Jews and Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Russia

The Jewish response to the pogroms of the early 1880s has been of great interest to historians concerned with the rise of modern Jewish national consciousness and its politico-cultural expression, Zionism. To some this response was akin to a ‘revolution’, to a sharp break with previous assimilationist tendencies, which ‘necessarily undermined the authority of groups most clearly identified with Jewish adaptation to Russian life’: the maskilim grouping around Baron Ginzburg's Society for the Promotion of Culture among Jews; and the socialist Jews, who themselves underwent a deep spiritual crisis that affected their commitment to the revolutionary cause of Russian Populism. Others, while recognizing the momentous impact of the pogroms on Russian Jewry, have cautioned us not to overemphasize the political and psychological effects of the crisis since for many Jews this did not result in ‘a complete rejection of assimilation and cosmopolitan radicalism and a wholehearted return to the Jewish masses and Jewish nationalism’. Historians of either viewpoint agree, however, that the loss or retention of ‘faith in socialist cosmopolitanism’ was a crucial factor in deciding whether or not a Jewish Populist remained loyal to the Russian revolutionary movement.

This faith, so the argument continues, had been seriously challenged by the massive anti-Jewish riots of the narod and even more so by ‘the fact that two major revolutionary parties showed clear signs of sympathy with the pogroms’. In other words, popular antisemitism and corresponding sentiments in the principal revolutionary groupings of Russian Populism – Narodnaia Volia and Chernyi Peredel – compelled Jewish socialists to reconsider their allegiance to revolutionary Populism.