His claim is twofold: By the late 19th Century Jews had become a dominant economic force in Kiev, when their rate of migration to the city outstripped all other groups, and when they became its largest non-Orthodox confession; and, at the same time, Meir contends, they had become a real community, despite the restrictions placed on Jewish residence, regular expulsions, and the unending enmity of the gentile majority. There is considerable truth to both claims. Under the leadership of their wealthy elite, headed by the Brodsky family, whose beet sugar fortune made possible their role as the principal donors to Jewish educational, religious, and welfare institutions, Kiev’s Jews found a permanent and indispensable, albeit precarious, position in the city’s social and economic life. The prominence of the Brodsky’s and other wealthy Jews both embodied and symbolized the commercial dominance of Kiev‘s Jews, who constituted 75 % of first-guild merchants within one decade of their first legal settlement in the city.[202] This dominance was complemented by the receptivity of Jewish hospitals and schools to gentiles, and both facilitated relations between open-minded members of the city’s Christian elite and wealthy, acculturated Jews.
Yet much of the book is inward-looking, treating the mutual relations among Jews and Jewish institutions. Kiev is little more than the stage setting for their affairs. The “Jewish Metropolis” of the title is thus an ambiguous characterization, suggesting Jewish hegemony, if not dominance, of a Slavic capital, but actually describing how the Jews constituted their own “metropolis”, self-sufficient and self-sustaining within the limits mentioned above. However, for a study set in the vibrant Russian and cosmopolitan center (arguably, the Empire’s third city) one misses a sense of Jews moving about in that larger urban, Slavic space. Even the acculturated and wealthy elite, the Jews’ most viable and influential link with the power and character of greater Kiev, is discussed principally in its relation with Jewish institutions and projects. No very concrete sense is evoked of how its members navigated their way in the alien yet attractive world of urban, modernizing Kiev. Does this represent a deliberate change of emphasis on Meir’s part, or simply an oversight, perhaps based on an implied understanding that the earlier article had treated the other side of the story and needn’t be repeated?
The case for the former possibility is strong. Assessing the communal nature of Kiev’s Jews must, in the first instance, take into account the severity of the conditions militating against community of any kind and leading to a tendency to draw together. Meir provides plenty of evidence of the obstacle to community formation among Kiev’s Jews. The only Jews legally allowed permanent residence in the city were first-guild merchants, and although other categories were granted temporary residence, the greatest number of the Jewish population were “illegals” in managing to live and even do business in Kiev without legal permission. Although that spoke to the bribability of Kievan officialdom and the resourcefulness of Jews in evading the law, legality was enforced frequently and harshly enough to make life in Kiev for most Jews an anxious and precarious experience, ever threatened with sudden expulsion. The hostility of most Russian, Polish and other Christian residents, reinforced by the known illegal status of most Jews and the open antisemitism of the city’s leading newspaper, encouraged the popular belief that Jews did not enjoy or deserve the protection of the law. That erroneous belief fostered frequent lawless, violent outbursts against Jews, especially after 1881, heightening the insecurity already felt from their residential status. It made Kiev not only a “Jewish metropolis”, but the capital city of antisemitism.
While all of this legal and extra-legal hostility toward Kiev’s Jews surely helped to draw them together against a common and seemingly ubiquitous enemy, it also created a tension between close community ties and the urge to acculturate or assimilate to Christian, Russian culture and society. To be sure, far from all Jews had the inclination or opportunity to adopt Russian ways, let alone assimilate or convert to Orthodoxy. Yet the bustle and opportunity for Jews in Kiev, indeed, the very closeness of urban relations, did encourage and maintain a steady, growing movement toward acculturation. The very prominence of Jews in trade to and from the city and the limits placed on Jewish residence made for much coming and going, meaning that community for many was a fleeting experience. Finally, the great wealth gap among Jews further divided the community in ways that the philanthropic nurturance of the needy by the wealthy elite could not completely offset. Wealthy Jews lived in different, more exclusive parts of the city from poor traders and workers. They insured cordial relations with state authority and their social ascendance among ordinary Jews by arranging the reelection of the same Crown Rabbi, who for over three decades protected the interests and provided religious legitimacy to the acculturated elite. For these several reasons, it would seem that the only reason to raise the question of community among Kiev’s Jews would be to note the anomaly that there was a community at all. Yet Kiev’s “Jewish Metropolis” functioned as a community of necessity that shielded Jews from a hostile and bigoted environment and that condition also engendered stronger and more meaningful common bonds.
Faith Hillis’s recent study of Kiev and Right-Bank Ukraine does not attribute any greater community cohesion to Kiev’s Jews, but it does place them within the larger political and economic framework of a city that was both more cosmopolitan and more bigoted than that described by Meir.[203] “Right-Bank Ukraine” comprised the pre-1914 provinces of Kiev, Podolia, and Volynia, and the book’s theme is the rise and decline of the “Little Russian” idea, a nationalist ideology nurtured in that region and stressing East Slavic unity and loyalty to the Russian autocracy. At first an “imagined community” that combined the East Slavs’ common origins in Kiev Rus’, Orthodox believers, and the exclusion of all non-Orthodox and non-East Slavs, the idea became, by the end of the 19th Century, an ideology of empire, embodied in a Russian nationalist political party. Although the study is not centered on Jews and their experience, Jews played a prominent part in the evolution of the Little Russian movement as active players in Kiev’s economic and political life and as an “indispensable enemy” that served to unify the often fractious Little Russia nationalists.
Jews were key players in the complex political struggle in 19th Century Kiev. Jewish commercial domination in Kiev and the Southwest served to shape the Little Russian claim to defend the Orthodox, East Slav peasant masses from their “exploiters”, Polish landlords and Jewish merchants. Little Russian intellectuals and elite spokesmen (who often had as little in common with the recently acquired peasant population of the Southwest as most Poles and Jews) drew on pre-existing class and ethnic prejudice to further their visions of national grandeur. In the process, the East Slav ideologists strengthened the appeal of their movement by amplifying the hatred and violence directed at both groups.
On the other hand, the severe and violent treatment experienced by Kiev’s Jews is traced not only to endemic antisemitism; anti-Jewish animus is shown to have been fed by a complex legal, economic, and political situation from which Jews drew benefits as well as woes and to which they were drawn in increasing numbers throughout the 19th Century. From a small number before 1859, when limited settlement was legalized, Kiev’s Jewish population rose from 13,000 in 1874 to 70,000 by around 1910, an increase in their proportion of the city’s population as well.