Changing ideologies of artisanal “productivisation”: ORT in late imperial Russia

摘要

The Society for the Promotion of Artisanal and Agricultural Work among the Jews in Russia (ORT) was established in St Petersburg in 1880. In its post-1921 form, as the World ORT Union, the organisation, with its headquarters in London, still operates in scores of countries throughout the world. This article analyses the ideological changes in ORT's craftsmen-related programmes during the first decades of its history: from the initial careful attempts to use qualified artisan labour as one of the ways to adapt the Jewish population to the economic, social and political conditions of the Russian empire, to later Jewish nation-building projects that incorporated elements of economic autonomy. Founded by maskilic intellectuals and entrepreneurs, from the 1900s ORT was gradually taken over by more radical activists. Some of them, including its future chairman Leon Bramson (1869-1941) and its leading economist Boris Brutskus (1874-1938), came from the Petersburg apparatus of the Jewish Colonization Association, which competed with ORT in all domains of philanthropic activities. Materials of two ORT conferences, in 1914 and 1916, help us understand the changes in the organisation's attitudes to vocational education and various forms of cooperatives and employment bureaux. Special attention is paid to ORT's role during World War I.