Potemkin's Jewish Cossacks: The story of the Israelovsky Regiment -feature

Some years ago, I began to dig a little deeper into my family history and came across something long forgotten that had disappeared from family lore. My great-grandfather, a Jewish immigrant to Leeds from Eastern Europe, volunteered for the British Armed Forces (39th Battalion, Royal Fusiliers) during World War I and saw “severe fighting” against the Ottomans near Jerusalem and in the Jordan Valley. The 39th Battalion has gone down in history as part of what is known as the Jewish Legion.

The Jewish Legion, the unofficial name for five battalions of the Army’s Royal Fusiliers regiment, consisted of Jewish volunteers and marked one of the first modern instances of a Jewish fighting force before the State of Israel. Throughout history, there have been sporadic instances of Jews bearing arms in a military capacity, but one of the more curious episodes occurred 250 years ago in the midst of the Russian Empire under the Romanov dynasty. It involved what was called the Israelovsky Regiment.

The scene

The first partition of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1772 significantly increased the Jewish population of the Russian Empire, bringing in some 45,000 more Jews within the borders. The empire at this time was ruled by Catherine II, later known as Catherine the Great, who had reigned since 1762, when she led a coup against her husband, Peter III.

This Peter, who was a grandson of Peter the Great, was regarded as incompetent to rule and too pro-Prussian. The irony is that Catherine herself was a German-born princess who would go on to become one of the most influential Russian monarchs of the Romanov dynasty.

Catherine did not rule effectively by herself, though. Her reign was permeated with noble favorites, and sometimes lovers, such as Count Grigory Orlov and Prince Grigory Potemkin. Potemkin was granted the Krichev estate on former Polish lands, facilitating his encounters with Jewish tenants. In 1775, when he invited settlers to move southward, he notably included Jews in the invitation, which was rare for the time.

Later, he sweetened the offer by granting them seven years of tax exemption and the right to trade in wines and spirits. He also promised them protection from marauding soldiers, the establishment of synagogues and cemeteries, and the freedom to resolve disputes through rabbinical courts.

“This is a period of great imperial expansion,” Simon Sebag Montefiore, historian and author of Catherine the Great & Potemkin: Power Love and Russian Empire, told the Magazine. “Catherine the Great and Prince Potemkin are two of the great statesmen of the Romanov dynasty period. Potemkin is probably the greatest chief minister or the most talented minister of the entire Romanov three-century rule.”

THE THREE partitions of Poland-Lithuania between 1772 and 1795 brought millions of Jews under the rule of the Romanovs – circumstances that would lead to rising antisemitism through the years under the tsars until the abdication of the last one in 1917: Nicholas II.

“Antisemitism hadn’t become an absolute basic part of the creed of Romanov rule at this point,” Montefiore explained. There was antisemitism within Russia and Jews had been banned from Russia at various times by various tsars, but this is a period when for the first time, massive numbers of Jews came under Russian rule.

It is also notable that “Catherine the Great was a usurper, a German-born usurper. She was never going to risk any political credit by becoming an advocate of Jews. Potemkin, for instance, was a different thing altogether,” he said.

“He was her co-ruler, her partner, her secret husband, her lover – and the man behind Russian expansion to Poland, into Romania, into the Crimean Khanate, and to the Black Sea,” which was a major goal of the tsars,” Montefiore told the Magazine. 

“What was extraordinary about him was he was obsessed with the different Abrahamic religions. He was unique in Russian history for his philo-Semitism, and he was always fascinated by the Jewish religion. When he traveled around Russia, he traveled with an entourage that included Jewish rabbis and Jewish ‘oligarchs,’ for want of a better word.”

Joshua Zeitlin

One of the men Potemkin formed a close bond with was a man named Joshua Zeitlin, a remarkable Jewish merchant and scholar of Hebrew texts. Zeitlin managed Potemkin’s estates, assisted in town-building, orchestrated financial transactions to support the prince’s military campaigns, and even later on ran the revived mint in Kaffa, Crimea, which had been conquered under Potemkin and Catherine’s imperial expansion.

Zeitlin’s relationship with the imperial prince was truly unique in Russian history. He was able to maintain his Jewish identity and religiosity while serving in Potemkin’s inner circle. Elevated to the status of court adviser, which granted him noble privileges, he held the right to own serfs on his estate. Among the Jews of the time, he was known as Ha’sar, or “lord.”

Whether they were discussing Talmudic disputes or 18th-century business, Zeitlin was often seen traveling with Potemkin, riding alongside him on a grand horse, and taking the occasional break to answer religious queries from local Jews.

This partnership exemplified an extraordinary level of tolerance, rare not only in Russia but in Europe as a whole.

Montefiore highlighted Zeitlin’s significant role under Potemkin, describing him as a major supplier for the Russian army and a deeply religious Jew. “Potemkin would travel with an entire entourage of rabbis,” the historian explained, often engaging in debates about rabbinical law and the Bible. Potemkin’s fascination with religious studies, particularly Judaism, made him an extraordinary character in Russian history, according to the author.

Potemkin repeatedly acted to support and protect the Jewish community. During Empress Catherine’s visit to the south in 1787, he sponsored a delegation led by Zeitlin, which petitioned her to stop the derogatory use of the term “zhidy” (Yids) for Jews. Catherine acquiesced and decreed that the Jews should be called “evref” – Hebrews.

The Israelovsky Regiment

Potemkin, with a flair for the dramatic, had the grand idea of creating a Jewish military regiment in December 1787 – perhaps inspired by late-night rabbinical debates with his friend Zeitlin. The plan, dubbed the Israelovsky Regiment, was to consist of Jewish soldiers from his Krichev estate – trained by the Cossacks.

One of the only sources available describing the Israelovsky Regiment comes from the writings of the Prince de Ligne, an Austrian field marshal who traveled throughout Europe, reaching the court of Catherine the Great.

“The prince has had a unique idea, that of forming a regiment of Jews, which he calls his Israelowsky [sic],” de Ligne wrote.

“We already have a squadron which is all my joy, for their beards, which fall to their knees because their stirrups are so short, and their terror at being on horseback, make them look like monkeys. You can read their uneasiness in their eyes, and the long lances which they hold in the most comical manner make you think that they want to mimic the Cossacks,” the prince said mockingly.

As noted, one of the great aims of Russian expansion in the 18th and 19th centuries was to reach the Black Sea and have naval access to the Mediterranean Sea, an act which consistently brought the Russians into conflict with the Ottoman Empire.

The idea, which became known as the Greek Project, was for Orthodox Russia to reconquer the Ottoman capital of Constantinople from the Muslim Turks, regaining Christian control of what was formerly the capital of the Byzantine Empire.

RUSSIA HAS long been obsessed with its lineage from the Byzantines – Orthodox Christianity was imported from Byzantium; Moscow (at this point between stints as Russia’s capital) was known as the Third Rome (after Rome and Constantinople); and the Russian Romanovs adopted the double-headed eagle standard after the Byzantine emperors.

“The Ottoman Empire also ruled Jerusalem at this time, and up to 1917 the Ottomans ruled the Arab world,” Montefiore explained. “Potemkin’s idea was to restore a Byzantine Greek empire and replace the sultan with a Russian Romanov grand duke, who would be Constantine.”

This Constantine was the grandson of Catherine and named in tribute to Roman emperor Constantine the Great, who converted the empire to Christianity and moved the capital to Constantinople.

“Being a philo-Semite, Potemkin would of course have planned for a Jewish restoration in Jerusalem, which wasn’t completely beyond the span of Russian requisite because in the 1770s, a Russian fleet under admiral Greig and Alexei Orlov had cruised off the shores of Palestine, bombarded Jaffa and encouraged a rebellion against the sultan by sheik Dahir al-Umar, who ruled northern Palestine,” Montefiore said.

This bold move to create an entirely Jewish military unit and lead it in the reconquest of Jerusalem demonstrated Potemkin’s unique philo-Semitism and Zeitlin’s influence, though it was a challenging idea given the antisemitism of the age, especially among the Cossacks.

Potemkin wanted the Israelovsky Regiment to be a mix of infantry and cavalry, and by March 1788 some 35 bearded Jewish Cossacks were in training. Soon, the regiment grew to two squadrons, with Potemkin optimistic about recruiting more from Poland.

“Potemkin was the first person to really arm Jews since the 7th century. He was a kind of political impresario, filled with ideas: rather like Churchill. Some of his ideas were terrible, some were fanciful, and some were brilliant – you never knew what you were going to get,” Montefiore recounted to the Magazine. “In that sense, he was a political impresario with great political imagination and creativity. This is a sort of scheme that he had, which he started and didn’t finish – like a lot of other things – but he was an extraordinary character.”

DESPITE THE raising and training of these horse-backed Jews whose beards reached past their stirrups, the Israelovsky Regiment was not to last long: After only seven months, in July 1788, the project was abandoned. Thus ended the brief but interesting experiment with Jewish soldiers that could have changed history. It remains, however, a testament to the quixotic and romantic notions that Potemkin held.

The idea seemed to plant a seed, however. Just a few years later, in 1794, Berek Joselewicz, a Polish Jewish colonel, would form another all-Jewish unit to serve during the Kościuszko Uprising, when Poles rose up and rebelled against Russia. Allowed to maintain their religious customs, the unit would be all but wiped out in the Battle of Praga later that year.

Potemkin himself would not outlive his Israelovsky Regiment by many years. The prince fell ill with a fever while campaigning in Romania and died on October 16, 1791, leaving behind a distraught Catherine and, one presumes, distraught Jewish tenants.

His long-time friend Joshua Zeitlin retired after the prince’s death to his estate in Ustye, Belarus, where he continued to support Jewish learning in his huge library of Jewish texts.

ALTHOUGH THE Israelovky Regiment may not have achieved the victories that Potemkin perhaps envisaged, the project is a glimpse into a unique moment in Russian history. The legacy of the Jewish military experiment – born from Potemkin’s philo-Semitic tendencies and Zeitlin’s influence – reaches down through history to this day.

“This is all relevant now because Catherine and Potemkin were the ones who annexed south Ukraine and annexed the Crimea in 1783,” Montefiore noted. 

“Potemkin founded Odessa and Sevastopol and created the Black Sea Fleet. He was really the creator of Black Sea Russian power, just as Peter the Great was the creator of Baltic Russian power. That’s why, when Putin’s forces invaded the Black Sea, they stole the body of prince Potemkin [which had lain in a cathedral in Kherson] and took it back to Russia. So it is all strangely relevant today.”

As has been well documented, the Jews of Russia never again had such a powerful patron in the Russian imperial court. The antisemitism that the Jews would suffer as Russian expansion took over more of the Baltics, Poland, and the Black Sea countries would increase to such an extent that millions of them took to the seas to find a better life elsewhere.

One hundred years after Potemkin’s great experiment and about a hundred miles down the road from the Krichev estate, my great-grandfather would set out on his own journey. I think his service in the Holy Land during WW I, helping to recapture it from the Turks, might have made Potemkin proud. 