A race for the future : scientific visions of modern Russian Jewishness

Amid the nationalization of Russian imperial politics, Jews developed a powerful version of race science and biopolitics as a response to their colonial condition, nonterritoriality, and exclusion from looming postimperial modernity. Marina Mogilner explores this story in the context of Russia’s turbulent early twentieth century. The forgotten story of a surprising anti-imperial, nationalist project at the turn of the twentieth century: a grassroots movement of Russian Jews to racialize themselves. In the rapidly nationalizing Russian Empire of the late nineteenth century, Russian Jews grew increasingly concerned about their future. Jews spoke different languages and practiced different traditions. They had complex identities and no territorial homeland. Their inability to easily conform to new standards of nationality meant a future of inevitable assimilation or second-class minority citizenship. The solution proposed by Russian Jewish intellectuals was to ground Jewish nationhood in a structure deeper than culture or territory—biology. Marina Mogilner examines three leading Russian Jewish race scientists— Samuel Weissenberg, Alexander El'kind, and Lev Shternberg—and the movement they inspired. Through networks of race scientists and political activists, Jewish medical societies, and imperial organizations like the Society for the Protection of the Health of the Jewish Population, they aimed to produce "authentic" knowledge about the Jewish body, which would motivate an empowering sense of racially grounded identity and guide national biopolitics. Activists vigorously debated eugenic and medical practices, Jews' status as Semites, Europeans, and moderns, and whether the Jews of the Caucasus and Central Asia were inferior. The national science, and the biopolitics it generated, became a form of anticolonial resistance, and survived into the early Soviet period, influencing population policies in the new state. Comprehensive and meticulously researched, A Race for the Future reminds us of the need to historically contextualize racial ideology and politics and makes clear that we cannot fully grasp the biopolitics of the twentieth century without accounting for the imperial breakdown in which those politics thrived. In the rapidly nationalizing Russian Empire of the late nineteenth century, Russian Jews grew increasingly concerned about their future. Jews spoke different languages and practiced different traditions. They had complex identities and no territorial homeland. Their inability to easily conform to new standards of nationality meant a future of inevitable assimilation or second-class minority citizenship. The solution proposed by Russian Jewish intellectuals was to ground Jewish nationhood in a structure deeper than culture or territory?biology.0Marina Mogilner examines three leading Russian Jewish race scientists? Samuel Weissenberg, Alexander El?kind, and Lev Shternberg?and the movement they inspired. Through networks of race scientists and political activists, Jewish medical societies, and imperial organizations like the Society for the Protection of the Health of the Jewish Population, they aimed to produce ?authentic? knowledge about the Jewish body, which would motivate an empowering sense of racially grounded identity and guide national biopolitics. Activists vigorously debated eugenic and medical practices, Jews? status as Semites, Europeans, and moderns, and whether the Jews of the Caucasus and Central Asia were inferior. The national science, and the biopolitics it generated, became a form of anticolonial resistance, and survived into the early Soviet period, influencing population policies in the new state.0Comprehensive and meticulously researched, A Race for the Future reminds us of the need to historically contextualize racial ideology and politics and makes clear that we cannot fully grasp the biopolitics of the twentieth century without accounting for the imperial breakdown in which those politics thrived "One of the most comprehensive projects of self-racialization in Europe before World War II was implemented in a surprising place by an unexpected group. In the late nineteenth century, Jewish scientists and intelligentsia grew increasingly concerned with the postimperial future of the crumbling Russian Empire. Marina Mogilner examines this anthropological self-exploration through both the science and biopolitics of race. She traces the activities of three leading Russian Jewish race scientists-Samuel Weissenberg; Alexander El'kind; and Lev Shternberg-and offers the first comprehensive investigation of the Society for the Protection of the Health of the Jewish Population, which aimed to produce independent, "authentic" knowledge about the Jewish body. Interweaving the personal and institutional, local and transnational, A Race for the Future turns a powerful lens on the tightly entangled crises of Jewish identity and the old imperial order at the turn of the twentieth century"-- Provided by publisher