ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to reassemble and at the same time reinterpret the principal facts bearing on the Jewish policies of Catherine the Great in whose reign Russian encountered for the first time a Jewish "problem" in the shape of over half a million Jews acquired in the partitions of Poland. Historians make much of Catherine's personal feelings towards Jews, although, given the political constraints under which she had to operate, it is doubtful whether these played a decisive role. She viewed Jews as a superstitious race, held in the grip of an obscurantist religion, rather unscrupulous and perhaps greedier than most. Catherine also had a healthy respect for Jewish commercial abilities and wished to avail herself of them. The real importance of the 1794 edict lay not so much in the double tax—repealed in 1817—but in those passages which for the first time formally defined the territories open to Jewish settlement.
