Simon Rabinovitch. Jewish Rights, National Rites

With Jewish Rights, National Rites: Nationalism and Autonomy in Late Imperial and Revolutionary Russia, Simon Rabinovitch offers an essential new account of Jewish nationalism in the Russian Empire and Eastern Europe through a supple history of the surprisingly successful career of an idea that now seems fanciful but that became central to the Jewish political imagination in the last decades of the tsarist empire: the program of Jewish autonomism. Jewish autonomism envisioned a state-mandated system of communal autonomy for Russia’s five-plus million Jews, to be defined legally as belonging to an extraterritorial Jewish nation with a constitutional right to self-determination. Concomitantly, Russia itself was to be recast not only as a constitutional order but also as a federal one whose constituent ethnicities would enjoy a formally mandated separate national life even as each individual enjoyed supra-ethnic Russian citizenship. Stated thus, this principle may seem both naive and anemic. Yet, as Rabinovitch shows compellingly, this principle not only generated an important Jewish politics of its own between the birth of Jewish nationalism in the 1880s and the consolidation of Bolshevik power in 1918, but also altered the constitution of Jewish nationalism, Russian Jewish liberalism, and Jewish socialism alike in Russia and beyond.

Autonomy · Citizenship · Constitution · Empire · Jewish state · Judaism · Nationalism · Political science · Politics · Sociology · State (computer science) · Zionism · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Philosophy · Religious studies · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies