СОЦІАЛЬНА СТРУКТУРА ЄВРЕЙСЬКОГО НАСЕЛЕННЯ РОСІЙСЬКОЇ ІМПЕРІЇ НАПРИКІНЦІ ХIХ СТОЛІТТЯ
THE SOCIAL STRUCTURE OF THE JEWISH POPULATION OF THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE IN THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY

Summary/Abstract: Modernization, which experienced a Late Imperial Russia in the last third of the nineteenth century changed the social structure of the multinational country. Russian Jews who were the largest Jewish diaspora in the world, found themselves locked in "permanent Pale of Jewish Settlement" which remained as a system component of the Jewish population’s social structure of the Russian Empire throughout of the XIXth century. Thereby, its specific institutions determined the direction and nature of social processes such as urbanization, secularization and professionalization of of the Jewish ethnic group. The structure of the Jewish population’s resettlement was defined by the legal restrictions regarding Russian Jews, as a result of which it was possible to distinguish the bulk of small-town Jewish (shtetl), urban Jews of the Pale of Settlement and Jews living outside the Pale. The main criterion of the allotment of Jewish population’s categories became the criterion of their identity. As the number of those who considered himself a Jew was less in urban areas outside the Pale of Settlement, but increased toward the small-towns' area within the Pale of Settlement. It's evident, that assimilationist, demographic and migratory pressure on the structure of the Jewish population was miscellaneous, both inside the Pale of Settlement and outside. The reason that generated it in the both parts, has been urbanization. It has resulted the impoverishment and emigration of small-towns’ Jewish, started the differentiation of social-professional groups which were at the center of economic modernization of the Jewish ethnic group. The most vulnerable group in the structure of the Jewish population were craftsmen. They were inhibited between the legal restrictions on free movement in the Russian Empire and economic nationalism of traditional ethnic groups in industrial centers of the country. Ⱥt the same time, Jewish oligarchic elite remained a privileged enclave that occupied a significant place in the structure of the imperial financial-industrial class. Although that modernization has broken the traditional models of social behavior of the Jews, most of which has changed for social adaptation. Probably, the confessional identity remained unchanged, which provided internal cohesion of the Jewish ethnic group. Only a small group of assimilated Russian-Jewish intellectuals, who has chosen accomplishments as the consistent criterion for their true identity, was the most secularized Jewish population group and thus was beyond the traditional model of social structure.

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