Известия Уральского федерального университета. Серия 2: Гуманитарные науки, Vol 20, Iss 4(181), Pp 9-26 (2018)

евреи, брак, черта оседлости, Урал, история, религиозная идентичность, иудаизм., History (General) and history of Europe, Language and Literature

This article analyses religious marriages which played an important role in preserving the identity of the Jewish urban population beyond the Pale of Settlement. It considers the basic legal provisions regulating Jewish marriages. The authors reconstruct wedding rituals typical of Russian Jews. They also analyse marriages contracted in Yeka­terinburg between the formation of the first families of Jewish soldiers in the 1850s until 1917. The main sources of research were the 8th Orenburg Batallion’s archival records containing information on marriages of soldiers during their service; the database “Ural Population Register”, containing transcribed data from Yekaterinburg synagogue’s metric books for the period between 1906 and 1917; late 19th and early 20th centuries ethnographic descriptions of Jewish wedding rituals in the western provinces of the country. According to the authors’ findings, soldiers of the 8th Orenburg Linear Batallion registered the first Jewish weddings in Yekaterinburg in the 1850s. They managed to communicate not only with their relatives remaining in the Pale of Settlement in the Western provinces of the Empire, but also with Jewish communities in Western Siberia. Permission to get married was granted by the commanders and demanded that the newly wedded be provided with their own accommodation. The research proved that Yekaterinburg Jews, with very few exceptions, contracted ethnically and religiously homogeneous marriages, which contributed to the preservation of their ethnic and religious identity. They observed religious regulations with regard to the time and date of marriage at least until 1917 and each marriage was accompanied by the signing of a marriage contract — Ktuba. The presence of a government rabbi was not mandatory; instead, the so-called spiritual rabbis or respected members of the community could conduct the wedding.