Chapter 8: Imperial Farbrekhers: Jewish Men and Crime in Tsarist Russia and Progressive New York City

Between 1791 and 1917, the Russian Empire was home to the world’s largest Jewish population, almost all of whom lived as imperial subjects within the Pale of Settlement. While scholars have drawn on early-century sociological and anthropological studies of the Pale region to effectively document the daily lives of the area’s five million Jews, literature on Jewish crime and punishment under imperial surveillance remains underdeveloped. This chapter begins by synthesising the available literature on Jewish encounters with Imperial police, courts and corrections before looking at the more than one million Jews who immigrated from Russia to New York City throughout the 1890s and 1900s. Employing data from Russian social scientists, along with records on Jewish-American crime from the American Jewish Committee and the United States Desertion Bureau, this chapter considers how Jews maintained, altered or abandoned criminal behaviours upon transitioning from subjects of the Russian Empire to immigrants in the United States. In comparing arrest and incarceration records in Progressive-era New York City and Tsarist Russia, this chapter reflects upon the circumstances that allowed Jews to maintain low rates of arrest and incarceration in both milieus. This chapter contends that a century of shtetl life and ghettoisation in Russia shaped Jewish criminality along material lines while minimising the functional need for violence, thereby priming Jewish immigrants for relative success within industrialised North American cities that vilified casual violence and accepted those forms of economic crime common among Jews as largely victimless and morally nebulous.