Description:
Informed by a common commitment to taking the reader “beyond the Pale,” new histories of Russian Jewry strike at the complex of images encapsulated in the single most important signifier of the Russian—Jewish condition. Between the partitions of Poland in the last quarter of the eighteenth century and the First World War, tsarist law restricted Jewish residence almost exclusively to the Pale of Jewish Settlement, an administrative unit that encompassed the Western borderlands of the empire. In Jewish memory, this confinement was not merely geographic but cultural and social; reference to the Pale evokes a sense of isolation from Russia proper inflicted from the outside by effective legal discrimination and buttressed from within by the force of tradition. The only way for Jews to leave the Pale presumably involved either emigrating or opting out of Judaism altogether. For some, conversion to Christianity relieved all of the burdens of communal authority and juridical disability associated with the Pale. For others, the turn to the universal faiths of the nineteenth century—Enlightenment, socialism, Marxism—constituted an analogous act of departure. The reduction of the Russian—Jewish experience to simple contrasts may be attributed, at least in part, to the fact that until a decade ago historians were forced to rely on anecdotal literary evidence; archival materials remained hidden behind the iron curtain. Four recent studies attribute their own historiographic departure from the pale directly to the availability of documentary sources that bring to light a variety of possibilities for defying the internal and external constraints of the Pale without abandoning one's Jewishness in the process.