Russia's first modern Jews

David E. Fishman

Long before there were Jewish communities in the land of the tsars, Jews inhabited a region which they called medinat rusiya, "the land of Russia." Prior to its annexation by Russia, "the land of Russia" was not a center of rabbinic culture. But in 1772, when it was absorbed by Tsarist Russia, this remote region was severed from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth; its 65,000 Jews were thus cut off from the heartland of Jewish life in Eastern Europe. Forced into independence, these Jews set about forging a community with its own religious leadership and institutions. The three great intellectual currents in East European Jewry - Hasidism, Rabbinic Mitnagdism, and Haskalah - all converged on Eastern Belorussia, where they clashed and competed. In the course of a generation, the community of Shklov - the most prominent of the towns in the area - witnessed an explosion of intellectual...

See on goodreads | librarything