Ellie R. SchainkerArthur Blank Family Foundation Associate Professor of Modern European Jewish History
Ellie Schainker, Arthur Blank Family Foundation Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies (Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania, 2010; B.A. University of Pennsylvania, 2000). East European Jewish History; Modern Jewish History; Imperial Russian history; conversion studies; gender, law, and religious modernization.
I am a historian of modern Jewish history, religion, and empire who focuses on the experience of Jews in the ethnically and religiously diverse Russian empire. My work engages the problem of religious diversity in imperial contexts, exploring the effect of toleration on the East European Jewish experience, and how religion was interestingly both a mechanism of imperial control and a source of Jewish empowerment.
In my first book, Confessions of the Shtetl: Converts from Judaism in Imperial Russia, 1817–1906 (Stanford University Press, 2017; winner of a National Jewish Book Award), I explore the experiences of Russian Jews who converted to Christianity and the implications of these sensitive boundary crossings for understanding larger issues of toleration, interreligious exchange, and gender relations in Russia’s multi-confessional empire. The study breaks new ground by moving the story of minority integration in the modern era from urban centers to rural peripheries, and by challenging the myth of Jewish cultural and social separation. I argue that baptism did not constitute a total break with Jewishness or the Jewish community and that conversion marked the start of a complicated experiment with new forms of identity and belonging. Research and writing of the book was supported by a Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies Fellowship and Emory University Research Council.
For my second book, Rites of Empire: Reforming Judaism in Imperial Russia (Oxford University Press, 2026), I explore the religious reform impulse among Jews in the Russian Empire, home to the world’s largest Jewish population over the long nineteenth century. It is a story of self-willed religious change in dialogue with a modernizing imperial state, global Jewish denominationalism, and the aesthetic and socio-economic developments of urban modernity. Rites of Empire charts new territory in Jewish and East European history by exploring non-traditional forms of Judaism in the Russian empire in the half century leading up to World War I and the Russian Revolution. It demonstrates that religious diversity and individual non-conformity shaped notions of Jewish identity in the Russian Empire, a context heretofore identified with religious intolerance and orthodoxy. It analyzes how empire both enabled and constrained changing religious identities and new claims and sources of cultural authority. Yet it also challenges understandings of minority religious behavior as being solely a response to imperialism and looks instead at how religious minorities shaped their own life reform. The project received support from the Yad Hanadiv/Beracha Foundation Visiting Fellowship in Jewish Studies; Global Fulbright Fellowship to Israel and Lithuania; Moscow Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center Fellowship; URC-Halle Global Research Award; and Senior Faculty Fellowship at the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry.
Research Interests:
- East European Jewish History
- Imperial Russian History
- Religion, Toleration, and Empire
- Conversion Studies
- Law and Comparative Secularisms
- Gender and Religious Modernization
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