Moscou

Moscow, capital of Russia and long the seat of tsarist and then Soviet power, occupies a singular place in the history of the Jewish diasporas. Unlike the great cities of the former Kingdom of Poland-Lithuania — Vilna, Warsaw, Odessa — which welcomed massive Jewish communities as early as the modern era, Moscow remained, for centuries, a place from which Jews were largely excluded. The city lay, in fact, outside the Pale of Settlement (in Russian cherta osedlosti), that territory established by Catherine II at the end of the eighteenth century, within which the great majority of the Empire's Jews were compelled to reside [Encyclopaedia Judaica, arts. « Moscow » and « Pale of Settlement »].

The Jewish history of Moscow is thus paradoxical: it is the history of an intermittent presence, tolerated and then hounded, legally restricted but never wholly abolished, which culminates, after the long Soviet winter, in a foremost communal renaissance at the turn of the twenty-first century. This Great Book proposes to retrace that trajectory — from the first mentions of Jewish merchants in the medieval city to the flourishing institutions of post-Soviet Moscow — scrupulously distinguishing what the archive establishes, what tradition transmits, and the zones of uncertainty in which the historian must proceed with caution.

Contacts between Moscow and the Jewish world are ancient but tenuous. As early as medieval Muscovy, Jewish merchants from Lithuania, Poland, or the southern principalities occasionally frequented the fairs and trade routes leading to the city, without a permanent community ever forming there [Encyclopaedia Judaica, art. "Moscow"]. Russian historiographical tradition reports, at the end of the fifteenth century, the so-called affair of the "Judaizers" (jidovstvouïouchtchie): a religious movement that appeared in Novgorod and then in Moscow, accused by ecclesiastical authorities of tendencies inspired by Judaism. The sources on this episode remain largely polemical, emanating above all from its adversaries, and historians still debate the actual extent of Jewish influence and the extent of inquisitorial construction [according to the reference works on the heresy of the Judaizers, cf. Encyclopaedia Judaica, art. "Judaizers"].

From the sixteenth century onward, Muscovy displayed explicit hostility toward the Jews. Tsar Ivan IV, known as Ivan the Terrible, refused entry to Jewish merchants on his lands, and this distrust persisted under his successors. When, through the partitions of Poland at the end of the eighteenth century, the Russian Empire absorbed the largest Jewish communities in Europe, the authorities chose not to open their interior cities, but rather to confine this population within the Pale of Settlement. Moscow, the former capital and a great commercial center, remained in principle forbidden to permanent Jewish residence [Encyclopaedia Judaica, art. "Pale of Settlement"]. Community memory and the administrative archive converge here: the city was long perceived as a threshold that Jews could cross only on an exceptional basis.

During the 19th century, breaches opened in the wall of exclusion. Imperial legislation progressively authorized certain categories of Jews to sojourn and reside outside the Pale of Settlement: first-guild merchants, university graduates, certain artisans, soldiers who had completed their long military service (the cantonists and so-called "Nicholas" veterans), as well as members of the liberal professions. These exemptions, granted under Alexander II within the framework of measured reforms, permitted the formation in Moscow of a restricted but active community, composed chiefly of well-to-do merchants, industrialists, physicians, and jurists [Encyclopaedia Judaica, art. "Moscow"].

It was in this context that religious life gradually took shape. The first places of prayer, at first discreet, developed over the decades. The community, though numerically modest on the scale of a metropolis numbering hundreds of thousands of inhabitants, acquired a real economic and cultural visibility. Veterans of military service, authorized to remain where they had served, constituted one of the oldest and most stable nuclei of the Moscow Jewish population. The status of these residents nonetheless remained precarious, suspended on the goodwill of the administration and on revocable individual permits. The Jewish presence in Moscow in the 19th century thus stemmed from a conditional, fragile tolerance, in perpetual negotiation with the tsarist bureaucracy [Encyclopaedia Judaica, art. "Moscow" and "Russia"].

The year 1891 marks one of the darkest pages in the history of Moscow's Jews. Under the reign of Alexander III, when Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich had just been appointed governor-general of Moscow, the authorities decided upon the mass expulsion of artisans and numerous Jewish residents from the city. Thousands of families, who had nonetheless settled legally thanks to earlier exemptions, were forced to leave Moscow, often under brutal conditions and within a very short timeframe. This episode, which provoked the indignation of part of European opinion, illustrates the reactionary hardening of imperial policy following the assassination of Alexander II and the wave of pogroms in the early 1880s [Encyclopaedia Judaica, art. "Moscow"; YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe].

It was in this ambivalent climate that the history of the city's main synagogue also unfolded. The Moscow community had undertaken, during the closing decades of the century, the construction of a choral synagogue worthy of its standing — the Moscow Choral Synagogue. The building, designed in a monumental style, was completed at the end of the nineteenth century, but the authorities long forbade its public use for worship, only permitting its opening as a synagogue in the early twentieth century, after the 1905 revolution and the edict of tolerance that accompanied it [Encyclopaedia Judaica, art. "Moscow"]. This edifice became the symbolic heart of Jewish life in Moscow and remained so throughout the twentieth century, enduring the trials of the Soviet regime.

The fall of the tsarist regime in 1917 abolished the Pale of Settlement and, with it, the restrictions that weighed upon Jewish settlement in Moscow. Having become the capital of the Soviet state in 1918, the city attracted a considerable influx of Jews from the former regions of the Pale, in search of education, employment, and integration into the new social order. Moscow's Jewish population then experienced rapid growth, making Moscow one of the largest Jewish centers in the Soviet Union [Encyclopaedia Judaica, art. "Moscow"; YIVO Encyclopedia].

The early Soviet years witnessed a paradoxical flourishing: while the regime repressed religion and Zionism, deemed "reactionary" or "bourgeois," it encouraged for a time a secular Jewish culture of Yiddish expression. Moscow thus welcomed leading institutions, including the famous Moscow State Jewish Theater (the GOSET), led by the actor Solomon Mikhoels, which flourished in the 1920s and 1930s [Encyclopaedia Judaica, art. "Moscow" and "Mikhoels, Solomon"]. This efflorescence was nevertheless closely monitored and progressively stifled. The late 1940s and early 1950s were marked by a wave of antisemitic repression: the assassination of Mikhoels in 1948, the dissolution of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, and the "campaign against cosmopolitanism" which specifically targeted Jewish intellectuals and artists. Moscow's institutional Yiddish culture was then largely annihilated [Encyclopaedia Judaica, art. "Anti-Semitism" and "Soviet Union"; YIVO Encyclopedia].

In the decades following Stalin's death, official Jewish life in Moscow was reduced to the barest minimum. The Great Choral Synagogue survived as one of the few authorized places, closely controlled by the authorities, yet it paradoxically became a rallying point. The spontaneous gatherings of young Jews in front of the synagogue on the occasion of the festival of Simchat Torah, beginning in the 1960s, bore witness to a vitality of identity that repression had not extinguished [Encyclopaedia Judaica, art. "Moscow"; YIVO Encyclopedia].

Moscow became the epicenter of the refusenik movement (in Russian otkazniki): those Soviet Jews who, having applied for permission to emigrate to Israel, were refused it and suffered in retaliation the loss of their jobs, harassment, and sometimes imprisonment. The struggle for the right to emigrate, championed by figures such as Anatoly (Natan) Sharansky, made the cause of Soviet Jews an international issue throughout the 1970s and 1980s, reaching into the very negotiations of the Cold War [according to the reference works on the Soviet Jewry movement; Encyclopaedia Judaica, art. "Aliyah" and "Soviet Union"]. The policy of glasnost initiated in the late 1980s by Mikhail Gorbachev gradually lifted the obstacles: a mass emigration to Israel, the United States, and Germany ensued, but so too, for those who remained, the possibility of an open rebuilding of communal life.

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 opened a new era. Freed from ideological constraints, Moscow's Jewish community experienced a spectacular institutional renaissance. Synagogues, schools, cultural centers, charitable organizations, and publications came into being or reopened their doors. The Lubavitch (Chabad) movement played a particularly active role, as did other currents of contemporary Judaism [Encyclopaedia Judaica, art. "Moscow"; YIVO Encyclopedia].

Among the major achievements of this period is the opening, in 2012, of the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center of Moscow (Evreyski muzey i tsentr tolerantnosti), housed in a former bus garage of constructivist architecture, which established itself as one of the world's great Jewish museums through its scale and museography [reference press and museum documentation, 2012]. The restored Great Choral Synagogue remains the historic seat of the community, alongside new communal complexes. Estimates of the number of Jews living in Moscow today vary considerably according to the criteria adopted — religious affiliation, ancestry, self-identification — but the metropolis is home to one of the largest Jewish populations in the post-Soviet space and in Europe [Encyclopaedia Judaica, art. "Moscow"; contemporary demographic estimates, Berman Jewish DataBank]. This renaissance nevertheless remains traversed by the uncertainties of continued emigration and political vicissitudes.

The Jewish history of Moscow reads like a long oscillation between exclusion and presence, between prohibition and tolerance. A city from which Jews were long banned, situated outside the Pale of Settlement, it became a major Jewish center only in the twentieth century, through the combined effect of revolution and urbanization. But this new centrality was immediately subjected to the contradictions of Soviet power, which at times encouraged a secular Jewish culture and at times repressed it to the point of annihilation. From the expulsion of 1891 to the struggle of the refuseniks, from the ephemeral brilliance of the GOSET to the opening of the Jewish Museum, Moscow encapsulates the paradoxes of the Jewish experience in the Russian Empire and then in the Soviet Union. The vitality of its contemporary community, rebuilt from almost nothing after 1991, bears witness to a tenacious continuity, made of transmitted memory and reviving institutions. The historian who traces this trajectory comes to measure how far the Jewish presence in Moscow was less an established fact than a conquest endlessly called back into question.