Classless: On the Social Status of Jewsin Russia and Eastern Europe in theLate Nineteenth CenturyELI LEDERHENDLER

Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry of The Hebrew Universityof Jerusalem

In this paper I examine the economic and political factors that undermined thesocial class structure in an ethnic community—the Jews of Russia and easternEurope at the end of the nineteenth century.1 Compared with the documentedrise and articulation of working classes in non-Jewish society in that region,Jews were caught in an opposite process, largely owing to discriminatorystate policies and social pressures: Among Jews, artisans and petty merchantswere increasingly reduced to a single, caste-like status. A Jewish middle classof significant size did not emerge from the petty trade sector and no significantindustrial working class emerged from the crafts sector. Historians have largelyoverlooked the significance of these facts, in part because they have viewed thiseast European situation as a mere preamble to more sophisticated, modern classformation processes among immigrant Jews in Western societies, particularly inlight of the long-term middle-class trajectory of their children. Those historiansinterested in labor history have mainly shown interest in such continuity as theycould infer from the self-narratives of the Jewish labor movement, and have thusoverstated the case for a long-standing Jewish “proletarian” tradition. In reasses-sing the historical record, I wish to put the Jewish social and economic situationin eastern Europe into better perspective by looking at the overall socialand economic situation, rather than at incipient worker organizations alone.I also query whether a developing class culture, along the lines suggested by

Acknowledgments: I want to thank the three anonymous CSSH readers whose suggestions andquestions were very helpful in reworking an earlier draft of this essay. All translations are mineunless otherwise stated.

1 Throughout this paper, I use “eastern Europe” and “Russia” almost interchangeably, despitedifferences in legal, political, and economic status that obtained across the region. I do so partlyfor convenience, given the Russian Empire’s domination over 80 percent of east EuropeanJewry. In addition, my use of “eastern Europe” underscores that “Russian” Jews did not actuallylive in “Russia,” per se, but in lands that were ethnically Polish, Lithuanian, Belorussian, Ukrainian,and Moldavian (among others).

Comparative Studies in Society and History 2008;50(2):509–534.0010-4175/08 $15.00 # 2008 Society for Comparative Study of Society and Historydoi: 10.1017/S0010417508000224

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E. P. Thompson, was at all in evidence before Jewish mass emigration. Thispaper is thus a contribution to the history of labor—rather than organizedlabor—as well as a discussion of the roots of ethnic economic identity.

In addition, a reexamination of the economic background of the east Euro-pean Jews who migrated in mass to the West suggests that theories of self-selection among the migrating population, which ostensibly favored thosefrom the light-manufacturing sector, overstate the case for individual agencyin the migration process, and the neat “fit” between Old World and NewWorld occupational structures.

Finally, conventional “ethnic” histories of Jews in the United States havelargely focused on cultural transmission issues. I hope to reintroduce the econ-omic factor into the discussion. In that sense, this paper argues for a more rig-orous comparison between the status of pre-migration east European Jewry andthat of post-migration communities in the United States. It forms the first part ofa longer work in progress on Jewish immigrant life in America and the pro-cesses of economic integration.

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Some five million Jews—nearly half of the world total—lived under Russianimperial rule at the end of the nineteenth century. (These included 1.3million who lived within the Kingdom of Poland.) As of 1910, an additional850,000 were living in Habsburg Galicia and some 400,000 were spreadthroughout southeastern Europe (chiefly in the Balkans and Romania), bringingthe total Jewish population for all of eastern Europe to 6.25 million. Nearlyone-third, or about two million, of these immigrated to the United Statesover a fifty-year period, beginning in the 1870s and peaking between 1905and the First World War.2 This mass outpouring ended in the 1920s whenthe U. S. government instituted country-of-origin-based immigration quotasweighted against east European countries.

The emigration of one-third of a population in so short a time-span is rare(only the mass out-migrations of the Irish or the Norwegians come to mindas comparable), and it has aroused interest about the conditions that spurredsuch an exodus. Jewish immigrants comprised about 11 percent of total Amer-ican immigrants between 1899 and 1914, and 14 percent of those whoremained permanently (i.e., net immigration). Jews made up one-quarter ofthe immigrants from southern, central, and eastern Europe.3

2 Evyatar Friesel, Atlas of Modern Jewish History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990),10–15, 32–36; Simon Kuznets, “Immigration of Russian Jews to the United States: Backgroundand Structure,” Perspectives in American History 9 (1975): 38, Table 1; Isaac M. Rubinow, “Econ-omic Conditions of the Jews in Russia,” Bulletin of the Bureau of Labor, No. 72 (Washington, D.C.:Department of Commerce and Labor, 1907; repr. New York: Arno Press, 1975), 495–96.

3 Niles Carpenter, Immigrants and Their Children, 1920. Census Monographs, vol. 7 (Washing-ton, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, 1927), 344, Table 158; Joel Perlmann,

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Research on the causes and the timing of the Jewish immigration has dweltupon both the social-political element (persecutions) and on economic elements(socioeconomic deprivation). Mob violence against Jews and Jewishproperty—“pogroms,” a Russian word coined expressly for this case—brokeout in the Pale of Settlement in the spring of 1881, following the assassinationof the tsar, Alexander II, and this is often considered to be the spark thattouched off the large-scale exodus. The question is far from settled, and isfar more complex than it would appear, for several reasons: (a) The migrationactually began, albeit on a smaller scale, in the 1870s; (b) scholars have shownthat the 1881-era immigrants came initially from centers of Jewish populationhardest hit by poverty more than from those areas directly affected by thepogroms4; (c) the migration was selective—migration was much higheramong younger, working-age people, and did not represent a cross-section ofthe Jewish population—and was responsive to business cycles in the Americaneconomy; and (d) although Jews were, like other migrating groups, clearlyeconomically motivated, they did emigrate more than non-Jews. Jews com-prised over two-fifths of all Russian emigrants between 1890 and 1915, andthey tended to bring more dependent family members with them, thusplacing themselves at an initial economic disadvantage in adjusting to theirnew home. These two idiosyncratic factors—more intensive out-migration

Italians Then, Mexicans Now. Immigrant Origins and Second-Generation Progress, 1890–2000(New York: Russell Sage Foundation and the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, 2005),11–12. For the general literature, see Walter Nugent, Crossings: The Great TransatlanticMigrations, 1870–1914 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992); Alan M. Kraut, TheHuddled Masses: The Immigrant in American Society, 1880–1921 (Arlington Heights, Ill.:Harlan Davidson, 1982); Salo W. Baron, “United States 1880–1914,” in Steeled By Adversity.Essays and Addresses on American Jewish Life (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society ofAmerica, 1971), 269–414; Liebman Hersch, “International Migration of the Jews,” in Imre Fer-enczi and Walter F. Willcox, eds., International Migrations (New York: National Bureau of Econ-omic Research, 1931), vol. 2, 471–520; and idem, “Jewish Migrations during the Last HundredYears,” in The Jewish People Past and Present (New York: Jewish Encyclopedic Handbooks,Central Yiddish Culture Organization [CYCO], 1946), vol. I, 407–30; Samuel Joseph, JewishImmigration to the United States from 1881 to 1910 (New York: Arno, 1969; repr. of 1914 ed.,New York: Longmans, Green).

4 Kuznets, “Immigration”: 116–19; Shaul Stampfer, “The Geographic Background of EastEuropean Jewish Migration to the United States before World War I,” in, Ira A. Glazier andLuigi De Rosa, eds., Migration across Time and Nations: Population Mobility in Historical Con-texts (New York and London: Holmes andMeier, 1986), 227–28; idem, “Patterns of Internal JewishMigration in the Russian Empire,” in, Yaacov Ro’i, ed., Jews and Jewish Life in Russia and theSoviet Union (Ilford, Essex: Frank Cass, 1995), 37; Rubinow, “Economic Conditions,” 491–92,495–96, 502. On the pogroms see: I. Michael Aronson, Troubled Waters: The Origins of the1881 Anti-Jewish Pogroms in Russia (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990); JonathanFrankel, “The Crisis of 1881–82 as a Turning Point in Modern Jewish History,” in, David Berger,ed., The Legacy of Jewish Migration: 1881 and Its Impact (New York: Columbia University Press,1983), 9–22; Shlomo Lambroza and John Klier, eds., Pogroms: Anti-Jewish Violence in ModernRussian History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

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and higher family migration—may attest to the added motivating “push” of aparticularly harsh political situation for Jews.5

We can assume, then, that both economic and other historical causes servedas “push” factors in the emigration of east European Jews, and that politicaloppression and economic causes were interrelated. The following discussionis intended to delineate briefly just how that was so.

By Western standards, Russia was a poor, mainly agrarian country. Urbaniz-ation did set in at a rapid pace after the 1860s, but by 1897, only 13 to 15percent of the Russian population was classified as urban. Twenty yearslater, the figure stood at only 18 percent and the agricultural sector stillaccounted for over half of the work force. Despite its predominant role, agricul-ture suffered from low productivity and slow modernization. It was only in the1880s that agricultural production began to grow appreciably.6 On the eve ofWorld War I, Russia’s per capita national income approached only one-tenththat of the United States, one-third that of Germany, and half that of Italy.7

Manufacturing and trade were established sectors in the Russian economyalongside agriculture, but as with increases in farm production, true industrialmodernization did not strike root until the 1880s and 1890s.8 Development wasmost noticeable in heavy industry and railroad building: Coal, iron, and oilwere crucial in this regard, though the largest single employment sectoramong the manufacturing branches was the textiles industry.9

5 Carpenter, Immigrants, 173, Table 78. Cf. Kuznets, “Immigration of Russian Jews”: 95,Table 10; cf. Peter Gatrell, The Tsarist Economy, 1850–1917 (New York: St. Martin’s Press,1986), 215; Joseph Kissman, “The Immigration of Rumanian Jews up to 1914,” YIVO Annual ofJewish Social Science, 2–3 (1948): 177–78.

6 Arcadius Kahan, Russian Economic History: The Nineteenth Century, Roger Weiss, ed.(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 10; Nicolas Spulber, Russia’s EconomicTransitions, From Late Tsarism to the New Millennium (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,2003), 84; Paul R. Gregory, Before Command: An Economic History of Russia from Emancipationto the First Five-Year Plan (Princeton: University of Princeton Press, 1994); Gatrell, TsaristEconomy; Michael F. Hamm, “The Modern Russian City, An Historiographical Analysis,”Journal of Urban History 4, 1 (1977): 40–42.

7 Gatrell, Tsarist Economy, 32; M. E. Falkus, The Industrialisation of Russia, 1700–1914(London: Macmillan/Economic History Society, 1972), 11–12; Alexander Gerschenkron, Econ-omic Backwardness in Historical Perspective (New York: Praeger, 1962), 138. Austrian Galicia,the source of 236,500 Jewish emigrants between 1881 and 1910, was also chronically underdeve-loped. See Georges Gliksman, L’Aspect economique de la question juive en pologne (Paris: Edi-tions Rieder, 1929), 26–29.

8 Kahan, Russian Economic History, 13; William L. Blackwell, The Beginnings of RussianIndustrialization, 1800–1860 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968); Olga Crisp, Studiesin the Russian Economy before 1914 (London: Macmillan/New York: Harper and Row, 1976),5–54; Falkus, Industrialisation of Russia, 44–75; Gatrell, Tsarist Economy, 67; Spulber,Russia’s Economic Transitions, 85–99; Gerschenkron, Economic Backwardness, 119–42.

9 Falkus, Industrialisation of Russia; Spulber, Russia’s Economic Transitions; Kahan, RussianEconomic History, ch. 2; Hugh Seton-Watson, The Russian Empire, 1801–1917 (Oxford: Claren-don Press, 1988 [1967]), 520–21.

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For our purposes, the relative slowness of modern economic development inRussia and across the region in general is a relevant place to start, but still morecrucial was the retarded character of the economy of the so-called “Pale ofSettlement,” the region on the western border of the empire where the over-whelming majority of Jews lived. Heavy industries were largely locatedoutside the Pale, and even the textile industry, though relatively well-developedin Poland, was still centered eastward, beyond Moscow. In Russia as a whole,by 1913, the yearly value per person of industrial production averaged thirtyrubles; within the Pale of Settlement it averaged only six rubles.10 “Thevisitor to the late-nineteenth-century towns in the western provinces wouldhave been struck by the deprivation of their predominantly Jewish inhabitants,”concludes one economic historian.11

Comparing Jewish and non-Jewish enterprises yields an even starker pictureof the relative underdevelopment of the Jewish economy. Jewish enterpriseshad a lower capital endowment and fewer employees, on average.12 Jewsowned 37.8 percent of the factories in the Pale but employed only 27 percentof the workers, while the value of products they manufactured was only 22.5percent of the total value of manufactured products. These disproportionswere largely due to the preponderance in the Jewish sector of small plantsand non-mechanized manufacturing.13 In the textile-manufacturing center ofŁodz, Poland, Jews owned nearly 12 percent of the mills in the 1880s, butthe value of their products was but 9 percent of the city’s textile output.14 InPoland as a whole, Jewish workers comprised nearly 44 percent of allworkers in non-mechanized factories but only 19 percent in mechanizedones.15 Figures for Warsaw—a relatively well-developed city with a moreestablished middle class and highly developed industry—show that Jewsowned only 21 percent of its larger factories (those employing over twenty-fiveworkers).16

10 Ezra Mendelsohn, Class Struggle in the Pale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1970), 17; Louis Greenberg, The Jews in Russia (New York: Schocken, 1976), vol. 1, 160–67;Robert J. Brym, Jewish Intelligentsia and Russian Marxism (London: Macmillan, 1978), 26–28.

11 Gatrell, Tsarist Economy, 40.12 Arcadius Kahan, “Impact of Industrialization on the Jews in Tsarist Russia,” in, Roger Weiss,

ed., Essays in Jewish Social and Economic History (Chicago and London: University of ChicagoPress, 1986), 3–4.

13 Rubinow, “Economic Conditions,” 537.14 Phillip Friedman, “Di industrializatsye un proletarizatsye fun lodzher yidn in di yorn 1860–

1914,” Lodzher visnshaftlekher shriftn 1 (1938): 76.15 Yoav Peled and Gershon Shafir, “From Caste to Exclusion: The Dynamics of Modernization in

the Russian Pale of Settlement,” in, Ezra Mendelsohn, ed., Studies in Contemporary Jewry, Vol. 3:Jews and Other Ethnic Groups in a Multi-Ethnic World (1987), 100–1.

16 In 1867, ninety-one Jewish-owned factories in Warsaw employed 1,761 workers (19.4 perfactory on average). For the Kingdom of Poland as a whole, 434 Jewish manufacturing enterprisesemployed 11,539 workers (or an average of 26.6 workers per factory). Bernard Weinryb, NeuesteWirtschaftsgeschichte der Juden in Russland un Polen: Von der I. Polnischen Teilung bis zum Tode

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The concentration of Jewish artisans, journeymen, and industrial workers inthe smallest workshops, mills and factories, or home workshops had importantramifications, for example in social and legal arenas. Russian labor legislationbegan in 1882 to institute reforms such as reduction of working hours, controlor elimination of child-labor and night-shift hours for female workers, insti-tution of written contracts for laborers, and the establishment of a system ofgovernmental factory inspection. These reforms (which were, in any case,slow to be enforced) only applied to workplaces with over sixteen employeesand were, therefore, irrelevant for the bulk of Jewish workers. Even when Jewsworked alongside non-Jews in the same factory, a pattern of discrimination leftthe Jewish workers with low-grade jobs, longer hours, and less pay. Theiryoungsters stood less chance of obtaining formal vocational training, andJews as a group could not hope to participate in civic affairs. As one observerhas put it, “The Jewish laborer . . . lived and worked under conditions so[adversely] different from the rest of the working class that they really werea separate, inferior category unto themselves.”17

Jews were concomitantly over-represented among “clerks” in the privatesector, among those who provided religious services, and particularly intrade (comprising over three-fourths of that sector). Fully 86 percent ofWarsaw’s street peddlers were Jews. A sizeable proportion of the Jewishgroup (15 percent in 1897) were classified as common laborers, domestic ser-vants, or apprentices (i.e., menial workshop assistants), or as having no knownoccupation.18

Kahan’s estimate for a Jewish bourgeoisie, properly speaking, within theRussian Pale came to about 16,850, or about 1 percent of economicallyactive Jews, based on 1897 figures. This category combined those withtitled ranks, honorary citizens, guild merchants, and people deriving incomefrom real estate and other forms of investment. If we add their family

Alexanders II (1772–1881) (Hildesheim and New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 1972 [Breslau: VerlagM. & H. Marcus, 1934]), 75–76.

17 Nearly two-thirds of all Jewish workers in Warsaw before World War I worked in shopsemploying between one and ten people, and in such workplaces Jews constituted between 97and 99 percent of all those so employed. Sixty-one percent worked in hand-operated, non-mechanized workshops and factories, and only 39 percent in proper industrial plants. Amongnon-Jews, the proportions were just the reverse. Bina Garncarska-Kadary, “Be’ayot matsavahhahomri vehahevrati shel haukhlusiyah hayehudit bevarshah beshanim 1862–1914,” Gal-’Ed 1(1973): 115, 118, 120, 128–30. Cf. Friedman, “Di Industrializatsye”: 81–82.

18 Stephen D. Corrsin, Warsaw before the First World War: Poles and Jews in the Third City ofthe Russian Empire 1880–1914 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 55–56, 145–58;Bina Garncarska-Kadary, Helkam shel hayehudim behitpathut hata’asiyah shel varshah bashanim1816/20–1914 (Tel-Aviv: Tel-Aviv University Press, 1985), 245. Nationwide, 12 percent of theJewish population was classified as messengers, day laborers, employees in private service,people of uncertain profession, or “unproductive.” See: Kahan, “Impact of Industrialization,”20–21.

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members, as well as 16,700 members of the legal and medical professions,artists, writers, and scientists, along with those whose trade was in “luxuryitems” (and their respective family members), we reach an estimate of some65,000 people. This was just under 1.3 percent of the general Jewish popu-lation. Regularly employed artisans numbered some 240,000, while factoryworkers who could be considered the makings of a modernizing Jewishworking “class” likely numbered no more than some 40,000 throughout thePale of Settlement.19

Among Jewish craftsmen and petty tradespeople an undetermined proportionwere engaged in the repair and sale of used goods rather than the production orsale of new commodities, while no more than 10–12 percent of Jewish crafts-men worked in the high-quality or luxury goods market.20 Taking all theseconsiderations into account, we can estimate that perhaps as much as 70percent of the Jewish labor force must be considered the “working poor,”whether they worked at a manual trade or eked out a living in minor and ephem-eral “businesses.”Another aspect to factor in is the higher-than-average natural increase of the

Jewish population. From 1825 to 1880 the annual net increase among Jews wasover 1.5 percent, their numbers rising from 1.6 to 4 million in those years, andgrowing to 5 million by 1897. By comparison, the non-Jewish population ofRussia experienced an annual net increase of about 1.1 percent. By the endof the century, a quarter of the Jewish population was under ten years of age,and half were under twenty.21 Given the large number of dependents, the gain-fully employed Jewish population was limited to about 30 percent of the total(about 1.5 out of 5 million in 1897). In certain cities, such as Warsaw, the rate oflabor force participation among Christians was twice that of the Jews!22 (Bycomparison, U. S. figures for 1900 indicate a participation rate of 50.2

19 Kahan, “Impact of Industrialization,” 20–21; Mendelsohn, Class Struggle, 67–68 (see n. 4on p. 68, citing Akimov); Isaac Levitats, The Jewish Community in Russia, 1844–1917 (Jerusalem:Posner, 1981), 148; Gliksman, L’Aspect economique, 58. Jewish factory workers comprised only1 percent of all Jewish wage earners, while Russian factory workers were 12.5 percent in theurban population of European Russia. See Peled and Shafir, “From Caste to Exclusion,” 100.

20 Kahan, “Impact of Industrialization,” 16.21 Kuznets, “Immigration”: 63, Table VI; Kahan, “Impact of Industrialization,” App. 50,

Table A2.22 Kahan, “Impact of Industrialization,” 6–8; Kuznets, “Immigration”: 62–77, 101; Jacob

Lestchinsky, “Statistikah shel ‘ayarah ahat,” Hashiloah 12 (1903): 89; Garncarska-Kadary,“Be’ayot matsavah hahomri”: 106–9; Friedman, “Industrializatsye”: 69. In 1897, according tothe Russian census, some 28 percent of the Jewish population was younger than ten years ofage. An additional 24 percent were aged ten to nineteen, and 1.4 percent over seventy. Therewere 2.24 dependents to every Jew employed in the craft and industry sector; 3.16 dependentsfor every person employed in trade; and over 3.3 per person in such service branches as religiousfunctionaries and transportation workers. Kahan, Essays in Jewish Social and Economic History,56, Table A6; Gliksman, L’Aspect economique, 28.

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percent.23) Viewed differently, however, the figure of 1.5 million economicallyactive people is statistically equivalent to almost 60 percent of all Jews aged20–59, plus a quarter of those aged 10–19. We may take these figures onlabor force participation as a further indicator of how difficult it was forJewish breadwinners to support themselves and their families. This despitewidespread employment, if uncertain or part-time, and even though theyenjoyed certain social advantages: relative freedom to move around, locationprimarily in towns and cities, and a 65 percent male literacy rate (33 percentfor females), comparatively high for Russia at the time.24 Historian Heinz-Dietrich Lowe aptly referred to their situation as “urban poverty in an agrariansociety,” and explained that their socioeconomic profile (their livelihoods basedon commerce, crafts, and limited industry, along with relatively high literacy)cannot be taken to imply that they were a vanguard of modernity in a backwardcountry. “Rather,” as he put it, “industrialization probably hit them harder thanany other section of the population [. . .]; at the same time they were excludedfrom the opportunities it offered.”25

The social position of the Jewish population within east European societyhas been a subject laden with considerable ideological and political freight.Recent scholarship on Polish Jewry, for example, has taken a corrective attitudeand has tended to argue that Polish political, social, economic, and culturalhistory is incomplete without merging the Polish and the Jewish narratives.26

Without prejudice to that particular argument, it is not farfetched to say thatby the end of the nineteenth century the position of the Jews was quite asanomalous as that of the (formerly enserfed) peasantry, if not more so.Their very existence and character appeared in the eyes of imperial Russianofficials as a persistent policy problem, or to use a blunter word, a ‘blight.’

23 U. S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States. Colonial Times to 1970(Washington, D.C., 1975), 127.

24 Kuznets, “Immigration”: 80; cf. Shaul Stampfer, “Yedi’at kro ukhtov`etsel yehudei mizraheiropah batekufah hahadashah,” in, Shmuel Almog et al., eds., Temurot bahistoriah hayehudithahadashah: kovets maamarim shai le-Shmuel Ettinger (Jerusalem: Merkaz Zalman Shazar,1988), 459–83; Joel Perlmann, “Literacy among the Jews of Russia in 1897: A Reanalysis ofCensus Data,” Working Paper no. 182 (Annandale-on-Hudson, NY: Levy Economics Institute,Bard College, 1996). The general population in Russia was considerably less literate comparedwith the Jewish population: in 1897, some 60 percent of Russia’s men and 83 percent of itswomen could neither read nor write (Gatrell, Tsarist Economy, 35).

25 Heinz-Dietrich Lowe, The Tsars and the Jews: Reform, Reaction and Anti-Semitism in Imper-ial Russia, 1772–1917 (Chur, Switzerland: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1993), 96, and esp.ch. 3.

26 Gershon David Hundert, Jews in Poland-Lithuania in the Eighteenth Century. A Genealogy ofModernity (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004); idem, “On theProblem of Agency in 18th Century Jewish Society,” in, Adam Teller, ed., Studies in the Historyof the Jews in Old Poland in Honor of Jacob Goldberg. Scripta Hierosolymitana, vol. 38 (Jerusa-lem: Magnes Press, 1998), 82–89; M. J. Rosman, The Lords’ Jews: Magnate-Jewish Relations inthe Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth during the 18th Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni-versity Press, 1990).

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Jews seemed to be a vestige of the old-regime system that a modernizing statewas struggling to reconstruct, moving from inconsistent to draconian methodsin the transition to the 1880s. These new methods included rural expulsions,wholesale expulsions from Moscow and St. Petersburg, exclusions from civilservice positions, quota limitations in secondary and higher education, andrepeal of residence licenses outside the Pale.27

From 1898 to 1902, the Jewish Colonization Association (JCA)—an import-ant European Jewish philanthropic foundation established by BaronMaurice deHirsch—compiled a major report on the Jewish economic condition in Russia.The following descriptions and data are among its representative findings:

(1) Master tailors in the Polish provinces might expect to earn as much as 6 rubles ina good week, or nearly 300 rubles (about US$154.50) per year, but their average incomewas likely to dip as low as 100–120 rubles.28

(2) These, however, were the most fortunate among artisans and employees in lightindustry. Tailors and shoemakers in the Polish town of Opole (Lublin province), forexample, worked sixteen-hour days in squalid and cramped conditions and could notsupport themselves and their families due to chronic unemployment in the summerseason. Similarly, female lace-makers in Opatow, who were employed only intermit-tently, could expect to earn no more than 45 rubles a year!

(3) In Gorkii (Mogilev province, White Russia/Belarus), the average artisan workedonly six to eight months out of the year. “All our correspondents affirm,” stated thereport, “that the Jewish artisan is . . . able to find work only for a particular part of theyear.” Little wonder, then, that the report also noted that artisans in that provinceappeared most frequently among the applicants for poverty relief at Passover (a custom-ary, institutionalized alms-giving season), while in the major port city of Odessa, in1900, a municipal welfare committee recorded 1,427 Jewish artisans living inextreme poverty amidst deplorable conditions.

(4) In Vilna, female knitting-loom operators worked fifteen-hour days and earned theincredibly low wage of less than a ruble a week. Out of this miserly sum they also had to“repay” their boss for providing light in the factory during the dark hours and for the oilused in lubrication of the machines.

(5) So-called “independent” craftsmen had lost what control they might once havehad over their labor and profits. In reality, they worked as subcontractors for larger enter-prises, with a status equal to that of any lowly employee working for a basic wage.“What is saddest of all,” the report stated, “is [the artisan’s] inability to exert anyimpact on his state of poverty through his own efforts.”29

One must not conclude that in the germinating “industrial revolution” of latetsarist Russia conditions such as these were simply the social cost paid

27 H. Sliozberg, Politicheskii kharakter evreiskago voprosa (1907), 136ff.; John D. Klier, Imper-ial Russia’s Jewish Question 1855–1881 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Lowe,Tsars and the Jews.

28 A ruble was roughly equivalent in value at the time to US$0.51. In terms of the local purchas-ing power of the ruble in Russia, however, the ruble was comparable to the dollar in America.

29 Sbornik materialov ob ekonomicheskom polozhenie evreev v rossii (St. Petersburg: JewishColonization Association, 1904), vol. 1, 220–26, 245, 285–86, 308. Cf. Mendelsohn, ClassStruggle, 11–13; E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: VictorGollancz, 1965), 250, 262, and esp. ch. 8: “Artisans and Others.”

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disproportionately by those engaged in outmoded, handicraft labor, to theoverall benefit and progress of a modern industrial economy and its laboringclasses. Data show that higher output per worker (in terms of product value)among Jews in late nineteenth century industrial plants simply meant thatthey did more work for less pay.30 The miserable wages paid for factorylabor went hand in hand with the deterioration of skilled craft workshopsand the families that depended upon them.31 Their case is reminiscent ofEnglish textile workers in England earlier in the century, about whom theBritish labor historian E. P. Thompson wrote: “For the power loom mastersit was . . . a great convenience to have [domestic craft workers as] an auxiliarycheap labour force as a stand-by in good times [for outsourced jobs] and as ameans of keeping down the wages of the women and girls who minded thepower-looms. Moreover, there was scarcely no ‘transfer to the factory.’”32

It is considerably more difficult to track the changing standard of livingamong petty tradesmen, peddlers, “brokers,” jobbers, sales agents, and middle-men of all types, who left less of a paper trail than the carefully recorded wagescale in industry and crafts. However, much literary and documentary evidencepoints to what can already be surmised from the foregoing discussion: In apopulation of which over a third was pauperized, purchasing power wasobviously reduced to a minimum. The small retail tradesman, street hawker,or market-stall keeper could not market his or her wares to any great advantage.In any case, the wholesale trade, dependent on meager sources of credit, andsubject to business cycles and grain price fluctuations, could not remain inde-pendent of the poor market situation. Some undoubtedly were helped throughtemporary crises by Jewish free-loan societies and the web of unofficial mutualaid mechanisms that proliferated in the synagogues of that era.33

Kahan, as we have seen, was able to identify a Jewish entrepreneurial bour-geoisie within the Pale of Settlement, but given that it comprised only about1 percent of the population, situated at its social apex, we can hardly dub it a“middle class,” or even a “class.” Meanwhile, the great majority of peoplewhose occupational status placed them under the common rubric of “com-merce” did not rise to the “middle” at all. The status line dividing manuallabor from commercial activity was thus rapidly growing thinner, if it wasnot already meaningless.

Echoes of this ‘declassification’ of the Jewish population left their trace inlater memoirs, whose writers recalled parents’ desperate and often fruitlesscompensatory efforts to cling to a last vestige of “dignity” and to uphold

30 Kahan, “Impact of Industrialization,” 21–22; Garncarska-Kadary, Helkam shel hayehudim,184–89; Mendelsohn, Class Struggle, 18, 23.

31 Kahan, “Impact of Industrialization,” 11.32 Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, 312.33 Levitats, Jewish Community, 153, 167, 169.

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a social demarcation that hardly reflected any economic difference ofconsequence.34

Wives and daughters of artisans and petty tradesmen were routinely engagedin breadwinning, mostly in small shops, inns, or market stalls. However, wecannot regard this, as some recent historians have, as a sign of women’s “econ-omic independence,” as a marker of their more “worldly” social role, or as“grooming for a career in commerce.”35 In reality, it reflected the plight of apetit-bourgeoisie ‘on the skids.’ Women’s employment became most wide-spread in the most economically depressed parts of the Pale. Higher percen-tages of women in the work force in those areas went hand in hand withcorrespondingly high proportions of Jews working as draymen and porters,domestic servants and unskilled labor.36 Ultimately, hard times for petty trades-people and craftsmen led to the final resort and the ultimate hardship:emigration.The prospect of emigration to the New World may have seemed especially

daunting to families who were dismayed that the move—and what mightawait them or their loved ones on the other side—signaled a final surrenderto proletarization. In Marcus Ravage’s classic immigrant memoir, An Americanin the Making, he recalls that as a young boy in Vaslui, Romania he had theimpression that America was a place for those who had gone into bankruptcy,for deserting soldiers, absconding husbands and the like—“an exile which menfled to only in preference to going to prison.” Ravage’s parents relinquishedhim, albeit reluctantly, because their once middle-class standing had erodedto something resembling genteel poverty. His father still made an effort tosend his boy on his way in some kind of self-respecting style, to keep upappearances, though it took the sale of the family cow to do so.37

Lest accounts by Ravage and other memoirists be dismissed as suspect latereconstructions, it is instructive to compare very similar accounts reported inreal-time proximity to the events by disinterested sources, which tend to corro-borate memoiristic accounts. One such example occurs in a 1905 study con-ducted by Emily Greene Balch, the American ethnographer, who did

34 Jocelyn Cohen and Daniel Soyer, eds. and trans., My Future Is in America. Autobiographiesof Eastern European Jewish Immigrants (New York and London: New York University Press, pub-lished with the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, 2006), 36 (autobiography of BenjaminReisman: “Why I Came to America”).

35 Susan A. Glenn, Daughters of the Shtetl: Life and Labor in the Immigrant Generation (Ithacaand London: Cornell University Press, 1990), 15–16. Glenn writes that women willingly becameartisans and workers, citing for example, the lace-making trade; but lace-making was an extremelylow-paying type of work, barely providing any income at all. Glenn’s treatment omits such detailsin favor of a thesis that emphasizes and valorizes women at work.

36 Moshe Mishkinsky, “Regional Factors in the Formation of the Jewish Labor Movement inCzarist Russia,” YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Science 14 (1969): 39.

37 Marcus E. Ravage, An American in the Making. The Life Story of an Immigrant (New York:Dover, 1971 [Harper and Bros., 1917]), 9, 47–50, 53.

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fieldwork in the Slovakian area of what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire.Balch noted that the first Jew to emigrate from a town she visited was a Jewishcloth merchant who had gone bankrupt.38 Likewise, in a social survey of ashtetl in the Kiev Province (Ukraine), we read of an elderly storekeeper,once quite well off, reduced to a hole-in-the-wall shop, selling goods on con-signment for a larger firm. Apart from two spinster daughters who helpedout by sewing linens, all this man’s children and their families (twenty-fivepeople in all) had left for America within the space of six years. The moneythey sent kept him going, for his earnings amounted only to some 50 rublesa year. Altogether, nearly 400 (or 68 percent!) of the town’s Jewish petty trades-men and their family members had emigrated overseas in the ten years from1893 to 1902.39

Countless similar cases are routinely recorded in the ethnographic literatureon immigrants and their old-world background. One interviewed informantreported that her father was a former melamed (teacher in a traditional school-room for young children). In the period before the family’s migration, theymoved to a town where the father tried his luck at small-scale retailing, “buthe wasn’t a businessman and made hardly any money.” His older children“used to do [common] labor . . . carry[ing] stones for new buildings. . ..[M]other used to stay with father at the market all day and they would comehome with about twenty-five kopeks.”40 Similar circumstances are revealedin letters written by Jews contemplating emigration, which were sent to aZionist information bureau in Jaffa in what was then Ottoman Palestine.41

Simon Kuznets argued that the Jewish commercial population was underre-presented in the emigration because its human capital—market knowledge,languages spoken, stock, and credit sources—was less transferable than mech-anical skills, and thus tradespeople were deterred from taking such an uncertainstep. By the same token, he suggests, simpler transferability of skills wouldexplain the overrepresentation of “mechanic” workers of various types, and

38 Emily Greene Balch, Our Slavic Fellow Citizens (New York: Arno/New York Times, 1969[New York: Charities Publication Committee, 1910]), 100–1.

39 Lestchinsky, “Statistikah”: 91, 94.40 Mark Zborowski and Elizabeth Herzog, Life Is with People (New York: Schocken, 1962

[1952]), 256. Life Is with People is notorious for its static, ahistorical, over-simplified, and uncriticalpicture of shtetl society. When its authors lapsed into over-generalized, “thick descriptive” para-phrase, purporting to characterize a sort of corporate Jewish mental attitude or ethic, they wereapt to fall short of historical accuracy, as illustrated in the following statement: “A good employer,mindful of the evils of idleness, will keep his workers busy even in slack season” (240). This is atodds with reported facts on the ground and clearly reflects a romanticized view of “folk” values. Butthe book also contains some more credible verbatim quotes drawn from the interviews conducted bythe research team, reflecting the informants’ individual family experiences prior to their (or theirfamilies’) emigration.

41 David Koheleth to Arthur Ruppin, 11 Nov. 1913, quoted in Gur Alroey, “Imigrantim”: haha-girah hayehudit leerez yisrael bereishit hameah ha’esrim (Jerusalem: Yad Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, 2004),67–68.

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tailors in particular.42 It is very likely, however, that the fluid movementbetween petty trade and other types of work might help explain some ofthese statistical distortions. Included among those categorized under “com-merce” in the 1897 Russian census were a substantial number of people whoevidently intended to abandon trade for wage work in America, which ledthem to declare a skilled or semi-skilled occupation upon arrival.43 Theyeither had given up hope of self-employment, or had been advised to do soby those who preceded them across the ocean. In such case, the effect wouldbe to swell the proportion of “mechanics” in the immigrant stream.Herman Frank, a contemporary observer of the Jewish immigration, stated

flatly, “The large majority of [Jewish immigrant] tailors had probably neverbefore held a needle and thread in their lives, but rather had been small shop-keepers, teachers [melamdim], children from middle-class households, or hadhad no steady job or trade. But they came here to their relatives, who werealready earning a living in the [tailoring] trade . . . and these new immigrantshoped to master the tailoring skills quickly.” He compared data from Russiaand Galicia (for 1899 and 1900, respectively) with figures from the UnitedStates (1900–1925), and found there had been 162,860 Jewish tailors in the“old country” at the turn of the century, and nearly twice that number inAmerica (306,672)!44

It has been argued that the underreporting of tradespeople in the immigrantstream meant that, sooner or later, their past experience in trade came to the foreas they readjusted to life in the New World, and that familiarity with an entre-preneurial culture—buying and selling—was part of the human capital broughtby Jewish immigrants to America.45 I would not dispute the point entirely, butrather qualify the issue in two ways. First, even peasants are familiar withbuying and selling, yet they are not considered middle class and do notreadily form a commercial class. The point is that the experience of the east

42 Kuznets, “Immigration”: 104–7. Interestingly, Lestchinsky was persuaded that petty trades-people from the Kiev area were more apt than artisans to go abroad to developed industrialcountries. He believed that in a more highly developed market they were liable to find a betterbusiness situation, whereas artisans were far more likely to try migrating to a large city close athand, such as Odessa, Nikolaev, or Ekaterinoslav (Lestchinsky, “Statistikah”: 94).

43 One wonders, for example, how one would classify Minnie Goldstein’s father (see above), afailed petty tradesman, who prior to his emigration told his wife: “That’s exactly what I want. I wantto go to a country where heavy labor is no disgrace. . . where I can work hard and make a livingfor my wife and children and be equal to everyone” (Cohen and Soyer, eds., My Future Is inAmerica, 21).

44 Herman Frank, “Di yidishe treyd-yunion bavegung in amerike,” YIVO Yorbukh funam-opteyl 2 (1939): 104–7.

45 Joel Perlmann, “Selective Migration as a Basis for Upward Mobility? The Occupations of theJewish Immigrants to the United States, ca. 1900,” Working Paper 172, The Levy Economics Insti-tute of Bard College, Oct. 1996; and idem, “Which Immigrant Occupational Skills? Explanation ofJewish Economic Mobility in the United States and New Evidence, 1910–1920,” Working Paper181, The Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, Dec. 1996.

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European Jewish petit bourgeoisie was one that impelled many of its membersto seek employment in manual trades, sometimes before migration, and over-whelmingly so after migration. There is therefore little to sustain a “predisposi-tion” argument. Subsequent developments in terms of second-generationmobility patterns must not overshadow these basic facts.

Second, I am making the case for shifting our theoretical focus from “humancapital” to include “social capital.” That is, we need to look at the situation notfrom the perspective of culturally recognized “skills” and “values,” but ratherfrom the aspect of the dynamics of real people’s economic relationships inspecific socio-economic contexts. The point here is that Jews from easternEurope emigrated when their social capital was reduced to almost nil,tipping the balance of remaining at home versus migration, toward migration.

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The “declassification” of eastern European Jewry (especially in Russia) towardthe end of the nineteenth century was the culmination of a process with rootsgoing back at least to the early 1850s: a progressive weakening of economicand social distinctions between petty tradespeople and small artisans, andbetween artisans and laborers.46 Simultaneously the gap widened between avery small, favored minority at the top and, below them, a population of fivemillion of the underemployed, underfed, and un-statused. If the last years ofthe century seem qualitatively different from what had come before, it isbecause the cumulative result of decades of impoverishment, capped by newgovernmental restrictions on the Jews’ residence rights, occupations, and edu-cational opportunities was the loss of class itself. What is at stake is no less thanthe recognition that Jews were being removed from what could be considered“normal” economic development (even by eastern European standards), andbeing reduced to the invidious position of a caste unto themselves.47

This state of affairs must be clearly distinguished from the relatively looseJewish social structure and the relative porousness of its internal boundaries,which had prevailed long before the mid-nineteenth century. The socialpecking order among Jews in earlier eras was never truly comparable tofixed, ascriptive divisions into hereditary estates.48 This was largely becauseJewry lacked most of the politicized functions of the social classes maintainedby other pre-modern societies. The separate feudal estates, generally speaking,were a system of governance that found expression in the fixed arrangement ofrights, prerogatives, and mutual obligations attendant upon each superior or

46 Michael Stanislawski, Tsar Nicholas I and the Jews: The Transformation of Jewish Society inRussia, 1825–1855 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1983), 170–82.

47 Peled and Shafir, “From Caste to Exclusion,” 98.48 Jacob Katz, Tradition and Crisis: Jewish Society at the End of the Middle Ages (New York:

Schocken, 1993), 170–79.

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subordinate rank, from the landowning aristocracy (who were servitors of kingand emperor as well as rulers over their own domains), right down to the enser-fed tenant-peasantry (whose obligations always far outweighed their rights).The landowner-tenant paradigm was clearly inapplicable to Jews, who werenever enserfed and, by and large, were always barred from land ownership.Jews, moreover, had neither a church with property and income to bemanaged, nor monastic orders to be housed and governed, nor bishops to bechosen. For that matter, Jews had no established, elevated, or hierarchicalclass of clergy. They were not integrated into any of these “normative” pre-modern systems of governance, either secular or ecclesiastical.Nonetheless, Jews did form a contractual part of the feudal system and, as

such, were not quite anomalous. As individuals, Jews were often leaseholdersof farm revenue from noblemen’s estates or were managers of concessions ontheir properties (mills, timber, inns and taverns, and entire villages). As com-munities, Jews obtained and lived under the terms of charters or “privileges”granted by the ruler in royal or feudal towns. Continuing well into the nine-teenth century (and in Russia, right through the century), Jews as a ‘nation’were a legally separate sector within the larger polity. Special state lawslimited, or at times enabled their residential and occupational rights. Theirown judges and courts adjudicated their civil suits and legal documents.They paid a separate, collective, per capita tax, along with other specialduties and taxes, such as a candle tax, and a meat tax—korobka—to financetheir local self-governing communal administration or kahal.49 Closely resem-bling burgher communes, Jews of various economic stations were all subject tothe same codes of law, rabbinical courts, and standards of ethics, and couldmove up and down the social ladder with no formal or arbitrary restrictions.50

Informal social distinctions, forming impediments to truly free social inter-action and mobility, could therefore assume all the more significance—perhaps, as one leading historian suggests, exaggeratedly so.51 Jewry alwayspossessed a social hierarchy composed of men, women, and children (ageand gender were “natural” status categories), divided among merchants, arti-sans and laborers of varying stations and degrees, and supervised by oligarchiccommunal boards. Social distinctions operated to determine such matters as theselection of marriage partners for one’s children, the location of one’s seat in thesynagogue, the number of guests permitted at a circumcision celebration orwedding, or the right to vote in the communal assembly. This situation

49 Isaiah Trunk, “The Council of the Province of White Russia,” YIVO Annual of Jewish SocialScience 11 (1956–1957), 203–4; Levitats, Jewish Community, vol. 2, 23–33; cf. Chone Shmeruk,“Mashma’utah hahevratit shel hashehitah hahasidit,” Ziyyon 20 (1955), repr. in David Assaf, ed.,Zaddik va’edah: hebetim historiim vehevratiim beheker hahasidut (Jerusalem: Zalman ShazarCenter, 2001), 169.

50 Jacob Katz, Tradition and Crisis.51 Hundert, Jews in Poland-Lithuania, 93.

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remained stable over the course of long eras despite intervening changes ofregime or political boundaries. This was partly because Jews were largelydependent for their collective security, and at times their very right of domicile,on the wealthiest members of their group. The latter held extensive leaseholdrights and always managed the contractual, legal, and extra-legal relationswith the governing authorities. From this advantageous position, they also exer-cised considerable internal authority and influence.52

On the other hand, the system possessed structural flexibility: A fortunate mar-riage, lucky transaction, or, alternatively, a debilitating or fatal disease, couldcause a rapid reversal of fortune. This state of affairs precluded extremes of sub-servience or permanent privilege, but also meant constant uncertainty and socialfriction. To read into this pre-industrial social order the presence of actuallyconscious and contentious “classes” would be as anachronistic as it is naıve toconceive of early modern Jewry in eastern Europe as an undifferentiated folksociety.53 It is more accurate to posit that Jewish society overall was characterizedby relatively greater internal mobility thanwas Christian society taken as a whole,but not appreciably more so than contemporary Christian burgher communities.

The attenuated extremes of Jewish social-class relations (neither lord norserf) and their relative fluidity have prompted wide and speculative thinkingon the supposedly “inherent,” middle-class mentality among Jews, or contrari-wise, the ostensibly long-standing history of internal social antagonism. Thethesis of choice has depended more or less on whether the thinker held amiddle-class or a Marxian point of view.

Reading Jewish social history “on the left” was once a more developedbranch of academic discourse, but since the 1980s relatively little new workof this sort has been written, with a few notable exceptions.54 This is surelya by-product of the steep decline of traditional socialist parties and thedemise of erstwhile communist regimes, and the ascendancy of postmodern-ism, including its critique of older political, intellectual, and academicschools of discourse. Still, the subject of internal social tension in Jewishsociety, and how or whether this tension was negotiated or exacerbatedtoward the end of the nineteenth century, is a necessary component of ouranalysis here. It bears directly on the question of whether eastern EuropeanJewry was, as I suggest, in the throes of “declassification,” or instead wasre-emerging along the contours of modern, class-defined societies.

As for the ostensible Jewish “middle-class mentality” thesis, it has along and checkered past, ranging from the long-discredited work of Werner

52 Eli Lederhendler, The Road to Modern Jewish Politics (New York: Oxford University Press,1989), ch. 1.

53 Theodore Bienenstock, “Social Life and Authority in the East European Jewish Shtetel [sic]Community,” Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 6 (1950): 239.

54 Tony Michels, A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York (Cambridge, Mass.:Harvard University Press, 2005).

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Sombart55 to writings that are more reputable. It has played an increasing role,especially since the end of the Second World War, in social-scientific attemptsto explain American Jews’ exceptional economic performance. As I haveexplained at length elsewhere, these more recent efforts to identify middle-class“values” in Jewish society that overlap with American values are over-determined and fraught with conceptual issues.56

Here I can address these issues only partially and briefly. To assess under-lying Jewish class structure and economic ideologies, it will be helpful tofocus on two topics: The first is the influences of and conflicts generated bythe Hasidic movement, the pietistic mystical trend in eastern EuropeanJudaism dating from the second half of the eighteenth century that held swayover extensive portions of eastern European Jewry. This sheds some light onthe question of Jewish “middle-class” values. The second is the dynamics ofartisan-journeyman relations in craft guilds and workingmen’s associations.

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We have found suggestive analogies between the Jews’ experience in the birthpangs of the industrial revolution in Poland and Russia and the earlier travailsof England’s incipient working class. In light of these, it is worth noting E. P.Thompson’s view that Non-conformist or Dissenting Protestantism (in socialform, a type of religion not entirely unlike eastern European Hasidism) borerelevance to subsequent social developments:

The very anarchy of Old Dissent, with its self-governing churches and itsschisms, meant that the most unexpected and unorthodox ideas might sud-denly appear. . .. No easy summary can be offered as to the Dissentingtradition. . .. It is its diversity which defies generalisation and yet which is,in itself, its most important characteristic. In the complexity of competingsects and seceding chapels we have a forcing-bed for the [many] variantsof 19th-century working class culture. . .. The countryside was ruled bythe gentry, the towns by corrupt corporations, the nation by the corruptestcorporation of all; but the chapel, the tavern and the home were their own.57

Hasidism was similarly diffuse in its organizational aspects, with feudingand spontaneously dividing centers of leadership (about seventy Hasidic dynas-ties proliferated in Poland and Russia),58 and is likewise difficult to reduce to a

55 Werner Sombart, Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben (Munich and Leipzig: Duncker andHumblot, 1911), translated by M. Epstein as The Jews and the Rise of Modern Capitalism(New York: 1951).

56 E. Lederhendler, “American Jews, American Capitalism, and the Politics of History,” in, EliLederhendler and Jack Wertheimer, eds., Text and Context: Essays in Modern Jewish History inHonor of Ismar Schorsch (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 2005), 504–46.

57 Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, 36, 51–52.58 Levitats, Jewish Community, 100.

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single form or character. It was similar, also, in its fellowship-based rituals andparticipatory enthusiasms. Hasidism, too, was mainly a small-town socialphenomenon right to the end of the nineteenth century. Finally, and not least,it resembled the Dissenting tradition in that established elites received it withhostility. Those hostile to the Hasidim from the standpoint of the then-regnantorthodoxy felt quite the same way as did American preacher Ezra Stiles aboutthe evangelical “Great Awakening” in the mid-eighteenth century: “[Their] reli-gion was made to consist in extravigancies [sic] and indecencies, which werenot according to the faith once delivered. Multitudes were seriously, soberly,and solemnly out of their wits.”59

There have been interesting attempts in the past to characterize Hasidism as aquasi-populist, anti-elitist, socio-religious protest against the regnant system ofsocial relations.60 Later historians have more or less refuted this view. Theyhave found that the founder of the Hasidic movement, Rabbi Israel the “BaalShem Tov,” was not the unassuming faith-healer-cum-backwoods-charismaticdepicted in popular lore, but rather an esteemed local figure financially sup-ported by his community.61 Furthermore, the mixed social composition ofthe early Hasidic groups and the inclusion of wealthy patrons as the movementdeveloped in the early nineteenth century seem to defy a deterministic identi-fication of the pietists with social protest from “below.”62

59 Ezra Stiles, Discourse on the Christian Union (1760), quoted by Walter Nugent, Structures ofAmerican Social History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981), 46. On the early historyand social aspects of the Hasidic movement, see Ben-Zion Dinur, Bemifneh hadorot (Jerusalem:Mosad Bialik, 1972), 131–59; Haviva Pedaya, “Lehitpathuto shel hadegem hahevrati-dati-kalkalibahasidut: hapidyon, hahavurah, veha’aliyah baregel,” in, Menahem Ben-Sasson, ed., Dat vekhalk-alah, yahasei gomlin. Kovets maamarim shay le-Yaakov Katz (Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center,1995), 311–71. Cf. David Assaf, ed., Zaddik va’edah; and Gershon David Hundert, “The Con-ditions in Jewish Society in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the Middle Decades of theEighteenth Century,” in, Ada Rapoport-Adler, ed., Hasidism Reappraised (London: LittmanLibrary of Jewish Civilization, 1996), 45.

60 Simon Dubnow, Toledot hahasidut (1944). See my translated sections of Dubnow: “TheBeginnings: The Baal Shem Tov (Besht) and the Center in Podolia,” and “The Maggid of Miedzyr-zecz, His Associates, and the Center in Volhynia (1760–1772),” in, Gershon David Hundert, ed.,Essential Papers on Hasidism: Origins to Present (New York and London: New York UniversityPress, 1991), esp. 26–36, 40–41, 71–73; and in the same volume, see my translated excerpts ofDinur’s Bemifneh hadorot, ibid., 87–89, 95–159. Cf. Raphael Mahler, Hahasidut vehahaskalah(Merhavya, Israel: Sifriat Poalim, 1961), ch. 1. On literary constructions of Hasidism as heroicradicalism, see David G. Roskies, A Bridge of Longing. The Lost Art of Yiddish Storytelling (Cam-bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 115. Hundert dismisses any notion of class-based“rebellions” or “class warfare” in the internal communal disputes that wracked some major Jewishcommunities in Poland-Lithuania in the late eighteenth century (Hundert, Jews inPoland-Lithuania, 110–18).

61 Moshe Rosman, “Mezhibozh verabbi yisrael ba’al shem tov,” Ziyyon 52 (1987): 177–89.62 Glenn Dynner, “Merchant Princes and Tsadikim: The Patronage of Polish Hasidism,” Jewish

Social Studies, n.s. 12, 1 (2005): 64–66; idem,Men of Silk: The Hasidic Conquest of Polish JewishSociety (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); Shmuel Ettinger, “Hasidism and the Kahal inEastern Europe,” in, Rapoport-Adler, ed., Hasidism Reappraised, 63–75; idem, “The HasidicMovement: Reality and Ideals,” in, Haim Hillel Ben-Sasson and Shmuel Ettinger, eds., Jewish

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Although we cannot call Hasidism a “forcing ground” of working classculture in quite the same way as Thompson meant regarding Protestant Dissen-ters, it did capture or heighten the value of certain non-utilitarian impulseswithin pre-capitalist Jewish society. Its metaphysical, communitarian ideologymeant that members were to ‘check their social assets at the door.’ Among thedevotees who periodically flocked to their masters’ “courts,” wealthy men wereencouraged, even pressured, to extend their stay as long as possible (lengthen-ing into months, rather than days or weeks). These served to attract and main-tain many other followers who had scant means or no apparent livelihood andwho formed a constant retinue of pilgrims.63 In that limited and specificmanner, Hasidism offered an alternative, even provocative, egalitarianism.That said, it would be simplistic to formulate the socio-economic impli-

cations of Hasidism as a matter of communitarian ideals alone. Looked atmore critically, the controversy over Hasidism in nineteenth-century easternEurope encapsulated a long-brewing Jewish conflict over political economy.Using this perspective, it becomes possible to see that Jewish society wasnever simply either proto-bourgeois, ‘endowed,’ as it were, by cultural andsocial values with middle-class thought habits, or a ‘proto-proletarian,’ ple-beian population being drawn inexorably into the class struggle. Rather,while Jewry was indeed stratified vertically, it was also subdivided horizontally,with ramifications for various issues related to class and ideology. The Hasidicvariant of Jewish communal patterns was one, widely diffused component ofthis horizontal differentiation.The Hasidic movement tended to establish sectarian Gemeinschaft around

rites of consumption and mutual dependence.64 The rebbe’s court, as wehave seen, assumed the character of a site of pilgrimage and, not coincidentally,was a place where relatively large sums of cash and commodities changed

Society through the Ages (New York: Schocken, 1971), 251–66; David Assaf, “‘Money for House-hold Expenses’: Economic Aspects of the Hasidic Courts,” in, Adam Teller, ed, Studies in theHistory of the Jews in Old Poland in Honor of Jacob Goldberg. Scripta Hierosolymitana,vol. 38 (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1998), 14–50; Hundert, “Conditions in Jewish Society,”45–50; Moshe J. Rosman, “Social Conflicts in Miedzyboz in the Generation of the Besht,” in,Ada Rapoport-Adler, ed., Hasidism Reappraised (London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization,1996), 51–62; Shmeruk, “Mashma’utah hahevratit,” 182–83.

63 Pedaya, “Lehitpathuto shel hadegem hahevrati,” 338–47; Immanuel Etkes, “The EarlyHasidic ‘Court,’” in, Eli Lederhendler and Jack Wertheimer, eds., Text and Context: Essays inModern Jewish History in Honor of Ismar Schorsch (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary,2005), 176–79.

64 These are performed around the common table (tish) of the rebbe, and generally focus on foodand drink. Further examples of spiritualized consumption among Hasidim would include an associ-ation between tobacco use and spirituality, and the custom of marking the anniversary of a death inthe family by providing alcoholic drinks for those present at prayers. Mahler, Hahasidut vehahas-kalah, 31–32; Aharon Wertheim, Halakhot vehalikhot bahasidut (Jerusalem: Mosad Harav Kook,1960), 221–25.

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hands.65 Some noblemen were reportedly eager to attract Hasidic leaders totheir domains because “it was good for business.”66 Yet, as much as theHasidic outlook was positively disposed toward societal welfare, it generallylooked askance at energies invested in securing anything more than a basic live-lihood. It assigned greater significance to spiritual activity that might promptdivine intervention in the mundane world, and ostensibly denied any director necessary cause-and-effect relationship between human endeavor and econ-omic success.67

Among Hasidim the object of individual as well as group devotions was toattain genuine, sustained, and not always “planned” moments of spiritual hyper-clarity. These ecstatic states of mind (hislahavus) served as the channel viawhich they sought dveykus: to “cleave” unto the ultimate or divine realm. Theabsolute supremacy of religious devotion in Hasidism required what one criticalscholar has called a “fundamental restriction” on the “rational use of time . . . forpractical purposes and for the realization of religious values,” extending, at itslogical extreme, to “the sanctification of idleness.”68

In the nominally “regular” orthodox or anti-sectarian (misnagdish) commu-nity, where the priority of the spiritual and eternal over the temporal andmaterial was similarly encoded,69 the behavioral expression of these valuespossessed a different twist. Societal productivity, not consumption, wascrucial to the legitimate order of life. One’s property, income, and line ofwork (trading, handicrafts, or common labor) had a direct bearing on one’scommunal status. These matters of status, in turn, received religious recog-nition and reinforcement. Thus, matrimonial preference for bridegrooms withsuperior religious learning, and for brides from ‘proper’ backgrounds ofpious virtue (and handsome dowries), perpetuated a close associationbetween socioeconomic and religious attainments.

Nearly all of this, it is true, could be found within Hasidic society, but withthe crucial difference that Hasidism subordinated all these elements to eschato-logical metaphysics and to charismatic communitarianism. The Hasidic world-view, for example, went beyond the prevailing standards of the easternEuropean Jewish tradition in its demarcation between the spiritual and the tem-poral. The binary, essentialist division between these twin poles of existencewas easily projected in social form as a distinction between the two genders.Men’s psychic life was celebrated as spiritual (though this spiritualism wasnot of the ascetic variety), while women’s corporeality, while undeniably com-pleting the mystical perfection obtainable through the combined spiritual/

65 Assaf, “Economic Aspects of the Hasidic Courts.”66 Levitats, Jewish Community, 99.67 Mordecai Levin, ’Erkei hevrah vekhalkalah baideologiyah shel tekufat hahaskalah (Jerusa-

lem: Mosad Bialik, 1975), 17–21; Mahler, Hahasidut vehahaskalah, 295–98.68 Katz, Tradition and Crisis, 212.69 Levin, ’Erkei hevrah vekhalkalah.

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temporal polarity, could almost never be considered anything but the mirror-opposite of preferred male attributes.70 The Hasidic congregation was avenue for male bonding, away from the demands of family life, with all ofits pragmatic negotiations over time and labor; there was no female counterpartor ‘women’s auxiliary.’71

Regular orthodox (misnagdish, or so-called “Lithuanian”) opponents ofHasidic Judaism generally couched their arguments against sectarianism inpurely religious terms, but they were clearly aware of the economic theme,and viewed Hasidism with suspicion on these grounds as well. One early anti-Hasidic tract pointed out that young men, “not yet twenty years of age,” wereenticed to join the sect by blandishments such as, “You will use the money[pocket money offered to the new recruit] . . . and you will eat, there will beno thought of fasts and deprivations, you will be only happy and of goodcheer.”72 In such critiques, the offending “consumerism” was compoundedby the idea that the impressionable young men in question, unable to exertmoral independence, were being seduced and led to abandon acceptedJewish ethics.73

As Hasidism’s influence spread widely throughout the region, such objec-tions carried less and less weight. But post-traditional maskilim (“Enlighten-ers,” adherents of Haskalah: Enlightenment), who were similarly appalled bythe pietists, often continued to put their case in social and economic terms.In a sense, we can regard them as the secularized, worldly counterparts of estab-lished orthodoxy.74 They viewed Hasidism as a form of fanaticism that wassapping Jewish society’s ability to support itself. The ‘scandal’ of Hasidism,as they saw it, lay in its shameless social parasitism and its disingenuouspose of otherworldliness.75

70 The gendering of all bi-polar relationships, including abstract representations of the cosmicorder, was typical of Jewish mystical thought. Human gendering (and human sexual union) wastherefore fraught with mimetic significance as it both reflected and enhanced the ‘cohabiting’aspects of the divine order itself.

71 Katz, Tradition and Crisis, 212.72 Etkes, “The Early Hasidic ‘Court,’” 178, cited from Shever posh’im, text in Mordecai

Wilensky, Hasidim umitnagdim (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1970), vol. 2, 172–73.73 Stripped of the anti-Hasidic, polemical critique, however, the point that Hasidic life was apt to

offer material as well as spiritual sustenance does appear to be valid. See Reisman, “Why I Came toAmerica,” in, Cohen and Soyer, eds., My Future Is in America, 55.

74 There was some degree of continuity between Orthodox, proto-maskilic arguments and latermore radical writings. An early example of a would-be economic reformer was the Lithuanianrabbi, Menashe of Ilya (1767–1831), author of Pesher davar (1804) and`Alfei Menashe (1822),and particularly the brochure Shekel hakodesh (1823). These works stressed the importance ofrationalism, knowledge, the value of productive labor, and the need for socio-economic reformin Jewish society “for the common good.” See Israel Zinberg, A History of Jewish Literature:The Haskalah Movement in Russia (Cincinnati and New York: HUC Press/Ktav PublishingHouse, 1978), vol. 11, 15.

75 Isaac Baer Levinson, Di hefker velt, printed in Shmuel Rozhansky, ed., Nusakh haskoleh(Buenos Aires: Yivo, 1968), 64.

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It is noteworthy in this regard that in their campaign against Hasidism, andtraditionalists in general,maskilicwriters saw something very much awry in thereligious valorization and spiritualization of male consumption (connotingpassivity, and inevitably also implying erotic passivity) and the concomitantrelegation of women to the comparatively active realms of productivity andcorporeality. Part of their views on the need to “productivize” Jewish societyentailed a reorientation and rebalancing of gender relations: male productiveenergy had to be privileged over spiritualized/feminized, passive consumption,and female physical and mental drudgery had to give way to more uplifting,spiritual, and aesthetic (“moral”) activities.76

Critical Jewish social thought in eastern Europe in the mid-nineteenthcentury focused on these economically grounded issues. This discourse corre-sponded to a social reality in which Jewish poverty and general ‘backwardness’was a perennial concern, but endemic pauperization had not yet set in. ManyJews, if not most, saw economic well-being as theoretically attainable and con-sidered the opportunities of self-enhancement to be open to every member ofthe community. But they differed over the ideologies associated with thedesired state of affairs. What some saw as a question of proprietary or laborrelations in Gesellschaft, moored within a system of graded but unfixedstatus ranks, others viewed as a question of communitas: they downplayedthe efficacy of human agency per se, resisted general prescriptions and pro-grammed, innovative interventions, and tended to favor ad hoc and adhominem solutions to individuals’ concerns.

Ostensibly ‘middle-class’ social and economic values were therefore muchcontested in the culture wars waged between various sectors of Jewishsociety throughout the period prior to the onset of mass emigration. Thus,when viewed as a traditional society facing modernization under harsh con-ditions, east European Jewry appears to have been beset by particularlyfraught internal relations. Conflicts over notions of communal integrity, econ-omic value, and social capital would be resolved later, in America (for thosewho emigrated) and Soviet Russia (for those who remained behind).

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The second main arena we will examine in tracing the social declassing of eastEuropean Jewry and its impact toward the end of the nineteenth century is thatof the artisan sector and the work ethic that evolved. Artisans, rather than indus-trial workers, constituted the main body of Jewish labor and furnished a majorpart of the emigration to America.77 Briefly, I will argue that pre-capitalist

76 Levin, ’Erkei hevrah vekhalkalah, 151–53; Michael Stanislawski, “For Whom Do I Toil?”Judah Leib Gordon and the Crisis of Russian Jewry (New York: Oxford University Press,1988), 28, 125–28; Olga Litvak, Conscription and the Search for Modern Russian Jewry(Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2006), 78–83, 89–90, 93, 97.

77 Frank, “Di yidishe treyd-yunion bavegung,” 107.

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standards of employment and rewards in the realm of social capital wereincreasingly eroded, but there was no new reconfiguration in the form of amodern class-structured society.This thesis runs counter to the narrative promoted by two generations of

writers, mainly from the Jewish left, which valorized the rise of a Jewish pro-letariat in the period from before the 1880s to the First WorldWar. According tothis quasi-canonical version, a progressive class consciousness developed“organically” among Jewish workers, moving from sporadic master-journeymen clashes within craft associations to the formation of separateworker associations, radical “circles,” and strike funds, and matured eventuallyinto a full-fledged workers’ movement composed of unions and radical socialistparties. Not only was the Jewish labor movement endowed with a coherent his-torical pedigree, but Jewish workers were also credited with having spear-headed working-class organization in the Russian empire.78

That reading of Jewish labor history is essentially driven by a labor ‘move-ment’ perspective rather than by a social-historical analysis of the life world ofworkers. It tends to transmute the small craft workshop into an embryonicfactory and confers upon the strike movement that developed in the Jewishmechanical trades at the end of the nineteenth century a distinction typicallyreserved in Marxian historiography for a class-conscious workers’ revolt. Infact, however, the tensions within the Jewish craft shop were not a ‘classstruggle,’ properly understood, for two reasons. First, the employees saw them-selves as future self-employed master artisans more than as members of a stableclass of wage laborers. Second, the master-artisans who employed them were ofthe same economic and social class as the journeymen, and were progressivelybeing reduced to the status of workers engaged under contract by stores andlarger manufacturers. The attempt to rally employed craftsmen around a spur-ious ‘class’ consciousness was doomed from the start, and led nowhere. Strikeswon short-term gains in terms of shorter working hours and higher wages, butthese were soon vitiated. By the turn of the century further strike action wasconsidered counterproductive, and leaders concluded that “it is impossible to

78 Peled and Shafir, “From Caste to Exclusion”; Mendelsohn, Class Struggle in the Pale, chs.1–3; Moshe Mishkinsky, Reshit tenu’at hapo’alim hayehudit berusiah: megamot yesod(Tel-Aviv: Tel-Aviv University and Hakibbutz Hameuchad Press, 1981), chs. 1–6; Levitats,Jewish Community, 151–60. For some standard histories, see Elias Tcherikower, “Der onheybfun der yidisher sotsialistisher bavegung,” YIVO Historishe shriftn 1 (1929): 469–532;Abraham Menes, “Di yidishe arbeter-bavegung in rusland fun onheyb 70-er bizn sof 90-eryorn,” YIVO Historishe shriftn 3 (1939): 1–59; Isaiah Trunk, “Di onheybn fun der yidisherarbeter bavegung,” in, J. S. Herts, ed., Di geshikhte fun bund (New York: Farlag Unser Tsait,1960), vol. 1, 26–39, 63–96; Kh. S. Kasdan, “Der ‘bund’—biz finftn tsusamenfor,” in Herts, DiGeshikhte, vol. 1, 218–30; Henry J. Tobias, The Jewish Bund in Russia from Its Origins to 1905(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1972); N. A. Bukhbinder, Di geshikhte fun der yidisherarbeter-bavegung in rusland (Wilno: Farlag “Tomor,” 1931); Michael Hendel, Melakhahuba’alei melakhah be’am yisrael (Tel-Aviv: Joshua Chachik Publishing House, 1956), ch. 6.

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conduct an economic struggle” under prevailing conditions. This, more thananything else perhaps, confirms the absence of a truly modern class structurein east European Jewry.79

The evidence, therefore, suggests that it is an exaggeration (at best) to assertthat Jewish workers had become what one writer called “a large and concen-trated urban . . . proletariat.”80 The real revolution in the lives of Jewishworkers lay not in the stalled attempt to foment a “class struggle” whereclass had all but evaporated, but rather in the secularization of workerculture and the Jewish work ethic.81 Workingmen’s societies tended to adopta new, purely economic organizing principle, replacing their more traditional,religious purposes with instrumental ones. When craft workers no longer feltable to negotiate for social capital within their old craft societies (khevrehs),they broke with their entire worldview, leaving the older groups largelyintact and pioneering a new format instead.82 The point, moreover, is notthat individual workers were abandoning religious traditions in their privatelives—many did not do so—but rather that working relations, mutual assist-ance, and the handling of labor grievances were routed into secular, purelyinstrumental groups that had no sacred function or legitimacy within theolder, religious social order. Thus, while khevrehs were all-male institutions(in keeping with their liturgical function), the new “funds” and other union-forerunners, albeit still predominantly male, were open to women.83

Nevertheless, it would stretch the point to assert that with the displacement ofthe religious khevreh Jewish crafts or manufacturing employees readilyreplaced the former ideology with a new, Marxist one.84 East EuropeanJewry in the decades before the turn of the century displayed much ideologicalferment, but those directly involved constituted a small segment of society: theintelligentsia and limited circles drawn into their orbit. The Jewish public atlarge knew about these new currents, but was neither thoroughly engaged bythem nor yet able to realign its civic life around them.

This conclusion is borne out even by a ‘strong case’ of Jewish political radic-alism, namely, that of the “Bund,” the most successful Jewish socialist party ofthat time. The Bund won its rank-and-file following, not because it developed a

79 Mendelsohn, Class Struggle, 61, 115; cf. ibid., 14–16, 26, 112–14; idem, “The RussianJewish Labor Movement and Others,” YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Science 14 (1969): 98; andcf. Peled and Shafir, “From Caste to Exclusion,” 100–1, 107.

80 Arthur Liebman, Jews and the Left (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1979), 70.81 Mendelsohn, Class Struggle, 41–44.82 Mendelsohn, Class Struggle, 43; cf. Levitats, Jewish Community, 151.83 Hendel, Melakhah uba’alei melakhah, 127–29.84 Even Arthur Liebman admits, “The Jewish working class that emerged in Russia . . . was rife

with . . . contradictions” (Jews and the Left, 86), and he cites the complaint of Ber Borochov,perhaps the leading Russian Jewish Marxist theoretician of his day, that Jewish artisans andworkers were typically eager to leave the working class behind. Ber Borochov, “Hahitpathuthakalkalit shel ha’am hayehudi,” in Ketavim nivharim (Tel-Aviv: Am Oved, 1944), vol. 1, 206.

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clear, autonomous ideology, but precisely because of its adept focus on praxis.Even the Bund’s worst enemies, of whom Lenin was one, never minimized theparty’s vaunted organizational abilities.85 As a leading historian of modernJewish politics, Jonathan Frankel, put it, the Bund “saw its role in the[Russian Social Democratic Workers] party as that of mediator, shunningpolemics and seeking to reconcile the warring factions.”86 In the decadebetween its formative years (1893–1897) and the violent events of the 1905Russian revolution, the Bund took up “economic struggle” (strikes), whichproved popular because it placed workers’ material gains ahead of doctrinalpurity or the quiet preparation of a revolutionary underground. During1905–1906, the party participated extensively in large-scale militant demon-strations and strikes and saw to the organizing of Jewish self-defense.87

Having fought honorably for the sake of workers’ and Jewish honor,however, the movement lost momentum in the post-1905 reaction, even asJewish emigration reached unprecedented levels.It appears from the foregoing that the Jewish trajectory differed, in the end,

from the paradigm described by E. P. Thompson’s classic English study.Thompson showed that a working class, considered as a social phenomenon,is a multi-dimensional, social, political, and cultural way of living and thinking.Its members derive their self-awareness, and hence their politics, from theirgradual occupation of a fixed place within the governance of state andsociety. In contrast, east European Jews were denied such a place; theirs wasa short-circuited development with no clear political destination. Moreover,the causes for the foreshortened process of class development in the Jewishcase had to do not only with the plight of the Jewish artisans and the sparseemployment of Jews in larger factories, but also—and crucially—with theinsufficient rise of a Jewish bourgeoisie against whose interests a properworking class culture might begin to find focus.The poverty that formed the backdrop of the mass Jewish migration must

therefore be assigned a “negative” legacy (meaning, its “non-” quality): Itplayed an important role in de-sacralizing the Jewish work ethic and

85 Hyman Lumer, ed., Lenin on the Jewish Question (New York: International Publishers, 1974);Jonathan Frankel, Prophecy and Politics: Socialism, Nationalism, and the Russian Jews, 1862–1917 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 203–8, 227–33, 236–48; Tobias, TheJewish Bund, chs. 14–16; Zvi Gitelman, Jewish Nationality and Soviet Politics. The Jewish Sec-tions of the CPSU 1917–1930 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 41–46; Liebman,Jews and the Left, 117–23.

86 Frankel, Prophecy and Politics, 256.87 The switch from intensive Marxist consciousness-raising in conspiratorial cells (“propa-

ganda”) to economic activism (“agitation”) was the hinge upon which the pre-Bund radicals trans-formed their organization into a full-fledged party for the Jewish workers. Mendelsohn, ClassStruggle, chs. 3–4; Frankel, Prophecy and Politics, 171–210; Bukhbinder, Di Geshikhte,64–74. On the 1905 pogroms see: Bukhbinder, Di Geshikhte, 350–56; Tobias, The JewishBund, 306, 313–16; Liebman, Jews and the Left, 126.

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workers’ culture, and it provoked among most Jews an essentially apoliticalresponse to their social predicament. The diffuse impact of new ideologicalstrategies speaks volumes about the overall blunting of actual class differenceswithin the Jewish population at the time. On the verge of becoming a migrantpopulation, their sociocultural baggage could not be characterized simply aseither “proto-capitalist,” or “proto-socialist.”88

To sum up: While peasants were beginning to be drawn into the emergingmanufacturing sector, and while foreign investment fuelled the financialmarket and major enterprises, Jews were marginalized in their economic pur-suits and in their Pale of Settlement. In contrast with their historical functionsin earlier eras as links between other actors in a regional economic system, Jewsin late-nineteenth-century eastern Europe were forced into the procrustean bedof a truly “ethnic economy,” dependent upon their own dwindling resources foremployment and credit opportunities. As a group, their power of social agencywas severely attenuated. Despite the individual successes of select Jewishnotables, the loopholes that permitted some Jews to exit this closed systemwere being narrowed rather than widened.89 All but a tiny percentage werenow part of one sub-class—which is tantamount to no class at all—andstood little chance of being integrated within the surrounding politicaleconomy.

All that we know about Jewish life in eastern Europe points toward the con-clusion that by emigrating to a highly developed industrial and commercialsociety Jews confronted circumstances of politics and economics so differentas to require a wholesale restructuring. Their economic transformation froma marginal caste to members of a modern class society would have huge rami-fications in terms of their social ethos. This transformation alone could endowthem with the tools they needed to integrate into the new society.

88 Liebman, Jews and the Left, 77; Gerald Sorin, The Prophetic Minority. American JewishImmigrant Radicals, 1880–1920 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 8, 11–41.

89 Lowe notes, for example, that the quotas placed on Jewish registration in Russian secondaryschools in 1887 succeeded by 1892 in reducing the proportion of Jewish pupils in such schools tojust 58 percent of the 1886 levels (Tsars and the Jews, 95).

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