Jews, Race, and the Politics of Difference: The Case of Vladimir Jabotinsky against the Russian Empire by Marina B. Mogilner (review)

Reviewed by: Jews, Race, and the Politics of Difference: The Case of Vladimir Jabotinsky against the Russian Empire by Marina B. Mogilner Inna Shtakser Marina B. Mogilner. Jews, Race, and the Politics of Difference: The Case of Vladimir Jabotinsky against the Russian Empire. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2023. 234 pp. Marina Mogilner specializes in the history of physical anthropology and has written extensively on perceptions of race in the Russian Empire. Her 2022 book A Race for the Future addressed how Russian Jewish intellectuals in the late nineteenth century developed a version of race science and biopolitics to claim Jewish nationhood and secure collective rights. The reviewed book returns to this theme, focusing specifically on how and why the Revisionist Zionist leader Vladimir (Zeev) Jabotinsky (1880–1940) constructed a common racial identity for Russian Jews. Mogilner's work is a response to the tendency among historians to downplay the prevalence of race-based Jewish nationalism within the Russian Empire, in particular among the secular Russian Jewish intelligentsia. The book specifically addresses Yuri Slezkine's claim that the Russian Jewish intelligentsia was largely cosmopolitan in their approach to politics. Mogilner finds this assertion excessive and notes that the prevalence of nationalist ideas in the Russian Empire affected the Jewish intelligentsia—whether conservative, liberal, or socialist. She contends that the dominance of nationalist ideas in Europe and in the Russian Empire created the perception among the Russian Jewish intelligentsia that having a national identity constituted the only viable means of garnering collective rights for the Jews. The problem was that the Jewish people had no identifiable national characteristics. Their multilingualism, multiple loyalties, multiple popular cultures, and even their self-definitions, for example, as Russian Jews, German Jews, or Iraqi Jews, made them difficult material for champions of national purity. Moreover, their only shared commonality—religion—was not recognized at that time as a national characteristic. Jabotinsky resolved this dilemma by constructing a Jewish identity based on blood and biology, rather than culture, religion, or territory. The author states that in the context of the Russian Empire Jabotinsky's view of humanity as consisting of racial groups, each having its own equally valuable characteristics and each deserving of equal consideration of these characteristics, was politically subversive and radically anti-imperial. Jabotinsky believed that empires inevitably repressed their constituent national groups and accused the Russian Jewish intelligentsia of abandoning their people in favor of their oppressors. This accusation was not unique. Within the framework of the Russian Empire, intellectuals of various nationalities were making similar accusations and on this basis were demanding either cultural autonomy or territorial independence. Thus, even as Jabotinsky's racial politics developed out of the Jewish experience of discrimination, it also fit within a broader anti-imperial rhetoric in Europe and in the Russian Empire that juxtaposed the provincialism, nature, and purity of nationalism with the urbanity, centrality, and hybridity of imperialism. In introducing Jabotinsky's racialized concept of Jewish nationhood as an integral part of imperial Jewish politics, Mogilner has made an important End Page 248 contribution to the historical debate on the Russian Jewish intelligentsia of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. She points out that the Russian Jewish intelligentsia had a political problem, namely, that their secular education within Russian and European educational institutions had estranged them from their constituency; their resulting cosmopolitan identity had undermined their attachment to Jewish popular culture and religion. Moreover, the growing popularity of nationalism in fin-de-siècle Europe, shaped by discourses of race and Social Darwinism, made cosmopolitanism an unviable political path forward for guaranteeing the collective rights of Jews. Thus, Zionists were not the only group within the Jewish intelligentsia who turned to this imagined biological commonality to demand communal rights or cultural autonomy for Jews within the Russian state. Recognizing the political usefulness of the concept, Jewish socialists and liberals also at times employed it, even though epistemologically and politically they were uncomfortable with biological determinism as the foundation for human culture. Mogilner offers a strong argument against historical works, such as those by Slezkine, that minimize the role of national identity in Jewish imperial politics. The problem is that her argument is so polemical, she...