How a Soviet Jewish Historian Survived Purges and Repression—and Discovered Jewish Cossacks

Born in Odessa in 1903, Saul Borovoi lived in the Soviet Union from its founding in 1917 until his death, two years before its collapse, in 1989. While the Communist regime strictly circumscribed any sort of explicitly Jewish activity, Borovoi managed to devote much of his life to Jewish historical scholarship. Brian Horowitz tells his story:

[Borovoi] protected himself by “meeting the needs” of the Soviet historical establishment, selectively interpreting the past, adopting aspects of the Soviet ideology from his time, and presenting Jews in ways that conformed to the political climate and demands of the Communist party. In fact, he became an accepted member of the intellectual elite, despite not becoming politically subservient in retaining his integrity as a serious scholar of Ukrainian and Russian-Jewish history.

In general, the Soviet intellectual milieu in the 1920s, [when Borovoi first entered academia], was characterized by contradictions. Judaism was condemned and its representatives—rabbis, communal leaders, and teachers-were repressed. Yet at the same time the government offered support for secular and pro-Communist Jewish culture. The Communist government frequently funded Jewish schools, museums, and scholarly institutions, [even as it] aimed to keep scholarly work within strict ideological bounds. In particular, the authorities prohibited mentioning Zionism or using Hebrew, while promoting Yiddish as the language of the Jewish working class.

From early in his career, Borovoi was interested in the relationship between Jews and Cossacks—the horse-riding warrior caste that sprung up in the wild border region where the Polish-Lithuanian, Russian, and Tatar empires met. During their great 17th-century revolt, Cossacks slaughtered hundreds if not thousands of Jews, and they remained perpetrators of anti-Jewish violence into the 20th century:

Borovoi made an unexpected discovery—that there existed Jewish Cossacks who aided the Ukrainians. In his view, two kinds of Jews lived among the Cossacks. One group consisted of Jews who converted to Russian Orthodoxy and joined as fighters (rarely) or as Christian clergy. For such Jews, membership in the 17th- and 18th-century Ukrainian Cossack state known as the “Hetmanate” offered escape from the fear of being captured and sold as slaves or for ransom.

But other Jews, as Borovoi documented, simply moved to the Hetmanate to serve as traders and commercial agents for Cossack landowners, as their coreligionists did for landowners in Poland.

Read more at The Librarians

More about: Cossacks, Jewish history, Soviet Jewry, Ukrainian Jews

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society