Russia's First Modern Jews

Yoichi Funabashi

ISBN 10: 0814726607 / ISBN 13: 9780814726600

Published by New York University Press NYU Press, 1996

About this Item

pp. 212.

Seller Inventory # 261825564

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Russia's First Modern Jews
• Publisher: New York University Press NYU Press
• Publication Date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0814726607
• ISBN 13: 9780814726600
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

Long before there were Jewish communities in the land of the tsars, Jews inhabited a region which they called medinat rusiya, the land of Russia. Prior to its annexation by Russia, the land of Russia was not a center of rabbinic culture. But in 1772, with its annexation by Tsarist Russia, this remote region was severed from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth; its 65,000 Jews were thus cut off from the heartland of Jewish life in Eastern Europe. Forced into independence, these Jews set about forging a community with its own religious leadership and institutions.
The three great intellectual currents in East European Jewry--Hasidism, Rabbinic Mitnagdism, and Haskalah--all converged on Eastern Belorussia, where they clashed and competed. In the course of a generation, the community of Shklov—the most prominent of the towns in the area—witnessed an explosion of intellectual and cultural activity.
Focusing on the social and intellectual odysseys of merchants, maskilim, and rabbis, and their varied attempts to combine Judaism and European culture, David Fishman here chronicles the remarkable story of these first modern Jews of Russia.

About the Authors

David E. Fishman is Associate Professor of Jewish History at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America.

Yoichi Funabashi is currently the Washington Bureau Chief of the Asahi Shimbun, a Japanese daily at which he has served as a correspondent in Washington, D.C., and Beijing and as diplomatic correspondent and columnist. He has been a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and a Ushiba Fellow at the Institute for International Economics.