Discusses the political cooperation between Jews and Lithuanians in the Tsarist Empire from the last decades of the 19th century until the early 1920s. These years saw the transformation of both Jewish and Lithuanian political life. Within the Jewish community, the previously dominant integrationists were now challenged both by those who believed that the Jews were not a religious but an ethnic or proto-nationalist group and those who believed that only with the abolition of capitalism and the establishment of a socialist state would Jewish integration be possible. Among the Lithuanians, the emergence of a modern national identity became increasingly prevalent.

Vladas Sirutavicius is a senior researcher at the Lithuanian Institute of History and associate professor at Vilnius University, Institute of International Relations and Political Science.

Darius Staliunas is Chief Researcher at the Lithuanian Institute of History and teaches at Vilnius University. He has published extensively on Russia’s nationality policy in the so-called Northwestern Region (Lithuania and Belarus), ethnic conflicts, problems of historiography, and places of memory in Lithuania.

Introduction Articles Chapter 1: Jews and the Lithuanian National Movement Chapter 2: Collaboration of Lithuanians and Jews during the Elections to the First and the Second Dumas Chapter 3: Lithuanians in the Jewish Politics of the Late Imperial Period Chapter 4: Lithuania? - But Which? The Changing Political Attitude of the Jewish Political Elite in East Central Europe towards Emerging Lithuania (1915–1919) Chapter 5: The Zionist Priorities in the Struggle for Lite (1916–1918) Chapter 6: Jewish-Lithuanian relationships during elections to the Constitutive Assembly of Lithuania Chapter 7 :Between Poland and Lithuania: Jews and the Vilnius Question, 1918–1925 Document publications 1 The Lithuanian-Jewish Political Dialogue in Petrograd in 1917 2 Jewish Politicians and Lithuanian Taryba in 1918 3 The Lithuanian Zionist Conference, Vilnius, December 5–8, 1918