This book makes accessible—for the first time in English—declassified 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 stories—reflecting not only the typical but also the extraordinary—the sources reveal the tensions and ruptures in a vanished society. An introductory survey of Russian Jewish history from the Polish partitions (1772–1795) 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.

Jehuda Reinharz, born in Haifa in 1944, spent his childhood in Israel and his adolescence in Germany, and moved with his family to the United States when he was seventeen. These three diverse geographies and the experiences they engendered shaped his formative years and the future of a prolific scholar who devoted his life to the study of the central role of leadership as Jews faced the challenges of emancipation and integration in Germany, the rise of modern antisemitism, the formation of Zionist youth culture and politics, and the transformation of Jewish politics in Palestine and the State of Israel. In this volume, eminent scholars in their respective fields extend the lines of Reinharz’s research interests and personal activism by focusing on the ideological, political, and scholarly contributions of a diverse range of individuals in Jewish history. Essays are clustered around five central themes: ideology and politics; statecraft; intellectual, social and cultural spheres; witnessing history; and in the academy. This volume offers a panoramic view of modern Jewish history through engaging essays that celebrate Reinharz’s rich contribution as a path-breaking and prolific scholar, teacher, and leader in the academy and beyond.

ChaeRan Freeze explores the impact of various forces on marriage and divorce among Jews in 19th-century Russia. Challenging romantic views of the Jewish family in the shtetl, she shows that divorce rates among Russian Jews in the first half of the century were astronomical compared to the non-Jewish population. Even more surprising is her conclusion that these divorce rates tended to drop later in the century, in contrast to the rising pattern among populations undergoing modernization. Freeze also studies the growing involvement of the Tsarist state. This occurred partly at the behest of Jewish women contesting patriarchy and parental power and partly because the government felt that Jewish families were in complete anarchy and in need of order and regulation. Extensive research in newly-declassified collections from twelve archives in Russia, Ukraine, and Lithuania enables Freeze to reconstruct Jewish patterns of marriage and divorce and to analyze the often conflicting interests of Jewish husbands and wives, rabbinic authorities, and the Russian state. Balancing archival resources with memoirs and printed sources in Hebrew, Yiddish, and Russian, she offers a tantalizing glimpse of the desires and travails of Jewish spouses, showing how individual life histories reflect the impact of modernization on Jewish matchmaking, gender relations, the "emancipation" of Jewish women, and the incursion of the Tsarist state into the lives of ordinary Jews.

Zinaida Poliakova (1863–1953) was the eldest daughter of Lazar Solomonovich Poliakov, one of the three brothers known as the Russian Rothschilds. They were moguls who dominated Russian finance and business and built almost a quarter of the railroad lines in Imperial Russia.
For more than seventy-five years, Poliakova kept detailed diaries of her world, giving us a rare look into the exclusive world of Jewish elites in Moscow and St. Petersburg. These rare documents reveal how Jews successfully integrated into Russian aristocratic society through their intimate friendships and patronage of the arts and philanthropy. And they did it all without converting—in fact, while staunchly demonstrating their Jewishness.

Poliakova’s life was marked by her dual identity as a Russian and a Jew. She cultivated aristocratic sensibilities and lived an extraordinarily lifestyle, and yet she was limited by the confessional laws of the empire and religious laws that governed her household. She brought her Russian tastes, habits, and sociability to France following her marriage to Reuben Gubbay (the grandson of Sir Albert Abdullah Sassoon). And she had to face the loss of almost all her family members and friends during the Holocaust.

Women’s voices are often lost in the sweep of history, and so A Jewish Women of Distinction is an exceptional, much-needed collection. These newly discovered primary sources will change the way we understand the full breadth of the Russian Jewish experience.