The region of Siberia has been home to Jews since the late 18th century, although Jewish communities did not exist in large part until after 1861, when Tsar Alexander II lifted the restrictions of his father, Tsar Nikolai I regarding Jews in the Pale of Settlement.
Background After the Second Partition of Poland in 1793, and the subsequent rebellion by Tadeusz Kościuszko in 1794, and a final Third Partition of Poland in 1795, the Russian Empire had inherited a huge amount of Jews that had lived in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth due to its lax and limited restrictions on Jews. For example, Jews could serve in the Great Sejm, the Polish–Lithuanian parliament.
This freedom and autonomy would not be reinforced by the Russian Empire. Queen Catherine II had numerous requests from different parts of society about what to do with the Jews. The Orthodox Church wanted her to expel them, while Baltic merchants who had worked with Jews for centuries under Poland asked her to let them stay. Catherine II allowed Jews to remain in the Empire, but imposed numerous restrictions on them and forced them into cramped ghettos called shtetls. Under her heir, Alexander I, the Pale of Settlement was expanded to include the newly conquered areas from the Ottoman Empire, where Jews could act like colonialists and settle the nearly uninhabited Ukrainian east, including modern day Donetsk, Luhansk, and in general what was known as Novorossiya.
Tsar Nikolay I, who succeeded Alexander I, began a long campaign of Russification, which was the act of getting Non-Russians to become Russian, through religious conversion to Russian Orthodoxy and through the erasure of local culture and language. One way that he tried to do this was to enlist young Jewish boys, sometimes as young as 5–10 years old into the Cantonists. The Jews were forbidden from speaking Yiddish or Hebrew, and were forced to convert to Christianity, if they wanted to become officers. He also passed a law not allowing Jews to live 53 kilometers next to the Prussian and Austrian borders. This law was later amended and then scrapped by Nikolay I. In reality, his policies of Russification were considered a failure. Sergey Uvarov, an imperial statesman, noted that the Jews were an ancient civilization, that had been brought down due to centuries of persecution. However, he realized that it was impossible to destroy Jews and Judaism, and the only way to "solve the Jewish Question" was to educate them, and to promote Jews getting higher education. Uvarov's reforms opened up a huge debate within the Jewish community between the more conservative Hassidim were against these reforms while the more Western Maskilim were for these reforms. In short, Nikolay's plans to russify Jews and destroy the Jewish culture and religion failed and his successor would understand.
Alexander II, Nikolay's son, turned out to be a reformer, as opposed to his father. He abolished the Cantonist system, thus ending conscription for Jewish boys. He allowed Jews to enter high schools and universities, reversing his father's ruling.
More importantly, on November 27, 1861, Alexander opened the rest of Russia for some specific groups of Jews. Jewish scholars, university graduates, merchants, artisans, and manufacturers, were all granted the ability to live in the interior parts of Russia, creating flourishing Jewish communities in Moscow, Petersburg, Yekaterinburg, Volgograd, and even in Siberia.
Jewish convicts Even prior to the 1861 decree, Jews had already been living in Siberia, mostly as convicts sent there among Russians. The first Jewish convicts sent there were those captured from the Third Partition of Poland. Omsk, Tomsk, Tobolsk, Kainsk, and Nizhneudinsk were recorded having Jewish convict populations.
The next Jews to arrive were Jewish soldiers who were fighting in the Russo-Japanese War in 1905. One of these Jews was Joseph Trumpeldor, who went on to fight in World War One, and in the Battle of Tel Hai, where he would ultimately perish.
The Jewish Autonomous Oblast The Jewish Autonomous Oblast was created in 1928 by Joseph Stalin, mostly as a place where Jews could be watched by Stalin and his advisors. Tens of thousands of poor Jews made this move in order to escape their extreme poverty. Many were promised good opportunities to gain status and wealth through forestry, logging, and fishing on the Amur River.
The plan was not very successful. Jewish migration was limited, as many had their eyes set first on Mandatory Palestine and then Israel. The region was also very boring, with people joking about how the most common cinema in the region was watching the pots boil.
Creation of the Jewish Autonomous Oblast The creation of the Jewish Autonomous Region in 1928 grew out of long standing economic and social concerns around the role of Jews in the Soviet Union. In 1934, the region was upgraded to become a full Jewish Autonomous Oblast (JAO).
Stalin and the "Jewish Question" Early Soviet leaders have a decidedly mixed history with antisemitism. While many of the early revolutionaries were Jewish, major players within the party had an antisemitic bias, including Stalin himself.Vaksberg, Arkadiĭ. Stalin Against the Jews. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994. Stalin wrote in his youth that Jews were characterized not by religion, as many at the time saw it, but from their shared origins. This set him apart in his view that Jews constituted a different, if not wholly unnatural, race. Stalin's secretary, Boris Bazhanov, wrote that Stalin was clearly anti-semitic, not shying away from using slurs to describe Jewish members of the party, while maintaining a façade of support for Jews:I wondered how Stalin, being anti-semitic, could have two Jewish secretaries: Mekhlis and Kanner . I soon discovered that they had been originally employed for camouflage purposes. During the Civil War Stalin had led a group of partisans who detested Trotsky, his deputy Skliansky, and their assistants: the jews of the army commissariat. This caused suspicions in the party leadership that Stalin was anti-semitic. When he returned to civilian life, he wanted to dispel these suspicions and so he took on Kanner and Mekhlis - first in 1921-22 when he was nominal head of the Workers and Peasants Inspection Commissariat, then as his personal secretaries in the Central Committee secretariat.Stalin also threw the Jewish film director Alexei Kapler in the Gulag after he struck up a relationship with Stalin's daughter, Svetlana.Vaksberg, Arkadiĭ. Stalin Against the Jews. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994. 139. When Svetlana later married a Jewish law student, Grigory Morizov, Stalin dissolved the marriage.
Formation of a Jewish national region In 1918, the Jewish Commissariat was established, marking the Jews as an official national minority.Ro'i, Yaacov. Jews and Jewish Life in Russia and the Soviet Union. Portland, Ore: F. Cass, 1995. Print. 75. This, along with the creation of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, which although not technically run by a Jew included many important Jewish figures, gave Jews in the Soviet Union a space where they could discuss the treatment of their people, in the light of the increasing threat of fascism. With their status as an official ethnic group, some started to consider the possibility of their own region like those afforded to the other ethnic minorities of the Soviet Union.
The concern for a Jewish autonomous homeland of sort had been circulating widely in response to the violence being witnessed in Europe during WWII. Zionism picked up large followings in the US and Britain, a phenomenon that the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee reported to Stalin. This development spurred on plans for a Soviet alternative. There were a couple of options discussed for this region, including part of Ukraine, Crimea, and lastly the Russian Far East. Of these options, Crimea was by far the most popular among members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and the intellectuals settled there, and they submitted a proposal for it to Stalin, citing the large Jewish presence in the region and existing successful Jewish collective farms there.Vaksberg, Arkadiĭ. Stalin Against the Jews. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994. 122–123. The Crimea however presented an issue for Stalin.
As it was also the original homeland of the Crimean Tatars, Stalin was concerned that making Crimea a Jewish Autonomous region would create ethnic conflict.Vaksberg, Arkadiĭ. Stalin Against the Jews. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994. 64. He instead eventually approved a plan to settle Jews in part of the Russian Far East region of Khabarovsk Krai.Vaksberg, Arkadiĭ. Stalin Against the Jews. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994. 64–65.Ro'i, Yaacov. Jews and Jewish Life in Russia and the Soviet Union. Portland, Ore: F. Cass, 1995. Print. 88. This area along the Amur River had another big benefit for Stalin – moving the Jews out of the Pale of Settlement cities such as Kiev and Odessa, where he feared their large numbers. By giving the Jews their own region about the size of Belgium, the Soviets hoped to turn the lowest class and rural Jews in productive workers by emphasizing a Yiddish society heavily built on the ideals of socialism. While some Jews supported the creation of the Jewish Autonomous Oblast, others were much more skeptical and outright hostile to the proposal. Israel Emiot, a prominent Jewish poet in the Soviet Union recalled that once when discussing Birobidzhan with his contemporaries, the famous Jewish journalist Ilya Ehrenburg yelled at them, "You people are trying to create a new ghetto!"Emiot, Israel. The Birobidzhan Affair: A Yiddish Writer in Siberia. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1981. Print. 4. Ehrenburg's outburst highlights the major concern held amongst Jewish opponents of the Jewish Autonomous Oblast, namely, that in facilitating the movement of all Soviet Jewry into one region (especially off in the remote Russian Far East) they would be easy prey for oppression, or even mass murder, as witnessed during the pogroms, and later the Holocaust.
Early migration and growth The region of Birobidzhan was occupied mainly by Russians, Cossacks, and Koreans, as well as the local indigenous groups.Klein, Mike. "Go East, Young Jew, Go East: Worlds Revealed." The Library of Congress, September 23, 2020. https://blogs.loc.gov/maps/2020/09/go-east-young-jew-go-east/. The influx of Jewish settlers started in 1928. In keeping with the push for greater collective farming, the first settlers to arrive in Birobidzhan were expected to work the land and become like Russian peasants. The following text summarized from the Komzet meeting on September 15, 1928, reveals the story of the first group to arrive: “[A]bout 125 of the 643 jews to arrive in Birobidzhan by late summer 1928 were directed to rice plantations located along the Amur River…[which] had been cultivate by either Koreans or Cossacks who inhabited the region before the decision to promote Jewish land settlement… Conditions on the plantations were harsh and primitive; due to short notice given to the personnel at the plantations, they were ill-prepared to handle the influx of several dozen new settlers, many of whom had to sleep out-of-doors until tents arrived from Khabarovsk and barracks had been erected. The closest medical facilities were located some twenty miles away and lacked even basic medical equipment and supplies.”Ro’i, Yaacov. Jews and Jewish Life in Russia and the Soviet Union. Portland, Ore: F. Cass, 1995. Print. 91–92.