The case for the former possibility is strong. Assessing the communal nature of Kiev’s Jews must, in the first instance, take into account the severity of the conditions militating against community of any kind and leading to a tendency to draw together. Meir provides plenty of evidence of the obstacle to community formation among Kiev’s Jews. The only Jews legally allowed permanent residence in the city were first-guild merchants, and although other categories were granted temporary residence, the greatest number of the Jewish population were “illegals” in managing to live and even do business in Kiev without legal permission. Although that spoke to the bribability of Kievan officialdom and the resourcefulness of Jews in evading the law, legality was enforced frequently and harshly enough to make life in Kiev for most Jews an anxious and precarious experience, ever threatened with sudden expulsion. The hostility of most Russian, Polish and other Christian residents, reinforced by the known illegal status of most Jews and the open antisemitism of the city’s leading newspaper, encouraged the popular belief that Jews did not enjoy or deserve the protection of the law. That erroneous belief fostered frequent lawless, violent outbursts against Jews, especially after 1881, heightening the insecurity already felt from their residential status. It made Kiev not only a “Jewish metropolis”, but the capital city of antisemitism.

While all of this legal and extra-legal hostility toward Kiev’s Jews surely helped to draw them together against a common and seemingly ubiquitous enemy, it also created a tension between close community ties and the urge to acculturate or assimilate to Christian, Russian culture and society. To be sure, far from all Jews had the inclination or opportunity to adopt Russian ways, let alone assimilate or convert to Orthodoxy. Yet the bustle and opportunity for Jews in Kiev, indeed, the very closeness of urban relations, did encourage and maintain a steady, growing movement toward acculturation. The very prominence of Jews in trade to and from the city and the limits placed on Jewish residence made for much coming and going, meaning that community for many was a fleeting experience. Finally, the great wealth gap among Jews further divided the community in ways that the philanthropic nurturance of the needy by the wealthy elite could not completely offset. Wealthy Jews lived in different, more exclusive parts of the city from poor traders and workers. They insured cordial relations with state authority and their social ascendance among ordinary Jews by arranging the reelection of the same Crown Rabbi, who for over three decades protected the interests and provided religious legitimacy to the acculturated elite. For these several reasons, it would seem that the only reason to raise the question of community among Kiev’s Jews would be to note the anomaly that there was a community at all. Yet Kiev’s “Jewish Metropolis” functioned as a community of necessity that shielded Jews from a hostile and bigoted environment and that condition also engendered stronger and more meaningful common bonds.

Faith Hillis’s recent study of Kiev and Right-Bank Ukraine does not attribute any greater community cohesion to Kiev’s Jews, but it does place them within the larger political and economic framework of a city that was both more cosmopolitan and more bigoted than that described by Meir.[203] “Right-Bank Ukraine” comprised the pre-1914 provinces of Kiev, Podolia, and Volynia, and the book’s theme is the rise and decline of the “Little Russian” idea, a nationalist ideology nurtured in that region and stressing East Slavic unity and loyalty to the Russian autocracy. At first an “imagined community” that combined the East Slavs’ common origins in Kiev Rus’, Orthodox believers, and the exclusion of all non-Orthodox and non-East Slavs, the idea became, by the end of the 19th Century, an ideology of empire, embodied in a Russian nationalist political party. Although the study is not centered on Jews and their experience, Jews played a prominent part in the evolution of the Little Russian movement as active players in Kiev’s economic and political life and as an “indispensable enemy” that served to unify the often fractious Little Russia nationalists.