Confronting Antisemitism
Bloch converted to Calvinism, the religion of a small minority in the Russian Empire. In this way he was able to avoid the legal disabilities imposed on Jews under Tsarist rule, especially the geographical limitation to the Pale of Settlement, banning Jews from living in the Empire's main cites - without needing to regularly attend a church and be visibly practising Christianity. As became evident especially in the later part of his life, he retained a strong concern for the situation of the Jews, even if formally no longer one of them.
Following the wave of pogroms of the 1880s and the early 1890s, a commission headed by the vociferously antisemitic Interior Minister Vyacheslav von Plehve recommended a further worsening of the Jews' legal position. In response, Bloch sent to the government a series of well-reasoned memoranda calling for an end to the discrimination of the Jews.
Bloch also embarked upon an extensive research on the social and economic conditions of the Russian Empire's Jewish subjects. For that purpose, he established a team of scientific researchers headed by the Russian economist A.P. Subotin, on whose work he spent hundreds of thousands of rubles.
The result, completed only in 1901 - one year before Bloch's death - was a five-volume work entitled "Comparison of the material and moral levels in the Western Great-Russian and Polish Regions". On the basis of extensive statistical data, compiled mainly in the Pale of Settlement, there was given a comprehensive account of the Jewish role in the Empire's economic life, in crafts, trade and industry. The study showed that the Jews were a boon to the Russian economy - rather than damaging and threatening it, as was at the time regularly claimed by anti-semites.
Bloch's great effort was, however, in vain. The Russian Council of Ministers banned the work, and nearly all copies were confiscated and burned. Only a few surviving copies remained in circulation, as great rarities. Subotin was, however, later able to publish a summary entitled "The Jewish Question in the Right Light".
Read more about this topic: Jan Gotlib Bloch
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