most destitute were buried in mass graves.32
Provincial governors sent detailed reports of the horrors they wit-
nessed. Initially, St. Petersburg responded by dismissing the news as
“unsubstantiated rumors,” but eventually it sent Senator D. O. Baranov
to inspect the hungry towns and villages.33 Baranov concluded what so
many others had said before him: he blamed the deteriorating situation
on Jews’ exploitation of the peasantry. The moment the commonwealth
was partitioned, Russia’s concerns with peasant drunkenness led to a
series of prohibitions on the liquor trade, with Jews as the chief tar-
gets. On April 11, 1823, Alexander I (reaffirming article 34 of the 1804
small-tOwn life
45
statute) forbade Jews from holding a lease on a tavern, drinking house,
or inn, and selling or distributing liquor in villages. The net result of
the state’s attempt to legislate tavern keeping was the resettlement of
tens of thousands of souls from the countryside. By January 1, 1824,
authorities expelled nearly 20,000 Jews from Chernigov and Poltava
provinces, 12,804 from Mogilev, and 7,651 from Vitebsk.34 In the ensu-
ing years, the situation got particularly bad in overcrowded towns. In
a desperate attempt to make a living, hungry and unemployed Jews
petitioned the governor- general’s office to allow them to return to the
countryside to find odd jobs in carpentry, blacksmithing, and road and
canal construction.35
Just as the imperial administration was busy drawing distinct
lines between Jews and peasants, it started to devise extensive poli-
cies to impose administrative order on its religious minorities. The
conscription of Jews into the imperial army in August 1827 con-
stituted the first successful effort to socially engineer the lives and
institutions of the largest Jewish population in the world. Parents
and children alike perceived military service to be a most frighten-
ing experience. For Jewish males between the ages of twelve and
twenty- five, the twenty- five- year term seemed like a death sentence.
The army’s missionary tactics resulted in more than twenty thousand
conversions, mostly of destitute and orphaned young males. In no
time, Nicholas’s conscription law sent shock waves throughout the
Jewish communities in the Pale, but the emperor had no intention
of stopping there.36
Nicholas’s regime spent considerable energy intervening in Jewish
communal affairs. Above all, it hoped to minimize the efficacy of the
kahal (the executive board of the community) and rabbinic authority.
Long before the 1844 reform officially weakened Jewish communal
autonomy, the tsars, from Catherine II to Nicholas I, considered sev-
eral proposals to refashion collective representation and to make the
state the ultimate arbiter of individual grievances. The drive to curtail
autonomous institutions represented a crucial moment in the state’s
efforts to forge direct links with its diverse populations. The campaigns
were largely consistent with the techniques with which the state man-
aged its vast empire. The idea was to do away with local intermediaries
who presided over a variety of matters involving record keeping, census
46
46
the Velizh affair
collection, and municipal administration. The reforms to destabilize
Jewish communal life were felt in the domestic sphere as well, includ-
ing the wildly unpopular sartorial decrees prohibiting men and women
from wearing Jewish dress.37
In the 1820s, when the Velizh ritual murder investigation was in full
swing, the state’s interventionist designs had not been fully put into
action. A community steeped in the day- to- day rhythms of Judaism
continued to define itself according to the Jewish calendar. The Jewish
spaces in Vitebsk and Mogilev provinces were populated by followers
of a branch of Hasidism known as Habad. Founded by Rabbi Shneur
Zalman at the end of the eighteenth century, the movement was cen-
tered in Liubavachi, only seventy miles south of Velizh.38 Hasidism, a
popular religious revival movement, emerged spontaneously. A group
of pious Torah scholars, Kabbalists, and baalei shem (miracle workers) made mystical ethos and ecstatic prayer a central part of religious experience. The groups were headed by tsaddikim (righteous individuals) known for their charismatic religious leadership, folksy discussions, and
supernatural powers. The tsaddikim established lavish courts and exerted a great deal of influence over their followers. The masses expressed their
allegiance through prayer, pilgrimages, the repetition of sermons, and
other religious activities. The misnagdim— the rabbinical opponents who elevated ascetic Torah studies— were greatly offended by the mystical prayers and communication with the supernatural realm, and dispar-
aged the baalei shem as superficial mystics and quack doctors.39
By the turn of the nineteenth century, Hasidism was firmly estab-
lished as a folk movement, which then split into numerous branches,
with large and small groups flourishing in Poland, Ukraine, Galicia, cer-
tain parts of Belarus, and various other corners of Eastern Europe. For
the Russian government, the Hasidim was one dark mass of religious
zealots, who “at time of prayer made loud, frightening noise— crying,
clapping hands together, performing somersaults, swinging arms in all
directions, while distorting and convulsing their bodies,” in the words
of Derzhavin.40 He compared the Hasidim to Russian Orthodox schis-
matics who had deviated from established religious norms and set new
customs for itself.41
In point of fact, important regional differences shaped the lifestyles
and religious activities of Hasidic communities. Shneur Zalman’s
small-tOwn life
47
principal contribution to Habad was in the form of an intellectual
spirituality and emphasis on practical action. After being charged with
sedition, he told Russian interrogators that the Hasidim “fulfilled the
commandments of God much more punctiliously than ordinary Jews,
and even more than some of the ones learned in Torah.”42 For his part,
Zalman took on the role of an educator and a spiritual guide. He never
claimed that the holy spirit permeated his sermons. Zalman may have
distanced himself from practical Kabbala practices— the ability to influ-
ence the supernatural realm by way of charms, amulets, and mystical
prayers— but his conception of Judaism was nevertheless imbued with
Kabbalistic doctrines.43
The thousands of Jews who visited Shneur Zalman’s court rarely lived
above the subsistence level. They came for advice, solace, and prayer,
harboring intense expectations that the tsaddik would help with their earthly needs. Most people in the northwest provinces of the Russian
Empire, including no smal number of Jews in Velizh, possessed the
barest necessities to feed their families. For the better part of the nine-
teenth century, Vitebsk province was in desperate economic shape. The
provincial governor warned St. Petersburg that the “standard of living
of the po
pulation would continue to decline if a positive resolution to
the situation would not soon be found.”44 In the span of thirty years,
between 1822 and 1852, the province was hit with ten disappointing har-
vests, three of which turned into famines.45 The scarcity of resources and
large- scale outbreaks of epidemics caused widespread misfortune. After
a tour of the region in 1841, one inspector found that there was little or
no maintenance of infrastructure in most provincial towns, including
bridges, highways, and streets. Nor was there any new construction
of town squares, public gardens, inns, and bridges. The morale of the
population was so low that more people died by suicide (56) than by
homicide (18).46
Russian administrators devised plans, usually with little foresight or
creativity, to increase productivity. Authorities blamed the underde-
velopment on two main factors: poor soil fertility, which contributed
to the inconsistency in crop yields, and the Jewish monopolization of
small- scale trade. It did not help matters that excessive rains curbed
grain yields and damaged plant roots and hay.47 The bulk of the govern-
ment programs, including restrictions on Jewish commercial activities,
48
48
the Velizh affair
did little to ease hunger problems or advance growth. The mass popula-
tion transfers— the main conduit by which the state hoped to trans-
form agricultural settlements— resulted in a severe loss of income for
Polish landlords, fueled overcrowding, and ultimately did nothing to
change the functional structure of the towns.48 The idea was to remake
urban centers into active sites of manufacturing and trade by replacing
the Jewish cloth stall— the principal site of exchange— with large- scale
industry.49 But for the better part of the second quarter of the nine-
teenth century, much of the economic output consisted of cheap goods
manufactured for local customers. Nearly 87 percent of the enterprises
involved the production of wine and beer, 11 percent of brick and
leather, and less than 2 percent of Jewish ritual garments, linens, glass,
and wax candles.50
The Vitebsk provincial economy displayed striking similarities to
that of sixteenth century Europe, where market towns within a radius
of fifty to one hundred square miles consumed the bulk of the agricul-
tural output. With the occupational structure firmly rooted in local
households and villages and semiautonomous market towns, the main
problem to overcome was how to expand interregional trade.51 In the
end, the commercial activities paled in comparison to what was hap-
pening in Podolia, Volynia, and Kiev (what is now Ukraine) or Nizhnii
Novgorod (the Russian heartland). On a typical day at a local fair in
a Ukrainian market town, customers could acquire an assortment of
locally manufactured and imported goods, such as rolls of fine silk,
velvet, satin fabric, caviar, coffee, Turkish beans, almonds, Chinese tea,
boots, belts, smoked fish, and tobacco.52 The Makar’ev Fair in Nizhnii
Novgorod turned into the largest gathering in all of Europe, attracting
Chinese and Jewish merchants, Russian textile producers, entertainers,
and more than one million visitors annually.53 By contrast, the Vitebsk
provincial fairs were so poorly attended that merchants from neigh-
boring regions decided that it was not worth the meager payoff to haul
caravans of heavy merchandise over the long distances. The bulk of the
Belarusian population lived in a state of semi- starvation and had no
means to buy anything of material significance. In 1848, at the annual
fair in Dinaburg, less than 37 percent of all goods were sold; the total
was slightly lower for Drissa, at 35 percent. With respect to Velizh, in
addition to poverty, epidemic diseases such as cholera and influenza
small-tOwn life
49
contributed to the lackluster sales. “Locals are just too poor [to purchase goods],” one official noted tersely.54
In the second half of the nineteenth century, improvement in com-
munications, infrastructure, and transportation, including large- scale
railroad construction, played a significant role in linking Russia’s
regional economies with global markets. The industrial age altered the
position of the retail trader and older ways of making money. Railway
lines created extraordinary opportunities to connect provincial popula-
tions with settlements in distant corners of the empire. Newly estab-
lished urban markets, from Warsaw and Odessa to St. Petersburg and
Kazan, gradually replaced the marketplace and the seasonal fair. With
the economy growing at a brisk rate of 5 percent annually, an increasing
number of Jews took advantage of the transportation revolution and
the relaxation of residence laws to travel to rapidly expanding urban
centers in the Pale of Settlement and beyond, where they became highly
visible participants in the wholesale industry, retail trade, banking, and
middle- class professions.55
The railroad track never made it to Velizh. But at least ten steamships
owned by two different companies transported a wide variety of textile
goods, grains, and timber along the Western Dvina from the Gulf of
Riga to the Russian interior, with stops in Polotsk, Vitebsk, and Velizh.56
Although Vitebsk province was not entirely bypassed in Russia’s great
leap forward— the provincial capital, for instance, became a hub for
merchants and troupes of touring actors and artists from St. Petersburg,
Kiev, and Odessa— most people lived in a world that was strikingly sim-
ilar to that of the 1820s and 1830s. According to the 1897 all- imperial
census, 85.5 percent of the 1,489,245 inhabitants in the province contin-
ued to reside in the countryside; Velizh county continued to rank dead
last in population density. Six of the eleven settlements designated as
urban had a population of less than 10,000 (five of which with less than
5,200 inhabitants). The town of Velizh may have mirrored Russia’s pop-
ulation explosion, nearly doubling in size from 6,953 in 1829 to 12,193
in 1897, but ranked a distant fourth behind Dvinsk (69,675), Vitebsk
(65,871), and Polotsk (20,294).57
Comprising nearly 50 percent of the population, most Velizh Jews
(numbering 5,989 in 1897) died in the same place where they were
born. They were unable or unwilling to leave their hometown for long
50
50
the Velizh affair
stretches of time. Jewish boys received their religious education in
Hebrew in kheyders, while girls were taught Yiddish grammar and reading by private tutors. Very few children went on to study in a besmedresh, which marked the end not only of their religious education but also of
their education generally.58
At the turn of the twentieth century, as before, Jews specialized in
small- scale trade and the production of clothing, footwear, and crafts.
They owned nearly all the shops, taverns, and inns in town. Some found
work at paper or water mills or brick and candlestick factories. Most
worked as bakers, tailors, shoem
akers, butchers, carpenters, and distill-
ers. Others caught fish, traded in livestock, and loaned money at inter-
est. Abraham Cahan, the founder and longtime editor of the Jewish
Daily Forward who spent some time teaching at a public school in
Velizh in the late 1870s, remembered Jews as extraordinarily pious,
superstitious, and set in their ways. Save for a few exceptions, they knew
just enough Russian to haggle at the bazaar and communicate with their
Belarusian neighbors, most of whom were “close to pure Russians in
their speech and dress.”59 That said, however fundamental the changes
in capitalist development may have been in the late Russian Empire,
Velizh Jews lived their lives in much the same way that their parents and
grandparents had before them.60
The development of a wide range of economic relationships between
Jews and their neighbors al owed social contacts to broaden. Jews played
visible roles in local economies by making and selling alcoholic bever-
ages, trading and delivering goods and products, and managing noble
estates. In the Lithuanian portion of the commonwealth, a handful of
noblemen owned as much as 90 percent of the land. Jews performed
such vital roles in local economies that they received communal protec-
tions, privileges, and support from the noblemen on whose estates they
lived and worked.61 For those Jews who lived in small market towns such
as Velizh, handicrafts or commercial trade were the preferred occupa-
tions. But no matter what economic activities they practiced, Jews and
their neighbors did not live in hermetic isolation or in clearly demar-
cated living quarters.62
Economic activities had important implications for the types of social
relationships Jews and their neighbors formed. Commercial exchanges
led to social connections, appreciation of religious differences, and even,
small-tOwn life
51
on occasion, friendships.63 At the same time, economic activities helped
to produce many of the conflicts between neighbors. Individuals turned
to local courts to protect their possessions and commodities from unlaw-
ful abuse. Imperial institutions structured people’s lives, while civil law provided the necessary framework for establishing the rules and procedures that helped to mediate conflicts.64 For cases involving litigants of
The Velizh Affair Page 8