Volume 52, Number 10 · June 9, 2005
The Fiddler's Children
By Orlando Figes
The Jewish Century
by Yuri Slezkine
Princeton University Press, 438 pp., $29.95
At the turn of the twentieth century, 60 percent of Europe's Jews (5.2 million out of 8.7 million) lived in the Russian Empire. Subject to a comprehensive range of legal disabilities and discrimination, the Tsar's Jews were forbidden to own land, to enter the Civil Service, or to serve as officers in the army; there were strict quotas on Jewish admissions into higher schools and universities; and with a few exceptions they were forced by law to live in the fifteen provinces of western Ukraine, Belorussia, Lithuania, and Poland which made up the Pale of Settlement. The Jews were 'middlemen between the overwhelmingly agricultural Christian population and various urban markets,' Yuri Slezkine writes in his bold interpretative history:
Review, 3940 words
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