Conscription and the Search for Modern Russian Jewry

Conscription and the Search for Modern Russian Jewry PDF Author: Olga Litvak
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253000777
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
"Olga Litvak has written a book of astonishing originality and intellectual force.... In vivid prose, she takes the reader on a journey through the Russian-Jewish literary imagination." -- Benjamin Nathans Russian Jews were first conscripted into the Imperial Russian army during the reign of Nicholas I in an effort to integrate them into the population of the Russian Empire. Conscripted minors were to serve, in practical terms, for life. Although this system was abandoned by his successor, the conscription experience remained traumatic in the popular memory and gave rise to a large and continuing literature that often depicted Jewish soldiers as heroes. This imaginative and intellectually ambitious book traces the conscription theme in novels and stories by some of the best-known Russian Jewish writers such as Osip Rabinovich, Judah-Leib Gordon, and Mendele Mokher Seforim, as well as by relatively unknown writers. Published with the generous support of the Koret Foundation.

Conscription and the Search for Modern Russian Jewry

Conscription and the Search for Modern Russian Jewry PDF Author: Olga Litvak
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253000777
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 297

Get Book

Book Description
"Olga Litvak has written a book of astonishing originality and intellectual force.... In vivid prose, she takes the reader on a journey through the Russian-Jewish literary imagination." -- Benjamin Nathans Russian Jews were first conscripted into the Imperial Russian army during the reign of Nicholas I in an effort to integrate them into the population of the Russian Empire. Conscripted minors were to serve, in practical terms, for life. Although this system was abandoned by his successor, the conscription experience remained traumatic in the popular memory and gave rise to a large and continuing literature that often depicted Jewish soldiers as heroes. This imaginative and intellectually ambitious book traces the conscription theme in novels and stories by some of the best-known Russian Jewish writers such as Osip Rabinovich, Judah-Leib Gordon, and Mendele Mokher Seforim, as well as by relatively unknown writers. Published with the generous support of the Koret Foundation.

Jews in the Russian Army, 1827-1917

Jews in the Russian Army, 1827-1917 PDF Author: Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521515733
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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Book Description
This is the first study of the military experience of some one to one-and-a-half million Jews who served in the Russian Army between 1827, the onset of personal conscription of Jews in Russia, and 1917, the demise of the tsarist regime. The conscription integrated Jews into the state transforming the repressed Jewish victims of the draft into modern imperial Russian Jews. The book contextualizes the reasons underlying the decision to draft Jews, the communal responses to the draft, the missionary initiatives directed toward Jews in the army, alleged Jewish draft evasion and Jewish military performance, and the strategies Jews used to endure military service. It also explores the growing antisemitism of the upper echelons of the military toward the Jews on the eve of World War I and the rise of Russian-Jewish loyalty and patriotism.

The Cantonists

The Cantonists PDF Author: Larry Domnitch
Publisher: Devora Publishing
ISBN: 9781930143852
Category : Cantonists
Languages : en
Pages : 154

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Book Description
Based on memoirs of former Cantonists and their contemporaries, describes the fate of Jewish servicemen in the Russian army during the rule of Nicholas I, before 1855. Discusses the introduction of the Cantonist system in 1827, the abduction of Jewish children, and the role played in this by Jewish community leaders. Dwells on the conversion of the Jewish conscripts to Christianity; in many cases the conversions were forced. Presents stories of some former Cantonists, adapted from memoirs published in Russian or Yiddish or found in manuscripts in archives.

Haskalah

Haskalah PDF Author: Olga Litvak
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813554373
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 247

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Book Description
Commonly translated as the “Jewish Enlightenment,” the Haskalah propelled Jews into modern life. Olga Litvak argues that the idea of a Jewish modernity, championed by adherents of this movement, did not originate in Western Europe’s age of reason. Litvak contends that the Haskalah spearheaded a Jewish religious revival, better understood against the background of Eastern European Romanticism. Based on imaginative and historically grounded readings of primary sources, Litvak presents a compelling case for rethinking the relationship between the Haskalah and the experience of political and social emancipation. Most importantly, she challenges the prevailing view that the Haskalah provided the philosophical mainspring for Jewish liberalism. In Litvak’s ambitious interpretation, nineteenth-century Eastern European intellectuals emerge as the authors of a Jewish Romantic revolution. Fueled by contradictory longings both for community and for personal freedom, the poets and scholars associated with the Haskalah questioned the moral costs of civic equality and the achievement of middle-class status. In the nineteenth century, their conservative approach to culture as the cure for the spiritual ills of the modern individual provided a powerful argument for the development of Jewish nationalism. Today, their ideas are equally resonant in contemporary debates about the ramifications of secularization for the future of Judaism.

War Or Revolution

War Or Revolution PDF Author: Harold Shukman
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
They arrived in Archangel in the autumn of 1917 together with the Arctic winter and the chaos of the revolution, which soon descended into bloody civil war. How they fared and how they struggled to return to Britain is the story of War or Revolution."--Jacket.

Everyday Jewish Life in Imperial Russia

Everyday Jewish Life in Imperial Russia PDF Author: ChaeRan Y. Freeze
Publisher: Brandeis University Press
ISBN: 1611684552
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 665

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Book Description
This book makes accessibleÑfor the first time in EnglishÑdeclassified archival documents from the former Soviet Union, rabbinic sources, and previously untranslated memoirs, illuminating everyday Jewish life as the site of interaction and negotiation among and between neighbors, society, and the Russian state, from the beginning of the nineteenth century to World War I. Focusing on religion, family, health, sexuality, work, and politics, these documents provide an intimate portrait of the rich diversity of Jewish life. By personalizing collective experience through individual life storiesÑreflecting not only the typical but also the extraordinaryÑthe sources reveal the tensions and ruptures in a vanished society. An introductory survey of Russian Jewish history from the Polish partitions (1772Ð1795) to World War I combines with prefatory remarks, textual annotations, and a bibliography of suggested readings to provide a new perspective on the history of the Jews of Russia.

Jews in the Russian Army, 1827-1917

Jews in the Russian Army, 1827-1917 PDF Author: Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521515734
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This book examines the experience of the Jews who served in the Russian Army between 1827 and 1917.

The Revolution of 1905 and Russia's Jews

The Revolution of 1905 and Russia's Jews PDF Author: Stefani Hoffman
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812240642
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description
In this multidisciplinary volume, leading historians provide new understanding of a time that sent shockwaves through Jewish communities in and beyond the Russian Empire and transformed the way Jews thought about the politics of ethnic and national identity.

Everyday Jewish Life in Imperial Russia

Everyday Jewish Life in Imperial Russia PDF Author: ChaeRan Y. Freeze
Publisher: Brandeis University Press
ISBN: 1611684560
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 665

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Book Description
This book makes accessibleÑfor the first time in EnglishÑdeclassified archival documents from the former Soviet Union, rabbinic sources, and previously untranslated memoirs, illuminating everyday Jewish life as the site of interaction and negotiation among and between neighbors, society, and the Russian state, from the beginning of the nineteenth century to World War I. Focusing on religion, family, health, sexuality, work, and politics, these documents provide an intimate portrait of the rich diversity of Jewish life. By personalizing collective experience through individual life storiesÑreflecting not only the typical but also the extraordinaryÑthe sources reveal the tensions and ruptures in a vanished society. An introductory survey of Russian Jewish history from the Polish partitions (1772Ð1795) to World War I combines with prefatory remarks, textual annotations, and a bibliography of suggested readings to provide a new perspective on the history of the Jews of Russia.

Drafting the Russian Nation

Drafting the Russian Nation PDF Author: Joshua A. Sanborn
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780875806631
Category : Draft
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
How did Russia develop a modern national identity, and what role did the military play? Sanborn examines tsarist and Soviet armies of the early twentieth century to show how military conscription helped to bind citizens and soldiers into a modern political community. The experience of total war, he shows, provided the means by which this multiethnic and multiclass community was constructed and tested. Drafting the Russian Nation is the first archivally based study of the relationship between military conscription and nation-building in a European country. Stressing the importance of violence to national political consciousness, Sanborn shows how national identity was formed and maintained through the organized practice of violence. The cultural dimensions of the "military body" are explored as well, especially in relation to the nationalization of masculinity. The process of nation-building set in motion by military reformers culminated in World War I, when ethnically diverse conscripts fought together in total war to preserve their national territory. In the ensuing Civil War, the army's effort was directed mainly toward killing the political opposition within the "nation." While these complex conflicts enabled the Bolsheviks to rise to power, the massive violence of war even more fundamentally constituted national political life. Not all minorities were easily assimilated. The attempt to conscript natives of Central Asia for military service in 1916 proved disastrous, for example. Jews, also identified as non-nationals, were conscripted but suffered intense discrimination within the armed forces because they were deemed to be inherently unreliable and potentially disloyal. Drafting the Russian Nation is rich with insights into the relation of war to national life. Students of war and society in the twentieth century will find much of interest in this provocative study.