Vladimir Levin Common Problems, Different Solutions: Jewish and Muslim Politics in Late Imperial Russia * Muslims and Jews were the two largest and most important non-Christian groups living in the Russian Empire: the all-Russian census of 1897 counted fourteen million Muslims and five million Jews (eleven and four percent of the total population, respectively). As non-Christians, both groups faced similar problems in the empire, which saw itself as a Christian state; both groups fell under the legal definition of inorodtsy and were viewed with hostility by ad- herents of Russian nationalism.1 Judaism and Islam traditionally had no for- mal religious hierarchy and thus faced attempts by the state to reorganize and control their religious leaderships. Both groups spoke their own languages and thus faced the demands of the state that their religious leaders learn Russian. Both had co-religionists abroad and were thus suspected of disloyalty; both also played a role in foreign policy considerations, although very different ones. The difference lay in the degree of integration, real and symbolic, of Jews and Muslims into the structures of Russian state and Russian society. Andreas Kappeler has pointed to the incorporation of non-Russian elites into the impe- rial ruling elite, and Benjamin Nathans has described the “selective integration” of Jews.2 While Muslim elites continued to be symbolically integrated until the collapse of the empire, the state-sponsored integration of Jews ended in 1881; nonetheless, Jewish involvement in Russian society continued to grow. Robert Crews has defined the nineteenth-century Russian Empire as a “con- fessional state”, i. e., a state “committed to backing the construction and im- plementation of ‘orthodoxy’ within each recognized religious community”.3 * I am grateful to Arkadii Zeltser, Semion Goldin, Alex Valdman, and Anna Berezina for reading drafts of this article and making important suggestions and improvements. 1 On inorodtsy see Slocum, J., “Who, and When, Were the Inorodtsy? The Evolution of the Category of ‘Aliens’ in Imperial Russia”, Russian Review 57 (1998), 173–190; Bobrovnikov, V., “Chto vyshlo iz proektov sozdaniia v Rossii inorodtsev? (otvet Dzhonu Slokumu iz musul’- manskikh okrain imperii)”, in: A. Miller/I. Schierle/D. Sdvizhkov (ed.), Poniatiia o Rossii: k istoricheskoi semantike imperskogo perioda (Moscow, 2012), vol. II, 259–291. 2 Kappeler, A., Russland als Vielvölkerreich: Entstehung, Geschichte, Zerfall (München, 1993); Nathans, B., Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia (Berke- ley, 2002), 45–79. 3 Crews, R., “Empire and Confessional State: Islam and Religious Politics in Nineteenth- Century Russia”, American Historical Review 108:1 (February 2003), 50–83, on p. 52. Jews and Muslims in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, ed. by Davies, Schulze Wessel and Brenner © 2015, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Theaterstraße 13, 37073 Göttingen