Nadene Goldfoot
Jews have lived in Russia longer than they had lived in the Pale of Settlement. In 986, Jews participated in a disputation on the occasion of Duke Vladimir's conversion to Christianity.
Volodymyr the Great portrait on obverse of ₴1 bill circa 2006
Originally a follower of Slavic paganism, Vladimir converted to Christianity in 988 and Christianized the Kievan Rus'. He is thus also known as Saint Vladimir. So Kiev and the great swatch of Ukraine under their domain was claimed to be Christian since 988.
The Primary Chronicle reports that in the year 987, after consultation with his boyars, Vladimir the Great sent envoys to study the religions of the various neighboring nations whose representatives had been urging him to embrace their respective faiths. The result is described by the chronicler Nestor.
Of the Muslim Bulgarians of the Volga the envoys reported there is no gladness among them, only sorrow and a great stench. He also reported that Islam was undesirable due to its prohibition of alcoholic beverages and pork. Vladimir remarked on the occasion: "Drinking is the joy of all Rus'. We cannot exist without that pleasure."
Ukrainian and Russian sources also describe Vladimir consulting with Jewish envoys and questioning them about their religion, but ultimately rejecting it as well, saying that their loss of Jerusalem was evidence that they had been abandoned by God.
However, a Jewish gate is mentioned in the 12th century at Kiev, and the Jewish quarter there was looted by 1113. During this period, Russian Jews attended western yeshivot and addressed queries to the German rabbis.
In the late 15th century, Jewish traders from Lithuania disseminated a Judaizing sect in Novgorod and Moscow and this precipitated a drastic reaction. In 1563, 300 Jews were drowned in Polensk and Vitebsk on refusing to accept baptism (into Christianity).
By 1667, the Jews were expelled from Eastern Ukraine upon its annexation to Russia. Clauses prohibiting Jews from visiting the country were inserted in treaties signed by Russia with foreign powers in 1550 and 1678, while expulsion orders were issued in 1727, 1738 and 1742.
In 1753, 35,000 Jews were driven out of Russia. In 1762, Catherine II permitted all aliens to live in Russia except Jews.
By the partitions of Poland in 1772, 1793, and especially 1795, the great Jewish masses of White Russia, the Ukraine, Lithuania and Courland became Russian subjects, and for more than a century, the great majority of the world's Jews were under the reactionary rule of the Czars. In 1786, their residence was restricted to towns, thereby laying the foundation for the PALE OF SETTLEMENT. Only the Karaites received equality of rights with the Christians by 1795.
On the authority of the Derzhavin report on White Russia, a Council for Jewish Affairs was established in 1802. 2 years later, it defined the Pale, restricted Jews in the villages by 1807-1808, and limited the activities of the Kahal (Jewish Congregation-organized Jewish community having autonomous rights; responsible for taxation) in the spheres of religion and charity, and prohibited the traditional Jewish costume. On the other hand, it tried to make farmers out of these artisans and traders by taking measures to promote agriculture.
The Jews remained loyal in Russia during Napoleon's 1812 invasion. Alexander I (1801-1825) was at first benevolent. Later, however, he turned reactionary and some 20,000 were expelled from the provinces of Vitebsk and Mohilev in 1824, and those remaining were forbidden to live near the frontier.
About 600 oppressive enactments regarding the Jews were published during the reign of Nicholas I who regarded them as an injurious element.
In 1827, military service was brutally imposed on Jews, taking their male teen-agers and turning them into Cantonists. This is when many Jewish sons were taken away from their families with the implicit intent of converting them to Christianity. The Jewish community was forced to supply a certain number of recruits from ages 12 or even 8 and 25. Service lasted 25 years and was not reckoned until the recruit had passed the normal conscription age of 18. They were educated at special institutions ouside the Pale of Settlement and then sent to distant places, like the eastern provinces, Siberia. Thousands were converted and assimilated, while many died of hardship. Most of the Cantonists were children of poor families, as the wealthy bought out their children.
The brutal police functions of the Russians imposed on the Jewish communal authorities in the selection (known as "kidnapping", of recruits led to widespread corruption and deep resentment on the part of the poorer Jews. i've heard of mothers cutting a finger off her son to keep him from being taken.
The frontiers of the Pale of Settlement were restricted in 1835 and remained effective until 1915. A censorship was imposed on Jewish books in 1836, and in 1844, the Kahal was abolished. Alexander II (reigned from 1855 to 1881) tried to Russify the Jews by education and the gradual relaxation of restriction, which the judicial law of 1864 contained no anti-Jewish discrimination. At this time, 65,000 Russian Jews were engaged in agriculture. Jews became prominent in economics, culture, and left-wing politics. Social anti-Semitism now began to replace or reinforce the former religious prejudices. This seemed to encourage emancipatory elements in Russian Jewry. However, toward the close of this reign, an anti-Semitic tendency paralleled the general reaction.
The intensive reaction which followed the assassination of Czar Alexander II in 1881 made the Jews its chief victim. On 13 March , 1881, Alexander II, the Emperor of Russia, was assassinated in Saint Petersburg, Russia while returning to the Winter Palace from Mikhailovsky Manège in a closed carriage. The assassination was planned by the Executive Committee of Narodnaya Volya, chiefly by Andrei Zhelyabov (People's Will) a revolutionary terrorist organization. He was not Jewish.
The appalling Pogroms of the early 1880s influenced the official view regarding the Jews as a foreign element to be kept apart from the village population which was expressed in the MAY LAWS of 1891. Jews were expelled from Moscow and a NUMERUS CLAUSUS was introduced into high schools and secondary schools. Jews then turned increasingly to Zionism and Socialism.
By 1897, Jews founded the BUND and a revolutionary movement had begun. The Bund sought to unite all Jewish workers in the Russian Empire into a united socialist party, and also to ally itself with the wider Russian social democratic movement to achieve a democratic and socialist Russia. An organizaion advocating equal rights was founded in 1905 and the following year, 12 jewish deputies were elected to the Duma, most of them representing the Liberal Party. A law proposed by the premier Stolypin alleviating the Jewish legal position was vetoed by Nicholas II and conditions steadily deteriorated. Official anti-Semitism reached a peak with the BEILIS case, the most notorious of a long series of Blood Libels.
The vast emigration, especially to the US, which been in the 1880s, barely offset the natural increase among Russian Jewry. Russian Jewry in the 19th century comprised perhaps the most vital elements of the Jewish people. The Pale of Settlement was, with Poland, the world's great center of Talmudic study. Southern Russia, particularly Odessa, was the focus of the Hebrew literary revival and the place of origin of many remarkable individuals in Zionist and contemporary Jewish history revival, while Lithuania was famous for its yeshivote and well-known rabbis.
At the outbreak of WWI, 5,600,,000 Jews lived in the empire of the Czars including almost 2 million in Poland. Those residing near war zones were deported en masse, and despite the 300,000 Jews in the Russian army, the community was made the scapegoat for the Russian defeats (expulsion of Jews from Kovno, Grodno, and Courland: prohibition of Hebrew and Yiddish printing.
Immediately after the Russian Revolution, the provisional government abrogated all anti-Jewish decrees on April 2, 1917, and Jews were prominent both in the Kerensky regime and later in the Bolshevik Revolution (Trotsky, Zinoviev, Sverd-lov), from 1918, Jewish departments existed in the Commisarian of National Affairs and of education.
In April 1919, the Soviet government abolished the non-communist Jewish institutions. The civil war was accompanied by a wave of pogroms, and the Soviet government proclaimed anti-Semitism a criminal offense. The policy of the Soviets rapidly changed the basis of the life of the petty traders, who had formerly constituted the great mass of Russian Jewry. Their traditional economic distinctiveness rapidly disappeared. A great number were in due course absorbed by heavy industry. There remained, however, a tendency to concentrate in the administrative and distributive branches of the new system.
The anti-religious policy of the Soviet government, the prohibition of public religious teaching, and the economic revolution, which made traditional observances difficult, had an immediate effect on the religious life of Russian Jewry. Although a minority, mostly of the older generation, tenaciously clung to the traditional Jewish way of life, it was abandoned by the vast majority with prodigious rapidity even in the 1st generation. On the other hand, the Soviet government, not recognizing the Jews as a nationality, discouraged Hebrew and persecuted Zionism. In the 1921-1929 period, the Jewish economic position improved. To encourage agriculture among the Jews, the government set up a committee for settling Jews on the land which furnished territory in the Ukraine, Crimea, and Biro Bidjan; the means for settlement were supplied by the American Jewish Agricultural Corporation,, but the Jewish part in agriculture remained small.
From 1930, increasing efforts were made to discourage Jewish practices, and many prominent Jews were removed in the purges of the 1930's. The annexation early in WWII of W White Russia, W Volhynia, E Galicia, N Bukovina, Bessarabia, Lithuania, and Latvia led to the mass deportation of Jews, especially the intelligentsia, from these regions.
The Nazis, who invaded Russia in 1941, aimed at exterminating the Jewish population. Of the 500,000 Jews in White Russia, only half escaped to the interior and up to 200,000 were slaughtered. The Soviet government established the Anti-Fascist Committee to appeal to World Jewry in 1941, but immediately the Nazi peril had passed, an anti-Jewish trend asserted itself; many outstanding Jews "disappeared" including most of the exponents of Yiddish culture. The charge brought in 1932 against Jewish physicians of plotting against the state served to presage a systematic anti-Jewish campaign but after Stalin's death in 1933, all who survived were released. The government, however, maintained a policy of anti-Jewish discrimination and restricting Jewish cultural expression. The large-scale evacuation and flight from the fighting area during the War, reinforcing the Soviet policy of creating new industrial centers of the Ural region, etc., resulted in a vast redistribution of the Jewish population, now spread more evenly throughout the country. Contacts with the outside Jewish world were slight and seldom spontaneous. Yet, notwithstanding the waiting of traditional Jewish life, among Jewish settlement persisted among a great part of the population.
In 1947, Russia supported the creation of the state of Israel but---disappointed by the almost complete failure of pro-Soviet elements there--adopted a strong pro-Arab and anti-Israel policy, intensified from 1955 and especially from the period of the 1967 Six Day War when the USSSR broke off relations with Israel and came out in unqualified support unilateral and political of the Arabs, especially Egypt. The number of Jews in Russia according to the 1959 census was 2,268, 000.
After 1967, many Russian Jews demanded the right to emigrate to Israel and this was achieved in the early 1970's. In the 1970 census, some 250,000 Jews left Russia. At first, 150,000 went to Israel but from the mid-1970s the main destination was the US. At the same time, there was a growing self-awareness among Soviet Jewry expressed in open demonstrations of their Jewishness, in publications, Hebrew classes and seminars in Jewish subjects and the activities of the REFUSENIKS. Refusenik (Russian: отказник, otkaznik, from "отказ", otkaz "refusal") was an unofficial term for individuals—typically, but not exclusively, Soviet Jews—who were denied permission to emigrate, primarily to Israel, by the authorities of the Soviet Union and other countries of the Eastern bloc.
In the 1980s, the doors of emigration were said to be again virtually closed but the Jewish ferment continued inside the country. I made aliyah from the US in September1980 and was among a sea of Russian Jews, so I think that door was kept quite open. I could always return to the USA if I wanted to, but the Russians could not. israel gave them special help. In the last years of the 1980s, President Gorbachev again allowed widespread emigration. His liberating policies had not only led to free Jewish expression but also to free expression of anti-Semitic groups such as Pamyat, previously suppressed. The open anti-Jewish manifestations intensified the desire of Russian Jews to leave and they streamed out in large numbers.
As the US had severely limited its intake of Soviet Jews, the main goal was again Israel which received almost 200,000 Soviet immigrants in 1990 alone and the stream continued in 1991. The official 1989 census put the Jewish population at 1,449,167 but it was thought that the real figure was considerably higher. Diplomatic relations with Israel were re-established in 1991, shortly before the liquidation of the USSR.
Resource:
Book: Letters From Israel, by Nadene Goldfoot
The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Jewish_Labour_Bund#:~:text=The%20name%20was%20inspired%20by,a%20democratic%20and%20socialist%20Russia.
https://www.ushmm.org/research/about-the-mandel-center/initiatives/ethics-religion-holocaust/articles-and-resources/christian-persecution-of-jews-over-the-centuries/christian-persecution-of-jews-over-the-centuries
