Klier shows that in the early 1880s Jewish interests received a hearing, informal but influential, within the Russian government. Besides the Gintsburg Circle’s personal contacts, an attentive, contentious, and vibrant Russian language Jewish press publicized Jewish views. Journals such as A. E. Landau’s Voskhod, or Sion, edited by Lev Pinsker – an acculturated, moderate physician, trained at Moscow University – argued the Jewish cause. The extent of Jewish acceptance of and acceptance into Russian society and its institutions has normally been overlooked in numerous studies whose leitmotif has been the exclusion of Jews rather than their inclusion. But the question of the actual integration of Jews into Russian Imperial society has receiving increased attention recently, most notably in Ben Nathan’s influential Beyond the Pale.[199] Natan Meir’s 2006 Slavic Review article continued that trend.[200] Meir’s book-length study of Jewish Kiev has not followed through with that theme; on the contrary, it has all but argued the converse.[201] From viewing the history of Kiev’s Jews as a part of the Russian mainstream, Meir has now put more stress on what set them apart.

His claim is twofold: By the late 19th Century Jews had become a dominant economic force in Kiev, when their rate of migration to the city outstripped all other groups, and when they became its largest non-Orthodox confession; and, at the same time, Meir contends, they had become a real community, despite the restrictions placed on Jewish residence, regular expulsions, and the unending enmity of the gentile majority. There is considerable truth to both claims. Under the leadership of their wealthy elite, headed by the Brodsky family, whose beet sugar fortune made possible their role as the principal donors to Jewish educational, religious, and welfare institutions, Kiev’s Jews found a permanent and indispensable, albeit precarious, position in the city’s social and economic life. The prominence of the Brodsky’s and other wealthy Jews both embodied and symbolized the commercial dominance of Kiev‘s Jews, who constituted 75 % of first-guild merchants within one decade of their first legal settlement in the city.[202] This dominance was complemented by the receptivity of Jewish hospitals and schools to gentiles, and both facilitated relations between open-minded members of the city’s Christian elite and wealthy, acculturated Jews.

Yet much of the book is inward-looking, treating the mutual relations among Jews and Jewish institutions. Kiev is little more than the stage setting for their affairs. The “Jewish Metropolis” of the title is thus an ambiguous characterization, suggesting Jewish hegemony, if not dominance, of a Slavic capital, but actually describing how the Jews constituted their own “metropolis”, self-sufficient and self-sustaining within the limits mentioned above. However, for a study set in the vibrant Russian and cosmopolitan center (arguably, the Empire’s third city) one misses a sense of Jews moving about in that larger urban, Slavic space. Even the acculturated and wealthy elite, the Jews’ most viable and influential link with the power and character of greater Kiev, is discussed principally in its relation with Jewish institutions and projects. No very concrete sense is evoked of how its members navigated their way in the alien yet attractive world of urban, modernizing Kiev. Does this represent a deliberate change of emphasis on Meir’s part, or simply an oversight, perhaps based on an implied understanding that the earlier article had treated the other side of the story and needn’t be repeated?