Skip to Main Content

Jewish Rights, National Rites: Nationalism and Autonomy in Late Imperial and Revolutionary Russia

Online ISBN:
9780804793032
Print ISBN:
9780804792493
Publisher:
Stanford University Press
Book

Jewish Rights, National Rites: Nationalism and Autonomy in Late Imperial and Revolutionary Russia

Simon Rabinovitch
Simon Rabinovitch
Boston University
Find on
Published online:
21 May 2015
Published in print:
29 October 2014
Online ISBN:
9780804793032
Print ISBN:
9780804792493
Publisher:
Stanford University Press

Abstract

This book examines the movement for nonterritorial autonomy that swept through Jewish politics in late imperial and revolutionary Russia. Jewish autonomism began around the turn of the twentieth century with the political theories of historian and journalist Simon Dubnov, who argued that Jews should demand national rights from the Russian government in addition to civil equality. Dubnov and other Jewish autonomists created a set of national demands that would allow Russia’s Jews to have autonomy locally and nationally rather than over a given territory. The book traces how Jews from across the political spectrum, especially those in the Jewish intelligentsia, came to agree with Dubnov’s idea that Jews, no less than Russia’s other nationalities seeking autonomy, could have the right to use their own language (or languages) in public life, to control their own schools, to create national cultural institutions, and to govern their internal life in these and other areas. The book also follows the cultural and institutional projects that Jewish activists created to lay the groundwork for autonomy. A main argument is that Jewish nationalism developed in a changing legal environment in which the idea that nations had rights was beginning to take hold. As Jewish politics took shape in Russia—during a period of repeated revolutionary hope and disappointment, the growth of national movements across Eastern Europe, and a war that would dismantle the region’s empires—Jewish autonomism became not merely an ideology but a principle around which Jewish political and social life could be organized.

Contents
Close
This Feature Is Available To Subscribers Only

Sign In or Create an Account

Close

This PDF is available to Subscribers Only

View Article Abstract & Purchase Options

For full access to this pdf, sign in to an existing account, or purchase an annual subscription.

Close