Introduction

The story of Russian and Soviet Jewry is basically that of the interrelationship between a numbers of factors which transcended transformations in the country's political order. Shaul Stampfer dwells on domestic migration within the tsarist empire: its dimensions, quality and significance for Jewish society. Because of the very large Russian Jewish emigration to the United States in the thirty or so years preceding World War I and its relevance for American Jewish historians in particular, local migratory trends have been generally downplayed. Klier takes as his point of departure Igor' Shafarevich's avowedly anti-Semitic condemnation of the Jews as an isolated, offish group in Russian society that had at heart its own interests and not those of the country and the general population. Ideology notwithstanding, policy was rooted rather on pragmatic considerations and political constraints. The vicissitudes of Soviet policy toward the Jews were perhaps no match for Jewish cultural activism and the emigration movement.