The Jews under Tsars and Communists: The Four Questions by RobertWeinberg. Russian Shorts. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2024. 147 pp. $17.75. ISBN 978‐1‐3501‐2915‐1

Given the sharp resurgence of global antisemitism over the past decade, this is an unfortunately timely book. It takes on the challenge of offering a concise history of the world’s “longest hatred,” a term popularized by Robert Wistrich, in the Russian and Soviet lands. In the process, the book also serves as a useful brief introduction to the broader history of the Jews in the Russian Empire and Soviet Union, making this volume an excellent overview of a difficult and contentious topic for an undergraduate or graduate class. Weinberg’s book eschews a strict chronological approach, dividing the topic into four thematic chapters explicating the mostly grim history. Rather than one singular “Jewish Question,” the chapters tease out four overlapping questions that structured Russian antisemitism: religious, cultural, socioeconomic, and political. From the outset, the goal is not to investigate “how Jews defined themselves individually or collectively,” or the transformation of Jewish society, but how “non-Jews formulated the Jewish Question” (p. 18). In other words, the goal is to explore how antisemitism came to be understood, articulated, and mobilized by holders of power and by the general Russian and Slavic populations amongst whom Jews lived. The first chapter, on the religious question, frames the Russian story against the long history of anti-Judaic practice. “For two millennia, Christians viewed Jews with suspicion” for their alleged complicity in the murder of Jesus, announcing the “eternalist” conception of antisemitism that undergirds the book. Like Wistrich, Weinberg posits antisemitism as a more or less ever-present, if at times veiled, phenomenon. As evidence, he focuses on the most heinous of Christian accusations of alleged Jewish depravity: the Blood Libel accusation that Jews ritually murdered Christian children to use their blood in the making of Passover Matzo, culminating in the Beilis trial of 1913. This is a curious choice to support an argument for eternal antisemitism. The narrative had been in circulation since the twelfth century elsewhere in Europe, yet, as Weinberg notes, allegations of ritual murder were largely absent in Russian lands until their sudden, widespread appearance in the late nineteenth century. Rather than evidence of eternal and ever-present hatred, the Blood Libel suggests historically discrete rupture. The second half of the chapter draws on anti-Jewish caricatures in the early Soviet press to show how vestiges of anti-Judaic thought merged with the social and political imperatives of the Soviet regime to produce great ambivalence about, and at times outright hostility toward, Jews, especially religious Jews. The second chapter focuses on the question of Jewish cultural isolation, examining failed efforts to promote Jewish integration and acculturation in the nineteenth century and early Soviet era. Imperial and Soviet regimes engaged in highly contradictory efforts to reform Jewish schools, education, and cultural production to make Jews more pliant and integrable subjects. Again, stressing continuities, Weinberg highlights deep and persistent ambivalences over the question of whether Jewish integration into broader society was desirable or possible. He also stresses the fact that, despite these efforts, most Jews nevertheless remained “firmly rooted in the world of tradition” and religion (p. 65). Chapter 3 explores efforts of Tsars and Soviets to reform and transform Soviet socioeconomic practice, wean Jews from the Russian exchange economy, and transform them into “productive” workers. This chapter, again, stresses similarities between Tsarist and Soviet efforts to force social change upon Jews from without. The chapter culminates in what ranks as perhaps the most ambitious effort to transform Jewish social life: Stalin’s completely failed project to build a Jewish national home in Birobidzhan. The final chapter shows how all of these questions came together to bring into doubt the political loyalty of Jews. It begins by outlining the various political movements that attracted and animated Jews throughout the revolutionary period, from socialist autonomous Bundism to nationalist Zionism. Weinberg traces how these previous political allegiances came to be dredged up and politicized in the purges of the 1930s, leading to the general allegation that Jews were politically suspect. Ultimately, the chapter shows how all of the preceding questions about Jewish otherness came together to render the Jews an ostracized, marginalized group within Soviet society, even before the mass onslaught of the Holocaust. While useful and timely, this book is limited by the eternalist conception of antisemitism at its heart. This leads the author to stress continuity between Tsars and Soviets throughout, obscuring meaningful shifts between and within epochs. Despite the heavy handedness of educational and cultural reforms forced by Nicholas I and Alexander II, the goal was integrationist; the turn to segregation, ostracism, and violence under Alexander III at the end of the nineteenth century, by contrast, suggests profound rupture. Similarly, one might ask whether the resurgence of antisemitism in the Stalin era constituted a link in the chain of continuity, or a radical break from the early revolutionary period when, for example, the Bolsheviks ordered the executions of hundreds of Red Army soldiers who engaged in antisemitic pogroms during the Civil War. To cite a more contemporary example, the book concludes by considering antisemitism in “contemporary” Russia, circa 2017. At the time of writing, the author plausibly argued that the Putin regime had proven to be relatively tolerant of Jews, suggesting that the long scourge of Russian antisemitism might recede into the distant past. Seven years and several wars in Ukraine and Gaza later, the Putin regime has adopted a hostile stance toward Israel, Zionism, and Jews. Is this evidence of a long line of continuity and eternal hatred? Or is it evidence of profound and historically discreet rupture? The former may be the more politically useful explanation in the present; but the latter is the critical historical orientation.