Евреи в царской России. Сыны или пасынки?

These are the issues Lev Berdnikov describes in his new book, trying to solve the eternal question: have Jews in Russia been its children or its stepchildren? The tragic dualism of Russian Jewry is suggested by the book's two epigraphs, by Saul Gruzenberg and Alexander Gorodnitskii, each of whom sees the fate of the Jews from his own point of view. Starting with the Jews of Muscovy, the author leads us down Russia's historical path, along which Jews left many significant marks but invariably found themselves in a kind of limbo, suspended between the roles of children and stepchildren.

Thus the Jewish doctor of Venice, Leon Mistro, was brought in to minister to Ivan Ill's ailing young son. Mistro treated the heir honestly and unselfishly, but the treatment was unsuccessful, and the unlucky healer was beheaded. He had been caught in the middle of a conspiracy: the heir had been poisoned and Leon tricked into trying to cure a non-existent disease. A similarly tragic fate befell another Jewish doctor – Stefan von Gaden, who was probably the best doctor at the tsar's court. He was accused of poisoning Tsar Fedor Alekseevich and killed after brutal torture.

Faithful sons thus shared the fate of hated stepchildren. But of course not all Jews experienced such unhappy endings. General Mikhail Grulev, for example, became one of Russia's most prominent military leaders and died peacefully at the age of 86. But he, as a Jew, had to endure a lot on the way to the heights of military glory. Equally difficult were the lives of the artist Moses Maimon, the writer Victor Nikitin, the folklorist Paul Shane, the famous photographer Konstantin Shapiro, all of which are described in this book.

To achieve success in any sphere of Russian life and prove that they could identify themselves as «true sons of Russia», Jews often had to make a very difficult step – to accept baptism. As the historian Simon Dubnov formulated this difficulty: «for Jews the only way to win the favor of the government was to bow before a Greek cross». Because of the laws limiting Jews to the Pale of Settlement and severe restrictions against living in large cities, getting a university education, taking part in professional activities, and so on, a baptismal certificate served as a ticket to the larger world and a better life.

Changing faith is always a very difficult and delicate process. It was especially difficult for Russian Jews because after conversion they almost invariably found themselves between a rock and a hard place. Their former coreligionists accused them of the greatest possible sin for a Jew, betraying their people; converts were considered dead and ritually mourned. Christians, on the other hand, looked on them with suspicion, considering their conversion fictitious and possibly even as a satanic way of destroying Eastern Orthodoxy from within. To prove their loyally baptized Jews sometimes endeavored to be «holier than the pope», trying to demonstrate their hatred for their former compatriots; such were branded with the contemptuous label «vykresty» (cf. «conversos» or «Marranos» in Spain). Some of these, like Johann Pfeferkorn and Jacob Brahman, and others who lived in different periods, played very sad role in Jewish life, e.g., slandering their fellow Jews and claiming the anti-Christian nature of the Talmud and other Jewish writings. And there were those like Paul Veinberg who mocked his fellow tribesmen in vicious caricatures, fueling Judeophobia in Russia.

But even if Jews sincerely wished to join the new community, they were often mistrusted. The historian of Spanish Jewry Benzion Netanyahu has claimed that the Spanish Jews were not baptized under compulsion, but willingly and consciously, wanting to assimilate into Spanish Christian culture. Nevertheless, Christians still hated the «Marranos» and suspected them of a variety of sins.

And baptism did not save them from the hatred of anti-Semites, or sometimes even from death. This applies to some of the Jews described in this book as well as to many others. Since their school years the prominent economist Mikhail Gertsenshtein and the journalist Grigory Yollos had been friends. The former was baptized while the latter preserved his Jewish faith. Both were Russian patriots, its true sons, and both became members of the first state Duma in 1906; in questionnaires they described themselves, respectively, as «Jew of the Orthodox Confession» and of the «Russian Jewish faith», And both were murdered by killed by the Black Hundreds as Russia's despised stepchildren.