Russia and the USSR: The Case for Teaching Jewish History

If the Jews of Russia and the Soviet Union are important enough to be acknowledged, they are clearly not considered important enough to be made active or meaningful actors in its history.

This is the rather glum conclusion I drew at the end of my first year of teaching A-Level Russian and Soviet History.

It’s not a conclusion I agree with. Neither is it one that I think we need to accept.

Here, I will make the case for teaching Jewish history as an active and vital constituent element of Russia and the Soviet Union’s history at KS5. In a subsequent series of posts, I will elaborate on how I have tried to do this, following a set of principles explored here.

Note - this is a rather long post! If you'd prefer to download and/or print a copy, a PDF is here.

The Case for Teaching Jewish History

In brief, these principles are:

• The history of Russia and USSR’s Jews provides window onto a distinct though extremely diverse group, through their own social, cultural, and economic lives, their organisation, realities of discrimination, and resistance;
• It simultaneously provides a mirror in which wider developments of Russian and Soviet History are reflected through Jews’ participation in and contribution to them;
• Teaching “beyond the textbook” is not only necessary to teaching a vibrant, diverse history in which Russian and Soviet Jews play a vital role; it enables us to strengthen students’ wider knowledge of the specification by more firmly grounding the context and concepts required to understand core content;
• This is also an opportunity to “do justice” to the history of Russia and the USSR’s Jews, but this requires the content and narrative framing of Jewish history to be carefully (re-)considered.

Jewish History as a Window and a Mirror

Following the conceptualisation of Emily Style, many History teachers are used to the idea of using our subject as a “window” and a “mirror”. This metaphor, in which “windows” offer glimpses of lives distinct from our own while “mirrors” reflect our own experiences, is widely used to advocate a diverse curriculum in which our students see the lives of both themselves and others.

It can, however, also be turned on the historical subjects about whom we teach. This is because, in all sorts of ways, the lives and experiences of individuals and groups from the past are both distinct from those of others and reflective of the wider worlds in which they once lived.

Russia and the Soviet Union’s Jews, heterogeneous and highly diverse as they were, retained key cultural and social distinctions from the non-Jewish population. Yet they were nevertheless closely entwined in wider events and processes that drove these countries’ historical development.

In the 19^th and 20^th century, Russian and Soviet Jews comprised peasants, workers, and intellectuals. They were rural and urban; culturally distinct and culturally assimilated; religious, secular, and all shades in between. Jews were capitalists and communists, socialists and liberals, reformers and conservatives; they maintained Russia’s “backwardness” and envisioned its “modernity”. Jews experienced unique forms of persecution in the form of pogroms and antisemitism, yet shared many common aspirations and dreams of non-Jews. In short, they were not only there at the time of Russia and the Soviet Union’s profound transformations; they were amongst its active agents.

Throughout all this, the question of Jewish distinctiveness was ever-present. Opening his monumental history of Russian and Soviet Jews, A Century of Ambivalence, Zvi Gitelman encapsulates the dilemma beautifully: “This has been a century of great enthusiasms and profound disappointments. Jews have eagerly embraced programmes to reform Russia or to leave it; to lose themselves within the larger population or to develop a distinctive culture of their own; to preserve traditional Jewish culture or to root it out completely.”

Going “Beyond the Textbook” as Strengthening the Specification

Considering the minimum required content to be taught for courses on Russia and the USSR at A-Level in England and Wales, the relevance of Jewish lives and experiences is widely acknowledged. Of four A-Level exam boards, two explicitly mention Jewish experiences or antisemitism in their specifications, while two nod towards them with references to Russian and Soviet social, cultural, and religious life.

Nevertheless, Jewish experiences seem fleeting and superficial. Even those specifications that explicitly reference Jews give the impression of their existing only in brief moments: 1881-84, during a murderous spate of pogroms; during the 1905 revolution and 1918-21 civil war, when they faced pogroms again; in 1948-53, during Stalin’s antisemitic terror and the “Doctors’ Plot” (the inexplicable omission of the Holocaust and its over one-million Jewish victims on Soviet territory is something I’ll discuss in a later post).

Analysis of three exam-board approved textbooks (a full writeup can be found here) reflects a superficial and one-dimensional approach to Jewish history. Between them, the three textbooks contain a number of references (Jews and their experiences are mentioned on between 18 and 22 pages, approximately 6-11% of the pages, per textbook). Consistent with the specification, however, these reference focus thematically on a narrative of victimhood – the largest number of references are to antisemitism, with only a handful of references to significant Jewish individuals (almost all socialist activists) who contributed actively to Russian and Soviet history.

There is little sign of Jewish resistance to oppression, and no attempt to explore the diversity of Jewish social, cultural, or political life. Jews are portrayed overwhelmingly as passive objects, primarily appearing as helpless victims of discrimination and oppression, rather than as genuine historical subjects with their own agency to contribute substantially to their own, and wider Russian and Soviet, history.

The thematic gaps, meanwhile, are considerable. The Pale of Settlement receives cursory mention before vanishing without explanation; Zionism is referenced indirectly without acknowledging its multiple forms and contentious role in Jewish politics; Jewish religion and language are passed over almost entirely. Toeing the specification’s line, the textbooks almost entirely overlook the Holocaust save for one, which gives brief mention in one short passage on the Second World War.

Teaching in depth and detail about Russia and the Soviet Union’s Jews, evidently, requires us to step beyond prescribed specifications and associated textbooks.

This is the kind of statement that might bring teachers out in a cold sweat. Tasked with seeing students through public examinations, we might ask, “Where is the time?” But my argument is that “teaching beyond the textbook” actually strengthens students’ understanding of the minimum specified content. It should help equip them for exams.

There are two reasons for this.

1. Firstly, sporadic references to Jews and antisemitism remain decontextualised and conceptually rootless unless explicitly framed within the specificities of wider Jewish history in Russia and the USSR. Pogroms from 1881 to 1921 cannot be understood without the Pale of Settlement, Jewish socio-economic and cultural diversity, and Jewish involvement in wider political movements. Stalin’s antisemitic campaigns after World War Two cannot be understood without understanding the role Jews played in the Soviet war effort from 1941-45, or the role and significance played by Zionism in the years prior to the war. Nothing in terms of Jewish life in the USSR from 1941 onwards can, of course, be understood without discussion of the Holocaust on Soviet soil.
2. Secondly, the interconnectedness of Jewish history means it has a key role to play in illuminating the wider developments of Russian and Soviet history, not just for Jews but for population as a whole. This can only be done by extending the Jewish history taught from the specified minimum. I should make clear that I am not arguing here that Jewish history is unique in linking to wider themes – we should also be engaging with the histories of Roma, Central Asian Muslims, individuals in same-sex relationships, and other oft-overlooked groups. However, the specific acknowledgement of Jews and antisemitism within the specification, and the prominent roles Russian and Soviet Jews played in wide areas of Russian and Soviet history, lends itself to a closer study of Jewish history in particular.

Jewish history links conceptually to the four underpinning themes of the course we teach (power/authority, economy, society, culture), as well as linking contextually to wider core content in the specification.

“Doing Justice to History”

Finally, Jewish history in a Russian and Soviet context gives us an opportunity (to borrow a phrase) to “do justice to history” – if we consider carefully how we go about teaching it.

As formulated by Abdul Mohamud and Robin Whitburn, this approach requires a historically rigorous reframing of the history of previously marginalised groups away from “established master narratives” and exclusive focus on victimhood in order to highlight the complexity and agency of those groups. Within the context of Jewish history, guidance from the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) on teaching the Holocaust pointedly notes the importance of “considering the broader contexts within the events of the Holocaust occurred.”

This principle has been used to great effect by Stuart Foster, Eleni Karayianni, Andy Pearce, and Helen McCord co-authors of an excellent recent KS3 Holocaust textbook. As a model, it gives a reminder of the problems inherent in reducing Jews to a homogenised mass united by a collective name and experiences of antisemitism.

“Doing justice to history” in this context is not an attempt to deny the reality of suffering of Russian and Soviet Jews. Antisemitic persecution was very real throughout the 19^th and 20^th centuries. It is a call, rather, to recognise in its full complexity and diversity the reality of Jewish life and experience in this context, in which Jews were fully fledged agents of History in their own right, not its passive recipients.

Planning for Jewish History: A Scheme Within Schemes

My initial approach to this question was to plan a limited stand-alone scheme of 3 or 4 lessons covering Jewish experiences of war and revolution, c. 1914-1921. This idea fell short on several counts. Firstly, it covered such a short – albeit critical – timeframe that it neglected the broader sweep of Jewish history between 1855 and 1964. Secondly, by existing separately from aspects of the A-Level course, it implicitly reinforced the false notion that Jewish history was separate from, rather than intertwined with, non-Jewish history.

My solution to this problem has been to write a longer-term enquiry, spanning aspects of Jewish history across the period approximately 1880 to 1953. This comprises eight lessons that explicitly explore Jewish history, interspersed amongst lessons from the rest of the course. Taken together, these lessons address a broad enquiry question, “How did Jews participate in and respond to the transformation of Russia and the Soviet Union?” They aim to tell a story in their own right, whilst simultaneously fitting within the existing enquiry questions that form the backbone of my A-Level course.

Moving away from the exam board-approved textbooks, I based my lesson content on Zvi Gitelman’s now classic text, A Century of Ambivalence, supported by a number of more recent scholarly works, including on the Russian Revolution and Civil War by Michael Hickey and Brendan McGeever, and on the Holocaust in the USSR by John Klier.

Noting the principles outlined above, I was particularly keen to ensure that these lessons:

• met the themes, but went beyond the prescriptive and limited content, of the KS5 specification;
• provided rich contextual and conceptual knowledge pertinent to the study of Russia and the USSR more generally in this period, whilst making explicit the links between this and Jewish history;
• avoided treating Jews as a homogenous group and instead disaggregated the Jewish population;
• where possible told the story of Russian and Soviet Jews through their own voices;
• avoided a simplified narrative of victimhood for Russian and Soviet Jews.

In a further series of posts, I will share and unpick the lessons themselves, giving an explanation for (and links to full) teaching resources.

Further Reading

Jonathan Dekel-Chen, David Gaunt, Natan M. Meir, and Israel Bartal (eds.), Anti-Jewish Violence: Rethinking the Pogrom in East European History, Indiana University Press (2010)

Stuart Foster, Andy Pearce, Eleni Karayianni, and Helen McCord, Understaing the Holocaust: How and why did it happen? Hodder (2020)

Zvi Gitelman, A Century of Ambivalence: The Jews of Russia and the Soviet Union, 1881 to the present (various editions)

Michael Hickey, "The Jews in the Revolution", in Daniel Orlovsky (ed.), A Companion to the Russian Revolution, Wiley Blackwell (2020)

International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, Recommendations for Teaching and Learning about the Holocaust (2019)

John Klier, "The Holocaust and the Soviet Union", in Dan Stone (ed.), The Historiography of the Holocaust, Palgrave Macmillan (2004)

John Klier and Shlomo Lambroza (eds.), Pogroms: Anti-Jewish Violence in Modern Russian History, Cambridge University Press (1992)

Brendan McGeever, The Bolshevik Response to Antisemitism in the Russian Revolution, Cambridge University Press (2019)

Abdul Mohamud and Robin Whitburn, Doing Justice to History: Transforming Black History in Secondary Schools, UCL IOE Press (2016)

Emily Style, "Curriculum as Window and Mirror", retrieved from: https://www.nationalseedproject.org/Key-SEED-Texts/curriculum-as-window-and-mirror (18/06/2024)