Jewish neighbourly relations and imperial Russian legal culture

Focusing on the northwest Russian provinces of Vil'na, Grodno, and Kovno (roughly, the territories that comprise present-day Lithuania), this essay analyses the role that courts and the legal process itself played in the mediation of Jewish neighbourly relations between the 1830s and the 1880s. Historians have argued that Jews lived side-by-side with other ethnic communities for hundreds of years before their mass destruction in the twentieth century. Yet they have failed to explain just how these communities managed to coexist with one another on an everyday level. In the period under investigation, relations between Jews and their ethnically diverse neighbours were not devoid of social conflict, but these disagreements were usually the product of daily economic exchanges rather than a disdain for one another based on either religious or ethnic differences.