The Velizh Affair
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39. David Assaf and Gadi Sagiv, “Hasidism in Tsarist Russia: Historical and Social Aspects,” Jewish History 27, no. 2 (2013): 241– 269.
40. “Evreiskie religioznye sekty v Rossii,” Zhurnal ministerstva vnutrennikh del, part 16
(1846): 574– 575.
41. Derzhavin, “Mnenie ob otvrashchenii v Belorussii goloda i ustroistva byta evreev,”
in Sochineniia Derzhavina, 254. See also Klier, Rossiia sobiraet svoikh evreev, 178; and Etkes, Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liady, 188.
42. As quoted in Moshe Rosman, Founder of Hasidism: A Quest for the Historical Ba’al Shem Tov, 2nd ed. (Oxford: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2013), 36.
nOtes tO Pages 47–49
175
43. Etkes, Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liady, 28– 30, 50, 54, 69– 70.
44. “O razvitii torgovli i promyshlennosti v Vitebskoi gubernii,” RGIA, f. 560, op. 4, d. 1413, l. 17 (1851); and RGIA, f. 1281, op. 11, d. 20, ll. 64– 64ob.
45. “O merakh dlia ustroistva Vitebskoi i Mogilevskoi gubernii,” RGIA, f. 1287, op. 3, d. 85, ll. 99ob– 100 (1853); and Voenno- statisticheskoe obozrenie Rossiiskoi imperii: Vitebskaia guberniia, 148.
46. “Po otchetu Vitebskoi gubernii,” RGIA, f. 1281, op. 4, d. 82, ll. 6ob, 9ob (1841).
47. RGIA, f. 1281, op. 11, d. 20, ll. 69– 69ob.
48. Hans Rogger, “Jews after the Liberation of the Serfs,” in his Jewish Policies and Right- Wing Politics in Imperial Russia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 116– 117.
49. RGIA, f. 560, op. 4, d. 1413, l. 17ob. For a general overview of pre- industrialized market towns, see Boris Mironov, A Social History of Imperial Russia, 1700– 1917
(Boulder: Westview, 2000), 443– 461.
50. RGIA, f. 1281, op. 4, d. 82, l. 15. For an overview of the economy before the Great Reforms, see M. F. Bolbas, Razvitie promyshlennosti v Belorussii (1795– 1861 gg.) (Minsk: Akademiia nauk BSSR, 1966).
51. For a classic statement, see Jan DeVries, The Economy of Europe in an Age of Crisis, 1600– 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), esp. 32– 33.
On mobility and innovation in the medieval and early modern economies,
see Robert S. Duplessis, Transitions to Capitalism in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). The flow of goods from Vitebsk province established wider connections with Riga, Moscow, and St. Petersburg, where linen, bread, and spring wheat were shipped (RGIA, f. 1281, op. 4, d. 82, ll. 14– 14ob). For an exploration of the wider economic context, see Sorkina, Miastechki Belarusi, 141– 169.
52. Yohanan Petrovsky- Shtern, The Golden Age Shtetl: A New History of Jewish Life in East Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 97.
53. Catherine Evtukhov, Portrait of a Russian Province: Economy, Society, and Civilization in Nineteenth- Century Nizhnii Novgorod (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011), 9– 10.
54. RGIA, f. 1281, op. 4, d. 89A, ll. 42– 42ob (1849); and Albert Kaganovitch, The Long Life and Swift Death of Jewish Rechitsa: A Community in Belarus, 1625– 2000
(Madison: University of Wisconsin, 2013), 98– 99.
55. Avrutin, Jews and the Imperial State, 89– 90; and Arcadius Kahan, “The Impact of Industrialization in Tsarist Russia on Socioeconomic Conditions of the Jewish Population,” in his Essays in Jewish Social and Economic History, ed. Roger Weiss (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 1– 69. For an excellent overview of Russia’s great transformation, see Mustafa Tuna, Imperial Russia’s Muslims: Islam, Empire, and European Modernity, 1788– 1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 109– 116.
56. Iz istorii Velizha, 157.
176
176
nOtes tO Pages 49–51
57. N. A. Troinitskii, ed., Pervaia vseobshchaia perepis’ naseleniia Rossiiskoi imperii, 1897 g. , 120 vols. (St. Petersburg: Izdatel’stva Tsentral’nago statisticheskago komiteta Ministerstva vnutrennikh del, 1899– 1905), vol. 5, part 2: 54. On the cultural life of Vitebsk, see Aleksandra Shatskikh, Vitebsk: The Life of Art, trans.
Katherine Foshko Tsan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 2– 3.
58. For a judicious discussion of Jewish social life and education in Minsk province, paralleling in many respects the story of Velizh, see Kaganovitch, The Long Life and Swift Death of Jewish Rechitsa, 169– 170.
59. Abraham Cahan, Bleter fun mein leben, vol. 1 (New York: Forverts Asosieyshon, 1926), 453.
60. A. M. Sementovskii, ed., Pamiatnaia knizhka Vitebskoi gubernii na 1864 god (St.
Petersburg: Tipografiia K. Vul’fa, 1864), 235, 239; and Pervaia vseobshchaia perepis’
naseleniia Rossiiskoi imperii, 1897 g. , vol. 5, part 3: 198– 201. See also the discussion in Arkadii Zel’tser, Evrei sovetskoi provintsii: Vitebsk i mestechki, 1917– 1941
(Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2006), 9– 10.
61. Magda Teter, Jews and Heretics in Catholic Poland: A Beleaguered Church in the Post- Reformation Era (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 21– 40; and Hundert, Jews in Poland- Lithuania in the Eighteenth Century, 38– 44.
62. On neighborly contact in the early modern period, see, for example, David Frick,
“Jews and Others in Seventeenth- Century Wilno: Life in the Neighborhood,”
Jewish Studies Quarterly 12, no. 1 (2005): 10– 20; and David Fram, Ideals Face Reality: Jewish Law and Life in Poland, 1550– 1655 (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1997), 30– 31.
63. Adam Teller, “The Shtetl as an Arena for Polish- Jewish Integration in the Eighteenth Century,” Polin 17 (2004): 37; and Jacob Katz, Exclusiveness and Tolerance: Studies in Jewish- Gentile Relations in Medieval and Modern Times (Springfield, NJ: Behrman House, 1961), 9.
64. On popular uses of the court system in the Russian Empire, see Jane Burbank, Russian Peasants Go to Court: Legal Culture in the Countryside, 1905– 1917 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004).
65. For an extensive analysis of the court cases, see Eugene M. Avrutin, “Jewish Neighborly Relations and Imperial Russian Legal Culture,” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 9, no. 1 (2010): 1– 16.
66. Michael J. Broyde and Michael Ausubel, “Legal Institutions,” in The YIVO
Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, 2 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 1: 1008.
67. See, for example, Burbank, Russian Peasants Go to Court, 84, n. 5.
68. Daniel Jütte, “Interfaith Encounters between Jews and Christians in the Early Modern Period and Beyond: Toward a Framework,” American Historical Review 118, no. 2 (2013): 398. See also Jütte’s “ ‘They Shall Not Keep Their Doors or Windows Open’: Urban Space and the Dynamics of Conflict and Contact in
Premodern Jewish- Christian Relations,” European History Quarterly 46, no. 2
nOtes tO Pages 51–54
177
(2016): 209– 237; and Benjamin J. Kaplan, Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 237– 265. For a perceptive analysis of social relations in a small community, see John Putnam Demos, Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England, updated ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 275– 312.
69. This point is based on a survey of roughly two hundred criminal cases from 1833 to 1869 in Kovno province (KAA, f. 76, op. 1). I would like to thank Aušra Paulauskienė for research assistance with these files.
70. Mary Lindemann, Medicine and Society in Early Modern Europe, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 38– 39; and Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997), 18– 19.
71. Quoted in Alla Sokolova, “In Search of the Exotic: ‘Jewish Houses’ and Synagogues in Russian Travel Notes,” in Writing Jewish Culture: Paradoxes in Ethnography, ed.
Andreas Kilchner and Gabriella Safran (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016), 299– 301.
72. C
ahan, Bleter fun mein leben, 450.
73. Moisei Berlin, Ocherk etnografii evreiskago narodonaseleniia v Rossii (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia V. Bezobrazova, 1861), 3– 5.
74. Yekhezkel Kotik, Journey to a Nineteenth- Century Shtetl: The Memoirs of Yekhezkel Kotik, ed. David Assaf (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2002), 152.
75. Vitebskie gubernskie vedomosti, no. 35 (1839), 2; no. 9 (1841), 1– 2.
76. NIAB, f. 1297, op. 1, d. 2477 (1827); and d. 2473, l. 6 (1827).
77. RGIA, f. 1281, op. 4, d. 71A (1846), ll. 21– 21ob, 23ob– 24.
78. “O dostavlenii vrachami svedenii v Vitebskuiu vrachebnuiu upravu o bol’nykh i ospoprivivanii,” Vitebskie gubernskie vedomosti, no. 9 (1841), 1– 2. See also
“Postanovlenii i predpisaniia gubernskago nachal’stva,” Vitebskie gubernskie vedomosti, no. 38 (1842), 1– 2.
79. “O bezporiadkakh po obozreniiu Vitebskoi gubernii,” RGIA, f. 1287, op. 31, d. 821, l. 4 (1844).
80. “Narodnoe zdravie i obshchestvennoe prizrenie,” in Obzor Vitebskoi gubernii za 1910 god (Vitebsk: Gubernskaia tipografiia, 1911), 47– 53. For a fascinating examination of medical practices in early modern Poland, see Yohanan Petrovsky- Shtern,
“ ‘You Will Find It in the Pharmacy’: Practical Kabbalah and Natural Medicine in the Polish- Lithuanian Commonwealth, 1690– 1750,” in Holy Dissent: Jewish and Christian Mystics in Eastern Europe, ed. Glenn Dynner (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2011), 13– 54.
81. This paragraph draws on Petrovsky- Shtern’s “ ‘You Will Find It in the Pharmacy’,”
13– 54.
82. R. Pinchas Kaztenelbogen’s remedy for fever is translated in the collection of primary sources, Freeze and Harris, eds., Everyday Jewish Life in Imperial Russia, 265.
178
178
nOtes tO Pages 54–56
83. Vitebskie gubernskie vedomosti, pt. 2, no. 3, (1857), 1– 3; pt. 2, no. 9 (1857), 1– 4; pt. 2, no. 23 (1857), 1– 2. On traditional healing and folk medicine in Vitebsk and Mogilev provinces, see L. I. Min’ko, Narodnaia meditsina Belorussii: Kratkii istoricheskii ocherk (Minsk: Izdatel’stvo “Nauka i tekhnika,” 1969).
84. W. F. Ryan, The Bathhouse at Midnight: Magic in Russia (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), 46– 57, 94– 114; and Robert H. Greene, Bodies like Bright Stars: Saints and Relics in Orthodox Russia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2010), 39– 72.
85. Pauline Wengeroff, Memoirs of a Grandmother: Scenes from the Cultural History of the Jews of Russia in the Nineteenth Century, vol. 1, trans. Shulamit S. Magnus (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 146, 170.
86. Kotik, Journey to a Nineteenth- Century Shtetl, 150.
87. On spirit possession, see, for example, Matt Goldish, ed., Spirit Possession in Judaism: Cases and Contexts from the Middle Ages to the Present (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003).
88. Gedalyah Nigal, The Hasidic Tale, trans. Edward Levin (Oxford: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2008), 195– 233.
89. Kotik, Journey to a Nineteenth- Century Shtetl, 157.
90. For a classic statement, see Joshua Trachtenberg, Jewish Magic and Superstition: A Study in Folk Religion (New York: Atheneum, 1970). For a succinct exploration, see Avriel Bar- Levav, “Magic,” The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, vol. 1: 1113– 1114. See also Dean Phillip Bell, “Jews, Magic, and Community in Seventeenth- Century Worms,” in Werewolves, Witches, and Wandering Spirits: Traditional Belief and Folklore in Early Modern Europe, ed. Kathryn A. Edwards (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University, 2002), 93– 118.
91. Michael Ostling, “Imagined Crimes, Real Victims: Hermeneutical Witches and Jews in Early Modern Poland,” in Ritual Murder in Russia, Eastern Europe, and Beyond: New Histories of an Old Accusation, ed. Eugene M. Avrutin, Jonathan Dekel- Chen, and Robert Weinberg (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
2017), 18– 38. For a perceptive analysis of the significance of popular medical knowledge and the blood libel, see Khanna Vengzhinek, “Meditsinskie znaniia i istochniki ‘krovavykh navetov’ v staroi Pol’she,” in Narodnaia meditsina i magiia v slavianskoi i evreiskoi kul’turnoi traditsii, ed. O. V. Belova (Moscow: Sefer, 2007), 81– 88. For an analysis of contemporary understandings, see Aleksandr L’vov, “Mezhetnicheskie otnoshenie ugoshchenie i ‘krovavyi navet,’ ” in Shtetl XXI vek: Polevye issledovaniia, ed. V. A. Dymshits, A. L. L’vov, and A. V.
Sokolova (St. Petersburg: Evropeiskii universitet v Sankt- Peterburge, 2008), 65– 82. See also R. Po- chia Hsia’s The Myth of Ritual Murder: Jews and Magic in Reformation Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 6– 9; and Joshua Trachtenberg, The Devil and the Jews: The Medieval Conception of the Jew and Its Relation to Modern Anti- Semitism (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1983).
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179
Chapter 3
1. Alan Palmer, Alexander I: Tsar of War and Peace (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), 397– 401, quote on 401. See also Richard S. Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy, vol. 1 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 238– 243.
2. RGIA, f. 1345, op. 235, d. 65, chast’ 1, ll. 5– 5ob. Based on the emperor’s private correspondence and his official itinerary, scholars have established that Alexander spent the month of July in and around St. Petersburg. Although July 15, 1825, is the date printed on the complaint, most likely Alexander read it on September 4, the same day he dispatched a short note from Velizh to St. Petersburg. See Nikolai Mikhailovich, Imperator Aleksandr I: Opyt istoricheskago izsledovaniia, 2nd ed. (Petrograd: Ekspeditsiia zagotovleniia gosudarstvennykh bumag, 1914), 679, 737.
3. John P. LeDonne, “Russian Governors General, 1775– 1825,” Cahiers du monde russe 42, no. 1 (2001): 5– 30; and LeDonne, “Administrative Regionalization in the Russian Empire, 1802– 1826,” Cahiers du monde russe 43, no. 1 (2002): 5– 34. For a short biography of Khovanskii, see Slovar’ russkikh generalov, uchastnikov boevykh deistvii protiv armii Napoleona Bonaparta v 1812– 1815 (Moscow: Studiia “TRITE”
N. Mikhalkova, 1996), 599– 600.
4. Wortman, Scenarios of Power, vol. 1, 264– 269, 297– 332; and Daniel Beer, The House of the Dead: Siberian Exile under the Tsars (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2017), 54– 55.
5. On Russian sectarianism, see Nikolai Varadinov, Istoriia Ministerstva vnutrennikh del, vol. 8 (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia Ministerstva vnutrennikh del, 1863), 188–
193. For recent studies, see Laura Engelstein, Castration and the Heavenly Kingdom: A Russian Folktale (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 49– 51; J. Eugene Clay, “Orthodox Missionaries and ‘Orthodox Heretics’ in Russia, 1886– 1917,”
in Of Religion and Empire: Missions, Conversion, and Tolerance in Tsarist Russia, ed. Robert Geraci and Michael Khodarkovsky (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 38– 69; Sergei I. Zhuk, Russia’s Lost Reformation: Peasants, Millennialism, and Radical Sects in Southern Russia and Ukraine, 1830– 1917 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004); Nicholas Breyfogle, Heretics and Colonizers: Forging Russia’s Empire in the South Caucasus (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005); and Nicholas Breyfogle, “The Religious World of Russian Sabbatarians (Subbotniks),” in Holy Dissent: Jewish and Christian Mystics in Eastern Europe, ed.
Glenn Dynner (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2011), 359– 392.
6. RGIA, f. 1345, op. 235, d. 65, chast’ 1, ll. 17– 24ob, 45– 47ob, 49– 52ob, 63– 70ob.
7. RGIA, f. 1345, op. 235, d. 65, chast’ 1, ll. 25– 26ob (November 22, 1825).
8. RGIA, f. 1345, op. 235, d. 65, chast’ 1, l. 27.
9. RGIA, f. 1345, op. 235, d. 65, chast’ 1, ll. 28– 28ob.
10. RGIA, f. 1345, op. 235, d. 65, chast’ 1, l. 29.
11. RGIA, f. 1345, op. 235, d. 65, chast’ 1, ll. 30– 31.
180
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nOtes tO Pages 64–70
12. RGIA, f. 1345, op. 235, d. 65, chast
’ 1, ll. 37– 37ob.
13. RGIA, f. 1345, op. 235, d. 65, chast’ 1, ll. 38ob– 39.
14. RGIA, f. 1345, op. 235, d. 65, chast’ 1, ll. 39– 41.
15. For a firsthand account, see Pauline Wengeroff, Memoirs of a Grandmother: Scenes from the Cultural History of the Jews of Russia in the Nineteenth Century, vol. 1, trans. Shulamit S. Magnus (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 207.
16. Judith Kalik, “Christian Servants Employed by Jews in the Polish- Lithuanian Commonwealth in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” Polin 14
(2001): 267; and Magda Teter, Jews and Heretics in Catholic Poland: A Beleaguered Church in the Post- Reformation Era (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 63– 69. On questions regarding halakhic teachings and everyday life, see Jacob Katz, The “Shabbes” Goy: A Study in Halakhic Flexibility, trans.
Yoel Lerner (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1989), 49– 67, 80– 81, 87– 105.
17. Judith Kalik, “Fusion versus Alienation— Erotic Attraction, Sex, and Love between Jews and Christians in the Polish- Lithuanian Commonwealth,” in Kommunikation durch symbolische Akte: Religiöse Heterogenität und politische Herrschaft in Polen-Litauen, ed. Yvonne Kleinmann (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2010), 159– 160.
18. Gershon D. Hundert, Jews in Poland- Lithuania in the Eighteenth Century: A Genealogy of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 38.
19. Iulii Gessen, “Naem lichnyi (usluzhenie khristian) po russkomu zakonodatel’stvu,”
Evreiskaia entsiklopediia: Svod znanii o evreistve i ego kul’ture v proshlom i nastoiashchem, 16 vols. (Moscow: “Terra,” 1991), 11: 492– 496.
20. Ellie R. Schainker, Confessions of the Shtetl: Converts from Judaism in Imperial Russia, 1817– 1906 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016), 147– 148.
21. Gessen, “Naem lichnyi,” Evreiskaia entsiklopediia, 11: 492– 496; and Eugene M. Avrutin, “Returning to Judaism after the 1905 Law on Religious Freedom in Tsarist Russia,” Slavic Review 65, no. 1 (2006): 94.
22. This paragraph draws on Breyfogle, “The Religious World of Russian Sabbatarians (Subbotniks),” in Dynner, Holy Dissent, 359– 392.