32. John P. LeDonne, “Criminal Investigations before the Great Reforms,” Russian History 1, no. 2 (1974): 112.
33. My own views on ritual murder and small- town life have been influenced by outstanding histories of witchcraft and magic. One of my personal favorites is Robin Briggs’s Witches and Neighbors: The Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft (London: Penguin Books, 1996). For a succinct exploration of the term “popular belief,” see Robert W. Scribner, “Elements of Popular Belief,” in Handbook of European History, 1400– 1600: Late Middle Ages, Renaissance, and
nOtes tO Pages 10–13
169
Reformation, ed. Thomas A. Brady Jr., Heiko A. Oberman, and James D. Tracy (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdsmans Publishing Company, 1994), 1:
231– 262.
34. Gershon D. Hundert, Jews in Poland- Lithuania in the Eighteenth Century: A Genealogy of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).
35. On the fluidity of boundaries, see Adam Teller and Magda Teter, “Introduction: Borders and Boundaries in the Historiography of the Jews in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth,” Polin 22 (2010): 3– 46. On the problem of coexistence in the borderlands, see Omer Bartov and Eric D. Weitz, eds., Shatterzone of Empires: Coexistence and Violence in the German, Habsburg, Russian, and Ottoman Borderlands (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013); and David Frick, Kith, Kin, and Neighbors: Communities and Confessions in Seventeenth- Century Wilno (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013).
36. For an excellent study of neighborly relations and legal culture, see Bruce H. Mann, Neighbors and Strangers: Law and Community in Early Connecticut (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987).
37. Historians working on a wide range of geographic regions and across vast chronological time frames have heatedly debated the popular beliefs of populations who left few written records of their everyday prejudices, fears, and preoccupations.
For the Russian Empire, see, for example, Simon Dixon, “Superstition in Imperial Russia,” in Past and Present, supplement 3 (2008): 207– 228; Christine D. Worobec, Possessed: Women, Witches, and Demons in Imperial Russia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois Press, 2003), 20– 63; and Greene, Bodies like Bright Stars, 17– 102.
38. W. F. Ryan, The Bathhouse at Midnight: Magic in Russia (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), 79.
39. On the relationship between microhistory and crime, see Edward Muir and Guido Ruggiero, eds., History from Crime (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994).
40. Barbara H. Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006). See also Ute Frevert, Emotions in History: Lost and Found (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2011); and Daniel Lord Smail, The Consumption of Justice: Emotions, Publicity, and Legal Culture in Marseille, 1264– 1423 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003).
41. On the ability of clerks of the courts for capturing oral culture of the interrogation chamber, see Lisa Silverman, Tortured Subjects: Pain, Truth, and the Body in Early Modern France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 12.
Chapter 1
1. NIAB, f. 1297, op. 1, d. 190, ll. 3ob– 8 (testimony by Agafia Prokof’eva and Emel’ian Ivanov, May 1823); and RGIA, f. 1345, op. 235, d. 65, chast’ 1, ll. 17– 24ob (testimony by Emel’ian Ivanov, November 1825).
170
170
nOtes tO Pages 16–27
2. Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter, From Serf to Russian Soldier (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 34; and John L. H. Keep, Soldiers of the Tsar: Army and Society in Russia, 1462– 1874 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 197– 199.
3. RGIA, f. 1345, op. 235, d. 65, chast’ 25, ll. 3– 5.
4. NIAB, f. 1297, op. 1, d. 190, ll. 3ob– 8; and RGIA, f. 1345, op. 235, d. 65, chast’ 1, ll. 17– 24ob.
5. NIAB, f. 1297, op. 1, d. 190, ll. 4– 7ob.
6. NIAB, f. 1297, op. 1, d. 190, l. 9; and RGIA, f. 1345, op. 235, d. 65, chast’ 25, l. 4.
7. NIAB, f. 1297, op. 1, d. 190, ll. 13– 15ob; and RGIA, f. 1345, op. 235, d. 65, chast’
25, l. 6.
8. NIAB, f. 1297, op. 1, d. 190, l. 9; and RGIA, f. 1345, op. 235, d. 65, chast’ 25, l. 4.
9. NIAB, f. 1297, op. 1, d. 190, ll. 20– 22ob; and RGIA, f. 1345, op. 235, d. 65, chast’
25, l. 7.
10. See the discussion in Yohanan Petrovsky- Shtern, The Golden Age Shtetl: A New History of Jewish Life in East Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 243– 255.
11. Miron Ryvkin, “Velizhskoe delo v osveshchenii mestnykh predanii i pamiatnikov,”
Perezhitoe 3 (1911): 69– 81.
12. Glenn Dynner, Yankel’s Tavern: Jews, Liquor, and Life in the Kingdom of Poland (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 17– 20; and Petrovsky- Shtern, The Golden Age Shtetl, 129– 135.
13. Ryvkin, “Velizhskoe delo,” 79.
14. This is a point made most eloquently by Robin Briggs, Witches and Neighbors: The Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft (London: Penguin Books, 1988), 146.
15. NIAB, f. 1297, op. 1, d. 190, ll. 18– 19, 29– 30; and RGIA, f. 1345, op. 235, d. 65, chast’ 25, ll. 6– 7, 9.
16. NIAB, f. 1297, op. 1, d. 190, ll. 62– 65ob; and RGIA, f. 1345, op. 235, d. 65, chast’
25, l. 12.
17. RGIA, f. 1345, op. 235, d. 65, chast’ 25, l. 116.
18. NIAB, f. 1297, op. 1, d. 190, l. 234.
19. NIAB, f. 1297, op. 1, d. 190, ll. 24ob– 33, 46, 51, 74– 81, 112– 113ob; and RGIA, f. 1345, op. 235, d. 65, chast’ 25, ll. 5, 11, 13, 18, 23.
20. NIAB, f. 1297, op. 1, d. 190, ll. 215– 216ob.
21. NIAB, f. 1297, op. 1, d. 190, ll. 100– 102; and RGIA, f. 1345, op. 235, d. 65, chast’
25, ll. 15– 16.
22. NIAB, f. 1297, op. 1, d. 190, ll. 217ob– 219ob (Khanna Tsetlina’s complaint to the magistrate, January 8, 1824).
23. NIAB, f. 1297, op. 1, d. 190, ll. 93– 98.
24. NIAB, f. 1297, op. 1, d. 190, ll. 39– 41, 144, 181, 187ob– 189.
25. Abby M. Schrader, Languages of the Lash: Corporal Punishment and Identity in Imperial Russia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2002). See
nOtes tO Pages 27–33
171
also Nancy Shields Kollmann, Crime and Punishment in Early Modern Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 303– 413.
26. RGIA, f. 821, op. 8, d. 296, ll. 1– 2; and Simon M. Dubnov, History of the Jews in Russia and Poland: From the Earliest Times until the Present Day, trans.
I. Friedlander, 3 vols. (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1916– 1920), 2: 74– 75. A detailed summary of the Grodno case is preserved at the RGIA, f. 1151, op. 2, d. 169, ll. 2– 52. See also Iulii Gessen, “Ritual’nye protsessy 1816 goda,” Evreiskaia Starina 4, no. 2 (1912): 144– 163.
27. RGIA, f. 1345, op. 235, d. 65, chast’ 25, ll. 24– 26.
28. Brian P. Levack, “The Decline and End of Witchcraft Prosecutions,” in Witchcraft and Magic in Europe: The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, ed. Bengt Ankarloo and Stuart Clark (Philadelphia: University Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 86– 87.
29. RGIA, f. 1345, op. 235, d. 65, chast’ 25, l. 27.
30. On charity and mutual aid, see Adele Lindenmeyr, Poverty Is Not a Vice: Charity, Society, and the State in Imperial Russia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); and Mordechai Zalkin, “Charity,” in The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, 2 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 1: 306– 309.
31. Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (London: Penguin Books, 1972), 660– 669; and Briggs, Witches and Neighbors, 137– 146.
Chapter 2
1. “Gibel’ detei ot nedostatka prismotra,” Zhurnal ministerstva vnutrennikh del, pt.
9 (1845): 133– 134, 138– 139; pt. 10 (1845): 123; pt. 11 (1845): 214– 215.
2. “Detoubiistvo,” Zhurnal ministerstva vnutrennikh
del, pt. 12 (1845): 139– 140.
3. David L. Ransel, Mothers of Misery: Child Abandonment in Russia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 8– 30, 150– 175. For a wide- ranging exploration of infanticide accusations and trials in France, Germany, and other places, see Mark Jackson, ed., Infanticide: Historical Perspectives on Child Murder and Concealment, 1550– 2000 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002).
4. Viktor Lindenberg, “Materialy k voprosu detoubiistve i plodoizgnanii v Vitebskoi gubernii” (PhD diss., Iur’ev University, 1910).
5. Robert Johnson, Travels through Parts of the Russian Empire and the Country of Poland, along the Southern Shores of the Baltic (London: J. J. Stockdale, 1815), 372.
6. Edward Morton, Travels in Russia, and a Residence in St. Petersburg and Odessa in the Years 1827– 1829 (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1830), 128, 129.
7.
Voenno- statisticheskoe obozrenie Rossiiskoi imperii: Vitebskaia guberniia, vol. 8, pt.
1 (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia departmenta general’nago shtaba, 1852), 15.
8. Johnson, Travels through Parts of the Russian Empire and the Country of Poland, 373.
9. David L. Ransel, “Mothering, Medicine, and Infant Mortality in Russia: Some Comparisons,” Occasional Paper, Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies, no.
236 (1990): 3– 4, 24– 30; Gershon D. Hundert, “The Importance of Demography
172
172
nOtes tO Pages 33–34
and Patterns of Settlement for an Understanding of the Jewish Experience in East-Central Europe,” in The Shtetl: New Evaluations, ed. Steven T. Katz (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 32– 33; and Boris Mironov, A Social History of Imperial Russia, 1700– 1917 (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2000), 107. See also Ransel’s Village Mothers: Three Generations of Change in Russia and Tataria (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 20– 42; and Shaul Stampfer, “Love and Family,”
in his Families, Rabbis, and Education: Traditional Jewish Society in Nineteenth-Century Eastern Europe (Oxford: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2010), 30– 31. For examples of child murder cases in Vitebsk province, see NIAB, f. 3309, op. 1, d. 1848 (1827); d. 1849 (1827); and d. 2052 (1829).
10. Langston Hughes, The Ways of White Folks (New York: Vintage Classics, 1990), 3.
For histories of Velizh, see O. M. Kiselev, comp., Velizh (Vitebsk: Gubernskaia tipografiia, 1895); and Iz istorii Velizha i raiona (Smolensk: Smolenskaia gorodskaia tipografiia, 2002). Much useful information on Vitebsk province is
included in the wide- ranging books by Mikhail Dolbilov and Alexei Miller, eds., Zapadnye okrainy Rossiiskoi imperii (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2007); and Ina Sorkina, Miastechki Belarusi w kantsy XVIII- pershai palove XIX st.
(Vilnius: Evropeiskii gumanitarnyi universitet, 2010). See also Sachar Schybeka,
“Die Nordwestprovinzen im Russischen Reich (1795– 1917),” in Handbuch der Geschichte Weissrusslands, ed. Dietrich Beyrau and Rainer Lindau (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2001), 119– 134; and Yakov Leshtinski, “Yidn in Vitebsk un Vitebsker gubernye,” in Vitebsk amol: geshichte, zikhroynes, khurbn, ed. Grigori Aronson, Yakov Leshtinski, and Avraham Kihn (New York: Waldon
Press, 1956), 57– 92.
11. John D. Klier, Rossiia sobiraet svoikh evreev: Proiskhozhdenie evreiskogo voprosa v Rossii, 1772– 1825, expanded edition (Moscow: Mosty kul’tury, 2000), 102; and Barbara Skinner, The Western Front of the Eastern Church: Uniate and Orthodox Conflict in 18th- Century Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2009), 145– 146.
12. For suggestive treatments of borderlands, see Omer Bartov and Eric D. Weitz,
“Introduction,” in Shatterzone of Empires: Coexistence and Violence in the German, Habsburg, Russian, and Ottoman Borderlands, ed. Bartov and Weitz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 1– 20; and Kate Brown, A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).
13. Antony Polonsky, The Jews in Poland and Russia, 3 vols. (Oxford: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2010– 2012), 1: 68– 90; and Gershon D. Hundert, The Jews in a Polish Private Town: The Case of Opatów in the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 3– 10. See also Glenn Dynner,
“Jewish Quarters: The Economics of Segregation in the Kingdom of Poland,” in Purchasing Power: The Economics of Modern Jewish History, ed. Rebecca Kobrin and Adam Teller (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 91– 111.
nOtes tO Pages 34–43
173
14. In the second half of the nineteenth century, Jews continued to face restrictions on their residence in cities such as Vil’na, Kovno, and Zhitomir. See Benjamin Nathans, Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 113– 114.
15. Klier, Rossiia sobiraet svoikh evreev, 98 (the first edition of Klier’s book listed thirty thousand Jews); Skinner, The Western Front of the Eastern Church, 147; “Velizh,”
in Evreiskaia entsiklopediia: Svod znanii o evreistve i ego kul’ture v proshlom i nastoiashchem, 16 vols. (Moscow: Terra, 1991), 5: 406.
16. The numbers for Velizh and the province of Vitebsk can be found in RGIA, f.
1281, op. 11, d. 21, ll. 18– 19 (1829). For comparable data, listing Velizh with 6,791
inhabitants, see RGIA, f. 1290, op. 1, d. 16, l. 4ob (1828).
17. Skinner, The Western Front of the Eastern Church, 43, 63– 64. See also Mikhail Dolbilov, Russkii krai, chuzhaia vera: Etnokonfessional’naia politika v Litve i Belorussii pri Alexandre II (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2010), 68– 108.
18. My analysis of Velizh’s topography is based on “Plan g. Velizha,” RGIA, f. 1293, op. 166, d. 19; and “Geometricheskii plan g. Velizha,” RGIA, f. 1293, op. 166, d. 18. See also the map in Miron Ryvkin, “Velizhskoe delo v osveshchenii mestnykh predanii i pamiatnikov,” Perezhitoe 3 (1911): 67 (which is probably based on RGIA, f. 1293, op. 166, d. 18). For an exceptionally detailed analysis of seventeenth-century Wilno’s (Vil’na’s) physical topography, an inspiration to my own work, see David Frick, Kith, Kin, and Neighbors: Communities and Confessions in Seventeenth- Century Wilno (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013), 20– 58.
19. Shaul Stampfer, “Heder Study, Knowledge of Torah, and the Maintenance of Stratification,” in his Families, Rabbis, and Education, 145– 166.
20. On the shtibl, see Shaul Stampfer, “How and Why Did Hasidism Spread?”
Jewish History 27, no. 2 (2013): 201– 219; Glenn Dynner, Yankel’s Tavern: Jews, Liquor, and Life in the Kingdom of Poland (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 38– 39; and Louis Jacobs, Hasidic Prayer (New York: Schocken Books, 1973), 43– 44.
21. Gershon D. Hundert, Jews in Poland- Lithuania: A Genealogy of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 53; and Leshtinski, “Yidn in Vitebsk un Vitebsker gubernye,” in Vitebsk amol, 64– 71.
22. Johnson, Travels through Parts of the Russian Empire and the Country of Poland, 374– 376.
23. E. R. Romanov, Materialy po istoricheskoi topografii Vitebskoi gubernii, uezd Velizhskii (Mogilev: [n. p.], 1898), 32– 33, 39. See also the discussion about poverty in Voenno- statisticheskoe obozrenie Rossiiskoi imperii, 147– 148.
24. Gavriil R. Derzhavin, “Mnenie ob otvrashchenii v Belorussii goloda i ustroistva byta evreev,” in Sochineniia Derzhavina, ed. Ia. Grota (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia Imperatorskoi akademii nauk, 1872), 230.
25. Klier, Rossiia sobiraet svoikh evreev, 171– 173; and ChaeRan Y. Freeze and Jay M. Harris, “Introduction: The Imperial Context,” in Everyday Jewish Life in Imperial
174
174
nOtes tO Pages 43–47
Russia: Select Documents, ed. Freeze and Harris (Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2013), 11.
26. Dominic Lieven, Russia against Napoleon: The True Story of the Campaigns
of War and Peace (London: Penguin Books, 2009), 124, 129, 146, 170, 269.
27. Morton, Travels in Russia, 129.
28. Johnson, Travels through Parts of the Russian Empire and the Country of Poland, 368.
29. Jakob Walter, The Diary of a Napoleonic Foot Soldier, ed. Marc Raeff (New York: Doubleday, 1991), 44.
30. S. M. Ginzburg, Otechestvennaia voina 1812 goda i russkie evrei (St. Petersburg: Razum, 1912), 109– 110.
31. Vladimir Medvedev, “Velizh: Otechestvennaia voina 1812 goda,” Krai Smolenskii: Istoriia Velizhskogo kraia, no. 3 (2013): 29.
32. RGIA, f. 1287, op. 12, d. 86, ll. 1– 1ob, 3– 3ob, 13, 42, 46– 49ob.
33. Concerning reports of the high number of illnesses and deaths in Vitebsk and Mogilev provinces, see RGIA, f. 1263, op. 1, d. 418, ll. 754– 755 (1825). On D.
O. Baranov, see Klier, Rossiia sobiraet svoikh evreev, 288.
34. Ginzburg, Otechestvennaia voina 1812 goda, 136; Klier, Rossiia sobiraet svoikh evreev, 288– 289; and Dynner, Yankel’s Tavern, 55– 56.
35. NIAB, f. 1297, op. 1, d. 7858, ll. 1– 2ob, 12–13 (accessed at the CAHJP).
36. Yohanan Petrovsky- Shtern, Jews in the Russian Army: Drafted into Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); and Michael Stanislawski, Tsar Nicholas I and the Jews: The Transformation of Jewish Society in Russia, 1825– 1855
(Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1983), 13– 34.
37. Eugene M. Avrutin, Jews and the Imperial State: Identification Politics in Tsarist Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010), 21– 52.
38. On the Habad movement, see Immanuel Etkes, Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liady: The Origins of Chabad Hasidism, trans. Jeffrey M. Green (Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2015); Naftali Lowenthal, Communicating the Infinite: The Emergence of the Habad School (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); and Ilia Lurie, The Habad Movement in Tsarist Russia, 1828– 1882 [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2006). For an excellent overview, see Lowenthal’s “Lubavitch Hasidism,” in The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, 2 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 1: 1094– 1097.
The Velizh Affair Page 26