officially awarded the right to live outside of the Pale of Settlement; eighteen years later that right was reluctantly extended to Jewish graduates of all institutions of higher learning. At that time most St. Petersburg Jews were still unable to read Russian. In Jewish families living in the most elite Petersburg neighborhoods at the turn of the centuryâand the Slonims were not yet doing soâabout half still spoke Yiddish at home. A tiny and wary minority, they both felt and were made to feel alien. The risk of expulsion followed them everywhere. Jews of the Pale were dismissed as Jews of the provinces, but even Petersburg Jews, even an assimilated family like the Slonims in their native country, were said to belong to a âcolony.â *
And that colony was engaged, between the judicial reforms of the 1860s and the Revolution, in what must have seemed like a colossal, rigged game ofSimon Says. A few rights were granted the Jews; it was understood that every right not expressly granted was denied. The Jewish statutes of 1914 ran to nearly a thousand pages, all of them ripe with complications and contradictions. Even someone who had read them all could remain in doubt as to what exactly was permitted and what was not. This left one in a constant state of possible infraction. Furthermore, the rules were subject to change at any time. The Jews could be expelled from the city one minute, invited to stay the next. A Jewish law graduate could practice diligently as an apprentice, or he might be pressured to leave the city, as without having passed the bar he had no right to residency. If he asked to submit to his law boards so as to secure his right to residency, he might be told there were no vacancies in the Jewish quota for testing. And if he was lucky enough to find a place despite the odds, he might, after passing the bar, learn he could not practice in Petersburg as a new percent rule had recently taken effect. A Jew could serve on a jury, but not as a foreman. A Jew could play in a military band but not lead one. A Jewish soldier could pass through Petersburg on leave but was required to spend his furlough outside of the city. There were quotas for how many Jews could be admitted to hospitals. Jews could die, but only in specified numbers. It was a source of outrage thatâin flagrant disregard for the lawâJews continued to compete for cemetery space in quota-defying numbers. For the right to reside in Petersburg countless professionals registered as domestic servants, including thegreatest historian of Russian Jewry, several renowned artists, and one future president of Israel. The case that most seized the public imagination was that of a young woman who registered as a prostitute in order to attend university; she was expelled when it was discovered that she was not practicing her trade. Nor were the cityâs most privileged Jews unaffected by these restrictions. When the âRailroad KingâSimon Poliakov donated a dormitory to St. Petersburg University, Jews were specifically barred from living in it.
Through these mine-infested waters Evsei Lazarevich cut a careful if confident path. His career was marked on all sides by the on-again, off-again game of acculturation: When he had come to Petersburgâand he appears to have been the first in his family to have done soâhis name wasGamshey Leizerovich. * Under that name he earned his legal degree, which secured hisright to settle in Petersburg. Each semester he secured residency papers, renewed with each return from a visit to Mogilev, and extended when necessary. He was part of a huge wave of Jewish law students that greatly alarmed the State; by 1890 nearly half the Empireâs apprentice lawyers were Jewish. The release of these statistics set off a furor. Within a matter of years it was next to impossible to do what Evsei Lazarevich had dreamed of doing in 1884. Between 1889 and 1896 no Jews wereadmitted to the bar anywhere in