Of making many books there is no end

A particular book has dominated my schedule recently: William G. Dever’s Beyond the Texts: An Archaeological Portrait of Ancient Israel and Judah. If all goes as planned, all 700+ pages will be published this fall. Now that the majority of my work on the book is behind me, I hope to return to some semblance of regular blogging about topics of interest to Bullers and others who want to learn more about our Mennonite history.

The reference to Dever’s book is not just a throwaway; in fact, the approach Dever takes to the study of the history of Israel and Judah of ancient times (from David through the fall of Jerusalem in 586 or 587 BCE) has relevance for own own explorations. Dever begins not with texts that recount a history but with what can be learned from the contexts behind that story. His portrait focuses on archaeology: what we can learn both from the ruins of cities and from the small objects—pottery fragments, seal impressions, inscriptions,  even animal bones—found within them. Dever then compares the picture sketched by the material remains with the written text to see where they cohere, where they diverge, and where one illumines or complements the other.

This is, I admit, a significant oversimplification of what Dever accomplishes in Beyond the Texts, and we obviously cannot mine archaeological data for Poland, Volhynia, or Molotschna as Dever does for Israel and Judah. Nevertheless, we can take a cue from Dever and seek to understand more fully the contexts in which our ancestors lived, their physical environment or legal setting, to identify just two examples. Adopting this approach will, I believe, benefit us in at least two ways: it will likely help us to connect the dots of our family history and thus produce a more accurate sketch of the lives of our forebears from centuries gone by; this approach will also help us fill in some of the gaps between the lines thus sketched, to add color and depth to the portrait we seek to paint.

What might this look like? Two examples from some recent reading, both authored by Professor David Moon of York University (U.K.), offer a hint of what we might expect.

Several years back Moon authored The Plough That Broke the Steppes: Agriculture and Environment on Russia’s Grasslands, 1700–1914 (see here for the GooglePlay e-book version). I have barely begun reading this award-winning monograph, but already it has prompted me to consider questions that would never have occurred to me otherwise. Specifically, I learned that Molotschna and Volhynia are part of significantly different environments, or regions, if you will. In other words, when Benjamin Buller and family moved from Volhynia to Molotschna and then back from Molotschna to Volhynia, they were not merely traveling miles (or versty, to use the Russian term); they were traversing distinct environments. Might this help us understand why Benjamin and family moved from one to another and then back to their starting point—before David moved back to Molotschna yet again? We are not yet ready to answer the question (more reading awaits), but by stepping outside of our family history to explore the Russian–Ukrainian environment, we at least know enough now to recognize a question that begs to be asked.

Moon is also known for a 2002 essay published in Coerced and Free Migration: Global Perspectives. The essay, titled “Peasant Migration, the Abolition of Serfdom, and the Internal Passport System in the Russian Empire, c. 1800–1914,” provides background to and documentation concerning peasant migration within imperial Russia, that is, the legal entity within which our family lived. Two words in his title bear special notice: internal passport. Nowadays we think of a passport as a document needed for travel between countries; in nineteenth-century Russia, certain residents of Russia were required to have official documents authorizing them to travel or move to another location within Russia. We have already encountered this system several times, although we did not know what to make of it. For example, when some of the original Waldheim residents moved back to Volhynia, to Heinrichsdorf, the census records that some did so with proper authorization but that others fled without permission. Moon’s essay enables us to paint a richer, deeper portrait of the reality that Benjamin and Helena and David and Helena faced, the limitations on their movement and the bureaucracy they had to navigate when they wished to enter or leave Russia or even move within the empire.

These two examples are only a taste of what we might learn about the environments and contexts in which our ancestors lived. We will return to them in due course and mine them for every detail they can provide. Other resources we hope to consult over the next months include the following, to list just a few:

• David Moon, “Peasant Migration and the Settlement of Russia's Frontiers, 1550–1897,” The Historical Journal 40 (1997): 859–93.
• Roger P. Bartlett, Human Capital: The Settlement of Foreigners in Russia 1762–1804. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979.
• Jane Burbank and David L. Ransel, eds. Imperial Russia: New Histories for the Empire. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998.
• Michael Khodarkovsky, Russia’s Steppe Frontier: The Making of a Colonial Empire, 1500–1800. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002.
• Nicholas B. Breyfogle, Abby Schrader, and Willard Sunderland, eds., Peopling the Russian Periphery: Borderland Colonization in Eurasian History. London: Routledge, 2007.
• David Saunders, “Russia’s Ukrainian Policy (1847–1905): A Demographic Approach,” European History Quarterly 25 (1995): 181–208.
• Esther Kingston-Mann and Timothy Mixter, eds., Peasant Economy, Culture, and Politics of European Russia, 1800–1921. Princeton : Princeton University Press, 1991.

Perhaps it is, in the end, a good thing that there is no end of the making of many books. After all, they help us imagine our ancestors a little more clearly and thus enable us to understand from whence we came with significantly more insight and appreciation.

Works Cited

Moon, David. 2002. Peasant Migration, the Abolition of Serfdom, and the Internal Passport System in the Russian Empire, c. 1800–1914. Pages 324–57 and 424–32 in Coerced and Free Migration: Global Perspectives. Edited by David Eltis. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

———. 2013. The Plough That Broke the Steppes: Agriculture and Environment on Russia’s Grasslands, 1700–1914. Oxford Studies in Modern European History. Oxford: Oxford University Press.