Jewishness through Hybridity? Acculturation and Jewish Identity in the Late-Nineteenth-Century Russian High School

Despite the fact that the acquirement of formal education had often led to a detachment from the Jewish society, graduates of the Russian educational system played a significant role in the shaping of the modern Russian-Jewish politics and society. Notwithstanding their influence, they have not yet attracted much scholarly attention. As a result, we know relatively little about the Jewish learning youth in Russia, and about the ideological and social factors that have shaped their worldviews.

In my paper I will attempt to fill this gap by presenting a contextualized examination of the practices and meanings of acculturation among the Jewish students in the Russian high-schools of the 1870’s and of the 1880’s in the northern parts of the Pale of Settlement.

Drawing on primary material gathered in East-European and Israeli archives, I will suggest that rather than merely creating alienation from the Jewish society – often described as a “departure,” leading either to a complete assimilation, or to “repentance” and “return” – the integration into the Russian-speaking high-school created new, and modified existing, modes of attachment to the Jewish collective.

I will suggest that the development of the students’ self-identification as Jewish activists was a complex social and cultural process, which can hardly be understood in the terms of either superficial ideological formulations or schematic descriptions. Rather than linear dialectical development, this process should be understood in view of the “dialectics of assimilation,” a constant dialectical tension that characterized the shaping of the modern Jewish identities.