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---------- Forwarded message --------- From: H-Net Staff <[email protected]> Date: Tue, Oct 23, 2018 at 9:12 PM Subject: H-Net Review [H-Judaic]: Hickey on Schainker, 'Confessions of the Shtetl: Converts from Judaism in Imperial Russia, 1817-1906' To: <[email protected]> Ellie R. Schainker. Confessions of the Shtetl: Converts from Judaism in Imperial Russia, 1817-1906. Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture Series. Stanford Stanford University Press, 2017. 360 pp. $65.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8047-9828-0. Reviewed by Michael C. Hickey (Bloomsburg University) Published on H-Judaic (October, 2018) Commissioned by Katja Vehlow Ellie R. Schainker's _Confessions of the Shtetl _is a welcome addition to the already remarkable body of recent literature on Jews in late imperial Russia.[1] In examining the lived experience of Jewish converts to Orthodox Christianity, Schainker expands our understanding of shtetl life and culture, engages fruitfully with recent historiography on the Russian state's imperial confessional politics, and places Jewish apostasy in the wider European context. Schainker concentrates on the experience of and discourses about Jewish converts to Orthodox Christianity in imperial Russia from the early 1800s to the establishment of legal freedom of conscience in 1905-6. She has mined material from sixteen different archives, more than two dozen newspapers, and an impressive number of other publications. She uses this evidence to challenge long-held assumptions about the eigthy-five-thousand-plus Jews in imperial Russia who converted to Christianity, the milieus in which they lived, and the complexities of Jewish identity (as lived and as imagined). Following recent historiography, Schainker situates Jewish apostasy within the context of the tsarist state's confessional politics.[2] The state privileged Orthodox Christianity but tolerated and supported other officially recognized confessions as a strategy of imperial rule. Schainker notes that toleration granted authority as well as responsibility to officially recognized confessional communities--for example, responsibility for metrical records that helped make Jews "legible" to the state--and stresses the importance of these practices in structuring the experience of conversion. Typically, Jewish apostasy in imperial Russia has been portrayed as the result of state coercion (for example, the "recruitment" of Jewish boys into cantonist military units between 1827 and 1856); as an insincere act motivated by the desire for social and economic mobility (for example, to escape the Pale of Settlement and gain residence rights in Russia's interior provinces); or as a consequence of spatial distance from the Jewish social milieu, in urban (and secularizing) settings. Schainker recognizes the partial validity of these tropes but offers a very different interpretation of Jewish conversion grounded in the fine details of lived experience. Schainker argues that conversion often was a voluntary act. Jews in provincial towns and shtetls--primarily Jewish women--were motivated to convert by their everyday interactions and relationships with Catholics, Protestants, and Orthodox Christians, and did so "under the gaze of communities" (p. 7). When converts crossed confessional boundaries, their Jewish families and communities did not simply treat them as "dead" or as "pariahs." Rather, families often sought to return converts to Judaism or accepted the Jewish identity of converts who continued to live as Jews. Like the Jewish Christian sects that Schainker explores in the book's penultimate chapter, converts blurred confessional distinctions in ways that provoked anxieties about identities (Jewish, Orthodox Christian, Russian, and imperial). Schainker examines public discourse concerning conversion as it related to a range of issues, from debates over legal freedom of conscience (which in 1905-6 "detach[ed] Orthodoxy from Russianness" [p. 10]), to the emergence of an ethnicized Jewish identity. The book's body is divided into three parts--"The Confessional State and the Jews," "Conversion and the Shtetl," and "Converts on the Move." Part 1 begins with "The Genesis of Confessional Choice," a chapter that considers the politics of conversion in the first half of the nineteenth century. Because confessional status was intertwined with other aspects of corporate status, conversion signified a change in one's "legal and social standing in the empire" (p. 19). Schainker argues that state confessional politics allowed space for confessional choice. While the state tolerated sanctioned confessions and supported approved confessional institutions (such as state or crown rabbis, entrusted with state functionary powers) as a tool in governance of a multi-confessional empire, it also promoted programs for the assimilation of Jews into the Orthodox faith (including missionary activities, provision of aid and shelter to neophytes, and schemes to create convert agricultural colonies). Schainker draws our attention to the paradoxes of this politics, which provided incentives for conversion while feeding doubts about the sincerity of such conversions, and which, by opening the possibility of confessional boundary crossings, provided Jewish families opportunities to subvert the state's managerial aims. She frames the second chapter, "The Missionizing Marketplace," with reference to major shifts in imperial policy in the era of the Great Reforms. These included abandonment of conversion efforts (for example, the dissolution of the cantonist battalions) and a turn toward Russification (initiated by the 1863 Polish uprising). This chapter examines the missionary function of philanthropic efforts to aid Jewish converts, who often found themselves isolated from both the Jewish and Christian communities, and the legacy of the Russian state and Orthodox Church response to efforts by foreign missionaries (and particularly British evangelicals) to proselytize among Jews. Schainker also analyzes projects proposed and undertaken by converted Jews whom she describes as "entrepreneurial converts," such as the publication of Yiddish-language New Testaments and Russian-language religious and ethnographic texts. These "entrepreneurs" (including Yakov Brafman, who went on to write sensationalist Judeophobic texts warning of an international conspiracy of Jewish elites) aimed at fostering conversions, but also hoped to shape Russian public opinion regarding Jews and converts. As the state retreated from the "conversion business," Schainker argues, entrepreneurial converts sought to sell the Orthodox Church on the need for Yiddish missionary work. The church, however, remained ambivalent about the prospects of these (or any) conversion efforts. Part 2 concentrates on the experience of converts in the provincial shtetl environment, and begins with a chapter titled "Shtetls, Taverns, and Baptisms." Here, Schainker most fully develops her argument that "civilian conversions from Judaism in the Pale of Settlement were facilitated by everyday Jewish-Christian encounters and relationships forged before baptism" (p. 85). She presents detailed evidence regarding taverns as sights of interethnic, interconfessional social interactions that led to conversions, particularly of women. She also examines other spaces that facilitated interconfessional social networks--again, with a primary focus on women and gender relations--and the participation of confessional communities (Jewish and Christian) in the conversion process. One of the great strengths of this chapter, and of the book as a whole, is Schainker's use of individual conversion stories and her analysis of conversion narratives to illustrate the diversity of the Pale as a social and cultural milieu and the importance of emotional attachments and emotional needs in shaping converts' actions. Intimate daily interactions between Jews and their Christian neighbors fostered the sorts of personal relationships--love affairs, friendships, and the sharing of beliefs and hopes--that often motivated acts of voluntary conversion. In the fourth chapter, "From Vodka to Violence," Schainker argues that "conversion as a form of boundary crossing raised anxieties about close interfaith living and became a flashpoint for negotiating the local politics of confessional and religious toleration" (p. 122). She examines violent tactics some Jews used to "recover" or discipline converts and the way the Russian conservative press between the 1870s and the 1890s exploited stories of violence to portray Jews as religiously intolerant fanatics. Schainker argues that state policies gave Jewish families and communal authorities tools to obstruct conversions, for example, by manipulating ambiguities in metrical records, and explains how shtetl social networks facilitated intimidation and violence to prevent voluntary conversion, most often of women. Women appeared not only as victims but also as agents asserting power over their own identity. This gendered aspect of apostasy underscored its power to unsettle the patriarchal order within Jewish society and the imperial state. In compounding anxieties over Russian and imperial identity, conversion became a focus of conservative critiques of "Jewish fanaticism" and of religious toleration. Part 3 begins with "Relapsed Converts and Tales of Marranism." Tsarist law allowed conversion to Christianity but made apostasy from Christianity "a criminal offense ... punishable by exile and hard labor" (p. 159). The law defied "relapsed" Jews as criminals and placed criminal responsibility on those who had "seduced" them away from Orthodoxy.[3] Until the institution of legal freedom of conscience in 1905, the Russian state judged one's religiosity on one's behavior. Hence "living as a Jew" was evidence of relapse. Schainker uses this issue to examine the relationship between state-defined confessional categories and individual religious identity. The re-crossing of confessional boundaries by cantonist "mutineers" who sought to return to Judaism and other relapsed converts exposed the limits of using state-ascribed confessional identity as a tool for social ordering. Schainker shows that converts in provincial shtetls often continued to live in a Jewish social milieu and were accepted as Jews by the Jewish community, and she focuses on responses to the perceived threat posed by the fluidity of Jewish identities. Both Russian officials and Jewish commentators compared converts to the early modern Spanish Marranos. While officials suspected converts as insincere and thus in need of surveillance and subject to discrimination, Jewish intellectuals like Simon Dubnov saw them as victims coerced into conversion by a hostile state. Schainker sees state policies, under which conversion did not free neophytes from the legal disabilities imposed on Jews, as tied to the emergence of the racialized concept of Jewishness. Similarly, Russian nationalist rhetoric concerning converts and the conservative press's fixation on Jews' "inherent" violent fanaticism (which found its most outrageous expression in blood libel accusations) introduced a racialized discourse about Jews and served the cause of discrediting the imperial policy of religious toleration. Schainker's sixth chapter, "Jewish Christian Sects in Southern Russia," considers the importance of another form of confessional border-blurring that underscored "the tension between tolerated confessions and personal faith" (p. 202). Three major Jewish Christian sects emerged in the Pale's southern "frontier" provinces in the 1880s and offered a synthesis of Christian and Jewish religious expression: Joseph Rabinovich's New Testament Israelites, Jacob Gordon's Spiritual-Biblical Brotherhood, and Jacob Priluker's New Israel sect. Schainker views these as part of the larger wave of sectarianism described by historian Sergei Zhuk (_Russia's Lost Reformation: Peasants, Millennialism, and Radical Sects in Southern Russia and Ukraine, 1830-1917 _[2004]). From the state's perspective, such sects were schismatic threats to the stability and clarity offered by officially sanctioned confessions. The new sects also aroused the same anxieties about blurred confessional boundaries as did conversion. For Russian conservatives and state policymakers, the sects were "morally and politically subversive" (p. 228); for Jewish commentators, the sects pointed to the possibility that Jewish national identity might be divorced from religious identity. In her epilogue, "Converts on the Cultural Map," Schainker contrasts her findings to Todd Endelman's typologies of modern Jewish apostasy (_Leaving The Jewish Fold: Conversion and Radical Assimilation in Modern Jewish History _[2015]). She also considers anxiety among prerevolutionary Jewish intellectuals, such as Ahad Ha'am, who held that conversion and intermarriage might lead to Jewish "national suicide." And she suggests that Jewish conversion in the late imperial period, by pushing us to consider how people were rethinking the meanings of Jewishness, can help us understand the emergence of an ethnicized Jewish identity in the Soviet period. Schainker skillfully links stories of intimate personal decisions to complex matters of political, intellectual, cultural, demographic, and intellectual history. She analyzes conversion narratives as acts of "self-fashioning subject to generic constraints" that employed "particular rhetoric to effect desired outcomes" (p. 7). She might have allowed readers more often to directly "hear" the voices taken on by converts in unpublished conversion narratives. But that is a minor criticism of a book that should be standard reading for students and scholars interested in modern eastern European Jewish history. Notes [1]. See, for example, Brian Horowitz, _Empire Jews: Jewish Nationalism and Acculturation in 19th- and Early 20th-Century Russia_ (Bloomington, IN: Slavica, 2009); Olga Litvak, _Conscription and the Search for Modern Russian Jewry_ (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006); Natan M. Meir, _Kiev, Jewish Metropolis: A History, 1859-1914_ (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010); Benjamin Nathans, _Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia _(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Yohan Petrovsky-Shtern, _The Golden Age Shtetl: A New History of Jewish Life in East Europe _(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014); Jeffery Veidlinger, _Jewish Public Culture in the Late Russian Empire _(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009); and Robert Weinberg, _Blood Libel in Late Imperial Russia: The Ritual Murder Trial of Mendel Beilis _(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013). [2]. Evgenii M. Avrutin, _Jews and the Imperial State: Identification Politics in Tsarist Russia _(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010); Nicholas B. Breyfogle, _Heretics and Colonizers: Forging Russia's Empire in the South Caucasus _(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005); ChaeRan Y. Freeze, _Jewish Marriage and Divorce in Imperial Russia _(Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2002); John Doyle Klier, _Imperial Russia's Jewish Question, 1855-1881 _(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); and Paul W. Werth, _The Tsar's Foreign Faiths: Toleration and the Fate of Religious Freedom in Imperial Russia _(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). [3]. Russian Orthodox Christianity was in no sense unique in attributing apostasy to acts of "seduction," "temptation," or "enticement." Citation: Michael C. Hickey. Review of Schainker, Ellie R., _Confessions of the Shtetl: Converts from Judaism in Imperial Russia, 1817-1906_. H-Judaic, H-Net Reviews. October, 2018. URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=52719 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. -- -- Best regards, Andrew Stewart _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
