Ellie R Schainker

Confessions of the Shtetl

Converts from Judaism in Imperial Russia, 1817-1906

• Gebundenes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

Confessions of the Shtetl explores Jewish conversions to a variety of Christian confessions in the Russian empire, with special attention to the relations of trust and attraction between Jews and Christians that facilitated religious conversions in the provincial heartland of Jewish Eastern Europe.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 360
• Erscheinungstermin: 16. November 2016
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 231mm x 155mm x 25mm
• Gewicht: 612g
• ISBN-13: 9780804798280
• ISBN-10: 0804798281
• Artikelnr.: 45003055

Autorenporträt

Ellie R. Schainker is the Arthur Blank Family Foundation Assistant Professor of History and Jewish Studies at Emory University.

Inhaltsangabe

Contents and Abstracts
Introduction: Converts and Confessions
chapter abstract
Thematically, the introduction first probes the role of the Russian
government in managing religious diversity and toleration, and thus the
relationship between mission and empire with regard to the Jews. Second, it
explores the day-to-day world of converts from Judaism in imperial Russia,
including the social, geographic, religious, and economic links among
converts, Christians, and Jews. This exploration of daily life is attuned
to convert motivations and post-baptism trajectories, and perhaps more
significantly, it focuses on everyday relations of trust and attraction
between Jews and their neighbors in the imperial Russian borderlands.
Finally, the introduction examines the challenges of constructing,
transgressing, and maintaining ethno-confessional boundaries by casting the
convert as a boundary-crosser who exposes and thus renders violable the
borders of faith, community, and nationhood.
1The Genesis of Confessional Choice
chapter abstract
Chapter 1 charts the institutionalization of confessional difference in the
Russian Empire, from Tsar Alexander I and the genesis of confessional
choice for Jews in 1817, to freedom of conscience measures instituted by
Tsar Nicholas II in the wake of the 1905 revolution, which allowed Jewish
converts to all tolerated confessions to legally reclaim their ancestral
faith. The chapter uses the 1820 conversion to Catholicism of Moshe
Schneerson, scion to the Chabad Hasidic dynasty, to illustrate the
conditions in pre-reform imperial Russia (1817-1855) that shaped the
conversion landscape for Jews. The tsarist state's missionary impulse was
tempered by religious toleration and the empire's increasing patronage and
sponsorship of a variety of Christian and non-Christian religions. The
Schneerson case also highlights how contemporary Jews actively engaged with
the problem of Jewish conversion and leveraged their confessional status to
vie with the state for control over apostasy and communal belonging.
2The Missionizing Marketplace
chapter abstract
Chapter 2 uses the story of the convert from Judaism turned missionary
Alexander Alekseev to highlight the overall reactive missionary policy of
the state and the Orthodox Church with regard to Jews. The chapter analyzes
self-appointed convert missionaries, their struggles with the strict
translation politics of the Holy Synod, and how many leveraged foreign,
non-Orthodox investments in proselytizing Jews to access Hebrew and Yiddish
publications of scriptures. The intellectual and literary biographies of
individual convert missionaries further illuminate how toleration and
multiconfessionalism created ambivalence about proselytizing Jews, and how
everyday Jewish encounters with Christianity were mediated by a range of
religious groups beyond just the Russian Orthodox Church. These convert cum
missionary stories are instructive for thinking about how converts
navigated the multiconfessional landscape and were acutely aware of the
marketplace of religion for Jews in a confessional state.
3Shtetls, Taverns, and Baptism
chapter abstract
Chapter 3 explores the social dynamics of religious toleration and the
confessional state from below by examining the spaces of Jewish conversion.
The chapter presents a range of conversion narratives which locate
interfaith encounters at the local tavern as the springboard for migrating
to a different confessional community. It analyzes daily social
interactions among Jewish and neighboring Polish, Lithuanian, Belorussian,
and Ukrainian communities, and how these encounters nurtured intimate
knowledge of other confessional lifestyles, facilitated interfaith
relationships, and provided access to the personnel and institutions of
other faiths. By taking a geographical approach, the chapter presents the
western provincial towns and villages of imperial Russia as interreligious
zones wherein conversion was predicated on interconfessional networks,
sociability, and a personal familiarity with Christianity via its
adherents. In exploring forms of encounter, the chapter highlights the role
of the local godparent-often local elites or civil/military personnel-in
facilitating confessional transfers.
4From Vodka to Violence
chapter abstract
Chapter 4 analyzes narratives of Jewish violence against converts as
another aspect of the provincial social threads of conversion. Here, the
local spaces of conversion are important for the proximity of baptisms to
the controlling gaze of Jewish family and community and the vulnerability
of convert relapse into a Jewish milieu. Conversion as a form of boundary
crossing raised anxieties about close interfaith living and became a
flashpoint for negotiating the local politics of confessional coexistence
and religious toleration. In these stories of violence in response to
conversions, confessional feuds became family affairs-complete with
familial contestation and the breakdown of the imperial, patriarchal family
through conversion. The chapter offers a view of Jewish politics, shaped
through empire and the confessional state, and the ways Jews worked through
state documentary practices to alternatively endorse and resist conversion,
and even mimic the previously violent, coercive practices of the state
towards converts.
5Relapsed Converts and Tales of Marranism
chapter abstract
Chapter 5 analyzes narratives of relapsed converts and their multiple
cultural fluencies using legal cases of converts suspected of illegally
relapsing back to Judaism before 1905 and petitions for relapse after the
legalization of apostasy in 1905. Imperial sponsorship of Russian Orthodoxy
combined with the criminality of Orthodox deviance until 1905 created an
environment in which Jewish converts often lived in the interstices of
communal and confessional life, defying clear religious categorization.
Relapsed converts and their tales of marranism, or secret Jewish practice,
called into question the confessional state's strategy of mapping identity
and community onto confessional ascription- especially in the wake of the
cantonist episode when legal and chosen religious identities were often at
odds. As church and state officials grappled with these difficulties,
relapsed converts and their defenders tried to inscribe their cultural
mobility into imperial law through freedom of conscience measures.
6Jewish-Christian Sects in Southern Russia
chapter abstract
Chapter 6 charts the proliferation of Jewish-Christian sects in southern
Russia in the 1880s and the confessional journeys of their leaders and
adherents who were in conversation with contemporary sectarian and
revolutionary political movements. These sects provided a forum for a
cross-cultural conversation in the public press on Jewish and Russian fears
of conversion, cultural hybridity, and trespassing the boundaries of
imperial confessions. The liminal space occupied by the sects highlighted
the tension between tolerated confession and personal faith in the empire,
and the question of where converts and schismatics communally belonged.
Epilogue: Converts on the Cultural Map
chapter abstract
The epilogue summarizes how the phenomenon of Russian Jewish conversion,
though marginal in number, left an outsized imprint on the cultural map of
East European Jews who grappled with questions of Jewish identity and the
role of religion in the increasingly powerful Jewish secular nationalist
ideologies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The
epilogue explores evolving Jewish attitudes towards baptism, interfaith
sociability, and cultural mobility in the late-imperial period, and it puts
conversions from Judaism in imperial Russia in conversation with
conversions from Judaism in the modern period more broadly. Finally, the
epilogue looks ahead to the inter-revolutionary period (1906-1917) and the
Soviet period when conversions from Judaism accelerated, accompanied by a
growing ethnic conception of Jewish identity whereby national Jewishness
found explicit harmony with Christian religious adherence.