Transnational Diaspora: Interaction of Jewish Elites and the Poliakovs

Abstract

Recently historians have come to recognize the need to go beyond national history and to acknowledge the transnational, which became so important in the globalization of 1870–1914. It is no less essential to expand the focus beyond economics alone and to consider the array of other factors, especially cultural and religious, that were ever more powerful and capable of transcending national boundaries. One key analytic framework in recent scholarship is “intimacy,” which focuses on the social nexus and political connections that were so critical in the rise of the new industrial-financial elites across Europe. This paper examines the case of the Poliakovs, a Russian Jewish family that began as petty merchants in the Pale of Settlement but became leading bankers, railroad barons, and factory owners in late Imperial Russia. Drawing on family records (especially the diaries of two family members) but also an array of archival and printed sources (including the societal pages of leading French and German newspapers), this paper examines: a) how the Poliakovs learned to “perform” successfully in aristocratic high society; b) how and why that performance was so critical to the family’s perceived affluence (and hence the credibility of their various businesses); c) how the transnational served simultaneously to cement the family’s status in the Russian elite and to become part of the Jewish diaspora (not only to promote business but to avoid intermarriage). This was a family business in the fullest sense: the family was the business.