Until the 1880s, actual Jews were a marginal presence in the Russian state, thought, and street. The official policy was essentially the same as that toward other “aliens,” oscillating as it did between legal separation and various forms of “fusion.” The most radical means to those ends—punitive raids and cross-border deportations (such as the ones used against insurgents in Turkestan and the Caucasus) or forced conversions and linguistic Russification (such as those used against Aleuts and Poles, among others) were not applied to the Jews. Otherwise, the administrative repertoire was largely familiar: from separation by means of residential segregation, economic specialization, religious and judicial autonomy, administrative self-government, and institutional quotas, to incorporation by means of army conscription, religious conversion, government- run education, agricultural settlement, and the adoption of “European dress and customs.” As was the case with Russia’s many nomads, who were subject to most of the same policies, conscription was the most resented of all imperial obligations (although the Jewish complaints seemed to suggest a different—and characteristically Mercurian—reason by arguing that the draft was incompatible with their economic role and traditional way of life). The official justifications for these policies were no less familiar: benefit to the treasury, protection of Orthodox Russians, and protection from Orthodox Russians in the case of separation; and benefit to the treasury, legal and administrative consistency, and the civilizing mission, in the case of incorporation. Jews were one of Russia’s many “alien” groups: more “cunning” than most, perhaps, but not as “rebellious” as the Chechens, as “backward” as the Samoed, as “fanatical” as the Sart, or as ubiquitous or relentlessly rationalistici artificiales as the Germans. Anti- Semitism was common, but probably no more common than anti-Islamism, antinomadism, and anti-Germanism, which may have been more pervasive for being unself-conscious and unapologetic. And yet there is clearly good reason to argue that the Jews were, in some sense, first among nonequals. They were by far the largest community among those that had no claim to a national home in the Russian Empire; by far the most urbanized of all Russian nationalities (49 percent urban in 1897, as compared to 23 percent for Germans and Armenians); and by far the fastest growing of all national or religious groups anywhere in Europe (having grown fivefold over the course of the nineteenth century). Most important, they were affected by Russia’s late-nineteenth-century modernization in ways that were more direct, profound, and fundamental than most other Russian communities, because their very existence as a specialized caste was at stake. The emancipation of the serfs, the demise of the manorial economy, and the