Archive for the ‘jewish’ Category
I first read Russell Hoban in about 1982, at the suggestion of my English literature teacher. Hoban’s post-apocalyptic novel Riddley Walker is set in East Kent, where I grew up and was attending school, which fact no doubt played some part in the recommendation. Whether it was otherwise an appropriate recommendation for a teenager is rather doubtful (although no more doubtful than the early works of Ian McEwan and the complete oeuvre of Samuel Beckett, which were also on the list my teacher gave me to while away that particular long summer holiday).
It was only when Hoban died earlier this month that I realised that he was not an Englishman but an American, and in fact the American-born child of Jewish immigrants. In the 1930 US census, he appears as the five-year old Pennsylvania-born Russell Conwell (sic), and is described as being the nephew of the newspaper advertising editor Abraham Hochban and his wife Jennie, Yiddish-speaking Russian Jews from Volhynia (or “Poland, Voline”, as it says in the census return). Wikipedia states that Russell was the son of this couple and that Conwell was his middle name not his surname, so presumably there is a clerical error in the census and/or a mistake on Wikipedia.
Abraham or Abram Hochban had married Jennie Dimmermann in Philadelphia in 1915 and became naturalised as a US citizen in 1922.
He had arrived in Philadelphia on 30th November 1913, on board the “Frankfurt” from Bremen in Germany. He appears in the incoming passenger list as Avram Gochbahn, not Hochban or Hochbahn. It is always worth remembering when undertaking genealogical research involving Russian records that the Russian alphabet lacks the letter H and uses the G instead. It is therefore not unusual to find names which we expect to begin with an H to be shown with a G in Russian language records and in English or German language records for which Russian language documents have been the source (as is the case here). Avram is recorded as being aged 19 (i.e. born circa 1894), single, and a clerk; his address (and that of his next of kin, his mother) appears to be Warschau (i.e. Warsaw).
The naturalisation papers give his date of birth as 3 June 1894. The passenger list states that Abraham had been born in Ostrog in Volhynia (now Ostroh in Ukraine). However, the naturalisation papers suggest that he was actually born in “Orgeiw”, Bessarabia (today Orhei in Moldova) but had been resident in Ostrog before emigration. Where was he actually born? Research would be necessary to determine this but it may be that Orhei, which like Ostrog had a thriving Jewish population, is the better candidate. In this instance, the need for caution is thrown up by the discrepancy in the records but, even where records appear consistent, one should still be cautious – across the Russian Empire the names of towns were often also the names of provinces or districts, and it cannot be automatically assumed that the town itself is intended.
The Banat is one of the regions of Europe known as contact zones, where peoples of different ethnicity, religion and language co-existed, and to an extent still co-exist – sometimes harmoniously, sometimes uneasily, as is the case the world over.
Imagined as a Venn diagram, the Banat is perhaps a natural intersection for the Serbs to the west (who had pushed north to escape the Ottomans) and the Romanians to the east. However, there is also an artificial historical factor, caused by the ruling Habsburgs’ intervention and planned settlement of the land in the 18th century and more natural immigration of Imperial subjects in the 19th century. The majority of these were German speakers – they became known as Swabians, although Swabia was only one of various German regions from which they came. In addition to the Germans, the Banat received, among others, Bulgarian, Croat, Czech, French, Hungarian, Italian, Slovak, Spanish, Swiss and Ukrainian settlers – mostly but not exclusively Catholics (there were also Protestants of different persuasions, among them again many German settlers). And further broadening the mix of peoples in the area were Jewish merchants and professionals, Austrian civil servants, and Gypsy (locally Tsigani or Ţigani) settlements.
Resources and professional genealogical research services for those with German Banater ancestry are well-established. In the wake of WW2, rightly or wrongly, the Germans in Yugoslavia and Romania became persona non grata. The descendants of the Banat Germans now live in Germany, in Canada, in USA and elsewhere and, like all displaced and diaspora peoples, show a keen interest in their roots (roots which, of course, pass through the rich black soil of the Banat and extend beyond it to Baden and Lorraine, Westfalen and Württemberg).
However, Bluebird Research, as well as undertaking German genealogy in Serbia and Romania, can assist with your genealogical research in the Banat whatever the nationality or religion of your ancestors. We work in both Romania and Serbia; we are just as interested in the cultural and social history of the Hungarians and the Slovaks of the Banat; we have a special interest in the Jewish communities, now mostly lost; and in the Serbian Orthodox families, many of which can trace their histories back to “continental” Serbia (for instance to Šumadija), or to Herzegovina, or to Montenegro.
If you have ancestors from the Banat, and would like professional assistance with your family history research, please get in touch with us for a free assessment and estimate of costs. Research is affordable and success rates are generally high.
This week the family history website Find My Past has published the central index to the register of merchant seamen on British vessels. The original record series was created by the then Registrar General of Shipping and Seaman (part of the Board of Trade). It is now held on microfiche at The National Archives in Kew, England and can be seen under shelf references BT348, BT349 and BT350.
The resource takes the shape of record cards which form a central index to seamen registered to serve on British-registered vessels within the period from approximately 1918 to 1941.
What makes the Central Index Register cards interesting from an Eastern European genealogical research perspective is that many of those employed in the British merchant navy were engaged at overseas ports. For example, there are large numbers of records relating to Estonian, Greek and Latvian sailors. Additionally, there are smaller but still significant quantities of seamen from Cyprus, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Russia, Ukraine and the former Yugoslavia, and even some from landlocked Czechoslovakia and Hungary. Some of these men may have settled and even become naturalised in Britain but presumably a majority remained citizens or subjects of their country of birth.
The front and back of each index card have been scanned and an online index published so that the records of individual merchant marines can be searched for and located. Two, three or more cards of different dates exist for some individuals.
The cards evolved a little over time, from CR1 to CR2 to CR10 types, and the details recorded changed too. However, the basic format remains the same, as does the core detail of name, year and place of birth, rating, Discharge A Number, ship name and/or official registered number, and date. Some cards give physical descriptions, while others sport a black and white passport-style photograph and signature.
The data is handwritten onto the printed index cards. The handwriting is not always legible and may be faint or contain abbreviations. The place of birth information on the cards will reflect the date at which they were created and the spellings current at that time, sometimes anglicised or misspelt. For example, the Estonian islands of Hiiumaa and Saaremaa often appear as Dagö and Ösel respectively (typically minus their diacritics), being their old Swedish names, and similarly the Saaremaa capital Kuressaare is often given as Arensburg.
This online collection is not a complete record of those sailing on British merchant vessels between the Wars. The majority of cards dating from 1913 to 1921 are known to have been destroyed in 1969. Moreover, a fourth record series at The National Archives (shelf reference BT364) is not being published, on account of data protection and personal privacy concerns. The series BT364 also covers the period 1921 to 1941 and was extracted from the materials that now comprise BT348 to BT350 inclusive. It remains possible that this series, which has also been scanned and indexed, may be released too in due course.
A final note: while some of the individuals contained within these records will have seen service additionally in the Royal Navy at some date, it must be emphasised that the majority would have served only on British merchant vessels and were not in the armed forces.
Imagine. Millions of individuals are researching their ancestors. Hundreds of professional researchers have come into being to assist in the reconstruction of these family histories. Original registers are being imaged and indexed to broaden access and facilitate the process of research.
No, not 2011 in North America or Britain or Australia, but the mid-1930s in Nazi Germany.
From April 1933, all citizens in Germany were required to research and document their family tree, at least back to the level of their grandparents, and to obtain as evidence the corresponding certified copies of entries in birth and marriage registers (while SS officers had to zealously research their pedigree back to 1750 and other high level Nazi Party functionaries had to go back to 1800).
The reason for this rush of interest in genealogy was, of course, to validate one’s Aryan credentials, or determine one’s degree of Aryan purity, as the case may be. And one’s genealogy had grave consequences, for those who were non-Aryan (by which was meant Jewish) and for the great many who were Mischlinge or of mixed blood – at the very least, discrimination and persecution. Determining the status of each individual was not as straightforward as one might now think, and such factors as Jewish conversion to Lutheranism or Catholicism, or dropping out of the Jewish community without conversion to Christianity (Austritte), or illegitimacy, or disputed parentage, meant that the state had to interpret and decide upon tens of thousands of moot cases.
Various official Nazi bodies were involved in the process. Foremost was the Reichsstelle für Sippenforschung (the “Reich’s Centre for Genealogical Research”). Once the necessary tree had been recreated and register entries had been found and authenticated, the documentation had to be submitted to the Reichsstelle, where bureaucrats would then rule as to whether one was Aryan, three-quarters Aryan, half-Aryan, quarter-Aryan or non-Aryan.
In 1934 the Reichsstelle für Sippenforschung embarked upon an ambitious project to microfilm parish registers, both to preserve the originals and to make the material more readily available to the state. Accordingly, registers were called in from the churches to a central micro-reprographics studio in Berlin. A copy was returned to the incumbent of the church, and the master held in the Reichsstelle für Sippenforschung archives.
The Reichsstelle für Sippenforschung also created a massive central card index system for ease of reference. This comprised abstracted births and baptisms, with particular attention paid to the baptisms of converted Jews, from which it constructed its own handy Jüdische Personenstandsregister. This Register comprised the so-called Judenkartei, the index cards relating to Jewish converts. In fact there were two copies of these particular index cards. The original Judenkarte remained in the Reichsstelle’s archives, while a copy was gifted to the Evangelical Lutheran Church – the latter is now housed at the Evangelische Zentralarchiv in Berlin.
During the meticulously orchestrated Kristallnacht pogroms in November 1938, the Nazis not only razed or damaged synagogues, smashed Jewish property and assaulted Jews, but also carefully removed Jewish vital records from the synagogues, so these could be put to use by the state. Likewise, in 1939, the Reichsstelle für Sippenforschung took over the Jewish genealogical record collection of the Gesamtarchiv der Deutsche Juden. The Gesamtarchiv had been collecting original birth, marriage and death registers from synagogues across Germany for over 30 years, held vital records for hundreds of local communities across Germany and had also created a card index of Jewish births in Berlin (where the sheer size of the community and number of synagogues made it difficult to find a particular record unless one already knew the exact place of registration).
Within seven years, mandatory genealogy had affected the lives of millions in Germany and, of course, impacted in particular upon the lives of the hundreds of thousands of German Jews. Today we do genealogy for a different reason, to affirm identity and heritage, but it is perhaps wise to remember that genealogy can also be put to sinister uses in the hands of eugenicists, racial supremacists and ultra-nationalists.
This blog article owes much to Prof Deborah Hertz. For further information on the uses to which the Nazis put genealogy, see Prof Hertz’s 1997 article “The Genealogy Bureaucracy in the Third Reich” published in the periodical Jewish History (Vol 11, No 2).
The Austro-Hungarian, or Habsburg, Empire, also known as the Dual Monarchy, collapsed and fractured during WW1 and new nation states emerged from its ruins, including of course the modest Central European state of Austria itself.
It is difficult to argue against today’s received opinion that empires are bad things and that it is wrong for one people to rule over another. In practice, though, the multinational Austro-Hungarian Empire was largely benign. It is true that from time and time, and perhaps particularly although by no means exclusively in areas under Hungarian rule, emerging nationalisms were suppressed; sometimes this was by show of force, but by the late 19th century the Empire had become largely a bureaucratic organism.
The great elegist of the Empire, Joseph Roth, does not attribute the collapse of Austro-Hungary to the rise of Yugoslav and Romanian and Czechoslovak nationalism, but to the overweening pan-Germanic nationalism which was to have such devastating consequences for Europe.
In his 1938 novel The Emperor’s Tomb (translated by John Hoare, pub Granta, 1999), the character Count Chojnicki — a cipher for Roth himself — prophesied before the outbreak of WW1 that “Austria will perish at the hands of the Nibelungen fantasy”1. “It is the Slovenes, the Poles and Galicians from Ruthenia, the kaftan-clad Jews from Boryslaw2, the horse traders from the Bacska3, the Moslems from Sarajevo, the chestnut roasters from Mostar who sing our national anthem “Gott Erhalte”, while the Germans in the Empire sing German martial and chauvinist tunes. Similarly, the narrator and protagonist, Trotta, writes of the “tragic love which the Crown Lands4 bore to Austria”:
“The gypsies of the Puszta5, the Huzulen6 of Subcarpathia, the Jewish coachmen of Galicia, my own kin the Slovene chestnut roasters of Sipolje, the Swabian7 tobacco growers from the Bacska, the horse breeders of the Steppes, the Osman Sibersna8, the people of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the horse traders from the Hanakei9 in Moravia, the weavers from the Erzgebirge10, the millers and coral dealers of Podolia11: all these were the open-handed providers of Austria.”
After WW1, reflecting on the demise of Austro-Hungary and the mediocrity to which defeated Austria had sunk, Chojnicki bemoans “the fatheads from the Alps and the Sudeten Germans, those cretinous Nibelungen… It was not our Czechs, our Poles, or Ruthenians who betrayed us, but the Germans, only the Germans, at our very heart.”
- Nibelungen: mythological nonsense popularised by Wagner
- Boryslaw: Boryslav, a small town now in Ukraine
- Bacska: properly Bačka, a region now largely in northern Serbia
- Crownlands: provinces of the Austro-Hungarian Empire
- Puszta: the steppes of the Alföld, the great Hungarian plain
- Huzulen: the Hutsuls, a Ruthenian or western Ukrainian people
- Swabian: 18th century German settlers in the Banat in northern Serbia and adjacent Romania
- Osman Sibersna: a phrase not properly translated into English from the original German language die osmanische Sibersna but presumably referring to Ottomans of Bosnia-Herzegovina
- Hanakei: the Moravian people of the Haná region around the town of Olomouc, Czech Republic
- Erzgebirg: the Krušné Hory mountain range, also now in the Czech Republic
- Podolia: here western Podolia is meant, being the region around the city of Ternopil‘, now in Ukraine
The Jews of Belgrade were largely exterminated by the Nazis and their local accomplices between October 1941 and May 1942. The Nazis declared the city Judenfrei by August of 1942. Of course, as elsewhere in Serbia and throughout Europe, this was seldom entirely true – individual Jews managed to go in to hiding, or were concealed and protected by kind neighbours, or left Belgrade for the relative safety of an obscure village in the countryside, or fled while there was still time with view to returning later. Nevertheless, the great majority of the pre-War Jewish population of Belgrade was destroyed.
The Jews of Belgrade were both Ashkenazic and Sephardic, with the latter in the majority (as tended to be the case throughout the former Yugoslavia and the Balkans), forming approximately 80% of the overall community. Before the Shoah there were four functioning Sephardic synagogues and prayer houses in Belgrade. However, families were not necessarily religious – the Jews of Serbia were usually assimilated and often upwardly mobile and, as well as merchants and craftsmen, there were many shop salesmen and clerks, professionals and intellectuals.
Although the community was destroyed in 1942, there are excellent surviving records covering the period from the turn of the century up to the Holocaust. These are not online but in some cases have been digitised and can be interrogated locally. Other and frequently more informative paper files have to be called up in the traditional way in the municipal archives. If an individual or a family was established in the city, especially in the Stari Grad (“old town”) neighbourhoods such as Dorćol, we can usually find a very good paper trail for the 1910s, 1920s and 1930s up to 1941/42, detailing dates of vital events, occupations, residential addresses and so on. Such records often indicate connections elsewhere in the former Yugoslavia or abroad – a sojourn in Croatia perhaps, a wife born in another city with a thriving Sephardic community, or a parent from Sofia in Bulgaria.
If you are interested in Jewish family history research in Belgrade, Bluebird Research would be delighted to assist – please email us for an assessment and estimate of costs.
The very nature of the trade of a professional genealogist is to undertake research into someone else’s family history. As a genealogist, one is accustomed to researching one’s own tree and generally feels reasonably confident when visualising the past and imaginatively reconstructing the lives of one’s ancestors, based upon what one knows of local history and culture, the places where they lived and what they did for a living. At least that is certainly the case when one’s ancestors come from the same country and, as in my own particular case, the same county and often the same town.
It is of course different if you live in diaspora, if you are, for example, a resident of North America or Australia or South Africa with ancestors back in the unfamiliar old world of continental Europe. When, as a professional genealogist, one conducts investigations on behalf of such individuals into their family background in Europe, one brings to bear the wide experience of one’s previous research across multiple cases, the knowledge derived from reading and, in many instances, from travel; but most of all one has to have what Keats called negative capability. This is the ability to suppress one’s own personality and to project oneself into the lives of others, to try to think and feel the world through their eyes. One might argue that this is largely spurious but I do not think it impossible to gain practical insights into avenues of research from this kind of imaginative or lateral thinking. Certainly, one often finds that one becomes preoccupied with particular individuals or lines of a family being researched, as one wonders about their lives, their motivations, what prompted them to emigrate, for example, or how they managed to survive adverse circumstances.
David Albahari published in 1998 a book called, in English translation, Götz and Meyer*. His book is an essay in negative capability, an attempt to come to terms with the experience and unknowable inner life of participants in the terrible drama of the extermination of the Jewish community of Belgrade once Serbia had been forced to capitulate to Nazi occupation. Between April and July 1941 almost 9,500 Belgrade Jews had to register with the authorities. The Jewish men of Belgrade were mostly shot in October 1941, but the women, children and elderly were taken to the Sajmište concentration camp (in the grounds of a former trade fair on the outskirts of the city) in December 1941. The protagonists of the title are Wilhelm Götz and Erwin Meyer, NCOs of the Nazi SS who operated the gaswagen (or dušegupka in Serbian) that liquidated the Sajmište camp Jews between March and May 1942, using the truck’s exhaust fumes, on daily or twice-daily trips (excepting Sundays) out towards Jajinci. What can one know of Götz and Meyer? Albahari presents them not as callous or psychopathic but as normal men carrying out a perhaps unpleasant but necessary duty for the greater good. Gradually over the course of the book they are used as a means of teasing out the last days and demise of the family Albahari doesn’t know, those lost in the Shoah:
“When I first tried to sketch out my family tree, it looked like… a blade of grass, like a bare tree, without leaves.”
He interviews an ailing elderly relative living in care but still able to record the names of multiple uncles, aunts and cousins, whose lives Albahari then researches as best he can using the surviving vital records of the Jewish community of Belgrade:
“My family tree now looked quite different, it had filled out with leaves and branches, and it was sturdier… I ought to have had 67 relatives, some of them close, others more distant… in fact I had only six, including the cousin in the old people’s home.”
The cousin passes away shortly after. The other five kin, “the last kernels on a gnawed ear of corn”, lived in Argentina, Australia, Israel and USA. Their average age was 80 and all were childless.
“I was an ear of corn with nothing but a few loose kernels left on it… when all of us died off, when our kernels fell into the washtub of time, nothing would be left from my parents’ families.”
Although ironically, perhaps, the book is an easy read – you can read it in two sittings – it is a serious and sobering reflection on persecutor and victim, as well as a personal journey in discovering and attempting to come to terms with the past and realising the significance of memory. It also makes one start to think about the ones who got away, and how; what role was played by chance or luck or circumstances, and what part by the initiative, or sheer determination, or instinctive will to survive of those Jews of Belgrade who somehow came through the Holocaust years alive, against all the odds.
*published by Vintage, 2005, in translation by Ellen Elias-Bursać
Czesław Miłosz relates the story of an independently wealthy Warsaw Jew named Felix, who had taken up residence in Vilnius’s Hotel Europa*. In 1939 Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia had discovered just enough friendship for one another to partition Poland between them along the euphemistic “peace boundary” (or Molotov-Ribbentrop line), and Felix was now seemingly trapped in Vilnius within an enlarged Soviet Union. Moreover, in the summer of 1940 he was relieved of his moveable assets by a duplicitous lawyer acquaintance. However, Felix found a way out by Trans-Siberian rail across the continent-sized USSR to its Far-East border with Japanese-occupied Manchuria. This was even less feasible than it may sound, as the Soviets permitted such travel only to those with a Japanese visa – and by mid-1940 it was no longer possible to acquire such a visa legitimately.
However, in Vilnius lived a rabbi named Silberstein with preternatural gifts of prescience: while exit visas were still to be had, he had done the rounds of the overseas consulates and filled his passport with as wide an array of stamps as possible. There also existed in Vilnius at that time extremely gifted illustrators, graphic designers and printers. Rabbi Silberstein’s Japanese visa therefore served as a template and could be duplicated as needed but, as Miłosz writes, “it was marked by one defect: no one in the city knew the Japanese alphabet, and therefore could have guessed that each visa contained the name of its first owner. When the five-hundredth Silberstein passed over the Manchurian frontier, the Japanese began to worry…”
Whether this part of the story is apocryphal in whole or in part, Felix did escape to Shanghai and thence via Australia to USA, only to be killed in a motor vehicle accident in Hawaii.
It is also likely that the good rabbi’s original bona fide visa was one of those issued by Chiune Sugihara, the Japanese Vice-Consul in Kaunas in independent Lithuania, and one of the Righteous Among The Nations. His story can be read on Wikipedia.
*see the essay collection Proud To Be A Mammal: Essays on War, Faith and Memory, pub Penguin, 2010.
The former Russian Empire gubernia or province of Volhynia, part of the region which Poles know as kresy, was divided at the Treaty of Riga in 1921. The western side was joined to newly re-independent Poland, while the eastern side became part of the Ukrainian SSR. Towns such as Lutsk and Rivno became officially Polish Łuck and Równe; Zwiahel and Żytomierz became formally Ukrainian Novohrad-Volynskyi and Zhytomyr. In the Imperial Russian era, Poles had made up a minority of the overall population across Volhynia but held disproportionate influence, usually forming the local elite in both town and country areas.
The situation on the ground was not so straightforward, however. Volhynia was an ethnically mixed region, home to Germans (for whom it was Wolhynien), Jews (who called it Vohlin in Yiddish), Poles (who called it Wołyń) and Ukrainians (Volyn), with a corresponding mix of religions. Even this does no justice to the granular complexity. For example, Roman Catholics, unless they were German, were usually regarded as Poles, even if they spoke only Ukrainian; but it was a moot point as to whether they were Poles who had lost their mother tongue over time, or Ukrainians whose ancestors had converted due to Polish landowner or clerical pressure. Moreover, while the population may not have been especially literate, many peasants and other villagers were bilingual.
Furthermore, there was little national consciousness. Just as in neighbouring Polissia immediately to the north, also split after WW1 between Poland and, in this case, the Belarusian SSR, the peasantry identified themselves primarily by their religion or by their social estate as peasants: many, when questioned by early Soviet ethnographers, stated that they were “locals” and spoke the “local” language.
Of course the Soviets, having gained formal control over Ukraine at the Treaty of Riga, sought to modernise and develop what was still a largely traditional society, religious, insular and self-sufficient. The Soviets wanted the backward periphery to acquire the new forward-looking Soviet consciousness. One way in which the USSR of the 1920s and early 1930s tried to achieve this was through recognising and encouraging national minorities. This involved tidying up the particularities of “local” cultures – for example, Poles had to be Poles and, if they were not sufficiently Polish, they must be polonised, meaning that Ukrainian-speaking Roman Catholics were classified as Poles and encouraged to learn proper Polish. Each national minority was acknowledged and appropriate local administrative structures were put in place to develop and of course to try to Sovietise each national group. Within Zhytomyr okrug, a special Marchlevsk Polish Autonomous Region (Marchlewszczyzna in Polish) was set up in 1925, centred around the Polish village of Dołbysz (re-named Marchlevsk after the Polish activist Marchlewski), during this phase of Soviet enthusiasm for the minorities. However, this was not to last.
The Soviets found that the local population in Marchlevsk and elsewhere in Volhynia was not compliant. The locals were averse to collectivisation, they failed to fulfil command economy quotas, they persisted in their old ways of life, preferring to remain upon their scattered homesteads and in their small hamlets rather than congregate in efficient centralised nuclear villages and towns. The experiment in encouraging national minorities backfired, not on the Soviets but on the minorities themselves. Increasingly they began to be seen as wreckers, saboteurs, conspirators, collaborators, spies; not good Soviet citizens but consciously or subconsciously working for capitalist Poland or Nazi Germany.
Volhynia didn’t really have any fat exploitative kulaks to purge but, nevertheless, in 1930 some 15,000 “kulaks” and “enemy Poles” were identified. In 1935 the Marchlevsk polraion was dismantled. Some 35,000 Poles were deported to eastern Ukraine, and 4,000 volunteer eastern Ukrainian families brought in to take their place. In the following year, 1936, there were mass summary deportations of approximately 70,000 Poles and Germans from Volhynia to Kazakhstan. In 1937/38 an estimated 56,000 Poles and German were arrested, charged and then imprisoned or deported.
The deportees became so-called special settlers in the remote semi-arid northern reaches of Kazakhstan. By 1945 the number of national minority special settlers in Kazakhstan had reached 900,000, including minorities from Karelia, the Caucasus and the Russian Far East as well as from the kresy. They were expected to cultivate the previously uncultivated steppe grazing lands of the Kazakh nomads (who themselves had been deprived of their traditional manner of life, forced into collectivised or urban existences). The new special settlements each comprised a founder population of 1,500 people, and initially were simply numbered rather than named. Later, the settlers named them, often reflecting their places of origin (such as Podilske or Volynka). The conditions imposed on the special settlements were not entirely punitive but there were restrictions upon travel and a requirement to register monthly with officers of the NKVD, the state apparatus which managed them. Special settlers were not in receipt of internal passports – from 1932, when they were re-introduced by the Soviets, until reforms in 1956 during the post-Stalin thaw, these were granted only to Soviet citizens in towns or working on state farms, not to peasants or collective farm workers.
The national minorities were encouraged to assimilate and to become Homo sovieticus. Mixed marriages were commonplace. Native language fluency diminished at the second or third generation. A new Soviet identity was forged. Today one must expect there to be a resurgence of interest in roots, in ancestry and in the historic homeland, among these peoples who were made to colonise Kazakhstan, just as, in an entirely different context, the growth of identity politics since the 1970s in the melting pot of USA has led to an increased desire to understand one’s family history and the specificity of its immigrant experience.
*This blog owes much to Kate Brown’s A Biography of No Place (Harvard University Press, 2004), to which the reader is referred for more on Marchlevsk Polish Autonomous Region and also on its German equivalent, the Pulin German Autonomous Region.
Who was recruited?
In the early 18th century, the expectation was that one man would be enlisted into the army from every 20 families within a community each year. All social estates, high and low, were liable for military service. However, over the decades many privileges and exemptions were granted so that by 1858 an estimated 20% of the otherwise eligible male population of the Empire was in fact exempt – this included landowners, members of merchant guilds, those with a higher education and the like, but also all those living in specific regions of empire such as Bessarabia. The burden of “other ranks” military service therefore fell heaviest on the peasantry and the urban poor.
How were recruits selected?
In rural Russia, the peasant community itself – the mir – was responsible for putting forward a list of candidates. While the mir or commune probably knew who among its members was eligible for the draft, the undertaking of the Russian censuses, producing the periodic but somewhat irregular revision lists (now of great value to family historians with roots in the former Russian Empire), formalised the process by identifying and recording the population. Unlike censuses in Britain, for example, which were used solely for social planning, the Russian revisions were used explicitly for taxation and conscription purposes.
Each year, the commune produced a shortlist of potential recruits which was then submitted to an army induction centre set up temporarily for the purpose in the nearest town in the volost or uezd (or district). The requisite number of men would then be conscripted into the army, while those not selected could expect to be put forward again the following year. Of course, some men were rejected by the army for not meeting its physical criteria and would unlikely to be conscripted in any year. Others, such as those with disabilities, were deselected by the commune itself and never made the list. To a certain extent, both the commune and the army were sensitive to the fact that each conscript was a lost worker and a lost taxpayer, with the peasants knowing that someone else would have to make up the deficit in labour and money. This meant that there was usually a conscious effort to spare only sons, or only working males in families. In a household of many brothers or sons, it was almost inevitable that one or more would be drafted. However, it was also possible for wealthier farmers to use influence or to purchase a surrogate from a different community to take the place of their brother or son who had been placed on the shortlist. Finally, commune members perceived to be unproductive, or exhibiting anti-social behaviour or committing petty crimes, would be sure to top the shortlist.
While therefore the commune exercised a measure of influence over who was recruited and who not, it is easy to see that the whole process of conscription was a source of stress and tension within each community. This was particularly the case as army service was neither short nor sweet…
How long did a soldier serve in the army?
- Before 1793, a soldier could expect to serve in the Russian army for life.
- From 1793, this was reduced to 25 years.
- From 1834, military service was reduced to 20 years.
- From 1874, the term of service was reduced to 18 years, of which initially the first 5 years were to be spent in the regular standing army and the subsequent 13 years in the reserves. However, later this was changed to 3 years in the army and 15 years in the reserves.
What happened to a new recruit?
Enlistment into the army was a transformational experience. Not only would the recruit very probably leave the vicinity of his native village for the first time but he would be unlikely to return for many years, if at all. Instead, he would be swallowed up into the army corpus, be billeted upon unwilling householders and endure all the hardships of army life which were severe even during peacetime.
However, something else rather peculiar immediately happened to a new recruit. His legal status in Russian society changed. That change was a form of emancipation, albeit deferred until such time as he was discharged from the army. Upon joining the army he ceased to be exposed to any of his former tax or labour obligations, whether to state, church or landowner. Effectively, he was now a free man, just a free man conscripted into the unfreedom of army life.
What about soldiers’ wives and children?
If a recruit was already married, with or without children, the usual scenario was long term separation. There was no easy mechanism for wives and children to go upon the strength, although some managed to continue to cohabit with their men when they were stationed in garrisons or fortresses. Instead, the recruit’s family was subject to great uncertainty and potential hardship. Wives, too, became legally free when the soldier attested. This meant also that they were entitled to an internal passport granting freedom of movement and employment. However, a disproportionate number of wives either drifted into prostitution in towns, or had illegitimate children; some remarried bigamously.
Soldiers’ children were a subcategory in the system of social estates. Sons, including until 1856 the illegitimate children of soldiers’ wives (where the soldier was not himself the father), were registered and expected to enter military service when they came of age.
In Imperial Russia, the status of women and children was determined by that of their husbands or fathers. This is why a soldier’s wife became free when he was recruited. However, this also meant that a soldier’s widow who remarried could become a serf or a peasant owing normal dues once again, and similarly a soldier’s daughter who married a serf lost her free status and became herself enserfed (until emancipation).
Unmarried recruits were of course strongly discouraged from marrying.
What happened to a soldier once discharged from the army?
If a soldier survived the hardships of a full term in the army, he would be discharged to enjoy for the first time and as best he could the freedoms he had acquired when he was recruited. Now he had theoretical freedom of movement; he was exempt from taxation; he did not have to labour for the landlord. However, at the same time he received only a small lump sum and had no immediate means of support. Therefore he was also free to become jobless and hungry and poor. In these circumstances, it was not unusual for a discharged soldier to have to live upon charity, or to become a hawker or a casual labourer, or to struggle to ply a trade. Other old soldiers entered state service as messengers or guards, or in the police or fire services. Additionally, until reforms in 1867, significant numbers of retired soldiers were settled in so-called veterans’ towns or on virgin lands owned or claimed by the state, often in frontier situations.
Others where they could returned to their native village to farm the family plot if it still existed, or to buy a new plot if they had the money. In fact, the 1867 returns henceforth required discharged soldiers to return to the community from which they had been recruited, at least partly to prevent the social problems associated with ex-soldiers which were a growing cause for concern in cities and towns.
In May 2001 I visited Trakai in Lithuania. A mini-bus took me and a handful of Japanese tourists the 30 or so km from Vilnius bus station and dropped us off outside the major tourist attraction, the restored Trakai Castle situated romantically in lake Galvė. While the others headed across the footbridge to the castle with their cameras at the ready, I wandered by myself the length of the little town to see what I could find of the Karaim.
Karaism is a non-Talmudic Mosaic faith and the Karaim, or Karaites, are a dispersed people with what are generally regarded as Turkic but sometimes as Jewish roots, living in scattered communities across the former Soviet bloc.
Historically in what is today Ukraine, Karaim lived in the towns of Lutsk (inter-War Polish Łuck) and Halych (after which the former Austro-Hungarian province of Galicia is named). In addition, communities were to be found in the Crimea in towns such as Bakhchisaray (Bağçasaray), Feodosiya (Kefe) and Yevpatoria (Keslev). One of the best-known traditional centres of the Crimean Karaim was Chufut Kale (Çufut Qale) but this was abandoned during the 19th century. The Crimean Karaim often lived by trade and therefore sometimes had mercantile links and family outposts in Black Sea ports (e.g. Kherson and Odessa) and the Eastern Mediterranean (e.g. Egypt and Constantinople).
The Karaim in Lithuania arrived at some date before the end of the 14th Century, almost certainly as officially invited and privileged settlers involved in defence. It is not clear whether the original settlers came from the Crimea or from Lutsk. In any event, while military service may have been the prime mover behind their arrival in Lithuania, soon many Karaim were involved simply in agriculture or in trade.
The most well-known settlement in Lithuania is that at Trakai but smaller communities survive in Panevėžys and Vilnius. There is a Karaim cemetery in each of these three places. The one in Trakai is disappearing amid meadow and woodland on the other side of lake Totoriškiai facing the town – inscriptions are mostly in Hebrew but with some Latin script. Karaim places of worship – prayer houses known as a kenesa – survive at Trakai and Vilnius but that in Panevėžys was destroyed in 1970, a victim of the atheist communist state and probably also the declining local population and the ongoing process of assimilation. Other Lithuanian Karaim communities such as the one in Biržai have become extinct or, like Naujamiestis, all but died out with only individuals or solitary families surviving. The Lithuanian Karaim population is now very small and dwindling: officially 423 in 1959, 388 in 1970, 289 in 1989 and 257 in 1997. Assimilation and out-marriage are serious issues for the survival of the community, which traditionally was endogamous and sometimes had to resort to sourcing marriage partners from Lutsk or even Crimea.
Another distinctive feature of the Trakai Karaim settlement is its vernacular architecture. The typical Karaim wooden cottage, sometimes painted in pastel or brighter shades, sits with its gable end with three ground-floor windows facing on to the street; the entrance is on the facade round the side.
One reason why the Lithuania Karaim community survives at all today is the official recognition it gained in 1863. In that year, they successfully asserted themselves as a Turkic people in contra-distinction to the Jews, with whom they had previously been associated in Russian Empire. The unforeseen consequence of this was that they were largely spared the fate of the Lithuanian Jews during the Holocaust.
Bluebird Research undertakes professional family history research across Lithuania and can help you with your genealogical research, whether your ancestors were Karaim, Jewish, Lithuanian or Polish. Please contact us for a free assessment.
London’s Olympia again hosted the annual Who Do You Think You Are? Live exhibition last weekend. I attended on both Saturday and Sunday and spoke with many family historians from all sorts of backgrounds and with the full range of experience from complete beginner to jaded and cynical old-timer.
Comparing this year’s WDYTYA event to last year’s, one has to say that the trends I wrote about in this blog have continued. All exhibition space was taken and there were some new exhibitors (such as Genes Reunited) and some returnees (Lincolnshire Family History Society, I believe). There has been no diminution in interest in family history in Britain. The show was busy every day and certainly it looked as though family historians were spending as if there were no recession.
The American giant Ancestry hoovered up even more floor space than last year and seemed to be sporting taller stands. It is now floated on the US stock exchange and preparing to register offshore so as to evade UK corporation tax (a wheeze already employed by S&N Genealogy, with its myriad misleading web domains).
This year is the Society of Genealogists’ centenary year and it was good to see them with a big footprint at the show and reasserting themselves at the heart of the world of British family history where they belong.
It is always fun to check out the more niche stallholders, to meet with the nice folk at the Anglo-German Family History Society stand, to browse through the second-hand book shelves, and to boggle one’s mind at the astonishing volume and variety of records which have been indexed or transcribed by the unsung heroic family history society volunteers.
This year, as last, the majority of the questions I took from family historians with roots outside the British Isles related to Ashkenazi Jewish ancestors from Russian Poland, usually via London’s East End. The problems brought to me were identical to last year’s too, as of course they would be, because this is necessarily the defining question of all such research: how to find out exactly where in Russian Poland an ancestor came from. The 1911 census of England & Wales too rarely gives a specific place name, although this year I was pleased to see a census return where the place of birth was recorded by the householder as “Lodge”, meaning Łódź (briefly renamed Litzmannstadt by the Nazis and the sad site of a notorious ghetto). It is a sobering and depressing thought that each of these family historians of Jewish descent with whom I spoke last weekend is perhaps only here through luck, by virtue of an ancestor having the means, or the pluck, or the desperation, to get out of Poland before the Nazis rolled in.
Incidentally, there is truth in the suggestions about the English Census Office producing both German language and Hebrew language 1911 census forms. Recently, I have seen one German and two Hebrew forms, the German one completed in German by the head of the household but the Hebrew ones filled in in English. However, this tiny number may represent the sum total of those German and Hebrew returns completed by householders in 1911, meaning that a great many unused foreign language forms printed by the Census Office must have been pulped. I wonder if one hundred years ago questions were raised in parliament about the waste of public funds…
The Manchurian city of Harbin, or Kharbin as it tends to be transliterated by Russians, became known as Belyi Kharbin, or “White Harbin”, to the Soviets, who depicted it as the refuge of the reactionary and royalist White Guard and its sympathisers. The history of Russian Harbin is much more complex and varied than this only partly true Soviet characterisation would suggest.
For starters, of course, Harbin was a pre-Revolutionary railway city when there was no such thing as Reds or Whites. The Russian community was founded in 1898 as the hub of the Russian-built Chinese Eastern Railway. The early settlers, therefore, were not politicised but were frontiersmen and pioneers, working on the railway and attracting all the support facilities that the town needed – builders to create housing, technical experts, service professionals such as doctors and teachers, shopkeepers and restaurant owners. The February 1913 census of Harbin enumerated 34,313 Russians in Harbin (Kharbintsy), almost exactly half the town’s total population of 68,549. In addition, there were 5,032 mostly Russian Jews and 2,556 Poles. Like many new settlements, there was out-migration as well – for instance, some engineers and labourers worked on a temporary contract and then left Harbin, while other Russians evacuated during and immediately after the Russo-Japanese War of 1904/05 – but the general trend was incoming, with an increasing influx in the four or five years up to the census date.
Of course, this settlement was greatly boosted by the wave of incoming White Russians after the Revolution. Again, it is important to note that many of these used Harbin as a stopping-off place en route to elsewhere. Perhaps between 100,000 and 200,000 Russians arrived in Harbin during the 1920s but the settled Russian population was smaller – for instance, there are precise counts of 55,959 in 1927 and 55,924 in 1935, showing just how many were in transit.
But these figures also conceal significant differences within the community: although there were indeed plenty of veteran White officers and soldiers, royalists and old intelligentsia, not all of Harbin’s 55,000 or so Russians in the late 1920s and early 1930s were Whites. The situation is complex. In September 1920, the Russians in Harbin had become officially stateless and, to compound matters, Sino-Soviet agreements of 1924 decreed that henceforth only Chinese and Soviet citizens could work on the Chinese Eastern Railway and in its extensive ancillary operations in the city. This was the tipping point for Harbin Russians. They were faced with a choice – either accept Soviet or Chinese citizenship, or remain stateless and become unemployed. This was the point at which the Russian community in Harbin really split into opposing political camps.
The situation did not improve. In 1935, the USSR sold its share in the Chinese Eastern Railway to the government of what in 1932 had become the Japanese Manchurian puppet state of Manchukuo. At this date, the majority of Soviet citizens, including those who had opted for citizenship after 1924 and often held only provisional Soviet passports, moved to USSR. The movement was not auspicious. Their fate was to become immediately suspect in the eyes of the Soviet state. In September 1937 the NKVD moved to repress the 25,000 or so Harbiners in USSR. Some were accused of being Japanese spies, some were regarded as White Guard veterans, others still as having engaged in bourgeois professions or occupations such as owning a hotel or being involved in business. They were deported to labour camps or executed.
Significant numbers of Russians still remained in Japanese Harbin. They were obliged to register with the Japanese Bureau for the Affairs of Russian Émigrés. By October 1936, there were 25,942 Russian Harbiners on its books (plus some 1,952 Soviet officials and other citizens). By 1942, this number had risen to 36,711. This rise probably reflects improved registration more than incoming migration or natural increase.
In August 1945, the Soviet Army defeated Japan and occupied Manchukou, receiving at least a tentative welcome from many Harbiners, exhausted as they were by their decades of exile and insecurity. The latest turn of events was not auspicious either, however: the Soviets were keenly interested in the voluminous files of the Bureau for the Affairs of Russian Émigrés and some 15,000 Harbiners were promptly arrested, deported to labour camps or summarily executed. Those not arrested were permitted to apply for Soviet passports. China regained control of Manchuria in 1949. In 1954, the USSR granted Harbin Russians the right to be repatriated to such virgin land destinations as Kazakhstan and Altai. Some Harbiners took up this offer, while the remainder, sensing the closing pages of the final chapter of Russian Harbin, chose to emigrate, heading overseas to Australia, USA and various South American countries.
Today surviving Harbiners and their descendants form communities in Moscow, Novosibirsk, Omsk and Yekaterinburg, as well as in diaspora cities such as San Francisco and Sydney. There is a rising interest in the history of Russian Harbin, including among genealogists. There are resources available for Harbin family history research but these are dispersed – there are archival and library holdings in, for example, Moscow, St Petersburg and Khabarovsk in the Russian Far East. We welcome enquiries from researchers investigating their Harbin Russian family trees and are available for professional research assignments in Russia.
From the 1842 Treaty of Nanking onwards, Shanghai had been a British and subsequently international city planted on Chinese soil. The International Settlement in Shanghai, with its neighbour the French Concession, was its own jurisdiction: as well as existing outside Chinese systems of justice and taxation, it developed its own defence, in the form of the Shanghai Volunteer Corps, and police, the Shanghai Municipal Police Force. Moreover, as a free port, it was open to all, which explains its pull to those not in possession of passport or visa during the great European crises of the Russian Revolution and the rise of Nazism. Even before stateless refugees arrived in Shanghai, however, it had a thriving Jewish community.
First to arrive was a small but influential community of Baghdadi Jews, wealthy trading families such as the Ezras, Hardoons, Kadoories and Sassoons whose business networks extended from Cairo to Bombay to Singapore to Hong Kong and Shanghai. These established branches in Shanghai within just a few years of the 1842 Treaty – for example, the Sassoons opened their first Shanghai office in 1845. Some of these families were British subjects, some Ottoman (before WW1) or Iraqi (after WW1).
The Baghdadi Jews founded Mizrahi or Sephardic synagogues in the International Settlement:
Beth-El, Peking Road, 1887 Shearith Israel, Seward Road, 1900 Ohel Rachel, Seymour Road, 1920 Beth Aharon, Museum Road, 1927
This development pattern shows the westward drift of the Jewish community from the densely built and increasingly overcrowded neighbourhoods of the eastern riverfront.
The same movement was also shown by the German and Russian Jews, who arrived in Shanghai somewhat later – from the 1870s – and tended to follow more modest occupations, running bars and cafes and small hotels, as well as engaging in trade and clerical work. They set up Ashkenazi synagogues:
Ohel Moishe, Seward Road, 1906 Ohel Moishe (sic), Ward Road, 1927 prayer house, Seymour Road, 1934 prayer house, Rue Bourgeat, 1937 New Synagogue, Rue de la Tour, 1941
For family historians, it is worth knowing that there have been two Ashkenazi synagogues with the same name at different locations within the International Settlement.
The Ottomans conceptualised the population of their empire as three basic communities: the Muslims, the non-Muslim inhabitants and the foreigners (or Franks). In turn, the non-Muslims were divided by religion into the millets.
This view of the population informed the arrangements made to measure and monitor the people. Only Muslims could serve in the army. Their Christian and Jewish neighbours instead had to pay a kind of poll tax called the cizye or jizye, later replaced by the bedelât-ı askeriye, literally a tax in lieu of military service. The early 19th century Ottoman censuses were designed primarily to capture the necessary information to enable the state to conscript Muslim men into the army and to levy taxes upon the non-Muslims. Over the course of the century, the Ottomans endeavoured periodically to improve the accuracy and comprehensiveness of their data, so as to boost army and reserve sizes and to maximise tax revenues.
Only males were counted in the census before reforms in 1878, as only males were liable to military service and taxation.
The Ottoman censuses were not defined regular (for instance, decennial) events taking place over a single night or weekend, unlike most of those in places like Britain and America. Rather, they tended to extend over two years and frequently longer. In due course, the census and civil registration functions merged into a single continuous ongoing recording of the population – the basis of this can be said to have been largely achieved by the mid- or late 1880s. This system was also joined up with the military, so that the army had a continuous feed of information for conscripting men into active service, the reserve and the local militia.
From the late 1850s, the census was also used to produce the equivalent of ID cards. The earliest of these was the vergi nüfus tezkeresi or population tax certificate issued to males, which recorded the holder’s obligations to the state, such as their tax liability.
From about 1878, this was replaced by nüfus tezkeresi or population certificate. This served for ID and had to be used in all interactions with the state and for travel purposes. The information on this population certificate was an extract from the sicil-ı nüfus, or nüfus defter, being the actual population registers created and maintained by the state. Muslims and non-Muslims were enumerated in separate registers. The registers included women for the first time. The register included name, age, place of birth, marital condition, religion, occupation, address and military status. Nickname and, in case of adult males, style of beard or moustache were also recorded for purposes of identification. Along side the population registers, a system of notifying and registering births, marriages, divorces, deaths and change of address was also implemented.
Between 1878 and 1885, the new system was gradually rolled out across much of the Empire. Provinces in Turkey-in-Europe which were not immediately covered included the vilayets of Kosovo, Monastir and Shkodër, plus Bosnia, Bulgaria, Crete, Cyprus, Hercegovina and the autonomous Eastern Rumelia. However, the Aegean, Constantinople, Danube, Edirne, Janina and Salonica provinces were covered, plus Ionia and all of western and central Asia Minor.
Finally, new regulations came into force between 1900 and 1902 that mandated the requirement to carry and present one’s population certificate. In due course, this was documenting so much information about the bearer that it became an ID booklet rather than card, known as the nüfus hüviyet cüzdanı or simply nüfus cüzdanı and still used in Turkey today.
Of course, an increasing numbers of Ottoman-born subjects of empire acquired, for protection or advantage, European passports. For instance, the Greek state was happy to assign Greek citizenship to all Greeks living beyond its borders who applied.
Civil registration – mandatory official secular registering of vital events of birth, marriage and death – was implemented by different states at different times.
In Hungary before 1895, registration was the responsibility of church not state. What this means is that the different faiths recorded the baptisms, marriages and burials of members of their congregations in different ways.
This also means, of course, that baptism was not compulsory. While in the 19th century baptism was probably near universal for those of Christian faith in Hungary, equally it is clearly the case that there may be no record of birth or baptism for some individuals born before 1895 (for example, if one or both parents were not religious, or resented the charge for baptism, or were travelling, or were of no fixed abode).
Marriageable age, before the 1895 Civil Marriage Act in Hungary, was set by the customs and traditions of the various faiths. For example, the age of marriage for Roman Catholics was 14 for males and 12 for females (although of course such ages are absolute minima and were presumably very rare in the 19th century). Similarly, for the Calvinists, the marriageable ages were 18 for males and 15 for females. Under Jewish law, the minimum age for marriage was traditionally 13 years for boys and 12 years for girls. Of course, marriages at such young ages were uncommon. Before WW1, the average age at marriage for both sexes spanned a couple of years either side of 20, with the groom usually two to four years older than his bride. This of course is in respect of first marriages. In the second half of the 19th century, up to 1 in 5 marriages related to remarriage of the widowed. Interestingly, demographers have reported that Hungarian widowers tended to remarry more quickly and more frequently than widows.
Marriage (and divorce) in Hungary became a civil institution from 1st October 1895. Henceforth, civil registration of marriages was compulsory; religious celebration was optional and a matter of personal conviction.
For genealogists, it is worth knowing the marriageable ages in different jurisdictions at different times. While, of course, some brides and grooms might be economical with the truth when declaring their ages, either adding or subtracting years to suit the occasion and the need, in theory when searching speculatively for the known, expected or possible marriage of a particular individual it makes sense to search from the marriageable age onwards, rather than covering years when a marriage should not have taken place. Only if a marriage is not found in such years should you backtrack to the years in which, strictly speaking, marriage was not permitted.
In this regard, it is important to note that Hungary had a surprisingly high marriageable age regulation between the Wars. In the 1930s, the legal age for marriage was 24 years. This was reduced to 20 years in 1952, then to 18 years, and finally, in 1973, to 16 years for females conditional upon parental consent.
Bluebird Research provides professional family history research assistance to genealogists researching their Hungarian roots and would be pleased to help or advise you as you investigate your family tree. Contact us for a free assessment.
“An immigrant shall be considered an undesirable immigrant if he cannot show that he has in his possession or is in a position to obtain the means of decently supporting himself and his dependents (if any)”.
from: An Act to Amend the Law with Regard to Aliens, 11 August 1905 (5 Edw. 7. c13), 1 (3a)
The Aliens Act 1905 was enacted in response to growing public alarm at the waves of Eastern European Jews which had been arriving in England from the Russian Empire since 1881. Much of the alarm was stoked by exaggerated media reports – even the respectable Whitaker’s Almanac claimed in 1902 that 140,000 Jewish immigrants were arriving each year, despite the average annual number settling throughout the period being 4,000 to 5,000 (partly this misperception was due to the very large number of trans-migrants for whom England was but a staging post en route to America). The Aliens Act put an end to unrestricted entry into Britain, although numbers picked up again in the years before the outbreak of war in 1914 as Jews claimed political or religious asylum, which continued to be permitted under the 1905 Act. It was WW1 which effectively halted Jewish immigration – thereafter, the only group which arrived in any numbers were the Polish Jews among post-War Belgian refugees.
It is often said that the Jewish immigrants arrived in response to poverty, persecution and pogroms in Tsarist Russia. The picture is more nuanced: it was, for example, the fear of pogroms which drove many to leave, as pogroms mainly affected a few communities in southern Russia (for instance, Odessa and Chişinău in what are today Ukraine and Moldova). Emigration was driven more by the obligations and restrictions upon Jewish life, which placed a cap on potential and ambition. As is well known, between 1791 and the Revolution in 1917 the majority of Jews had to reside within the Pale of Settlement. Even those, such as university graduates and Guild merchants, who were exempted and could live beyond the Pale (only 4.1%, according to the 1897 Russian census) had to pay an annual tax for the privilege. There were quotas for Jewish university student numbers: a decree in 1887 restricted the numerus clausus to 10% of the student body in those cities in which Jews were entitled to reside, to 5% elsewhere and to a mere 3% in Moscow and Petersburg. Jews were excluded from the professions and the vast array of career options in the Tsarist civil service. Nor could Jews become army officers. This was ironic as it was precisely compulsory and onerous military service which impelled many young Jewish men to emigrate. The trade unionist Joseph Fine, giving evidence before the Royal Commission on Alien Immigration in 1903 cited escaping military service as one of four principal reasons for Jewish immigration in Britain (see David Englander’s A Documentary History of Jewish Immigrants in Britain 1840-1920, Leicester University Press, 1994). The other three he gave were the 300 roubles the Russian government fined the fathers of sons who escaped military service, which prompted many to emigrate instead; the poverty of the artisan and small tradesmen class into which excessive numbers of Jews were forced through lack of other options; and the proscribing of trades unions, in which many Jews were active.
These were all “push” factors in migration. Of course, “pull” factors were exerted by Britain. It had an open door policy till 1905; it had a liberal tradition as the home of refugees; it could be a first stop on an intended eventual continued journey to America; and, of course, its ever-increasing Jewish population led to a chain of migration as friends, wives, sweethearts and children followed the (usually male) initial migrants from a shtetl or neighbourhood.
By the time of the 1911 census of England, the Jewish population is thought to have been in the order of 257,000. The exact number is unknown: the census is silent on religion and race. Numbers have been variously estimated based upon such factors as the known size of particular long-established communities and the numbers of individuals who declared their place of birth as, for example, Poland, Romania or Russia.
The 1911 census is a snapshot of the population as at Sunday 2nd April 1911. It is a superb resource for those studying their Jewish family history, particularly those late 19th and earlier 20th century immigrant families (the wealth of resources available before the public release of the 1911 census made the researching of earlier, established Anglo-Jewish families somewhat more straightforward). For instance, the 1911 census asks married couples to state the duration of their marriage, the number of children born to the marriage, the number of children still living and the number now deceased. It is therefore possible to calculate the approximate year of marriage. Treat the date with caution, as the duration of marriage figure may well have been rounded, usually upwards, and the longer a couple had been married the more likely it is that rounding will have taken place. The number of children may surprise. Sometimes this will be because the census shows the existence of hitherto unknown children (tantalisingly so, if they are not resident at the family home). Sometimes, it will be the prodigious family size which surprises. Immigrant Jewish fertility rates were high but it is less well known that infant mortality rates were low, due to better hygiene and childcare practices than much of the surrounding gentile population (see Eilidh Garrett, Changing Family Size in England and Wales: Place, Class and Demography 1891-1911, Cambridge University Press, 2001).
Of course, there were many exceptions and not all families were large. The family of Abraham Bevistein (a boy soldier “shot at dawn” in WW1) is one. At the time of the 1911 census, he was residing at the family home at 5 Anthony Street, Stepney. His parents Joseph and Rebbeca (sic) Bevistein state they have been married 16 years (which places the event circa 1894/95) and have had two children only, both of whom survive and are living with them – Abraham, 15, and Kate, 12. Against all four, the place of birth is given as “Russia Poland”. This means that we know that the family arrived in England after the birth of Kate in around 1899 (in fact, they arrived in 1902). The nationality is Russian. This indicates that Joseph had not been naturalised by that date: the £5 fee, if not the need for a formal petition and police report, may have been off-putting for a tailor such as Joseph living in a two-room dwelling. This common failure to naturalise later made many alien Jews vulnerable to being returned to Russia to fight in WW1 under the 1917 Anglo-Russian Convention.
When the Bevisteins arrived in England, they stayed briefly at the Poor Jews’ Temporary Shelter in Leman Street, London. Newly arrived immigrants could stay there for up to 14 days while orientating themselves, seeking accommodation and employment, or readying themselves for an onward journey to America or elsewhere. Admission registers survive and the 43,000 names from the 13 volumes covering admissions from 1896 to 1914 are searchable online . The Bevisteins were admitted, recorded under the spelling Biberstein, on 1st October 1902.
The different spelling of the surname highlights the importance of considering name variants when making census searches. Remember that the names of recent immigrant families might not have stabilised by 1911 and English would very likely have been the third or fourth language in which they became literate (after, for example, Polish, Russian and Yiddish).
The painter Mark Gertler was also born in London to Jewish immigrant parents, although, as the 1911 census return makes clear, his came from Austria rather than Russia. He was born in Spitalfields and at the time of the 1911 census was a 19-year old art student studying at the Slade. The Gertlers came not from Vienna or elsewhere in today’s Austria but, as was often the case, from its far-flung province of Galicia, today divided between Poland and Ukraine. Whereas the 1911 census form stipulates “if born in a Foreign Country, write the name of the Country”, the Gertler return is unusual in delivering an exact place of origin (Przemyśl, in today’s Poland). Unfortunately, this is all too rare. If the census simply states “Russia”, the birthplace could have been anywhere within the then Russian Empire, which often means today’s successor states such as Belarus, Lithuania, Poland and Ukraine rather than Russia itself. If “Poland” or “Russian Poland” is stated, this narrows down the region to the then Congress Poland, which it should be noted does not at all coincide with the borders of modern Poland.
Landsleit, immigrants from the same hometown, often settled in the same communities or neighbourhoods or streets, and knowledge of this may assist if your own ancestor’s 1911 census is silent as to exact place of origin. For instance, a significant number of the Jews in Leeds were Litvaks from the Kovno gubernia, who travelled purposely to Leeds to join the clothing industry. Generally, where places are given on the 1911 census, they are in the Yiddish or transliterated Russian form, not the name current today (e.g. Kovne or Kovno, not the Lithuanian Kaunas). It is important to note that “Kovno” may well refer to the Russian gubernia or province rather than necessarily to the city itself (although that was 36% Jewish at the time of the 1897 Russian census). Incidentally, the 1911 census return for the Poor Jews’ Temporary Shelter mentioned earlier is unusually forthcoming about place of origin, perhaps because as a charitable institution it felt obliged to record information more diligently than the average householder. For instance, on the second page of its census return, birthplaces include, as well as the expected Grodno, Kovno and Minsk, less expected Russian places of origin such as Radomsk and Samaroff, and even some Bulgarian towns.
As mentioned earlier, many Jews landing at London and other east coast ports were trans-migrants rather than immigrants intending to reside permanently in Britain. The trans-migrants may have stayed in Britain only long enough to cross the country to Liverpool or Southampton to catch their steamer to America. Others stayed in England for years and then decided (or had saved the money) to emigrate to America. Although it was possible to travel direct from, say, Hamburg to New York, it was significantly cheaper to break your journey in England – £5 15s compared to £7 15s in 1902 (according to David Cesarani, The Making of Modern Anglo-Jewry, Blackwells, 1990) – and this was one of the main reasons why trans-migrants to America appear in such numbers in the British passenger lists.
America was not the only destination for trans-migrants. Litvaks in particular passed through England on the way to the Cape in South Africa. Others headed to Canada, of course, and to South America. On the night of the 1911 census, Nestor Derenzuk, a 26-year old agricultural labourer from Grodno (now in Belarus), was one of the persons staying at the Poor Jews’ Temporary Shelter. He is described as having been married for four years and having two children, both alive. However, they are not staying at the Shelter with him and it can be inferred that they were still in Grodno and would join him later if he made a success for himself overseas. In fact, a search of the outward-bound passenger lists show him, as Nestor Derenczuk, leaving England from Dover four days later, on 6th April 1911, bound for Buenos Aires. The passenger list also shows that he had arrived at London on 27th March 1911 on a United Shipping Co vessel. Other men, also farm labourers, were on the same vessel arriving in London in March, in the Shelter on census night, and embarking on the same ship from Dover as Nestor Derenczuk and he was clearly travelling as one of a party. Did he make it to Argentina? Did his family ever join him there? We do not know. We can only catch a glimpse of his life through the official documents he left behind, and imagine the rest.
The situation of the peasantry in the 19th century Russian Empire is much more complex than generally thought, and a genealogist with ancestors in the territories of rural Russia should be aware of this complexity so as to better understand the likely circumstances under which their ancestors may have lived.
Firstly, it is not true to think of the peasantry as being a single undifferentiated mass, or to say that all peasants were serfs. The Russian Empire was expanding in all directions at the start of the 19th century. The Poles in the Partition were not enserfed when they came under Tsarist jurisdiction; nor were the Finns after 1809 or the Bessarabians after 1812. Furthermore, where serfdom had previously existed in the Baltic, it began to be modified, first in Livonia (or Livland – roughly the north of modern day Latvia and the south of Estonia), where there were reforms in 1804, and then in Estland (today’s northern Estonia) and Courland (or Kurland, western and southern Latvia) where there was landless emancipation of the serfs during the years 1816 to 1819. This introduces another point worth emphasising: emancipation did not necessarily lead to increased prosperity and, in fact, the opposite was true in these Baltic regions – the serfs were freed without being gifted or sold land and therefore became more destitute than they had been before the reforms.
Elsewhere in the empire, most minorities, such as the free agriculturalists, were not subject to serfdom, something that the Russian peasantry did not understand and which could cause resentment – why should German colonists, for example, be free when native Russians were not?
Secondly, there were different types of peasant in the lands of Imperial Russia.
There were state peasants, who were literally owned by the state and worked upon state lands. They were the responsibility of the Ministry of Finance and later, from 1837, the Ministry of State Properties. Although state peasants enjoyed some rights and freedoms (for example, they could acquire smallholdings of their own and even become civil servants), they had to pay taxes, maintain roads and supply recruits to the army. Moreover, the state was a largely indifferent owner and did not invest in its properties.
Then there were privately-owned serfs, who were the property of the landowning aristocracy and gentry. Absentee landowners often left an estate manager in charge, not infrequently to exploit the serfs on the estate. Some landowners permitted their serfs to remit in cash not labour dues – in other words, instead of working upon the landowner’s estate, they could leave the land and go to work in a town or city, and pay their owner in lieu. Of course, while some serfs made a substantial amount of money and were able to purchase their freedom, the majority remained upon the land in reduced circumstances.
The serfs in Russia were emancipated from 1861. Unlike in the Baltic region of the empire in 1816, the serfs were able to purchase their dwelling and land, so as to become independent smallholders. As redemption prices for the privilege of emancipation were way beyond the means of many serfs, the state lent them monies at 6% annual interest for up to 49 years, thereby creating a generation of peasants perpetually in arrears to the state.
Then there was the issue of military service. By 1815 the Russian Army was 1 million strong and the state, entering peacetime, was apprehensive of demobilisation and its impact upon communities across Russia and its potential for unrest. At this point, it needs to be explained what military service entailed. Men were recruited at aged 20 years for a period of 25 years (reduced to 15 years from 1834). Once enlisted, a serf became a free man in law; hence, once demobbed he would be his own man, with no immediate source of employment but with the experience of handling a weapon. To mitigate the risks that this entailed, the army found ways of making military service mean life service, not releasing men at the end of their term (for instance, by imposing extra service as a penalty for the many disciplinary offences).
Between 1815 and 1858, the state found an ingenious way of dealing with demobilisation and managing the risk to stable civilian life of releasing ex-soldiers into the community. So as not to demobilise troops, agricultural “military colonies” were established. Previously uninhabited state land was colonised by a mixture of soldiers and state-owned peasants commandeered from elsewhere. The soldiers retained the status of soldiers, although in their everyday lives they became agricultural labourers working for the state peasants. The army was therefore kept at full strength and made economically productive and self-supporting. Furthermore, the reserve army was strengthened because of the newly acquired status of the state peasants residing in these military colonies. The head of the household and the eldest son remained state peasants. However, younger sons were classed as military canonists (the term used for sons of soldiers during their minority) and joined the reserve at aged 18 years. It is estimated that by 1825 over 750,000 soldiers and families had been settled on these military colonies in areas such as Mogilev, Novgorod and St Petersburg, as well as in the southern region of Ukraine.
Much has been written about Jewish aversion to military service and, of course, the Jews shared the same reasons as the Russian peasantry for not being keen on being conscripted into the army, plus had plenty more valid religious reasons of their own. In fact, the Jewish population of the Russian Empire was not subject to military service until 1827. However, from then on, the state pursued a russification programme for the Jews and required them to be available for service from aged 12 years. Community elders had to select the recruits whenever demanded each year and of course this led to tension and frequent flight to evade the draft.
It is interesting to note that the infantry divisions of the Russian Army tended to be garrisoned around the periphery of the empire, especially in the west. While therefore there might be a solitary division in the Caucasus, or one in Orenburg towards the restless Kazakhstan, the vast majority were stationed in occupied Congress Poland and the westernmost gubernia of Russia (areas now in Belarus’ and Ukraine) where there was a perceived and sometimes a very real threat of politically or economically driven internal unrest.
It would be naive to expect family history research in Russia, and many other places within the former Soviet Union, to follow the comparatively smooth path that it can take in most of the English-speaking world and in many countries in Western Europe. Even if the First World War, the ensuing Civil War and the Great Patriotic War (as the Second World War is known in Russia) are put to one side, millions were arrested, killed, internally deported, or incarcerated in the Gulag. For a great many others, the social revolution provided for a new, albeit still relative freedom of movement, and travel for education, employment and political career, often across great distances and what are today’s international borders, became commonplace.
The NKVD, a precursor of the KGB, disappeared many tens of thousands of Soviet citizens at Moscow’s Lubyanka prison. The victims were drawn in from all across the USSR and from all sections of society, from the poorest to the elite, from the apolitical to the committed Stalinist, and from the capital itself to the remotest corners of the Soviet empire. The photographer and collector of Soviet era visual art David King gathered mugshots of some 166 of these victims for publication in a volume called Ordinary Citizens: The Victims of Stalin (Francis Boutle, 2003). Apparently, King obtained the photographs from the NKVD’s interrogation files held by Russian human rights organisation Memorial, which documents the Soviet repressions across Russia and campaigns for official rehabilitation of the victims. It publishes regional and local memorial books and lists of the executed.
Among the haunting photographs in King’s selection are the following:
Fedor Andreevich Baikov – peasant, born 1861 in Moscow, executed 20 October 1930 on charges of anti-Soviet agitation
Pyotr Petrovich Dragachevatz (Dragačevac) – lithographer, born 1886 somewhere in what was later Yugoslavia, executed 19 April 1939 on charges of anti-Soviet espionage
Stefan Leonovich Geltman – collective farm technical manager, born 1886 in Zamość, Poland, executed 20 September 1937
Wolf Shmulievich Genpelman – Jewish apprentice locksmith, born 1914 in Dombrovitsy, near Rivne (Rovno), Volhynia, Ukraine, executed 1 November 1940 on charges of being counter-revolutionary
Yelena Ignatievna Oshmyago – railway guard, born 1911 in Sprugi, Belarus, executed 10 October 1939 on charges of railway sabotage
Dionis Petushkov – Russian Orthodox monk, born 1863 in Tver’, Russia, executed June 1931 on charges of anti-Soviet activities
Ruzya Iosifovna Todorskaya – technician, born 1900 in Łódź, Poland, executed 9 October 1937 as a Trotskyist
The Temporary Regulations of May 1882 required Jews within the Pale of Settlement to settle only in towns and cities. In Bessarabia, which was situated within the Pale, some towns were demoted to the status of village to debar Jews from residence. Town and city limits were also redefined to reduce the immediately surrounding area available to Jews. In addition, Jews were forbidden to reside in an international border strip 50 versts (about 53 km) wide; as Bessarabia was a border province, this meant that a significant area of land along the Russian border with Romania was also out of bounds. Rights of residence for Jews were therefore strictly delimited in Bessarabia to around 40 larger settlements.
And of course they were subject to all the other civil and political disabilities imposed upon the Jews throughout Russia.
They were subject to two special taxes: the box tax (collected on kosher meat, at slaughter and sale) and the candle tax (on candles lit in synagogues). The community as a whole was made to make up the deficit of a Jewish tax defaulter.
Quotas (of from 2% to 10% of intake) controlled the admittance of Jews to high schools and universities, while other higher education institutes elsewhere in the empire (such as the Moscow Medical Academy and the Veterinary Institute in Kharkiv) were completely closed. Jewish school teachers were forbidden from teaching Russian to their pupils.
Jews could not enter government service, with the sole exception of doctors. They were usually prohibited from serving as elected representatives of zemstvo or town assemblies or artisan boards, or were restricted by quotas, as in the case of aldermen and guilds.
Jews could not become officers in the Russian army but were required to undertake military service; for various reasons, a higher proportion of the Jewish population was enlisted. A collective punishment was exacted, so that a Jewish family as a whole was held responsible for draft-dodgers in its midst, to the tune of a 300 ruble fine.
And in Bessarabia, as elsewhere in Russia, the Jews were resented for their acumen and their success in the remaining fields left open to them: as landowners’ preferred tenant farmers, as vine growers and inn keepers, as orchard men and tobacco growers, as middlemen and agents, as traders and exporters, and as money-lenders. What is interesting but probably not at all unusual is that the anti-Semitic feelings which led to the April 1903 pogroms in the Bessarabian capital Kishinev definitely appear to have been orchestrated and encouraged by the provincial government and police, and stoked by local media agitation, rather than being a spontaneous outburst of animosity from the townspeople. 42 Jews were killed, countless Jewish properties damaged and a community temporarily divided.