Ostjuden: a review

Shalom Boguslavsky’s book, Ostjuden: The Forgotten Story (published in Hebrew as הסיפור הבלתי סביר והלא מספיק זכור על עלייתה ונפילתה של מזרח אירופה היהודית) is not only a wonderful, captivating, and enjoyable work of popular history. It is also a serious and important book that can contribute to our collective historical memory and to the way we, Jewish Israelis, understand the relationship between our present and our past.

My perspective is relevant to this book because my PhD dissertation focused on the economic history of Eastern European Jewry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In recent years, I have also become interested in earlier periods covered in the book. I am not a historian but an economist, which means that I do not read the relevant languages or specialize in archival research. Instead, I focus on collecting and analyzing historical statistical data. But to do so, I have read many books and articles dealing precisely with the history surveyed here. As a result, I am broadly familiar with some of the current scholarly literature on which Boguslavsky relies, and I can roughly situate his book within that literature and assess its contribution.

I think I understand how Boguslavsky came to write this book. He, too, is not a historian, but rather a user of history as an input for his own trade, namely a tour guide in the Eastern European lands discussed in the book. Anyone who has read his columns and posts over the years knows that his craft is storytelling: explaining complex political and social realities in a way that is as profound as it is entertaining. Doing this well requires reading a great deal of history, and in doing so, he must have encountered the same problem I did: there is no up-to-date book that presents this important history in an organized and accessible way for a general audience. One can guide tours in places like Kraków, Warsaw, Kyiv, or Lviv, rely on a handful of Holocaust stories, and spice things up with colorful anecdotes. But to do this seriously, one must also provide context—and there is no single book that does this well, comprehensively, and in a modern and up-to-date way. I can imagine that this book took shape in Boguslavsky’s mind over a long period of time, born out of necessity and the absence of an alternative, until there was simply no choice but to write it himself.

What existed until now? A partial list includes the classic and monumental series by Salo Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews, which contains several volumes dealing with Eastern Europe, or Simon Dubnow’s earlier book History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. These works are still important, but they are outdated, and it is hard to say that they are suitable today for a general audience. One can also mention the old Hebrew textbook edited by Israel Halpern, The House of Israel in Poland (בית ישראל בפולין), most of whose chapters were written by the historian Meir Balaban—a book that is far more than a textbook. There is also Bernard (Dov) Weinryb’s The Jews of Poland: A Social and Economic History. More recent is Gershon Hundert’s Jews in Poland–Lithuania in the Eighteenth Century, which of course deals with only a sub-period of nearly 700 years of Jewish settlement in Eastern Europe. One might also mention Jews and Ukrainians: A Millennium of Coexistence by Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern and Paul Magocsi (in English), which focuses specifically on Ukraine; or Yuri Slezkine’s The Jewish Century, which focuses on the modern era and the Jewish–Russian encounter. But until now, there was no book that was accessible, fluent, covered the entire span of Jewish existence in Eastern Europe (or at least the territories that were part of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth), was intellectually serious and firmly grounded in up-to-date scholarship, and at the same time told great stories rather than merely reciting history. This is precisely the niche filled by Boguslavsky’s book: history that is popular without compromising seriousness, depth, or breadth. There is quite a bit of colorful detail in the book, but it is inductive color—not there merely to hook the reader, but first and foremost to illuminate the core.

But Boguslavsky does more than that. At least two topics are covered in the book better than in any other account I know: the Cossack uprisings led by Bohdan Khmelnytsky, known in Jewish tradition as פרעות ת”ח-ת”ט (the massacres of 1648–49), and the participation of Jews as fighters—here and there—mainly in municipal self-defense militias and, more rarely, as soldiers in regular armies. The book’s treatment of the Cossack uprisings illustrates well its advantage as a work of Jewish history, in that it fully internalizes the need to read the history of Eastern European Jewry not as an internally Jewish process of development, but as an integral part of Eastern European history as a whole. To understand the significance of the Cossack uprisings, one must understand the place of Cossack society within the geopolitical and socioeconomic space between three powers: Tsarist Russia, the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, and the Ottoman Empire, with Sweden and various German principalities occasionally entering the stage as secondary actors. One must also discard the common stereotypes in Jewish collective memory that portray the Cossacks as bloodthirsty, mounted beasts. In the Khmelnytsky uprising, most Cossacks fought on foot. More importantly, as deadly and gruesome as their massacres were, the Cossacks are better understood as another social estate in Eastern Europe, distinctive like any other, attempting to carve out a niche of freedom and modest prosperity in the borderlands between empires. The story of the uprising is thus far more complex and nuanced than the familiar version, according to which Khmelnytsky was a vicious rebel leader who led the Cossacks in revolt against the Polish nobility and, along the way, slaughtered their Jewish protégés. The Jews were not at the center of this event, which was no less important for the development of Ukrainian or Polish identity and history than it was for Jewish history.

Eastern Europe was an ethnic and religious hodgepodge, where Poles, Ukrainians, Tatars, Russians, Belarusians, Germans, Lithuanians, Moldovans, Jews—and at times also Dutch, Scots, Italians, Greeks, and Armenians—lived side by side in the same places at the same times. The Jews’ neighbors included Orthodox Christians, Catholics, Uniates, Protestants, Muslims, and Karaites. The underlying logic of Boguslavsky’s book is that one cannot understand the history of the Jews there without understanding the entire stew. That means starting with the history of Rus’, tracing the separate paths of state formation in Poland, Lithuania, and Muscovy, following the settlement of the Polish and later Ukrainian frontier, and so on — exactly as one would when studying Ukrainian, Polish, or Russian history. Compared to most of the books mentioned above, Boguslavsky takes this task very seriously, and this is an important innovation.

Another strength of Boguslavsky’s writing is his talent for explaining complex processes and concepts clearly and concisely to the layman. A partial list includes explanations of the different social estates in Eastern European society and their economic roles; the structure of the Polish state; the rise of the absolutist state; Sabbateanism; Hasidism and opposition to it; the Haskalah; nationalism; and Zionism. He also does important work dismantling stereotypes about Jews—the Fiddler on the Roof type and many others. As he observes:

Everyone carries in their head an image whose connection to historical reality is quite dubious. Everyone suppresses and forgets the parts of history they do not like or that do not serve them, and relates with romantic nostalgia to those that do. For everyone, the image of Jewish Eastern Europe is strongly influenced by the time and place in which they live, because the real Eastern Europe is a distant and unfamiliar place for most of them.

The dominant popular view, held by many—Jewish and non-Jewish alike—is that Eastern European Jews were passive and wretched, whose main defense against harassment from authorities, nobles, and neighbors was prayer and waiting for the Messiah. This is a fiction, rooted in a distorted twentieth-century memory of the nineteenth-century Pale of Settlement. For centuries, Jews were one estate among others, enjoying extensive rights, economic power, administrative and legal autonomy, and a shrewd ability to maneuver politically. They were part of a complex web of political and economic forces, and they were not always only on the receiving end. Jews did live in small towns, but they were also present in villages, forming an integral part of the rural economy and the landscape of the frontier. As Boguslavsky puts it,

A Western is a far more fitting image than a contemporary ultra-Orthodox community.

As economists might say: update your priors.

A few words about style. The first thing one notices when reading the opening lines of the book is that it is written partly in a colloquial register. This can easily become a serious problem. Some writers fall into this trap in a failed attempt to draw the reader closer, to make the text easier, to ingratiate themselves. There are good reasons why nonfiction is written in a higher linguistic register than everyday speech and does not try to entice the reader with expressions like “you gotta hear this” or “listen to this” (the latter appears in the fourth paragraph of the introduction). Anyone familiar with Boguslavsky’s writing on social media knows this is his style: he is a master of colloquial writing, and the style does not cheapen the content but rather enhances the reading experience. The writing evokes a friend sitting with you over a beer, unloading the ideas crowding his head, or a guide providing the narration that completes the experience of touring a foreign city.

But style is also content. The early history of Eastern European Jewry has until now been held almost exclusively by academic historians—scholars who devoted their lives passionately to the subject, but whose professional incentives pushed them toward microscopic innovations, peer persuasion, and writing primarily for one another. What often gets lost along the way is the story: the flow of life and the animation of history. I think this is exactly what Boguslavsky wanted to convey—that we should not think of Eastern European Jewish society as a fossil or merely an object for academic study, but imagine it as a living, visceral, entertaining, dynamic entity, constantly changing. What is worth remembering is not only documents, rulings, and episodes of persecution, but also brawls, drunkenness, love affairs, and vibrant family and communal life. He wants us to imagine real people, to put ourselves in their place, and to see the world through their eyes. Their story ought to be told by a storyteller, not only by a historian.

A common way of describing the crisis of Eastern European Jewry in the final decades of the nineteenth century is as a kind of big bang, triggered by the growing realization that the modern world—particularly in its Russian incarnation—offered no viable path forward for the traditional way of life. There were several ways of responding to this reality. The most common was denial: an attempt to continue living traditional lives in defiance of mounting negative signals. Another was withdrawal and the construction of fences, an approach that eventually gave rise to today’s ultra-Orthodox society. Other responses were revolutionary: Zionism; joining the Russian revolutionary movement, usually in various labor-oriented forms, including the Bundist version that did not abandon Jewish nationalism; or emigration to America.

The Jewish Century, Yuri Slezkine’s book mentioned above, focuses on this period and tells the story of the big bang through the lives of Tevye the Dairyman’s three daughters—the Zionist, the one who ran away with her non-Jewish lover, and the one who emigrated to America. Slezkine is particularly interested in the formation of the Jewish–Soviet individual, but there is a degree of symmetry in his account among the three revolutionary options, since it was impossible to know in advance which, if any, would offer a solution to the Jewish question.

When Boguslavsky reaches this period, he chooses to emphasize one path—the one that led to Zion. Had Boguslavsky been an American Jew, this path would likely have received only marginal attention, roughly commensurate with its numerical weight at the time and its limited importance for the early stages of American Jewish growth. In that case, the chapter would probably have focused much more on the Bundists and the birth of the Jewish proletariat in the northwestern provinces of the Pale of Settlement, whose representation in Boguslavsky’s book is relatively modest. Of course, westward migration—ultimately chosen by roughly a third of the population—would then have become the climactic event.

That is to say, while most of the book deals with the multiple currents of earlier centuries, which are relevant to all three of Tevye’s revolutionary daughters, when Boguslavsky reaches the late nineteenth-century fork in the road he largely follows only one path. The reason becomes clear in the final chapter, which addresses the significance of Eastern European Jewish historical memory for contemporary Israel. In other words, the goal is not only to tell the story of this diaspora, but also to understand its meaning for the lives of that segment of its descendants who now live in Israel.

The part of the book that deals with the nineteenth century—the period in which most of the territories inhabited by Eastern European Jews fell under tsarist rule and became the Pale of Settlement—differs from the earlier sections in another important respect as well. Whereas the history of earlier centuries is indeed an insufficiently remembered story (as the Hebrew title has it), such that the book fills a genuine gap on the shelf, the big bang of the late nineteenth century is a well-documented story that has been told many times. Boguslavsky’s challenge here is therefore not how to introduce this history to an audience unfamiliar with it, but how to present it from a fresh angle. His choice is to examine it through the personal perspectives of several central figures and the upheavals they experienced: a secret police officer, an unhinged and ruthless revolutionary, a great poet, and an antisemitic agitator. This approach works well, but it also produces a different reading experience and a different kind of contribution to the Israeli bookshelf: rather than laying out a story that was never told, the innovation lies in the choice of multiple, often eccentric, perspectives.

Moreover, the events of this period took place in a world in which print was widely accessible and mass journalism already existed, and they are therefore richly documented. The Jewish population was also many times larger than in earlier centuries—about five million in 1897, compared with roughly 750,000 in 1765 and no more than a few tens of thousands in the sixteenth century. In other words, there is an orders-of-magnitude increase in the number of events that could be covered, while the canvas itself is not infinite. Episodes that could easily have filled entire chapters are compressed into a few pages, and I found myself wishing that Boguslavsky could devote an entire separate book to this period alone.

One example of this approach is the figure of Jacob Brafman, who is mentioned only briefly in the book. Brafman, who is indeed largely forgotten today, was a disruptive and quarrelsome figure within the Jewish community who converted to Christianity and then exploited his intimate familiarity with Jewish religious life and communal institutions to act as a censor of Jewish texts on behalf of the Russian bureaucracy. He incited the tsarist regime and Russian public opinion against Jewish communal leadership through denunciations and exposés that were not entirely fabricated. His Book of the Kahal (kniga kagala) is perhaps the most important antisemitic text written between Martin Luther’s On the Jews and Their Lies (1543) and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (1903), for which it served as a clear inspiration. An entire current of Russian Judeophobia drew intellectual sustenance from the materials Brafman supplied. In short, Brafman was a marginal Jew, but his very deviance illuminates the pressures operating within and upon Jewish communal life—its internal tensions, its vulnerabilities, and its constraints. Despite his marginality, he left a tangible mark on the history of Jewish–Russian relations. One can only imagine the ten pages Boguslavsky would have devoted to him in the book that never-written second book.

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The announcement that Ostjuden will be translated into English is unsurprising, but nonetheless thrilling. If this was not already clear, the book is a must-read for anyone curious about Jewish history, from interested amateurs to professional scholars. It is entertaining, but it will also change your priors.