PANTELEIMON KULISH AND THE "JEWISH QUESTION" IN THE MID-NINETEENTH CENTURY

Abstract

The author attempts to analyze the views of Panteleimon Kulish on the history, culture and everyday life of Jews who lived along with Ukrainians in the Ukrainian provinces of the Russian Empire, to determine what factors and stereotypes formed the outlook of the great writer and his attitude to the Russian imperial project of resolving the "Jewish question". With the growing of Russian imperial messianism and chauvinism, Ukrainian intellectuals appeared in a difficult situation. The tsar held assimilation policies towards both Jews and Ukrainians. At the same time, Jews additionallly suffered from manifestations of state anti-Semitism. Engagement of Ukrainian Christians in anti-Semitic actions has intensified the position of Russifikators of Ukrainian lands. The Ukrainian elite aimed to stop these manifestations of anti-Semitism by its actions. Obviously, the Ukrainian protest did not condemn anti-Semitism without reservations, because its authors suggested that Jews should partly share responsibility for anti-Semitism. The idea of protesting Ukrainian intellectuals coincided with ideas of Russian liberals who offered to consider Russian Jews as carriers of "civil autonomy and moral independence," and urged them to abandon their national-religious prejudices. While supporting the civil rights of Jews, Kulish at the same time realized that the Ukrainians themselves belonged to the oppressed nations in the Russian Empire, where, in general, social and national rights and freedoms were much less than in the constitutional states of Western Europe. Therefore, he found it impractical to move from there to Russian blindly a practice of artificial support for only Jewish nationality, because in imperial terms this meant only a change in the configuration of national unequal, and not the elimination of it at all. P. Kulish's views on the "Jewish question" of the mid-nineteenth century corresponded to the conceptions of Russian liberal intellectuals regarding the modernization of Russian society. He supports the proclaimed liberal ideas of the need to integrate Jews into imperial life. Jews must be the most interested in destroying of the traditional world of the Jewish town. Giving the Jews of secular education, adopting by them the modern values could lead to the elimination of intolerance and manifestations of anti-Semitism in the society. The Jews himself, according to P. Kulish had to go towards society and change their social mood.