Description
Book SynopsisAmid the nationalization of Russian imperial politics, Jews developed a powerful version of race science and biopolitics as a response to their colonial condition, nonterritoriality, and exclusion from looming postimperial modernity. Marina Mogilner explores this story in the context of Russia's turbulent early twentieth century.
Trade ReviewThis is an important, provocative work that should be read by anyone interested in the history of race in the Russian Empire and Soviet Union. -- Andrew Sloin * Russian Review *
Mogilner makes a tremendous contribution to the understanding of the ‘Jewish Question’ in the nineteenth century in this thoroughly researched and fluidly written volume. -- Leora Eisenberg * EuropeNow *
A brilliant work of intellectual and cultural history. Drawing on an impressive range of sources, Mogilner argues that the language of race science—and the embrace of biopolitics by Jewish social scientists—possessed powerful exclusionary potential, even as it was used to study, improve, and protect the population of Russian Jews. I have no doubt
A Race for the Future will become
the standard book on the subject for many years to come. -- Eugene M. Avrutin, author of
Racism in Modern Russia: From the Romanovs to PutinA gripping story of the power of ‘racial science’ as a paradigm of global modernity, its emancipatory attractions to educated Russian Jews, and the assimilative impetus of the Russian empire that made Jewish self-racialization, oddly, an anticolonial gesture. A brilliant and erudite scholar, Mogilner endows this mind-bending story with a deep appreciation of its historical actors’ diverse intellectual trajectories, motivations, and political entanglements. This groundbreaking book sparkles with insights into Russia’s unique imperial predicaments. -- Edyta M. Bojanowska, author of
A World of Empires: The Russian Voyage of the Frigate PalladaBold and highly original. Challenging the entrenched misconception that race was peripheral to group identity in imperial Russia and the early Soviet Union, Mogilner shows how Jewish self-racialization was paradoxically a project of anticolonial resistance. With its clear and engaging prose, this will be a crucial reference for historians of empire—or anyone interested in how subaltern actors exercise agency within a colonial setting. -- Vera Tolz, author of
Russia’s Own Orient: The Politics of Identity and Oriental Studies in the Late Imperial and Early Soviet Periods
