Mikhail Dolbilov (SRC)
Russifying Bureaucracy and the Politics of Jewish Education in the Russian Empire’s
Northwestern Region (1860s-1870s)

Contemporary historiography has actively engaged the subject of the influence ofRussian imperial authorities on the religious and national identity of the Jewish population.1 As
it is clear from the most recent works, in spite of vacillation, disruption, and failure, theauthorities’ orientation toward inclusion of particular groups of the Jewish population in theestate (soslovie) structure of Russian society (“selective integration” in the terminology ofBenjamin Nathans2) represented the most well-considered and legitimate approach to theresolution of the Jewish problem.
The subject of this paper is the influence of the priorities of educational and confessional
politics in the authorities’ efforts to decide the Jewish problem in the area of the Pale ofSettlement (cherta osedlosti) with greatest share of the Jewish population—the Northwesternregion (the present territory of Belarus and Lithuania) after the January (Polish) uprising of 1863.
During the 1860s and later, the Northwestern region was the area of the most intense PolishRussian rivalry, the most bitter clash of nation-building projects expressing “Russianness” and“Polishness”.3 In their struggle to reduce the Polish elite’s influence and integrate this1

Stanislawski M. Tsar Nicholas I and the Jews. The Transformation of Jewish Society in Russia, 18251855 (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1983); Lederhendler E. The Road to Modern Jewish
Politics. Political Tradition and Political Reconstruction in the Jewish Community of Tsarist Russia (New York Oxford, 1989); Klier J.D. Imperial Russia’s Jewish Question, 1855-1881 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1995); Nathans B. Beyond the Pale. The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia (Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 2002); Petrovskii-Shtern I. Evrei v russkoi armii (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2003).
2
Nathans B. Beyond the Pale, 45-79.
3
For studies of the post-1863 Russifying policy in the Empire’s western provinces in general, see, e.g.:
Theodore R. Weeks, Nation and State in Late Imperial Russia. Nationalism and Russification on the Western
Frontier, 1863-1914 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1996); Witold Rodkiewicz, Russian Nationality
Policy in the Western Provinces of the Empire (1863-1905) (Lublin: Scientific Society of Lublin, 1998); Leonid

2borderland with the territorial core of the Empire, the central and local administration used avariety of approaches to reshaping ethnic and confessional identities. In the case of Jews, whoconstituted one-sixth of the entire population of the region and a majority in many cities, statesponsored education was considered both a primary tool of making subjects loyal and a crucial
prerequisite for extending civil rights.
I will focus on the system of separate state schools for Jews, established as early as 1844,
under the aegis of the Minister of Education S. S. Uvarov. The system was built on the premiseof the indissoluble link between education and faith in Jewish culture, despite its violation ofmany traditional values. Religious subjects and subjects related to religion—bible, prayers,
religious codes, Hebrew, even in elementary schools (the first category) had greater weight in the
program than for example Orthodox catechism in institutions of general education. The Talmud
was not included in the curriculum of the first and second categories (the level of the district
school), but was taught in the Rabbinical seminary (the level of the gymnasium.) Rabbinicalseminaries, established in Vilna and Zhitomir, trained students for two specialties: state Rabbi
and elementary school teacher. The teaching of most religious subjects was conducted inGerman as the language of the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment), with the use of German
language literature.4
A rather substantial literature exists about the system of separate Jewish education.
Michael Stanislawski, revealing the different facets of the conflict provoked among Jews by theestablishment of state school, showed that the higher bureaucracy, and most of all, S. S. Uvarov,
Gorizontov, Paradoksy imperskoi politiki: Poliaki v Rossii i russkie v Pol’she (XIX – nachalo XX v.) (Moscow:
Indrik, 1999); Henryk Głębocki, Fatalna sprawa. Kwestia polska w rosyjskiej myśli politycznej (1856-1866)(Kraków: ARCANA, 2000); Mikhail Dolbilov and Aleksei Miller, eds. Zapadnye okrainy Rossiiskoi imperii(Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2006), 318-27 ff.; and the articles of the forum “Alphabet, Language andNational Identities in the Russian Empire”: Ab Imperio no. 2 (2005).
4
On the Rabbinical seminaries, see e.g.: Dohrn V. “The Rabbinical Schools as Institutions of Socializationin Tsarist Russia, 1847-1873” Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry vol. 14 (2001), 83-104.

3
was moved in this undertaking not by missionary but by rationalistic motives of enlightenment.
The goal was to bring Jewish religion in Russia closer to the current concept of “civicmindedness” (grazhdanstvennost’), to the standards of reformed Judaism in European countries.
Stanslawski advanced a thesis about significant contributions of these institutions, most of all the
Rabbinical seminaries, to the mentality and program of Russophile maskilim (proponents ofHaskalah).5
John Klier’s opus magnum on the Jewish question in the epoch of Alexander II elaborates
the theme of Jewish schools in the context of discussions in the press and publicistics. Klier
shows that by the middle of the 1860s the view that the government’s involvement in thereligious education of Jews was bankrupt reigned in the Russian and the Russian-Jewish press.6
The turning point in the history of the Uvarov system Klier considers to be 1864, when the Vilna(now Vilnius) General-Governor, M. N. Murav’ev, troubled by the depolonization of the region,began to introduce Russian language into the elementary education of non-Russian groups andparticularly issued orders about the opening of “people schools” (narodnye shkoly) or
Russifying schools for Jews. In the framework of Klier’s conception this observation is
confirmed by the course of the discussion on the same question in the nationalist press, though
the author’s assertion that Murav’ev may have “simply seized the state Jewish primary schools
and turned them into ‘Russifying schools’” is erroneous. Exaggerating the brutality, Klier’s
narrative draws a straight line from the establishment of people’s schools to the actual abolitionof the Uvarov system in 1873 and the introduction in the 1880s of the numerus clausus,
drastically limiting the access of Jews to institutions of higher education.7

5

Stanislawski M. Tsar Nicholas I and the Jews, 43-122, 65-66 ff., 201 note 51.
Klier J. Imperial Russia’s Jewish Question, 222-244, 234-235 ff.
7Ibid., 160-162, 230 (the quotation), 237-238.
6

4
In this paper I will show that the trajectory sketched by Klier was significantly more
complex. Particularly, in the first years after the suppression of the January uprising, the local
bureaucracy, most of all the administration of the Vilna Educational District undertook an effort
to reinvigorate the separate and religion-based system of education and effect a more decisivetransformation of Jewish identity. The search for new means of acculturation of the Jews,
spurred by both the Polish uprising and by the strengthening of Prussia, alerted officials, on one
side, to the secularization of Jewish consciousness (wished for or not—there was no single
opinion on this), and to the increased publicity of Judaism in the new conditions of the era ofreforms.
The confessional dimension of the politics of Jewish education appears particularly
important from the point of view of the borrowing of European experience in Russia. If in theterms of civic emancipation of the Jews, European states (even the Hapsburg empire) weresignificantly in advance of Russia, the experiments of Russian authorities with Jewish religiosity
were more in tune with European developments. In France, Prussia, and the small German states,
full or partial civic emancipation preceded the posing of the question of Jewish rights as areligious community. Jews as individuals could already enjoy broad civil rights, but theirtraditional faith was still regarded by authorities as something of a superstitious sect with a cultthat was unsightly for Christians.8 One of the Uvarov’s system’s co-architects, the Bavarianreformed rabbi, Max Lilienthal, offered his services to Russian authorities at the beginning of the1840s after the Ultramontane government of his native state refused to introduce the already8Frankel J. “Assimilation and the Jews in Nineteenth-Century Europe: towards a New Historiography?” in
J. Frankel and S. Zipperstein, Assimilation and Community. The Jews in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1992), 11-23; Itzkowitz D. “The Jews of Europe and the Limits of Religious
Freedom,” in R. Helmstadter, Freedom and Religion in Europe and the Americas in the Nineteenth Century(Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997), 150-171, 165 ff.

5approved reform of Judaism and demanded strict observation of Jewish orthodoxy in its teaching
and ceremony.9
The disillusion of part of the bureaucracy with the Uvarov system, which became evident
by the middle of the 1850s, also correlated with European experience. One of the first efforts torethink the conception of religious education was proposed at the beginning of the reign ofAlexander II in 1857 by N. I. Pirogov, then the Curator of the Odessa Educational District. A
humanist educator, Pirogov was a Judeophile and one of the convinced advocates of arapprochement of Jews with Christians in the empire10, though he had no sympathy for Judaism.
He enumerated the failures of Uvarov’s policies: the traditionalist Jews had not been dissuaded
from their view that the new schools had been established for Orthodox missionary work, andthose who nonetheless sent their children to them were not happy with the quality and extent of
the religious education. On the question of the instruction of Jews in institutions of general
education, Pirogov called not for direct but indirect struggle with “the deeply rooted moral andreligious prejudices [of the Jewish] people”: “Let us leave all these prejudices as if inviolate andmake it appear that we pay no attention at all to them, and in the meantime let us destroy them
gradually by means of the dissemination of humane and scientific information, which in the eyesof the commoner have no relation at all to his moral beliefs and his religious convictions.”
Pirogov concluded from this that Jews had to be encouraged to enter the general educational
institutions and taught subjects “apparently having not the slightest relation to popular religious
and moral superstitions and prejudices.” He referred to the measures taken by Prussian9

Meyer M. Response to Modernity. A History of the Reform Movement in Judaism (NY, Oxford, 1988),
32-43, 104-105; Stanislawski M. Tsar Nicholas I and the Jews, 91.
10
Klier J. Imperial Russia’s Jewish Question, 40-42, 70; Dohrn V. “The Rabbinical Schools as Institutionsof Socialization in Tsarist Russia,” 92.

6
authorities in Poznan, where mandatory education of Jews in state schools was introduced, andreligious teachings were to be learned in free time from private tutors.11
In 1858-1859, the idea of educational non-intervention in religious affairs was reflectedin the regulations of the Minister of Education and the special Jewish committee in Petersburg
where it was combined with the legacy of the Uvarov system. In accordance with a resolution ofMay, 1859, (in the Vilna Education District it was implemented in 1861) state Jewish schools of
the second category were abolished; mandatory instruction was introduced for children of Jewish
merchants and honorary citizens (pochetnye grazhdane) in institutions of general education,
though implementation proved more difficult than issuing the measure. The Jewish Committee
advocated leaving the religious instruction of children “to the care” of their parents, but at thesame time planned to the proceed to the gradual replacement of teachers in traditional schools(melamdim) by certified teachers, a measure that remained on paper.12
From the middle of the 1850s, “Jewish policy” began to involve new actors from central
and local bureaucracy and varied groups among the Jews. The interaction of interests between
center and borderland, between Jews and Gentiles in general, between currents among the Jews
and departmental fractions in the bureaucracy in particular proved to be highly complex. In
comparison to Nicholas’s reign, the role of localities increased significantly. In Petersburg, thenon-interventionist mood of the Alexandrine higher bureaucrats and the shtadlanut efforts of theJewish merchant elite headed by E. Gintsburg led, as Benjamin Nathans has showed, toredirecting the “selective integration” policy from attempts to “fashion a (non-hereditary) elite,
an officially trained rabbinate,” to “drawing economically ‘useful’ elements [of the Jewish

11

Pirogov N.I. “Dokladnaia zapiska otnositel’no obrazovaniia evreev,” in Pirogov N.I. Sochineniia (Kiev,
1910), vol. 1, otd. 3, 741-70.
12
Georgievskii A.I. Doklad po voprosu o merakh otnositel’no obrazovaniia evreev (St.Petersburg, 1886),281-84.

7
population] into the Russian estate hierarchy.”13 But in Vilna, the methods of deciding the
Jewish question, based on confessional policies, had more defenders. Besides, GeneralGovernor Murav’ev’s campaign of Russification begun in 1863 gave local authorities greater
freedom than they had before.

Vilna project of mass education and the “purification” of Judaism
The first innovation in the “Jewish” policy in Vilna was the so called peoples’ schools.
From the point of view of the higher administrators of the SZK, Jewish peoples’ schools served
above all the goals of the depolonizing of the region. The very chronology of M. N. Murav’ev’s
regulations attests to this. On January 1, 1864, he signed a circular eliminating of Polishlanguage teaching from the program of instruction for peasants.14 But besides the peasantry,
other groups in the area remained vulnerable to the assimilative effect of Polish education,
among them Jews. Only a few days later, on January 5, a regulation was issued opening in Vilna
two people’s schools consisting of two classes for Jews. These schools replaced the state schoolof the first category that that had been in existence since 1847. They introduced freeeducation—in distinction to the state school. The subjects taught included Russian language,
Russian penmanship and arithmetic. Instruction was in Russian, with Yiddish used only for
introductory explanations. Murav’ev announced that instruction in Russian grammar wascompulsory for Jewish boys from age eight to seventeen. Parents who did not send their children
to school were fined sums from eight to fifteen rubles.15 By the end of 1865, six people’s
schools were in existence in Vilna—five with two classes and one with one. The pupils

13

Nathans B. Beyond the Pale, 68-69, 376-377.
Lietuvos valstybės istorijos archyvas (Lithuanian State Historical Archives [henceforth LVIA]), f. 378,
BS, 1862, b. 629, l. 251-252.
15
LVIA, f. 567, ap. 6, b. 1020, l. 6-7.
14

8
numbered 522 boys and 114 girls. The sums for their support came as before from the candle tax,
i.e. in the final accounting, the Jewish population themselves supported the functioning of thefree schools.16
In the context of the entire empire, the regulation about the people’s schools for Jews isdistinguished by two features. First, the principle of compulsory attendance of school was
extended to the entire male membership of a numerous ethno-confessional group. There was nocomparable precedent before that time in the Russian empire. By all appearances, the initiatorsof this measure took into account the experience of Prussia, where compulsory attendance ofschool had been introduced already at the end of the eighteenth century for children of allconfessions (earlier than in England and France) and fining of parents by the police was widelypracticed for violating this rule.17 In practice, however, the Vilna authorities did not succeedingin ensuring compulsory education. Even, if the police showed zeal and organized something likea raid on Jewish boys to force them into the schools, the space simply could not accommodate
them, one could not speak of normal instruction, and it would have been necessary to send thechildren home.18 Compulsory education, in contrast to Prussia, never became an active norm oflaw. In 1865, the curator of Vilna Educational District indicated that it was necessary tomaintain obligatory attendance “at least for several years.”19 Attracting children to school evenfor a brief time was expected to increase more quickly the number of young Jews who had atleast some acquaintance with Russian. After the balance of Polish, German and Russian among

16

LVIA, f. 567, ap. 6, b. 1138, l. 1-3, 13; ap. 21, b. 80, l. 49. Cf.: Otchet chlena soveta ministra narodnogo
prosveshcheniia Postel’sa po obozreniiu evreiskikh uchilishch s 7 maia po 7 sentiabria 1864 g. (St.Petersburg, 1865),65.
17Lamberti M. State, Society, and the Elementary School in Imperial Germany (NY, Oxford: Oxford UP,
1989), 18-23.
18
LVIA, f. 567, ap. 6, b. 1138, l. 9 (director of the Vilnius Rabbinical Seminary Petr Bessonov to Curator
of District Ivan Kornilov, 15 May 1865).
19
LVIA, f. 567, ap. 6, b. 1204, l. 23-24.

9
the Jews changed in favor of the latter, it would be possible to weaken the rule of compulsory
attendance, which had caused the authorities considerable trouble.
The second feature of people’s schools for Jews, making them unique among the
educational institutions of the empire, was the absence of religious subjects. For a “confessional
state”20 like Russia, this was extraordinary. Even among the “mixed” elementary schools in the
Kazan Educational District, where Russian and Tatar children studied together, the latter wereseparately taught the principles of Islam.21 The non-confessional character of the new Jewish
schools in Vilna reflected the interests of different authors. On one hand, such a type of school
corresponded completely with the recommendations of N. I. Pirogov about the non-interventionof the Ministry of Education in religious affairs of the Jews. On the other, different groups ofJews agreed among themselves on the question of the people’s schools. The Petersburg Jewish
elite, led by E. Gintsburg and the Society for the Dissemination of Enlightenment among Jews,
which he financed, consistently spoke out for the removal of the state from the religious
education of Jews and for the redirection of its forces towards secular education. In themoderate maskilic spirit, they held that teaching of the Jewish law was useless within the wallsof a school called upon to give children the burning necessity of a secular education.22 Moreradical Russophile maskilim in Vilna (for example the Vilna rabbi O. Shteinberg) helped the
local administration to open people’s schools, hoping that these institutions would succeed also
in renewing the cadres of teachers and the methods of instruction in the traditional Jewish
20

The term has been introduced in: Crews R. “Empire and the Confessional State: Islam and Religious
Politics in Nineteenth-Century Russia,” American Historical Review 108: 1 (2003), 50-83. See also: Werth P.
“Schism Once Removed: Sects, State Authority, and the Meanings of Religious Toleration in Imperial Russia,” A.
Miller and A. Rieber, Imperial Rule (Budapest, 2004), 85-108.
21
Dowler W. Classroоm and Empire. The Politics of Schooling Russia’s Eastern Nationalities, 1860-1917(Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001), 31-32; Geraci R. Window on the East: National and Imperial
Identities in Late Tsarist Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 136-38; LVIA, f. 567, ap. 6, b. 1204, l.
14 ap.
22
Cherikover I. Istoriia Obshchestva rasprostraneniia prosveshcheniia mezhdu evreiami v Rossii, 18631913 (St.Petersburg, 1913), 188-191, 200-201.

10
schools—heders and yeshivas. According to a regulation of January, 1864, teachers in theheders, melamdim, were charged with the obligation to make sure that their pupils attended apeople’s school in addition to the heder and learned Russian grammar.23
However, there was not a full consensus about a religiously neutral state education of
Jews. In the spring of 1864, Ivan P. Kornilov was appointed curator of the Vilna Educational
District. He was an ardent Russian nationalist, a supporter of identification of Russianness andOrthodoxy, inclined to Judeophobia, who understood little about “the Jewish question.” But inthe first years of his service he was tolerant of Judaism believing in the primacy of traditionalreligion in education—the education of a loyal subject. Kornilov limited the number of Jewish
people’s schools to approximately ten for the entire district, which comprised six provinces, andalong with them preserved more than thirty-five of the previous, Uvarov type elementary stateschools. Although in the latter the religious program was curtailed in order to free time for
Russian language classes, the teaching of Hebrew and the Bible (in German) continued.
Kornilov emphasized that the preservation of the “Uvarov” state school was “the single means toimprove the system of teaching of Jewish subjects.”24 The same point of view was then held bypart of the local maskilim, the graduates of the Vilna Rabbinical seminary, for the elimination ofreligious subjects from elementary schools would have left many of them without work.
Petr A. Bessonov, the director of the Vilna Rabbinical Seminary, emerged in 1865-1866
as the ideologue of a separate Jewish education. He endeavored to adapt the Uvarov system of
the “purification” of Judaism to meet the demands of the new policy of Russification. Bessonov
was rather famous in his time as a linguist and folklorist. In his political views he was close to
the Slavophiles. He had little specialized knowledge of Judaica or Hebraica. Kornilov asked
23

LVIA, f. 567, ap. 6, b. 1020, l. 7; Shteinberg O.N. “Graf M.N. Murav’ev i ego otnosheniia k evreiam g.
Vil’ny v 1863-1864 gg.,” Russkaia starina no. 2 (1901), 312-313.
24
LVIA, f. 567, ap. 6, b. 1020, l. 48-49.

11
him to assume the office of director of the Rabbinical seminary, being confident that “theauthority of the indisputable learning” of Bessonov “will flatter Jewish pride” and strengthen“the party of the so called Russian Jews,” i.e. the Russophile maskilim.25 Although the role of
the Slavophiles in the “Jewish question” has attracted the interest of historians,26 the activity ofBessonov has not yet become a subject of research.27
Bessonov appears as an unusual figure in the “Jewish” policy of the empire. Judeophilia
coexisted in him with Judeophobia. Upon his arrival in Vilna, he established close contacts withthe young Jewish maskilim pedagogues, openly protected them, and invited them to his home,where, according to the words of one of them, “for the first time a kind of friendship started
between Christians and Jews.”28 He showed proper respect for the professional level of Jewish
pedagogues and often with pride referred to the Rabbinical seminary as a university. But in spiteof the Judeophile conduct and gestures, Bessonov did not divest himself of many prejudicesregarding Jews that characterized Russian educated society.
Judaism struck Bessonov precisely because he perceived it as a complex social organism
shaken by internal contradictions, but at the same time united and dynamic. As an adherent of
Slavophile teachings, Bessonov could not remain indifferent to the fact that the enlightened
Jewish elite in Vilna had not lost its ties with the common people, and that the majority had not
become apathetic to religion. Jews had their own “society,” which Russians in the Western
Region lacked, and which the imperial state was trying to destroy among the Poles.

25

Manuscript Division of the Russian State Historical Museum in Moscow (henceforth - OPI GIM), f. 56, d.
338, l. 1 v. (Kornilov to Deputy Minister of Education Ivan D. Delianov, 3 February 1865).
26
Klier J. “Evreiskii vopros v slavianofil’skoi presse 1862-1886 g.: I.S. Aksakov i ego izdaniia,” Vestnik
Evreiskogo universiteta 17: 1 (1998), 41-60.
27
More on Bessonov as director of the Vilna Rabbinical Seminary, see: Dolbilov M. “Ochishchenie”
iudaizma: Konfessional’naia inzheneriia uchebnogo vedomstva Rossiiskoi imperii (na primere Severo-Zapadnogo
kraia),” Arkhiv evreiskoi istorii (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2006), vol. 3 (forthcoming).
28
Evrei [Plungianskii M.] Pis’mo k redaktoru, Vilenskii vestnik no. 14 (1867, February 2).

12Bessonov was the first local administrator to connect “the Jewish question” not with thePolish, but the German threat. In his private correspondence, the danger of the Germanizationof the Jews assumed a geopolitical dimension (of course, one must keep in mind that he wanted
to appear as a “discoverer” and so tended to exaggerate the openness of the orthodox Jews toGerman influence).
Instead of mindless Poles there emerged a gifted, deeply intelligent tribe [ethnicity, plemia]
instead of squanderers, misers; instead of ruin a strong financial operation; instead of gangs,
a solid corporation; instead of alliance with the distant French, a close bond with friends
who can extend both arms from Vilna—the right to Baltic Germans, the left to thePrussians… From Pomerania to the Finns, from Kovno and Vilna to Kamenets-Podol’sk
and the Ukraine—all of this is one German realm of reformed Jews, intermediaries between
the Prussians and the Russians. Then will come their emancipation, then their movement
into the interior of Russia, by means of their capital, their corporation, their nihilism, andtheir atheism.29

The Jews appeared to Bessonov potentially as both the most dangerous and the mostuseful ethno-religious group for Russian domination of the North-Western Region, depending on
which path of assimilation, German or Russian, the majority would follow.
This conclusion quickly affected the instructional program of the Rabbinical seminary.
Bessonov assigned political significance to the question of German, the language, in which the
Ministry of Education had prescribed religious subjects were to be taught. German in Jewish
schools now was perceived not as the language of the Haskalah, but as the language of an alien
nation with a powerful assimilatory potential. Bessonov demanded the swiftest transition from

29

Manuscript Division of the Institute of the Russian Literature (Pushkinskii Dom) in St.Petersburg(henceforth – RO IRLI), f. 3, op. 4, l. 11v, 23-23v (Bessonov to Ivan Aksakov, 7 March and 6 June 1865); Klier J.
Imperial Russia’s Jewish Question, 155-156.

13
German to Russian, or at least (temporarily), to Yiddish. The students were to begin with thestudy of the Bible in Russian. Before this, the Vilna maskilim had argued for Russian language
instruction for “Jewish subjects,”, but they hesitated before the serious obstacles of aconfessional character. The text of a few books of the Old Testament had become available incontemporary Russian (not Church Slavonic) only recently in scholarly Synodal translations
from Orthodox clerical academies. These translations were completed from the ancient Hebrew
original, with extensive borrowing from the Greek text (Septuagint) and the inclusion of thosepassages which are not in the Hebrew bible (Tanakh).30
Bessonov, however, considered the problem of averting Germanization much more
important than dealing with these religious “fine points”. In 1865, the teaching of the Bible
according to Synodal translations began in the Rabbinical Seminary and then in a few elementarystate schools.31 This was not motivated by the direct intention to move Jewish youth to convert
to Orthodoxy. It seemed much more important that Jews and Orthodox receive simultaneousaccess to a common (except for what in this light seemed details) biblical text in a language
common to all. According to this logic, Jews should be lured by the gift of a translation of the
Bible that even members of the dominant confession had so long awaited.32
From Bessonov’s point of view, it was necessary to maintain religious subjects in state
educational institutions for Jews not only to serve as a conduit for Russian language. Jewish
religiosity itself was also important. Placing his proposals in the imperial context of educational
measures in regard to inorodtsy—aliens--he noted that, in terms of the resistance to assimilation,
Jews were inorodtsy to an even greater degree than “Muslims, for example Tatars and

30

S.S. Averintsev, ed. Khristianstvo. Entsiklopedicheskii slovar’ (Moscow, 1993), vol. 1, 249-50.
OPI GIM, f. 56, d. 338, l. 63-64v.
32See, e.g.: Batalden S.K. “The Politics of Modern Russian Biblical Translation,” in Ph. Stine, ed. Bible
Translation and the Spread of the Church. The Last 200 Years (Leiden, 1992), 68-80.
31

14
Bashkirs.”: “The latter…do not have so ancient, so important, and unique a history as the Jews
and, lacking by the same reason their own special, uninterrupted historical education… [TheJews] …have their immemorial, unique, original, … stubborn, unyielding forms of upbringing
and education…”33 Unlike Pirogov, Bessonov did not draw the conclusion that religiosity basedon so deep a tradition would not yield to direct state influence. He held that such influence wasboth necessary and possible, but for him it was necessary to use non-religious channels, such as
the language of instruction in state institutions. “Russian language acts with full force on theancient Hebrew language, the jargon [Yiddish] is giving way to Russian speech… Jewish
religiosity is not violated, does not vanish: it is cleansed, ennobled and elevated…A boy, making
use of the methods of science provided him, leaves any melamed at an impasse, whether it is inancient Hebrew, in the understanding of the Bible or the interpretation of the Talmud.”34
Moreover, in the eyes of the Slavophile Bessonov, the historical uniqueness of the Jews
living in the empire became still another attribute of the uniqueness of Russian culture, itsdissimilarity with the West.

In a speech, delivered before the teachers of the RabbinicalSeminary, on the occasion of the director’s resignation, he said: “I from now on consider myself
tied to you forever, we are linked specifically by Russian civilization on your Jewish soil, thefruits of Jewish thought and activity on Russian soil.”35
It is understandable that separate Jewish schools seemed to Bessonov to be the mostimportant instrument for the assimilation of Jews. In a programmatic memorandum of May,
1865, he emphasized that even the ten year course of the Rabbinical seminary was sufficient for

33

LVIA, f. 567, ap. 6, b. 1204, l. 16 v.
LVIA, f. 567, ap. 6, b. 1204, l. 18-18 v. There is an intriguing parallel with later imperial attempts tomodernize the teaching of religion for Muslims in the Kazan’ Educational District, especially in the Kazan’ Tatar
Teachers’ School. For a statement by the Orientalist and inspector of Kazan’ District, Vasilii Radlov, echoing
Bessonov’s earlier judgement about Judaism, see: Geraci R. Window on the East, 144.
35
OPI GIM, f. 56, d. 332, l. 87v-88.
34

15
becoming acquainted only with the bases of Jewish learning. Without the mediation of separate
schools, with Russian language instruction of both secular and religious subjects, Jews would notreceive the inclination for Russian culture. General educational institutions in Russia were forthe time being too alien to the majority of Jews to expect a flow of Jewish children into them.
Bessonov defended this view with fervor, accusing opponents of a conspiracy with the Germans.
In his opinion, conversations in the Ministry of Education about non-intervention of the state inmatters regarding the Jewish faith were only a specious pretext for a reorientation of Jews toward
secular educational institutions in Germany.36
Concern for the menace of Germanzation (linked also with Slavophile doctrine)
predetermined the ambivalence of Bessonov’s project, its mixture of reformism andtraditionalism. According to his idea, the introduction of Russian language instruction meant
not so much to integrate the Jews as to create the conditions for their future integration into
Russian society. In the immediate future, the chief goal was creating a barrier to the secularizing
influence of the German reform Judaism. Such a concept of the dynamic of acculturation did
not correspond with European experience. In European states, the Jews’ adoption of thelanguage of the dominant population proceeded more or less simultaneously with their gaining of
new civil rights. In distinction to this model, Bessonov, who was so fearful of the competing
project of assimilation, assigned special importance, along with Russian language, to thereligiosity of Jews, and so considered it beneficial to limit the granting of those rights that mightcause the secularization of Jewish identity. Neither in his official memoranda, nor in his private
correspondence does one encounter opinions about the abolition of the Pale of Settlement. He
did not wish to facilitate the flow of Jews into the gymnasia by introducing a gymnasium
program of Jewish religion (even in Russian). He was not opposed to the entry of alumni of the36

Ibid., l. 20-20 ap., 21; RO IRLI, f. 3, op. 4, d. 45, l. 21 (Bessonov to Aksakov, 5 June 1865).

16
Rabbinical seminary into the University, but limited this privilege to able pupils whom he took
informally under his own patronage.37
At the end of 1865, the curator of the Vilna Educational District Kornilov approved
Bessonov’s view of maintaining separate Jewish schools and presented such a conclusion to the
Ministry of Education. In it, the chief task of the Vilna Rabbinical seminary was defined topartly correspond with the conception of the instruction of inorodtsy by their Russified coethnics (exemplified in the system of N.I. Il’minski in the Volga – Kama region).38 The local
educational officials saw in the graduates of the Vilna Rabbinical Seminary the bearers of a
hybrid identity combining secular education and fluency in Russian speech with Jewish
religiosity. Only such teachers were considered capable of inculcating their “ignorant” fellow
tribesmen with a taste for knowledge: “The problem is that to act on the convictions of theJewish masses, and that is attained only under the condition that educated Jewish leaders arerespected by the Jews themselves as learned and pious. Therefore even the pupil of the
Rabbinical seminary, entering the university…can be considered lost for the enlightenment of
the Jewish people…”39 In opposition to the tendency of the heads of the Ministry of Education
to encourage the merger of separate Jewish and general institutions, the Vilna Education Districtinsisted that the Uvarov strategy of reforming Jewish identity through the “purification” of
Judaism, had not outlived its usefulness.
In spite of the brief tenure as director (less than a year), Bessonov was able to unite theyoung maskilim teachers of the Rabbinical seminary around his project and to reinforce their37

YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York City (henceforth – YIVO), Record Group 24, folder
135, folios 1-3; folder 136.
38
On the similarities and differences between the system of N.I. Il’minski and separate Jewish schools, see:Dolbilov M. “Prevratnosti kirillizatsii: Zapret latinitsy i biurokraticheskaia rusifikatsiia litovtsev v Vilenskom
general-gubernatorstve, 1864-1882” Ab Imperio no. 2 (2005), 280-89.
39
LVIA, f. 567, ap. 6, b. 1204, l. 26.

17
missionary feeling. The turn towards Russian language education of religious subjects realized
by Bessonov responded to their self-identification as “Russian Jews” and to their professionaland career interests. They enthusiastically planned an attack, under Bessonov’s protection, onsuch centers of traditional Jewish learning as for example the famous yeshiva in Volozhin.40
Under Bessonov, the teachers of the Rabbinical seminary began to prepare translations of Jewish
prayer books into Russian, text books on Jewish history, and even separate tractates from the
Talmud. A translation of the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) was planned. In the following years, thisactivity continued, and a whole series of translations was published.

“Kahalomania”: state non-intervention in the religion
and segregationism in the educational policy
Although Bessonov’s project of Russian language instruction of the Jews by the Jews
themselves did not incur the (official) doubt of the local bureaucracy at least until the end of
1867, as early as 1866 a new turn in the “Jewish” policy of the Vilna administration became
evident, and that was in the direction of the abolition of separate Jewish schools. However, now
the motive was not the enlightened effort to secularize Jewish education, but an increase of the
Judeophobic urge to segregation, and according to the expression of one official, to “make theJews ignorant” (onevezhestvlenie) of the Jews. The sharpness of this turn should be no surprise.
The changes in “Jewish” policy from the end of the 1850s to the first half of the 1860s, did not at
all touch the roots of cultural and emotional alienation of officials from the Jewish population.
As a result of stereotyped ideas of Jewish distinctiveness and otherness, the position of theauthorities in relation to the principle of separate education was subject to the influence of
personal and irrational factors.
40

OPI GIM, f. 56, d. 335, l. 129-130, 137-138.

18
Owing to conflict with his superiors, for ideological as well as personal reasons,Bessonov left Vilna in the middle of 1866 in the midst of scandal.41 Among the accusations
leveled against him were reproaches for his excessive Judeophilia. In the same period, Iakov
Brafman, a convert to Russian Orthodoxy from the Jewish lower classes, emerged in the role ofexpert on “the Jewish question.” In a short time, appeared Brafman’s ill-famed The Book of theKahal, which would become a guide for Russian Judeophobes and a universal explanation of all
problems connected with Jews. Brafman depicted the kahal (the organ of Jewish selfgovernment abolished by the state in 1844) as an indestructible and ubiquitous institution—thetreasured essence of the Jews’ social life, and therefore the prime reason for all their vices.
Relying on the Talmud, the kahal presumably had everyone and everything under its control andhad extended its influence far beyond its boundaries.42
The views of Brafman have been well studied in the context of Russian Judeophobia.
However, the connections of “kahalomania” with the idioms of Russification, on the one hand,
and with the European tradition of discrediting Judaism, are more interesting for the historian.
Brafman formed his narrative of the kahal in close cooperation with the so-called “pedagogicalcircle” in Vilna—an informal company of nationalistically minded officials and journalists, forthe most part subordinates and protégés of Kornilov. The members of the circle cultivated apopulist notion of Russification as a weapon against particularistic, retrograde, and allegedly
conspiratorial elites who prevented a face-to-face encounter between the reforming state and the“masses” of the people. At the basis of The Book of the Kahal, exposing the “Talmudic
aristocracy,” lay those same emancipatory and anti-elitist tropes that before then were used, forexample, in the campaign against the Catholic clergy. The Russian officials lack of acquaintance41

RO IRLI, f. 3, op. 4, d. 297, l. 15v-16 (M. Koialovich to Aksakov, 30 October 1865).
Klier J. Imperial Russia’s Jewish Question, 263-83; Eliashevich D.A. Pravitel’stvennaia politika ievreiskaia pechat’ v Rossii: Ocherki istorii tsenzury, 1797-1917 (St.Petersburg – Jerusalem, 1999), 289-300.
42

19with Jewish realities made the populist conspiratorology of Brafman especially plausible. E.
Gintsburg’s secretary E. Levin expressed this aspect of The Book of the Kahal well: “Theaccusations set forth in it represent a mixture of falsehood and truth, so skillfully woven together
that not every Jew would be able to disentangle them…Brafman argues in this work not as theenemy of the Jews, but, to the contrary, as the friend of the indigent masses of the people and adefender of the poor classes against the rich, the plebes, as he expresses himself, against thepatricians, and this lends great force to his phillipic.”43
In Vilna, Brafman was appointed a member of the special commission on Jewish mattersunder the authority of the Governor-General, which also included several Russophile maskilim—
Lev Levanda, Asher Vol’ (one of the Rabbinical seminary’s bessonovtsy), and later on Iona
Gershtein. Differences between them and Brafman became increasingly evident during thecourse of the commission’s activity. The first initiative of Brafman, however, was indirectlyreflected in the fate of the separate Jewish schools. He proposed a plan of administrative
unification of the Jews with Christians in the towns, the shtetls, and the settlements. A year later,in August 1867, Governor-General Baranov, developing an idea of Brafman, issued a wellknown circular, sharply condemning any forms of Jewish “kahal” self-government andproposing the inclusion of all Jews residing in the shtetls and peasant settlements, in the volost,
without providing them with land. Two years later, in 1869, a detailed project of Brafman,
formulated on this basis, was subjected to bitter criticism at the conference with Jewish deputies
and was rejected.44 Brafman’s goal was some kind of “shock” integration of the Jews: placed
under the “constant and merciless supervision” of rural assemblies and elders (starosty), theywould be compelled to engage in “productive” toil as landless laborers (batraki) and in this way,
43

YIVO, Record Groups 80-89, file 756, ff. 63532-63533.
LVIA, f. 378, BS, 1869, b. 40, l. 118-120; Klier J. Imperial Russia’s Jewish Question, 173-181; Nathans
B. Beyond the Pale, 174-180. For the original copy of the project, see: LVIA, f. 378, BS, 1869, b. 40, l. 350 etc.
44

20
by Brafman’s logic, be retrained as worthy Russian subjects. Without touching on thepsychological motivations for such an adventuristic and cruel experiment, it is worth noting that
Brafman actually thought about the integration of the Jewish population, although at the cost ofcultural uniqueness and of their religion as well. But the bureaucrats taking an interest in his
plan, hoped rather for an indefinitely long preservation of a new subordinate situation of the Jews
within peasant volosts. In other words, Brafman’s plans could be read both in an integrationist
and segregationist sense.
The administrative fusion of Jews and Christians proposed by Brafman implied
specifically the liquidation of all remaining autonomous systems of Jewish self government,
including the special tax assessment, upon which the system of separate Jewish education
depended. Therefore, the beginning of the discussion of this plan in Vilna in 1866 wasperceived by lower officials in the Vilna Educational District and the teachers in the Jewish
school as a signal of the precariousness of the system. Brafman, on his part, spared no effort inhis polemic against the supporters of the separate Jewish schools. In his opinion, their very
existence promoted separatism and the “Talmudic propaganda,” which was understood as the artof evading integration with the surrounding non-Jews, the Gentile population. Brafman chose as
his chief target the Rabbinical Seminary, where in that period the administration sponsoredtransition from German language to Russian language instruction of the Bible and even the
Talmud. In his letter to Kornilov, Brafman wrote: “… The Jewish ignoramus was better and lessdangerous than the educated Jews, remaining in a systematic and sensible Judaism …whoteaches Talmud in an attractive, sensible form.”45 From Brafman’s point of view mitnagdim(orthodox, non-reform, Jews) with their yeshivas and heders were less dangerous for the cause of
Russifying the Jews, than the maskilim who mastered Russian speech. The latter, according to
45

Russian State Historical Archive (henceforth – RGIA), f. 970, op. 1, d. 103, l. 15.

21
Brafman, were an incarnation of the “Talmudic” elite. Under the mask of devotion to theauthorities, they devised a new strategy of separating their fellow believers from the outside
world.
In the same way, Brafman discarded the project of the improvement of religious
education and the upbringing of the Jews going back to Uvarov. For him this project waserroneous in its very essence from its inception. Besides the closing of separate elementary
schools, Brafman proposed removing religious subjects from the program of Jewish women’s
pensions and warned against permitting the teaching of Jewish religion in the gymnasia.
Brafman’s discourse was not an expression of an extraordinary example of Judeophobia.
In a comparative historical context, his ideas resemble techniques of discrediting Judaism inseveral European states (in particular, Prussia and the Hapsburg empire) of the first half of thenineteenth century. Michael Meyer calls such a policy “encouraging the dissolution of Judaism
through inner decay.” Intentionally distancing himself from the regulation of the Jewish cult andtaking the side of orthodox Jews against the reformers, the authors of this policy calculated on
discrediting Judaism in the eyes of their subjects, including the Jews themselves, as a backward
sect with absurd rituals, and without a clergy recognized by the state.46 Such a policy of nonintervention in religious affairs aimed at discrediting the Jews was advocated by Brafman in
Russia in the 1860s. He associated any attempts at “regulating”or “cleansing” Jewish religion,
especially through the system of education, with the machinations of a sophisticated or selfish
elite. He thought that it was necessary “to help” the Jews to take Talmudic interpretations to46

Meyer М. Response to Modernity, 103-110, 146-149, the quote comes from the p. 104; Itzkowitz D.
“The Jews of Europe and the Limits of Religious Freedom,”162; Rozenblit M. “Jewish Assimilation in Habsburg
Vienna,” in J. Frankel and S. Zipperstein, Assimilation and Community, 228-229. Later in the second half of the 19th
century the Russian imperial authorities took a similar attitude toward Islam in Turkestan. See: Khalid A. The
Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform. Jadidism in Central Asia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 5061.

22complete absurdity, without introducing improvements in the traditional teaching of the Talmud.
Brafman was confident that the publication of the Russian translation of the full text of the
Talmud “in all its confusion” would make Judaism a laughing stock.47 The officials of the Vilna
Educational District heeded this advice. At first, they demanded an exact translation of the
Talmudic tractates in order to convince Jews that the change in language would not affect theessence of faith. And after Brafman’s advice they began to watch closely to make sure that thetranslations did not omit the most illogical or physiological frank fragments, or those that were“indecent” in the view of the Gentiles.48
Brafman’s “theory of the kahal” was of course not the only reason for the reversal ofpolicy toward Jewish education in Vilna. For officials of the educational administration,
Brafman made it simpler to articulate Judeophobic emotions, which had already been aroused
simply by the growth of the number of Jews in the sphere of Russian language instruction. In
1866, the newspaper Vilenskii Vestnik, under the control of the direction of the educational
district, was overflowing with Judeophobic materials.49 Divergence from the Bessonov systembecame evident in practice as well: in the Jewish schools of the provinces that were furthest from
Vilna—Mogilev and Vitebsk instruction in religious subjects was completely terminated. In
other provinces Kornilov encouraged reducing the number of classes in Bible and Hebrew.50 A
few of Kornilov’s subordinates, reacting to the change of mood in the district administration,
presented reports that opposed the overemphasis on Russian language in the acculturation of theJews: “To transform the Jews, to make them Russian, [it is insufficient] to simply teach them
47

Kornilov I.P. Russkoe delo v Severo-Zapadnom krae. Materialy dlia istorii Vilenskogo uchebnogo
okruga preimushchestvenno v murav’evskuiu epokhu (St.Petersburg, 1908), 251; RGIA, f. 970, op. 1, d. 103, l. 15.
48
RGIA, f. 970, op. 1, d. 103, l. 9v-10; Manuscript Division of the Russian National Library in
St.Petersburg (henceforth – RO RNB), f. 377, d. 836, l. 12v, 15v.
49
Klier J. Imperial Russia’s Jewish Question, 166-69.
50
LVIA, f. 567, ap. 6, b. 1266, l. 12. There were 17 separate Jewish schools in Mogilev and Vitebsk
provinces, and 21 in the four other provinces of North Western Region.

23
Russian language.” They seconded Brafman who asserted: “That the Jew speaks Russian, will
not bring great benefits; he remains the same Jew if he studied Russian from a Jew in a Jewish
school.” They even advanced the opinion that separate schools for Jews were an exclusive
privilege, separating them from “other peoples and tribes.”51 The special status of Jewish
education, wrote Kornilov’s assistant, A. K. Serno-Solov’evich, prevented the authorities fromrecognizing the unconditional priority of the education of Russians, including the mass of thepeasantry: “This broadens the intellectual horizon of our people…, provides them with a reliablemeans for competition with other peoples and tribes inhabiting Russia…” Only after educationof Russians had progressed would it become possible for the Jews to do the same; they thenwilly-nilly would have to catch up to the “masses.” As result of this, they “would begin to
accept Christianity, or, at least, would cease to believe in the Talmud, and, consequently, wouldcease being Jews.”52
So as early as 1866, the idea of discrimination against Jews in the sphere of education
was expressed, though at first not officially. But it proved not so simple to move from words topractice. The integrationist policy of Uvarov was imprinted both on institutions and in the
discourse about Jewish education, so that Kornilov and his assistants, as a result of thebureaucratic order, often would find they could not challenge the institution of the separate
Jewish school. The situation was complicated by the fact that at the end of 1866 and the
beginning of 1867, the voice of still another participant was added to the debate about Jewish
education—the traditionalists (mitnagdim). This was one more reminder that different groups
among the local Jews were not passive objects of government measures. The most notable were51

RGIA, f. 970, op. 1, d. 103, l. 15; LVIA, f. 567, ap. 6, b. 1319, l. 13-14. On how the Judeophobic point
about Jews as a “privileged tribe” in Russia emerged in press, see: Klier J. Imperial Russia’s Jewish Question, 19394.
52
LVIA, f. 567, ap. 6, b. 1319, l. 14-14 v.

24
two evidently coordinated petitions from the Vilna and Kovno (now Kaunus) Jewish
communities, signed by merchants and other well-to-do individuals. The petitioners sharply
criticized the maskilim, particularly state rabbis and teachers, who numbered among the alumniof the Vilna Rabbinical seminary, for ignorance of the Halakhah, open violation of Jewish law,and, most important, inculcating atheism in their students. Such complaints had come frommitnagdim earlier, but the tactic chosen by these petitioners was new. In the first place, they
took into account the political changes taking place after the attempt of Karakazov on the life of
Alexander II in 1866—the importance of atheism and nihilism in the new hierarchy ofadministrative anxieties, and the related redefinition of the tasks of the Ministry of Education
headed by Count D. A. Tolstoi. They stressed that Russian language, without firm religious
belief would not make “loyal subjects of the Tsar and true sons of the Fatherland” from Jews.
Secondly, objecting to the “Uvarov” schools staffed by the Rabbinical seminary’s alumni, thepetitioners unexpectedly represented the enlighteners more than did the maskilim. They asserted
that at the present time there was no need at all for intermediary educational institutions for Jews
and that their fellow Jews striving for education could enter the general educational institutions
in Russia, up to the universities. The petitioners considered the Russian teacher and theelementary school more beneficial for Jewish children than the secularized Jew in the RabbinicalSeminary. As a Gentile, his conduct did not offend the religious feelings of his pupils, and he“would inculcate in them much more of the spirit of Russian nationality.”53
The petitions of the mitagdim prompted contradictory reactions among the heads of the
Vilna Educational District. The web of interests that had formed around the question of Jewish
education proved truly fantastic. Kornilov and his assistants were convinced (admittedly notwithout reason) that the unexpected benevolence of the mitnagdim toward Russian Orthodox
53

LVIA, f. 577, ap. 1, b. 16, l. 35-36; f. 567, ap. 6, b. 1317, l. 1-10.

25
teachers concealed an isolationist calculation—to scare all Jewish students away from schools
with such teachers and to provoke the administration to close the schools completely. Rejecting
the petitions, Kornilov was compelled to defend the credentials of the maskilim (which at thesame time Brafman also attacked from his ultra-integrationist position) as enlighteners of theJews.54 However, only shortly thereafter, the conservative arguments advanced by the
mitnagdim against the maskilim and the Vilna Rabbinical Seminary, along with Brafman’s
invectives, were appropriated by bureaucrats to justify the abolition of separate Jewish schools.

The fate of separate Jewish schools: Looking from Vilna and Petersburg
At the end of 1867, after a period of uncertainty about the question of Jewish education in
Vilna, Kornilov decided to present a plan to abolish the separate schools. The misgivings of themaskilim, who already at the beginning of 1867 felt “contempt” in the dealings of the Vilna
Educational District with the teachers of the Rabbinical Seminary55, now proved justified. The
circular mentioned above by Baranov about the prospective complete administrative fusion of
Christian and Jews was the starting point. In his reports to Baranov, Kornilov relied on the factthat Jewish schools enjoyed an impermissible advantage: each of the 48 Jewish elementary
schools (including both state and people’s schools) received an average of 1100 rubles annually,
while each of the approximately 100 parish schools, only 460 rubles. Since Jewish communities
were richer, part of their means would be used for the good of their Christian neighbors. The
curator of the Vilna Educational District proposed the abolition of the candle tax, of separate
Jewish schools, and the introduction of a general tax for Christians and Jews commensurate with
their economic status to support the elementary schools. In the spirit of Brafman’s “theory”, this54
55

LVIA, f. 577, ap. 1, b. 16, l. 9-10, 17. See also: Dolbilov M. “Prevratnosti kirillizatsii,” 287-88.
OPI GIM, f. 56, d. 515, l. 60 v. (M. De Pule to Bessonov, 13 May 1867).

26
measure was depicted as the rescue of the Orthodox peasants and the poor “majority of Jews”
from the exploitation of Jewish upper class, for whom the candle tax was presumably a source ofexpenses “for the support of exclusively Jewish interests.”56 This proposal, segregationist in its
essence, was covered with integrationist rhetoric to the effect that there was no more need forseparate schools, since Jewish children were already prepared to enter general schools directly,
and even parish schools. (Kornilov thus repeated the very argument of the mitnagdim that hehad considered hypocritical.)Kornilov’s calculation of the positive fiscal effect of introducing a general tax was both
unscrupulous and speculative. He completely ignored the question of how rural Jews could
protect their economic condition and solvency after their incorporation in the volosts without
allotments of land. The support of parish schools was just a pretext. The abolition of theinstitution of the separate Jewish school was the principal goal. The point is that by the end of
1867 the Jewish phobias of Kornilov and his assistants had reached critical proportions. The
disagreements between the Vilna Educational District and the Petersburg Society for theDissemination of Enlightenment among the Jews played an important role in this. The
Petersburg Society was engaged in the publication and dissemination of literature providing
secular knowledge in Hebrew, which Vilna bureaucrats saw as proof of the existence of theramifying “kahal.”57 As early as fall 1866, Kornilov made a paradoxical remark that theprotectors and leaders of the Society, which included E. Gintsburg, represented “a party ofcosmopolitan-nationalists.” He had in mind the presumed close ties of the Society with richJews abroad, “Rothchilds, Pereiras, Montefiores, etc.” were being organized in order to “to keep
the Jews nationally and religiously separate from other peoples and also to attain full equality
56

Kornilov I.P. Russkoe delo, 294-298 (Kornilov’s report to Baranov, 11 November 1867); RO RNB, f.
377, d. 185, l. 2-3v. (Kornilov’s report to Baranov, 13 September 1867).
57
Cherikover I., Istoriia, 64-65, 79-80, 114-15.

27
with Russians in civil rights.” Moreover, the Society was presumably “able to purchase or
influence views in the press to its own benefit” and wished “to take Jewish education ingovernment schools into its own hands, and use force to influence the appointment of teachers
and rabbis.”58
Blinded by this conspiratorial mythification, Kornilov ignored the serious disagreements
between the Society and the Vilna maskilim of the Rabbinical Seminary. The Society, as
indicated above, was not at all a supporter of the “Uvarov” type schools, including RabbinicalSeminaries, while the young maskilim in Vilna considered the Society’s Hebrew-language
undertakings a waste of money and energy. But the leaders of the Vilna Educational District
conflated the two generations of maskilim and suspected both of being adherents of Jewish
nationalism. In December, 1867, the director of the Vilna Rabbinical Seminary N. Sobchakov
composed a programmatic memorandum recognizing that the Uvarov project had collapsed andstressing that in the new era, with the spread of “the spirit of separatism”, special Jewish schools
would become particularly dangerous: “[They] promoted and still promote the strengthening of a
distinct and autonomous Jewish nationality in Russia, which, although it existed earlier, was notrecognized by the representatives of Jews in Russia themselves…[Italics is mine. – M.D.]
Together with the dissemination of religious fanaticism, they are cultivating Jewish national
fanaticism.”59
This conclusion of the leaders of the Vilna Educational District may be described as ahalfway insight. On one hand, the admission of the possibility of a modern Jewish nationalorganization was a bold, innovative thesis for the discourse of Russian nationalism. (Even
Bessonov, fearing the Germanization of the Jews in the sense of their entering into modern

58
59

RO RNB, f. 377, d. 185, l. 13 v.
RGIA, f. 970, op. 1, d. 455, l. 1-2.

28
nationhood, did not imagine a specifically Jewish national community.) On the other hand,these Russian nationalists could not conceive of real collisions of the modern Jewish nationbuilding and seriously exaggerated when they saw one of its forces in the Rabbinical Seminary.
The seminary fulfilled its function of acculturation of Jewish youth into Russian society fairly
well, though not always the way the authorities had wished. Its graduates became imperial
officials, scholars, teachers, state rabbis or radicals oriented towards the Russian populists60, but
it did not become a laboratory of Jewish national thought.
The characteristic ambivalence of the imperial conception of assimilation is evident in the
distrust and suspicions of the Vilna Russifying bureaucrats toward the Vilna maskilim. The
formation of Russified elites in non-Russian ethnic or ethno-confessional groups was at once thegoal and the fear of the Russifiers. So Kornilov in these years complained that Russian language
schools for Lithuanians “were not capable of producing a single reliable and energetic Russian
Lithuanian.”61 In the context of the Lithuanian case, the maskilim appeared as the ideal allies of
the authorities—an entrepreneurial and loyal elite, ready to introduce their fellow Jews to
Russian language and culture (though not to Russian Orthodoxy). But it was exactly theireducational level and activism that prompted the doubts of the Russifiers about whether
Russification had turned into a formulation of a modern mindset that could also promoteindigenous nation-building.62 This makes it more understandable why the policy ofRussification wavered between integration and segregation. The latter seemed a means of
benevolent isolation of the population from the enticements of modernity.

60

Haberer E. Jews and Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1995), 77-80.
61
RO RNB, f. 523, d. 711, l. 19-19 v.
62
On a similar fear regarding Tatars, see: Geraci R. Window on the East, 150-52.

29
As a result, by the end of 1867, Kornilov and his assistants were fully disposed to theabolition of the separate system of Jewish education. Nonetheless, no official resolution of thisproblem occurred. It turned out that the officials in Vilna and Petersburg understood the goal ofabolition in different ways. At the same time as the reports of Kornilov to Baranov, the Ministerof Education, Count D.A. Tolstoi, ordered the heads of the educational districts in the west of the
Empire to promote the entry of Jewish children into general educational institutions, particularly
gymnasiia. As an example, Tolstoi cited the gimnaziia of Odessa and other southern towns
where Jews made up from a third to a half of the students.63 As Benjamin Nathans showed, inthe 1860s and the 1870s, Tolstoi was a real advocate of selective integration of Jews by means ofstudy in the gymnasiia and the universities.64 Tolstoi was dissatisfied with separate Jewish
schools (including the Rabbinical Seminaries) because he considered that they made too modest
a contribution to the enlightenment of Jews. In contrast to Tolstoi, Kornilov wanted theabolition of separate schools not to promote assimilation but to isolate Jews (at least temporarily)
from the sources of modern education. In response to the inquiry of the minister, the curator of
the Vilna Educational District resorted to a conciliatory tactic. He tried to give the impressionthat no special measures to increase the flow of Jews into the general educational institutions
were required in the Vilna Educational District: that it would happen by itself.65 Leaving theissue of separate Jewish schools in limbo, Kornilov wanted not to give Tolstoi a cause to abolishthem on his own grounds, i.e, that Jewish students actually would stream into the gymnasia andother general schools.

63

LVIA, f. 567, ap. 6, b. 1411, l. 1-2.
Nathans B. Beyond the Pale, 259-60, 263-64, 271-72.
65
According to the data Kornilov cited, out of 54636 pupils (47873 boys and 6763 girls) of all the generalsecondary and elementary schools (that is, gymnasia, uezd schools, pensions, parish schools) in the Vilna
Educational District, 1446 (1032 boys and 414 girls) were Jewish. (LVIA, f. 567, ap. 6, b. 1411, l. 45-46, 49 –Kornilov to Tolstoi, 31 January 1868).
64

30

Last attempts at preserving the Uvarov system:
Maskilic plan of confessional reform
The last major episode of this complex interplay of interests between the bureaucracy and
the Jews was the effort of the Vilna maskilim to defend a separate system of Jewish schools. It
seemed that favorable conditions arose for this in 1868. The new Governor-General, A.L.
Potapov, an opponent of a hard line policy of Russification and, in comparison with other higher
administrators, one sympathetic to the Jews, relieved Kornilov of his office. The working out ofa plan to abolish Jewish schools came to a halt. Local initiative on “Jewish” policy shifted fromthe Vilna Educational District to the commission, mentioned above, under the Governor-General,
where Brafman shared influence with Russophile maskilim. By the fall of 1869, members of thecommission prepared a series of projects, which were not completely reconciled with each other,for discussion with Jewish deputies from the provinces. If Brafman relied on the plan tosubordinate the Jews to peasant volosts, the maskilim and the Vilna Rabbinical Seminary’s
alumni, Levanda, Vol’, and Gershtein presented projects of reform of the Jewish religious
administration and the system of Jewish education.
Both projects, like earlier proposals of Bessonov, who was respected by the maskilim,
were based on the paradigm of state disciplinary intervention in the formation of the religious
identity of the Jews. This was the maskilim’s response to Brafman’s version of the policy ofconfessional non-intervention that sought to discredit Judaism.66 It was also an answer to the66

In John Klier’s opinion, Brafman was one of the co-authors of the confessional project. (Klier J.
Imperial Russia’s Jewish Question, 178, 473 note 42.) However, as is clear from E. Levin’s memorandum to bequoted further, in the debate Brafman declared himself an opponent to the draft. Most important, the draft by
Levanda, Vol’ and Gershtein in principle contradicted Brafman’s idee fixe about state non-intervention in Jewish
religious affairs. In his The Book of the Kahal, he sharply criticized the European experience of state-sponsoredreforms of Judaism, particularly practice of giving the “rabbi’s function” a clerical status. See: Brafman Ia. Kniga
kagala. Materialy dlia izucheniia evreiskogo byta (Vil’na, 1868), lxiii-lxxiv.

31bureaucrats’ suspicion that it was especially the Russophile maskilim who were promoting a
sense of Jewish nationalism. The authors of the projects, without mentioning Brafman’s name,refuted his point that “government intervention gives too much credit” to Judaism, and asserted
that “intentional neglect will not destroy” one of the world’s religions “based on revelation.” On
the contrary, “developing outside of government supervision, Judaism [in Russia] is turning froma religion, a confession into a unique nationality.” The fault for this was placed on “the oldgeneration”, i.e. the mitnagdim, inimical toward “the youth, brought up in the Russian
spirit…[who] do not want to know anything about Judaism as a nationality and who settle for
Judaism as a religion…”67
If Brafman’s plan revived the Prussian method of “encouraging the dissolution throughinner decay,” the measures proposed by the maskilic drafters recalled the effort at restructuring
Judaism of other German states of the first half of the nineteenth century, where reform rabbis
instilled elements of the ceremonial, liturgical and pastoral practices of Christianity. However, asignificant difference was that Vilna project did not foresee the formation of a central religious
administration on the model of the Jewish consistories in France and the German states.68
The project lifted the rabbi and the so called “rabbi’s assistants” into some kind of semiclerical office, above such traditional offices and titles of Jewish law as magid, daion, shokhet,
etc., and endowed the synagogue with the exclusive attributes of a parish church by forbidding“public prayers and devotions” in other traditional houses of prayers (like bet-gamedrosh).

In

his administrative capacity, the rabbi resembled the Catholic dean or Orthodox blagochinnyi(superintendent). The rabbi and his assistant were assigned the obligations to supervise religious

67
68

LVIA, f. 378, BS, 1869, b. 40, l. 338.
See: Meyer M. Response to Modernity, 32-43, 104-5.

32
services, to deliver sermons and homilies regularly in Russian, and to restrict the custom of theinterpretation of Jewish law to a circle of official individuals.69
The project of confessional reform was complementary to that of reform of the Jewish
schools. Just as the new rabbinate was invested with status and powers comparable with thoseof the Christian clergy, the maskilim proposed giving rabbinical seminaries the status of special
institutions for the education of the clergy. In regard to the curriculum of the rabbinicalseminaries, the intention was to leave the program of Jewish subjects unchanged, but at the sametime to raise the course of general sciences to the level of classical gymnasia by introducing
Latin, Greek and even Arabic, which were necessary “for the rabbinical specialty.” The drafters
tried to invoke the image of a rabbi of the new generation who was not only experienced in thefine points of Jewish law, but also erudite in secular learning. The preservation of separate
elementary schools was based on the existence of “prejudices, accumulating in the dense massesof the Jewish population of Russia,” and “the Orthodox direction” of rural schools. Instead ofmerger, the maskilim proposed to make the elementary Jewish schools functionally similar to theChristian ones. In the former, religious instruction should make up the essential part of the
program, but it should assume the character of moral admonitions, education in the bases of thefaith, and not the special study of texts according to Jewish tradition. As a result, according theideas of the maskilim, separate Jewish schools, and Christian rural schools would become twosimilar versions of elementary civic education, with approximately the same number of religious
subjects.70 As in the project of confessional reform, Judaism appeared like Christianity—not in
the essence of its religious teaching, but in regard to civic institutions connected with religion.
Of course, the maskilim gave free rein to their repugnance to traditional schools—yeshivas and69
70

LVIA, f. 378, BS, 1869, b. 40, l. 338-348.
LVIA, f. 378, BS, 1869, b. 40, l. 58 v.-62.

33
heders. They summoned the authorities not to retreat from the realization of the rules
promulgated in 1859, according to which melamdim should be replaced by certified teachers
before 1875. The abolition of the institution of traditional Jewish education would become, it
was proposed, a legislative norm: “Special private institutions for the study only of the laws ofJewish faith (heders, yeshivas and others) are not permitted.”71
Both projects designated the boundary that the group of Vilna maskilim inspired by theideal of militant enlightenment had reached in their effort to preserve their alliance with theauthorities. The discussion of the projects at the conference with deputies in October, 1869,
showed the isolation of these maskilim among the Jews. Even maskilim deputies, whom the
projects of Levanda, Vol’, and Gershtein promised advancement in their careers, sharply rejected
them as a crude intervention in matters of conscience. Brafman criticized the confessional
reform from his point of view: “It is not religion and Talmudists who ruin the Jews, but the tax
collectors.”72 Governor-General Potapov supported the deputies and had all questions related to“the religious teaching of the Jews” taken off the agenda. When news of this spread throughVilna, the deputies had to dissuade their fellow believers from illuminating their synagogues inhonor of Potapov. The maskilic drafters did not find understanding in the direction of the Vilna
Education al District, either. The officials were particularly irritated by the point about theattack on the yeshivas and heders, which threatened to draw the authorities into a conflict withthe orthodox Jews.73

71

LVIA, f. 378, BS, 1869, b. 40, l. 38-45 v.
LVIA, f. 378, BS, 1869, b. 40, l. 66 (the session of 8 October 1869); YIVO, Record Groups 80-89, file756, folios 63441v-63442 v., 63443 (E. Levin’s memorandum on the Commission’s deliberations). On theCommission’s sessions with the deputies, see: Nathans B. Beyond the Pale, 174-80.
73
RO RNB, f. 523, d. 114, l. 12-20 (a memorandum by the inspector of the Vilna Educational District, N.
Novikov).
72

34
At the beginning of the 1870s, the maskilim of Vilna tried to prevent the closing of the
Rabbinical Seminary by submitting petitions to the Ministry of Interior and Ministry of
Education.74 These petitions attest to the authors’ uniquely anachronistic mode of thought.
Hoping to regain the disposition of the authorities, they stubbornly appealed to the model of statesupervision of Judaism, which, with the assistance of reformer rabbis, had been tested in the firsthalf of the nineteenth century in several European countries. The applicability of this model in
Russia a half a century later seemed obvious to them, on the strength of “the backwardness” ofthe mass of Russian Jews, which required the benevolent intervention of the state in various
spheres of their life. One could apply to these maskilim Benjamin Nathans’s observation about“the limits of a diachronic analysis,” drawing “the [seemingly compelling] analogies between
Jews in late imperial Russia and their counterparts elsewhere in Europe fifty or one hundredyears earlier.”75 In the new cultural context of the second half of the nineteenth century, towhich the maskilim and other groups of reform-minded Jews in Russia were sensitive, the very
idea of state tutelage over Judaism was being rethought in modern terms as a violation of
freedom of conscience. Professional bias and maskilic stereotypes prevented teachers who were
defenders of the Rabbinical Seminary from realizing that their proposals were playing into thehands of Judeophobe bureaucrats. The latter, while declining their proposals, took theopportunity to give the segregationist tendencies of Jewish educational policy the appearance ofa liberal rejection of confessional supervision.
The Vilna maskilim decided too late, in 1873, to overcome their disagreements with thePetersburg Society for Dissemination of Enlightenment and its patron, E. Gintsburg, who had
petitioned the government for the transformation of the Rabbinical Seminary into a private

74
75

RGIA, f. 733, op. 189, d. 433, l. 2.
Nathans B. Beyond the Pale, 375.

35institution, an autonomous center of reform Jewish learning.76 Soon after the Society received
letters from Vilna, the government reduced Rabbinical Seminaries to the status of pedagogicalschools graduating teachers for Jewish preparatory classes, i.e., the previous Uvarov system wasbrought down to an elementary level, while “the preparation of educated rabbis was left to thewhim of fate.”77 As D. Tolstoi reckoned, many Jewish youth had even earlier begun trying toenter institutions of general education. However, that was an emphatically secular path ofacculturation that would not mitigate the contradictions between reform movement and orthodox
Jewish religiosity so characteristic of imperial Russia.

Conclusion
The complexities of the Jewish question on the Russian Empire’s Western periphery canbe better understood if we take into account two perspectives of Russifying policy after 1863 –the Russification of ethnically and confessionally diverse population and that of the territory, theland.78
In the first perspective, the Jews emerged as inorodtsy, as put by Petr Bessonov, to aneven greater degree than Muslims in the Empire’s eastern regions. Cultural alienation andotherness of orthodox Jews were striking in the eyes of bureaucrats who customarily described itin terms of “fanaticism” and “superstition.” Throughout the imperial period, there were noserious attempts to introduce and even draft a hybrid of the Russian state schools and Jewish
traditional ones, heders and yeshivas, like the so-called Russo-native schools (russko-tuzemnye

76

YIVO, Record Groups 80-89, file 756, folio 63535 (a copy of memo of 5 October, 1871).
Cherikover I. Istoriia, 196-97 (quoting a resolution of the Society for Dissemination of Enlightenment).
78
For an excellent analysis of different directions and versions of Russification, see: Alexei Miller,
Imperiia Romanovykh i natsionalizm: Esse o metodologii istorii (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2006)(forthcoming).
77

36
shkoly) for Muslims in Turkestan.79 By means of the separate (“Uvarov”) schools for Jews, theauthorities since the 1840s sought only to get some of them closer to secularized values of
Russian culture and incorporate them in the Russian civilisational space, rather than assimilate
the Jewish population or convert it to Orthodoxy.
However, the task of Russifying the territory of western provinces, made so crucial forthe authorities by the challenge of the 1863 Polish uprising, came to reshape the bureaucratic
perception of the region’s ethnic heterogeneity. It implied a heavy accent on mental mappingand symbolic reconquering of the region as an inseparable part of the “Russian land from times
immemorial”. Symbols and spectacular signs of the Russian presence were given priority overstep-by-step assimilationist efforts. In this perspective, there appeared a tendency to circumvent
gradual acculturation of the non-Russian groups, including Jews, by imposing on them Russianlanguage education, banishing indigenous languages from public sphere (often without soberly
assessing the state’s potential for assimilation). As one higher official of the Vilna Educational
District optimistically wrote in 1869,…Lithuanians, Latvians and even Jews are eager to get Russified (obruset’), all of themunderstand and nearly all speak Russian. But even if there are those among them who do
not speak Russian, then it is they who are obliged to learn the language of Government, notvice versa. All these small peoples (narodtsy) are not some pagans and savages (ne kakienibud’ dikari iazychniki), while we are not missionaries among savages. We need not comedown to their dialects and notions; rather, we should make them get up to our level(podniat’sia k nam)…80

The label inorodtsy (even in its informal usage) seemed to be out of place in the “ancientRussian land”, and separate educational institutions, such as the Uvarov Jewish schools, as well79
80

See: Khalid A. The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform, 157-60.
RO RNB, f. 52, d. 28, l. 1-2 v.

37
as the very principle of instruction of non-Russians by their Russified co-ethnics, became
associated with separatism. What was still welcome in eastern borderlands proved to beunacceptable in the Western region. Characteristically, the Ministry of Education began to
introduce its network of Russian-Tatar schools in the Kazan Educational District, partly modeled
after the Uvarov Jewish schools, as late as 187081, i.e., when the latter themselves were evidently
on the edge of being dismantled.
Drawing Jewish children into gymnasia and declaring elementary Russian-language
education mandatory for Jewish boys soon resulted in a new dynamics of bureaucratic
Judeophobia. Paradoxically, the seeds of forthcoming segregationist policy were to be found in
relative success of the state’s efforts to integrate Jews. The enthusiasm the educated Jews
showed at the prospect of the enlightenment of their coreligionists quickly aroused suspicion andanxiety among the Russifiers. The rapid success of Jews in education rendered the Russophone
Jew a highly suspicious figure in the eyes of bureaucrats. No longer was he associated withloyalty and reliance. Instead, his linguistic skills were considered one more reason for mistrust.
Such a Jew was regarded as a dangerous stranger, an unwelcome newcomer in a Russian milieu
or an agent of the German reformed Jewry striving to secularize and Germanize the masses of
Russian Jews, that is, to destroy their beneficial isolation.82 Such were the misgivings of the
Vilna bureaucrats of Ministry of Education who, under the cloak of integrationist rhetoric, strove
to abolish the Uvarov system and at the same time hinder a reorientation of Jewish children
toward general schools.

81

Geraci R. Window on the East, 136-50, for the point about the school system for Jews as one of possiblemodels, see p. 139.
82
For a study of the Russian fear of assimilated Jews, see, e.g.: Safran G. Rewriting the Jew: Assimilation
Narratives in Imperial Russia (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000).

38This vacillation between integrationism and segregationism overlapped with an importantchange in confessional policy. In the beginning of Alexander II’s reign, the pattern of state nonintervention in Judaism was viewed by a number of bureaucrats and pedagogues as an alternative
to Uvarov’s interventionist attempt to enlighten Jews by means of “purifying” their religion. In
Nikolai Pirogov’s both humanitarian and condescending rendering, non-intervention in Judaism
and Jewish religiosity meant neglecting what was considered “superstition” in order to facilitate
secular education and secularization of Jewish identity. In the middle of the 1860s, Petr
Bessonov of Vilna Educational District, supported by a group of Russophile maskilim in Vilna,
tried to rehabilitate the role of religion in the state-sponsored education of Jews. He suggested
combining the “purifying” approach to Judaism with Russian-language education, justifying his
experiment by the alleged menace of secular Germanization of Russian Jews. His project was
short-lived. From the middle of the 1860s, the non-interventionist approach began to affect the“Jewish” policy more and more. However, unlike Pirogov, such “non-interventionists” as Iakov
Brafman were more interested in a destructive aspect of neglecting Judaism. For them, it was a
way of “encouraging the dissolution of Judaism through inner decay” (as put by Michael Meyer)– a pattern of policy that somewhat later found its proponents also among imperial bureaucrats
dealing with Islam in Turkestan. In conjunction with educational policy, confessional noninterventionism that might have borne a resemblance to the liberalism of the 1860s Great
Reforms contributed to legitimizing the abolition of the religion-based Uvarov system in 1873.
In an indirect way, it interacted with the rise of segregationist sentiments among the architects ofimperial “Jewish” policy. Thus, the imperial state’s failure to play its traditional role ofconfessional supervision in regard to Judaism helped thwart Russifying efforts to integrate themasses of Jews into the imperial society through education.