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Admission: Free

Jewish life in late imperial Russia is remembered most as a time and place of residential restrictions, shrinking opportunities for professional and economic advancement, sporadic anti-Jewish violence, massive emigration, and political radicalism. Yet from the perspective of Jews living in the Russian Empire in the early years of the twentieth century, many political possibilities remained open. Jewish intellectuals, be they liberal or radical, expected the empire’s transformation—imminently or eventually—and sought to prepare the way for Jews to participate politically as equal members of a new society in a reconstituted state. Such political preparation took place noisily and in an atmosphere of intense competition between parties and ideologies, as well as growing rivalry between nationalities.

In his talk Simon Rabinovitch will assess the overriding political concerns and legal demands of Russian Jews from 1897 to 1917. He will focus on some of the individuals instrumental to YIVO’s founding, such as the historian Simon Dubnow and his political and intellectual circle. Using examples from the Revolutionary Russia collections in the YIVO Archives, he will explain how and why Jews demanded autonomous national rights. Because demanding legal recognition from the state was a rite of passage for all emerging national movements in both the Russian and Austrian empires, there was a need for Jews to define what they were as a group and to describe what they wanted. The result was the rise of the many overlapping varieties of Jewish nationalism.

Simon Rabinovitch is an Assistant Professor at Boston University, where he teaches Jewish, European, and Russian history. His publications have examined Jewish politics in revolutionary Russia, Jewish nationalist thought, and Jewish folkloristics and ethnography. His edited anthology, Jews and Diaspora Nationalism: Writings on Jewish Peoplehood in Europe and the United States, was recently published by Brandeis University Press. The current talk is taken from a larger work in progress about Jewish autonomism in late imperial and revolutionary Russia.

Inaugurated in 2008 thanks to a major gift from the family of Ruth Gay, the Ruth Gay Seminar in Jewish Studies takes place several times a year at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. Established in honor of Ruth Gay (1922-2006), the noted American Jewish historian and writer, the seminar series is given by scholars who have used the resources of the YIVO Archives and who wish to share their research with the public.

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