Jewish marginal people in premodern Europe -- Blind beggars and orphan recruits : the Russian state, the kahal, and marginal Jews in the early nineteenth century -- "A pile of dust and rubble" : poorhouses, real and imaginary -- The cholera wedding -- A "republic of beggars"? : charity, Jewish backwardness, and the specter of the Jewish idler -- Madness and the mad : from family burden to national affliction -- "We singing Jews, we Jews possessed" : the Jewish outcast as national icon.
This article explores the associational life of late imperial Kiev to gauge the extent of Jewish participation in the city's civil society and the nature of interethnic relations in the voluntary sphere. Natan Meir demonstrates that, despite political and societal circumstances that often discouraged positive interactions between Jews and their Russian and Ukrainian neighbors, the voluntary association made possible opportunities for constructive interethnic encounters. These opportunities included a range of experiences from full Jewish integration to a segregation of Jewish interests within the sphere of activity of a particular association. While taking into account the central role of intergroup tensions and hostility in Kiev, Meir notes that the frequency of contacts between Jews and non-Jews was higher than most scholars have assumed. By placing the case of Kiev against the larger framework of the Russian empire as well as other European states, Meir contributes to our understanding of the development of late imperial civil society and of the modern Jewish experience in the late Russian empire and across urban Europe.
What's in a pogrom? European Jews in the age of violence / David Engel -- 1915 and the war pogrom paradigm in the Russian empire / Eric Lohr -- The role of personality in the first (1914-1915) Russian occupation of Galicia and Bukovina / Peter Holquist -- Freedom, shortages, violence: the origins of the "revolutionary anti-Jewish pogrom" in Russia, 1917-1918 / Vladimir P. Buldakov -- Preventing pogroms: patterns in Jewish politics in early twentieth-century Russia / Vladimir Levin -- The sword hanging over their heads: the significance of pogrom for Russian Jewish everyday life and self-understanding (the case of Kiev) / Natan M. Meir -- The possibility of the impossible: pogroms in Eastern Siberia / Lilia Kalmina -- Was Lithuania a pogrom-free zone? (1881-1940) / Vladas Sirutavičius and Darius Staliūnas -- The missing pogroms of Belorussia, 1881-1882: conditions and motives of an absence of violence / Claire Le Foll -- Ethnic conflict and modernization in the interwar period: the case of Soviet Belorussia / Arkadi Zeltser -- Defusing the ethnic bomb: resolving local conflict through philanthropy in the interwar USSR / Jonathan Dekel-Chen
