In this unique book Brian Horowitz, Sizeler Family Chair Professor at Tulane University, articulates what is hidden in plain view: namely that many Jews in late-tsarist Russia were in love with its culture. Although they despised its government, large numbers of Jews eagerly joined Russian culture as members of the Russian cultural elite and participants in a distinct Russian-Jewish intelligentsia. Examining a broad range of figures and ideas at the heart of Jewish life during the revolutionary era at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, Brian Horowitz casts radically new portraits of such central intellectuals as Shimon Ansky, Simon Dubnov, Vladimir Jabotin–sky, Lev Shestov, Nikolai Berdyaev, and Mikhail Gershenzon, while reviv¬¬¬ing for the reader such forgotten heroes as Shimon Frug, Lev Levanda, Leib Jaffe, and Mikhail Morgulis. In the book Horowitz treats a broad panorama of subjects, encompassing legal studies, Jewish historio¬graphy, Jewish literature, Russian-Jewish relations, liberal politics, and Zionism.

This book “will revive interest in some of the most complex figures of Russian Jewish intellectual history, many of whom have been widely forgotten. Russian Jewish intellectual history has largely concentrated on those who contributed to the two major utopian projects of the 20th century: Zionism and Socialism. In many ways, Leon Trotsky and Vladimir Jabotinsky have become metonyms for all Russian Jewish intellectual history. […] The essays here demonstrate clearly the close intersection between key Jewish thinkers and Russian elite culture of the late 19th and early 20th century, thereby challenging the conventional impression of Jewish isolation within the Russian Empire.” Jeffrey Veidlinger, Indiana University

This book is volume 2 of the series New Approaches to Russian and East European Jewish Culture.

Book Reviews

Review in Jahrbucher für Geschichte Osteuropas, Volume 59, no. 3, 2011 (via Recensio.net, Review platform for European History)

In 987 or 988 AD, the Kievan prince Vladimir Sviatoslavich chose to adopt the Christian religion for his people, a move that earned him a permanent place in the history of the East Slavs, the peoples that now inhabit Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. Enlightener of Rus' is the most detailed survey in any language of literary perceptions of Vladimir from the 11th century through the early 18th century. The first two chapters examine the earliest extant representations of the prince, in the Sermon on Law and Grace attributed to the Metropolitan Ilarion and in the Kievan Primary Chronicle. The third chapter deals with the reasons for the long delay in Vladimir's canonization and the probable date and location of that canonization (in Novgorod around 1300). The fourth covers the growth of interest in the saint as a political figure in Muscovy from the 13th through the 16th century. The fifth traces the development of representations of Vladimir in Ukraine during the 16th and 17th centuries. The sixth discusses portrayals of the prince in the works of Feofan Prokopovich and Gavriil Buzhinskii, and concludes by suggesting that representations of Peter the Great in the early 18th century were consciously modelled on representations of Vladimir. The seventh outlines the development of the prince's image from the early 18th century to the present. The book is intended for anyone interested in Vladimir and his image. While most readers are likely to be literary scholars or historians, the text is designed to meet the needs of undergraduates and casual readers as well. Although the saint is is referred to as "Vladimir" rather than as "Volodymer," the name that he bears in Ukraine, the book should be of interest to readers interested in the development not only of Russian, but also of Ukrainian and (to a lesser extent) of Belarusian literature and culture.

Contributions by eminent American and European scholars for the sixtieth birthday of a noted Soviet medievalist; the studies are primarily in the field of history. Also contains a study of Zimin's work and a complete bibliography of his publications. Contents: Daniel Clarke Waugh: A. A. Zimin's Study of the Sources for Medieval and Early Modern Russian History; Bibliography of the Works of A. A. Zimin; Gustave Alef: Was Grand Prince Dmitrii Ivanovich Ivan III's `King of the Romans'?; Samuel H. Baron: Shipbuilding and Seafaring in Sixteenth-Century Russia; Robert O. Crummey: Court Spectacles in Seventeenth-Century Russia: Illusion and Reality; John Fennell: The Last Years of Riurik Rostislavich; Carsten Goehrke: Entwicklungslinien und Schwerpunkte der westlichen Russlandmediaevistik;Frank Kampfer: Die `parsuna' Ivans IV. in Kopenhagen - Originalportrat oder historisches Bild?; Edward L. Keenan: The Karp/Polikarp Conundrum: Some Light on the History of `Ivan IV's First Letter'; A. M. Kleimola: Patterns of Duma Recruitment, 1505-1550; Ludolf Mueller: Zum dogmatischen Gehalt der Dreifaltigkeitsikone von Andrei Rublev; Andzhej Poppe: K nachal'noj istorii kul'ta sv. Nikoly Zarazskogo; Rex Rexheuser: Ballotage: Zur Gechichte des Wahlens in Russland; Hartmut Ruess: Adel und Nachfolgefrage im Jahre 1553: Betrachtungen zur Glaubwuerdigkeit einer umstrittenen Quelle; Wladimir Vodoff: Le Slovo pokhval'noe o velikom kniaze Borise Aleksandroviche: est-il une source historique?; Index of personal names. "Alles im allem ein ueberaus gehaltvoller Band, der in eindrucksvoller Vielfalt von Quellen und Methoden dem wissenschaftlichen Verstaendnis des alten Russland dient." (Jahrbuecher fuer Geschichte Osteuropas) "This is an extraordinary book..." (CSP)

Contents:

Richard Stites: Festival and Revolution: The Role of Public Spectacle in Russia, 1917-1918;
Gabriele Gorzka: Proletarian Culture in Practice: Workers' Clubs, 1917-1921;
Felix Patrikeeff: Russian and Soviet Economic Penetration of North-Eastern China, 1895-1933;
Ben-Cion Pinchuk: Sovietization of the Shtetl of Eastern Poland, 1939-1941;
Michal Reiman: The Russian Revolution and Stalinism: A Political Problem and Its Historiographic Content;
Pierre Brouï: Party Opposition to Stalin (1930-1932) and the First Moscow Trial;
Graeme Gill: Stalinism and Institutionalization: The Nature of Stalin's Regional Support;
Niels E. Rosenfeldt: Stalinism as a System of Communication;
Michael Gelb: Mass Politics under Stalinism: Two Case Studies;
William Chase and J. Arch Getty: The Soviet Bureaucracy in 1935: A Socio-Political Profile;
Roberta T. Manning: Peasants and Party: Rural Administration in the Soviet Countryside on the Eve of World War II.

Everyday Life and the "Reconstruction" of Soviet Russia During and After the Great Patriotic War, 1943–1948 reminds us of how little we know about the end of the war and the immediate post-war era in the Soviet Union. Jones uses the case of Rostov-on-Don, totally devastated by the vast battles that raged around it, to reveal how people and party responded to the grim task that confronted them after the German forces were expelled. Society and state both strived to rebuild but comprehended the process differently. In the official "reconstruction" mythology, state and party leaders portrayed themselves as a vanguard, whereas local populations, mostly workers, saw them as a privileged elite. The chapters revolve around these conflicting interpretative ideologies, as expressed through official public sources, internal documents, police reports on the population, and interviews and memoirs. What emerges is a portrayal, compelling and persuasive, of the physical realities of rebuilding the infrastructures of modern life and the ways various elements of society perceived the process. Jones' study will help define our approaches to chronicling post-war Soviet life, the most exciting new field in Russian historiography. From the Introduction: The period officially dubbed “reconstruction” has not received due attention in the scholarly literature. The natural tendency is to look at the war years (1941–45) or concentrate on the period from the end of the war to Stalin’s death (1945–53). Yet the period of reconstruction (1943–48) is vitally important in part precisely because it bridges the war and postwar periods. The end of the war in Europe in May 1945 is, of course, highly significant […] However, the end of the war is not the natural breaking point historians often designate it as because many of the issues facing societies in the immediate postwar period were rooted in the prewar and war years. […] The regime’s heroic tale of “reconstruction” ended abruptly (and somewhat arbitrarily) in 1948 [the year of the Soviet blockade of Berlin and the US and British airlift to end it], a year which many scholars in Soviet history have noted as an important turning point [and] relations with the USSR’s wartime allies had turned cold.

This book is Volume 3 of the  Allan K. Wildman Group Historical Series