One thing that stunned me in Slezkine’s book is how extremely successful Jews were in the Russian Empire in finance, banking, business and manufacturing circles. We are talking the decades of 1870-1890s, and the numbers are insane. I had this image in my head of miserable, persecuted, long-suffering Jews in the Pale of Settlement, when in reality, the percentage of Jews among, for example, factory owners in Kyiv, Odessa and St Petersburg was insane relative to their percentage in the population.
Slezkine gives pages and pages of numbers, endless bibliographical references. It’s incontrovertible evidence, and I had absolutely no idea. Dude. This is hardcore. It is even more hardcore that the children of all these very successful Jews then went on to organize the Communist revolution. I thought they were reacting to poverty and misery but I was wrong. Oh wow.
I’m very glad I found this book based on a random Twitter post rubbishing Slezkine for being pro-Putin. But he’s part-Jewish himself and see what I wrote earlier today about that.
Clarissa's Blog 
\\ I thought they were reacting to poverty and misery but I was wrong.
Imo, your conclusion is wrong.
Akunin does describe in his books discrimination against Jews. We know it existed, as did the Pale of Settlement itself. I remember that Akunin wrote that even within the Pale of Settlement Jews were allowed to settle only outside of big cities. To receive a permission to move to St Petersburg , Jews had to have a required profession.
После тяжелой продолжительной болезни. Время Николая II is free online here:
https://loveread.ec/book-comments.php?book=100560
A few quotes from the chapter Еврейский «вопрос»
Those Jewish factory owners were a small minority, outliers, while the majority was indeed “miserable, persecuted, long-suffering.”
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Now I read a review with a summary of the last , most interesting part of this book (about Jews in America vs Israel) and got sorely disappointed. Will wait for your review, hoping that reader misrepresented Slezkine’s analysis.
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Honestly I cant imagine how you did not know this. This was common knowledge in that time. Trollopes book The Way We Live Now is based on this common observation. Who do you think bankrolled these revolutions? Who do you think the Rothschilds were? When Herman Goering was put in charge of reorganizing the banking system in the Third Reich, he found that every bank in Germany, with only two exceptions, were either directly controlled or controlled via shell corporations by Jewish interests. The two exceptions were two very small banks in two very small towns. Nothing succeeds like corruption.
Walnut
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Should I have underlined the words “the Russian Empire”? Or what it is that is creating the confusion between these completely different countries?
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When it comes to Jews they weren’t different at all. That’s the entire point. This was pretty much true throughout Europe and the US. What do you think Henry Fords The international Jew was talking about?
Walnut
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Again, did I not mention the Pale of Settlement?
Analogy, as I keep repeating, is the tool of a weak intellect. You can do better than “everything is like everything else.”
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It’s never the oppressed who start successful revolutions, but the educated and sometimes even wealthy ones who are shunned by the elites or want more power (see all the lawyers and nobles – even the king’s uncle after all – who started the French Revolution, the gentry who toppled Charles I, the nobility who toppled James II, the wealthy and/or influential thinkers who led the American “Revolution”, the bankers and industrialists who sponsored Hitler for Chancellor when all of von Hindeburg instincts were to stay away from the corporal, the Duma who overthrew the Tsar and Lenin the minor aristocrat who overthrew the Duma etc, so no wonder a lot of the heirs of the Jewsih elite of Tsarist Russia aided the bolsheviks, most to be paid in a bullet to the head or a hatchet to the head like Trotsky…)
As for influence, one should read the book The Hare with Amber Eyes by E de Waal to see how the wealthy Jewish merchants of Russia extended their influence to all Europe – the plaque honoring one such branch at their (former) Vienna residence – still belonging to the Austrian state after it was seized in 1938 (as the joke says, Austrians are very clever as they convinced the world, Mozart was Austrian and Hitler German) is a pilgrimage place for Jewish people from all over the world – I went twice at random times and met people from Israel and from the USA there…
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Hmmm… ;-D
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Funnily enough, that little cartoon is similar to something I actually did in a literature class I took back in college.
I was taking Brit lit one and two in order to fill up some of the required course work that the college demanded which had nothing to do with my actual degree. That stupid bit about wanting people to graduate well rounded.
So I made a bit of a game of it. I was a bit of a morbid fellow at the time and the professor had a bad habit of assigning us these very bright and cheerful poems, literature, etc to read and then in turn to write about. I in turn did my absolute dead level best to convince the professor and the class that the writers of these works wanted nothing but death and destruction. Their own and humanity in general.
Ironically I think I actually got an A- or a B+ in that class.
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We are all dying for a student who’d be as creative and original as you were. I have one in my class this semester, and it’s a great joy.
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Yeah, that was the reason I took an Art History course. And, actually the information on the construction of how the great Cathedrals were built using simple mathematics was fascinating ;-D
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There were lots of rich Jews in SA in those days. There was an entire conspiracy theory that the Boer War was a Jewish plot, although it was mostly British imperialism.
https://ihr.org/journal/v18n3p14_weber-html
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