The Jewish Settlement in Siberia

By Dr. Irena Vladimirsky

A historian and researcher with the Department of History, Achva College of Education, Israel, specializing in the history of Central Asia. She contributed this article to the website of Beit Hatfutsot.

Siberia, which means “Sleeping Land” in Tatar, and “The Edge” or “The End” in Ostyak – one of the local languages of the region – is a vast territory. It spreads eastward from the Ural Mountains to the highlands bordering the Pacific Ocean and from the Arctic Ocean in the north to the borders of Kazakhstan, China and Mongolia in the south. The Russian Far East region has also been traditionally considered a part of Siberia.

Geographically, Siberia is divided into the more populous Western Siberia (bordered by the Yenysey river), which was incorporated into the Russian Empire as early as the end of 16th century, and the sparsely populated Eastern Siberia, whose more distant regions began to be settled by the Russians only towards the end of the 19th century.

From its very beginning, the history of the Siberian settlement became synonymous with the history of Russian exile, forced settlements, labor camps and prisons. While the burgeoning Moscow principality achieved its first victories against the Polish Lithuanian kingdom in the early 17th century, Mikhail Romanov (1613-1645), the first Romanov Tsar, established a separate Ministry for Siberian Affairs. By a special decree issued in 1635, all captured war prisoners – Lithuanians, Germans and Jews – were sent to forced settlement in Siberia. This policy was intended to strengthen the developing Moscow principality by bringing about a colonization of Siberia as well as by getting rid of all undesirable political opponents. The next tsar of the Romanov dynasty, Alexei Romanov (1645-1676), continued with this strategy. Following an extended internal struggle for the throne, Alexei resolved to punish his political opponents and their supporters by banishing them to Siberia. Subsequently, several dozen Jews and Germans from the German Sloboda district (till the beginning of the 18th century, all foreigners in Russia were called “Germans”) were expelled to Siberia in 1659 as numerous opponents of the tsar sought shelter in the houses of “foreigners”.

In order to properly explore this enormous territory, the Russian Imperial Geographic Society sent several scientific expeditions to Siberia in the early 18th century. These expeditions discovered vast natural resources of gas, coal, gold, iron, silver, copper, etc. As a result, it was decided that a network of state-owned enterprises should be immediately established with the aim of encouraging the industrial development of the region by taking full advantage of the newly discovered natural resources. Such enterprises were founded in Nerchinsk, Achinsk, Kainsk, Kansk (Krasnoyarsk), Nizhneudinsk. The work force was mainly composed of administrative and political prisoners, and was later augmented with criminals as well.

Early Jewish community of Tobols’k

In addition to merchants, Jewish political and administrative exiles were among the first settlers of these towns. Jews began to set up communities throughout Siberia. The first reference to the Jewish community of Tobols’k dates from 1813. The document mentions the establishment of a Hevra Kadisha, and of a separate Jewish cemetery and praying house. In 1816, a Jewish merchant called Preisman donated 10.000 rubles in gold for the building of a Russian Orthodox church. Consequently, he was permitted to settle in the town along with his entire family and to open a synagogue for the needs of the local Jewish community. The newly established Jewish communities of Siberia had enough members to ensure the preservation of the Jewish traditional way of life; every Jew was free to study the Torah and the Talmud.

Early Jewish community of Kainsk

At the beginning of the 19th century, the center of Jewish life moved to Kainsk. Count Michael Speransky (1772-1839), a dismissed Russian prime-minister, who later became Governor-general of Siberia, wrote in his diary: ”Kainsk is a newly established settlement. What surprised me here – a lot of Gypsies and Jews”. Sergei Maksimov (1831-1901), a famous Russian geographer and writer passing through Kainsk, wrote: ”The numerous Jewish population makes the city similar to the Russian cities in the Western part of the Russian Empire. They [the Jews] make up four fifths of the city’s total population and wear traditional Jewish clothes and side curls. Jewish presence transformed the city into one of the main centers of economic activity in the Siberian territories”. Kainsk became one of the main trade centers of Siberian furs, which were well prized in Western Europe; each year the local Jewish merchants sent a special shipment of furs to the Leipzig fair. There were 70 merchants, all of them Jews, among a total population of 700 inhabitants. The number of Jewish merchants increased after 1820 with the discovery of new gold mines in the Altai Mountains, not far from the city. The Jews also owned 23 of the largest and richest houses in the city.

First half of the 19th century

Despite the law of 1812 that allowed Jewish craftsmen and merchants to leave their villages in the western guberniyas (regions) of the Russian Empire and settle in Siberia, exiled Jews continued to be the main reason for the increase in the Jewish population of Siberia. As a rule, new Jewish settlers maintained close relationships with relatives whom they had left behind in their former places of residence.

Setting up a family was one of the problems facing new male settlers. Numerous shadkhanim (matchmakers) wandered all over Siberia to provide Jewish men with brides from western Russian guberniyas for a sum of 50-200 rubles in gold. Despite the fact that the Jews of Siberia were known as “wealthy grooms,” not everybody was ready to pay such a large amount of money to a shadkhan. In April 1817, the government issued a special decree by which all the new inhabitants of Siberia, including Jews, were permitted to marry women from the native population on the condition that they converted to either Christianity or Judaism. Very often, these newly proselyte women became more religious than their husbands and their devoutness became proverbial. Jewish men were forbidden to marry Christian women and were not allowed to follow their exiled wives. Only Jewish wives with female children were allowed to follow their Jewish husbands to the Siberian exile.