Historically, the Jewish population of not only the major cities of the former Pale of Settlement of the Russian Empire, but also of Moscow, preserved features of traditional ethnic culture, including Yiddish, longer than was the case, for example, in the "northern" Russian capital, where modern Jewish culture originally developed predominantly in Russian. Today, however, interest in Yiddish in St. Petersburg is growing. Yiddish has acquired the charm of exclusivity—something connected neither to the state nor to ideology, but solely to a romantic past, art, and literature. It is evident that the roots and consequences of these virtually unexamined processes require not only recording but also interpretation and scholarly analysis. This is highly relevant both academically and for the practical activities of Jewish organizations and communities.

Series Editor's Preface

Among the significant findings of the large-scale sociological study of Jews in the post-Soviet space, conducted in 2019–2020 by the IISER under the direction of the author of these lines at the initiative of the Euro-Asian Jewish Congress, were data reflecting the dynamics of the formation of a new Jewish identity in the capital cities of the former USSR. These data allow for a critical reassessment of the belief—still widespread not only in popular consciousness but also in professional circles—that the social profile of Jewish residents of Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kyiv, or Minsk is roughly identical and contrasted with Jews of the Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian provinces, rather than with one another. However, the study's findings revealed notable differences in reactions to identical social and cultural phenomena within the Jewish environment among Muscovites, Petersburgers, Kyivans, and Minskers of Jewish origin. They also highlighted the specific nature of their ties to the non-Jewish environment of their countries of residence, including in politics, economics, and culture in the broadest sense of these fields.

Undoubtedly, these virtually unexamined processes[i], which are highly relevant both academically and for the practical activities of Jewish organizations and communities, require not only recording but also interpretation and scholarly analysis.  Among other things, it is crucial to understand why Moscow, compared not only with the capitals of Ukraine and Belarus but also with St. Petersburg, appears to be something of a "bastion of imperial identity," despite the fact that the survey respondents were members of an ethnic and religious minority. At the same time, it was precisely in Moscow that the proportion of those who defined their Jewishness through knowledge of Yiddish, Bukharan-Jewish, or Judeo-Tat was 2.5 to 3 times higher than in other capital cities. Perhaps this is due to a higher level of preservation of ethnic traits during the formation of the Jewish population of Moscow compared to Leningrad/St. Petersburg. If so, what are the causes of this phenomenon?

One possible answer to this question is provided in the following essay by the prominent St. Petersburg ethnographer, Professor Valery Dymshits.

Prof. Ze'ev Khanin, Chairman of the Academic Council of the IISER 

Yiddish: Language and Jewish Culture in St. Petersburg and Moscow: An Ethnographer's View

Petersburg-Petrograd-Leningrad, and once again St. Petersburg, was never a Jewish city. St. Petersburg has accumulated many Jewish treasures in its archives, museums, and libraries, and has played a significant role in Jewish history, science, and culture—even in the history of Yiddish. It was here in 1901 that S. Ginzburg and P. Marek published the first collection of Jewish folk songs; it was here in 1904 that the world's first daily Yiddish newspaper, *Der Fraynd*, began publication. Yet, to reiterate, it was never a Jewish city in the sense that Odessa and Warsaw were "Jewish" cities, or as New York has become in our time.

Before the revolution, the Jews living in St. Petersburg were those who possessed residency rights: wealthy, European-educated, and Russian-speaking. After the revolution, they emigrated. Their descendants now live, for example, in Paris. After the Civil War, Jews from the former shtetls of the Pale of Settlement flooded into Petrograd-Leningrad, primarily from northeastern Belarus: the Mogilev and Vitebsk provinces, which were closest to St. Petersburg. Notably, Jews from these areas close to Pskov and Smolensk—and thus to Great Russia—already spoke Russian better at the beginning of the twentieth century than the majority of Jews in the Russian Empire. To this day, 80% of St. Petersburg's Jews are descendants of those Belarusian migrants. This resembles the Jewish community of South Africa, which is composed almost entirely of emigrants from the Kovno Governorate.

Before the Second World War, more than 200,000 Jews lived in Leningrad. Yet, Leningrad never became a Jewish city. The blame lies entirely with the housing question.

Before the revolution, Moscow had a population of 1.5 million, while St. Petersburg had nearly 3 million. After the revolution and the Civil War, Moscow, having become the capital, became overcrowded with a rapidly growing population, while Petrograd was left with only 700,000 residents. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Jews from the shtetls of the former Pale flooded into Moscow and Leningrad in search of work, and Jewish youth in search of education, as universities and all other higher education institutions were now open to them. In depopulated Leningrad, Jewish migrants settled throughout the city, becoming an indispensable feature of the vast communal apartments in former "general's" residences, and rapidly dissolved into the surrounding Russian population. In Moscow, where there was no vacant housing, settlers—mostly from Ukraine—established Jewish quarters on the city's outskirts and in the suburbs: Cherkizovo, Maryina Roshcha, Ostankino, Saltykovka, and Malakhovka. The peak influx of Jews occurred in the early 1930s: these were Ukrainian Jews fleeing the Holodomor. Typical immigrant "ghettos" emerged, where even in the 1950s and 1960s, Yiddish was spoken not only by the elderly at home but also by people of various ages with one another on the street. In Leningrad, Jews became entirely part of the Russian intelligentsia, while in Moscow, some remained "a little Jewish"—if not themselves, then their relatives. A colleague of mine, a historian and the son of a historian, a graduate of Leningrad University, recalled that when he visited his grandmother in Malakhovka (a Moscow suburb) for the holidays as a child, she would not give him lunch until he asked for food in Yiddish. He had to learn it, though he later forgot it all. It is difficult to imagine such a story in Leningrad.

To simplify the situation somewhat, one could say that in Moscow, Jewishness remained for a long time not only a religion and an idea but also an everyday reality, a lifestyle, whereas in Leningrad it never was.

From the very beginning, Jewish life in St. Petersburg was built on the basis of Russian, not Yiddish. The oldest Russian-Jewish journal, *Voskhod*, was published in Russian. A. Harkavy, S. Dubnow, S. Ginzburg, J. Hessen, S. An-sky, and S. Zinberg wrote their works in Russian. Incidentally, when the Jewish Historical and Ethnographic Society, its museum, and the journal *Evreyskaya Starina* were closed in 1929, the justification was not only the non-Marxist ideology of these organizations but also the fact that they operated in Russian rather than Yiddish. At the time, Russian, along with Hebrew, was considered the language of the Jewish bourgeoisie, while Yiddish was considered the language of the Jewish working class.

In the 1920s and 1930s, the Soviet authorities patronized Yiddish, but this did little to help it in Leningrad. Even during these favorable years for Yiddish, it was impossible to establish a professional Jewish theater in Leningrad, despite repeated attempts. At that time, there was only one Jewish school in Leningrad, established at an orphanage for Jewish orphans—victims of the Civil War. (Admittedly, this school was run by the remarkable folklorist and student of An-sky, Zinoviy Kiselgof). In 1938, this school was closed, as was the Evdomprosvet (Jewish House of Political Education) with its clubs, the amateur Evtram (Working Youth Theater), and library. In the same year, Israel Zinberg was arrested while completing his multi-volume history of Jewish literature in Yiddish. Jewish cultural life, which had not been particularly rich to begin with, ground to a halt. Only manuscripts and books in Hebrew and Yiddish in the Public Library continued, now in vain, to await their readers.

No prominent Jewish writer writing in Yiddish ever lived in Leningrad. On the other hand, the poet Chaim Lensky, a classic of Hebrew literature rejected by the authorities, spent his brief life here. In short, there was no place for Yiddish in Leningrad, either in official or underground culture. Leningrad was not so much hostile to Jews as it was indifferent to them: by the force of its architectural landscape, it rapidly turned them, like its other inhabitants, into abstract Europeans, detached from any ethnic roots.

This remained the case until Perestroika. In the late 1980s, the Jewish cultural movement emerged from the underground and became a mass phenomenon. Among the many variants of the new Jewish identity, alongside religion, Hebrew, and Israel, images of the shtetll suddenly loomed. In fact, this had begun even before Perestroika: the authors grouped around the samizdat almanac LEA (*Leningrad Jewish Almanac*) were primarily interested in history and folklore, viewing themselves as the legitimate heirs of Dubnow and An-sky.

In 1989, the Leningrad Jewish University (now the St. Petersburg Institute of Jewish Studies) was established, and at the same time, the first expeditions to Ukraine began in search of traces of the vanished "shtetl civilization." The initial participants of these expeditions were mainly interested in monuments of material culture—traces of a majestic past: synagogues and cemeteries. On the whole, looking back from today, one can say that this was pure national romanticism in the spirit of the early twentieth century, in the spirit of An-sky; it is no coincidence that the first expeditions operated precisely where An-sky's expeditions had traveled.

There was neither the skill, the language, nor the understanding to communicate with people—with the still numerous provincial Jews who spoke Yiddish and were bearers of folklore. Much water has flowed under the bridge since then. From among the participants of those early expeditions, who began as amateurs, emerged several well-known researchers of the Jewish culture of Eastern Europe. Yet, initially, Yiddish still remained on the periphery of the consciousness of the new generation of researchers. After all, it was not just the parents—even the grandparents of the participants of this Leningrad group did not speak the language.

And yet, Yiddish gradually began to force its way through, becoming the core of a new St. Petersburg Jewish identity. The gates of the former Soviet Union remained open long enough for everyone who wished to emigrate to do so. Those who remained, if they wished to remain Jewish, required a positive self-identification. Religion did not appeal to everyone, but Yiddish, the shtetl, Jewish music, literature, and art appeared to some as an engaging cultural alternative.

The old expedition routes acquired new substance: since 2004, the expeditions have been oriented toward folkloric and ethnographic research in the former shtetls of southwestern Ukraine, where an indigenous Jewish population still remains. These expeditions are conducted by the "Petersburg Judaica" Center at the European University at St. Petersburg. Yiddish became an indispensable tool in the work of the expeditions.

Concurrently, a group of translators works at the Center, aiming to introduce the Russian reader to Jewish literature. The "Petersburg Judaica" Center offers courses in Yiddish, Yiddish literature, traditional Jewish art, Jewish ethnography, and folklore. These classes are conducted not only by the Center's instructors, but outstanding scholars such as Dr. Krutikov, Dr. Estraikh, and Prof. Roskies also lecture to the audience.

Another "Yiddish" venue in St. Petersburg is the St. Petersburg Jewish Community Center. It also offers Yiddish courses, and Yiddish is studied by children and teenagers in the Sunday school. Furthermore, the Community Center's "heavy artillery" is music.

Interest in Yiddish is growing, much as interest in Hebrew once grew. Hebrew has lost the allure of forbidden fruit, but has instead become associated with the routine of widely accessible Israeli programs. Yiddish has acquired the full charm of exclusivity, privacy—something unconnected to either the state or ideology, but solely to a romantic past, art, and literature. Young people studying Yiddish and passionate about shtetl culture do not possess the idiosyncrasy toward Yiddish or the shtetl that their Jewish grandparents had, who fled the shtetl in their youth. Quite frequently, those who study Yiddish, sing Jewish songs, and participate in Jewish expeditions do not have Jewish grandparents. Jewish culture, particularly Jewish music and song, is beginning to attract non-Jewish youth as well.

Admittedly, one could argue that all this activity lacks ground, roots, or tradition. Yet, it is not for nothing that St. Petersburg is the most fictitious city in Europe, so Yiddish here can only be fictitious as well. Today, on the map of Russia, it is St. Petersburg, rather than Moscow—where Yiddish once had deep roots—that has become the primary center for teaching Yiddish and studying the culture of East European Jews. One cannot help but recall an old anecdote: in the first half of the nineteenth century, there were almost no Jews in St. Petersburg. Then, following the reforms of Alexander II, a significant Jewish community appeared in St. Petersburg within a matter of years. Recalling this time of change, a memoirist wrote with pride: "What was St. Petersburg before—a desert; what is it now—Berdichev."

[i]Ze'ev Khanin's article "The Jew in the Big City: A Sociocultural Portrait of the Jewish Population of Kyiv, Minsk, Moscow, and St. Petersburg," published in the EAJC scholarly and publicistic almanac *Jews of Europe and Asia: State, Legacy, and Prospects* (Vol. 2, 2019-2020/5780. – Jerusalem: EAJC, 2020, pp. 36–64), is, to our knowledge, the first scholarly publication on this matter.