentsia, however, the Holy Synod's
attempt to distinguish Jewish from Christian names served as yet another
example of the many painful discriminations inflicted upon the Jewish peo-
ple by the Russian government. "It seems that [the imperial Russian govern-
ment] has taken everything possible away from us: the freedom to travel,
the freedom to work, the freedom to educate ourselves. Turns out, this is
not all," a journalist writing for Evreiskii mir exclaimed. "Now it seems
that [the state] is taking away the freedom to pick names of our own choos-
ing." Like so many other Russian-Jewish journalists before him, the Evre-
iskii mir correspondent reminded his readers that the entire enterprise defied
all historical logic, since the vast majority of Russian Orthodox names had
their origin in the Greco-Roman cultural tradition: "How could [the Holy
Synod] even consider these names Christian? And what's more, almost all
the names that are not Greek are derived from the Old Testament. Many of
the popular names used by the Russian Orthodox people-such as Mikhail,
Gavriil, Daniil, David, Yakov, Il'ia-are all Old Testament names." If the
church was trying to protect the Russian Orthodox people from "Jewish
fraud" (evreiskago obmana), then it also needed to deal with the fact that
there were plenty of Christians who had adopted Jewish names. The name
Mikhail Yakovlevich, for instance, could be interpreted as both authenti-
cally Russian and authentically Jewish. An ordinary Russian peasant could
not be expected to accurately discern the ethnic origin of an individual who

107. RGIA, f. 821, op. 133, d. 722, II. 53-53b (1911).

108. Ibid. Glubokovskii, Po voprosu o "prave" evreev imenovat'sia khristianskimi ime-
nami, 59. Glubokovskii's work originally appeared in the Holy Synod's journal Tserkovnye
vedomosti 24 (1911): 999-1017 and 25 (1911): 1057-1076.
178 I Jews and the Imperial State

went by such a name. _While authorities had once criticized Jews for their
distinctive appearance, the journalist pointed out, at the present moment
they wanted Jews not only to remain distinctive but also to be marked by
special signs. The Holy Synod's efforts to draw distinct boundaries between
Christian and Jewish names was shaping up to be nothing more than a me-
dieval attempt to publicly mark Jews in hopes of making them appear more
visible in the public eye. 109
Even if a complete book of Jewish names would have alleviated many
of the administrative concerns in identifying individual Jews, as Professor
Glubokovskii and so many other conservative publicists and government
officials had suggested, the fact that Jews did not have a set of "canonized"
names made the entire enterprise futile. As late as 1913, provincial adminis-
trators continued to ask if and when central authorities would publish and
distribute to the imperial provinces a booklet with standardized lists of Jew-
ish names. One official from Tver Province, for example, inquired whether
the ministry had ever completed the project and when would it be possible
for his office to obtain a copy of the book. This particular official made the
request because he felt that a complete book of Jewish names would help
resolve many of the record-keeping questions and administrative misunder-
standings that had emerged in the last few years as a result of the improper
transliteration of Jewish names. 110
In the end, after a lengthy discussion of the meaning of names, the procu-
rator of the Holy Synod refused to condone a law that might further mar-
ginalize or weaken the Russian Orthodox community. For the church, a
name reflected what one historian called "the dominant values of Christian
Orthodoxy." In the prerevolutionary period, Russian Orthodox families
had required children to pick a name from a list of saints from the church
calendar that marked the newly born as "members of a heavenly kingdom"
and as "members of a distinct social class." 111 As the Russian religious
philosopher Sergei Bulgakov explained, Christians did not name their chil-
dren in an arbitrary manner but according to fixed norms of the Christian
calendar: "The name expresses the very essence of the individual, the very
core of his inner self." 112 From the perspective of the church hierarchy
and the Russian Orthodox community, the adoption of baptismal names

109. "Chto v imeni tebe moem?" Evreiskii mir 5 (191 1), 1-5.
110. RGIA, f. 821, op. 133, d. 771, I. 9 (1912-1913).
111. Daniel H. Kaiser, "Naming Cultures in Early Modern Russia," Harvard Ukrainian
Studies 19 (1995): 272, 291. See also Kaiser, "Quotidian Orthodoxy: Domestic Life in Early
Modern Russia," in Orthodox Russia: Belief and Practice under the Tsars, ed. Valerie A. Kivel-
son and Robert H. Greene (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2003), 186-87.
112. Sergei N. Bulgakov, Filosofiia imeni (1953; repr., St. Petersburg: Nauka, 1999),
242,266.
 The] ewish Name I 179

by anyone other than a Christian desecrated the very sanctity of a well-

established cultural tradition. 1 13
The creation of an exhaustive and authoritative archive of Jewish names
promised to solve one of the most perplexing dilemmas that imperial au-
thorities encountered: how to recognize and identify the Jewish people as a
distinctive ethnic group. Although ethnicity became a powerful and impor-
tant category for the state in the fin de siecle, the cataloging of the popula-
tion by ethnic markers was often a difficult and frustrating process. By the
end of the nineteenth century a new epistemological paradigm appeared
that privileged signs or clues for penetrating the most "opaque" realities.
The Jewish name offered imperial administrators an important marker to
document individual Jewish identities in a precise and unambiguous man-
ner. The construction of the complete book of Jewish names emerged in the
context of this epistemological shift, which posited that the "idea of totality
does not necessarily need to be abandoned." 114

113. Jews were not the only ethnic group who used Russian or Christian names. In Rostov-
on-Don, for example, Poles, Germans, and Armenians often used Russian-sounding names in
everyday life. And like Jews, they too petitioned to use Russian names in their business docu-
ments and passports. As one official remarked in 1912, the usc of Russian names by ethnic
minorities had become quite a popular custom, and the official wondered whether they had the
right to change their names. RGIA, f. 821, op. 10, d. 1158, I. 4 (1912).
114. Carlo Ginzburg, "Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm," in Clues, Myths, and the
Historical Method, trans. John and Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1989), 123.
 Epilogue
Collapse ofthe Imperial Ghetto

I realized then that in Russia, it is not only the Jews who have no
right to live, but also a great many Russians, crowded together like
lice in the hair.
My God!
-MARK CHAGALL, My Life

After reading a short pamphlet entitled Cherta evreiskoi osedlosti (The Pale
of Settlement) penned by Il'ia Vladimirovich Galant, the world-renowned
novelist Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy decided to write a letter to the author. In
the letter, Tolstoy praised Galant for explaining convincingly the many in-
justices that the Jewish people had endured over the years because they were
unable to live in those places they deemed most "convenient or desirable." 1
"From the point of view of elementary civil rights," Galant wrote in his
pamphlet, "the attachment of a people to a particular territory, without
right of movement, represents a pointed anomaly. " 2 For Tolstoy, who spent
the last years of his life denouncing all forms of political violence and ag-
gression, the Russian government's decision to establish the pale and thereby
restrict the mobility of Jews violated one of the most basic human rights.
"I have always considered and continue to consider to this day," Tolstoy
ended his letter to Galant, "that the toleration of various forms of aggres-
sion is the principal source of human suffering. " 3

1. L. N. Tolstoi, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 90 vols. (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo

khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1928-1958), 82:142 (letter to I. V. Galant, September 9, 1910).
2. I. V. Galant, Cherta evreiskoi osedlosti (Kiev: Tipografiia Rabotnik, 191 0), 7. Galant
worked as a journalist for the newspaper Kievskaia mysl'.
3. Tolstoi, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 82:142.
 Epilogue I 181

Ever since the Russian government had granted the more privileged Jews
the right to relocate to the interior provinces, the Pale of Settlement had
become the focal point of a heated public debate. Tolstoy was one of a
long list of prominent public intellectuals who took a stance on a question
that was regarded by some as a "disgraceful stigma" on the face of Russia. 4
After the revolution of 1905, with the relaxation of censorship laws, the
proliferation of the mass circulation press, and the emergence of the radi-
cal right, the discussions surrounding the pale assumed a new intensity
and urgency. Radical-right journalists urged Russian provincial adminis-
trators to expel all Jews who did not enjoy interior residency privileges.
Amid the unprecedented political disorganization and public upheavals, the
radical-right press helped popularize racially infused images of Jews. Vul-
gar representations of Jews-as parasites, revolutionaries, and moral
degenerates-suddenly appeared in editorials, articles, and cartoons in the
mass media. Popular periodicals such as Novae vremia, Pluvium, Vampir,
and Karikaturnyi listok published images of Jews with highly exaggerated
physiognomic features such as large noses and thick lips. Article after article
imagined Jews polluting the streets of Russia and threatening to destroy the
moral fabric of the imperial state. 5 For the politically conservative journal-
ists writing in newspapers such as Russkoe delo, Pakhar', Russkoe znamia,
Russkaia zemlia, and Zemshchina, the pale remained a necessary tool to
minimize the demographic presence of Jews in the interior.
The debates surrounding the merits and injustices of the pale continued
long after the Great War induced a massive influx of Jewish refugees into the
interior. During a period of ethnic conflict and increased popular identifica-
tion with the Russian nation, Jews, Germans, foreigners, and many other
ethnic minorities experienced discriminations and hostilities in their every-
day lives. Although these conflicts were exacerbated by long-term develop-
ments in the official government policies of Alexander III and Nicholas II,
the Great War and the subsequent revolutionary upheavals presented newer
challenges by radicalizing nationalist sentiment. Patriotic propaganda, na-
tionalist campaigns, and the state's enemy-alien policies divided the empire
along ethnic lines. With the eruption of ethnic riots, largely caused by fears
of foreigners and enemy aliens, organizations across the political spectrum

4. In 1915, after the publication of the second edition of Galant's Cherta evreiskoi osed-
losti, several prominent intellectuals praised the book, including the symbolist poet Dmitrii
Sergeevich Merezhkovskii. For a sampling of the responses to the publication of Galant's pam-
phlet, see YIVO, RG 89, folios 61747-61763.
5. On the radical right, see, for example, Hans Rogger, Jewish Policies and Right-Wing
Politics in Tmperial Russia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), chap. 7; and Heinz-
Dietrich Lowe, "Political Symbols and Rituals of the Russian Radical Right, 1900-1914,"
Slavonic and East EurotJean Review 76 (1998): 441-66.
182 I Jews and the Imperial State

expelled politically suspect populations from the interior, while govern-

ment officials and factory owners dismissed individuals with German and
Jewish names. 6
Shortly after the outbreak of the war, martial law granted state officials
the right to deport civilian subjects from areas under military rule (a terri-
tory that covered large sections of the Pale of Settlement). All individuals
who were deemed politically unreliable-Germans, Poles, and especially
Jews-were subject to mass deportations. Between July 1914 and January
1915, the forcible expulsions of Jews were sporadic, and little evidence ex-
ists that "these scattered and uncoordinated actions were part of an official
policy formulated at the highest levels of the military command. " 7 On Janu-
ary 25, 1915, however, when General Nikolai Nikolaevich Ianushkevich
ordered the forcible relocation of all Jews who lived near the front zone, the
uncoordinated actions were transformed into mass-scale operations. Begin-
ning in April 1915, entire Jewish communities in the northwest provinces
were subject to mass deportations. Accompanied by violence and looting
of property, the military campaigns forced hundreds of thousands of Jews
to flee from their homes (estimates range from half a million to one million
subjects). 8
Strikingly similar to modern ethnic cleansing practices, the wartime ex-
pulsions targeted every Jew. "Hundreds of thousands of people are being
expelled [from the northwest territories]," the weekly Evreiskaia nedelia re-
ported in an alarmist tone. 9 Between January and August 1915, the imperial
army cleansed Jews from Kurland and Kovno provinces as well as some (but
not all) the provinces in the Kingdom of Poland. In Minsk Province, another
thirty-six market towns were cleansed of their Jewish population. Singling
out Jews for special treatment, Russian army officers and provincial admin-
istrators resorted to ruthless deportation tactics. Young children, the elderly,
the gravely ill, wounded soldiers, medical doctors, and mentally ill patients

6. Mark von Hagen, "The Mobilization of Ethnicity," in Post-Soviet Political Order: Con-
flict and State Building, ed. Barnett R. Rubin and Jack Snyder (London: Routledge, 1998),
34-57; Eric Lohr, Nationalizing the Russian Empire: The Campaign against Enemy Aliens
during World War One (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003); David Moon,
"Peasants into Russian Citizens? A Comparative Perspective," Revolutionary Russia 9 (1996):
4 7; and Joshua Sanborn, Drafting the Russian Nation: Military Conscription, Total War, and
Mass Politics, 1905-1925 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003), 65-82.
7. Lohr, Nationalizing the Russian Empire, 138. See also Peter Gatrell, A Whole Empire
Walking: Refugees in Russia during World War I (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1999), 145-50.
8. Mordechai Altshuler, "Russia and Her Jews: The Impact of the 1914 War," Wiener Li-
brary Bulletin 27, no. 30/31 (1973): 14; and Jonathan Frankel, "The Paradoxical Politics of
Marginality: Thoughts on the Jewish Situation during the Years 1914-1921," in Studies in
Contemporary Jewry 4 (1988): 6. See also Lohr, Nationalizing the Russian Empire, 138.
9. "Khronika: Vyselentsy," Evreiskaia nedelia 3 (1915), 16-17.
 Epilogue I 183

were all given no more than twenty-four hours to pack their belongings
and leave their homes. A small number of the refugees were packed into
freight train wagons, while most of the people were forced to travel by foot
or oxcart. 10 Against the background of mass terror and military paranoia,
many of the refugees separated from their families, lost most of their belong-
ings, and were in desperate need of medical care, a roof over their heads,
and clean clothes. The displaced traveled south to places such as Ekaterino-
slav, Simferopol', Kherson, Rovno, Vinnitsa, Berdichev, Akkerman, Bel'tsy,
and Kiev. "The southern towns are overflowing with so many refugees,"
Evreskaia nedelia exclaimed, "that local administrators are hoping that [the
Russian government] will issue an order halting any new deportations." 11
By August 1915, the movement of Jewish refugees was so widespread
that the interior minister, N. B. Shcherbatov, proposed to dissolve almost all
existing Jewish residency restrictions. "Hundreds of thousands of Jews are
moving eastwards from the theatre of war," Shcherbatov pointed out. "Al-
location of these masses of people within the [existing borders of the] Pale of
Settlement is not just difficult; it is, quite simply, impossible. The local gov-
ernors report that everywhere is full to bursting, and that if further arrivals
are not stopped, they will be unable to take any responsibility for the safety
of the new inhabitants." 12 On August 15, 1915, as a result of the extraordi-
nary circumstances of the war, the Council of Ministers issued a circular that
expanded the boundaries of the Pale of Settlement until the end of the war.
Designed to alleviate overcrowding in the southwestern regions and mini-
mize the radicalization of the Jewish population, the temporary measure on
movement and residence allowed Jews to settle in all cities and towns of
the empire-with the exception of Petrograd, Moscow, and Tsarskoe Selo
(a summer residence of the Russian tsars about twenty-six kilometers south
of Petrograd)-that were located beyond the historical boundaries of the
Pale of Settlement. In addition to limiting residence in the two capitals, the
Russian government continued to restrict Jews from residing in the country-
side, settling in the-Caucasus or on Cossack territories, and purchasing land
and other real estate in those places they were allowed to settle. 13

10. For two excellent recent studies of expulsions, see Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking,
15-16, 145-50; and Lohr, Nationalizing the Russian Empire, 137-50.
11. "Vyselentsy na iuge," Evreiskaia nedelia 5 (1915), 18.
12. As quoted in Heinz-Dietrich Lowe, The Tsars and the Jews: Reform, Reaction, and
Anti-Semitism in Imperial Russia, 1772-1917 (Langhorne, Pa.: Harwood Academic Publis-
hers, 1992), 329-30.
13. On the August 15, 1915, circular, see Otmena cherty evreiskoi osedlosti: S prilozhe-
niem tsirkuliara o prave zhitel'stva evreev, razoslannogo g. ministrom vnutrennikh del guber-
natoram i gradonachal'nikam (Ekaterinoslav: A. I. Gall, 1915); and Gatrell, A Whole Empire
Walking, 145-46.
184 I Jews and the Imperial State

For many educated Jews, the expansion of the boundaries of the Pale
of Settlement carne too late to have any practical benefits. Before the war,
one critic observed, the measure would have given Russian Jews consider-
able satisfaction by granting them the right to travel where they pleased.
But at a time when so many desperate and devastated Jews were being
forced out of their homes under such tragic circumstances, the newly im-
plemented policy was unable to alleviate Jewish rnisery. 14 The historian
and communal activist Simon Dubnow was one of a long list of political
observers who denounced the expansion of the pale as yet another ex-
ample of a half-hearted "concession" made by the government. According
to Dubnow, the Russian government did not open the bars of the "enor-
mous prison cell"-a phrase he used to describe the Pale of Settlement-to
emancipate Jews but rather because the massive social dislocations and
wartime atrocities had forced its hand. "And if this is how the [govern-
mentj will proceed to emancipate us [Russian Jews]," Dubnow ended
his editorial, "then we will receive our complete freedom only after our
annihilation." 15
Despite the reservations and criticisms voiced by the Jewish educated
elite, the August 15, 1915, circular helped shift the demographic distribu-
tion of the Jewish population by opening the "gates of the ghetto." 16 At the
same time that the mass emigration movement from the Pale of Settlement
was coming to an abrupt end because of the imposition of strict, worldwide
passport laws and border-control practices, tens of thousands of individuals
took advantage of the temporary relaxation on Jewish residency rights and
fled eastY New Jewish communities formed in all parts of the empire-
some in central territories of European Russia, others in the Volga region,
and still others in either Siberia or the U rals. 18 After the Provisional Govern-
ment formally abolished the Pale of Settlement and all residency restrictions
on March 20, 1917, Jews continued to migrate into the interior en masse.
During the 1920s, when the new Bolshevik government provided little over-
sight on the rights of movement and residence, Jews relocated with relative

14. "Vpred do peresmotra," Evreiskaia nedelia 14 (1915), 5.

15. "Ustupki," Evreiskaia nedelia 4 (1915), 3-4. See also Simon M. Dubnov, Kniga zhizni:
Vospominaniia i razmyshleniia, ed. Viktor Kel'ner (St. Petersburg: Petersburgskoe vostokove-
denie, 1998), 337-39.
16. "K voprosu o 'razselenii,"' Evreiskaia nedelia 29 (1915), 22-27.
17. On the imposition of strict passport controls during the Great War, see John Torpey,
The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship, and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2000); and Aristide R. Zolberg, A Nation by Design: Immigration Policy in
the Fashioning of America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006).
18. Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking, 146; and Mordechai Altshuler, Soviet jewry
on the Eue of the Holocaust: A Social and Demographic Profile (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem,
1998), 9-10.
 Epilogue I 185

ease to either the interior or many of the larger towns once located in the
Pale of SettlementY
In 1932, the Soviet state introduced passport legislation, which gave au-
thorities a powerful instrument to enforce residency laws, to contain inmi-
gration to large cities, to colonize internal space, and to identify and liquidate
socially harmful elements. Only two years after the law's implementation,
more than 27 million Soviet subjects received passports. Modeled partially
on the old-regime passport laws, the Soviet registration system (the prop-
iska) not only fostered nationality by ascribing ethnic origin in the identity
document but also fixed individuals to their place of residence. 20 The Soviet
system made residence difficult not only for Jews but for all Soviet sub-
jects (especially in certain cities such as Leningrad, Moscow, and Khar'kov)
who did not engage in "socially useful work." Nevertheless, over the course
of the 1930s and beyond, large numbers of Jews obtained residence rights
in closed cities because they practiced professions-medicine, engineering,
law, pharmacy, journalism, and science-that the Soviet state deemed so-
cially useful. 21 According to the 1939 census, slightly more than 3 million
Jews lived in the USSR, but only about 1.3 million resided in territories that
had once been located in the Pale of Settlement. The vast majority of all
Soviet Jews (86.9 percent) settled in large urban communities, and about
half in some of the most populated and prosperous cities in the USSR, such
as Leningrad, Moscow, Kiev, Odessa, and Khar'kov. By 1939, at which time
the registration system had severely restricted territorial movement, Soviet
Jewry had undergone a remarkable geographic transformation. 22

II

The formal delineation of the Pale of Settlement gave the Russian govern-
ment a convenient geographic space in which to isolate an undesirable pop-
ulation from the imperial core. Since the seventeenth century, the autocratic
state had developed a series of contradictory policies to regulate human

19. Altshuler, Soviet Jewry on the Eve of the Holocaust, 10-11.

20. On the Soviet passport, see David Shearer, "Elements Near and Alien: Passportization,
Policing, and Identity in the Stalinist State, 1932-1952," Journal of Modern History 76 (2004 ):
835-81; Peter Holquist, "State Violence as Technique: The Logic of Violence in Soviet Totali-
tarianism," in Landscaping the Human Garden: Twentieth-Century Population Management
in a Comparative Framework, ed. Amir Weiner (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003),
33-35; and Gijs Kessler, "The Passport System and State Control over Population Flows in the
Soviet Union, 1932-1940," Cahiers du monde russe 42 (2001): 477-503.
21. Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004),
222-24.
22. Altshuler, Soviet Jewry on the Eve of the Holocaust, 14-15.
186 I Jews and the Imperial State

movement. 23 The Russian government relied on containment policies to

keep populations in their place, even as it facilitated their mass movement
to make the newly acquired borderland territories economically productive
and politically stable. But unlike politically suspect groups and religious
heretics-such as Old Believers, Molokans, Dukhobors, Subbotniks, and
Skoptsy-who were forcibly relocated to the peripheries of the empire in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Jews were not physically segregated by
the tsarist authorities. 24 Instead, they were restricted to legal residence in the
territories where they had lived prior to Russia's annexation of the Polish-
Lithuanian Commonwealth. In the Pale of Settlement, Jews lived among
and worked with a diverse conglomeration of religious groups-Catholics,
Calvinists, Lutherans, and Russian Orthodox-and were subject to many
(but not all) of the same rights and restrictions on movement and residence
as everyone else. To be sure, from time to time, the Russian government
regulated Jewish-Christian contact (mostly in the workplace), but these pro-
hibitions never attempted to create the type of physical enclosure that the
early modern ghetto had once achieved.
Although contemporaries compared the Pale of Settlement to the early
modern European ghetto, the Russian government had not designed the
pale to draw distinct boundaries between Jews and Christians but to re-
strict Jews from migrating into the interior of the empire.ZS Despite this
important difference between the ghetto and the pale, Russian administra-
tors, police officials, and journalists, much like church authorities in early
modern Italy, voiced concerns that Jews could not be easily recognized.
What distinguished Jews from their neighbors, and what techniques did

23. For a suggestive analysis of border-control policies in seventeenth-century Muscovy, see

Brian J. Boeck, "Containment vs. Colonization: Muscovite Approaches to Settling the Steppe,"
in Peopling the Russian Periphery: Borderland Colonization in Eurasian History, ed. Nicholas B.
Breyfogle, Abby Schrader, and Willard Sunderland (London: Routledge, 2007), 41-60. See
also Richard Hellie, "Migration in Early Modern Russia, 1480s-1780s," in Coerced and Free
Migration: Global Perspectives, ed. David Eltis (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002),
292-323. For an excellent treatment of the Russian government's population policies in the
eighteenth century in a comparative framework, see Roger P. Bartlett, Human Capital: The Set-
tlement of Foreigners in Russia, 1762-1804 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
24. On the forcible removal of heretics and Christian sectarian communities, see Nicholas
Breyfogle, Heretics and Colonizers: Forging Russia's Empire in the South Caucasus (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 2005), 17-83. For other studies dealing with isolation and contain-
ment, see Alan Wood, "Crime and Punishment in the House of the Dead," in Civil Rights in
Imperial Russia, ed. Olga Crisp and Linda Edmondson (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1989), 215-33; and Laura Engelstein, Castration and the Heavenly Kingdom: A Russian Folk-
tale (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999).
25. N. D. Gradovskii, "0 cherte osedlosti: 0 proiskhozhdenie i sovremennoi znachenii
etogo ustanovleniia s tochki zreniia russkogo cheloveka," Voskhod, val. 112 (1889): 42-43.
See also Benjamin Nathans, Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 85-86.
 Epilogue 187

authorities use to identify Jews? On occasion, dress and religious customs

provided important visual codes, but these markers often proved decep-
tive and unreliable. Unlike early modern European legislators, who required
Jews to wear special distinguishing signs (yellow circles on hats for men and
yellow sleeves on garments for women), Russian officials relied on univer-
sal knowledge-based technologies to document Jews. And unlike the early
modern identification sign that grouped Jews as a collective category, pass-
ports and metrical books (the two most widely used identification tools in
imperial Russia) documented individuality rather than sameness. 26 It has
been a central argument of this book that the problem of identifying Jews
in the Russian Empire emerged out of the everyday administrative concerns
of managing territorial movement, ethnic diversity, and the maze of rights,
special privileges, and temporary exemptions that comprised the imperial
legal code.
At the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century, a
gradual shift occurred in the ways in which European governments man-
aged their populations, imposed social order, and made every subject know-
able. Badges, headgear, and other distinguishing signifiers were replaced
with universal forms of documentation techniques that relied on statistics,
numerical representation, and the power of paper. In Russia, this transfor-
mation in governance meant that Jews could no longer remain a people
apart. Throughout the nineteenth century, the Russian government partici-
pated in the process of individualization while at the same time relying on
the community, collectivity, and social estate to rule its populations and
territories. The reforms of Nicholas I facilitated administrative intervention
into the religious, cultural, and administrative autonomy of the Jewish com-
munity, but the empire proved too large, the bureaucracy too small, and the
resources too limited to effect meaningful change.
Over the course of the second half of the nineteenth century, the mass
movement and sociability of populations created unprecedented tensions in
documenting individual identities. In a world of strangers, social, religious,
and administrative boundaries were easily crossed. Arousing fears, anxieties,

26. On the regulation of Jewish dress and the problem of distinguishing Jews from Chris-
tians in the medieval and early modern periods, see Stefanie B. Siegmund, The Medici State
and the Ghetto of Florence: The Construction of an Early Modern Jewish Community (Stan-
ford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 82-87; Herman Pollack, Jewish Folkways in Germanic
Lands (1648-1806): Studies in Aspects of Daily Life (Cambridge, Mass.: M. I. T. Press, 1971),
85-91; Ariel Toaff, Love, Work, and Death: Jewish Life in Medieval Umbria (London: Littman
Library of Jewish Civilization, 1996), 173-79; Benjamin Ravid, "From Yellow to Red: On the
Distinguishing Head-Covering of the Jews of Venice," Jewish History 6 (1992): 179-99; Guido
Kisch, "The Yellow Badge in History," Historia Judaica 19 (1957): 89-146; and Diane Owen
Hughes, "Distinguishing Signs: Ear-Rings, Jews and Franciscan Rhetoric in the Italian Renais-
sance City," Past and Present 112 (1986): 3-59.
188 I Jews and the Imperial State

and suspicions, the illegibility of Jewishness did not go unnoticed among

government administrators, conservative commentators, and the broader
public. Provincial administrators, police officials, civil servants, church of-
ficials, and high-level ministers lamented how easily Jews could manipulate
their official identities, assume false pretenses, and reinvent themselves under
new guises. As Alexander III "affirmed the principle of ethnic supremacy"
by elevating Russianness and Russian Orthodoxy, the imperial Russian gov-
ernment introduced a series of regulations that attempted to make Jews and
baptized Jews identifiable by ethnic origin and not religious classificationY
Like so many other states across the globe, the imperial Russian government
predicated power-or the direct rule of individuals-on the ability to count
and classify populations in an objective manner. Relying on documentary
practices, modern bureaucratic states established their population's identi-
ties and thereby increased their capacity to "to make the unknown and the
strange knowable. " 28 Russian administrators relied on knowledge-based
technologies to govern the vast territories and populations of the empire
but concluded that these technologies were often poorly administered and
could be easily circumvented.
For the government, record-keeping mistakes, omissions, and irregu-
larities hindered effective administration, while for Jews similar prob-
lems limited their participation and membership in the polity. One of the
most important consequences of the shift in governance was the inculca-
tion of a participatory ethos and the involvement of individual Jews in the
record-keeping enterprise. 29 While documents controlled and constrained
movement, they also proved invaluable for delineating rights, duties, and
membership. Without passports, vital statistics records, and other essential
documents, Jews were not able to participate in professional and educa-
tional institutions, move legally from place to place, and receive exemptions
from military service. By the end of the nineteenth century, more and more
Jews began to recognize the power of documentation in their everyday lives
for the simple reason that record-keeping errors and omissions constrained
meaningful participation in the social order. Without denying the contradic-
tory or restrictive aspects of the legal system, this book has analyzed a broad
spectrum of professional, residential, and personal choices Jews were able to
make as they engaged with the world around them.

27. RichardS. Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy,
val. 2 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 237.
28. BernardS. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Prince-
ton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 4.
29. For an insightful analysis of individualization and mass participation in light of imperial
taxation policies, see Yanni Kotsonis, "'Face to Face': The State, the Individual, and the Citizen
in Russian Taxation, 1863-1917," Slavic Review 63 (2004): 221-46.
 Bibliography

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 Index

Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations.

"About the Jewish Passport" (Ian), Artisans, Jewish, 32; expulsions from urban
129 centers, 99-101, 1 09; police surveillance
Abramovitsh, S. Y., 21, 34, 37 of, 98; residence rights of, 13, 54, 89,
Administrative system: co-opting of religious 94, 104-5
elites in, 34-35, 56n6; development of, Austria, Russian Jews in, 136, 143
18; inefficiencies in, 1 7-19, 51; informal "The Automatic Exemption" (Aleichem), 68
exchanges in, 28-29, 127; modernization Axel'rod, Pavel, 130, 143
of, 32-33, 51. See also Provincial authori-
ties; Record keeping Baku, Jewish population in, 112
Aleichem, Sholem, 68, 86, 147 Baltekalis, Yanke! Abramov, 166
Alexander I (Emperor of Russia): adminis- Baptists, 72n82
trative system under, 15n34, 18, 19; Jew- Baptized Jews: 1905 statute on religious
ish reforms under, 39; population counts freedom and, 123-24, 123n24; eth-
under, 23 noracial traits of, difficulties in over-
Alexander II (Emperor of Russia): assas- coming, 120-22, 124-25; Great War
sination of, crisis of autocracy follow- and, 157; name-change petitions by,
ing, 87-88, 95; and clothing decree, 49; 120-21,153-58, 176-77; second-
and mobility of Jews, 89; and passport generation, 158-59
commissions, 92 Barats, Khaim-Genzel, 151
Alexander III (Emperor of Russia), 95, 98, Barinshtein, Duvid Kel'manovich, 81
181, 188 Barkovich, Osip Vasil'ev, 159
Amirov, Khazkiia, 60 Beider, Alexander, 149n5
An-skii, S., 1-2, 116 Belorussia, Jews in, 5; surnames of, 149
Apostol, Natan, 163 Belostok (Grodno Province), 2, 19, 142
Aptekman, Nikolai Vladimirovich, 156 Bel'skovoler, Yanke!, 75
Archives: of Jewish names, 169-72, 174-79; Bendery (Bessarabia Province), 19, 78
of metrical books, 74; state, 19-20 Berdichev (Kiev Province), 1, 19, 48, 55, 183
Argentina, Jewish immigration to, 137 Berenshtein, Aleksandr Mikhailovich,
Arkhangel'sk, Jewish community in, 74 158-59
208 Index

Bertillon, Alphonse, 144 Civil rights: metrical records and, 54, 71, 82,
Bessarabia Province, xui, 5; errors in vital 84-85; Russian Jews' lack of, 87, 180
statistics from, 78-79, 81 Civil servants: replacing crown rabbis with,
Bikerman, I. M., 87 72; and vital statistics records, 80nl10
Birth, date of: failure to record, 60, 78-79, Clergy: co-opting in administrative system,
81-82; falsification of, 65; Jewish tradi- 34-35, 56n6. See also Crown rabbis; Holy
tion and, 35-36, 37-38 Synod; Rabbis
Birth certificates: false, 70-71, 127; Jews Clerical error (pogreshnost' pistsa), 83
and, 14,59,60,82 Clothing, Jewish, 40-41, 46, 48, 50; dif-
Brafman, Yakov, 162, 171 ferences emphasized by, 40, 41, 48;
Brandrendler, Mordakh Itsak, 163 tax on, 40, 40, 42, 43, 45, 49. See also
Bribery, 28-29, 127; to avoid expulsion, Dress codes
103; of border patrol guards, 138; and Collective identity, Jewish, 6, 8
census inaccuracies, 24, 31-32; of crown Commission for Restructuring Jewish Life,
rabbis, 69, 75; and draft evasion, 63; of 59,60-61
police officials, 107, 131 Complete Collection of Jewish Names
Briushveiler, Pavel, 126 (Zhurakovskii), 170-71, 174, 174-75
Bulgakov, Sergei, 178 Conscription, 61-68; census revisions and, 22,
Bureaucracy. See Administrative system 61; and Jewish community, reconstruction
of, 32; Jewish names and problems with,
Catherine the Great (Empress of Russia), 66-67; Jewish resistance to, 62-64, 62n35,
4,5n10 65, 68; mobility and problems with, 64,
Catholic Church: Jewish conversion to, 125; 64n46; universal, introduction of, 61-62;
and vital statistics records, 73 vital statistics errors and problems with,
Caucasus: Jewish population in, 59, 88, 95; 67-68, 70, 80, 81. See also Evasion of draft
mass migration to, 91; Muslim population Containment of Jews: imperial policies
in, 115; restrictions on residence of Jews of, 5, 7, 12; in Kiev, 101-2; in Pale of
in, 116-17, 183 Settlement, 5, 94, 117, 185-86. See also
Census: city, 33; first empirewide, 61; of Residence restrictions
Jewish population, 21, 23-24, 63; Jewish Conversion of]ews, 116-27; and destabili-
resistance to, 24, 27-30; provincial gover- zation of religious boundaries, 7, 10; and
nors and, 61-63, 104n68; religious affilia- educational opportunities, 118, 124, 127;
tion marked in, 10; role of, 22-23, 25 official efforts to reduce, 117, 119-27;
Census revisions, 22-24; decreased useful- rate of, history of empire and, 125; and
ness of, 32-33; first, 22n4; inaccuracies in, residence privileges, 116-1 7, 119, 124,
23-24, 30, 31-32; Jewish practices as ob- 126. See also Baptized Jews
stacles to, 29-30; metrical books compared Corruption. See Bribery
with, 36; military conscription and, 61-63 Criminal activities, Jews and, 128-29,
Central Registration Bureau, 144 128n42; charges of, 86-87, 101; expulsion
Chagall, Mark, 180 based on, 87, 98-99
Chancellery for Receipt of Petitions, 15-16, Crown rabbis: civil servants replacing,
15n34; name-change requests and, 153, 72; criticism of record-keeping prac-
154, 157-58 tices, 59-61, 66, 68-71, 74-78, 81-82;
Cherkes, Sender and Yanke!, 166 demands placed on, 76, 78; and draft eva-
Chernigov Province, xvi, 5, 55n3, 64, sion, 69, 78; election of, 26; and Jewish
113,133 names, preservation of, 167-68; and met-
Chertov, Faibus, 99-101 rical books, 34-36, 56, 58, 59-60, 71-72;
Christianity: sectarian communities, 10, vs. spiritual rabbis, 60, 69, 75n93
126-27. See also Conversion of Jews;
Russian Orthodoxy Daly, Jonathan, 144
Cities: expulsion of Jews from, 98-101, Death, date of: inaccuracies in recording,
98n48, 109-1 0; Jewish migration to, 7, and conscription problems, 67-68, 70, 80,
95, 97, 147, 149-50; Soviet Jews in, 185 81; Jewish tradition and, 37, 38; metrical
City censuses, 33 records of, 57
Civil registration: attempts to introduce in Deportation. See Expulsion of Jews
Russia, 72; in Western Europe, 73 Derzhavin, Gavriil Romanovich, 21-22
 Index 209

Difference: clothing practices and, 40, 41, violations, 84-85; and conscription
48; and collective identity of Jews, 8-9; problems, 67-68, 70, 80, 81; corrections
ethnicity as marker of, 11, 148, 179; of, 82-83; crown rabbis and, 59-60,
governance based on, 8, 17; religious 66, 68-71, 78, 81-82; and governance
affiliation as marker of, 7, 10 problems, 85; petitions to correct, 81-82;
Discrimination against Jews: conversion transliteration problems and, 66, 166,
prompted by, 119; Great War and, 181; 173, 178
merchants, 5, 156, 163; and name-change Ethnic cleansing, expulsions of Jews com-
requests, 155-56, 160, 161; name restric- pared to, 115, 182
tions as, 177 Ethnicity (narodnost'lnatsional'nost'), as
Dmitrievskii, A. A., 177 marker of identity, 11, 148, 179
Documentary records, 18-19; accuracy of, Ethnic tensions, 108; Great War and, 154,
increased interest in, 52, 54; changes in, 157, 181-82
strict regulation of, 83; and choices avail- Evasion of draft: crown rabbis' role in, 69,
able to Jews, 14; ethnicity in, 11, 148, 78; false documentation used for, 57, 65;
179; mobility and importance of, 52, 85; Jewsand,62-64,62n35,65,68
modernization of 1850s and, 32-33; reli- Exit permits, 137, 138
gious affiliation in, 10; role in empire, 3, Expulsion of .Jews, 87, 100, 108; criminal
20, 51, 187-88. See also False documenta- activities and, 87, 98-99; devastating
tion; Metrical books; Passports; Record consequences of, 112-14; ethnic cleansing
keeping; Vital statistics records compared with, 115, 182; during Great
Draft. See Conscription; Evasion of draft War, 182-83; and imprisonment, 106-7;
Draispits, Evolmii, 157 in interrevolutionary period, 112; jokes
Dress codes, 39-50, 39n61; difficulties in about, 130; from Kiev, 109, 133; from
enforcing, 45, 49-50; and divisions in Moscow, 90, 99-101, 122; petitions
Jewish community, 45-49; police brutality against, 26, 96, 99, 109-10, 114-15;
in enforcing, 43-44 pogroms compared with, 114; from rural
Dubnow, Simon, 96, 184 settlements, 95-97, 96n41; from Siberia,
Dukhobors, 10, 186 103; slow procedures for, 99; social
Durnovo, Petr Nikolaevich, 152 occupation and, 105-6, 113-14; from
Dvernitskii, Stepan Diomidovich, 77 St. Petersburg, 98n48, 99; temporary
moratorium on, 108-9, 108n82; at turn of
Ebin, Joann Oskarov, 126 20th century, 109-1 0; from urban centers,
Education: conversion of Jews and, 118, 98-101, 98n48, 109-10; from Western
124, 127; documentary records and, 14, European countries, 136, 140
54, 188; Jewish encounter with modernity
and, 9, 32; and name changes among Fainzil'ber, Srul-Aba Yosiov, 83
Jews, 150-51, 162; polarization of Jewish Faktorovich, Girsh, 109
community around issues of, 45; selective False documentation: to avoid conscription,
integration of Jews and, 13, 54; vital 57, 65; crown rabbis accused of, 69-71;
statistics and, 71, 82, 84, 84n125 passports, 127, 128, 129-30, 140, 142;
Efron, Isaak Abramov, 143 and police surveillance difficulties, 128,
Eizenberg, Pavel Osipovich, 121 131-32; punishment for, 160; residence
Ekaterinoslav, xvi, 5, 55n3; Jewish migrants permits, 105
in, 7, 89-90 Fedoruk, Nikifor, 97
El'ts (Ore! Province), 112 Finland, conversion of Jews in, 127
Emigration of Jews, 64n46, 135-43; applica- Frainblium, Mikhel and Vul'f, 32
tion process for, 137, 138; during Great France: civil registration in, 73; law on
War, 184; illegal, 138-42; as punishable name changes in, 1.59-60; surnames in,
offense, 13 6 148, 149n3
England: civil registration in, 73; Jewish emi- Freeze, ChaeRan, 13
gration to, 135; name changes in, 160n46
Epshtein, Yanke!, 86 Gabrielovich, Eizik, 150
Erozalimskaia, Rakhel, 99 Galant, Il'ia Vladimirovich, 180, 18ln4
Errors in record keeping, 53, 54, 59-61, Gefter, Aleksandr Osipov, 101
66-71, 80-85, 188; and civil rights Gendel'man, Vsevolod Petrovich, 154-55
210 Index

Gender imbalance, in vital statistics Ianushkevich, Nikolai Nikolacvich, 182

records, 78-79 Identification: administrative challenges as-
Germany: Jewish emigration to, 135, 140, sociated with, 2-3, 6-7, 145-46; portrait
143; law on name changes in, 159-60 par/e system of, 144, 144n93; tools for, 187
Gessen, lulii, 17 Identity: documentation of, 134-35, 187-88;
Ghetto, Pale of Settlement as, 117, 186 ethnicity and, 11; name and, 153, 169,
Ginsburg, Anatolii Federovich, 155 179; religious, destabilization of, 7, 10;
Girls: failure to record birth dates of, 78-79. Russian Orthodox, crisis in, 176. See also
See also Women Jewish identity; Mistaken identity
Glubokovskii, N. N., 177, 178 Identity theft, 128, 129
Godlevich, Shmiel Moishev, 76-77 Integration of Jews: clothing as symbol of,
Gol'dberg, Eduard, 159n45 49; Great Reform era and, 54-55, 117;
Go!' dshtein, Risia Mendeleva, 113 imperial program of, 32, 38-39, 50-51;
Goloshchekin, Shaia Itskov-Isaakov, 165 selective, 13
Gol'tsman, Aleksandr, 159n45 Interior provinces, Jewish population in,
Gomel' (Mogilev Province), 19 55, 88, 89-90, 94. See also Moscow,
Gorodka (Podolia Province), 76-77 St. Petersburg
Governors, provincial: and emigration of Irkutsk, 60, 103, 104n68
Jews, 137-38; and enforcement of laws Isolation of Jews, 6; clothing as symbol of,
against Jews, 44-45; and expulsion of 4 7--48, 5 I. See also Containment of Jews
Jews, 86, 87, 96, 97, 101-2, 106, 109, Ivanov, Mark, 116
117; petitions against crown rabbis and,
68, 69, 71, 77, 78; petitions for change Jewish Colonization Association, 136-37
of name and, 151, 167; and popula- Jewish Committee, 23, 23n6; book of names
tion counts, 61-63, 104n68; and record proposed by, 169; and dress reform,
keeping, 18, 58-59, 74, 80; and residency 40--45, 49; on naming practices, 30; vision
restrictions, easing of, 183 of ideal Russian Jew, 49
Great Reform era: individual's authority Jewish communities (evreiskie obshchestva):
expanded in, 14-16; and integration of administrative and judicial autonomy
Jews, 54-55, 117; modernization projects of, 32, 35; and clothing practices, 40;
of, 7, 18; and movement of Jews, 88-90, conscription of Jews and, 32; ideological
94-95; and name changes among Jews, divisions within, 45; as ''juridical person-
151; universal conscription in, 61-62 alities," 27; responsibilities of, 26
Great War: and ethnic tensions, 154, 157, Jewish identity: challenges in documenting,
181-82; impact on Russian Jews, 181-84; 2-3, 6-7, 145--46, 187-88; collective, 6,
and mass movement of people, 11, 181, 183; 8; conversion to Christianity and, 120-21;
and name-change petitions, 154-57, 158-59 destabilization of, 7, 10; masking of, 127,
Greitser, Boris Pctrov, 122 130-31, 161-62; passports and, 94; physi-
Gresser, PetrA., 163 cal characteristics and, 6, 146n98
Grishch, Khaim Yanke!, 142 Jewish law: and clothing style, 48; incompat-
Grodno Province, xvi, 1, 2, 5; Jewish ibility of civil code with, 37; and recording
population in, 55, 133; criticism of crown of vital events, 35, 57
rabbis, 77-78; dress codes for, 44--45; Jews, Russian: accommodation to imperial
surnames of, 149 system of government, 13-14; caricatures
Gurevich, Timofei Nikolaevich, 159 of, 130, 131; collective identity of, 6, 8;
demographic expansion of, 88-90; dress
Hal'pern, Izrail, 42 codes for, 39-50; vs. peasants, 95-97,
Hamsheev, Shmerk, 82 109. See also under Containment; Con-
Harkavi, V. 0., 35 version; Criminal activities; Discrimina-
Hirsch, Baron Maurice de, 136-37 tion; Integration; Isolation; Movement;
Holy Synod: on Jewish naming practices, Name(s); Petitions; Residence
173, 175-78; and limits on strategic con- Judicial Reform of 1864, 15
fessional transfers, 117, 119-20; on name-
change petitions by converts, 158n39 Kahals: abolition of, 25, 26, 32; and census
Hrushevskii, Moshka, 70 taking, 21, 23; and draft evasion, 63; as
 Index 211

internal administrative organs, 25-26; Labor migrants: Jewish, 64, 89-90; Russian
and Jewish surnames, 149; and tax Orthodox (otkhodniki), 89, 91; transpor-
collection, 23 tation revolution and, 132-33, l33n54
Kaiser, Daniel, 38 Lapedus, Dovid, 32
Kal'varskii, Izrail, 70 Law: tensions between religious and civil,
Kamenets-Podol'skii, 142 37. See also Jewish law; May Laws; spe-
Kaplun, Shmul, 76-77 cific statutes
Karamnik (Rabbi of Lida), 69 Legal assistance bureaus, 93, 93n26. See also
Karamzin, Nicholas, 18 Public advocates
Kats, Fridel Shulimovich, 77 Levi, Leib Itsykovich, 64
Kats, Khaim, 75 Levin, Vul'f, 98
Kazakhstan, migration to, 91 Lezinskii, Shmuil, 42
Kennan, George, 86 Liapidus (Rabbi of Smeliansk), 69-70
Keppen, Petr, 24-25 Lida (Volynia Province), 69
Kherson Province, xvi, 5 Lipa, Shpacr, 110
Khlysty (Christian sect), 10 Livgindov, Maksim Efimovich, 99
Khvol'son, Daniel, 170
Kibal'skii, Shmuil, 163 Machurin, Vladimir Mikhailovich, 112-13
Kiev, xvi, 5, 141; containment of Jewish Mandel'shtam, Osip, 126
population in, 101-2; criminal activities of Marcus, Ivan, 37
Jews in, 86-87; dress codes in, 42; expul- Margolioth, Ephraim Zalman ben Menahem
sion of Jews from, 109, 133; imprison- Mannes, 170n82
ment of Jewish travelers in, 106-7; Jewish Mariavites, 72n82
population in, 7, 9, 89, 98, 102-3, 112, Marmor, Aizek, 31
185; Jewish surnames in, 149; jewish trav- Marriage: certificates of, 14; fictitious, 117,
elers in, 133; police in, 19, 106-8; Russian 117n2; rabbis' failure to record, 81-82
names used by Jews in, 161 Maskilim, 45; on clothing decree, 47-48
Kingdom of Poland: civil servants in, 72; May Laws, 95-96, 135n62
clothing decree in, 49; Jewish population Medem, Vladimir, 165
in, Sn9, 88, 90; wartime expulsion of Jews Merchants, Jewish: clothing decree and, 42,
from, 182 47, 48; conversion of, 122-23; discrimina-
Kirsner (Rabbi of Tashkent), 78 tion against, 5, 156, 163; and draft eva-
Kiselev, Pavel D., 25 sion, 65; name-change petitions by, 147,
Kishinev (Bessarabia Province), 19, 150, 151, 152, 166; residence/travel rights
78-79, 108 of, 4, 13, 29, 54, 89, 106, 132
Klier, John D., 135n62 Merezhkovskii, Dmitrii Sergeevich, 181n4
Klimovichi (Mogilev Province), 27 Metrical books, 33-34; alternatives to,
Kobrin (Grodno Province), 77-78 80n 110-81 nllO; census revisions com-
Kobrin, Rebecca, 139n76 pared with, 36; civic importance of, 36,
Koifman, Khaim Shmil Mardkovich, 71 56, 79, 80, 85; crown rabbis and, 34-36,
Korobka (tax), 40 56, S8, 59-60, 71-72; individuality docu-
Kosher meat consumption, and population mented in, 187; police officials and, 34;
statistics, 102-3 storage and archiving of, 74; technical is-
Kovno Province, xvi, 5; census irregularities sues regarding, 37. See also Vital statistics
in, 30, 62, 64; name-change petitions in, records
151; wartime expulsion of Jews from, Metrical records affair (metricheskoe delo),
182 53-54
Krasil'shchikov, Shaia-Abram Aizikov, 113 Migration, internal, 64, 89-91; Great War
Kremenchug, 65, 132-33 and, 11, 181, 183; peasants and, 97n43.
Krementsa, 42 See also Movement
Kreps, Leizer Markovich, 113-14 Military: Jews in, name changes by, 150,
Kretsner, M. B., 146n98 151, 152, 153n20; reform of 1874,
Kulisher, Isser Isasvich, 175 62-63. See also Conscription
Kursk, expulsion of jews from, Miliutin, Boris, 24
105-6, 112-14 Miliutin, Dmitrii and Nikolai, 25
212 Index

Minevich, Srul, 106-7 Name(s), Russian Orthodox, 35n50,

Minsk, xvi, 5; census irregularities in, 23-24, 175-76; Jews using, 161; origins of, 177;
30; wartime expulsion of Jews from, 182 religious importance of, 178-79; Russian
Minskin, Yosel, 129 law on, 160
Mistaken identity: and conscription prob- Name changes: administrative response to
lems, 64-68; name changes and, 152; vital petitions for, 153, 154, 157-58; au-
statistics records and, 54, 57 thorities' concerns about, 160-62, 166;
Modernization: of administrative system, baptized Jews and petitions for, 120-21,
32-33, 51; Jewish encounter with, 7, 9, 153-58, 176-77; Great War and petitions
32; and population movement, 7, 11; and for, 154-59; informal, 161; Jewish revo-
tensions in documenting identities, 11-12 lutionaries and, 165-66; legal problems
Mogilev Province, xvi, 5; administrative associated with, 160-61; and masking of
challenges for, 19; census revision in, 27; Jewish origin, 161-62; military academy
vital statistics errors in, 80 graduates and, 150, 151, 152, 153n20;
Molokans, 10, 186 move to cities and, 147, 150; petitions
Montefiore, Sir Moses, 46, 4 7 for, 83, 120-21, 147, 150-60, 176-77;
Moscow, Jewish population in, 7, 9, 90, 98, second-generation converts and, 158-59;
101, 185; conversion of, 125, 126; expul- social discrimination and petitions for,
sion of, 90, 99-101, 122; regulation of 155-56, 160; Western European laws
names of, 163 on, 159-60
Movement, population: and conscription Napoleon Bonaparte, 34
problems, 64, 64n46; and documentary Natanz, Yakov, 163
records, importance of, 52, 85; easing of Nathans, Benjamin, 13, 89n10, 117
restrictions on, 89, 93, 111; in European Neiavivshikhsia, 64, 80
states, ease of, 145; modernization and, New Russia, Jews in, 5, 5n10
7, 11; passports used to regulate, 11, 26, Nezhin (Chernigov Province), 64
92, 133-34; police surveillance of, 1-2, Nicholas I (Emperor of Russia): army service
132-33, 143-44; as threat to autoc- under, 23, 32, 62; and dress reform, 39,
racy, 88; transportation revolution and, 49, 50; interventionist policies of, 32; and
7, 90-91 Jewish Committee, 23; and population
Movement of Jews: away from Pale of Settle- management policies, 4, 36, 37, 187; re-
ment, 117, 147, 149-50, 184; to cities, forms following death of, 54; and religious
7, 95, 97, 147, 149-50; difficulties in communities, state involvement in, 34-35;
regulating, 11-12; Great Reform era and, unification policies of, 50-51
88-90, 94-95; Great War and, 11, 181, Nicholas II (Emperor of Russia), 153, 181
183; labor migrants, 64, 89-90; reaction- Nicknames, Jewish, 148, 149; confusion
ary journalists on, 112; restrictions on, resulting from, 151n14; and documenta-
4-5, 17, 87, 88, 95; temporary travel tion challenges, 29-3 0
permits and, 94; transportation revolution Nikol'skii, Semen, 116
and, 88, 89. See also Emigration of Jews; Niman, Moshko Mendelev, 139
Expulsion of Jews Noiriel, Gerard, 73
North America, Jewish emigration to,
Name(s), Jewish: 1804 statute on, 148-49, 135,138
152-53; administrative challenges associ-
ated with, 29-30; archives/collections Occupation: expulsions based on, 105-6,
of, 169-72, 174-79; and conscription 113-14; and residence rights, 104-5, 115
problems, 66-67; elements of, 148; Jewish October Manifesto, 125
Committee's recommendations on, 30; as Odessa, Jewish population in, 7, 9, 89-90,
marker of identity, 153, 169, 179; mean- 185; criminal activities of, 128-29;
ing of, discussions on, 168-69, 172, 173; migrant workers, 133n54; use of Russian
preservation of, 166-68; religious authori- names by, 161
ties on, 172-73, 175-78; symbolism of, Okutarovskii, Daniil Petrovich, 133
148; transliteration problems associ- Old Believers, 10, 72n82, 186
ated with, 66, 166, 173. See also Name Omel'chuk, Maksim, 97
changes; Nicknames; Surnames Orshanskii, I. G., 119, 119n8
 Index 213

Otkhodniki (Russian Orthodox labor mi- rahhis, 68-70; to emigrate, 137, 138;
grants), 89, 91 to erase "Jewish origin" from passport,
Ozeranskii, Mordukh Davidovich, 116-17 121-22; for name changes, 83, 120-21,
147, 150-60, 176-77; to preserve Jewish-
Paksher, Mordak Zaivelev, 152 sounding names, 166-67; for residence
Pale of Settlement, xvi, 5, 5n10; abolition of, permits/privileges, 26, 1 06; vital statistics
184; containment of Jewish population in, errors and, 81-82
94, 117, 185-86; creation of, 4-5; expan- Petrozavodsk, 129
sion during Great War, 183-84; ghetto Pirom, Artur, 127
compared with, 117, 186; Great Reform Piskun, Mendel-Khaim Gershov, 97
era and, 54-55; Great War and expulsion Plekhanov, Georgii, 143
of Jews from, 182-83; Jewish population Pleve, V. K., 108, 108n82, 109
in, 55, 88; migration of Jews away from, Pobedonostsev, Konstantin, 119, 173, 175
117, 14 7, 149-50, 184; naming patterns Podolia Province, xvi, 5, 141
in, 149; porous boundaries of, 12, 13; Podpol'nyi advokat (underground street
poverty in, 98, 164; public debate on, advocate), 15, 99
180-81; revolutionary activists in, 164; Pogorel'skii, M. V., 171
settlement types in, 97 Pogroms: of 1881-82, 17, 135n62; expul-
Panin, Viktor, 28 sions compared with, 114
Panteleev, A. I., 104n68 Poland. See Kingdom of Poland; Warsaw
Paperna, Abraham, 50 Poles, identification of, 170n80
Passports, internal, 7; and choices avail- Police informants, Jewish, 86
able to Jews, 14; complexity of system of, Police officials: administrative duties of, 19,
92, 93; counterfeit, 127, 128, 129-30; 34, 72n82, 80n110; corruption and un-
distinguishing characteristics marked in, ethical conduct of, 106-7, 131; vs. crown
94; failure as policing instrument, 131-32; rabbis, attempt to replace, 72; and dress
functions of, 33, 86, 91-93; and gover- code enforcement, 43-44; in Kiev, 106-8;
nance of empire, 85, 127-28; hierarchical and population count enforcement, 63;
differentiation in, 92n20; as indicator and registration of male subjects, 61
of identity, 134-35, 187-88; "Jewish Police surveillance: fake identity documents
origin" marked in, 94, 120-22; religious and difficulties of, 128, 131-32; of Jewish
affiliation marked in, 1 0; seasonal labor artisans, 98; in Kiev, 102; of revolutionar-
migrants and, 93; Soviet state and, 185; ies, 143--44, 165; transportation revolu-
and travel, 11, 26, 92, 133-34 tion and problems for, 132-33; of travel!
Passports, international: administrative chal- movement, 1-2, 132-33, 143--44
lenges associated with, 145-46; cost of, Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, 8,
137n70; counterfeit, 140,142 9n19,21
Patushinskii, Yakov, 60 Poll tax censuses. See Census revisions
Paul I (Emperor of Russia), 23 Polotsk (Vitebsk Province), 29
Peasants: emancipation of, 54; exploitation Poltava, xvi, 5, 132-33
by Jews, claims of, 95-97, 109; migration Population count. See Census
to cities, 97n43; passports of, 134 Population management, 3--4, 7-8; adminis-
Perel'man (Rabbi), 84 trative challenges associated with, 145-46;
Perm, Jewish population in, 112 documentation and, 51, 187-88; police
Perovskii, Lev, 25, 153n20 surveillance and, 143-44; strict regula-
Perski, Isaak and Mordukh, 65 tions on name changes and, 83
Peter the Great (Tsar of Russia), 18; and Population movement. See Movement
census revisions, 22n4; and dress reform, Portrait parle, 144, 144n93
39, 50; and state archives, 19; and vital Poverty: in Pale of Settlement, 98, 164; in
statistics records, 33 Siberia, 103
Petitions by Jews, 14-16; to avoid expulsion, Propiska (Soviet registration system), 185
26, 96, 99, 109-10, 114-15; for census Protestantism, Jews converting to, 125-26
revision extensions, 2 7-28; clothing Provincial authorities: responsibility for vital
decree and, 43--44, 47--48; conversion statistics records, 74, 80, 80n110. See also
to Christianity and, 126; against crown Governors
214 Index

Prussia, surnames in, 148, 149n3 Revolution of 1905: antisemitism after, 181;
Public advocates, 116. See also Underground and easing of travel restrictions, 111;
street advocate impact on Jews, 110
Pustovskii (Rabbi of Ruzhin), 71-72 Riga, Jewish population in, 90, 110
Rodishchak (Volynia Province), 31
Rabbinical Commission: on book of Jewish Rostov-on-Don, 126, 161
names, 171, 175; on Jewish record- Rotenberg, Tsvi-Gersh, 150
keeping duties, 30 Rotwand, Jakob, 170n82
Rabbis: absence in interior provinces, 55; on Rovno (Volynia Province), 75-76
clothing decree, 46-47, 48-49; spiritual, Rozenfrukt, Garviil, 167
60, 69. See also Crown rabbis Rubinchik, Itsak, 27
Rabinovich, Osip, 151, 151n14 Rubinovich, Rakhel, 26
Rabinovich, S. M., 170 Rudin, Srol, 110
Railroad: impact of, 7, 12, 90; Siberian, Rural settlements: expulsion of Jews from,
91; and surveillance problems, 1-2, 95-97, 96n41. See also Peasants
132-33, 136 Russian language requirement: and census
Rakhlis, Yanke!, 67 revisions inaccuracies, 31-32; and peti-
Rappoport, Shiloma, 2 tions by Jews, 14, 15
Raznochintsy (peoples of various ranks), Russian Orthodox population: boundaries
23 with Jews, efforts to preserve, 175-78;
Record keeping: administrative challenges labor migrants (otkhodniki), 89, 91;
of, 2-3, 6-7, 18-19; Jewish, attempts to recording of vital events among, 35, 38,
reform, 72, 73-74; Jewish aversion to, 79-80, 79n106
53, 61; Jewish names and challenges to, Russian Orthodoxy: challenges to purity
29-30; modernization and challenges to, of, 10; names in, 35n50, 175-76; as
11-12. See also Documentary records; privileged religion, 119, 123, 188. See also
Errors in record keeping; Vital statistics Conversion of Jews; Holy Synod
records
Religion: in documentary records, 10; free- Sabler, V. K., 175-76
dom of, 1905 statute on, 123-24, 123n24, Sborshchiki (community officials), 26, 63
125; identities based on, destabilization of, Sectarian communities, Christian, 10; con-
7, 10. See also Conversion of Jews; Rus- version of Jews to, 126-27
sian Orthodoxy Segal, Mariia (Mina), 156
Religious communities: state involvement in, Shafit, Avram Govsei Mairashovich,
34-35. See also Jewish communities 77-78
Religious toleration, policy of, 44, 72 Shapiro, Avraam-Aron Osherov, 105-6
Residence permits/privileges, 86; conver- Shcherbatov, N. B., 183
sion to Christianity and, 116-17, 119, Shcinis, Mikhail, 60
124, 126; false, 105; marriage to obtain, Shekhel (Rabbi of Shepetovka), 71
117; petitions for, 26, 1 06; social estate Sherman, David, 99
(soslovie) and, 104-5, 115 Shimanskii, Petr Efimovich, 132
Residence restrictions, 4-5, 17, 87, 88, 92, Shkurnik, Yanke!, 42
95, 186; evasion of, 101-2; proposed re- Shmerkes, Movsha, 142
laxation at turn of 20th century, 11 0-11; Shneerson (Rabbi of Berdichev), 48
relaxation during Great War, 183; relax- Shor, Manus L'vovich, 75-76
ation under Alexander II, 89; social status Shtern (Rabbi of Odessa), 48
and, 104-5, 115; in Soviet state, 185. See Shulman, Arii, 78
also Expulsion of Jews Shusterman, Shmul', 114
Revolutionaries: border crossings by, Siberia: Jewish population in, 60, 88, 103-4,
143; name changes by, 165-66; in Pale 103n64;Jews exiled in, 165; mass migra-
of Settlement, 164; police surveillance tion to, 91
of, 143-44 Sil'tser, Tsiporia Raiza, 75
Revolutionary movement, 108; and de- Singer, Isaac Bashevis, 1
mand for fake passports, 128; Jews in, Sirkin, Leib Itskovich, 26
2, 163-65 Skoptsy, 10, 186
 Index 215

Sliozberg, Henrik, 65-66, 96 Trans-Siberian Railway, 91

Smeliansk, 69-70 Travel. See Movement
Smolenskii, Movsha Aron Avseev, 82 Travel permits, 106-7
Social estate (soslovie}, 10, 89n10; chal- Troitskii, I. G., 177
lenges to system of, 23; and passport laws, Tsirel'son, L. M., 79, 175
92; and residence rights, 104-5, 115. See Twain, Mark, 116
also Artisans; Merchants
Sokolov, Evgraf Mikhailov, 122-23 Ukloniaiushchikhsia (evaders), 64
Soviet Union, passport system in, 185 Ukraine: Jewish surnames in, 149. See
Spiritual rabbis, vs. crown rabbis, 60, 69, also Kiev
75n93 Underground street advocate (podpol'nyi
St. Petersburg, Jewish population in, 2, 7, advokat), 15, 99
9, 59, 90, 98; conversion of, 125, 126; Urban centers. See Cities
expulsion of, 98n48, 99; name changes
among, 162-63 Vainshtein, Abram Sholomov, 112-13
Stampfer, Shaul, 89n11 Vainshtein, Mikhail, 155
Statistical studies: limitations of, 24-25; Vasser, Yosel, 82
and population management, 51; role in Velikii Cherniatin (Kiev Province), 96-97
18th and 19th centuries, 22-23. See also Verkhneudinsk, 60, 103, 103n64
Census; Vital statistics records Vigorchik, Kirill Aleksandrovich, 156-57
Statute of 1804, 148-49, 152-53 Vilkomir (Kovno Province), 30
Statute of 1835, 5, 33, 35; 1840 amendment Vil'na, Xl'i, 5; dress codes in, 47-48; Jewish
of, 36; on Jewish clothing, 39; technical population in, 55, 167; police department
difficulties with, 3 7 in, 19
Statute of 1848, 57 Vissonov, Ioann, 122-23
Statute of 1905, 123-24, 123n24 Vital statistics records, 33-34; accuracy of,
Staviskii, Avrum Shilomov, 101-2 increased interest in, 52, 54; Catholic
Stavropol (Caucasus), 116-17 Church and, 73; challenges in late imperial
Steinwedel, Charles, 1 11 period, 57-61, 78; and civil rights, 54, 71,
Stolypin, P. A., 110-11, 122n18 82, 84-85; criticism of crown rabbis for,
Subbotniks, 10, 186 59-61,66,68-71,74-78, 81-82;crown
Surnames: Jewish, retention upon baptism, rabbis and, 34, 35, 36, 56, 58; errors/omis-
153, 155-56;Jews required to adopt, 21-22, sions in, 53, 54,59-61,66,68-71, 80-81;
148-49; omissions in official documents, gender imbalance in, 78-79; importance
134; restrictions on changes of, 154; Western of, attempts to educate population about,
European requirements for, 148, 149n3 79-80; introduction of, 7, 33; Jewish cul-
Suval'skii, Samuil Assakovich, 99 tural practices and obstacles to, 35-38, 57,
78-79; provincial authorities and, 74, 80,
Tashkent: crown rabbis in, 77, 78; Jewish 80nl10; religious affiliation in, 10; Russian
population in, 112 Orthodox population and, 35, 38, 79-80,
Taurida Province, xvi, 5, 133 79n106; social role of, 54, 56. See also
Taxes: census revisions and, 21, 22, 23, 24; Birth certificates; Metrical books
income, introduction of, 7; on Jewish Vitebsk Province, xvi, 2, 5, 29
clothing, 40, 40, 42, 43, 45, 49; Jewish Vladimir, Jews in, 58-59
communities and collection of, 26; kahals Vladimirov, David, 121
and collection of, 23; passport and, 92 Volershtein, Shmuel-Yanke!, 151
Tolstoy, Lev Nikolaevich, 180 Vol'kenzon, Lazar Evseevich, 156
Tomashenko, Ivan, 101 Volochisk, 140
Tanis, Beniamin, 32 Vol'tka, G., 128n42
Transliteration of Jewish names: discrepan- Volynia Province, 5, 141; assaults on Jewish
cies caused by, 66, 166, 173, 178; stan- women in, 43-44; census inaccuracies in,
dardization of, 169 23, 31; policy surveillance of travel in,
Transportation revolution, 7, 90-91; and l; record keeping hy crown rabhis in,
movement of Jews, 88, 89; and police 69, 75-76; spiritual vs. crown rabbis in,
surveillance, 1-2, 132-33, 136 75n93
216 Index

Voskoboinik, Idasiia Zeilikovna, 81 Yoffe, Shlema Yudelevich Leibovich, 81

Vul'fman, Yakov Vul'fov, 126 Yudovskii, Viktor, 70-71

Warsaw: conversion of Jews in, 125; Jewish Zagoviazinskii, Geshelev, 105

migrants in, 7, 9, 90; regulation of Jewish Zalmen, Brustin, 66
names in, 163 Zaslav (Bessarabia Province), 81
Weber, Max, 18 Zaslavskii, Mendel Yanke!, 70-71
Werth, Paul, 38n60 Zbarskii, Ikhel, 86-87, 88
Witte, Count Sergei, 127 Zhilovskii, Frants, 77
Women, Jewish: clothing of, 46; head cover- Zhitomir (Volynia Province), 1, 43-44
ings of, 43-44; migration by, 89; passports Zhurakovskii, K. S., 170-71, 174,
for, 92; physical characteristics of, 6; regu- 174-75
lation of clothing of, 41-42. See also Girls Zinger, Abram-Itsek Einokh-Vol'fov, 83
Zislin, Mera Yakalev, 82
Yaney, George, 26 Zolotushko, Luka, 101
Yel'son, Faivish Davidovich, 167 Zunz, Leopold, 170n82
Yoffe, Movsha Areevich, 168 Zvenigorod, 70