Baptized Jews in the Vyatka Governorate in the Late 19th – Early 20th Centuries

Identificator

EDN: PQTOSG ; УДК: 94(470.342=411.16)

Authors

Kasanov Anton Sergeevich, PhD in Historical Sciences, independent researcher. Russia, Kirov. E‑mail: kasanv@rambler.ru

Journal

HERALD OF HUMANITARIAN EDUCATION №1 (41), 2026

Section

NATIONAL HISTORY

Pages

30-36

Abstract

The topic of the formation and development, changes in the size of the Jewish diaspora in the Vyatka Governorate has become an object of study for historians only recently. One of the significant research goals in the current period is to count the people who left Judaism and became converts to Christianity in the region. In this article, based on documents from the Vyatka Spiritual Consistory of the Central State Archives of the Kirov Region, the number of converts who were in the Vyatka Governorate in the late 19th – early 20th centuries is calculated. The motives for converts to Christianity, their demographic characteristics, and the geography of their settlement in the Vyatka‑Kama region are also examined. We divided all baptized Jews of the province into several groups: officials, political exiles, and family members of military personnel. We included in a special category of converts those Jews who performed the rite of baptism into the Orthodox faith not in the Vyatka province, but lived in the region during the chronological framework under consideration. Also, based on the data of some files preserved in the archive, it is stated that the change of faith was used by Jews as a tool in the sphere of personal and family relations. After analyzing the collected array of archival data, we conclude that there was no mass and numerous conversion of members of the Vyatka Jewish community to Orthodoxy in the second half of the 19th – early 20th centuries. A review of the files of the Vyatka spiritual consistory available to us for the period from 1873 to 1916 allowed us to establish 28 names of Vyatka Jews who converted. With the exception of the family of Mordukh Rosenberg, none of the significant members of the diaspora who lived for a long time in the Vyatka province left the community by choosing a new faith.

Keywords

Jews converts Orthodoxy change of religion political exile Pale of Settlement Vyatka province

Recieved

14.03.2025

Published

03.06.2026

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