Classless: On the social status of Jews in Russia and Eastern Europe in the late nineteenth century

In this paper I examine the economic and political factors that undermined the social class structure in an ethnic community - the Jews of Russia and eastern Europe at the end of the nineteenth century. Compared with the documented rise and articulation of working classes in non-Jewish society in that region, Jews were caught in an opposite process, largely owing to discriminatory state policies and social pressures: Among Jews, artisans and petty merchants were increasingly reduced to a single, caste-like status. A Jewish middle class of significant size did not emerge from the petty trade sector and no significant industrial working class emerged from the crafts sector. Historians have largely overlooked the significance of these facts, in part because they have viewed this east European situation as a mere preamble to more sophisticated, modern class formation processes among immigrant Jews in Western societies, particularly in light of the long-term middle-class trajectory of their children. Those historians interested in labor history have mainly shown interest in such continuity as they could infer from the self-narratives of the Jewish labor movement, and have thus overstated the case for a long-standing Jewish "proletarian" tradition. In reassessing the historical record, I wish to put the Jewish social and economic situation in eastern Europe into better perspective by looking at the overall social and economic situation, rather than at incipient worker organizations alone. I also query whether a developing class culture, along the lines suggested by E. P. Thompson, was at all in evidence before Jewish mass emigration. This paper is thus a contribution to the history of labor - rather than organized labor - as well as a discussion of the roots of ethnic economic identity.