Jewish Studies Fall Graduate-Faculty Workshop Series

"Jews and their Neighbors: Law and Interethnic Relations in the Russian Empire"

Professor Eugene Avrutin 

Professor of Modern European Jewish History and Tobor Family Scholar,

Program of Jewish Culture and Society, University of Illinois

Friday, October 15

12:00 noon

Distinguished Alumni Room, IMU

This talk analyzes the role that the law played in the mediation of interethnic relations in the Russian Empire. Historians have argued that Jews lived side-by-side with other ethnic communities for hundreds of years before their mass destruction in the twentieth century. Yet they have failed to explain just how these populations managed to coexist with one another on an everyday level. Between the 1830s and the 1880s, relations between Jews and their ethnically diverse neighbors were not devoid of social conflict, but these disagreements were usually the product of daily economic exchanges rather than a disdain for one another based on either religious or ethnic differences. Drawing on court records and other unexplored archival materials, this talk analyzes how Jews and their neighbors utilized the law to mediate everyday disagreements, which took place in three contact zones in nineteenth century Russia: the neighborhood, the noble estate, and the marketplace.

Participants are asked to read a copy of Professor Avrutin’s paper prior to the workshop. To obtain a copy the paper, please email Melissa Deckard.