Changing ideologies of artisanal “productivisation”:ORT in late imperial Russia

https://www.academia.edu/3262111/Changing_ideologies_of_artisanal_productivisation_ORT_in_late_imperial_Russia

Gennady Estraikh*

Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies, New York University, New York, USA

The Society for the Promotion of Artisanal and Agricultural Work among the Jews in Russia (ORT) was established in St Petersburg in 1880. In its post-1921 form,as the World ORT Union, the organisation, with its headquarters in London, still operates in scores of countries throughout the world. This article analyses the ideological changes in ORT’s craftsmen-related programmes during the first decades of its history: from the initial careful attempts to use qualified artisan labour as one of the ways to adapt the Jewish population to the economic, social and political conditions of the Russian empire, to later Jewish nation-building projects that incorporated elements of economic autonomy.
Founded by maskilic intellectuals and entrepreneurs, from the 1900s ORT was gradually taken over by more radical activists. Some of them, including its future chairman Leon Bramson(1869–1941) and its leading economist Boris Brutskus (1874–1938), came from the Petersburg apparatus of the Jewish Colonization Association, which competed with ORT in all domains of philanthropic activities. Materials of two ORT conferences, in 1914 and 1916, help us understand the changes in the organisation's attitudes to vocational education and various forms of cooperatives and employment bureaux. Special attention is paid to ORT’s role during World War I.

In imperial Russia, centralised Jewish philanthropic projects became possible onlyin the last decades of the nineteenth century, following Tsar Alexander II’s edict of March 1859, which allowed Jewish merchants of the first guild to settle outside thePale of Jewish Settlement and, inadvertently, facilitated the appearance of a St-Petersburg-based Jewish national elite. From the 1860s onward, the Russian capital housed a few Jewish-owned banks, including the bank of the Gintsburgs. This enlightened, Westernised family and their circle (the “Gintsburg Circle,” to borrow John Klier’s term) of financiers and intellectuals played a central role in the Peters- burg Jewish community and, to a considerable degree, in the whole of Russian Jewish life.

While Petersburg’s Jewish notables often internalised antisemitism by accepting the negative stereotypes that defined a dweller of the Pale as inferior, many members of the Gintsburg Circle were also sincerely perturbed about the economic predicament of the Pale

Keywords:

Artisans; Nikolai Bakst; Leon Bramson; Boris Brutskus; cooperatives;employment; Jacob Lestschinsky; Jewish Colonization Association; ORT; philanthropy; productivisation; vocational education