Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia (Studies on the History of Society and Culture) [Paperback]

Benjamin Nathans (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0520242327 | ISBN-13: 978-0520242326 | Publication Date: April 29, 2004 | Edition: 1

A surprising number of Jews lived, literally and figuratively, "beyond the Pale" of Jewish Settlement in tsarist Russia during the half-century before the Revolution of 1917. Thanks to the availability of long-closed Russian archives, along with a wide range of other sources, Benjamin Nathans reinterprets the history of the Russian-Jewish encounter.
In the wake of Russia's "Great Reforms," Nathans writes, a policy of selective integration stimulated social and geographic mobility among the empire's Jews. The reaction that culminated, toward the turn of the century, in ethnic restrictions on admission to universities, the professions, and other institutions of civil society reflected broad anxieties that Russians were being placed at a disadvantage in their own empire. Nathans's conclusions about the effects of selective integration and the Russian-Jewish encounter during this formative period will be of great interest to all students of modern Jewish and modern Russian history.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"A groundbreaking, brilliant and compelling book." -- Haaretz

From the Inside Flap

"Nathans's deeply researched and meticulously argued book takes us into the drawing rooms and offices of successful Jews of St. Petersburg and greatly enhances our understanding not only of Jewish intellectual, political, and professional leadership but of Russian politics and society as well."--Richard Stites, author of Russian Popular Culture

"The work of an extremely talented and intelligent historian. It breaks new ground both conceptually and substantively."--Michael Stanislawski, author of Zionism and the Fin de Siècle

"Ben Nathans moves in this remarkable book well beyond the standard spatial as well as conceptual boundaries typically associated with prerevolutionary Russian Jewry. It is the work of a splendid historian who negotiates brilliantly the borders of Russian and Jewish history, and manages to link the two persuasively in an original, lucid narrative."--Steven J. Zipperstein, author of Imagining Russian Jewry

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Product Details

• Paperback: 441 pages
• Publisher: University of California Press; 1 edition (April 29, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0520242327
• ISBN-13: 978-0520242326
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 5.9 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #122,141 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Benjamin Nathans teaches and writes about Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union, modern European Jewish history, and the history of human rights. He edited A Research Guide to Materials on the History of Russian Jewry (19th and Early 20th Centuries) in Selected Archives of the Former Soviet Union [in Russian] (Moscow, 1994) and is author of Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter With Late Imperial Russia (Berkeley, 2002), which won the Koret Prize in Jewish History, the Vucinich Prize in Russian, Eurasian and East European Studies, the Lincoln Prize in Russian History and was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award in History. Beyond the Pale has been translated into Russian (2007) and is forthcoming in Hebrew. Nathans has published articles on Habermas and the public sphere in eighteenth-century France, Russian-Jewish historiography, the state of the field of Russian and East European studies in Germany and the United States, the Soviet logician and rights activist Aleksandr Esenin-Vol'pin, and other topics.

Nathans' current research explores the history of dissent in the USSR from Stalin's death to the collapse of communism. It traces the paths by which Soviet dissidents found their way to the doctrine of inalienable rights--the world's first universal ideology--and employed rights doctrine in an attempt to place limits on the sovereignty of the Soviet state. How did "legalist" dissidents (pravozashchitniki) appropriate a tradition grounded in conceptions of the human personality antithetical to Soviet ideology and practice? Was the turn to human rights a symptom of the globalization of moral individualism, or did Soviet dissidents in effect reinvent human rights on their own and in their own terms? Even as rights have become the dominant moral language of our time, this project seeks to de-familiarize and de-naturalize them by studying them in the unlikely setting of "mature socialism." It aims, in other words, to give human rights a history.

Benjamin Nathans received his BA from Yale University and his PhD from the University of California at Berkeley. He lives in Bala Cynwyd, PA, with his wife and three children.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent work, October 26, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia (Hardcover)

This is a fascinating study of the Jews in Russia. The book description is accurate... it is a highly detailed and first rate work of scholarship. The only concern is that it is not casual reading-- it is an in-depth and comprehensive study that rewards the devoted reader.

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Book Prize Winner, November 19, 2004

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JMD (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia (Studies on the History of Society and Culture) (Paperback)

Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia won the 2003 Wayne S. Vucinich book prize awarded annually by the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS) for the most outstanding monograph in Russian, Eurasian, or East European studies in any discipline of the humanities.

The book prize selection committee wrote the following about this volume:

Benjamin Nathans' masterful study provides a fresh look at an age old problem, the entry and integration of Jews into larger territorial, cultural and political communities. The book takes us, literally and figuratively, "beyond the pale" of Jewish life in late imperial Russia to the encounter of Jewish professionals and intellectuals with Russian civil institutions.

Through exhaustive and innovative research, from newly available archives to private family memoirs, Nathans brings to life key personalities and social interactions that redefine the Jewish presence in St. Petersburg, and in turn reshape ties to the other subjects of the empire and to Russian Jewry. Through these vibrant portraits of the Jewish-Russian encounter, the author paints a much larger canvas tracing a cultural world of understandings and misconceptions, a social existence beset by advances and setbacks, and a political discourse of emancipation and reaction.

This exemplary, insightful book, argued with balance and nuance and written with flair, provides an original interpretation of a central problem in Russian history and politics. More, the intellectual journey goes well beyond Russia to recast our understanding of broader, ever-present issues of identity, integration, and conflict.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Jewish Question, May 5, 2011

By 

Richard A. Blumenthal - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia (Studies on the History of Society and Culture) (Paperback)

Russia came to the Jews; the Jews did not come to Russia. As the tsarist regime expanded westward, it annexed large portions of Poland between 1772 and 1795, inheriting approximately half a million Jews in the process. Divided into four parts, Nathans's book traces what he terms the selective integration into Russian society of colonized Jewish people from the Pale of Settlement in late imperial Russia. Focusing on a range of demographic, cultural, and political issues, Nathans analyzes the geographic and social mobility of the Jews during this period, and the impact they had on the transformation of Russian society in the modern age.

Part I frames the monograph by looking at the attempt to adapt European-style emancipation to a tsarist autocracy still emerging as a hierarchy of culturally and juridically distinct estates. As a result, a policy of what Nathans calls "selective integration" evolved where certain categories of "useful" Jews were granted rights and privileges similar to those enjoyed by their Gentile counterparts according to social estate, including the right to reside outside the Pale. Nathans situates the selective integration of the Jews in the context of Alexander II's Great Reforms. Part II examines the privileged Jews who, taking advantage of residential freedom offered by the policy of selective integration, moved to St. Petersburg, which became the largest and most prominent Jewish community in Russia, and the politics that arose within the Jewish community itself, as St. Petersburg's Jewish elite asserted a self-appointed leadership role over Russian Jewry as a whole.

The second half of the book looks at Jewish integration into two specific social institutions. Part III traces the experience of Jewish men and women who enrolled in Russia's institutions of higher education. Taking advantage of a decree in 1861 guaranteeing Jews with university degrees the right to live outside the Pale, Jews, with the aid of new forms of Jewish philanthropy, flocked to the universities in such disproportionate numbers to their Gentile counterparts that official quotas were enacted in 1887 to stem the tide. Nathans also examines the role Jewish students played in the failed 1905 Revolution. Part IV examines the Russian-Jewish encounter in terms of the newly reformed Russian court system. The Judicial Reform of 1864 created a modern judiciary, and is especially significant in that it broke with the tradition of officially sanctioned discrimination against the Jews. Barred from employment in academia and civil service, Jews flocked to the bar and became private practitioners. By the twenty-fifth anniversary of judicial reform, in 1889, Jews constituted 14% of the empire's certified lawyers and an astounding 43% of apprentice lawyers, the primary pool from which future lawyers would be drawn. Unwilling to tolerate the dominance of Jews in the legal profession, Tsar Alexander III enacted a so-called temporary degree (which remained in effect until the October Revolution-nothing was more permanent in late imperial Russia than a temporary decree) requiring the personal approval of the Minister of Justice for the admission of any non-Christian to the bar. The impact on the Jews of this decree was felt immediately. Half a century after the creation of an open, semi-independent legal system in Russia, Jews were completely barred from it. Interestingly, the impetus for state protection came not only from the state but also from within the ranks of the bar itself. Fear of competition was the clear motivation.

Nathans concludes this excellent piece of scholarship with a comparison of the policy of selective integration to the experience of Jews elsewhere in Europe and the experience of other Russian minorities within late imperial Russia. Although sharing many similarities with its Western European counterparts, the Russian-Jewish encounter was distinct in that it unfolded at a time when Russia's hereditary estates remained the predominant source of social identity and the means through which the tsarist regime sought to manage its residents. The tsarist autocracy attempted to use these estates as a conduit for Jewish integration, all but ensuring a stratifying effect on the Russian Jewish population as a whole, which in Nathans view prepared the ground for the significant role played by Jews in the Russian Revolution and development of Soviet society.