Jews were initially urban communities of merchants and artisans, but when the Rus' palatinates became part of the kingdom of Poland in 1569, Jews followed Polish noblemen to work as bailiffs, tavern keepers, mill-owners, and managers on magnate estates. The Jewish population in Volhynia grew by 400 percent from 1569 to 1648 (from 3,000 to 15,000); in the Kyiv and Bratislav palatinates, by 1648 19,000 and 13,500 Jews lived, respectively, where only a few thousand had lived in 1569. By the mid-eighteenth century two-thirds of the Commonwealth's Jews lived in urban communities and one-third in villages. The population steadily grew with the demographic rise of the era. By about 1500, Jews comprised 10,000-20,000 people; by 1600, 80,000-100,000; by 1650 150,000-170,000; on the eve of the partitions, about 800,000, a good 10 percent of the Commonwealth's population, the fourth largest ethnic group in the Commonwealth and the largest Jewish population in the world.
Since Jews had been forbidden to settle in the Hetmanate after Russian control tightened there (decrees of 1717, 1731, 1740, 1742, 1744), the Russian empire had few Jews until the partitions. Some Jews were allowed to settle in Novorossiia in the 1760s, but the partitions brought a major Jewish presence to Russia. In 1772 over 50,000 Jews of the Grand Duchy came into the empire, and another half million to 700,000 in the 1790s, concentrated in Right Bank and ethnic Lithuania. By the early nineteenth century, as Alexei Miller noted, "More than half of all European Jews ended up in the Russian empire." This took place at a time when Catherine II was advocating Enlightenment religious tolerance, and Russia had not had a medieval tradition of "blood libel" and anti-Semitic pogroms. Nor was the Orthodox Church officially anti-Semitic in the early modern era. But anti-Semitism and economic resentments had persisted since they were exacerbated in the seventeenth century by economic depression and political turbulence sparked by the Khmelnytsky rebellion. Working for noblemen as leaseholders for distilling and selling liquor, Jews were distrusted by
Russian authorities and subjects, and their contributions to local economies were not appreciated.
Official Russian policy to Jews alternated between Enlightenment-inspired declarations of religious toleration and socially homogenizing efforts, on the one hand, and forcibly managing their economic roles and settlement on the other. Initially, under Catherine II, Jewish representative institutions were maintained (useful for tax collection and providing liaison with the government), but efforts were also made to integrate Jews into existing Russian social categories. Jews were classified in the urban categories of merchant or poll taxpaying townsmen; they were encouraged (even forcibly moved) from rural roles into urban settings. Lower-class Jews were expected to provide recruits, but were allowed to buy out the obligation. In 1780 Catherine II declared that all Jews should join burgher ranks or the merchantry, which opened up economic opportunity, particularly since Jewish merchants were permitted to travel around the empire (a privilege not allowed to most merchants). In principle the 1785 Charter to the Towns allowed Jews to be elected to town government and in the same year the Senate affirmed that any Polish laws that discriminated between Poles and Jews were to be negated. In 1787 Catherine II declared that official documents would not use the derogatory term of "zhid.."
In the 1790s, however, official policy on many of these issues changed in response to the opposition of Christian townsmen and nobles and to the greater influx of Jews in the second and third partitions (1793, 1795). In 1794 their poll tax rate was doubled. Even the most successful Jewish merchants were forbidden to move to major cities beyond the lands of the partitions and some of the new Black Sea acquisitions. As the state investigated how to alleviate general rural poverty in the new western borderlands, Jews tended to be blamed; hostility rose. In 1802 the state inaugurated work on a new legal code for Russia's Jews; issued in 1804, it maintained double taxation, backed off from their access to urban government and guilds, and formalized a Pale of Settlement to which Jews were restricted. The Pale consisted of Commonwealth territories acquired in the partitions and new farming lands and urban centers in the Black Sea steppe. Jews continued to be able to lease distilling operations and taverns, but this remained a point of tension into the nineteenth century. Perhaps more than with any other ethnic group, Jews were treated officially with hostile and discriminatory attitudes, generally reflecting beliefs at large in the lands of the Commonwealth.
EMPIRE IN 1801
By the end of the reign of Paul I (1796-1801), the Russian empire was massive and powerful. It stretched across European Russia and Siberia to the Pacific, it enjoyed brisk trade on the White, Baltic, and Black Seas. It was a major player in central European power politics, epitomized by multiple victories over the Ottoman Turks and partnership with European allies to partition Poland. Russia's army had proven formidable, and European powers regarded with apprehension Russia's potential naval capacities in the Black Sea and Mediterranean.
Domestically, the empire had begun to implement a rational, homogenized administrative structure in Catherine II's reforms of the 1770s-80s. But by no means had Russia's essential character as an "empire of difference" been erased. We will see in further chapters where Catherinian reforms asserted standard imperial practices and where local differences persisted. Concluding this chapter, one might simply note that even after the 1775 gubernia reforms were introduced across the empire, the borderlands were treated to different models.
Borderlands with the steppe from the Volga eastward, for example, were administered as large governor-generalships with less articulated hierarchies of lower and upper courts, police, and fiscal institutions. Cossack Hosts, more and more drawn under Russian military control, nevertheless maintained autonomies over territories and communities. Each was different, representing the eclectic diversity of military defense and social organization characteristic of the middle ground. By 1801 Russia had "separate deals" with a vast array of Cossacks—the Don Cossack Host, the Black Sea, Greben and Terek Hosts in the northern Caucasus, small groups of Cossacks on the Bug and Volga Rivers, the Orenburg, Ural, and Siberian Hosts on the Kazakh "Line," and smaller Cossack-type regiments of Bashkirs, Tatars, and others.
The western borderlands, where one might expect rationalization to have proceeded on the basis of pre-existing administrative divisions and state organizations, also persisted as islands of difference in the empire. Paul I felt that Catherine II had reached too far in destroying the autonomies ofBaltic Germans and Polish elites; he regarded these lands as functioning sufficiently well not to need such drastic revision. As discussed in Chapter 14, in 1796 he designated most of the lands of the partitions, from Volhynia to Vyborg, as areas of special status, restoring many traditional rights to the German and Polish nobles, particularly in local government. He also restored rights to non-Orthodox religious communities (including Jews). His step was particularly welcome in the Baltics, where he restored Baltic institutions and partly abrogated the 1785 Charter to the Nobility to restore traditional rights to the Baltic German nobility. Thus, strong Polish and German traditional nobilities, welcomed into the imperial Russian nobility and civil service, also retained local power into the nineteenth century.