Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>Rites of Empire explores the religious reform impulse among Jews in the Russian Empire, home to the world’s largest Jewish population during the long nineteenth century. It is a story of self-willed religious change in dialogue with a modernizing imperial state, global Jewish denominationalism, and the aesthetic and socio-economic developments of urban modernity. Beyond the old narrative of Russian Jewry as Orthodox or secular, many Russian Jews from the 1840s to 1917 sought a synthesis between modern subjectivity and religious Judaism. The imperial state’s authorization and even promotion of Jewish reforms and ritual innovations, such as moving the new moon blessing indoors and restricting men’s and women’s traditional head coverings, 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 nonconformist. Rites of Empire charts new territory in Jewish and East European history by exploring nontraditional forms of Judaism in the Russian Empire in the half century leading up to World War I and the Russian Revolution. It demonstrates that both religious diversity and individual nonconformity shaped notions of Jewish identity in the Russian Empire, a context heretofore identified with religious intolerance and orthodoxy. It analyzes how empire both enables and constrains changing religious identities and new claims and sources of cultural authority. Yet it also challenges understandings of minority religious behavior as being solely a response to imperialism and looks instead at how religious minorities shaped their own life reform.</jats:p>