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In Europe, the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were a time of conflict and creativity about the nature and role of the sacred in private life and public culture. During these decades, the imperial Russian state became more interventionist in the realms of religion and culture, with interests in rationalizing religion and wiping out "superstition." At the same time, urban life gave rise to new forms of religious expression.
Rites of Empire explores the religious reform impulse among Jews in the Russian Empire, home to the world's largest Jewish population over the long nineteenth century. Moving beyond the old narrative of Russian Jewry as Orthodox or secular, Ellie R. Schainker shows how many Russian Jews in fact sought a synthesis between modernity and religious Judaism. Rabbis and voices in the newly emerging Jewish press debated reforms to Jewish law regarding dress, head coverings, circumcision, the number of prayers recited each day, sabbath observance, education, dietary rules, divorce laws, burial, and other religious practices. Urban Jewish communities built progressive synagogues in places like Vilnius, Odesa, and Moscow that featured choral music as a sign of modern Jewish expression. The imperial state's allowance and even promotion of Jewish reforms and ritual innovations shifted with the rise of political conservatism at the turn of the twentieth century. Religious reform went from being a political asset to being discredited as sectarian and non-conformist, and the state supported an increasingly politicized Orthodox Judaism as a conservative partner in combating revolution and secularity.
Schainker masterfully demonstrates how minority religious behavior was shaped by the imperial state as well as by the minorities themselves. In doing so, she recovers a history of religious diversity that was erased from the memory of Eastern European Jewry during the Soviet years and in the Russian diaspora following mass migration.
