This is the story of Aharon Ya’akov Dukhan, a Jewish-Russian frontier man whose life spanned the second half of the nineteenth century. In Pale in Comparison , a paper that I am currently developing, I argue that even in as late a period as the one in which Aharon Ya’akov was active, Jews were, in a certain economic sense, truly countryside people. The rural frontier was an integral part of the ecology that defined the economic and demographic aspects of Jewish lives in the Pale of Settlement. Dukhan embodied the experience of the Jewish frontier, and his path exemplifies several of the empirical regularities that I demonstrate in the paper.
The Life of Aharon-Ya’akov Dukhan
Aharon-Ya’akov Dukhan was born in the early 1850s in Glusk, a small town in present-day Belarus. Glusk was a typical Lithuanian shtetl, a local market town of 5,328 inhabitants (henceforth, all figures are according to the 1897 Russian census), and it was crowded with Jews that comprised more than 70 percent of its population.
As Aharon-Ya’akov came of age, he migrated south. He established himself in the province of Yekaterinoslav, and settled first in the town of Verkhne-Dnieprovsk (pop. 6,701), on the banks of the Dniepr River, Ukraine’s primary artery. While Jews were 30 percent of the population of this town, in the entire district of Verkhne-Dnieprovsk (of which the town was the administrative center), Jews were still a rather small minority. In the town, more than two-fifths of all Jewish workers were employed in commerce, a relatively high rate. Among the district’s Jews residing outside the main city, this rate was even higher, 55.2 percent.
- Minsk Province (back)
- Minsk Province (front)
- Yekaterinoslav Province (back)
- Yekaterinoslav Province (front)
Cards depicting features of Minsk and of Yekaterinoslav Provinces, 1856.
Source: World Digital Library, http://www.wdl.org/en/item/85/ and http://www.wdl.org/en/item/771/
At the end of the century, Aharon-Ya’akov moved again with his growing family and settled in Bozhedarovka, a small village situated 50 kilometers further south. Bozhedarovka was a new settlement that grew together with an eponymous railway station, built in 1881 along the new Kazanka-Yekaterinoslav railway line. It had a few agricultural warehouses and mills, a handful of Jewish families trading in agricultural produce, and in total less than 500 inhabitants. During harvest, dozens of rail cars were loaded daily with wheat and were shipped to the markets.

Bozhedarovka [Bozhedarivka, in Ukrainian] station, founded in 1881. The name of Bozhedarovka village was changed in 1939 to Shchors’k. Source: http://www.panoramio.com/photo/30369233
Aharon-Ya’akov traded there in grains, and in addition was employed by a local Russian landlord widow as a manager of her estates. Fully versed in traditional Jewish learning, he taught himself German and Russian, a language in which he worked and in which he enjoyed conversing for hours on end with his trusting aristocrat mistress. Dukhan (incidentally or not, the Hebrew meaning of the word is a stall) and his household prospered in Bozhedarovka, “God’s gift” in Russian. Life was peaceful, livelihood was plenty, and food was cheap. By the time of his death in 1904 he had fathered 16 children, of whom 12 had reached adulthood.

A historical map of Verkhne-Dnieprovsk district, 1903. The Dniepr River flows southeast, and the province capital Yekaterinoslav (renamed to Dniepropetrovsk in 1925) is seen on the middle right. Bozhedarovka is marked as a station along the red railway line. It is labeled under the large bold “A”, on the southern branch after the first bifurcation west of Yekaterinoslav. The town of Verkhne-Dnieprovsk is seen exactly at the point in which the longitude line in the middle meets the river. Source: http://rodmurmana.narod.ru/maps/Guberniya-Ekaterinoslavskaya.htm
Aharon-Ya’akov was an educated man, mobile, hard working, talented, entrepreneurial, and engaging both culturally and economically across ethnic boundaries. In short, he was a decent representative of the the ideal type of a Jewish economic agent, an example of a service minority. But strange enough, he was not an urban dweller but a rural frontier man. Rather than moving to Warsaw, Odessa, London, or New York, he moved to a tiny railroad village in the provincial countryside. He even skipped the regional urban center of Yekaterinoslav, only 80 kilometers to the east, a bustling and rapidly growing commercial city, favoring Bozhedarovka instead.
From Jewish Congestion to the Frontier
What Aharon-Ya’akov did was to move from where Jews and their services were abundant to where they were scarce. The table below shows how his place of birth and his place of death were different from one another. He came from Bobruisk district, in Minsk Province, that was in the midst of historical Lithuania. Jews had been established there for several centuries, and by 1897 the Jewish population was 19.4 percent of the total.
In contrast, Verkhne-Dnieprovsk district, part of Yekaterinoslav Province, was an area of new Jewish settlement. Having been part of the New-Russia region, despite not being part of the historical Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Russia exempted it from the restrictions on Jewish settlement. The recently established Jewish communities still comprised only 2.6 percent of the district’s population. Migrating from Bobruisk to Verkhne-Dnieprovsk was a move from the Pale’s 94th percentile of Jewish density, in terms of the share of Jews in the district, to the 7th percentile.
Since Jews occupied particular occupational niches and were absent in others, the two labor markets were also very different. Aharon-Ya’akov sought employment in commerce, and in Bobruisk 6.3 percent of all workers were employed in this sector. In contrast, in Verkhne-Dnieprovsk only 2.5 percent of all workers were in commerce, and clearly his skills were relatively scarce there. The two districts were at the 90th and at the 12th percentile of the distribution of total employment in commerce in the Pale. This difference was directly related to the difference in Jewish density. While in the southern district a greater share of non-Jewish workers was employed in commerce (0.9 as against 0.4 percent), this hardly compensated for the low number of Jews.

A historical military map of Minsk Province, 1821. Source: World Digital Library, http://www.wdl.org/en/item/2587/
Moreover, in Bobruisk, the share of Jewish commerce workers out of all Jewish workers was only 21.6 percent (11th percentile). Evidently, the supply of commerce workers was so large that Jews in Bobruisk were crowded out and spilled over to other occupational sectors in which, as I explain in the paper, they had a lesser comparative advantage, mainly manufacturing and personal services. In sharp contrast, in the southern district the share of Jews in the population was so low that there seems to have been little restriction on Jews to opt for commerce. With every second Jewish worker employed in commerce, Verkhne-Dnieprovsk exceeded all but one of the remaining Pale’s districts!
The Role of the Frontier in the Jewish Economic Ecology

Bobruisk District, 1821, a detail of the map of Minsk Province. Glusk appears as a town on the road between Bobruisk and Slutsk to the west. The numbers along the yellow road curve denote the distances in versts, a Russian measure that is slightly longer than a kilometer. Glusk stood roughly 50 kilometers west-southwest of Bobruisk, the district capital.
In short, Dukhan benefitted from the migration from Glusk to Bozhedarovka precislely because the latter was a rural frontier village in a district in which Jewish settlement was still new and rare. As a result, there were fewer workers in commerce, and the profits in this sector must have come at a premium relative to similar positions in the Lithuanian home district of Bobruisk. This explains why the share of commerce workers among Jews was so much higher—they were too few to cause congestion that would have brought down profits in this Jewish occupational niche.
While the notion that over-congestion of Jews cuased poverty is well understood in the historical literature, the importance of the almost immdeiate correlary—that dispersion brought prosperity—has not been fully acknowledged. In the paper I argue that the case of Aharon-Ya’akov Dukhan, the Jewish rural frontier man, was not all that strange after all. Rather, it was emblematic of the economic ecology practiced by Jews in the Pale of Settlement during the late imperial period. Jews responded to local congestion either by spilling over to occupations beyond their preferred niches, or by migrating to areas that were less dense with Jewish settlement, where traditional Jewish occupations were relatively more profitable. Aharon-Ya’akov made the second out of the two choices. The dispersed spatial distribution of Jews in the Pale of Settlement was thus the outcome of a centuries-old tradition of Jewish frontier settlement, of which Dukhan was among the last bearers.
When Jews migrated to the US and other western countries, they disengaged at once from the countryside and overwhelmingly chose to live and work in large meotropolitan centers. Most historians saw the move from small towns in the old country to big cities in the US as a natural continuation of an old Jewish pattern of urban settlement. I, on the other hand, observe this transformation with complete bafflement, and wonder why Jews abandoned the frontier economy. The shift was neither continuous nor predictable. On the contrary, it was nothing short of a complete revolution. After all, Bozhedarovka was not unlike many railway towns in the American frontier. Why were they not filled with recent East-European Jewish immigrants, the likes of Aharon Ya’akov Dukhan?
Dukhan was the grandfather of Leah Dukhan-Landau, my grandmother. This post is partly based on a note in her memoirs (in Hebrew), describing the events of the summer of 1918. Four-years old Leah spent part of that last peaceful summer in Bozhedarovka, which she vividly remembered decades later.
Carola Murray-Seegert
April 2, 2016
In the family I’m researchig, a fragmentary memoir tells us that Zalman Feldbin, our earliest known ancestor, left Brody (in Galicia) to settle in Pogost (6 miles east of Berazino, Igumen district) “at some time before the Napoleonic War.” The question of why a young man would leave a well-established, prosperous place like Brody for a tiny shtetl in the middle of nowhere has nagged at me for years. Your idea, that ‘dispersion brought prosperity’ suggests a possible answer. In your discussion, a new railroad village attracted Dukhan’s attention. I speculate that in Feldbin’s case, it was the construction of the Berezinsky Water System – begun 1797, completed in 1805 – which linked the Western Dvina with the River Berezina, creating a new shipping route between the Baltic and Black Sea. Again, this is only my speculation, but I assume that this development would have boosted the economy of the Berezina valley, thus attracting new settlers – ‘frontiersmen’ in your terms – like Zalman Feldbin. Does that seem plausible?
Yannay Spitzer
April 2, 2016
Very interesting, and as far as I can tell this must have been the explanation. This is the same way the towns along the Erie Canal were settled before the arrival of the railways, and Jews must have naturally provided the first trading boots on the ground. A peculiar thing about this story is that this was seemingly a migration over a long distance into a region that was already heavily settled by Jews. I would have expected this area to be settled primarily by Lithuanian Jews, rather than by Galicians. I would guess that Feldbin had already been involved in long-distance trade and had some familiarity with the region by the time he migrated.
Carola Murray-Seegert
April 4, 2016
I assume that the areas around Bobruisk and Borisov were already well-populated by Jews in the late 18th c but I wonder whether the in-between parts of the Berezina valley were as developed. The online Encyclopedia Judaica reports a Jewish population of 208 for Byerazino in 1766 (208 taxpayers, I assume). The figure jumps to 1,289 in 1847. Does that agree with your thinking about settlement in this part of the region? I admit that my conception of Berazino / Pogost as a backwater is highly colored by historic postcards from Beresin, showing its muddy streets (ca 1910). I have since learned that it was a bustling, prosperous place, at least by the end of the 19th c.
Yannay Spitzer
April 4, 2016
I don’t have particular knowledge about this region, but I can try a few educated guesses here. On the one hand, it is hard to make clear sense of the population growth figures. It is well known that the Polish Jewish census of 1764 under-counted the Jewish population. There was also very rapid population growth for the entire Jewish population of the Pale of Settlement during that period. Additionally it’s always hard to tell what were the real criteria for inclusion in that census and in the later revisions. So I would not rule out that the town had a “normal” Jewish population growth between 1764 and 1848.
On the one hand, it is quite possible that this town was a sort of internal frontier: surrounded by established communities, but suddenly a particular point of local attraction where new economic opportunities arise. The fact that it seemed to have been ran down by the turn of the century does not mean that it did not prosper in the first half of the 19th Century. This is, in fact, the typical pattern that Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern describes in his recent book, The Golden Age of the Shtetl (invaluable if you’re interested in the social economic fabric of small Jewish towns in that period). I would guess that in the same way that this town might have been booming due to the waterways, it was busted by the arrival of the railways in the last third of the century.
Carola Murray-Seegert
April 4, 2016
I am very interested in the socio-economic fabric of such towns – the Petrovsky-Shtern reference looks great. I just read a review that portrays the author as both a serious scientist and a good story-teller. A promising read, indeed.
I appreciate, by the way, your suggestion (post of 2 April) that the long-distance nature of the migration (Brody to Pogost) indicates some familiarity with the area on Feldbin’s part. Both Brody and Berazino /Pogost belonged to the Polish Potocki family, so I speciulate about a possible commercial connection (I.e. Berezinskaya Waterway completed, Potockis decide to exploit new business opportunities in Byerazino, Feldbin hears about it and leaves for the Wild East). I have no data to support this, except for the fact that Zalman’s son Israel Feldbin had a documented (and tempestuous) business relationship with the Potocki counts, beginning in 1863. If you are interested, see “How Israel Feldbin Got the Best of Count Potocki ” at http://www.kehilalinks.jewishgen.org/Byerazino/family-stories/how-israel-feldbin-got-the.pdf