Conclusion: The Russian-Jewish Liberals and their Position in European Jewish History

Abstract

Contrary to the development in the West, where they appeared first, Jewish Liberals were the last of the four major political forces of Russian Jewry to appear on the political stage. The reasons for this reversal of the ‘normal’ historical sequence — which were not the object of this study — lay in the historical backwardness of Russia in general and of the Jewish community in Russia in particular, partly also in the fact that Russian Jews had not been emancipated. For these reasons, a modernized Jewish middle class or Jewish middle class intelligentsia were late to appear as it remained extremely difficult for Jews in the Russian empire to pursue normal lives and normal bourgeois careers. The Jewish communities largely remained caught in the patterns of a traditional life that did not allow for a separation of secular and religious leadership and that therefore had made no room for the participation of groups of Jews that had fully accepted a modern way of life and had cut a niche for themselves in that life. Only by the end of the ninteenth century these new forces of Jewish society grew strong enough, and the communities became sufficiently touched by some modicum of modernization, that the former could organize themselves and start to make their impact felt. Until then, small layers of a Jewish intelligentsia, Socialists or Zionists, acculturated in any case, had been able to show their flags as opposed to the vast masses of an immobile Orthodoxy.