For more than 1,000 years only limited numbers of Jews lived in Russia. Than territorial conquests beginning in the late 18th century gave Russia the world’s largest Jewish population. These Jews were an unwelcome burden the imperialist czars accepted as the price of annexing Ukraine, Belorussia, and Poland. According to historian Michael Stanislawski, the czars regarded the Jews as an “anarchic, cowardly, parasitic people, damned perpetually because of their deicide and heresy [who were] best dealt with by repression.” In the 1880s the Russian statesman Pobedonostsev suggested to the czar that one-third of the empire’s five million Jews be converted to Christianity, one-third forced to emigrate, and one-third killed. The Orthodox Christian Russian people shared their rulers’ disdain.
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The “century of ambivalence” began March 1, 1881, when Czar Alexander II was killed in Saint Petersburg by a bomb-carrying member of People’s Will, a revolutionary group committed to popular government. The assailant wounded himself and was caught. He subsequently named his comrades, one of whom was a Jew named Gesia Gelfman, who had recently fled her village to escape an arranged marriage. Though all of the conspirators were found guilty, the murder was regarded as a Jewish plot, and the reign of Alexander III began with a campaign of terror against Jews throughout the empire. The next hundred years brought cycles of repression and hope for liberation.
In the dozens of images of Jews in traditional religious clothes, at weddings, and at other family occasions, there’s not one smile, not one twinkle in the eye. Shining through the hardships in the literature of Shalom Aleichem (stern-faced here in an 1889 family New Year’s card) and Isaac Bashevis Singer are faith, joy, and humor. Jewish writers were rarely as harsh about the Russian and Polish past as this group of photographs.
As if to round off the century of ambivalence, the exhibit catalog describes Mikhail Agursky, the son of the purged Samuil, who emerged in the 1960s as an outspoken Soviet dissident but finally emigrated to Israel, unable to find a place in Russia. Today the Jewish population in the former Russian empire is less than half what it was a century ago and continues to shrink. A 50-nation study conducted recently by the London-based Institute of Jewish Affairs reports that Russia today “has probably the most dynamic anti-Semitic movement in the world.”
