Jews and Muslims in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. Ed. by Franziska Davies, Martin Schulze Wessel and Michael Brenner. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2015. 168 S., 12 Abb., 4 Tab. = Religiöse Kulturen im Europa der Neuzeit, 6. ISBN: 978-3-525-31028-1

Jews and Muslims in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. Ed. by Franziska Davies / Martin Schulze Wessel / Michael Brenner. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2015. 168 S., 12 Abb., 4 Tab. = Religiöse Kulturen im Europa der Neuzeit, 6. ISBN: 978-3-525-31028-1.

Table of Contents:

https://d-nb.info/1071491431/04

Jews and Muslims were the largest non-Orthodox minorities in the Russian empire since the end of the 18th century and also in the early Soviet Union and, as the authors of the volume Jews and Muslims in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union agree, in the Russian and Soviet contexts this was their most significant resemblance. Otherwise, the history of the Jewish and Muslim populations differ starkly, expressed in one of the chapter’s title Jewish Apples and Muslim Oranges in the Russian Basket: Options and Limits of a Comparative Approach by Johanan Petrovsky-Shtern. The author, but also the editors of the volume, proposes to focus on the “Russian basket” as a framework to compare Jewish and Muslim Russian experiences. The volume, then, is not about Jewish or Muslim religious or cultural practices but rather their standing with the Russian government and society, e. g. Russian government’s policies towards Muslims and Jews and the groups’ strategies of dealing with the questions of political and social integration and transformation. It provides an overview of Russian state’s strategies to incorporate Jews and Muslims and provides some explanations about the different treatment and lack of political unity between these groups.

There are several common arguments that appear throughout the volume’s chapters. First is the observation that Jews and Muslims were not homogeneous groups. In the case of Muslims, some Tatar elites, for example, were integrated into the Russian imperial state bureaucracy much earlier than representatives of other Muslim populations of the Caucasus and Central Asia. It would therefore be wrong, as Adeeb Khalid argues, to treat Muslims as one community due to stark differences between Volga-Ural, Caucasian and Central Asian Muslims. Even though they attempted to form one unified political front during the Russian revolutions and even formed a Muslim Party in 1906, they ultimately failed to harmonize differences, partly due to ambitions of European Muslims to speak on behalf of all Muslims. Naming the all-Russian Muslim union an “historical accident” that was the result of Russian political developments rather than Muslim societal reform and unity, Khalid demonstrates on the example of the Central Asian Jadid movement that within Central Asia, too, Muslims were not united on the issue of social and political reform. Historical developments in Russia and then Soviet geopolitical interests and ideology decided the fate of Central Asian Muslim population, not its internal political evolution. Similarly, the Jewish population was diverse and did not form one political front in the revolutionary period, but due to its geographical location in the European part of imperial Russia (Central Asian and Caucasian Jews are largely left out from the volume), it underwent massive social change during the 19th and early 20th century due to increasing mass urbanization and industrialization. Despite the variety of political, religious and social trends that this change has streamlined, the Yiddish-language press and theatre, David Fishman argues in this volume, became forgers of “imagined communities” among “Zionists and socialists, middle-class and poor, religious and secular” Jews, which substituted “absence of political sovereignty and political institutions” (p. 110).

Second, Muslims and Jews were treated differently by the Russian imperial government. Although religion as such was an important pillar through which the Russian state governed its populations, this does not mean that all non-Orthodox groups were treated similarly. Muslim groups were incorporated into the Russian empire much earlier and in different contexts than the Jewish populations. The Orenburg Muslim Spiritual Assembly (integrated within the imperial Ministry of Internal Affairs) was founded in 1788 to manage religious appointments and jurisdiction in the Volga-Ural region and the Crimea, incorporating local Muslim spiritual leaders, who pledged loyalty to the sovereign. In contrast, as Franziska Davies shows, Rabbinical Commissions, which were formed to regulate Jewish religious affairs, consisted of Russian bureaucrats, were not institutionalized and gathered only six times between 1848 and 1910. The commissions’ major goal was, as Davies shows, to train “state rabbis” who would enlighten and teach Jews loyalty to the Russian state (p. 51). Thus, while Muslim structures allowed for observed self-regulation, Rabbinical Commissions aimed to directly intervene into Jewish religious education, reflecting the state’s ambition to transform the Jewish population. Yet, despite the differences in strategies of “disciplining through confessions”, in both cases the institutions did not become moral authorities among Muslims and Jews. The level of education in state rabbinical schools was low and considered by the Jewish population as an attack on religion and no authoritative Muslim scholars were called to the Muslim Assembly. However, when it came to practical consideration of providing religious guidance and support to serving Muslims and Jews in the Russian army, these larger institutional policies played a crucial role. While the military generally allowed rabbis and mullahs to support dying soldiers (and even reimbursed for their expenses) and hold some rituals, the Russian state made official concessions to the Muslim soldiers only. It institutionalized official military mullahs because the Muslim Spiritual Assembly, which was part of the Russian administration, could press interests at the beginning of the 20th century. Since no institutionalized Assembly was created for the Jewish population, it had fewer opportunities to claim rights.

Third, Muslim and Jewish leaders also chose varying strategies for claiming rights within the imperial polity, despite very similar problems that they faced. Vladimir Levin’s chapter on political activities of Muslim and Jewish political elites during the revolution of 1905–1907 and its aftermath argues that despite common problems that faced both groups and some identical political strategies, they did not build an alliance and chose separate strategies. Although both Muslim and Jewish parties appealed for ex-territorial autonomy, cooperated (at first) with Kadets and (later) partially with Octobrists, they did not cooperate because, as Levin argues, both “concentrated on their relations with the imperial centers” (p. 71). Yet, both largely failed to achieve autonomy due to increasing official islamophobia and antisemitism. Since, however, zionism was perceived as dangerous to the Russian statehood, there was an important difference in how these two groups were treated by the Russian elites, allowing minor concessions to the Muslims. The Russian imperial administration, then, became key in forming the framework for behavior of both groups.

But were there any similarities in how Muslims and Jews understood their place in the Russian empire? Similarities could be found on the individual level, which had more to do with the spirit of Enlightenment and individual concerns for modernization than with religious groups themselves. Taking an example of two enlightenment figures – Judah Leib Gordon and Ismail Bey Gaspirali – Michael Stanislawskii shows how ideas of reform and modernization could be articulated almost identically, despite religious affiliation. Both Gordon and Gaspirali believed in an integrationalist, enlightened future for Jews and Muslims in the imperial “basket”. Both argued for reform in pedagogy and female education, both were equally against narrow territorial nationalism and even preached loyalty to the Russian state. The difference developed due to the Russian state’s anti-Semitic spirit and pogroms in the 1880s: it disappointed Gordon, pressing him to revise his vision of the future of the Jews in the Russian empire, who increasingly believed that Jews should emigrate to America.

Comparing Jewish and Muslim experiences within the Russian empire reveals not only strategies of the groups’ leaders, but also the tensions of the Russian state between imperial and stately ambitions and realities. Michael Khodarkovsky proposes to understand the relationship towards non-Russians as asymmetrical, hierarchical, and one-dimensional. By analyzing the treatment of peoples of Asiatic Russia, Khodarkosvky shows that the Russian central administration officially denied its colonial nature, yet acted in a colonial way. This ambivalence between colonial practices and universal civilizational claims (to incorporate all subjects as Russian citizens) produced dissonance between Russian officials who clearly saw themselves as colonizers and Russian Petersburg self-image of a civilizational (not colonial) power. It also disappointed representatives of non-Russian peoples integrated into the Russian administration who attempted (similar to Gordon and Gaspirali) to incorporate the Russian system into the worlds of the non-Russians and vice versa. Yet, as there were no clear ideas, policies and commitments to non-Russians, the ambivalence constituted the core of Russian imperial relation with non-Russians. The ambivalence between universal and colonial politics was not resolved in the early Soviet period, as David Shneers’ chapter on Jewish photographers, i. e. Zelmanovitch and Fridlyand, shows. For one, they mixed images of Soviet Orientalism and Socialist Realism to highlight successful Soviet modernization of Asiatic “others”. Yet, as liminal figures of a liminal project, which aimed both to construct and deconstruct “others”, they found themselves in a complicated web of visual power plays. As Shneer interprets, they produced the images of the “other” to “make themselves feel whiter and more Russian” (p. 162), i. e. to portray not only others, but also themselves.

The volume is a useful and (correctly) cautious introduction into the topic of Russian imperial and the early Soviet state’s perception and treatment of the Jewish and Muslim populations. Yet, taking into account that both groups underwent different histories of integration into the Russian empire, it is useful to ask if comparison between the integration of, e. g. Catholic, Jewish and Christian populations in European Russia or Muslim and Buddhist groups in Asiatic Russia would provide a historically more useful and context-sensitive analysis.

Botakoz Kassymbekova, Berlin