Dr. Ellie R. Schainker, Arthur Blank Family Foundation Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies, recently published her second book, Rites of Empire: Reforming Judaism in Imperial Russia, with Oxford University Press. In the latest installment of our New Faculty Books Q&A series, Dr. Schainker below provides us with a glimpse into the making of Rites of Empire.
Books are produced over years if not decades. Give us a sense for the lifespan of this book, from initial idea to final edits.
The idea for this book came while I was writing my first book on the history and politics of Jewish conversions in the Russian empire. Two tantalizing references to Reform Judaism came up in my research. First, I came across a file in the Ministry of the Interior’s archive in St. Petersburg in which a Reform Jew from Austria sought baptism, and an imperial official asked if the state recognized Reform Judaism as a Jewish “sect” and if there were Reform Jews in the empire. Second, I researched several Christianizing Jewish sects in southern Ukraine that emerged in the turbulent pogrom period of the 1880s which sparked a heated debate in the Russian Jewish press whether the groups should be classified as religious reformers or Christian missionaries. Both references made me think about the role of religious reforms in imperial governance of ethno-confessional minorities, and the relationship between conversion and reform of colonized subjects.
I started researching Rites of Empire during a 2014 research trip to Russia while I was finishing up the research and writing of my first book. I made the final edits on this book in June 2025. Indeed, decade is the right measurement for book production. In that time, I conducted research in archives and libraries in Russia, Ukraine, Lithuania, and Israel. Two workshop invitations in 2020 during COVID helped me transition from research and conference paper mode to drafting manuscript chapters. The real press to complete a full manuscript was afforded by a full year fellowship at the Fox Center in 2023-24 that allowed me to write full time.
What was the research process like?
Although I’m an archive junkie, I made a commitment early on to not just make this an imperial story of reforming Jews and Judaism, but to really investigate Jews’ own commitment to religious reform and the preservation of religion. Aside from investigating the archive of imperial intervention into Jewish religious life, I explored internal Jewish sources on self-modernization and how many Russian Jews from the 1840s to 1917 actively sought a synthesis between modern subjectivity and religious Judaism. I researched Jewish autobiography, literature, the popular press, rabbinic responsa, rabbinic correspondence, and vernacular publications on Jewish religion, pedagogy, choral synagogues, and ritual life.
In the process of researching, I needed to train myself in new scholarly literatures. I sought professional retooling in the sociology of religion and scholarship on law and religion. New sociological approaches to secularism extended my work on modern Jewish culture beyond surveying religion and its absence to interrogating ideas, modes, and political implications of regulating the practice of religion in the modern world. Post-colonial scholarship on law and religion gave me insight into how religion formed the basis for imperial order and exercise of authority. In this way, debates on religion became a key arena for the extension of state power and new forms of individual and communal self-fashioning. With this second book, I have also moved into the field of legal history. I have started to share my work at legal studies conferences, and I am teaching a new graduate course in Spring 2027 on Law and Religion.
Are you partial to a particular chapter or section?
I am slightly partial to Chapter 5 on the rise of liberal choral synagogues and modern cantors from Warsaw to Siberia in the late imperial period. This chapter showcases the DIY approach to Jewish religious reforms and how the story of imperial coercion to reform did not control Jews own internal impulse for reform. The chapter also led me into the history of music and architecture as well as the aesthetics of religious experience and modernization. It also tied my work to the material history of imperial Russian Jewry that still dots the landscape of Jewish life in the Former Soviet Union today. Choral synagogues still exist in places such as St. Petersburg, Moscow, Vilnius, and Minsk, often serving as the only active synagogues in these cities. While they have been internally remodeled to conform to Orthodox Jewish strictures, their names and architectural design attest to a moment when liberal Judaism was developing across Eastern Europe and Russia in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
How does this project align with your broad research agenda (past, present, or future)?
I’m broadly interested in exploring the social and cultural “margins” of East European Jewish society (or topics that scholars have sidelined) and asking what they can teach us about modern Jewish life. In my first book, I studied converts who were stigmatized by both Jews and Christians, and yet centering their experiences allowed me to narrate the Jewish encounter with imperial Russia as a profoundly religious drama in which a diverse, alluring, and at times aggressive Christianity attracted many Jews, threatened Jewish communal cohesion, and shaped the defensive behavior and identity of Russian Jewry as a whole.
In my new book, I explore the history of liberal Judaism and religious modernization in East Europe—a part of the modern Jewish world often thought of as highly traditional or ardently secular. I argue that religious diversity and individual non-conformity shaped notions of Jewish identity in the Russian Empire, and that for a time, the tsarist state was eagerly supportive of Jewish reforms and actively brought liberal Jews into its Jewish bureaucracy.
In my future work, I am interested in bringing together my previous research and current teaching engagements. In connection to my work on conversion and religious liberalization and my teaching for study abroad on contemporary Jewish life in Poland, I am exploring a book project on new Jews and Jewish renewal in post-communist Eastern Europe and its diaspora.
In the meantime, I’m working on an article on Jewish thought and empire, and a collaborative project on gender, Jewish law, and the practice of legal pluralism.
