Turgenev and the 'Jewish Question'

Turgenev and the ‘Jewish Question’ Elena Katz The ‘Jewish question’ is part of other issues of Russian life which are more important; when the latter are solved, the former will be solved of its own accord. Ivan Turgenev The ‘Jewish question’ was one of the most hotly disputed issues of Turgenev’s time. Yet that issue remained marginal in Turgenev’s writings, giving the impression that this distinguished writer and adherent of European humanism and democracy was ignorant of the gloomy realities experienced by millions of Russian Jews.1 The absence of civil rights, the poor standard of living, discrimination and pogroms were the hallmarks of imperial Jewish history. In fact, however Turgenev was neither unconcerned about nor unsympathetic to the plight of Jews in Russia. As my analysis will show, a combination of various factors contributed to his status as a bystander in regard to the ‘Jewish question’. That question may be seen as among the less important of the many painful ‘questions’ waiting to be addressed in nineteenth-century imperial Russia, where the state of the majority of the population, the Russian serfs, was one of destitution. Russian authors advocating the emancipation of the serfs found inspiration in contrasting serfdom with the position of blacks in America. The hugely popular Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) heightened the interest of Russian society in the issue of liberty. Turgenev’s novel Smoke (1867) narrated the story of an encounter in Paris between Harriet Beecher Stowe and a Russian landowner, Tentelev, who was ‘a most terrible despot with his serfs, though he gave himself out as an emancipator’. On Tentelev’s request to be introduced to her she replied, once she heard his name, ‘“What? He presumes to be introduced to the author of Uncle Tom?” And she gave him a slap on the cheek! “Go away!” she said. “At once!” And what do you think? Tentelev took his hat and slunk away, very despondent’ (VII, 262).2 The Russian serf and the American black were a common object of sympathy among leading men of Russian letters. The history of the development of Russian state policies toward its Jewish population provides a necessary context to Turgenev’s view of the position of Jews in Russia as an element of the larger problematics 170 Elena Katz of the country’s socio-economic and political developments. These ‘other issues of Russian life’ had crucial repercussions when the Jewish people, an insignificant drop in the imperial ethnic melting pot at the start of the nineteenth century, were turned into a default target-group for the pogroms of the last quarter of the same century. Hence my enquiry begins with an outline of the history of the ‘Jewish question’ in the Russian Empire.3 I will then focus on Turgenev’s personal agenda regarding that question. Finally, I will consider some of his fiction, focusing on the story The End of Chertopkhanov (1871-2), which best reflects his stance on the ‘Jewish question’. What To Do with the Jews? In brief, the ‘Jewish question’ for the Russian state was an issue of ‘how to deal with the Jews’. Before the partitions of Poland in the last quarter of the eighteenth century the Jews as such were absent from Russia, a rarity consigned to the abstract realm of commonplace negative stereotypes imported from the West which regarded the Jews as ‘aesthetically unappealing aliens’.4 The Russian state had no need to ‘deal with the Jews’, nor did Russian society need to formulate attitudes to a people who were not part of the imperial landscape. A European traveller to Vienna in 1786 recorded the Jews’ exotic ‘foreignness’, manifested in the peculiarity of their manners, appearance, religion and language, with the following words: ‘Polish Jews, all swathed in black, their faces bearded and their hair all twisted in knots, resemble scarecrows: a living satire of the Chosen Race’.5 This view was typical of perceptions of Polish Jewry, whose traditional occupations as leaseholders, tavernkeepers and petty traders contributed to the formation of unflattering attitudes to Eastern European Jews in the West. In Poland Jews acted as intermediaries between the peasants and the Polish Catholic landowner, who, as noted by the historian John Klier, ‘often had no desire to manage his own serf estate’. Polish Jews made a living from ‘leasing the numerous prerogatives and monopolies that the landowner enjoyed’.6 Among these leases was the right of propination (distilling and selling alcohol), which largely predetermined the precarious social position of the Polish Jew. This go-between role made him responsible for the landowner’s actions and the image of the Jew both exploiting the peasant and corrupting him with drink entered the annals of Polish anti- Jewish sentiments, which later became an intrinsic element of the.

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